Anybody else think the W bros only got this deal because Warner Brothers executives thought it would be cool to have brothers named W working for WB?
Just how Vin Deisel got put in the Fast and the Furious because he was named Deisel. That's what I kept thinking when the Asan Akbar guy did his granade shit. If he had joined the navy instead, and stayed less crazy, what are the chances he'd get the fastest promotion to Admiral ever? I'm sure you'd at least have people weighing the annoyance of an unqualified officer vs. chance to have Admiral Akbar do all your press conferences.
Well, the slow motion adds another level of disconnection with reality. You never really see stuff moving in slow-mo, so it's a lot easier to accept ridiculous movements if they go slow enough that you don't look at the movement as a whole.
The Spiderman running was odd. The swinging worked well, but the running looked too much like cheap TV car chases where they speed up the 30mph chase to triple-speed. I didn't work out the physics or anything, so it probably actually did make sense the way they did it.
My problem was that fast runners usually lean way forward and basically pump their legs up and down behind them. Now, that's really to get good acceleration, and I guess if you were a superhero you could maintain a really fast speed with regular distance running form, so I think it was just the unnatural speed that made it look odd. I was expecting somebody going that fast to be halfway falling the whole time. He was just way too perfect to look real.
Anyway, I agree that flying is just going to look freaky. It's magic, and there's no way to make magic look like it's obeying the laws of physics. You have to stylize it somehow, and that's more work than just getting better motion capture.
You unholy bastard. I'll be at your door noon tomorrow to beat you unconsious with a variety of live shellfish.
Uh oh, better get going. I have to get to the local theater monopoly, conveniently owned by the same corporation as all the nearest electronics stores and my cable monopoly, oh, and all the local sports teams and their stadiums. I might miss the first 15 minuites of advertizing if I don't hand over the $8 for the ticket soon! I'm sure they need those advertizing dollars, after all, they only get $50 a month out of me for cable, another $50 for crappy broadband, and a few hundred every few months for some overpriced electronics that were only jacked up exactly 10 cents less than the shipping would cost from a competent, reliable retailer!
Why wouldn't they? You have an rfid, someday some of that flexible display stuff woven into the back, and if you don't buy anything from Microsoft within 30 days, your back starts flashing "ALLAH IS GREAT! DEATH TO AMERICA!" next time you go through a metal detector.
A-fucking-men. Not so much republican as Dow astroturf, but it's still 3/4 bs. Some of his stuff is good, which is a shame because it's all mixed in with personal attacks on environmentalists and worship of the chemical industry.
If he tried to do something like teach people how to logically evaluate bad claims, or even just to foster challenges to existing theory I'd respect him, but using Fox News to politicize important research just hurts everybody. There's good research being done in nutrition, but he uses it as a weapon against vegitarians rather than saying anything about the science itself.
Milloy's created this "rebel" persona about himself by pissing off people for no good reason. He could just advocate contention, but instead he insists on attaching political and idealogical baggage to everything he produces. It's stupid and petty and it isn't science.
None of that matters. All that was the bullshit that the media covered. The real problem with the election was the involvement of the Supreme Court.
"Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors..."
There wasn't and isn't any constitutional reason AT ALL for the Supreme Court, or any federal entity to have any say in an election. All the feds should care about is the envelope congress gets in the mail. The final authority was the Florida supreme court, but the SCOTUS stepped in and suspended the state of Florida's right to direct it's own electoral process in the interest of preserving Bush's credibility. The election wan't clean and pretty, but it also wasn't conducted legally, as laid out by the constitution.
I'd think a libertarian would be more constitutionally-minded.
We really wouldn't. The only reason we're at war with Iraq right now is because Bush basically pulled Reagan's old cabinet out of the closet in it's entirety. Without Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz where they are, this wouldn't have happened.
I'm hoping for Howard Dean myself. And really, I'm getting more and more desperate for this guy as time goes on. He's not my ideal candidate, but he's at least liberal, which puts him a good lap ahead of everybody else. If we end up with Leiberman v. Bush, I'll hate myself no matter who I vote for.
Why don't you have proof? It's not like Iraq invented whole new classes of weaponry off the tops of their heads in a decade. The first thing I found on Google. It's not like we kept it a secret or anything. I guess it's just that nobody wants to bring it up right now.
And the important part there is that he hasn't been questioned by anybody, either.
All this bull is just the FBI and the CIA shitting their pants over the possibility that somebody will figure out how incompetent they are, so they go nuts and arrest everybody wearing pants because Osama sometimes wears pants.
You missed that boat. Those checks were cut before we even hit the ground over there. Who the hell put USAID in charge of that stuff anyway? Weren't they the CIA front that let them get into places by posing as aid workers? They're just not trying anymore. They put the Scientologists in charge of the oil well fires, for fuck's sake. That's just sad.
I'm all for it, but it'll never happen. The camera operation would get contracted out to a private company that wouldn't be obligated to install public monitoring cameras. Maybe we'd at least get webcams scattered through the White House and the Capitol. You know Congress just spends all their time running around playing grabass when C-SPAN isn't in the room. At least they can give us some crappy reality TV if nothing else.
This is what I love about this country. We have no verifiable evidence of the existence of any single living thing with more power than George W. Bush. Don't you just feel all tingly inside?
He's just using the Fox News logic where they trace back the spinnoffs of the anti-war groups to the 19th century when they were all communists. Hey, did you know Fox News spun off of tabloids... oh, wait, no-spin zone, duh. They didn't spin off.
Do you honestly think Slashdot can even approach the volume of mail a dedicated special interest group can produce? They don't even have to write fake letters to create a fake public outcry.
Example: My grandfather wrote over a dozen letters to various representatives and entities a few weeks ago in support of the French boycott shit on the urging of a letter from one of the conservative think-tank things he donates to. He wasn't joining the boycott himself, he just wanted to help increase the group's political influence.
There's just no way for a representative to differentiate between astroturf and genuine public opinion. Even polls don't really work. I know I intentionally go against the answer the guy doing the poll is obviously going for, regardless of how I feel. A few days ago I said I don't support the war, even though I really only feel it just shouldn't have happened in the first place, because it was pretty obvious my yes would be used as support for Bush's handling of the shitbucket. I'm sure there's people out there with weaker convictions and a better understanding of polling methods that just toe the party line on everything.
Heh. Fox News started calling them "homicide bombers" too. If you don't understand the vocabulary-obsessive Stallmanesque mindset, that's gotta be entirely opaque! "HOMICIDE bomber drives exploding bus into screaming children!" I think we got the homicide part of that, but how many people are sitting there saying, "Oh, it wasn't a suicide bomber? Did they catch the bad man when he jumped out of the bus just before the explosion?" That's actually what I was thinking until I recognized the story they were talking about.
"Man found in park killed by homicide killer!!!" Christ. As bad as freedom toast. I guess it says something that we can eat our freedom for breakfast, but I still liked it better when we made our truck stop breakfasts out of Frenchmen, like God fucking intended. Otherwise he wouldn't have made them so buttery and delicious.
Oh, come on. You missed the chance for both the Grosse Point Blank reference and the Clerks reference. And I'm sure you could have found a Simpsons reference too.
Remember, missed culture references make baby Jeebus cry.
You're wrong. All of them that were engaged were intercepted. That's something like 2 or 3. Still 100%, but 13 or 2, it's still way below the numbers that they were trying to deal with in GWI.
Just figured that out now? Even when they were still using the nukebiochem excuse they had UN resolutions, torture and terrorist payoffs hanging around in the wings in case it fell through.
The freedom excuse is BS too, if you haven't gotten that far yet. If we held a democratic election there anytime soon, they'd elect an Ayatollah and self-destruct.
It's about posturing, not a sexy enough reason to sell, so we have this multiple choice thing going on. The US needs to convince everybody that we can fight nice, clean, humane little wars wherever we want, and then no one will get too upset if we go all willy-nilly on North Korea, Iran, Syria, Yemen, etc. We just have to assume that terrorists and communists are basically the same, and it makes perfect sense.
I think Wolfowitz is a smart guy. I think he has a plan that will get us somewhere he wants us to be. I also think he has the finesse of a rhino and is going to cause no end of trouble trying to copy the lessons of the Cold War and the War on Drugs onto an even more fragmented and vaugely-defined enemy that doesn't even work rationally.
If you want civility, stay in the real world. Not that I wouldn't necessarially strip naked and call you a donkey-raping fucknut in person too, but here I don't have to deal with your rightous indignation, nor your indecent exposure charges.
Furthermore, your "nothing to hide" attitude tells me that you probably don't know what crimes you've comitted. You should probably check that out. It's a lot harder to get away with things when you don't even know what you're supposed to be hiding.
Still furthermore, I can't imagine a more fundamental American value than getting away with murder. What kind of country would we have without furious benders, adventuresome sprees and enchanting capers? A country under the foot of THE MAN, that's what kind!
The private store stuff seems kinda creepy. If WA developments are anything like the east coast ones I've had the misfortune to have encountered, the stores probably revert to selling nothing but adult diapers, collectable figurines and lawn ornaments within a week of opening. And don't think I just made that up. I've been in that store. It's a combination gas station and crapmart. Possibly the most disturbing place I've ever seen.
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Anybody else think the W bros only got this deal because Warner Brothers executives thought it would be cool to have brothers named W working for WB?
Just how Vin Deisel got put in the Fast and the Furious because he was named Deisel. That's what I kept thinking when the Asan Akbar guy did his granade shit. If he had joined the navy instead, and stayed less crazy, what are the chances he'd get the fastest promotion to Admiral ever? I'm sure you'd at least have people weighing the annoyance of an unqualified officer vs. chance to have Admiral Akbar do all your press conferences.
Well, the slow motion adds another level of disconnection with reality. You never really see stuff moving in slow-mo, so it's a lot easier to accept ridiculous movements if they go slow enough that you don't look at the movement as a whole.
The Spiderman running was odd. The swinging worked well, but the running looked too much like cheap TV car chases where they speed up the 30mph chase to triple-speed. I didn't work out the physics or anything, so it probably actually did make sense the way they did it.
My problem was that fast runners usually lean way forward and basically pump their legs up and down behind them. Now, that's really to get good acceleration, and I guess if you were a superhero you could maintain a really fast speed with regular distance running form, so I think it was just the unnatural speed that made it look odd. I was expecting somebody going that fast to be halfway falling the whole time. He was just way too perfect to look real.
Anyway, I agree that flying is just going to look freaky. It's magic, and there's no way to make magic look like it's obeying the laws of physics. You have to stylize it somehow, and that's more work than just getting better motion capture.
All right, all right, I'll take a few of those consoles off your hands if it'll help you sleep better.
You unholy bastard. I'll be at your door noon tomorrow to beat you unconsious with a variety of live shellfish.
Uh oh, better get going. I have to get to the local theater monopoly, conveniently owned by the same corporation as all the nearest electronics stores and my cable monopoly, oh, and all the local sports teams and their stadiums. I might miss the first 15 minuites of advertizing if I don't hand over the $8 for the ticket soon! I'm sure they need those advertizing dollars, after all, they only get $50 a month out of me for cable, another $50 for crappy broadband, and a few hundred every few months for some overpriced electronics that were only jacked up exactly 10 cents less than the shipping would cost from a competent, reliable retailer!
Why wouldn't they? You have an rfid, someday some of that flexible display stuff woven into the back, and if you don't buy anything from Microsoft within 30 days, your back starts flashing "ALLAH IS GREAT! DEATH TO AMERICA!" next time you go through a metal detector.
Truly, the future is a beautiful place.
I thought I had a Mr. Fusion(R) home energy reactor,
but it turns out it was just a coffee maker
with a post-it note.
A-fucking-men. Not so much republican as Dow astroturf, but it's still 3/4 bs. Some of his stuff is good, which is a shame because it's all mixed in with personal attacks on environmentalists and worship of the chemical industry.
If he tried to do something like teach people how to logically evaluate bad claims, or even just to foster challenges to existing theory I'd respect him, but using Fox News to politicize important research just hurts everybody. There's good research being done in nutrition, but he uses it as a weapon against vegitarians rather than saying anything about the science itself.
Milloy's created this "rebel" persona about himself by pissing off people for no good reason. He could just advocate contention, but instead he insists on attaching political and idealogical baggage to everything he produces. It's stupid and petty and it isn't science.
None of that matters. All that was the bullshit that the media covered. The real problem with the election was the involvement of the Supreme Court.
"Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors..."
There wasn't and isn't any constitutional reason AT ALL for the Supreme Court, or any federal entity to have any say in an election. All the feds should care about is the envelope congress gets in the mail. The final authority was the Florida supreme court, but the SCOTUS stepped in and suspended the state of Florida's right to direct it's own electoral process in the interest of preserving Bush's credibility. The election wan't clean and pretty, but it also wasn't conducted legally, as laid out by the constitution.
I'd think a libertarian would be more constitutionally-minded.
We really wouldn't. The only reason we're at war with Iraq right now is because Bush basically pulled Reagan's old cabinet out of the closet in it's entirety. Without Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz where they are, this wouldn't have happened.
I'm hoping for Howard Dean myself. And really, I'm getting more and more desperate for this guy as time goes on. He's not my ideal candidate, but he's at least liberal, which puts him a good lap ahead of everybody else. If we end up with Leiberman v. Bush, I'll hate myself no matter who I vote for.
Why don't you have proof? It's not like Iraq invented whole new classes of weaponry off the tops of their heads in a decade. The first thing I found on Google. It's not like we kept it a secret or anything. I guess it's just that nobody wants to bring it up right now.
And the important part there is that he hasn't been questioned by anybody, either.
All this bull is just the FBI and the CIA shitting their pants over the possibility that somebody will figure out how incompetent they are, so they go nuts and arrest everybody wearing pants because Osama sometimes wears pants.
You missed that boat. Those checks were cut before we even hit the ground over there. Who the hell put USAID in charge of that stuff anyway? Weren't they the CIA front that let them get into places by posing as aid workers? They're just not trying anymore. They put the Scientologists in charge of the oil well fires, for fuck's sake. That's just sad.
I'm all for it, but it'll never happen. The camera operation would get contracted out to a private company that wouldn't be obligated to install public monitoring cameras. Maybe we'd at least get webcams scattered through the White House and the Capitol. You know Congress just spends all their time running around playing grabass when C-SPAN isn't in the room. At least they can give us some crappy reality TV if nothing else.
Well, there was only one. We had him shot back in February, the whiny bastard.
This is what I love about this country. We have no verifiable evidence of the existence of any single living thing with more power than George W. Bush. Don't you just feel all tingly inside?
He's just using the Fox News logic where they trace back the spinnoffs of the anti-war groups to the 19th century when they were all communists. Hey, did you know Fox News spun off of tabloids... oh, wait, no-spin zone, duh. They didn't spin off.
Do you honestly think Slashdot can even approach the volume of mail a dedicated special interest group can produce? They don't even have to write fake letters to create a fake public outcry.
Example: My grandfather wrote over a dozen letters to various representatives and entities a few weeks ago in support of the French boycott shit on the urging of a letter from one of the conservative think-tank things he donates to. He wasn't joining the boycott himself, he just wanted to help increase the group's political influence.
There's just no way for a representative to differentiate between astroturf and genuine public opinion. Even polls don't really work. I know I intentionally go against the answer the guy doing the poll is obviously going for, regardless of how I feel. A few days ago I said I don't support the war, even though I really only feel it just shouldn't have happened in the first place, because it was pretty obvious my yes would be used as support for Bush's handling of the shitbucket. I'm sure there's people out there with weaker convictions and a better understanding of polling methods that just toe the party line on everything.
Heh. Fox News started calling them "homicide bombers" too. If you don't understand the vocabulary-obsessive Stallmanesque mindset, that's gotta be entirely opaque! "HOMICIDE bomber drives exploding bus into screaming children!" I think we got the homicide part of that, but how many people are sitting there saying, "Oh, it wasn't a suicide bomber? Did they catch the bad man when he jumped out of the bus just before the explosion?" That's actually what I was thinking until I recognized the story they were talking about.
"Man found in park killed by homicide killer!!!" Christ. As bad as freedom toast. I guess it says something that we can eat our freedom for breakfast, but I still liked it better when we made our truck stop breakfasts out of Frenchmen, like God fucking intended. Otherwise he wouldn't have made them so buttery and delicious.
Oh, come on. You missed the chance for both the Grosse Point Blank reference and the Clerks reference. And I'm sure you could have found a Simpsons reference too.
Remember, missed culture references make baby Jeebus cry.
You're wrong. All of them that were engaged were intercepted. That's something like 2 or 3. Still 100%, but 13 or 2, it's still way below the numbers that they were trying to deal with in GWI.
Just figured that out now? Even when they were still using the nukebiochem excuse they had UN resolutions, torture and terrorist payoffs hanging around in the wings in case it fell through.
The freedom excuse is BS too, if you haven't gotten that far yet. If we held a democratic election there anytime soon, they'd elect an Ayatollah and self-destruct.
It's about posturing, not a sexy enough reason to sell, so we have this multiple choice thing going on. The US needs to convince everybody that we can fight nice, clean, humane little wars wherever we want, and then no one will get too upset if we go all willy-nilly on North Korea, Iran, Syria, Yemen, etc. We just have to assume that terrorists and communists are basically the same, and it makes perfect sense.
I think Wolfowitz is a smart guy. I think he has a plan that will get us somewhere he wants us to be. I also think he has the finesse of a rhino and is going to cause no end of trouble trying to copy the lessons of the Cold War and the War on Drugs onto an even more fragmented and vaugely-defined enemy that doesn't even work rationally.
If you want civility, stay in the real world. Not that I wouldn't necessarially strip naked and call you a donkey-raping fucknut in person too, but here I don't have to deal with your rightous indignation, nor your indecent exposure charges.
Furthermore, your "nothing to hide" attitude tells me that you probably don't know what crimes you've comitted. You should probably check that out. It's a lot harder to get away with things when you don't even know what you're supposed to be hiding.
Still furthermore, I can't imagine a more fundamental American value than getting away with murder. What kind of country would we have without furious benders, adventuresome sprees and enchanting capers? A country under the foot of THE MAN, that's what kind!
Waldo (II)'s had quite the stunt career.
The private store stuff seems kinda creepy. If WA developments are anything like the east coast ones I've had the misfortune to have encountered, the stores probably revert to selling nothing but adult diapers, collectable figurines and lawn ornaments within a week of opening. And don't think I just made that up. I've been in that store. It's a combination gas station and crapmart. Possibly the most disturbing place I've ever seen.