Right, but fortunately the rest of us live in the United States, and not Weenie McCrazyland, where Peppermint Moneytrees solve conflicts of interest with a wave of Ayn Rand's nutsack and the Good King Lucky Foopoopenstien's Invisible Hand ensures that greed always comes second to morality.
Hint: You have 50,000 votes, but the creepy German guy who owns "Trader Joe's" has 25,000,000,000, and really doesn't give a shit what you think.
If Scarface isn't engaging you, it's not doing it's job. Every movie or book or play gives you someone to indentify with, someone that you ultimately have a substantial degree of control over in your own mind due to the purposeful uncertainties you build into a movie. A game just takes that to the next level.
Neither Scarface nor VC is art. It's not like anything is being communicated here. It's hormone-stroking, but I find it interesting that you're finding VC more repugnant than Scarface. The pleasure you get from Scarface is good strong hunter-killer pleasure, the joy of killing your enemies. VC is more the farmer-gatherer pleasure, like gambling or buying shit from Ikea. Who the hell enjoys killing the Hatians? You enjoy finishing missions, or jacking a nicer car. No killing instinct there. Helluva lot more peaceful than pretty violence, even if it is probably more dangerous.
Anyway, in my opinion, the game of chess itself is speech. I'd think that ought to be obvious. You play a game of chess, it's telling you all kinds of shit. It's a reflection of the world, like any other work of art, it's just a bit more dynamic.
The thing that's in danger of not being speech isn't the game, it's the dressing they slapped on top of it. The comparison to chess would be if you made a chess set with drunken, NASCAR hat-wearing white trash for white and watermellon-clutching black people for black. The game is speech no matter what, the question is whether "Kill the Hatians" is an integral part of the game, making it as much speec h as the rest of the game, and if not, if the "Kill the Hatians" dressing they stuck on the underlying speech can be considered speech on it's own.
OnStar commercials remind me of the crime prevention system commercial in the Minority Report.
OnStar commercials remind me of how fucking awful OnStar commericals are. What the hell kind of commercial presents a product's users as such incredible fools? "Yeah, that beer commercial says I'll get to sleep with that hot chick if I buy their swill, but, you know, that OnStar commercial says I can be a panicky moron who spends ridiculous ammounts of money to call insipid dorks 3 time-zones away to whine about the scary snakes outside my car! To the GMC dealer!"
First, "themself" is not even close to a real word. If you're trying to do a cockney accent, don't.
Second, reveal themselves? How the hell would you know who gave you smallpox when you show up in the E.R. two weeks later? I can't even guess who picked my pocket last summer in Puerto Rico, how am I supposed to tell who gave himself smallpox and then coughed on me?
And ruining the GDP by shutting down eBay? I guess Osama's cousin Akbar in Clevland isn't exactly the Mossad, but I think even Akkie can figure out that keeping people from leaving their houses is a hell of a lot more ruinous to business than making people switch from eBay to Amazon.
To be honest, using eBay to spread anthrax in particular might work better than spreading it on the street, since anthrax is about as contagious as colon cancer, but if you're a multinational terrorist network, you're better off blowing up a few more embassies with your time. Spending a week selling anthrax-dusted Beanie Babies on eBay two kill two old ladies in Minnesota isn't really getting your money's worth.
I mean, if you want to give somebody a difficult to contract, non-contagious disease with a 5% fatality rate why the fuck did you pick a disease? Just send somebody a box with a bottle of acid. At least there you have a better than 5% chance that some idiot will open it and melt his face off.
Not entirely. Perhaps the parent is just being overzealous in his application of the "f" word, but nevertheless I find it rather ammusing that libertarians spend so much time talking about how the extreme left becomes the extreme right and vice versa, and yet is completely appalled at the very idea that the same crossover might occur on their own extremes.
Did you ever realize that American libertarianism is a largely religious philosophy? It's set by the early American intellectual climate of elightened deists. Very mathematical. God as the supreme architect. Delicately balanced rules laid out at compiletime and set loose to run as they will. Hence the libertarian chic among programmers and mathematicians. When you get right down to it, it's an aesthetic. Kinda modernist, with an absolute minimum of complexity.
Absolute minimum of legislation, just use different types of markets to run everything, reuse the same patterns over and over. It's the Einstien universe. No dirty complicated particles, just a nice, simple unified theory with no infinities or dead ends. This is why you, and, I admit, I, like it. It's pretty.
But then, of course, this is where we run into the innevitable trouble. We're taking form over function, which, when you get right down to it, is 90% of facism. Have you ever read about the Nazis? I mean, in depth, with primary sources. Go read the transcript of the meeting where they decided to start gassing the Jews, and then tell me that extremist libertarianism could never turn into that. The laws of the Third Reich were quite near the libertarian's ideal. They were perfectly logical, internally consistent, simple, and nicely justified. But they never applied. The entire Reigh was run on the equivalent of our commerce clause. The SS assures everyone that they're well within their pervue, and off we go.
Admittedly, the Nazis started from the other direction, an aesthetic which the laws were made to fit, but an aesthetic born of a libertarian legal philosophy can just as easily find the same ground from the opposate road.
The libertarian ignores fundamental human nature just as handily as the facist, the libertarian just uses ivory-tower logic while the facist uses gut-instinct bullshit. They both run into the same problem. People aren't predictably petty and cruel, nor are they predictably cold and calculating. They're wishy-washy whirlwinds of mass destruction, and unless your government is designed equally ugly and unpredictable, it will collapse into unpredictability in the ways you don't want it to.
France's constitution explicitly demands secularism. This stems from France's roots as a Catholic state, they've had their own Popes and whatnot, if you remember any European history. After they had their little revolution, although they were largely modeling their new constitution after ours, they felt that explicitly stating a goal of secularism was what they needed. Instead of the the US's extemely heterogeneous population in terms of faith, France was all Catholic at that point, so if any leeway in terms of religion could be expected, they would have to keep religion off the streets.
The US could afford live and let live, because everybody was a minority. Everybody could start hatin' on the Quakers, and the Quakers would be screwed, but then the Calvinists or whatever could just as easily be next. In France, if the Catholics decided to start opressing Lutherans or whatever, they had no other group to keep them in line.
This is pretty much still true. France is 80, maybe even 90% Catholic still, and anti-semitism and crap like that are always right under the surface. If they don't want an entire country of Northern Ireland-esque religious riots, forcing religion to stay a non-issue is what has to happen.
They don't have one because they don't need one. H-11B is a service the government is providing to industry to lower their labor costs. It's not some gift to dirty foreign devils, it's for us. If India's computer industry were lobbying like mad that computer workers were scarce and they wanted to be able to hire Americans, they'd have an H-11y thing in a second.
You've never met a Walmart customer, have you? Not people that go to Walmart to buy condoms and liquor at 2 in the morning, I mean customers. The psychotic women who take 5 kids down there every other day. They recoil in horror at a $0.06 markup on the one fucking jar of pickles they buy a year. They're caught in the Cult of Walmart, and they will ford a river with a dozen fucking oxen to save $0.10 on little Susie's shitty Linkin Park song. And if Susie points out the free would be even cheaper? Then Susie is fucking wrong, goddamnit, because nothing is cheaper than Walmart, you hear me? NOTHING!
Pfft. Sure, like that's gonna work. "Oh, let's not design any super-robot overlords! I'm sure everyone will be perfectly happy hiring expensive union workers to do jobs of infuriating drudgery that could easily be taken over for almost zero cost by robots if I explain that it's all to preserve our pride in our existence!"
Why don't you try that out by convincing everybody to stop paying less at Wal-Mart for the sake of preserving the concept of the middle-class sometime. Get that working first, then try something hard.
If you really want to keep puny human-meats around for whatever reason, get on genetic engineering our intelligence. If you pull up the slope of our singularity enough to match theirs, we've got nothing to worry about. For a while anyway.
Ahhh! Jesus! Dancing disco robot raver geishas! Kill! Kill!
Well, ok, the other two got a little bit of the funk in 'em, so I guess they can live. What's with the audience though? Robots put all this work into this whole routine with props and everything and nobody even claps? Where's the love?
Seriously though, Sam, your new glasses are not cool. Putting them in your movie isn't going to help, they're just ugly. You look like a goddamn racoon with jaundice. I know the poster at Lens Crafters said they were "tight", but sometimes Calvin Klein has to tell those little lies to make you buy his crap. I feel for ya, Sam baby, really, but sometimes you just have to quit while you're ahead. Nobody wants to get rescued by a flying emo kid with super powers, not even in a movie.
Except only the newest version of flash can play the video. I think people who compulsively upgrade flash to enable stupid little niche features are about as common as people with quicktime. It's nice that it works on Linux properly, but I'm not going to congratulate them for having found a byzantine escape route to avoid using a sane format.
I wouldn't even mind losing some quality on Macromedia's "NEED MORE NON-STANDARD PRODUCT LOCK-INS RAARR" video codec to make some people happy, but couldn't they have used a slightly less infuriating interface? OK, flash isn't exactly known for fuctionality, but I'm pretty sure the ability to navigate within a clip is pretty fucking fundamental to this whole video player idea. Maybe a simple seek bar is to useful to be trendy enough, but Jesus, how hard is a rewind button? "Oops! You blinked during the cool bit, now you gotta sit through 30 soul-raping seconds-that-feel-like-decades of Peter the Emo Bitch being a pussy again! Ha ha! That'll teach you to consider paying us exhorbitant amounts of money for 2 hours of questionable entertainment, you dumbass!"
The Tappan-Zee bridge has psychic scanners or something. The glove box works in the city, but if you're going to Jersey, you just have to leave it at home or something. I've had the Tappan-Zee read EZpasses through glove boxes, from under my seat, even from the back seat. I'm probably sterile from whatever those things are zapping me with.
I hope this means Tom Cruise gets the role for the Bush II movie.
"Heheheh! GOOOOOOSE!" "Goddamnit, Tom, did you even read the fucking script?" "Look, all I'm saying is we need a scene where he plays air guitar in the Roosevelt Room with no pants on." "We already have two of those in Crawford! Just get the damn speech right!" "TECH SUPPORT! Teleprompter down! Teleprompter down!" "That's better."
Bush II: Stuff's Gonna 'Splode
I make fun, but I'd pay to see that at this point. At least it's not fucking Gothica, Jesus God that sucked.
Yes, that is indeed what the four ATF agents knocked on his door to arrest him for right before he shot them to death with said machine guns.
I'd disagree with a government that attacked it's people for refusing to let their children go to school or hoarding poisons too, but in real life they were attacked for shooting an assload of federal agents and for having the misfortune of following a psychotic guy who was obsessed with impregnating young girls and was incapable of conducting the rational negotiations that would've easily prevented the escalation of the standoff.
The earth's rotation is slowing down (.0000002 seconds a year or whatever) due to the tidal interaction between the moon and us. That energy has to go somewhere, so the moon's orbit is raised (by.000002 meters a year or whatever). If you let it play out over twice the lifetime of the universe or so, the month and the day would eventually equal eachother, for reasons which I used to understand, but couldn't explain for shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but fortunately the rest of us live in the United States, and not Weenie McCrazyland, where Peppermint Moneytrees solve conflicts of interest with a wave of Ayn Rand's nutsack and the Good King Lucky Foopoopenstien's Invisible Hand ensures that greed always comes second to morality.
Hint: You have 50,000 votes, but the creepy German guy who owns "Trader Joe's" has 25,000,000,000, and really doesn't give a shit what you think.
Yes. It also means you're gay and you hate your mother.
If Scarface isn't engaging you, it's not doing it's job. Every movie or book or play gives you someone to indentify with, someone that you ultimately have a substantial degree of control over in your own mind due to the purposeful uncertainties you build into a movie. A game just takes that to the next level.
Neither Scarface nor VC is art. It's not like anything is being communicated here. It's hormone-stroking, but I find it interesting that you're finding VC more repugnant than Scarface. The pleasure you get from Scarface is good strong hunter-killer pleasure, the joy of killing your enemies. VC is more the farmer-gatherer pleasure, like gambling or buying shit from Ikea. Who the hell enjoys killing the Hatians? You enjoy finishing missions, or jacking a nicer car. No killing instinct there. Helluva lot more peaceful than pretty violence, even if it is probably more dangerous.
Anyway, in my opinion, the game of chess itself is speech. I'd think that ought to be obvious. You play a game of chess, it's telling you all kinds of shit. It's a reflection of the world, like any other work of art, it's just a bit more dynamic.
The thing that's in danger of not being speech isn't the game, it's the dressing they slapped on top of it. The comparison to chess would be if you made a chess set with drunken, NASCAR hat-wearing white trash for white and watermellon-clutching black people for black. The game is speech no matter what, the question is whether "Kill the Hatians" is an integral part of the game, making it as much speec h as the rest of the game, and if not, if the "Kill the Hatians" dressing they stuck on the underlying speech can be considered speech on it's own.
OnStar commercials remind me of the crime prevention system commercial in the Minority Report.
OnStar commercials remind me of how fucking awful OnStar commericals are. What the hell kind of commercial presents a product's users as such incredible fools? "Yeah, that beer commercial says I'll get to sleep with that hot chick if I buy their swill, but, you know, that OnStar commercial says I can be a panicky moron who spends ridiculous ammounts of money to call insipid dorks 3 time-zones away to whine about the scary snakes outside my car! To the GMC dealer!"
First, "themself" is not even close to a real word. If you're trying to do a cockney accent, don't.
Second, reveal themselves? How the hell would you know who gave you smallpox when you show up in the E.R. two weeks later? I can't even guess who picked my pocket last summer in Puerto Rico, how am I supposed to tell who gave himself smallpox and then coughed on me?
And ruining the GDP by shutting down eBay? I guess Osama's cousin Akbar in Clevland isn't exactly the Mossad, but I think even Akkie can figure out that keeping people from leaving their houses is a hell of a lot more ruinous to business than making people switch from eBay to Amazon.
To be honest, using eBay to spread anthrax in particular might work better than spreading it on the street, since anthrax is about as contagious as colon cancer, but if you're a multinational terrorist network, you're better off blowing up a few more embassies with your time. Spending a week selling anthrax-dusted Beanie Babies on eBay two kill two old ladies in Minnesota isn't really getting your money's worth.
I mean, if you want to give somebody a difficult to contract, non-contagious disease with a 5% fatality rate why the fuck did you pick a disease? Just send somebody a box with a bottle of acid. At least there you have a better than 5% chance that some idiot will open it and melt his face off.
Not entirely. Perhaps the parent is just being overzealous in his application of the "f" word, but nevertheless I find it rather ammusing that libertarians spend so much time talking about how the extreme left becomes the extreme right and vice versa, and yet is completely appalled at the very idea that the same crossover might occur on their own extremes.
Did you ever realize that American libertarianism is a largely religious philosophy? It's set by the early American intellectual climate of elightened deists. Very mathematical. God as the supreme architect. Delicately balanced rules laid out at compiletime and set loose to run as they will. Hence the libertarian chic among programmers and mathematicians. When you get right down to it, it's an aesthetic. Kinda modernist, with an absolute minimum of complexity.
Absolute minimum of legislation, just use different types of markets to run everything, reuse the same patterns over and over. It's the Einstien universe. No dirty complicated particles, just a nice, simple unified theory with no infinities or dead ends. This is why you, and, I admit, I, like it. It's pretty.
But then, of course, this is where we run into the innevitable trouble. We're taking form over function, which, when you get right down to it, is 90% of facism. Have you ever read about the Nazis? I mean, in depth, with primary sources. Go read the transcript of the meeting where they decided to start gassing the Jews, and then tell me that extremist libertarianism could never turn into that. The laws of the Third Reich were quite near the libertarian's ideal. They were perfectly logical, internally consistent, simple, and nicely justified. But they never applied. The entire Reigh was run on the equivalent of our commerce clause. The SS assures everyone that they're well within their pervue, and off we go.
Admittedly, the Nazis started from the other direction, an aesthetic which the laws were made to fit, but an aesthetic born of a libertarian legal philosophy can just as easily find the same ground from the opposate road.
The libertarian ignores fundamental human nature just as handily as the facist, the libertarian just uses ivory-tower logic while the facist uses gut-instinct bullshit. They both run into the same problem. People aren't predictably petty and cruel, nor are they predictably cold and calculating. They're wishy-washy whirlwinds of mass destruction, and unless your government is designed equally ugly and unpredictable, it will collapse into unpredictability in the ways you don't want it to.
But hey, what the fuck do I know.
France != America
France's constitution explicitly demands secularism. This stems from France's roots as a Catholic state, they've had their own Popes and whatnot, if you remember any European history. After they had their little revolution, although they were largely modeling their new constitution after ours, they felt that explicitly stating a goal of secularism was what they needed. Instead of the the US's extemely heterogeneous population in terms of faith, France was all Catholic at that point, so if any leeway in terms of religion could be expected, they would have to keep religion off the streets.
The US could afford live and let live, because everybody was a minority. Everybody could start hatin' on the Quakers, and the Quakers would be screwed, but then the Calvinists or whatever could just as easily be next. In France, if the Catholics decided to start opressing Lutherans or whatever, they had no other group to keep them in line.
This is pretty much still true. France is 80, maybe even 90% Catholic still, and anti-semitism and crap like that are always right under the surface. If they don't want an entire country of Northern Ireland-esque religious riots, forcing religion to stay a non-issue is what has to happen.
It's already a marvel of engineering, that doesn't mean it can't double as a marvel of catastrophic project management at the same time.
They don't have one because they don't need one. H-11B is a service the government is providing to industry to lower their labor costs. It's not some gift to dirty foreign devils, it's for us. If India's computer industry were lobbying like mad that computer workers were scarce and they wanted to be able to hire Americans, they'd have an H-11y thing in a second.
You've never met a Walmart customer, have you? Not people that go to Walmart to buy condoms and liquor at 2 in the morning, I mean customers. The psychotic women who take 5 kids down there every other day. They recoil in horror at a $0.06 markup on the one fucking jar of pickles they buy a year. They're caught in the Cult of Walmart, and they will ford a river with a dozen fucking oxen to save $0.10 on little Susie's shitty Linkin Park song. And if Susie points out the free would be even cheaper? Then Susie is fucking wrong, goddamnit, because nothing is cheaper than Walmart, you hear me? NOTHING!
Is that supposed to be what Professor Frink says all the time or are you just spelling gay wrong? I'm honestly curious.
Pfft. Sure, like that's gonna work. "Oh, let's not design any super-robot overlords! I'm sure everyone will be perfectly happy hiring expensive union workers to do jobs of infuriating drudgery that could easily be taken over for almost zero cost by robots if I explain that it's all to preserve our pride in our existence!"
Why don't you try that out by convincing everybody to stop paying less at Wal-Mart for the sake of preserving the concept of the middle-class sometime. Get that working first, then try something hard.
If you really want to keep puny human-meats around for whatever reason, get on genetic engineering our intelligence. If you pull up the slope of our singularity enough to match theirs, we've got nothing to worry about. For a while anyway.
Ahhh! Jesus! Dancing disco robot raver geishas! Kill! Kill!
Well, ok, the other two got a little bit of the funk in 'em, so I guess they can live. What's with the audience though? Robots put all this work into this whole routine with props and everything and nobody even claps? Where's the love?
Well, I'd be looking for a hundred dollar discount if it didn't come with a caps lock too.
Well, it's the frikin University of Tokyo, I think it kinda has to be.
Sorta cruel of us to be Slashdotting them during finals season for eye-candy though.
No, he just gets hired to be the stunt double for every goddamn member of Weezer right before the restauraunt scene.
Seriously though, Sam, your new glasses are not cool. Putting them in your movie isn't going to help, they're just ugly. You look like a goddamn racoon with jaundice. I know the poster at Lens Crafters said they were "tight", but sometimes Calvin Klein has to tell those little lies to make you buy his crap. I feel for ya, Sam baby, really, but sometimes you just have to quit while you're ahead. Nobody wants to get rescued by a flying emo kid with super powers, not even in a movie.
Jesus, of course. Why would you subject yourself to the second half when you could leave early and pretend it stayed decent all the way through?
Except only the newest version of flash can play the video. I think people who compulsively upgrade flash to enable stupid little niche features are about as common as people with quicktime. It's nice that it works on Linux properly, but I'm not going to congratulate them for having found a byzantine escape route to avoid using a sane format.
I wouldn't even mind losing some quality on Macromedia's "NEED MORE NON-STANDARD PRODUCT LOCK-INS RAARR" video codec to make some people happy, but couldn't they have used a slightly less infuriating interface? OK, flash isn't exactly known for fuctionality, but I'm pretty sure the ability to navigate within a clip is pretty fucking fundamental to this whole video player idea. Maybe a simple seek bar is to useful to be trendy enough, but Jesus, how hard is a rewind button? "Oops! You blinked during the cool bit, now you gotta sit through 30 soul-raping seconds-that-feel-like-decades of Peter the Emo Bitch being a pussy again! Ha ha! That'll teach you to consider paying us exhorbitant amounts of money for 2 hours of questionable entertainment, you dumbass!"
And that's why we have "beyond a reasonable doubt".
The Tappan-Zee bridge has psychic scanners or something. The glove box works in the city, but if you're going to Jersey, you just have to leave it at home or something. I've had the Tappan-Zee read EZpasses through glove boxes, from under my seat, even from the back seat. I'm probably sterile from whatever those things are zapping me with.
I hope this means Tom Cruise gets the role for the Bush II movie.
"Heheheh! GOOOOOOSE!"
"Goddamnit, Tom, did you even read the fucking script?"
"Look, all I'm saying is we need a scene where he plays air guitar in the Roosevelt Room with no pants on."
"We already have two of those in Crawford! Just get the damn speech right!"
"TECH SUPPORT! Teleprompter down! Teleprompter down!"
"That's better."
Bush II: Stuff's Gonna 'Splode
I make fun, but I'd pay to see that at this point. At least it's not fucking Gothica, Jesus God that sucked.
Well, we've known for years that he's a robot in disguise, I guess that he's more than meets the eye has always just been implied.
Ahem? DEA? At least the ATF isn't solely funded by the property it siezes during it's "investigations".
Failing to pay taxes on 2 machine guns.
Yes, that is indeed what the four ATF agents knocked on his door to arrest him for right before he shot them to death with said machine guns.
I'd disagree with a government that attacked it's people for refusing to let their children go to school or hoarding poisons too, but in real life they were attacked for shooting an assload of federal agents and for having the misfortune of following a psychotic guy who was obsessed with impregnating young girls and was incapable of conducting the rational negotiations that would've easily prevented the escalation of the standoff.
The earth's rotation is slowing down (.0000002 seconds a year or whatever) due to the tidal interaction between the moon and us. That energy has to go somewhere, so the moon's orbit is raised (by .000002 meters a year or whatever). If you let it play out over twice the lifetime of the universe or so, the month and the day would eventually equal eachother, for reasons which I used to understand, but couldn't explain for shit.