Denis Leary or someone had a bit that went as follows: JFK: Dead. Robert F. Kennedy: Dead. Ted Kennedy: Still alive. WHY, GOD, WHY?
And I can't help but notice: Futurama: Canceled. Family Guy: Canceled. King Of The Hill is entering its seventh goddamn season - WHY, GOD, WHY???
I have never understood why King Of The Hill is still on the air. Watching the Simpsons end and King Of The Hill begin is like leaving Disney World and walking across the street to a wake. Fox is stupid. They don't deserve the new Family Guy episodes. Put them on Comedy Central where the executives know gold when they see it. Here's a time-traveling thought experiment: Put Family Guy between the Simpsons and X-Files on Sundays, and instead move King Of The Hill to a different weeknight every three weeks like they did with Family Guy, and then see whether people even remember King Of The Hill these days, let alone buy a million four-DVD sets of it.
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
There was no such year as AD 0. Jeez, you're as bad as the Itchy and Scratchy animators who had Itchy strike the same one of Scrathy's ribs twice in succession while producing two distinctly different tones.
"It's like in chess: First, you strategically position your pieces and when the timing is right you strike. They're using this signal to syncronize their efforts and in 5 hours the countdown will be over"
Remember, Kif: in the game of chess, you must never let your adversary see your pieces!
Obviously eBay is liable because they failed to ensure that no banking information was available for sale on their site. Furthermore, anyone whose web site contains a LINK to an eBay page is EQUALLY liable, because linking to information is the same as hosting that information. And, since I have it on good authority that music CDs and adult videos are also sold on eBay, anyone with a link to eBay should be sued by the RIAA as well as prosecuted for obscenity if a child has access to the link.
You think I'm kidding? All this has been decided in actual court cases over the last few years. Judges with little technical knowledge, and juries with less still, don't understand the technical reasons why the prosecutor's arguments, when framed in intentionally deceptive "layman's terms," are ridiculous, and absurd case law is formed. The lawyers love this. Make the law as much of a minefield as possible. All the more business for the nationwide glut of attorneys.
The problem is that getting several bands to come to my house and play the songs I like while skipping over the ones I dont takes a lot of room and money.
In the 80s, it was actually quite common for bands to come over to your house, if you were a kid. The way it worked was, if your dad always yelled at you and wouldn't let you listen to a particular hair band, the band would come over to your house, smash through the door, trash the place while performing their single, and horrify your dad by loudly playing their guitars inches from his face.
And I think there was at least one documented case of band members coming to life from a poster on a young fan's bedroom wall.
Here in the States, this simple, common sense ruling is still dozens of months and millions of dollars away.
Notice, also, that Germany has wisely put the smack down on the cult of Scientology for a decade now, while the American authorities are still under the delusion that it's harmless and legitimate.
But on the other hand, Germany embraces its own collection of stupid ideas, like the cradle-to-grave welfare state and the belief that Saddam wasn't worth getting rid of.
So it appears that the German FUD-suppression system is most effective when it comes to lunatic litigation, and not so effective when it comes to touchy-feely politics.
Maybe I should RTFA, but I doubt that, when the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel showed a face reconstruction from a skull last week, the method was subjected to SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY. For instance, judges could compare each CAD face to a series of photos, one of them being an actual photo of the skull model (old family photos could be used if the skull model is deceased) and select their best guess. If the average correct photo cannot be selected by more than N% of the judges, the technique cannot be held to be scientifically valid.
Why don't people demand this level of veracity from everything in their life? People down herbal placebos by the truckload and spend big bucks for "ancient Chinese traditional medicine" without even realizing or caring that no scientific study has ever verified such practices. People don't even understand what science IS. They think scientific ideas are just one class of things, existing alongside "traditional," "spiritual," or "alternative" theories. This is ludicrous. There are only two categories of things - things that truly exist or truly work, and things that don't. And the only reliable way to tell them apart is through the scientific method, not an appeal to the supernatural or something's ancientness. How can people have been so inadequately educated? Ugh! I hate everybody.
Sorry, my misanthropy flared up again (as I have trained it to). But on a related note, the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel also has lots of other forensics shows where they show hair analysis and "blood spatter analysis." And I want to know whether ANY of these things have ever been scientifically established, or whether (and this is my suspicion) they're partially or totally bogus but more than convincing enough to fool the average jury member - who himself probably wears an energy crystal and watches John Edward every week. I'm skeptical about even fingerprint analysis. Has there ever been a study done to support them? I don't know. Every schoolboy is taught about fingerprints and how each one is unique, but what if their effectiveness is just an urban legend that even law enforcement believes? After all, every schoolboy knows about lie detectors too, and those are notorious for being totally bogus, completely unable to withstand and kind of scientific scrutiny. Polygraphs aren't even allowed as evidence. (But, of course, the federal government still uses them for hiring - further proof that the government is stupider even than the average fool.)
I just hope I'm never accused of a crime. Who knows what kind of "analysis" they'll have come up with. "My office analyzed the victim's facial muscles using muscular memory analysis, and I can say with 99.999847% certainty that the last words formed by her mouth were 'No!' followed by the defendant's name."
God, tell me about it. Let's put an interstate through what is essentially a hundred miles of suburbs, with no other efficient way to go from town to town, and let's make it only TWO LANES in each direction. And while we're at it, let's make the ramps as short as we possibly can, so you have to slow down while you're still in the road.
And how's this for helpful signage? Exit 68 - US Route 1. Exit 67 - US Route 1. Exit 65 - US Route 1. Et cetera. Maybe it would be more helpful to list PERPENDICULAR roads instead of a parallel one.
Real world: Behind-the-scenes shorts are a form of preview, designed to whet the audience's appetite. Lucas world: Behind-the-scenes shorts are a saleable product, offered at twice the price of the actual movie being made.
Real world: Buying the VHS or DVD is like owning the actual print of the film, in a cheaper format. Lucas world: There is no such thing as the print of the film. Films are like operating systems; a new version is released avery year or so, and the customer base must pay to replace their DVDs with the latest version.
Real world: The special effects exist to serve the story. Lucas world: The special effects exist to improve sales of the upcoming Xbox title.
Real world: A franchise goes downhill when the original creators are replaced. Lucas world: The franchise went downhill when the original creator came back.
Snow Crash's smartwheels have nothing to do with this. They're for shock absorption, not stickiness. And each telescoping foot is the size of a coin, a far cry from the gecko's nanoscopic scale. Guh.
I agree! Look, in Latin it may be "viri" or it may be "virus," I'm not certain. I don't even know if the word came from Latin at all. But I do know one thing: IT WOULDN'T BE "VIRII" IN EITHER LANGUAGE, LATIN OR ENGLISH. It's no more correct than "nexii" or "bonii" or (uhuhuhuh) "anii." By incorrectly constructing the word in an attempt to display your intellect, you instead reveal only your ignorance and pretension.
Another pretentious but less common mistake is to pronounce words like "processes" as "processEEZ." That would be correct if the singular were "processis," but it isn't. Once again your attempt to sound knowledgable backfires.
It has enough intelligence to know to put your address into a form that has a slot that says "Address" or "Address #1", and your last name in a form slot that says "Last Name" or "Sirname" or "Full Name".
Sounds to me like an easily-abused out for people who either didn't read the EULA, or simply want to get out of a contract they regret entering.
I agree there could be problems, but it's not really far-fetched; the law already works this way in some respects. There are countless laws under which people with "diminished capacity" can't be prosecuted, for instance. Maybe "unusual" contracts - contracts where the terms are substantially different in kind from what a party would resaonably expect - or contracts that are deemed intentionally deceptive, could be held to a higher standard of clarity. For instance, when you're signing a car loan, you wouldn't reasonably expect the fine print to include "I agree that the loan officer gets to drive the car on Fridays," so that unusual language would have to be more prominently displayed than the rest of the text would have to be. And I would argue that sending your browsing habits to the company, and modifying banner ads, is an equally unusual appendage to the EULA for a cheesy calendar program. Gator should have to explain itself prominently, and without hiding behind vague language like "we may communicate data to our servers for the purpose of enhancing your browsing experience."
Hijacking banner ads is not illegal...
on
Gator Examined
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...it's sneaking the spyware on the victim's machine without his informed consent that's an unfair business practice. I worry that the courts, or far worse, the legislature, will miss the point. Instead of forcing spyware to announce its presence more clearly, they'll go after the wrong thing and make modification of commercial web pages illegal, which is not only Not The Issue, it's a major "YRO" offense - an offense to our liberties.
Conceivably, and according to the bullshit they spew in their defense, a customer could want the service they provide, namely (supposedly) an intelligent browsing agent that gives the user helpful information (i.e. Expedia's airfares) based on his interests (i.e. browsing Orbitz.com). Suppose someone actually found this desirable, and maybe even found it desirable to modify his browser's rendering of a web page, or perform search-and-replace operations on the original HTML document, so that, say, every banner ad became an Expedia link. Surely he should be allowed to install such a program if he wanted. It's not as if Orbitz can sue me for modifying or differently rendering their web page in the privacy of my own home! Unless the government makes it so, in its infinite lack of wisdom.
The issue is not that spyware "hijacks" commercial web pages, but that it deceives the victim. There needs to be a doctrine of "clear language" applied to contracts like clickwrap licenses. A contract is (or ought to be) invalid if a party does not understand its terms. When Kazaa gives you fifty pages of 8-point legalese in a ten-line window, a user of reasonable competence cannot be expected to notice, let alone understand, all the contracts he is implicitly entering into - including the contract that says "We the Gator Corporation get to fuck with your computer and read all your email and analyze your personality and sell it to porn companies and degrade your performance by 95% and never tell you about it hahahahaha."
That's what the government should work to correct. But forgive me if I'm not exactly filled with confidence that it will.
"That government is best which governs least." -- Henry David Thoreau "The more laws, the less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Oh, and don't put commas after your conjugations; put them before them. If they occur in the start of a sentence, do not use any punctuation there.
You mean CONJUNCTIONS, not CONJUGATIONS, TOEFL-boy! YOW!
You are correct, however, that grammar and usage are quite important; under the surface they arouse in your audience a strong yet subtle, almost unconscious impression of your intelligence.
nor does it invalidate someone's annoyance with them.
Here's an example from part-time comedian, full-time leftist David Cross: When someone says "Dude, that was so funny I literally shit my pants!" you still understand what he means, but that doesn't mean his usage of "literally" is in any way correct or commendable.
1. The "period-ness" of the novel may surpass the "geek-ness." This is a tad disappointing.
2. I'm rather indifferent to the genealogical links between these characters and Cryptonomicon's. I mean, the characters in Cryptonomicon were pretty good, but it's not as if they were so fabulously conceived that I said "Goddamn, I wish I could read an entire cycle of books about their ancestors!" But Stephenson obviously has affection for them, so whatever helps him write is okay by me.
3. I also suspect the idea of a "cycle" of books arose from his experience writing (and attempting to end) Cryptonomicon. I suppose it's easier to write an ending if it needn't be the ultimate ending. And also, if he found himself generating more than a thousand pages once again, it was probably better to partition them into several volumes and write as much as wanted, rather than form the immense tome that Cryptonomicon became and be forced to cut the story off somewhat abrupty.
Slashdot Mirror
Denis Leary or someone had a bit that went as follows:
JFK: Dead. Robert F. Kennedy: Dead. Ted Kennedy: Still alive. WHY, GOD, WHY?
And I can't help but notice:
Futurama: Canceled. Family Guy: Canceled. King Of The Hill is entering its seventh goddamn season - WHY, GOD, WHY???
I have never understood why King Of The Hill is still on the air. Watching the Simpsons end and King Of The Hill begin is like leaving Disney World and walking across the street to a wake. Fox is stupid. They don't deserve the new Family Guy episodes. Put them on Comedy Central where the executives know gold when they see it. Here's a time-traveling thought experiment: Put Family Guy between the Simpsons and X-Files on Sundays, and instead move King Of The Hill to a different weeknight every three weeks like they did with Family Guy, and then see whether people even remember King Of The Hill these days, let alone buy a million four-DVD sets of it.
...FOR ME TO POOP ON!
And to think the company touts its product as strongly as those cultists hyped their cloned baby.
What's cool is that this paper is worded as closely to "HA HA HA WHAT A BUNCH OF DOUCHEBAGS" as academic writing ever comes.
2*b || !(2*b) is actually a tautology
Oh yeah? How do you know that's how Shakespeare envisioned the order of operations?
Maybe it's 2*(b || !2)*b instead.
So, a citizen of the Roman Empire circa 0 A.D. wouldn't be a bit surprised at the world of 2003? In any sphere; not just science, but art, politics, culture, etc.?
There was no such year as AD 0. Jeez, you're as bad as the Itchy and Scratchy animators who had Itchy strike the same one of Scrathy's ribs twice in succession while producing two distinctly different tones.
"It's like in chess: First, you strategically position your pieces and when the timing is right you strike. They're using this signal to syncronize their efforts and in 5 hours the countdown will be over"
Remember, Kif: in the game of chess, you must never let your adversary see your pieces!
As in The RIAA, Eh?
(Sorry)
Obviously eBay is liable because they failed to ensure that no banking information was available for sale on their site. Furthermore, anyone whose web site contains a LINK to an eBay page is EQUALLY liable, because linking to information is the same as hosting that information. And, since I have it on good authority that music CDs and adult videos are also sold on eBay, anyone with a link to eBay should be sued by the RIAA as well as prosecuted for obscenity if a child has access to the link.
You think I'm kidding? All this has been decided in actual court cases over the last few years. Judges with little technical knowledge, and juries with less still, don't understand the technical reasons why the prosecutor's arguments, when framed in intentionally deceptive "layman's terms," are ridiculous, and absurd case law is formed. The lawyers love this. Make the law as much of a minefield as possible. All the more business for the nationwide glut of attorneys.
The problem is that getting several bands to come to my house and play the songs I like while skipping over the ones I dont takes a lot of room and money.
In the 80s, it was actually quite common for bands to come over to your house, if you were a kid. The way it worked was, if your dad always yelled at you and wouldn't let you listen to a particular hair band, the band would come over to your house, smash through the door, trash the place while performing their single, and horrify your dad by loudly playing their guitars inches from his face.
And I think there was at least one documented case of band members coming to life from a poster on a young fan's bedroom wall.
Here in the States, this simple, common sense ruling is still dozens of months and millions of dollars away.
Notice, also, that Germany has wisely put the smack down on the cult of Scientology for a decade now, while the American authorities are still under the delusion that it's harmless and legitimate.
But on the other hand, Germany embraces its own collection of stupid ideas, like the cradle-to-grave welfare state and the belief that Saddam wasn't worth getting rid of.
So it appears that the German FUD-suppression system is most effective when it comes to lunatic litigation, and not so effective when it comes to touchy-feely politics.
There's a term paper in here somewhere....
In fact, stretches of interstate have to meet certian specifications for landing of (large) aircraft, in the event that airbases are destroyed.
That is a myth.
Maybe I should RTFA, but I doubt that, when the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel showed a face reconstruction from a skull last week, the method was subjected to SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY. For instance, judges could compare each CAD face to a series of photos, one of them being an actual photo of the skull model (old family photos could be used if the skull model is deceased) and select their best guess. If the average correct photo cannot be selected by more than N% of the judges, the technique cannot be held to be scientifically valid.
Why don't people demand this level of veracity from everything in their life? People down herbal placebos by the truckload and spend big bucks for "ancient Chinese traditional medicine" without even realizing or caring that no scientific study has ever verified such practices. People don't even understand what science IS. They think scientific ideas are just one class of things, existing alongside "traditional," "spiritual," or "alternative" theories. This is ludicrous. There are only two categories of things - things that truly exist or truly work, and things that don't. And the only reliable way to tell them apart is through the scientific method, not an appeal to the supernatural or something's ancientness. How can people have been so inadequately educated? Ugh! I hate everybody.
Sorry, my misanthropy flared up again (as I have trained it to). But on a related note, the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel also has lots of other forensics shows where they show hair analysis and "blood spatter analysis." And I want to know whether ANY of these things have ever been scientifically established, or whether (and this is my suspicion) they're partially or totally bogus but more than convincing enough to fool the average jury member - who himself probably wears an energy crystal and watches John Edward every week. I'm skeptical about even fingerprint analysis. Has there ever been a study done to support them? I don't know. Every schoolboy is taught about fingerprints and how each one is unique, but what if their effectiveness is just an urban legend that even law enforcement believes? After all, every schoolboy knows about lie detectors too, and those are notorious for being totally bogus, completely unable to withstand and kind of scientific scrutiny. Polygraphs aren't even allowed as evidence. (But, of course, the federal government still uses them for hiring - further proof that the government is stupider even than the average fool.)
I just hope I'm never accused of a crime. Who knows what kind of "analysis" they'll have come up with. "My office analyzed the victim's facial muscles using muscular memory analysis, and I can say with 99.999847% certainty that the last words formed by her mouth were 'No!' followed by the defendant's name."
EULA's take rights granted under normal copyright law away
I'm sorry, how exactly do EULAs violate copyright law?
Same problems on I-95 here in Connecticut
God, tell me about it. Let's put an interstate through what is essentially a hundred miles of suburbs, with no other efficient way to go from town to town, and let's make it only TWO LANES in each direction. And while we're at it, let's make the ramps as short as we possibly can, so you have to slow down while you're still in the road.
And how's this for helpful signage? Exit 68 - US Route 1. Exit 67 - US Route 1. Exit 65 - US Route 1. Et cetera. Maybe it would be more helpful to list PERPENDICULAR roads instead of a parallel one.
You're forgetting that the exit polls declared Gore the winner in Florida, by a pretty good margin.
Actually, I recall the news outlets initially calling Florida for Bush, not Gore. I think you might be mistaken there.
as well as Arizona... and parts of New Mexico.
Har!
Real world: Behind-the-scenes shorts are a form of preview, designed to whet the audience's appetite.
Lucas world: Behind-the-scenes shorts are a saleable product, offered at twice the price of the actual movie being made.
Real world: Buying the VHS or DVD is like owning the actual print of the film, in a cheaper format.
Lucas world: There is no such thing as the print of the film. Films are like operating systems; a new version is released avery year or so, and the customer base must pay to replace their DVDs with the latest version.
Real world: The special effects exist to serve the story.
Lucas world: The special effects exist to improve sales of the upcoming Xbox title.
Real world: A franchise goes downhill when the original creators are replaced.
Lucas world: The franchise went downhill when the original creator came back.
Snow Crash's smartwheels have nothing to do with this. They're for shock absorption, not stickiness. And each telescoping foot is the size of a coin, a far cry from the gecko's nanoscopic scale. Guh.
I agree! Look, in Latin it may be "viri" or it may be "virus," I'm not certain. I don't even know if the word came from Latin at all. But I do know one thing: IT WOULDN'T BE "VIRII" IN EITHER LANGUAGE, LATIN OR ENGLISH. It's no more correct than "nexii" or "bonii" or (uhuhuhuh) "anii." By incorrectly constructing the word in an attempt to display your intellect, you instead reveal only your ignorance and pretension.
Another pretentious but less common mistake is to pronounce words like "processes" as "processEEZ." That would be correct if the singular were "processis," but it isn't. Once again your attempt to sound knowledgable backfires.
It has enough intelligence to know to put your address into a form that has a slot that says "Address" or "Address #1", and your last name in a form slot that says "Last Name" or "Sirname" or "Full Name".
I envy the easily impressed....
Sounds to me like an easily-abused out for people who either didn't read the EULA, or simply want to get out of a contract they regret entering.
I agree there could be problems, but it's not really far-fetched; the law already works this way in some respects. There are countless laws under which people with "diminished capacity" can't be prosecuted, for instance. Maybe "unusual" contracts - contracts where the terms are substantially different in kind from what a party would resaonably expect - or contracts that are deemed intentionally deceptive, could be held to a higher standard of clarity. For instance, when you're signing a car loan, you wouldn't reasonably expect the fine print to include "I agree that the loan officer gets to drive the car on Fridays," so that unusual language would have to be more prominently displayed than the rest of the text would have to be. And I would argue that sending your browsing habits to the company, and modifying banner ads, is an equally unusual appendage to the EULA for a cheesy calendar program. Gator should have to explain itself prominently, and without hiding behind vague language like "we may communicate data to our servers for the purpose of enhancing your browsing experience."
...it's sneaking the spyware on the victim's machine without his informed consent that's an unfair business practice. I worry that the courts, or far worse, the legislature, will miss the point. Instead of forcing spyware to announce its presence more clearly, they'll go after the wrong thing and make modification of commercial web pages illegal, which is not only Not The Issue, it's a major "YRO" offense - an offense to our liberties.
Conceivably, and according to the bullshit they spew in their defense, a customer could want the service they provide, namely (supposedly) an intelligent browsing agent that gives the user helpful information (i.e. Expedia's airfares) based on his interests (i.e. browsing Orbitz.com). Suppose someone actually found this desirable, and maybe even found it desirable to modify his browser's rendering of a web page, or perform search-and-replace operations on the original HTML document, so that, say, every banner ad became an Expedia link. Surely he should be allowed to install such a program if he wanted. It's not as if Orbitz can sue me for modifying or differently rendering their web page in the privacy of my own home! Unless the government makes it so, in its infinite lack of wisdom.
The issue is not that spyware "hijacks" commercial web pages, but that it deceives the victim. There needs to be a doctrine of "clear language" applied to contracts like clickwrap licenses. A contract is (or ought to be) invalid if a party does not understand its terms. When Kazaa gives you fifty pages of 8-point legalese in a ten-line window, a user of reasonable competence cannot be expected to notice, let alone understand, all the contracts he is implicitly entering into - including the contract that says "We the Gator Corporation get to fuck with your computer and read all your email and analyze your personality and sell it to porn companies and degrade your performance by 95% and never tell you about it hahahahaha."
That's what the government should work to correct. But forgive me if I'm not exactly filled with confidence that it will.
"That government is best which governs least." -- Henry David Thoreau
"The more laws, the less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
...shouldn't throw nitpicks.
Oh, and don't put commas after your conjugations; put them before them. If they occur in the start of a sentence, do not use any punctuation there.
You mean CONJUNCTIONS, not CONJUGATIONS, TOEFL-boy!
YOW!
You are correct, however, that grammar and usage are quite important; under the surface they arouse in your audience a strong yet subtle, almost unconscious impression of your intelligence.
Keep on geeking in the Third World!...
(repeat 32 times)
nor does it invalidate someone's annoyance with them.
Here's an example from part-time comedian, full-time leftist David Cross: When someone says "Dude, that was so funny I literally shit my pants!" you still understand what he means, but that doesn't mean his usage of "literally" is in any way correct or commendable.
Three thoughts:
1. The "period-ness" of the novel may surpass the "geek-ness." This is a tad disappointing.
2. I'm rather indifferent to the genealogical links between these characters and Cryptonomicon's. I mean, the characters in Cryptonomicon were pretty good, but it's not as if they were so fabulously conceived that I said "Goddamn, I wish I could read an entire cycle of books about their ancestors!" But Stephenson obviously has affection for them, so whatever helps him write is okay by me.
3. I also suspect the idea of a "cycle" of books arose from his experience writing (and attempting to end) Cryptonomicon. I suppose it's easier to write an ending if it needn't be the ultimate ending. And also, if he found himself generating more than a thousand pages once again, it was probably better to partition them into several volumes and write as much as wanted, rather than form the immense tome that Cryptonomicon became and be forced to cut the story off somewhat abrupty.