Except...I'm not being strapped down, force fed bullshit. It's advertising, and I have the option of walking away from it. The will power argument applies here, strictly BECAUSE it's one's choice whether they pay attention or not.
Yes, you are VERY special.
You probably have a healthy brain, were probably fed well as a child, you probably had authority figures in your life who placed importance on critical thinking and passed those values on to you, you probably had access to books and time and space to develop a strong will and the ability to discern lies from truth.
A great many people do NOT have those benefits.
You are working from a state of high benefit to condemn those who are not as smart as or as gifted as you as though these areas of lack were deliberately acquired based on fully informed choices. You might as well condemn house pets for not having thumbs.
All men were NOT created equal. If everybody was exactly the same as you, and they made poor choices, then you would have some legitimate complaint, but they were not. As such, you are blowing hot air either out of impatience or conceit.
As such, it is NOT a straw man argument. If it were, then there wouldn't be an obesity problem in the U.S.
The question becomes this: "Is it morally okay to trick a dog because the dog technically has the option of not being tricked?"
Automatic Assumption #1: "The day of the week is irrelevant. The probability is 1/2. Dice and (theoretical) Wombs don't have memory."
Automatic Assumption #2: "This is one of those loaded math problems, which means my first automatic assumption is almost certainly false and I need to apply further examination to work out why."
Please note that. . .
Intuition had exactly NOTHING to do with that process. Both assumptions were based on fast pattern recognition and old survival tactics. Old monkey/reptile brain stuff. You can program all of that into a machine. Real intuition cannot be programmed.
REAL Intuition works from the soul level and taps into a knowledge base which includes data from past life experiences and the "infinite universal hard drive". (Which, of course, is still a form of pattern recognition and response, but it allows for more information than is actually available in the physical realm.)
Here's what My REAL intuition told me: "There's something fishy about this. The mathematicians working on this are making assumptions which are actually debatable. This isn't as cut and dried as the Monty Hall problem; you cannot apply this to the real world. Also. . , most of Slashdot is going to take this personally and get all huffy."
Real intuition, if people followed it, would see them switch doors when Monty offers the option. Their guts would tell them to because their guts have access to the universal probability calculator. Unless of course the prize was behind the first door.
Jedi don't lose at Monty Hall. But then, of course, Jedi don't go on game shows either. On the way to becoming a Jedi, you realize that money and fame and glittery distraction for the masses belongs to a different realm. -A realm where automatic behavior is confused with intuition.
Yes, yes. We get it. What you're really saying is, "Look at me! I have my shit together! I'm smarter and stronger, and everybody should strive to be me!"
So, fine then. Good for you! Here's a gold sticker! You should be praised and patted on the head.
People who rail on about personal responsibility are often the least aware people on the planet. They really, honestly, truly believe that they are indestructible, that they are immune to mind programming.
But if I were to take you and strap you down and feed you drugged food every day hit you with sleep deprivation, your vaunted will-power would be mush within 72 hours. Within two weeks, a smart programmer could have you shaven-headed, dressed in a robe and shaking a tambourine for donations at the airport.
The "Lone Wolf" is a myth. Everybody can be broken. You are fooling yourself if you think you are somehow special and exempt from the realities of the human psyche. As Pavlov discovered, even a strong dog can be broken if you first broke its health.
The fact of the matter is that mind-control techniques of this nature are played out upon the populace of the world in slow form. They work and they need to be addressed and understood. The government has a vested interest in NOT helping, but that's not the point. Yes, people are stupid and they certainly need to be more aware, but you cannot condemn the ignorant for being ignorant. The fact that you are condemning them is a direct proof that the dumbing-down tactics employed are effective.
BP is a band of complete villains. Putting these psychopaths in charge of the cleanup is like putting the same cast of characters who crashed the economy back in charge of the economy. Fuck these guys.
It's not how many dollars you spend, it's HOW you spend them.
Nobody could afford the mountains of free press attention Apple has received over the last year. Apple knows how to play the market like a violin! And what have they offered us? A touch screen and an internet converted into a pay-per-click environment for people who don't like to express their own thoughts (who needs a keyboard?) and who primarily want to consume pre-packaged media -where the artist STILL doesn't get his/her fair share.
And for this, they come off like saints!
Yes, it took extremely clever marketing to pull off a con job of that magnitude!
There are always going to be examples available to demonstrate a point, but they are usually going to be taken out of the context of overall trends, or placed in straw man juxtaposition so as to create an argument which cannot be resolved. This is why I haven't bothered to mention any specifics from Futurama or the Simpsons.
All I've got are my reactions, which are both consistent and honest, and my attempt to explain why they exist. I look at old Simpsons episodes and I look at new ones and there appears to me a clear a MASSIVE, noticeable difference in the story structures and focus and the resulting effects they had/have upon me. Not all of the older ones were home runs, but there was a consistent effort by the creators to attain a certain quality which has since been dropped. One can argue points all day, but this observation isn't going to go away or be any less true. The newer episodes seem stupid and uninteresting to me, nor am I the only one who has noticed this. I think my explanation for how humor works remains one of the top reasons for this difference. Futurama, from my viewings, has only ever existed on one side of that invisible line and it simply didn't sustain my interest as a result. I've tried to explain why, but I guess you don't get it. Perhaps you honestly can't tell the difference, but whatever. We all have different ways of perceiving reality. Nobody is universally aware.
And I will say that your note that overall story reality continuing from episode to episode in Futurama seems pretty valid. I like to see that kind of continuity in stories, and such things do certainly contribute to the life blood of a story universe. I simply got fed up and lost interest after a season and a half and wasn't able to continue long enough perhaps for those details to pile up into anything relevant for me.
But again, whatever. People take criticism of shows they watch far too personally. If one person cannot see something another can, then this becomes a way of reflecting upon one's perceptive abilities. And that's life. We're all growing at our own pace, so it's best just keep on doing what we're doing. We all get there eventually if our intention is to grow. But typically, people have a hard time discussing stuff associated with this perception differential in a non-combative manner, which I find too much work to deal with beyond a certain point, so I'll leave it all here.
We watch what we watch, we grow as we grow. No biggie.
I don't think your analogy quite works. -No physical property is affected by non-malicious intrusions on computers.
The reason hackers get nailed after politely informing the companies whose systems they have penetrated of security holes which need filling is two-fold;
1. The non-computer literate company heads simply react out of fear at the word, "Hacker".
But the big reason, I suspect. . ,
2. The admin in charge of security now looks incompetent. An admin is not going to thank a Hacker for threatening his job. So if he can paint the hacker as a malicious trouble-maker, hunt down and persecute said Hacker, then suddenly he looks like he's doing a great job rather than looking like an idiot.
Maybe it's an age thing and no longer the case with younger generations, but the GP's comments are fairly reflective of my own experience.
I'm a Canadian, and while only about 10% of the people I knew became involved in the military, a LOT of the guys I went through school with either owned guns or were very comfortable with fire arms and various hunting/survival technologies.
While never officially trained myself, I know my way around numerous types of fire arm in terms of cleaning and safe use, and while I'd prefer to brush up on several skills before jumping in, I would nonetheless feel quite confident about having to survive in the bush.
I have a feeling, though, that Canada is losing this level of knowledge among the iPod generation.
Then you weren't looking. Seriously. Go watch Jurassic Bark, Luck of the Fryfish, or particularly the montage at the end of Leela's Homeworld, and tell me again how the show wasn't packed with serious, heartfelt moments.
It's true; I WASN'T looking, and that's because all of the episodes you are pointing out happened long after I'd given up. I will indeed check them out. I like a decent story and a good animated pratfall as much as anyone.
I can count on my hand the number of Simpsons episodes that reached that level of depth and emotional honestly. And yet you expect every fucking episode of Futurama to be a life-changing experience...
Not life-changing. Just emotionally believable. Also, things are only really funny if they break with reality.
I'll try to explain. I've spent a long time trying to work out how writing works, and this is what I discovered. ..
The way "Funny" works is that our brains perceive a sudden divergence in reality, from one stream of True to another, but which are mutually incompatible with each other. It's that simple. An example is the simple Pie in the Face gag. -At one point, a person is standing thinking about the weather, and in the next, he has a pie in his face. He has to exist from one state to another regardless; he has no choice, but there is no logical transition from his perspective. The two realities simply can't work together, so he has to rapidly shift gears in order to catch up. For some reason, this hits the giggle button in humans.
Every instance of "Funny" boils down to this same element; a person, (either an observed subject or your own intellect) trying to stay sane while moving from one version of stable events through a sudden shift or reversal into another. Try it out as a yard stick against the next joke which makes you really laugh. It seems to hold true for all brands of humor.
Now. . . The way this relates to what we're talking about is that a common mistake I see, is that for Funny to work, the transition must be possible. That is, there have to be two different states to travel between. If the story universe matters; if there is cause and effect and some sense of normal, then an abrupt shift from that solid normality to a nonsense reality creates a powerful shearing force on the mind, and Funny erupts. In the early Simpsons episodes, things mattered. If Lisa or Bart were bullied at school, you felt for them. If Marge were struggling to achieve some new goal in her life, you wanted her to succeed because failure would hurt her and it would be a lasting hurt. So when a ridiculous moment came along, it represented a strong a break from reality, but a reality which we would quickly return to. But like I said, those days were long ago. Today, with something like Futurama, the moments of nonsense come so frequently that no sense of normal is ever really established, thus the shearing force isn't there. -This doesn't mean that there is a lack of cleverness; many Family Guy jokes, for instance, are very clever, but none of them break with reality since there isn't one to break from, except the loose break between our outside the TV reality and the joke itself. But all this can do is elicit a small chuckle and perhaps some admiration for the cleverness of the gag. But it's hardly ever funny. Futurama and the last decade or more of the Simpsons suffers from the same thing.
All it would take to improve things would be to create narratives which contain a rational thread and characters who are affected emotionally by the events which happen to them. The stories don't have to make people cry or cheer or anything like that. They simply have respect Cause and Effect consistently enough to make me think that if I punched one of the characters, they would hurt and not forget about it five seconds later, and thus make me feel bad for hurting them. The characters in Futurama do things to each other which are unforgivable, require an improbable
Ahh, I see... you fancy yourself an intellectual snob. *sigh* Pity I wasted time reading the "insipid nonsense" that is your comment...
Where do you get that? A season and a half, dude. I really wanted to like Futurama, but just couldn't find anything there which made me care about the characters or think that anything in their lives mattered even the tiniest tiny bit because dumb jokes ALWAYS came before any sense of reality. This was one of the things the Simpsons managed to get right seemingly effortlessly for years before it began cranking out the same kind of aimless nonsense Futurama molded itself after. It's Family Guy in space, for crying out loud? Do you like that shit as well?
Cuz there's "intellectual snobbery" and then there's "breathing". If you can't immediately see what I'm talking about, then you're missing part of your brain.
You're one of several people who has indicated that a couple of episodes from later seasons were worth while. I'm going to go look for that four leaf clover episode now, as it sounds like it might help pay for some of the toxic spill Futurama left behind in my brain.
Are you fucking *kidding* me? Have you never watched "Jurassic Bark", "Luck of the Fryfish", or "The Sting"? The Simpsons had some brilliant, emotional moments in it's golden years, but Futurama is easily its equal.
No. I just watched the first season and a half and then gave up figuring I'd given it a very fair chance to impress me. Since then I've watched maybe a dozen hours of Futurama over the years and sorely regretted it each time. While the production values have always been high, the writers have never achieved anything but high levels of "groan." The last thing I watched of theirs was one of their movies, and I didn't even make it all the way through before bailing.
But if you had the patience to wade through acres of that insipid nonsense in order to find something which finally worked, then congratulations. You're FAR more patient than I am.
Remember waaaay back when the Simpsons offered stirring emotional and psychological insights into the world and its people through humor? When the show had a soul and used satire with a light hand?
I do. That was a long, long time ago.
Futurama never had a soul. -Which is a shame, because it could have done. It offers a huge and fun world to explore, but it never gets serious for even a second, none of the characters speak to me. Sure, it's clever and witty, and it made me chuckle a few times, but that's SOOOO not the point of humor. It only reflects upon a bunch of writers who haven't figured out what it means to be human. Imagine Calvin & Hobbes without human insight and only dumb gags. Yeah.
The sooner Futurama stops twitching, the better. The damned thing was never alive.
I don't like seeing the big maple leaf on Slashdot. I like Canada to be unnoticed. That's where it's safe.
Canada managed to ride out most of the last wave of economic melt down, (thanks to keeping regulations in place.) It's manage to stay out of the bulk of unnecessary wars. Though, with Harper in power and Canadians descending into "Dumb" too quickly to notice that their voting choices are INSANE, I suppose it was going to be inevitable that things would start to get ugly around here.
Here's how it works. . .
There is no "matter" in the universe; it's all energy right down to the smallest level. Every "particle" breaks down to reveal more vast expanses of empty. Matter truly is an illusion; everything is just energy vibrating in a medium of nothing. So what's the difference between a thought and a brick? They're both made of energetic nothing, but the thought pattern is more alive and dynamic than the brick. Here in the giant dream of reality, consciousness is king.
As such, I see everything which happens in the physical realm as being a metaphor little different than the objects and events which show up in dreams. So. . , earthquakes in Canada, eh?
Yay. The problem with big ticket government purchases which keep thousands of people employed is that such expenses need to be justified. None of those thousands of employed people are going to want to have to go looking for work. Even in Canada's only slightly singed economic environment people fear losing their jobs. So. . , what keeps a billion dollars worth of security goons employed?
My guts are tied up in some knots over this because it seems very reasonable to expect violence at this clown show.
At least the earthquake didn't knock any buildings down or kill anybody.
Country A bombs country B. Daily. For years. Country B retaliates by bombing country A's power plant. Seems like sound logic to me. If country A had wanted to keep its power plant it should have either (a) refrained from bombing country B or (b) arranged some pretty serious defenses against country B's counterattacks.
It's not anywhere nearly that simple. This is a result of manipulations on many levels and decades of spy craft. The Hamas itself is largely a creation of the Israeli government and has done nothing but exacerbate the situation with the net effect of bringing Palestine to its present situation. And worse are the examples, (many of which are consistently and conveniently scrubbed from the internet), of Mossad hands in the creation of false flag terror events; everything from news crews being set up and waiting at a checkpoint where a drug-addled child bomber was due to arrive, to Mossad agents caught using stolen passports and manufacturing 'Islamic' terror bombs.
-If you take the time to research the issue, you will note that any time peace agreements were threatening to turn down the heat and thus remove excuses for Israel to continue its genocidal practices and land grabs, somebody would conveniently set off bombs or fire rockets into Israel, the immediate result of which was detrimental to Palestine. The pattern is clear, but you need to want to learn rather than live in denial in order to understand.
Israeli repair crews did not need to enter Gaza, because the damage was done to power lines in Israel, connecting Israel's power plants to Gaza. Hamas were not kind enough to hold their fire while technicians were fixing the electricity for them.
This is a combination of make-believe and the above mentioned details.
Your complaints against Israel are perhaps valid, but why isn't Gaza getting any fuel, electricity or supplies from its neighbor to the south? Is it because Jews are expected to act as saints unconditionally, while Arabs treating fellow Arabs as dirt is considered normal?
Egyptian politics are owned by Israel and the U.S. and thus serve Zionist ends. The people in Egypt protest over this and have raised entire subversive organizations in response to their hijacked government. It's the same reason the U.S. behaves the way it does; the Israeli lobby and secret services own much of the American leadership. Research this.
Considering Gaza as a "victim" is just outrageous. Since Israel evacuated the territory, granting independence to the local population, it has seen nothing but a torrent of rockets, attempted (and one successful) soldier kidnappings and terrorist attacks coming from the territory. We give them electricity, they bomb us. We give them supplies, they bomb the border crossings. And then they cry that they have no power and no supplies. And then the international media wakes up... and then trolls like you show up.
This stance is so completely out of sync with reality as to be a sign of either mind control, stupidity or insanity.
Israel has turned Gaza into a concentration camp, has killed thousands of civilians and militantly prevents supplies and aid from entering. What little it does allow in are meted out in controlled measure so as to keep the population weak and terrorized, but primarily to keep the rest of the world from crying foul. The objective is to seize land, partly in accordance with religious texts; the psychopaths in charge don't care how many Palestinians or Jews have to be sacrificed to obtain this objective. Hamas and the rest of this theater is just that. Theater.
Only a blind man would think that the surface story is all there is. There are far too many holes in it, far too much history of corruption, far too many confessions, far too many contrivances. Very simply, Humans are liars, cheats and cruel assholes, and the worst of the worst work in government.
Your arrogance and juvenile petulance astounds me. I don't have an iPad. I feel like my Droid does everything an iPad does and more. But I'm not going to sit around on a high horse and dog people that do see value in the device. Basically, go fuck yourself.
Hm. Well now, if you typed that response on your iPad clone, then you might (almost) have a valid point of view.
Otherwise, I have to wonder if you didn't simply recognize exactly what I was saying as an uncomfortable and unavoidable truth and reacted primarily because you don't like what it says about you or where your brain might be headed.
Anybody disagreeing with me simply hasn't done the research or is evil.
This absolute was spoken in haste and while I haven't heard anything yet which alters my general position on Israel, anybody who speaks in absolutes is closed off to new knowledge and isn't interested in learning. That's not who I am, but you can't take stuff back on Slashdot. You can however say that you were wrong.
Apple redesigned an shitty product that MS had been utterly failing at for a decade. They made it actually worth buying and, surprise, people are buying it. How them grapes taste?
Herd instincts only affect cows. Who cares what everybody else thinks is good? I'm only really interested in serving my personal requirements when it comes to a Personal Computer. (Go figure!)
The iPad makes it hard to fix stupidity on the Web. This is due to it's design factor, which is all about feeding people pre-made media while severely gimping HALF the point of the entire internet. Interactivity without a keyboard means you've been reduced to a drooling consumer. Or a paste-eating finger-painter. This might be fine for brain potatoes, but for me it's a huge, "No Thank-You!"
I've had an ASUS netbook for a couple of years now, and I find the little guy quite useful. It won't replace my desktop setup, but it's pretty darned handy in the ways it was meant to be. This new Toshiba jobbie looks neat, but I'd have to try out their keyboard before picking one up. If it had a pair of 10" screens and higher resolution and maybe pen input, then it would be pretty awesome, but it's early days still. Somebody is bound to make something truly useful soon.
Even if the runoff water from this AC unit isn't filled with toxins, then AC units have life spans, which means pretty much every unit they ship is going to end up in a land fill or dump somewhere. So, sure, this is about making cold air and saving energy, (if the press release is truthful), but it's ALSO a clever scheme for invisibly distributing a rarefied psychoactive substance used in anti-depressant medications into ground water.
And everybody sure loves air conditioning! We're talking millions of gallons of this stuff over a few years.
Combined with the billion or so cell phone and laptop batteries which are currently and ever-so-quietly leaching lithium into the environment, I do pause to wonder why the government is so eager to exacerbate this situation.
Objective Reality? The Mossad organized rockets to be fired from Gaza into Israel? I bet you're one of those "9/11 was an inside job" folks too.
I am. And pardon me for saying, but the fact that you are not doesn't exactly throw me into a tailspin of self-doubt. A quick review of your recent posts immediately illustrates demonstrably flawed thinking and poor research. You are a light-weight fool. Sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
Except...I'm not being strapped down, force fed bullshit. It's advertising, and I have the option of walking away from it. The will power argument applies here, strictly BECAUSE it's one's choice whether they pay attention or not.
Yes, you are VERY special.
You probably have a healthy brain, were probably fed well as a child, you probably had authority figures in your life who placed importance on critical thinking and passed those values on to you, you probably had access to books and time and space to develop a strong will and the ability to discern lies from truth.
A great many people do NOT have those benefits.
You are working from a state of high benefit to condemn those who are not as smart as or as gifted as you as though these areas of lack were deliberately acquired based on fully informed choices. You might as well condemn house pets for not having thumbs.
All men were NOT created equal. If everybody was exactly the same as you, and they made poor choices, then you would have some legitimate complaint, but they were not. As such, you are blowing hot air either out of impatience or conceit.
As such, it is NOT a straw man argument. If it were, then there wouldn't be an obesity problem in the U.S.
The question becomes this: "Is it morally okay to trick a dog because the dog technically has the option of not being tricked?"
-FL
Automatic Assumption #1: "The day of the week is irrelevant. The probability is 1/2. Dice and (theoretical) Wombs don't have memory."
Automatic Assumption #2: "This is one of those loaded math problems, which means my first automatic assumption is almost certainly false and I need to apply further examination to work out why."
Please note that. . .
Intuition had exactly NOTHING to do with that process. Both assumptions were based on fast pattern recognition and old survival tactics. Old monkey/reptile brain stuff. You can program all of that into a machine. Real intuition cannot be programmed.
REAL Intuition works from the soul level and taps into a knowledge base which includes data from past life experiences and the "infinite universal hard drive". (Which, of course, is still a form of pattern recognition and response, but it allows for more information than is actually available in the physical realm.)
Here's what My REAL intuition told me: "There's something fishy about this. The mathematicians working on this are making assumptions which are actually debatable. This isn't as cut and dried as the Monty Hall problem; you cannot apply this to the real world. Also. . , most of Slashdot is going to take this personally and get all huffy."
Real intuition, if people followed it, would see them switch doors when Monty offers the option. Their guts would tell them to because their guts have access to the universal probability calculator. Unless of course the prize was behind the first door.
Jedi don't lose at Monty Hall. But then, of course, Jedi don't go on game shows either. On the way to becoming a Jedi, you realize that money and fame and glittery distraction for the masses belongs to a different realm. -A realm where automatic behavior is confused with intuition.
-FL
Yes, yes. We get it. What you're really saying is, "Look at me! I have my shit together! I'm smarter and stronger, and everybody should strive to be me!"
So, fine then. Good for you! Here's a gold sticker! You should be praised and patted on the head.
People who rail on about personal responsibility are often the least aware people on the planet. They really, honestly, truly believe that they are indestructible, that they are immune to mind programming.
But if I were to take you and strap you down and feed you drugged food every day hit you with sleep deprivation, your vaunted will-power would be mush within 72 hours. Within two weeks, a smart programmer could have you shaven-headed, dressed in a robe and shaking a tambourine for donations at the airport.
The "Lone Wolf" is a myth. Everybody can be broken. You are fooling yourself if you think you are somehow special and exempt from the realities of the human psyche. As Pavlov discovered, even a strong dog can be broken if you first broke its health.
The fact of the matter is that mind-control techniques of this nature are played out upon the populace of the world in slow form. They work and they need to be addressed and understood. The government has a vested interest in NOT helping, but that's not the point. Yes, people are stupid and they certainly need to be more aware, but you cannot condemn the ignorant for being ignorant. The fact that you are condemning them is a direct proof that the dumbing-down tactics employed are effective.
-FL
???
What a peculiar response.
-FL
Kindra Arnesen
BP is a band of complete villains. Putting these psychopaths in charge of the cleanup is like putting the same cast of characters who crashed the economy back in charge of the economy. Fuck these guys.
-FL
Ha ha!
It's not how many dollars you spend, it's HOW you spend them.
Nobody could afford the mountains of free press attention Apple has received over the last year. Apple knows how to play the market like a violin! And what have they offered us? A touch screen and an internet converted into a pay-per-click environment for people who don't like to express their own thoughts (who needs a keyboard?) and who primarily want to consume pre-packaged media -where the artist STILL doesn't get his/her fair share.
And for this, they come off like saints!
Yes, it took extremely clever marketing to pull off a con job of that magnitude!
-FL
There are always going to be examples available to demonstrate a point, but they are usually going to be taken out of the context of overall trends, or placed in straw man juxtaposition so as to create an argument which cannot be resolved. This is why I haven't bothered to mention any specifics from Futurama or the Simpsons.
All I've got are my reactions, which are both consistent and honest, and my attempt to explain why they exist. I look at old Simpsons episodes and I look at new ones and there appears to me a clear a MASSIVE, noticeable difference in the story structures and focus and the resulting effects they had/have upon me. Not all of the older ones were home runs, but there was a consistent effort by the creators to attain a certain quality which has since been dropped. One can argue points all day, but this observation isn't going to go away or be any less true. The newer episodes seem stupid and uninteresting to me, nor am I the only one who has noticed this. I think my explanation for how humor works remains one of the top reasons for this difference. Futurama, from my viewings, has only ever existed on one side of that invisible line and it simply didn't sustain my interest as a result. I've tried to explain why, but I guess you don't get it. Perhaps you honestly can't tell the difference, but whatever. We all have different ways of perceiving reality. Nobody is universally aware.
And I will say that your note that overall story reality continuing from episode to episode in Futurama seems pretty valid. I like to see that kind of continuity in stories, and such things do certainly contribute to the life blood of a story universe. I simply got fed up and lost interest after a season and a half and wasn't able to continue long enough perhaps for those details to pile up into anything relevant for me.
But again, whatever. People take criticism of shows they watch far too personally. If one person cannot see something another can, then this becomes a way of reflecting upon one's perceptive abilities. And that's life. We're all growing at our own pace, so it's best just keep on doing what we're doing. We all get there eventually if our intention is to grow. But typically, people have a hard time discussing stuff associated with this perception differential in a non-combative manner, which I find too much work to deal with beyond a certain point, so I'll leave it all here.
We watch what we watch, we grow as we grow. No biggie.
-FL
I don't think your analogy quite works. -No physical property is affected by non-malicious intrusions on computers.
The reason hackers get nailed after politely informing the companies whose systems they have penetrated of security holes which need filling is two-fold;
1. The non-computer literate company heads simply react out of fear at the word, "Hacker".
But the big reason, I suspect. . ,
2. The admin in charge of security now looks incompetent. An admin is not going to thank a Hacker for threatening his job. So if he can paint the hacker as a malicious trouble-maker, hunt down and persecute said Hacker, then suddenly he looks like he's doing a great job rather than looking like an idiot.
-FL
Why on Earth did this get modded as "Troll"?
I suppose the PTB wouldn't keep on lying if it didn't work so incredibly well.
-FL
Maybe it's an age thing and no longer the case with younger generations, but the GP's comments are fairly reflective of my own experience.
I'm a Canadian, and while only about 10% of the people I knew became involved in the military, a LOT of the guys I went through school with either owned guns or were very comfortable with fire arms and various hunting/survival technologies.
While never officially trained myself, I know my way around numerous types of fire arm in terms of cleaning and safe use, and while I'd prefer to brush up on several skills before jumping in, I would nonetheless feel quite confident about having to survive in the bush.
I have a feeling, though, that Canada is losing this level of knowledge among the iPod generation.
-FL
Then you weren't looking. Seriously. Go watch Jurassic Bark, Luck of the Fryfish, or particularly the montage at the end of Leela's Homeworld, and tell me again how the show wasn't packed with serious, heartfelt moments.
It's true; I WASN'T looking, and that's because all of the episodes you are pointing out happened long after I'd given up. I will indeed check them out. I like a decent story and a good animated pratfall as much as anyone.
I can count on my hand the number of Simpsons episodes that reached that level of depth and emotional honestly. And yet you expect every fucking episode of Futurama to be a life-changing experience...
Not life-changing. Just emotionally believable. Also, things are only really funny if they break with reality.
I'll try to explain. I've spent a long time trying to work out how writing works, and this is what I discovered. . .
The way "Funny" works is that our brains perceive a sudden divergence in reality, from one stream of True to another, but which are mutually incompatible with each other. It's that simple. An example is the simple Pie in the Face gag. -At one point, a person is standing thinking about the weather, and in the next, he has a pie in his face. He has to exist from one state to another regardless; he has no choice, but there is no logical transition from his perspective. The two realities simply can't work together, so he has to rapidly shift gears in order to catch up. For some reason, this hits the giggle button in humans.
Every instance of "Funny" boils down to this same element; a person, (either an observed subject or your own intellect) trying to stay sane while moving from one version of stable events through a sudden shift or reversal into another. Try it out as a yard stick against the next joke which makes you really laugh. It seems to hold true for all brands of humor.
Now. . . The way this relates to what we're talking about is that a common mistake I see, is that for Funny to work, the transition must be possible. That is, there have to be two different states to travel between. If the story universe matters; if there is cause and effect and some sense of normal, then an abrupt shift from that solid normality to a nonsense reality creates a powerful shearing force on the mind, and Funny erupts. In the early Simpsons episodes, things mattered. If Lisa or Bart were bullied at school, you felt for them. If Marge were struggling to achieve some new goal in her life, you wanted her to succeed because failure would hurt her and it would be a lasting hurt. So when a ridiculous moment came along, it represented a strong a break from reality, but a reality which we would quickly return to. But like I said, those days were long ago. Today, with something like Futurama, the moments of nonsense come so frequently that no sense of normal is ever really established, thus the shearing force isn't there. -This doesn't mean that there is a lack of cleverness; many Family Guy jokes, for instance, are very clever, but none of them break with reality since there isn't one to break from, except the loose break between our outside the TV reality and the joke itself. But all this can do is elicit a small chuckle and perhaps some admiration for the cleverness of the gag. But it's hardly ever funny. Futurama and the last decade or more of the Simpsons suffers from the same thing.
All it would take to improve things would be to create narratives which contain a rational thread and characters who are affected emotionally by the events which happen to them. The stories don't have to make people cry or cheer or anything like that. They simply have respect Cause and Effect consistently enough to make me think that if I punched one of the characters, they would hurt and not forget about it five seconds later, and thus make me feel bad for hurting them. The characters in Futurama do things to each other which are unforgivable, require an improbable
Ahh, I see... you fancy yourself an intellectual snob. *sigh* Pity I wasted time reading the "insipid nonsense" that is your comment...
Where do you get that? A season and a half, dude. I really wanted to like Futurama, but just couldn't find anything there which made me care about the characters or think that anything in their lives mattered even the tiniest tiny bit because dumb jokes ALWAYS came before any sense of reality. This was one of the things the Simpsons managed to get right seemingly effortlessly for years before it began cranking out the same kind of aimless nonsense Futurama molded itself after. It's Family Guy in space, for crying out loud? Do you like that shit as well?
Cuz there's "intellectual snobbery" and then there's "breathing". If you can't immediately see what I'm talking about, then you're missing part of your brain.
-FL
See response here. . .
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1696366&cid=32678784
You're one of several people who has indicated that a couple of episodes from later seasons were worth while. I'm going to go look for that four leaf clover episode now, as it sounds like it might help pay for some of the toxic spill Futurama left behind in my brain.
Cheers!
-FL
Are you fucking *kidding* me? Have you never watched "Jurassic Bark", "Luck of the Fryfish", or "The Sting"? The Simpsons had some brilliant, emotional moments in it's golden years, but Futurama is easily its equal.
No. I just watched the first season and a half and then gave up figuring I'd given it a very fair chance to impress me. Since then I've watched maybe a dozen hours of Futurama over the years and sorely regretted it each time. While the production values have always been high, the writers have never achieved anything but high levels of "groan." The last thing I watched of theirs was one of their movies, and I didn't even make it all the way through before bailing.
But if you had the patience to wade through acres of that insipid nonsense in order to find something which finally worked, then congratulations. You're FAR more patient than I am.
-FL
Remember waaaay back when the Simpsons offered stirring emotional and psychological insights into the world and its people through humor? When the show had a soul and used satire with a light hand?
I do. That was a long, long time ago.
Futurama never had a soul. -Which is a shame, because it could have done. It offers a huge and fun world to explore, but it never gets serious for even a second, none of the characters speak to me. Sure, it's clever and witty, and it made me chuckle a few times, but that's SOOOO not the point of humor. It only reflects upon a bunch of writers who haven't figured out what it means to be human. Imagine Calvin & Hobbes without human insight and only dumb gags. Yeah.
The sooner Futurama stops twitching, the better. The damned thing was never alive.
-FL
Whoever modded this off-topic probably also has trouble grasping the relationship between milk and cereal.
Stretch your brain. You're not a house pet.
-FL
I don't like seeing the big maple leaf on Slashdot. I like Canada to be unnoticed. That's where it's safe.
Canada managed to ride out most of the last wave of economic melt down, (thanks to keeping regulations in place.) It's manage to stay out of the bulk of unnecessary wars. Though, with Harper in power and Canadians descending into "Dumb" too quickly to notice that their voting choices are INSANE, I suppose it was going to be inevitable that things would start to get ugly around here.
Here's how it works. . .
There is no "matter" in the universe; it's all energy right down to the smallest level. Every "particle" breaks down to reveal more vast expanses of empty. Matter truly is an illusion; everything is just energy vibrating in a medium of nothing. So what's the difference between a thought and a brick? They're both made of energetic nothing, but the thought pattern is more alive and dynamic than the brick. Here in the giant dream of reality, consciousness is king.
As such, I see everything which happens in the physical realm as being a metaphor little different than the objects and events which show up in dreams. So. . , earthquakes in Canada, eh?
Well, on the 26th, the G20 is landing in Toronto, and the government has spent approximately a BILLION dollars on security, including controversial sound cannons.
Yay. The problem with big ticket government purchases which keep thousands of people employed is that such expenses need to be justified. None of those thousands of employed people are going to want to have to go looking for work. Even in Canada's only slightly singed economic environment people fear losing their jobs. So. . , what keeps a billion dollars worth of security goons employed?
My guts are tied up in some knots over this because it seems very reasonable to expect violence at this clown show.
At least the earthquake didn't knock any buildings down or kill anybody.
-FL
I thought that shit pile was dead years ago?!? They have paying customers? Who the fuck are these people that are still even pulling a paycheck?
AOL users occupied a certain head-space, represented a genetic strain, filled a personality archetype.
And they all just bought iPads.
-FL
Country A bombs country B. Daily. For years. Country B retaliates by bombing country A's power plant. Seems like sound logic to me. If country A had wanted to keep its power plant it should have either (a) refrained from bombing country B or (b) arranged some pretty serious defenses against country B's counterattacks.
It's not anywhere nearly that simple. This is a result of manipulations on many levels and decades of spy craft. The Hamas itself is largely a creation of the Israeli government and has done nothing but exacerbate the situation with the net effect of bringing Palestine to its present situation. And worse are the examples, (many of which are consistently and conveniently scrubbed from the internet), of Mossad hands in the creation of false flag terror events; everything from news crews being set up and waiting at a checkpoint where a drug-addled child bomber was due to arrive, to Mossad agents caught using stolen passports and manufacturing 'Islamic' terror bombs.
-If you take the time to research the issue, you will note that any time peace agreements were threatening to turn down the heat and thus remove excuses for Israel to continue its genocidal practices and land grabs, somebody would conveniently set off bombs or fire rockets into Israel, the immediate result of which was detrimental to Palestine. The pattern is clear, but you need to want to learn rather than live in denial in order to understand.
Israeli repair crews did not need to enter Gaza, because the damage was done to power lines in Israel, connecting Israel's power plants to Gaza. Hamas were not kind enough to hold their fire while technicians were fixing the electricity for them.
This is a combination of make-believe and the above mentioned details.
Your complaints against Israel are perhaps valid, but why isn't Gaza getting any fuel, electricity or supplies from its neighbor to the south? Is it because Jews are expected to act as saints unconditionally, while Arabs treating fellow Arabs as dirt is considered normal?
Egyptian politics are owned by Israel and the U.S. and thus serve Zionist ends. The people in Egypt protest over this and have raised entire subversive organizations in response to their hijacked government. It's the same reason the U.S. behaves the way it does; the Israeli lobby and secret services own much of the American leadership. Research this.
Considering Gaza as a "victim" is just outrageous. Since Israel evacuated the territory, granting independence to the local population, it has seen nothing but a torrent of rockets, attempted (and one successful) soldier kidnappings and terrorist attacks coming from the territory. We give them electricity, they bomb us. We give them supplies, they bomb the border crossings. And then they cry that they have no power and no supplies. And then the international media wakes up... and then trolls like you show up.
This stance is so completely out of sync with reality as to be a sign of either mind control, stupidity or insanity.
Israel has turned Gaza into a concentration camp, has killed thousands of civilians and militantly prevents supplies and aid from entering. What little it does allow in are meted out in controlled measure so as to keep the population weak and terrorized, but primarily to keep the rest of the world from crying foul. The objective is to seize land, partly in accordance with religious texts; the psychopaths in charge don't care how many Palestinians or Jews have to be sacrificed to obtain this objective. Hamas and the rest of this theater is just that. Theater.
Only a blind man would think that the surface story is all there is. There are far too many holes in it, far too much history of corruption, far too many confessions, far too many contrivances. Very simply, Humans are liars, cheats and cruel assholes, and the worst of the worst work in government.
-FL
Your arrogance and juvenile petulance astounds me. I don't have an iPad. I feel like my Droid does everything an iPad does and more. But I'm not going to sit around on a high horse and dog people that do see value in the device. Basically, go fuck yourself.
Hm. Well now, if you typed that response on your iPad clone, then you might (almost) have a valid point of view.
Otherwise, I have to wonder if you didn't simply recognize exactly what I was saying as an uncomfortable and unavoidable truth and reacted primarily because you don't like what it says about you or where your brain might be headed.
-FL
Anybody disagreeing with me simply hasn't done the research or is evil.
This absolute was spoken in haste and while I haven't heard anything yet which alters my general position on Israel, anybody who speaks in absolutes is closed off to new knowledge and isn't interested in learning. That's not who I am, but you can't take stuff back on Slashdot. You can however say that you were wrong.
I was wrong.
-FL
Apple redesigned an shitty product that MS had been utterly failing at for a decade. They made it actually worth buying and, surprise, people are buying it. How them grapes taste?
Herd instincts only affect cows. Who cares what everybody else thinks is good? I'm only really interested in serving my personal requirements when it comes to a Personal Computer. (Go figure!)
The iPad makes it hard to fix stupidity on the Web. This is due to it's design factor, which is all about feeding people pre-made media while severely gimping HALF the point of the entire internet. Interactivity without a keyboard means you've been reduced to a drooling consumer. Or a paste-eating finger-painter. This might be fine for brain potatoes, but for me it's a huge, "No Thank-You!"
I've had an ASUS netbook for a couple of years now, and I find the little guy quite useful. It won't replace my desktop setup, but it's pretty darned handy in the ways it was meant to be. This new Toshiba jobbie looks neat, but I'd have to try out their keyboard before picking one up. If it had a pair of 10" screens and higher resolution and maybe pen input, then it would be pretty awesome, but it's early days still. Somebody is bound to make something truly useful soon.
-FL
I must have come across the wrong way, I'm in agreement with you. With your post, not about needing to pick up more books.
Sorry!
I misunderstood.
-FL
Even if the runoff water from this AC unit isn't filled with toxins, then AC units have life spans, which means pretty much every unit they ship is going to end up in a land fill or dump somewhere. So, sure, this is about making cold air and saving energy, (if the press release is truthful), but it's ALSO a clever scheme for invisibly distributing a rarefied psychoactive substance used in anti-depressant medications into ground water.
And everybody sure loves air conditioning! We're talking millions of gallons of this stuff over a few years.
Combined with the billion or so cell phone and laptop batteries which are currently and ever-so-quietly leaching lithium into the environment, I do pause to wonder why the government is so eager to exacerbate this situation.
-FL
Objective Reality? The Mossad organized rockets to be fired from Gaza into Israel? I bet you're one of those "9/11 was an inside job" folks too.
I am. And pardon me for saying, but the fact that you are not doesn't exactly throw me into a tailspin of self-doubt. A quick review of your recent posts immediately illustrates demonstrably flawed thinking and poor research. You are a light-weight fool. Sorry.
-FL