I liked how Tolkien put it, when the hobbits from one end of the Shire called those from the other end, "Queer" and vice versa, when basically they were the same brand of small, silly people.
Personally, my guess is that the poster has forgotten his time in, (or never went to) university and envies the students their youth and seemingly privileged lives. (Not counting the $30,000 in student loans and stress about having to pick a career, etc.) --While he has to work a tough day job.
It's far easier to pretend one is right than it is to say, "Yeah. That's a good point."
For several messed up reasons, people make it very difficult on each other to learn or teach something new without a sense of shame being a significant part of the information transaction. I know people who remain stunted at various schoolyard ages (mentally) because they got very good at hurting others and very afraid of being hurt themselves in games of "Who's right?" when they were young. They closed themselves and the flow of new information down to a trickle, and so grope towards mental maturity like wounded insects.
Life gets a lot easier when one loses the fear of automatic ridicule. Any behavior which extends from programmed thinking isn't worthy of emotional attention. It's a lesson which is almost impossible for people to learn, but once you get it, it's like being given your first lightsaber.
Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
My feelings exactly. It has lots of woo-woo words and ideas which seem magical and yet, I can't understand what the fundamental idea is exactly. --It almost sounds like she's suggesting that we use phone system-like switching technology to route power to individual homes and devices. Sounds bloody expensive to put into place. A high voltage router on every street corner, though I don't really see the advantage, unless each house is also generating electricity. Maybe I'm missing something.
If the concept is viable, then it can be explained in baby terms, which clearly I need. I feel like one of those really thick studio execs guys like Kevin Smith make fun of. So either I'm really, really dumb, the idea needs work, or she needs a good translator to stand between her head and the audience.
Those Zip Cars looks sort of cool, though I don't quite see the advantage. Do they have a team of service people running around each city maintaining the cars? It sounds like a de-centralized "Rent-a-Car", but while they don't have to rent a main lot, they still must have to maintain a garage and offices somewhere, and I bet they have to pay for all the individual parking spaces. Seems gimmicky, but again, maybe I'm just not seeing the big picture. (After all, I still refuse to use a cell phone over my trusty land line, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing the point.)
And as my wife will tell you, I scream "F*** you Rick Berman!' during the credits every time I see it.
Anyone who bristles at the mention of Rick Berman's name is good in my books. You can judge much about a man's character (and reviews) based on such things.
Now I have to go watch this film rather than muck around with torrents.
Get rid of the unions and open teaching to folks who would get paid on their performance. (GASP!)
Yes, Unions, the organizations responsible for you and your extended family not working in a coal mine seven days a week and dying at 35, yes, they are bad and should be gotten rid of in an expression of overt extremism.
A little perspective, please. Extremism is useless.
Paid by performance? Okay, and how does one measure performance? That question has been circled around forever and nobody has come up with a useful answer. Kids are not car parts. They are not binary bits. The question, in short, is not black and white. Some subjective imagination is required to solve the problem. --Come on, you must have heard the arguments and counter-arguments. They nearly all, on both sides, have reasonable concerns.
Extremism is never the answer, because the school system is littered with retarded people who can only see in black and white who are best treated like cogs, and it is also filled with people who know how to use their imaginations who die if they are treated like machine parts. The lizards and the monkeys need to live together and so the system needs to not be one thing or the other.
First I want to see what is actually under the cloth, second I want to know if he is just using a multiple pickup therimin, one for each axis.
I balked at the cloth as well, but stuck out the video to the last quarter, where they pulled it back and gave a short tour of the guts of the system.
Looks pretty simple. I don't think any new discoveries have been made, but rather the device is a clever bit of engineering using known electrical properties. Applied and scaled correctly, it holds some neat possibilities, though without some form of tactile feedback it might be awkward to manage information with one's hands in that manner. But who knows? Humans are good at adapting. The basic keyboard input seemed pretty impossible when I was a kid, but now my fingers are able to fly across the keys.
There is no such thing; it's a myth. That's why communism doesn't work. Capitalism is the idea that instead of living in a fantasy world where everyone cares about the common good, we're going to be honest and admit that people are hardwired for certain instincts, one of which (survival) manifests itself in current society as 'greed'. Instead of having a system like communism that is DESTROYED by greed, we have a system like capitalism that thrives on it.
Speak for yourself. I'm not a sociopathic freek hardwired for greed, thank-you very much. I've lived in modern communities where awareness of the common good works extremely well, where greed is punished by simply not including people. The funny thing is that the greedy creeps exist in the extreme minority, though they struggle mightily to convince us otherwise.
It's only when the monsters are allowed to rise to the top that society goes bankrupt, as it is currently doing right before our eyes. If you really do work in neuroscience, then you should have some notion as to how brains of that sort work. But who knows? Perhaps you have a prime example floating around in your own skull; you sure sound angry, arrogant and ignorant enough for that to be the case. --Precisely the type who honestly can't wrap his head around such a basic concept as, "The Common Good". Thinking in ridiculously simplistic terms like, "Communism was bad and Socialism is like Communism, so it's also bad!" is flat-out retarded. And I'm not saying that in the colloquial sense. You're a scientist? Either that's bullshit, or there may be far more pressing issues preventing you from finding funding. People who need to see things in terms of black & white by definition have limited imaginations.
Well, that's not really fair. We still need lab techs to clean the test tubes. The real issue is more likely that any grant application you may have participated in writing over the last eight years was done under Bush Jr. I'm no Obama fan, but it's important to bitch about the right people when expressing one's irritation for a policy. You don't need to be a scientist to work that one out. Which again makes me wonder what your job description really is.
In any case, the whole point is moot. When the national monetary system is based on borrowing at interest from a small cabal of private banks, (as it is here and as it was in Russia, though in a different manner), then it doesn't matter if you build a Communist Empire or Disney World on your plastic. In a hundred years, either the whole thing collapses under its own weight, or everybody becomes a slave.
Get out of your box and breathe something other than your own toxic fumes for a few minutes. You need to clear your head.
Lower my taxes so I have money to spend on things that will actually stimulate the economy.
If I'm not mistaken, then unless you are a multi-millionaire, he DID lower your taxes.
It seems to me that those tea parties were organized by multi-millionaires who work as talking heads on network news. I'm no Obama fan, but one needs to keep one's facts straight.
It's also a good idea to keep in mind that an enormous number of the luxuries of American technology which you take for granted every day resulted directly from the race to the moon as set in motion by JFK. Would you like to see the that government spending erased from history?
Sort of right. GE is not a good corp, but any vitriol directed at Iran is the result of propaganda. I find it amazing after the Iraq debacle that people are still capable of being tricked by state/Israeli sponsored nonsense.
But if you've not figured that out by now, all words to the contrary are probably wasted air. If only we could export blind ignorance and violent stupidity as commodities, the nation's economic woes would be vanquished. Oh. . , hold on. No, that's what got us into this mess in the first place.
Ya, mod me down, i cant help it that i despise the man and doing it wont change my mind.
Mod you down? Hardly! I wholeheartedly agree with your take on that sick twerp.
OS's were set to become huge regardless of who happened to be at the switch. There was a requirement for them, a vacuum in the world which needed filling, and so here we are. That we happened to get a power-mad creep at the front of the parade is just bad luck. (Though, in a game which is heavily biased toward psychotic jerks rising to the top, chances are if it wasn't him, it would have been somebody like him.)
From where you sit, I'm sure you think you are right. And to some degree, you are. But one day you will experience the other side of the coin, (assuming you have a soul), and then you will know a larger part of the story of life.
That's how it works. It's all about learning, and the world is one giant school.
I don't sense much bias in your comment, (for which you are to be congratulated), but I do take exception with some of your statements.
Living in Canada, I've known numerous older people, (over 60) who receive excellent health care. Elaborate heart surgeries and such. Nobody seems to think that they're being given second rate care or that preferential treatment is being given to younger people. I've never even heard that idea floated until you brought it up just now. My grandfather is in his 80's and two years ago he was treated successfully for cancer. He's still quite active for a very old dude, and he has a lot of respect for his doctors.
My other favorite is Yeast. --You can still take dough and make bread without having to add yeast from a jar. Bread results from one of the oldest and most amazing symbiotic relationships ever.
Cheese is also pretty neat that way. Though honey is nicer than bread. You don't need to bake the bees in order to eat the end product.
Saying the reason the bees were dying was because of human pollution.
It is. A healthy colony is far more able to fight off infections naturally than those which exist in a food chain polluted by all the various bits of crap which have been introduced. I suspect that the problem isn't any one thing but rather a broad spectrum build-up of contaminants and environmental irritants. Even the article makes no bones about the fact that this one particular type of infection is not the sole cause of CCD.
Frankly, this solution, (antibiotics) sounds suspiciously like just another way to sell more drugs on an industrial scale. I wonder who funded and promoted these lab-coats?
1. I kind of like winning the Turing Test. It makes me feel human. Some days, before the coffee kicks in, this is a plus.
2. It's funny when I can't read the secret warped word. It throws me in existential questioning for about half a second.
3. I like the new idea of having to describe a randomly rotated 3D image. That's a cool system which I'd like to see implemented, though I can't imagine it will be very long before it too is solved.
4. I find it funny that proving one's "Human-ness" is easier to do with a basic kindergarten reading or shape-recognition test than with the old Star Trek method of demonstrating an understanding of Love or being able to write an opera or such. --Especially since you can fairly easily program a computer to compose random Haiku.
5. An interesting test would be to write a short paragraph and ask the potential human how they feel about it. You could probably weed out trolls as well as computers that way. Or potentially learn something disturbing about the head-space of the webmaster and/or feel like a total outsider when you fail at multiple choice emotions.
6. Whatever the case, I think it's pretty sci-fi that we've gotten to the point where major effort is being spent to out-smart AI's. William Gibson and Niel Stephenson keep getting closer to having described our Now.
I'm guessing this cut & paste comment was taken directly from the talking points memo because clearly you are not being paid to write original content. I'm sure the PR guys wouldn't trust a lowly troll with such a task.
I'm thinking that the term "Freetard" might have come from the same PR division which brought us other social-engineering words designed to heckle people out of doing sensible things by invoking the old, "You're not wearing cool shoes" programming acquired by everybody during high school. Anybody who falls for that is spineless. Wear your tinfoil with a little bit of pride, damn it. God, I hate spineless sheep who live their lives according to which direction the cattle-prods poke them. --They make life hell for anybody trying to live according to what makes sense rather than what will get them laughed at the least by the dangerously ignorant.
Anyway, if the responses you received to your last iteration/s are any indicator, some humble pie might make a nice chaser for the current meal you've got in front of you.
Aw, why do I bother. --I'm arguing with a broken Turing machine.
I find it funny how much a penis really bothers people.
Especially since it was rather blink-and-you-missed-it. I must have blinked a few times because I don't remember any blue penises. You'd think it would be hard to miss a blue penis. --Of course, I was cringing with my eyes shut a few times for other reasons. Like the dialogue.
So long as there is a need to keep the people sedated and distracted, there will be video games. The manner of distribution hardly matters. Though while dedicated video game shops at the mall may change or vanish, (un-likely, given the reality of console games), I certainly doubt we'll stop seeing physical game packages any time soon.
Since racks of video game packages are shiny and alluring with all their colors and public profile, I suspect, like magazines, they'll remain in the public perception even after they stop making immediate sense. Mind control works best when you saturate awareness from multiple vectors.
Think of it this way: If I were a huge game manufacturer, I'd be sure to want a highly visible rack of my game packages standing a few feet away from the wall of new lap tops at the local computer store. --If you think of every game box primarily as an advert rather than a product conveyance, then it not only fits into the budget, but if I sell enough of them to cover the printing bill, then the advertising pays for itself directly. --While every laptop consumer is a potential game customer, not all of them read game magazines. The video game rack for many is probably the most important way of getting product awareness into their heads.
Yeah, it's cynical, but so is the whole concept of advertising. Heck, most magazines stopped earning any real money from their point of sale cover prices long ago. They exist because they are good advertising vehicles.
Almost didn't respond because your points are thoughtful and I didn't want to sound like a dick, but then I read your signature and it falls into the same category of "Not quite far enough away from the picture to be an entirely valid observation."
-People are designed to be bipedal locomotives. They were not designed to slide down hills in sub-zero conditions. Biology has put a lot more R&D into solving the problem of running versus skiing, so your point, while quite cool, doesn't really apply to the question.
-In Capitalist America, the government is controlled by those who own it's debt. In Soviet Russia, the same held true. --What you do with the borrowed money, (build a communist empire or Disney Land, is a sort of flash-in-the-pan, "So what?" --When the interest finally and inevitably balloons beyond the government's ability to pay it back, (and by "government," I mean "We the People") --the system crumbles into oblivion. Communes and Magic Kingdoms just don't matter. Everybody is owned in the end. America and Russia are on the same leash.
Yeah, but this is Ridley Scott. He's hit some serious home runs, and Blade Runner, whether or not it was your cup of tea, remains quite spectacular. I have a hard time watching the thing for all its misery and violence, but I can repeat word for word some of the dialogue while the music swells in the ears of my memory. ("I've. . , SEEN things. ..") --It takes a pretty impressive film maker to accomplish something like that.
And frankly, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," while interesting, didn't change reality much, whereas Blade Runner made a significant mark on the look and feel not just of sci-fi, but on the whole cultural imagining of the future. My only concern is that Scott isn't young anymore, and so maybe the fire in his creative gut isn't burning as brightly or as hot.
As for those other films you mentioned. . .
I agree. And I would add to the list, "Jurassic Park". The hoopla and dino-madness was amusing to watch when Spielberg did his thing, but the book felt far more genuine and insightful to me.
Anyway. . , fingers crossed.
Though 3D? I'll try to get into it when the curtains go up, but there's such a Rocky Horror stigma with 3D that it'll definitely take some mental stretching to deal.
Slashdot Mirror
If there are fairness issues, just enable MACs (not the Big ones:) for 30 min.
Yeah, I think 'sandwiches' are only allowed to sit under a heat lamp for 15 minutes before the McPloyees have to throw them out.
-FL
It's different, so it's bad.
I liked how Tolkien put it, when the hobbits from one end of the Shire called those from the other end, "Queer" and vice versa, when basically they were the same brand of small, silly people.
Personally, my guess is that the poster has forgotten his time in, (or never went to) university and envies the students their youth and seemingly privileged lives. (Not counting the $30,000 in student loans and stress about having to pick a career, etc.) --While he has to work a tough day job.
-FL
It's far easier to pretend one is right than it is to say, "Yeah. That's a good point."
For several messed up reasons, people make it very difficult on each other to learn or teach something new without a sense of shame being a significant part of the information transaction. I know people who remain stunted at various schoolyard ages (mentally) because they got very good at hurting others and very afraid of being hurt themselves in games of "Who's right?" when they were young. They closed themselves and the flow of new information down to a trickle, and so grope towards mental maturity like wounded insects.
Life gets a lot easier when one loses the fear of automatic ridicule. Any behavior which extends from programmed thinking isn't worthy of emotional attention. It's a lesson which is almost impossible for people to learn, but once you get it, it's like being given your first lightsaber.
-FL
Having read TFA, it sounds to me a bit like confused meandering of someone trying to figure out how to use some of the stimulus billions for yet another social pet cause, but without the clear definition of what that cause is.
My feelings exactly. It has lots of woo-woo words and ideas which seem magical and yet, I can't understand what the fundamental idea is exactly. --It almost sounds like she's suggesting that we use phone system-like switching technology to route power to individual homes and devices. Sounds bloody expensive to put into place. A high voltage router on every street corner, though I don't really see the advantage, unless each house is also generating electricity. Maybe I'm missing something.
If the concept is viable, then it can be explained in baby terms, which clearly I need. I feel like one of those really thick studio execs guys like Kevin Smith make fun of. So either I'm really, really dumb, the idea needs work, or she needs a good translator to stand between her head and the audience.
Those Zip Cars looks sort of cool, though I don't quite see the advantage. Do they have a team of service people running around each city maintaining the cars? It sounds like a de-centralized "Rent-a-Car", but while they don't have to rent a main lot, they still must have to maintain a garage and offices somewhere, and I bet they have to pay for all the individual parking spaces. Seems gimmicky, but again, maybe I'm just not seeing the big picture. (After all, I still refuse to use a cell phone over my trusty land line, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing the point.)
-FL
And as my wife will tell you, I scream "F*** you Rick Berman!' during the credits every time I see it.
Anyone who bristles at the mention of Rick Berman's name is good in my books. You can judge much about a man's character (and reviews) based on such things.
Now I have to go watch this film rather than muck around with torrents.
-FL
Get rid of the unions and open teaching to folks who would get paid on their performance. (GASP!)
Yes, Unions, the organizations responsible for you and your extended family not working in a coal mine seven days a week and dying at 35, yes, they are bad and should be gotten rid of in an expression of overt extremism.
A little perspective, please. Extremism is useless.
Paid by performance? Okay, and how does one measure performance? That question has been circled around forever and nobody has come up with a useful answer. Kids are not car parts. They are not binary bits. The question, in short, is not black and white. Some subjective imagination is required to solve the problem. --Come on, you must have heard the arguments and counter-arguments. They nearly all, on both sides, have reasonable concerns.
Extremism is never the answer, because the school system is littered with retarded people who can only see in black and white who are best treated like cogs, and it is also filled with people who know how to use their imaginations who die if they are treated like machine parts. The lizards and the monkeys need to live together and so the system needs to not be one thing or the other.
-FL
First I want to see what is actually under the cloth, second I want to know if he is just using a multiple pickup therimin, one for each axis.
I balked at the cloth as well, but stuck out the video to the last quarter, where they pulled it back and gave a short tour of the guts of the system.
Looks pretty simple. I don't think any new discoveries have been made, but rather the device is a clever bit of engineering using known electrical properties. Applied and scaled correctly, it holds some neat possibilities, though without some form of tactile feedback it might be awkward to manage information with one's hands in that manner. But who knows? Humans are good at adapting. The basic keyboard input seemed pretty impossible when I was a kid, but now my fingers are able to fly across the keys.
-FL
There is no such thing; it's a myth. That's why communism doesn't work. Capitalism is the idea that instead of living in a fantasy world where everyone cares about the common good, we're going to be honest and admit that people are hardwired for certain instincts, one of which (survival) manifests itself in current society as 'greed'. Instead of having a system like communism that is DESTROYED by greed, we have a system like capitalism that thrives on it.
Speak for yourself. I'm not a sociopathic freek hardwired for greed, thank-you very much. I've lived in modern communities where awareness of the common good works extremely well, where greed is punished by simply not including people. The funny thing is that the greedy creeps exist in the extreme minority, though they struggle mightily to convince us otherwise.
It's only when the monsters are allowed to rise to the top that society goes bankrupt, as it is currently doing right before our eyes. If you really do work in neuroscience, then you should have some notion as to how brains of that sort work. But who knows? Perhaps you have a prime example floating around in your own skull; you sure sound angry, arrogant and ignorant enough for that to be the case. --Precisely the type who honestly can't wrap his head around such a basic concept as, "The Common Good". Thinking in ridiculously simplistic terms like, "Communism was bad and Socialism is like Communism, so it's also bad!" is flat-out retarded. And I'm not saying that in the colloquial sense. You're a scientist? Either that's bullshit, or there may be far more pressing issues preventing you from finding funding. People who need to see things in terms of black & white by definition have limited imaginations.
Well, that's not really fair. We still need lab techs to clean the test tubes. The real issue is more likely that any grant application you may have participated in writing over the last eight years was done under Bush Jr. I'm no Obama fan, but it's important to bitch about the right people when expressing one's irritation for a policy. You don't need to be a scientist to work that one out. Which again makes me wonder what your job description really is.
In any case, the whole point is moot. When the national monetary system is based on borrowing at interest from a small cabal of private banks, (as it is here and as it was in Russia, though in a different manner), then it doesn't matter if you build a Communist Empire or Disney World on your plastic. In a hundred years, either the whole thing collapses under its own weight, or everybody becomes a slave.
Get out of your box and breathe something other than your own toxic fumes for a few minutes. You need to clear your head.
-FL
Lower my taxes so I have money to spend on things that will actually stimulate the economy.
If I'm not mistaken, then unless you are a multi-millionaire, he DID lower your taxes.
It seems to me that those tea parties were organized by multi-millionaires who work as talking heads on network news. I'm no Obama fan, but one needs to keep one's facts straight.
It's also a good idea to keep in mind that an enormous number of the luxuries of American technology which you take for granted every day resulted directly from the race to the moon as set in motion by JFK. Would you like to see the that government spending erased from history?
Didn't think so.
-FL
What I don't understand is where is the tea?
Oh dear. A response like that was highly improbable.
-FL
Sort of right. GE is not a good corp, but any vitriol directed at Iran is the result of propaganda. I find it amazing after the Iraq debacle that people are still capable of being tricked by state/Israeli sponsored nonsense.
But if you've not figured that out by now, all words to the contrary are probably wasted air. If only we could export blind ignorance and violent stupidity as commodities, the nation's economic woes would be vanquished. Oh. . , hold on. No, that's what got us into this mess in the first place.
*sigh*
-FL
Based on this post, it's been done for 10 years :-).
Oh, now be fair. He didn't once utter the phrases, "What?", "I don't understand" or "Where's the tea?"
-FL
Ya, mod me down, i cant help it that i despise the man and doing it wont change my mind.
Mod you down? Hardly! I wholeheartedly agree with your take on that sick twerp.
OS's were set to become huge regardless of who happened to be at the switch. There was a requirement for them, a vacuum in the world which needed filling, and so here we are. That we happened to get a power-mad creep at the front of the parade is just bad luck. (Though, in a game which is heavily biased toward psychotic jerks rising to the top, chances are if it wasn't him, it would have been somebody like him.)
-FL
It's all about perspective.
From where you sit, I'm sure you think you are right. And to some degree, you are. But one day you will experience the other side of the coin, (assuming you have a soul), and then you will know a larger part of the story of life.
That's how it works. It's all about learning, and the world is one giant school.
-FL
I don't sense much bias in your comment, (for which you are to be congratulated), but I do take exception with some of your statements.
Living in Canada, I've known numerous older people, (over 60) who receive excellent health care. Elaborate heart surgeries and such. Nobody seems to think that they're being given second rate care or that preferential treatment is being given to younger people. I've never even heard that idea floated until you brought it up just now. My grandfather is in his 80's and two years ago he was treated successfully for cancer. He's still quite active for a very old dude, and he has a lot of respect for his doctors.
Just FYI.
-FL
Yeah. No one cares.
Speak for yourself. Few have what it takes to speak for everybody, least of all those who think they do.
-FL
My other favorite is Yeast. --You can still take dough and make bread without having to add yeast from a jar. Bread results from one of the oldest and most amazing symbiotic relationships ever.
Cheese is also pretty neat that way. Though honey is nicer than bread. You don't need to bake the bees in order to eat the end product.
-FL
Saying the reason the bees were dying was because of human pollution.
It is. A healthy colony is far more able to fight off infections naturally than those which exist in a food chain polluted by all the various bits of crap which have been introduced. I suspect that the problem isn't any one thing but rather a broad spectrum build-up of contaminants and environmental irritants. Even the article makes no bones about the fact that this one particular type of infection is not the sole cause of CCD.
Frankly, this solution, (antibiotics) sounds suspiciously like just another way to sell more drugs on an industrial scale. I wonder who funded and promoted these lab-coats?
-FL
Some notes in no particular order. . .
1. I kind of like winning the Turing Test. It makes me feel human. Some days, before the coffee kicks in, this is a plus.
2. It's funny when I can't read the secret warped word. It throws me in existential questioning for about half a second.
3. I like the new idea of having to describe a randomly rotated 3D image. That's a cool system which I'd like to see implemented, though I can't imagine it will be very long before it too is solved.
4. I find it funny that proving one's "Human-ness" is easier to do with a basic kindergarten reading or shape-recognition test than with the old Star Trek method of demonstrating an understanding of Love or being able to write an opera or such. --Especially since you can fairly easily program a computer to compose random Haiku.
5. An interesting test would be to write a short paragraph and ask the potential human how they feel about it. You could probably weed out trolls as well as computers that way. Or potentially learn something disturbing about the head-space of the webmaster and/or feel like a total outsider when you fail at multiple choice emotions.
6. Whatever the case, I think it's pretty sci-fi that we've gotten to the point where major effort is being spent to out-smart AI's. William Gibson and Niel Stephenson keep getting closer to having described our Now.
-FL
This is an insightful post. Too bad it was posted AC. A waste of mod points.
-FL
I'm guessing this cut & paste comment was taken directly from the talking points memo because clearly you are not being paid to write original content. I'm sure the PR guys wouldn't trust a lowly troll with such a task.
I'm thinking that the term "Freetard" might have come from the same PR division which brought us other social-engineering words designed to heckle people out of doing sensible things by invoking the old, "You're not wearing cool shoes" programming acquired by everybody during high school. Anybody who falls for that is spineless. Wear your tinfoil with a little bit of pride, damn it. God, I hate spineless sheep who live their lives according to which direction the cattle-prods poke them. --They make life hell for anybody trying to live according to what makes sense rather than what will get them laughed at the least by the dangerously ignorant.
Anyway, if the responses you received to your last iteration/s are any indicator, some humble pie might make a nice chaser for the current meal you've got in front of you.
Aw, why do I bother. --I'm arguing with a broken Turing machine.
-FL
I find it funny how much a penis really bothers people.
Especially since it was rather blink-and-you-missed-it. I must have blinked a few times because I don't remember any blue penises. You'd think it would be hard to miss a blue penis. --Of course, I was cringing with my eyes shut a few times for other reasons. Like the dialogue.
-FL
So long as there is a need to keep the people sedated and distracted, there will be video games. The manner of distribution hardly matters. Though while dedicated video game shops at the mall may change or vanish, (un-likely, given the reality of console games), I certainly doubt we'll stop seeing physical game packages any time soon.
Since racks of video game packages are shiny and alluring with all their colors and public profile, I suspect, like magazines, they'll remain in the public perception even after they stop making immediate sense. Mind control works best when you saturate awareness from multiple vectors.
Think of it this way: If I were a huge game manufacturer, I'd be sure to want a highly visible rack of my game packages standing a few feet away from the wall of new lap tops at the local computer store. --If you think of every game box primarily as an advert rather than a product conveyance, then it not only fits into the budget, but if I sell enough of them to cover the printing bill, then the advertising pays for itself directly. --While every laptop consumer is a potential game customer, not all of them read game magazines. The video game rack for many is probably the most important way of getting product awareness into their heads.
Yeah, it's cynical, but so is the whole concept of advertising. Heck, most magazines stopped earning any real money from their point of sale cover prices long ago. They exist because they are good advertising vehicles.
-FL
Almost didn't respond because your points are thoughtful and I didn't want to sound like a dick, but then I read your signature and it falls into the same category of "Not quite far enough away from the picture to be an entirely valid observation."
-People are designed to be bipedal locomotives. They were not designed to slide down hills in sub-zero conditions. Biology has put a lot more R&D into solving the problem of running versus skiing, so your point, while quite cool, doesn't really apply to the question.
-In Capitalist America, the government is controlled by those who own it's debt. In Soviet Russia, the same held true. --What you do with the borrowed money, (build a communist empire or Disney Land, is a sort of flash-in-the-pan, "So what?" --When the interest finally and inevitably balloons beyond the government's ability to pay it back, (and by "government," I mean "We the People") --the system crumbles into oblivion. Communes and Magic Kingdoms just don't matter. Everybody is owned in the end. America and Russia are on the same leash.
There. That wasn't too dickey, I hope. :-)
-FL
Yeah, but this is Ridley Scott. He's hit some serious home runs, and Blade Runner, whether or not it was your cup of tea, remains quite spectacular. I have a hard time watching the thing for all its misery and violence, but I can repeat word for word some of the dialogue while the music swells in the ears of my memory. ("I've. . , SEEN things. . .") --It takes a pretty impressive film maker to accomplish something like that.
And frankly, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," while interesting, didn't change reality much, whereas Blade Runner made a significant mark on the look and feel not just of sci-fi, but on the whole cultural imagining of the future. My only concern is that Scott isn't young anymore, and so maybe the fire in his creative gut isn't burning as brightly or as hot.
As for those other films you mentioned. . .
I agree. And I would add to the list, "Jurassic Park". The hoopla and dino-madness was amusing to watch when Spielberg did his thing, but the book felt far more genuine and insightful to me.
Anyway. . , fingers crossed.
Though 3D? I'll try to get into it when the curtains go up, but there's such a Rocky Horror stigma with 3D that it'll definitely take some mental stretching to deal.
-FL