Re:A sophisticated way of relating to others?
on
More on JSF Laser System
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, we have now wandered far, far afield, but...
A year ago, I would have agreed with you completely. In fact, your reply is so reasonable and lucid, I still have a hard time disagreeing with it.
And I will agree that my reaction here is born more from emotion than logic. I teach at a college in Japan, where I watched the exultation of the Muslim community after 9/11. Maybe it was the assorted bomb threats that got phoned in to the registrar's office in Arabic-accented Japanese that pushed me over the edge. (It's a secular college that was founded by Christian missionaries long, long ago.)
Having lived abroad for almost ten years now, and marrying a woman whose native language is not English, I've lost that subtle racism that most liberals, and I am one, have -- the idea that people born in the third world somehow have an excuse not to behave in a civilized fashion.
Looking at my own history, my grandparents lived in Appalachia, without benefit of indoor plumbing or electricity. Possums formed a staple of their diet. Somehow, I don't recall them chanting in the streets for anyone's blood.
France helped my country throw out the British, and they did it for purely selfish reasons. Without the French, it's entirely likely that Washington would not have survived. After 1776, France didn't stick around and send aid and workers to help us "nation build." With their purposes accomplished, they got out. You know what? I'm still grateful for the help. Left to our own devices, fractious and quarreling colonies somehow managed to have a meeting and come to an agreement about how to live together. We did it, France did it, England did it. Australia did it, India did it.. We're not unique. The list of people who have found themselves in chaos, had a meeting, made agreements and lived by them is quite a long one. When they do, we refer to it as a "civilization."
Afghanistan could have done the same thing. We built the mujahadeen purely so the Soviets would have a thorn in their side, and then we left. Fine. There's not a reason in the world that the Afghani people couldn't have had a meeting and worked it out.
Instead, they chose to run around the streets beating their women and staging public executions. They wasted time in pointless feuding and religious nonsense that threw away their one chance at a viable nation. They submitted to the rule of the Taliban, despite the fact that they had just ejected a far greater power, the Soviets.
Currently, the provisional government of Afghanistan has a myriad of problems. No agriculture, no utilities, no infrastructure of any kind. They apparently can't do anything, but theyve somehow managed to reinstitute the Office of Vice. Once again, religious police walk the streets of Afghanistan making sure women wear their veils.
Sure, Cletus, we ain't got no food, no water, no plumbin', but dammit, them wimmen are wearin' them veils.
The original poster argues that this is somehow America's fault, that the 3,000 dead in New York deserved to die.
Complete and utter bull. The Arabs are not the only people with grievances. If anyone should be bombing American cities, it should be the Cherokee and Lakotas. Somehow, I don't see the Native Americans doing anything more violent than holding sit-ins at Alcatraz. Furthermore, historical grievances do not excuse atrocities. If they did, then by all rights my family should start bombing London and assassinating anyone named "Campbell."
But the Arabic world in general is hardly a charity case. They've been flooded with oil money for almost five decades now. A reasonable people would have taken the oil money and built prosperous nations.
I still can't get over the fact that the first request of the Kuwaiti ruling family from the Army core of Engineers was to rebuild the royal palace, complete with solid-gold faucets, even before basic life-saving services had been restored.
I'm sorry. Muslim behavior has pushed me over the edge on this one. The dancing in the streets after 9/11. The joy that I saw among the Muslims here at the sight of people jumping from windows. The utter and complete lack of condemnation from the Muslim community until only recently. The meeting in London last month "celebrating" 9/11 and vowing to bring England under Sharia law. The fact that the Daniel Pearl murder video is reported to be a best-seller in the Arabic world. The Palestinian infant dressed up as a suicide bomber. (I don't care if the black-oil aliens from the X-Files have taken over. There is no excuse for the babarism of teaching children to blow themselves up.)
I look at the Middle East and I see Isreal, with no oil money but significant American support. I see a democracy with reasonable people who have gone from decimation to prosperity after WWII. I see Taiwan, with greater problems, accomplishing the same thing.
Then I see the Arab countries, awash in oil money, ruled by feudal lords, stricken by poverty, beating their women, chanting in the streets for blood, supporting people whose main goal in life is the death of civilians.
I use to make excuses for these people, but no longer. It's long past time for these people to grow up, let their women come out from under the rock, and step into the sunshine. It's time for the Muslim community to live like human beings and quit making excuses for the homicidal maniacs in their midst.
Imagine the response from the pulpits across Christendom if Jerry Falwell had blown up the great Buddhist Temple in Nara, claiming he was following the Old Testment instruction to smash idols, claiming he was drawing vengeance for the thousands of martyred Christians here, including the American pilots who were vivisected just up the road from me in WWII. I'd begin every day here by saying: "Hi. I'm from America. I'm a Christian. Falwell is a monster. He's completely wrong." CNN would be one nonstop show of Christian ministers lining up to denounce him.
I have yet to hear the same response from Islam. Bin Laden appears to be a popular hero in the Middle East, a modern-day psychotic bloody version of Robin Hood. I've heard a few qualified, mealy-mouthed responses from the Muslim community here in America about how "violence is not the best solution." What I have not heard is the shocked thundering raging denouncement and the commensurate police activity coming from Islam if the situation were truly what you say it is.
I'm sorry, but the Muslim community has burned through their "benefit of the doubt." Until they start acting like civilized human beings, I'm not going to pretend that they are.
Islam is a religion of violence, historically spread through military conquest. The Koran basically offers two choices for the "infidel:" conversion or death.
The Arabs could have had peace a million times since 1948 and they've rejected it each time. The Palestinians could have had their own nation a dozen times over, and each time, they rejected it.
The fact that Arafat tried to assassinate the journalists who got the pictures of Palestinians dancing in the street after 9/11 did not endear him to me. The Daniel Pearl video ended all discussion on this matter for me.
The Prophet can now take his place beside Charles Manson, another leader of a dangerous and bloody cult. Five years ago I was an apologist for the Palestinians. Today I see Isreal was right all along. You can keep your anti-semitism which is no doubt boiling in your throat already. I'm not a Jew.
You can't negotiate with people who want nothing more than to see you dead.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, I know, but I was wondering if anyone knew of any companies that actually crush and re-smelt old CRTs, instead of just shipping them off to China?
Wasn't there some variation on DeCSS that represented the program as a (very long) prime number? People claimed that they weren't swapping a banned file, simply trading primes.
Maybe someone with a better memory and better undersanding of what they did could fill in the blanks?
Specifically, if I consume too much sugar too quickly it puts me to sleep.
Uh, do yourself a favor. Go to your friendly neighborhood health care provider. Repeat the above sentence to the doctor. Have your insulin checked/ do a screen for diabetes/ glucose tolerance, etc.
Diabetes caught early is inconvenient. Diabetes caught late is REALLY inconvenient.
Yet again, one of my Christian brothers seems to have forgotten a central tenet of our faith.
There has only been one flawless, blameless life, and He was crucified roughly 2,000 years ago. The rest of us are "sinners saved by grace," though you seem to have misplaced that fact. Perhaps a rereading of Paul is in order.
You were a slave to sin, redeemed by blood. You sound as if you were raised in the church and therefore have forgotten that no one is perfect or blameless.
Everyone has something to hide, whether it's Noah, Moses, David, Peter or Paul. Perhaps you should have learned more about poker to learn when one side has more information about the other, the game isn't even remotely fair.
Somehow though, you strike me as the type who would never dirty his hands with a deck of cards, and that sig of yours reeks of self-righteousness, the sort that will eventually lead you to say, "Lord, Lord, Did we not..?"
You have forgotten that our faith was originally spread by cheats, brawlers and prostitutes, the very people this system will wield the most power over. Somehow, I think Mary Magdelene would have had something to add.
The supreme sovereign power in Iran is still a religious figure with his very own police force. They routinely arrest and torture journalists who "offend God." Iran President Khatami recently tried to have one of these journalists released. The religious police wouldn't even tell him where the journalist was being held.
Just because Iran hasn't publicly blown up a building lately doesn't mean they've joined the forces of goodness and light in the Universe...
Hit Google on "Iran" and "journalist" to get an eyeful. Here are a few links to get you started so you can verify this for yourself:
http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=214 h ttp://www.time.com/time/europe/timetrails/iran/ir 980427.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/worl d/middle_east / newsid_1535000/1535836.stm http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/i ra n000424.html
Let's see, two grand for a 386 puts you in college in the mid-80's. I'm going to try to put this as gently as I can, in the hopes that you might listen to it and spare some kids some grief.
I too paid for my own college. I could not afford a computer of any kind. I graduated in 1989, paid for entirely on my own dime. I too resented the frat rats who were handed everything while I worked two, and at one point, three jobs.
Now, you need to understand, that sometimes the world can change. Brace yourself, get a stiff drink, and try to cope with the fact that while lower-end wages have fallen, tuitions have multiplied.
After taking a few more courses in 1995, I realized that there is no way in hell I would have my degree if I had tried to go to school just six years after I graduated. Tuition had doubled, and for the tech-related courses, tripled. In economic terms, you had it easy.
Looking back, the kids who truly got the most out of school were the ones who didn't have to spend 50 hours a week working like I did. My kids will go to college with all the trimmings, fully funded, and I will be proud that I could give them something I didn't have.
You aren't "helping your kids grow." What you're really doing is taking your bitterness out on them.
Does anyone know if this technology can scale down? Would it be possible to use the same principles to build a craft that is 10 meters across instead of 100?
Hurry Igor! The peasants are coming to burn us down. I suppose there are some things Man was just not meant to know....
Seriously though, if your God is so small that He actually feels threatened by what is essentially a glorified kite without a string, you need to find something else to pray to. Personally, my God created the entire cosmos, and views stunts like these with the same amusement I feel when my toddler plays with paper airplanes.
Imagine if Captain Kangaroo had turned into an alcoholic lunatic, or Mr. Rogers had fallen to AIDS or if Kermit turned up as part of the Cajun dinner special...
"Star Wars" was MY childhood. My middle-school friends and I argued endlessly about "Empire." Vader, Luke's father? No way. Who was this Boba Fett anyway? Why was he masked the entire film. Somethin's gotta be goin' on there.
WE WAITED MORE THAN A DECADE FOR EPISODE 1! I grew up, I became an OLD MAN waiting for that bloody movie. When I heard it was coming, it was like the Return of Gandalf. The World would be OK. I dragged my wife to the theater, promising her it would be great, this would be epic, Strap In and Enjoy the Ride.
Ten minutes in, I wanted to shoot myself. Twenty minutes in, and my wife was openly wondering if this constituted the sort of spousal abuse that would get her more than 50% in the divorce.
To give you a contemporary example, I want you to go to your child and explain that in the next book, which we're all waiting for like it was Christmas, in the next book, Dumbledore turns out to be a child molester.
Watch the look on the face of your little Harry-or-Hermione-wannabe.
THAT's exactly how episode one made me feel.
The current matches have preselected audiences
on
RoboCup 2001 Underway
·
· Score: 1
You do not have statistically normal audiences at your matches right now.
Yes, crowds will gather to watch paint dry. Truckenstein has a fan base.
But I'm talking about Box Office, events that generate excitement across the population at large. Right now, you're holding matches at the Mayfair Municipal Auditorium. I'm talking about matches at Madison Square Garden.
What I learned from that contact -- who is still a consultant to MusicNet -- is they're not engaging smaller entities at this point. They're targeting four or five large companies to be distributors.
Hence the $750,000 fee to even talk to you about a licensing deal. It's just a number they pulled out of the air to give them an excuse to turn you away.
However, let's say a group of radio stations, KISS 95, WIMP 92, WILD 98, and KARS 88, decide to pool resources and pony up the fee.
How many of you think the Industry would take their money, give them a five minute "negotiation" with Johnson from the mail room, and then have security hustle them out the door?
No, no, no. You should have paid more attention in your Lit courses.
People watch sports and movies because they "identify" with their heroes. Watch a boxing match. See how many people move like they're the ones fighting? Been to an actual ball game lately? Ever notice how many beer-sodden wretches actually think they're part of the game? You know why you like sex scenes in movies? Because deep down you sort of believe that you're the one getting laid.
Now, if you replace the human players with bots, you really discourage identification. The whole thing devolves into a tractor pull, which isn't nearly as satisfying as watching Knute Rockney win one for the Gipper.
Here's what you want to do. Mix the humans and robots. Give each team a couple of bots. Make some of them ED 209s. Make the others Bishop.
Inevitably, some of the human players will turn into John Henry "A Man Ain't Nothing But a Man" Heroes who fight valiantly and get ripped apart by the machines.
Now, you have identification, crowds on their feet, stadiums shocked into silence, Maximus getting carried off the field by an honor guard.
And there's your box office.
Soccer matches make Baby Darwin cry.
on
RoboCup 2001 Underway
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No, let's hope it exactly gets battle-botted.
Soccer matches do not have the raw Darwinian drive to perfection necessary to provide me with my own personal R2 unit before I die. As someone who makes his living in a non-English speaking country, I WANT my own protocol droid, dammit, and I want it SOON, if not now.
Let's face it. If Team Gizmo goes to compete, and GizmoBot misses a point, they're going to go out drinking later and talk.
However, if Team Gizmo goes to compete, and the StripeBot rips the living fur off of poor little GizmoBot, leaving him to howl and scream as he goes into that long night, Team Gizmo ain't going drinking later. No, they're taking their butts back to the lab to make "the MogwaiBot: Midnight Buffet and Swim."
Enough iterations of that, and pretty soon I'll have my very own protocol droid, courtesy of Riff.
You get double geek cred too, because Chewbacca wears one.
The problem is walking around in public giving the appearance that yer totin' ammunition...
Given today's climate and recent events, if I wuz getting a Big Mac or mailin' a letter and you walked in wearing one, I might jest hit the deck and return fire.
Now, I'd feel bad about killin' yer Palm Pilot when I filled you full o'lead. But me feelin' bad wouldn't matter. The durn thing still wouldn't boot after havin' it's BIOS flashed with a.45 slug.
I just read Bero's page about shared source. It was lucid, clear and logical. I don't think it's going to influence any purchasing decisions, though.
I remember when Microsoft first began their public attack on Open Source, before they began to backpedal with "Oh, we meant the GPL." The news program I saw was a double-headed interview, first the guy from MS, then the Redhat guy. (I remember who, but let's not name names to protect egos.)
The MS guy, some lower-level marketing droid, came on and gave a short statement. If you knew the issues, or even just paid attention to what he was saying, it was obvious every single word out of his mouth was a lie straight from the Pits of Hell.
But the guy looked like Alec Baldwin, with a voice like a really good late-night radio host. His suit was perfect. In all honesty, this guy could have won the last presidential race hands down. If you've just been arrested for murder, this is the Bobby Donnell-clone you want to walk into your cell.
The interviewer thanked him for his time, flashed him a smile that promised dinner and drinks later, and then turned to Redhat -- our guy. *sigh*
Our guy was wearing a badly-fitting T-shirt. He was sitting down with his shoulders slumped. He forgot to bring a chin. The glasses, what you could see of them, looked like they had been scavenged. He wore this oversized red fedora that looked like the headgear from Indiana Jones and Dale Evans had had a secret love child. In trying to pull it down rakishly over his eyes like Humphrey Bogart, he covered half his face and made himself look like a suspected child molester hiding from the crowd. His voice was nasal and cracked badly from nervousness.
If you paid attention, and had read Eric S. Raymond before you saw the interview, then you understood Mr. Redhat was rehashing all of the stock arguments against the Great Evil of Microsoft.
If you hadn't, then this nut kept prattling on about the Cathdrals and Bazaars in the Middle Ages and how Microsoft wanted to be a feudal lord and Dear God, this poor geek had obviously lost his mind to decades of Dungeons and Dragons...
The interviewer cut him off, thanked him for his time, and turned back to the camera. She flashed the audience a perfect smile that mixed amusement and pity.
Mr. Redhat had just won all of the debate points. He was still nuked into oblivion by Mr. Microsoft's style.
I've seen this particular game play out more times than I want to remember -- honest yet bumbling Reason blown away by treacherous Style.
If Linux really wants to win the war for the Desktop in time to prevent the.NET holocaust, then maybe it's time to hire a couple models of our own.
Think of them as tactical nukes. They got theirs, so we got ours...
1. DOOM
2. Half-Life
3. Warcraft 2
4. Sid Meier's Civilization
5. Quake
6. Diablo
7. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
8. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
9. Starcraft
10. Legend of Zelda
I cannot believe Star Raiders for the Atari 400 did not make the list...
When I read the title, I initially thought they would be talking about an array of smaller telescopes, taking data from a bunch of smaller mirrors and cobbling it together like the compound eye of an insect or something...
Nope. Un uh, sorry, these bad boys are talking about one solid 100-meter MIRROR with a telescope assembly that would just fit under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and stand almost 3/4 as tall.
To put that in perspective, once the thing's built, you would have a good chance of seeing it on the horizon with your naked eye from 15-20 miles away (a rough guess, I know).
You know that gargantuan telescope Marvin the Martian had in the Bugs Bunny cartoons? The OWL makes it look like a Cracker Jack prize.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, we have now wandered far, far afield, but...
A year ago, I would have agreed with you completely. In fact, your reply is so reasonable and lucid, I still have a hard time disagreeing with it.
And I will agree that my reaction here is born more from emotion than logic. I teach at a college in Japan, where I watched the exultation of the Muslim community after 9/11. Maybe it was the assorted bomb threats that got phoned in to the registrar's office in Arabic-accented Japanese that pushed me over the edge. (It's a secular college that was founded by Christian missionaries long, long ago.)
Having lived abroad for almost ten years now, and marrying a woman whose native language is not English, I've lost that subtle racism that most liberals, and I am one, have -- the idea that people born in the third world somehow have an excuse not to behave in a civilized fashion.
Looking at my own history, my grandparents lived in Appalachia, without benefit of indoor plumbing or electricity. Possums formed a staple of their diet. Somehow, I don't recall them chanting in the streets for anyone's blood.
France helped my country throw out the British, and they did it for purely selfish reasons. Without the French, it's entirely likely that Washington would not have survived. After 1776, France didn't stick around and send aid and workers to help us "nation build." With their purposes accomplished, they got out. You know what? I'm still grateful for the help. Left to our own devices, fractious and quarreling colonies somehow managed to have a meeting and come to an agreement about how to live together. We did it, France did it, England did it. Australia did it, India did it.. We're not unique. The list of people who have found themselves in chaos, had a meeting, made agreements and lived by them is quite a long one. When they do, we refer to it as a "civilization."
Afghanistan could have done the same thing. We built the mujahadeen purely so the Soviets would have a thorn in their side, and then we left. Fine. There's not a reason in the world that the Afghani people couldn't have had a meeting and worked it out.
Instead, they chose to run around the streets beating their women and staging public executions. They wasted time in pointless feuding and religious nonsense that threw away their one chance at a viable nation. They submitted to the rule of the Taliban, despite the fact that they had just ejected a far greater power, the Soviets.
Currently, the provisional government of Afghanistan has a myriad of problems. No agriculture, no utilities, no infrastructure of any kind. They apparently can't do anything, but theyve somehow managed to reinstitute the Office of Vice. Once again, religious police walk the streets of Afghanistan making sure women wear their veils.
Sure, Cletus, we ain't got no food, no water, no plumbin', but dammit, them wimmen are wearin' them veils.
The original poster argues that this is somehow America's fault, that the 3,000 dead in New York deserved to die.
Complete and utter bull. The Arabs are not the only people with grievances. If anyone should be bombing American cities, it should be the Cherokee and Lakotas. Somehow, I don't see the Native Americans doing anything more violent than holding sit-ins at Alcatraz. Furthermore, historical grievances do not excuse atrocities. If they did, then by all rights my family should start bombing London and assassinating anyone named "Campbell."
But the Arabic world in general is hardly a charity case. They've been flooded with oil money for almost five decades now. A reasonable people would have taken the oil money and built prosperous nations.
I still can't get over the fact that the first request of the Kuwaiti ruling family from the Army core of Engineers was to rebuild the royal palace, complete with solid-gold faucets, even before basic life-saving services had been restored.
I'm sorry. Muslim behavior has pushed me over the edge on this one. The dancing in the streets after 9/11. The joy that I saw among the Muslims here at the sight of people jumping from windows. The utter and complete lack of condemnation from the Muslim community until only recently. The meeting in London last month "celebrating" 9/11 and vowing to bring England under Sharia law. The fact that the Daniel Pearl murder video is reported to be a best-seller in the Arabic world. The Palestinian infant dressed up as a suicide bomber. (I don't care if the black-oil aliens from the X-Files have taken over. There is no excuse for the babarism of teaching children to blow themselves up.)
I look at the Middle East and I see Isreal, with no oil money but significant American support. I see a democracy with reasonable people who have gone from decimation to prosperity after WWII. I see Taiwan, with greater problems, accomplishing the same thing.
Then I see the Arab countries, awash in oil money, ruled by feudal lords, stricken by poverty, beating their women, chanting in the streets for blood, supporting people whose main goal in life is the death of civilians.
I use to make excuses for these people, but no longer. It's long past time for these people to grow up, let their women come out from under the rock, and step into the sunshine. It's time for the Muslim community to live like human beings and quit making excuses for the homicidal maniacs in their midst.
Imagine the response from the pulpits across Christendom if Jerry Falwell had blown up the great Buddhist Temple in Nara, claiming he was following the Old Testment instruction to smash idols, claiming he was drawing vengeance for the thousands of martyred Christians here, including the American pilots who were vivisected just up the road from me in WWII. I'd begin every day here by saying: "Hi. I'm from America. I'm a Christian. Falwell is a monster. He's completely wrong." CNN would be one nonstop show of Christian ministers lining up to denounce him.
I have yet to hear the same response from Islam. Bin Laden appears to be a popular hero in the Middle East, a modern-day psychotic bloody version of Robin Hood. I've heard a few qualified, mealy-mouthed responses from the Muslim community here in America about how "violence is not the best solution." What I have not heard is the shocked thundering raging denouncement and the commensurate police activity coming from Islam if the situation were truly what you say it is.
I'm sorry, but the Muslim community has burned through their "benefit of the doubt." Until they start acting like civilized human beings, I'm not going to pretend that they are.
Get this through your head.
Islam is a religion of violence, historically spread through military conquest. The Koran basically offers two choices for the "infidel:" conversion or death.
The Arabs could have had peace a million times since 1948 and they've rejected it each time. The Palestinians could have had their own nation a dozen times over, and each time, they rejected it.
The fact that Arafat tried to assassinate the journalists who got the pictures of Palestinians dancing in the street after 9/11 did not endear him to me. The Daniel Pearl video ended all discussion on this matter for me.
The Prophet can now take his place beside Charles Manson, another leader of a dangerous and bloody cult. Five years ago I was an apologist for the Palestinians. Today I see Isreal was right all along. You can keep your anti-semitism which is no doubt boiling in your throat already. I'm not a Jew.
You can't negotiate with people who want nothing more than to see you dead.
Thermal. Shutdown. Initiated.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, I know, but I was wondering if anyone knew of any companies that actually crush and re-smelt old CRTs, instead of just shipping them off to China?
Listen to an old man on this:
There's always more gear at the store.
The same is not true for your hide.
Tell your friend to get her priorities straight.
Hey, why not go one better?
Wasn't there some variation on DeCSS that represented the program as a (very long) prime number? People claimed that they weren't swapping a banned file, simply trading primes.
Maybe someone with a better memory and better undersanding of what they did could fill in the blanks?
Uh, do yourself a favor. Go to your friendly neighborhood health care provider. Repeat the above sentence to the doctor. Have your insulin checked/ do a screen for diabetes/ glucose tolerance, etc.
Diabetes caught early is inconvenient. Diabetes caught late is REALLY inconvenient.
*sigh*
Yet again, one of my Christian brothers seems to have forgotten a central tenet of our faith.
There has only been one flawless, blameless life, and He was crucified roughly 2,000 years ago. The rest of us are "sinners saved by grace," though you seem to have misplaced that fact. Perhaps a rereading of Paul is in order.
You were a slave to sin, redeemed by blood. You sound as if you were raised in the church and therefore have forgotten that no one is perfect or blameless.
Everyone has something to hide, whether it's Noah, Moses, David, Peter or Paul. Perhaps you should have learned more about poker to learn when one side has more information about the other, the game isn't even remotely fair.
Somehow though, you strike me as the type who would never dirty his hands with a deck of cards, and that sig of yours reeks of self-righteousness, the sort that will eventually lead you to say, "Lord, Lord, Did we not..?"
You have forgotten that our faith was originally spread by cheats, brawlers and prostitutes, the very people this system will wield the most power over. Somehow, I think Mary Magdelene would have had something to add.
Where is your compassion? Where is your humility?
//shakes his head and sighs
h ttp://www.time.com/time/europe/timetrails/iran/ir 980427.htmll d/middle_east / newsid_1535000/1535836.stm i ra n000424.html
Um, uh, no.
The supreme sovereign power in Iran is still a religious figure with his very own police force. They routinely arrest and torture journalists who "offend God." Iran President Khatami recently tried to have one of these journalists released. The religious police wouldn't even tell him where the journalist was being held.
Just because Iran hasn't publicly blown up a building lately doesn't mean they've joined the forces of goodness and light in the Universe...
Hit Google on "Iran" and "journalist" to get an eyeful. Here are a few links to get you started so you can verify this for yourself:
http://www.rsf.fr/article.php3?id_article=214
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/
Let's see, two grand for a 386 puts you in college in the mid-80's. I'm going to try to put this as gently as I can, in the hopes that you might listen to it and spare some kids some grief.
I too paid for my own college. I could not afford a computer of any kind. I graduated in 1989, paid for entirely on my own dime. I too resented the frat rats who were handed everything while I worked two, and at one point, three jobs.
Now, you need to understand, that sometimes the world can change. Brace yourself, get a stiff drink, and try to cope with the fact that while lower-end wages have fallen, tuitions have multiplied.
After taking a few more courses in 1995, I realized that there is no way in hell I would have my degree if I had tried to go to school just six years after I graduated. Tuition had doubled, and for the tech-related courses, tripled. In economic terms, you had it easy.
Looking back, the kids who truly got the most out of school were the ones who didn't have to spend 50 hours a week working like I did. My kids will go to college with all the trimmings, fully funded, and I will be proud that I could give them something I didn't have.
You aren't "helping your kids grow." What you're really doing is taking your bitterness out on them.
But for future infants born blind, getting this device in early enough might allow the needed development.
Does anyone know if this technology can scale down? Would it be possible to use the same principles to build a craft that is 10 meters across instead of 100?
Seriously though, if your God is so small that He actually feels threatened by what is essentially a glorified kite without a string, you need to find something else to pray to. Personally, my God created the entire cosmos, and views stunts like these with the same amusement I feel when my toddler plays with paper airplanes.
"Star Wars" was MY childhood. My middle-school friends and I argued endlessly about "Empire." Vader, Luke's father? No way. Who was this Boba Fett anyway? Why was he masked the entire film. Somethin's gotta be goin' on there.
WE WAITED MORE THAN A DECADE FOR EPISODE 1! I grew up, I became an OLD MAN waiting for that bloody movie. When I heard it was coming, it was like the Return of Gandalf. The World would be OK. I dragged my wife to the theater, promising her it would be great, this would be epic, Strap In and Enjoy the Ride.
Ten minutes in, I wanted to shoot myself. Twenty minutes in, and my wife was openly wondering if this constituted the sort of spousal abuse that would get her more than 50% in the divorce.
To give you a contemporary example, I want you to go to your child and explain that in the next book, which we're all waiting for like it was Christmas, in the next book, Dumbledore turns out to be a child molester.
Watch the look on the face of your little Harry-or-Hermione-wannabe.
THAT's exactly how episode one made me feel.
Yes, crowds will gather to watch paint dry. Truckenstein has a fan base.
But I'm talking about Box Office, events that generate excitement across the population at large. Right now, you're holding matches at the Mayfair Municipal Auditorium. I'm talking about matches at Madison Square Garden.
Hence the $750,000 fee to even talk to you about a licensing deal. It's just a number they pulled out of the air to give them an excuse to turn you away.
However, let's say a group of radio stations, KISS 95, WIMP 92, WILD 98, and KARS 88, decide to pool resources and pony up the fee.
How many of you think the Industry would take their money, give them a five minute "negotiation" with Johnson from the mail room, and then have security hustle them out the door?
People watch sports and movies because they "identify" with their heroes. Watch a boxing match. See how many people move like they're the ones fighting? Been to an actual ball game lately? Ever notice how many beer-sodden wretches actually think they're part of the game? You know why you like sex scenes in movies? Because deep down you sort of believe that you're the one getting laid.
Now, if you replace the human players with bots, you really discourage identification. The whole thing devolves into a tractor pull, which isn't nearly as satisfying as watching Knute Rockney win one for the Gipper.
Here's what you want to do. Mix the humans and robots. Give each team a couple of bots. Make some of them ED 209s. Make the others Bishop.
Inevitably, some of the human players will turn into John Henry "A Man Ain't Nothing But a Man" Heroes who fight valiantly and get ripped apart by the machines.
Now, you have identification, crowds on their feet, stadiums shocked into silence, Maximus getting carried off the field by an honor guard.
And there's your box office.
Soccer matches do not have the raw Darwinian drive to perfection necessary to provide me with my own personal R2 unit before I die. As someone who makes his living in a non-English speaking country, I WANT my own protocol droid, dammit, and I want it SOON, if not now.
Let's face it. If Team Gizmo goes to compete, and GizmoBot misses a point, they're going to go out drinking later and talk.
However, if Team Gizmo goes to compete, and the StripeBot rips the living fur off of poor little GizmoBot, leaving him to howl and scream as he goes into that long night, Team Gizmo ain't going drinking later. No, they're taking their butts back to the lab to make "the MogwaiBot: Midnight Buffet and Swim."
Enough iterations of that, and pretty soon I'll have my very own protocol droid, courtesy of Riff.
Somebody stop the sponsors of this competition before they senselessly frame the living hell out of yet another website!
The problem is walking around in public giving the appearance that yer totin' ammunition...
Given today's climate and recent events, if I wuz getting a Big Mac or mailin' a letter and you walked in wearing one, I might jest hit the deck and return fire.
Now, I'd feel bad about killin' yer Palm Pilot when I filled you full o'lead. But me feelin' bad wouldn't matter. The durn thing still wouldn't boot after havin' it's BIOS flashed with a .45 slug.
I remember when Microsoft first began their public attack on Open Source, before they began to backpedal with "Oh, we meant the GPL." The news program I saw was a double-headed interview, first the guy from MS, then the Redhat guy. (I remember who, but let's not name names to protect egos.)
The MS guy, some lower-level marketing droid, came on and gave a short statement. If you knew the issues, or even just paid attention to what he was saying, it was obvious every single word out of his mouth was a lie straight from the Pits of Hell.
But the guy looked like Alec Baldwin, with a voice like a really good late-night radio host. His suit was perfect. In all honesty, this guy could have won the last presidential race hands down. If you've just been arrested for murder, this is the Bobby Donnell-clone you want to walk into your cell.
The interviewer thanked him for his time, flashed him a smile that promised dinner and drinks later, and then turned to Redhat -- our guy. *sigh*
Our guy was wearing a badly-fitting T-shirt. He was sitting down with his shoulders slumped. He forgot to bring a chin. The glasses, what you could see of them, looked like they had been scavenged. He wore this oversized red fedora that looked like the headgear from Indiana Jones and Dale Evans had had a secret love child. In trying to pull it down rakishly over his eyes like Humphrey Bogart, he covered half his face and made himself look like a suspected child molester hiding from the crowd. His voice was nasal and cracked badly from nervousness.
If you paid attention, and had read Eric S. Raymond before you saw the interview, then you understood Mr. Redhat was rehashing all of the stock arguments against the Great Evil of Microsoft.
If you hadn't, then this nut kept prattling on about the Cathdrals and Bazaars in the Middle Ages and how Microsoft wanted to be a feudal lord and Dear God, this poor geek had obviously lost his mind to decades of Dungeons and Dragons...
The interviewer cut him off, thanked him for his time, and turned back to the camera. She flashed the audience a perfect smile that mixed amusement and pity.
Mr. Redhat had just won all of the debate points. He was still nuked into oblivion by Mr. Microsoft's style.
I've seen this particular game play out more times than I want to remember -- honest yet bumbling Reason blown away by treacherous Style.
If Linux really wants to win the war for the Desktop in time to prevent the .NET holocaust, then maybe it's time to hire a couple models of our own.
Think of them as tactical nukes. They got theirs, so we got ours...
1. DOOM
2. Half-Life
3. Warcraft 2
4. Sid Meier's Civilization
5. Quake
6. Diablo
7. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar
8. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
9. Starcraft
10. Legend of Zelda
I cannot believe Star Raiders for the Atari 400 did not make the list...
here
Do these maniacs have any appreciation for how much Windex and how many paper towels they're talking about?
Nope. Un uh, sorry, these bad boys are talking about one solid 100-meter MIRROR with a telescope assembly that would just fit under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and stand almost 3/4 as tall.
To put that in perspective, once the thing's built, you would have a good chance of seeing it on the horizon with your naked eye from 15-20 miles away (a rough guess, I know).
You know that gargantuan telescope Marvin the Martian had in the Bugs Bunny cartoons? The OWL makes it look like a Cracker Jack prize.