I hope the liberal half of the spectrum can manage to pull that off. A bug chunk of the conservatives we used to have fell into this hole where "conservative" got drowned out by "Republican". Hence this shit. I think a lot of that is just the euphoria from being on the winning team, and if Dean or somebody kicks ass next November, it'll break we'll have some conservatives again. This doesn't help, though, if we turn just as many "liberals" into "Democrats".
That's a lot of why I like Dean. He's pretty much a libertarian in disguise, even more so than Clinton, but that'll be useful for bringing back the possibility of a decent Green party after a term or two, once real liberals aren't so worried about the neocons.
I want that picture of Bill Kristol from that last site on a t-shirt.
I love the PNAC guys, though. We have to stick a new branch for them somewhere between the live-action RPGers and the fanfic writers. Every inch of that PNAC site is just dripping with long-repressed adolescent rage. Their policy recomendations sound more like a 14 year old writing himself into his GI-Joe fanfic than anything else. It's fucking hilarious.
Although, we coul put one of those "donate a dollar" checkboxes on the income tax forms that would go towards buying them some hookers, to burn off some of that pent-up energy that lets them whip around fucking things up so damn fast. Well, armed hookers, we don't want Dean or whoever to have to spend the first 6 months of his term fishing dead hookers out of the ceilings in the West Wing.
Ah, but you miss the sexy, sexy point about the Federal Reserve. It's not privately owned, it's a corporation, which up until the mid-19th century, were chartered organizations created by a government to perform a strictly limited function that was necessary for the public good. There wasn't any point in forming a federal agency to run a bank back then, since the government was still allowed to regulate anti-capitalist collusions like corporations.
Instead of appointing an "Electrical Engineering Czar", they used to offer a charter to some investors so they could start a university. Instead of Social Security, they would've offered a charter to some insurance guys to start a retirement fund that was controlled enough to ensure that it wouldn't collapse and the guys wouldn't steal the cash and run to Mexico.
Ah, back in the day we just contracted out for what we needed. If we wanted to find out how bad the air was at the WTC, we'd call up NYU and have them write up a report. But I'm sure that'd never work.
The phonebook is local. WHOIS releases the same information no matter where you are, and no matter where the person looking you up is. If it's illegal to collect some kind of information in Taiwan, the Taiwan phone books won't collect that, and there's no problem.
Oh, Christ, don't try and do that. So they're suing our team, but the Beatles are always at least above 20 in anybody's list of most important musicians in history. They could do just about everything with a fair degree of brilliance, and it paid off. Just because idiots can rip them off doesn't make them any less brilliant.
It's stupid to use an optical disk in a portable. You burn a lot of power with a motor to spin the thing up, and then you need a ridiculous anti-skip buffer. Solid state is a buzzword for a reason.
If you're making a PSP and you've already stuck 90% of a full laptop in there, then you can go ahead and splurge on the motor, but that's not Nintendo's style. You have to beat them over the head just to get them to light up the screen.
#1 is just a rewrite of something signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and those other guys. The Project for a New American Century isn't some kind of secret. It's the platform Bush's foreign policy and military policies are based on. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld wrote letters to both Clinton and Newt Gengrich in '98 demanding that they invade Iraq. So, once they're both in charge of the army, they do it. It's not paranoia, it's just what they did.
The part most people would dismiss as paranoid would be Rebuilding America's Defenses (also available in ridiculously huge pdf from their site) where Wolfie and Rummy outline their plans for taking advantage of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor", missile defense, increasing independence from the international community, a more mobile, flexible army, robot exoskeletons, tactics for use of robot exoskeletons culled from that 08th MS Team anime, ultrasonic guns designed to induce the brain to release chemicals to produce intense panic, rage, or anything else, drugs that would allow soldiers to deaden their consiences, and chemical and biological weapons tied to certain gene types that would allow them to carry out undetectable assasinations by spraying around genetically engineered ebola viruses.
Good Lord. I'd make some kind of argument about 2/3 majorities and how that applies states in the Senate, but somehow I don't think you care. Instead I'll just link to some PENISES!
Maybe you have a point and I'm just distracted by this (that one's not a penis, it's another under-reported story) shit, but hey, we can always use a little more gay porn.
I don't know, I'd probably be more passionately against you people if I thought that a hypothetical anti-gay ammendment would last more than a decade before it gets repealed. Sure, I'd be embarassing historically, but I get the sense that we're just gonna be writing off this whole decade 50 years down the road. "The 1950s Part II" or something. They'll probably find some logical explaination for how stupid we all are. Like the hallucinagenic wheat fungus they came up with to explain the Salem witch trials.
Whatever. I'm just keeping my head down until 2015 and hoping I don't get burned at the stake before we get out of this.
Not exactly "equal opportunity". It isn't really right to do that, but it's a way to discourage this sort of thing.
There's some quote from Grapes of Wrath about how none of the employees at a bank want to forclose on your house, but somehow it happens anyway. A company is more than the sum of it's parts, so to speak. The money-grubbing lawyers aren't even really responsible. They're just doing what their professional ethics demand and following the wishes of their client, which are expressed through the CEO, who is only acting on what he believes the shareholders want, who are only there because they followed the advice of their brokers, who... etc.
You can't hold a company responsible, you can't exert social pressure on a company. None of the components of a company are responsible enough for the actions of the company to feel guilty about what the whole thing does. Chrisd's kind of cold-hearted bastard-dom might actually be the most humane way to try and give corporations a consience, or at least a V-chip in their skulls that can simulate one. If employees are held responsible for what their company does, (so long as it's not retroactive, like if Chrisd had just eliminated everybody who worked for SCO even before it went obviously fucking nuts) it could very well make it impossible for Enrons and SCOs to go on these year-long final orgies of destruction before they go under.
Same difference. You have so much overlap between the two that it doesn't really matter. Unless you're Anne Frank, you're not publishing a journal on the web without acknowledging other web sites. And no blogger does anything but relating links that he personally enjoyed.
Blogging isn't some selfless public service. It's just as narcissistic as any other personal site. Bloggers are promoting their own interests through the words of others. Maybe it's more interesting to read than someone just promoting themselves, but it's no less self-absorbed.
It's the same damn thing as a newspaper column, only on the internet. How the hell's that gonna date? Maybe the kind that are just public diaries by boing people can date, but those already did in the early 90s when it was a publishing fad.
Wasn't Google planning on making a blog tab? If they're still working on that, they could be trying to make Blogger dominant enough to let them invent all kinds of blog standards to make all the cool features they've come up with practical.
That's kinda what I think. It's like Superman. I actually had that conversation a few times with different people. Why is there no really good way to make a guy look like he's flying? The better the special effects get, the bigger a problem this is. If you just go with a cartoon or a bluescreen, you can get away with the fist out in front and the sad little cape-flap, but when you have top-of-the-line CGI, it's way to easy to get bothered by the whole thing subconsiously. The more detail with aerodynamics and G-forces you get right, the weirder the whole "hey! he's flying!" thing gets.
Matrix had that problem. If you think about it, there wasn't really anything wrong with the way they made Neo fly, his coat flaps fine, he has that crazy wake thing going on, but he was flying and dragging cars along in his wake. Whether or not that would really happen if you flew a guy through a city at 90 billion MPH, it looks wrong.
That's what I like about this cubist guy. Maybe not cubism specifically, but we need people thinking about non-realistic ways to shoot things. We need somebody to play around and find out what trips off your subliminal wrong-o-meter and maybe make a Superman animation that isn't completely mathematically correct, but looks way better than one that is.
That's a pretty good point. Some kind of limit is a good idea, otherwise you get inflation and people won't know where to set a threshhold. If you only have a hundred or so mods, a low number's good just to make sure a good post can actually get to the top of the scale, but considering the volume of availible moderators/. must have, I think you can afford to have a scale of at least 10 or something. Or you could go with unlimited scores and just make the threshholds and everything curved. Set the highest score to 10, lowest to -10, filter that way.
Yeah, the unemotionality of the whole thing was Reloaded's big problem. Not that there was much emotion in the first one, but at least Smith was vaguely human in that one. In Reloaded he's just as mechanical as Neo.
Oooh! Oooh! Idea! Everybody still connected to the Matrix is human-seeming, like Smith and the Oracle and the Architect and the orphans and all the normal people Neo talks too at the beginning of the first movie. Everybody outside is a cold and mechanical mockery of the living with ridiculously simple motivations and thought proceses. So in Revolutions, we should learn that the "real world" is the computer simulation and Neo's real mind was killed by the evil mirror juice leaving a cheap emulation.
Either that or it's just the logical difference between a hyper-advanced AI and a plain ol human. AI now is mechanical-seeming because it's simpler than us, so if you make The Matrix from the frame of reference that puts hyper-advanced AI at human level, it's entirely appropriate for regular people without the helping hand of the AI in their neck-plugs to seem mechanical, dull and repetitive.
Oh, wait, option 3: I just smoked so much damn weed my head's about to fall off.
It was funny because you think you can do something to either the RIAA, any federal, state or local government, or really any group of more than a dozen people with a gun. No matter what crazy shit you got stashed in your garage, a couple/.ers just can't spill enough blood to even slow down something like this.
I always thought that Gates looked about ready to beat the shit out of that other guy in that video. He just stands there doing the DeNiro "I heard things" pose from that SNL sketch once it goes blue. It's just screaming "you are so dead, you little fucker."
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I hope the liberal half of the spectrum can manage to pull that off. A bug chunk of the conservatives we used to have fell into this hole where "conservative" got drowned out by "Republican". Hence this shit. I think a lot of that is just the euphoria from being on the winning team, and if Dean or somebody kicks ass next November, it'll break we'll have some conservatives again. This doesn't help, though, if we turn just as many "liberals" into "Democrats".
That's a lot of why I like Dean. He's pretty much a libertarian in disguise, even more so than Clinton, but that'll be useful for bringing back the possibility of a decent Green party after a term or two, once real liberals aren't so worried about the neocons.
Well, except for the atheism and the "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" thing.
I want that picture of Bill Kristol from that last site on a t-shirt.
I love the PNAC guys, though. We have to stick a new branch for them somewhere between the live-action RPGers and the fanfic writers. Every inch of that PNAC site is just dripping with long-repressed adolescent rage. Their policy recomendations sound more like a 14 year old writing himself into his GI-Joe fanfic than anything else. It's fucking hilarious.
Although, we coul put one of those "donate a dollar" checkboxes on the income tax forms that would go towards buying them some hookers, to burn off some of that pent-up energy that lets them whip around fucking things up so damn fast. Well, armed hookers, we don't want Dean or whoever to have to spend the first 6 months of his term fishing dead hookers out of the ceilings in the West Wing.
Ah, but you miss the sexy, sexy point about the Federal Reserve. It's not privately owned, it's a corporation, which up until the mid-19th century, were chartered organizations created by a government to perform a strictly limited function that was necessary for the public good. There wasn't any point in forming a federal agency to run a bank back then, since the government was still allowed to regulate anti-capitalist collusions like corporations.
Instead of appointing an "Electrical Engineering Czar", they used to offer a charter to some investors so they could start a university. Instead of Social Security, they would've offered a charter to some insurance guys to start a retirement fund that was controlled enough to ensure that it wouldn't collapse and the guys wouldn't steal the cash and run to Mexico.
Ah, back in the day we just contracted out for what we needed. If we wanted to find out how bad the air was at the WTC, we'd call up NYU and have them write up a report. But I'm sure that'd never work.
The phonebook is local. WHOIS releases the same information no matter where you are, and no matter where the person looking you up is. If it's illegal to collect some kind of information in Taiwan, the Taiwan phone books won't collect that, and there's no problem.
Oh, Christ, don't try and do that. So they're suing our team, but the Beatles are always at least above 20 in anybody's list of most important musicians in history. They could do just about everything with a fair degree of brilliance, and it paid off. Just because idiots can rip them off doesn't make them any less brilliant.
So, could we buy, like, Ringo? Is he new enough?
Ok, that sounded funny in my head, really. Ah, whatever.
It's stupid to use an optical disk in a portable. You burn a lot of power with a motor to spin the thing up, and then you need a ridiculous anti-skip buffer. Solid state is a buzzword for a reason.
If you're making a PSP and you've already stuck 90% of a full laptop in there, then you can go ahead and splurge on the motor, but that's not Nintendo's style. You have to beat them over the head just to get them to light up the screen.
#1 is just a rewrite of something signed by Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and those other guys. The Project for a New American Century isn't some kind of secret. It's the platform Bush's foreign policy and military policies are based on. Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld wrote letters to both Clinton and Newt Gengrich in '98 demanding that they invade Iraq. So, once they're both in charge of the army, they do it. It's not paranoia, it's just what they did.
The part most people would dismiss as paranoid would be Rebuilding America's Defenses (also available in ridiculously huge pdf from their site) where Wolfie and Rummy outline their plans for taking advantage of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor", missile defense, increasing independence from the international community, a more mobile, flexible army, robot exoskeletons, tactics for use of robot exoskeletons culled from that 08th MS Team anime, ultrasonic guns designed to induce the brain to release chemicals to produce intense panic, rage, or anything else, drugs that would allow soldiers to deaden their consiences, and chemical and biological weapons tied to certain gene types that would allow them to carry out undetectable assasinations by spraying around genetically engineered ebola viruses.
Good Lord. I'd make some kind of argument about 2/3 majorities and how that applies states in the Senate, but somehow I don't think you care. Instead I'll just link to some PENISES!
Look! Gay porn! Penis penis penis. Perhaps even a nut sack or two.
Maybe you have a point and I'm just distracted by this (that one's not a penis, it's another under-reported story) shit, but hey, we can always use a little more gay porn.
I don't know, I'd probably be more passionately against you people if I thought that a hypothetical anti-gay ammendment would last more than a decade before it gets repealed. Sure, I'd be embarassing historically, but I get the sense that we're just gonna be writing off this whole decade 50 years down the road. "The 1950s Part II" or something. They'll probably find some logical explaination for how stupid we all are. Like the hallucinagenic wheat fungus they came up with to explain the Salem witch trials.
Whatever. I'm just keeping my head down until 2015 and hoping I don't get burned at the stake before we get out of this.
If it doesn't take Mozilla into account, that's a design issue.
Not exactly "equal opportunity". It isn't really right to do that, but it's a way to discourage this sort of thing.
There's some quote from Grapes of Wrath about how none of the employees at a bank want to forclose on your house, but somehow it happens anyway. A company is more than the sum of it's parts, so to speak. The money-grubbing lawyers aren't even really responsible. They're just doing what their professional ethics demand and following the wishes of their client, which are expressed through the CEO, who is only acting on what he believes the shareholders want, who are only there because they followed the advice of their brokers, who... etc.
You can't hold a company responsible, you can't exert social pressure on a company. None of the components of a company are responsible enough for the actions of the company to feel guilty about what the whole thing does. Chrisd's kind of cold-hearted bastard-dom might actually be the most humane way to try and give corporations a consience, or at least a V-chip in their skulls that can simulate one. If employees are held responsible for what their company does, (so long as it's not retroactive, like if Chrisd had just eliminated everybody who worked for SCO even before it went obviously fucking nuts) it could very well make it impossible for Enrons and SCOs to go on these year-long final orgies of destruction before they go under.
Well, clearly they prefer that you wear their ads over taking their money.
Same difference. You have so much overlap between the two that it doesn't really matter. Unless you're Anne Frank, you're not publishing a journal on the web without acknowledging other web sites. And no blogger does anything but relating links that he personally enjoyed.
Blogging isn't some selfless public service. It's just as narcissistic as any other personal site. Bloggers are promoting their own interests through the words of others. Maybe it's more interesting to read than someone just promoting themselves, but it's no less self-absorbed.
It's the same damn thing as a newspaper column, only on the internet. How the hell's that gonna date? Maybe the kind that are just public diaries by boing people can date, but those already did in the early 90s when it was a publishing fad.
Wasn't Google planning on making a blog tab? If they're still working on that, they could be trying to make Blogger dominant enough to let them invent all kinds of blog standards to make all the cool features they've come up with practical.
That's kinda what I think. It's like Superman. I actually had that conversation a few times with different people. Why is there no really good way to make a guy look like he's flying? The better the special effects get, the bigger a problem this is. If you just go with a cartoon or a bluescreen, you can get away with the fist out in front and the sad little cape-flap, but when you have top-of-the-line CGI, it's way to easy to get bothered by the whole thing subconsiously. The more detail with aerodynamics and G-forces you get right, the weirder the whole "hey! he's flying!" thing gets.
Matrix had that problem. If you think about it, there wasn't really anything wrong with the way they made Neo fly, his coat flaps fine, he has that crazy wake thing going on, but he was flying and dragging cars along in his wake. Whether or not that would really happen if you flew a guy through a city at 90 billion MPH, it looks wrong.
That's what I like about this cubist guy. Maybe not cubism specifically, but we need people thinking about non-realistic ways to shoot things. We need somebody to play around and find out what trips off your subliminal wrong-o-meter and maybe make a Superman animation that isn't completely mathematically correct, but looks way better than one that is.
That's a pretty good point. Some kind of limit is a good idea, otherwise you get inflation and people won't know where to set a threshhold. If you only have a hundred or so mods, a low number's good just to make sure a good post can actually get to the top of the scale, but considering the volume of availible moderators /. must have, I think you can afford to have a scale of at least 10 or something. Or you could go with unlimited scores and just make the threshholds and everything curved. Set the highest score to 10, lowest to -10, filter that way.
Yeah, the unemotionality of the whole thing was Reloaded's big problem. Not that there was much emotion in the first one, but at least Smith was vaguely human in that one. In Reloaded he's just as mechanical as Neo.
Oooh! Oooh! Idea! Everybody still connected to the Matrix is human-seeming, like Smith and the Oracle and the Architect and the orphans and all the normal people Neo talks too at the beginning of the first movie. Everybody outside is a cold and mechanical mockery of the living with ridiculously simple motivations and thought proceses. So in Revolutions, we should learn that the "real world" is the computer simulation and Neo's real mind was killed by the evil mirror juice leaving a cheap emulation.
Either that or it's just the logical difference between a hyper-advanced AI and a plain ol human. AI now is mechanical-seeming because it's simpler than us, so if you make The Matrix from the frame of reference that puts hyper-advanced AI at human level, it's entirely appropriate for regular people without the helping hand of the AI in their neck-plugs to seem mechanical, dull and repetitive.
Oh, wait, option 3: I just smoked so much damn weed my head's about to fall off.
Maybe he's a FIlTHY PIRATE!!!1 One of the divx files floating around is from a promo DVD that doesn't have all the work done.
Fuck. I forgot to extend my rule to hackers. Sorry.
It was funny because you think you can do something to either the RIAA, any federal, state or local government, or really any group of more than a dozen people with a gun. No matter what crazy shit you got stashed in your garage, a couple /.ers just can't spill enough blood to even slow down something like this.
Well, we have naval dominance in the Pacific, Russia has a hundred thousand square miles of wolf-infested tundra. Gotta work with what you got.
Like a space shuttle, only instead of reusable tiles they use ablative poorly-researched Greek mythology.
I always thought that Gates looked about ready to beat the shit out of that other guy in that video. He just stands there doing the DeNiro "I heard things" pose from that SNL sketch once it goes blue. It's just screaming "you are so dead, you little fucker."