The little boy dresses in animal skins, wears a turtle shell hat, carries a club, and can constantly be heard saying, "Bam! Bam! Bam bam bam!".
Barney and Betty's kid? How about a reality check. Consider the following from one of the articles:
The child's mother was strong - she had been a professional sprinter in the 100-meter dash - and she came from a strong family. Her grandfather, a construction worker, had unloaded curbstones by hand, hefting stones weighing at least 330 pounds. (There was no information on the baby's father.)
They probably couldn't get ahold of the father because he was doing the laundry, taking out the trash or washing dishes, if he knows what's good for him!
Former AOL employee Smathers sold the initial list for an unmentioned amount to Dunaway (the spammer) then Smathers sold an updated list to Dunaway for $100,000. Dunaway sold lists to other spammers for $52,000.
Smathers & Dunaway to AOL members: "All your screenname are belong to us!"
I expect something like this happened at eBay a while back. I changed my email address for eBay to a new mailbox. A few weeks later someone spammed it offering to sell lists of eBay members. Then spam followed, usually from phishers.
The MPAA is going to love this, NOT. I can imagine the day already where they will convince ISP's (or lobby the right people) to slow down network speeds in order to curb piracy (just like most cars have speed governors, eventho it is mostly for safety reasons).
Assuming the MPAA aren't utterly brainless, they should have predicted this day would come and probably are already talking with SBC about ways to bust chops of movie swappers. It won't just be movies anyway. This kind of bandwidth would mean I could record (using my ATI AIW card and software) TV shows, edit out commercials (with Pinnacle) and make them available to friends and strangers alike. Slow bandwidth would have effectively limited my ability to move 700 MB or larger videos. Not anymore.
Occasionally you'll see people saying that MB or Mb is megabyte and Mb or mb is megabit, but obviously this is far from consistent. The above is the most common that I've seen, or just avoid the whole subject and explicitly say 10mbit.
And here I wasted my time in college learning 'M' is the abbreviation of Mega (million) and 'm' is the abbreviation of Milli (thousandths).
Imagine the disappointment of subscribers finding that they get millibits per second.
"Look, Dad, somethings coming in on the Teletype!"
Most of the other companies out there have some sort of corporate backing as well. And companies like Napster were actually involved in the music distribution biz a lot longer than Apple (even if it was illegal distribution).
Napster was in and out of court for quite a while, then shut down while changing hands and becoming a different style of business (a front for a music company.) It's amazing anyone still remembers them.
So I'm not sure what your complain it other than you being a typical slashdotter that has to question everything.
I'm not sure what I'm complaining about, either. I didn't actually think I was complaining. I was alluding to Microsoft and their efforts to *compete in the same market.
* Compete, from the Microsoft dictionary: To give away products (often shoddy) others sell and support to make a living, thus driving other worthy products out of the market.
This is good news for Apple (obviously) but what will be more interesting is how this affects iPod sales. We all know the iTunes Music store is a pimp for the iPod, so now that we have a controlled environment that we can monitor closely, I guess we can prove if Apple's music model really works the way they planned.
I like sitting on the sidelines on this one. I'm not about to buy an iPOD or other personal digital music player, mostly because I like to go around with headphones on my head, but the pricing is probably as good a reason as any. Apple's making money and that should be a good thing for Apple fans, better than watching them hemorrage capital while clinging to a minority personal computer market. How would you feel about another company coming in and setting up shop, underwritten by wildly profitable other divisions, and screwing the market up with crappy products and service, while crowding anything halfway decent into oblivion by bundling and undercutting prices?
So while inertia-bound Microsofattempts to shift itself toward its many stated
directional goals and moribund music industry giants try to pedal their own wares, puny
Apple Computer, with a less than perfect portfolio continues to run rings around these beasts.
I'm not exactly a fan of Apple, and find it quite odd that they have branched into music distribution,
but I do love these results. Apple is establishing itself well and by the time the
competition sorts out its own problems iTunes will be ubiquitous.
I've spent the past several years reading a lot of old Sci Fi, like Heinlein and Clarke. Many of the recognized great authors used SciFi to tell stories which would be difficult without the flexibility it offers. I suppose you could do an outterspace 'To Kill A Mockingbird', but it wouldn't have the same impact as the story set in the familiar context of a racially divided southern United States. But Stranger In a Strange Land or Rendezvous With Rama present themes which challenge how we see ourselves and how we react to unpredicted or unwanted outside influences which make people interpret a variety of ways.
So in other words, your suggestion is to "make it good". Wow, that's really helpful. And also, how were Picard, Ricker, etc. 'flawed' They may have had some minor weaknesses, but in general they were pretty functional people (hardly dysfunctional anti-heroes). The DS9 crew was more human, (and I thought it was a better show). But yeah, I've seen like half of an ep. Of Enterprise, so I have no idea.
Do you remember how the characters in TOS used to play off each other? When McCoy became angry or uninhibited he'd make snide remarks about Spock? When Spock would lose control over his emotions he'd reveal flashes of what the Vulcans had left behind? I really mean the intercharacter tensions which appeared on the show, despite humanity being so advanced.
I generally thought of TNG as The Politically Correct Generation.
I like the idea of conflicts that echo current world adversaries. Political fragmentation to the point of rebellion within the Federation could be quite interesting too. Sort of a macro extension of allowing character flaws.
Consider this: As we have seen over the past 100 years, since most monarchies fell and the world became largely variable and unstable, parties and ideals have come and gone in relatively short time spans. We can even see the change in the USA between a highly optimistic Clinton Era to a very pessimistic GWB Era. Though the Federation is supposed to be stable, imagine a change in leadership and ideals happening over a season and how Piccard and crew might feel about it, particularly as some of the crew feel the change is good while others feel it's bad. Something like all the Fundies out there running off at the mouth about how they have all the answers. I think such stresses are the things that can make a great show. I'm largely put off, even by The Borg, as the writers seemed determined to come up with more and more powerful aliens. The show became dull.
Star Trek: Yet Another Generation 'The NeoCon Federation'
Today's episode begins with ArchSecretary of Order Oakcroft pressing the Federation Council to approve measures which allow Federation Special Agents to send people to the planet Gowanus for an indefinite period of detention because they look shifty. The Enterprise would be enlisted in delivering several prisoners...
WTF are you talking about? TNG had a MUCH longer run than TOS. How can you suggest that going back to the formula that resulted in less of a success?
Yes, TOS was so horrible they made a few movies and brought it back after 20+ years as another group of space crusaders.
As I mentioned in another post, the original audience was not the audience TNG attracted. At the time TOS was on it appealed to radical thinkers, college age people, not geeks. TNG seemed to appeal exclusively to geeks, children of the generation that avidly followed TOS to the day the network killed it (there's plenty of information about this topic, the network moved it around, effectively trying to bury it out of site because it was so controversial.)
I think you are vastly overestimating people. The sad fact is that the majority of people do not want to be challenged by their TV. They use it as a way to unwind after a day.
Have you thought, for one minute, who the audience was for TOS? I'm not quite old enough to have been among them, but I have read enough of the history of the show, it's struggles and eventual cancellation. Effectively it wasn't unwinding Joe Six-Packs or Merry Homemakers and it wasn't gee-wizard geeks, but radicals. That the show's audience seems to be geeks, not radicals, IMHO says a lot about why the show struggles.
During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth.
Similar to one of the Orig. Star Trek movies, the one where effectively a cabal of military and diplomats try to keep the Klingon - Federation rivalry going.
...is a rest. For about 10 years. I don't say that unkindly...I like Star Trek, but familiarity breeds contempt. Only time can make it fresh at this point.
BEEP! Wrong!
Think back to when ST:TNG came out. It was slick to look at, but the stories were very tame and seemed to dwell heavily on gizmos and soap opera moments. Time did the show no favors. After the first season I gave up on following it regularly, and checking in from time to time found it getting scarcely better (about 20 minutes of material stretched into 1 hour show most of the time.)
It needs to get back to its roots. Let the characters have flaws, let them make mistakes. Put irony and humor into it in difficult situations. Make the leaders make difficult choices. Make it interesting again with good stories, not practically perfect people and a lot of references to Shakespeare.
Heck, Klingons were a cold-war type adversary -- make up some nasty race like Al Qaeda and have the characters discuss how the federation got into a mess with them and try to find a way out of it.
What is so tiring about Star Trek? Well, when I've watched it it's extremely dull in that the stories don't
challenge me to think. The original series challenged a lot of commonly held social values, sometimes having a hard
time getting past network Standards & Practices censors. If they make the episodes topical to today's world
issues they should certainly stir more interest as people either think to themselves 'Yeah, that's right, that is unfair!' or
'No, that's better the way it is, we shouldn't change!' There are hot issues out there and if they
take them on and use the set and actors as the method and galaxy as the vehicle, they should have no problem
getting people fired up about the series. Viewers become more passionate about a show when there's something they
have at stake being bandied about.
"Captain, it's a planet where they allow men to marry men and women to marry women!"
"Well, that's something Earth had to recognise as a fundamental human right..."
"But, Captain, they're doing it in polygamus unions!"
"WHAT!?!? Helm to starboard! Weapons officer, load all topedo tubes! Raze their capitol!!"
Yeah. The thing that bothers me is the thought of being asked to pay $10 for a $0.15 plastic container filled with $0.05 worth of methanol.
You won't have to look hard to find this stuff, it'll be the next offer spammers bombard you with. Probably filling containers (made by some shady outfit in SE Asia which could give a rat's patoot about patents or copyrights) with drugstore rubbing alcohol and tap water (watch those calcium deposits!) in their bathrooms in finer trailer parks everywhere.
I regularly participate in triathlons, strictly amateur. Someone once asked me what my least-favorite part is. I quickly answered, the cycling.
I forked over large last year for my primier road bike. It's light, stiff, responsive and great handling. When it started pouring, as it does in the early part of the year, I shelled for a winter bike, a measely $550 and though steel came killer equiped. Put on some aero bars and a disc on the back and It's practically a TT bike. Granted some time spent making it a little more aero could shave a few seconds. More to the $$$ point, though would be shelling and getting into a wind tunnel and working on position and getting the full rundown (maybe I'd be better in a different gear than I think I'm good in, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
When will they learn?
That's what the movie is about. Oh, and they give you little cardboard puzzle pieces in the lobby. Enjoy the show!
Yeah and all the stillborn lookups for those of us who don't have FLASH enabled.
Ob FLASH rant: *grumble* *bitch* *whine* *fume* *drool* *gripe*
Barney and Betty's kid? How about a reality check. Consider the following from one of the articles:
They probably couldn't get ahold of the father because he was doing the laundry, taking out the trash or washing dishes, if he knows what's good for him!
Former AOL employee Smathers sold the initial list for an unmentioned amount to Dunaway (the spammer) then Smathers sold an updated list to Dunaway for $100,000. Dunaway sold lists to other spammers for $52,000.
Smathers & Dunaway to AOL members: "All your screenname are belong to us!"
I expect something like this happened at eBay a while back. I changed my email address for eBay to a new mailbox. A few weeks later someone spammed it offering to sell lists of eBay members. Then spam followed, usually from phishers.
Assuming the MPAA aren't utterly brainless, they should have predicted this day would come and probably are already talking with SBC about ways to bust chops of movie swappers. It won't just be movies anyway. This kind of bandwidth would mean I could record (using my ATI AIW card and software) TV shows, edit out commercials (with Pinnacle) and make them available to friends and strangers alike. Slow bandwidth would have effectively limited my ability to move 700 MB or larger videos. Not anymore.
Can you watch TV on it?
And here I wasted my time in college learning 'M' is the abbreviation of Mega (million) and 'm' is the abbreviation of Milli (thousandths).
Imagine the disappointment of subscribers finding that they get millibits per second.
"Look, Dad, somethings coming in on the Teletype!"
Well, movies anyway, eh?
Napster was in and out of court for quite a while, then shut down while changing hands and becoming a different style of business (a front for a music company.) It's amazing anyone still remembers them.
So I'm not sure what your complain it other than you being a typical slashdotter that has to question everything.
I'm not sure what I'm complaining about, either. I didn't actually think I was complaining. I was alluding to Microsoft and their efforts to *compete in the same market.
* Compete, from the Microsoft dictionary: To give away products (often shoddy) others sell and support to make a living, thus driving other worthy products out of the market.
I like sitting on the sidelines on this one. I'm not about to buy an iPOD or other personal digital music player, mostly because I like to go around with headphones on my head, but the pricing is probably as good a reason as any. Apple's making money and that should be a good thing for Apple fans, better than watching them hemorrage capital while clinging to a minority personal computer market. How would you feel about another company coming in and setting up shop, underwritten by wildly profitable other divisions, and screwing the market up with crappy products and service, while crowding anything halfway decent into oblivion by bundling and undercutting prices?
So while inertia-bound Microsofattempts to shift itself toward its many stated directional goals and moribund music industry giants try to pedal their own wares, puny Apple Computer, with a less than perfect portfolio continues to run rings around these beasts. I'm not exactly a fan of Apple, and find it quite odd that they have branched into music distribution, but I do love these results. Apple is establishing itself well and by the time the competition sorts out its own problems iTunes will be ubiquitous.
Hopefully they'll also make available over internet stream, though.
Please see this post
I've spent the past several years reading a lot of old Sci Fi, like Heinlein and Clarke. Many of the recognized great authors used SciFi to tell stories which would be difficult without the flexibility it offers. I suppose you could do an outterspace 'To Kill A Mockingbird', but it wouldn't have the same impact as the story set in the familiar context of a racially divided southern United States. But Stranger In a Strange Land or Rendezvous With Rama present themes which challenge how we see ourselves and how we react to unpredicted or unwanted outside influences which make people interpret a variety of ways.
Nope. Further, I hardly watch TV, because it's so insipid.
Do you remember how the characters in TOS used to play off each other? When McCoy became angry or uninhibited he'd make snide remarks about Spock? When Spock would lose control over his emotions he'd reveal flashes of what the Vulcans had left behind? I really mean the intercharacter tensions which appeared on the show, despite humanity being so advanced.
I generally thought of TNG as The Politically Correct Generation.
Consider this: As we have seen over the past 100 years, since most monarchies fell and the world became largely variable and unstable, parties and ideals have come and gone in relatively short time spans. We can even see the change in the USA between a highly optimistic Clinton Era to a very pessimistic GWB Era. Though the Federation is supposed to be stable, imagine a change in leadership and ideals happening over a season and how Piccard and crew might feel about it, particularly as some of the crew feel the change is good while others feel it's bad. Something like all the Fundies out there running off at the mouth about how they have all the answers. I think such stresses are the things that can make a great show. I'm largely put off, even by The Borg, as the writers seemed determined to come up with more and more powerful aliens. The show became dull.
Star Trek: Yet Another Generation 'The NeoCon Federation'
Today's episode begins with ArchSecretary of Order Oakcroft pressing the Federation Council to approve measures which allow Federation Special Agents to send people to the planet Gowanus for an indefinite period of detention because they look shifty. The Enterprise would be enlisted in delivering several prisoners...
Yes, TOS was so horrible they made a few movies and brought it back after 20+ years as another group of space crusaders.
As I mentioned in another post, the original audience was not the audience TNG attracted. At the time TOS was on it appealed to radical thinkers, college age people, not geeks. TNG seemed to appeal exclusively to geeks, children of the generation that avidly followed TOS to the day the network killed it (there's plenty of information about this topic, the network moved it around, effectively trying to bury it out of site because it was so controversial.)
Have you thought, for one minute, who the audience was for TOS? I'm not quite old enough to have been among them, but I have read enough of the history of the show, it's struggles and eventual cancellation. Effectively it wasn't unwinding Joe Six-Packs or Merry Homemakers and it wasn't gee-wizard geeks, but radicals. That the show's audience seems to be geeks, not radicals, IMHO says a lot about why the show struggles.
Similar to one of the Orig. Star Trek movies, the one where effectively a cabal of military and diplomats try to keep the Klingon - Federation rivalry going.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
BEEP! Wrong!
Think back to when ST:TNG came out. It was slick to look at, but the stories were very tame and seemed to dwell heavily on gizmos and soap opera moments. Time did the show no favors. After the first season I gave up on following it regularly, and checking in from time to time found it getting scarcely better (about 20 minutes of material stretched into 1 hour show most of the time.)
It needs to get back to its roots. Let the characters have flaws, let them make mistakes. Put irony and humor into it in difficult situations. Make the leaders make difficult choices. Make it interesting again with good stories, not practically perfect people and a lot of references to Shakespeare.
Heck, Klingons were a cold-war type adversary -- make up some nasty race like Al Qaeda and have the characters discuss how the federation got into a mess with them and try to find a way out of it.
That or a better looking for the next installment of Stone Trek
"Captain, it's a planet where they allow men to marry men and women to marry women!"
"Well, that's something Earth had to recognise as a fundamental human right..."
"But, Captain, they're doing it in polygamus unions!"
"WHAT!?!? Helm to starboard! Weapons officer, load all topedo tubes! Raze their capitol!!"
You won't have to look hard to find this stuff, it'll be the next offer spammers bombard you with. Probably filling containers (made by some shady outfit in SE Asia which could give a rat's patoot about patents or copyrights) with drugstore rubbing alcohol and tap water (watch those calcium deposits!) in their bathrooms in finer trailer parks everywhere.
I forked over large last year for my primier road bike. It's light, stiff, responsive and great handling. When it started pouring, as it does in the early part of the year, I shelled for a winter bike, a measely $550 and though steel came killer equiped. Put on some aero bars and a disc on the back and It's practically a TT bike. Granted some time spent making it a little more aero could shave a few seconds. More to the $$$ point, though would be shelling and getting into a wind tunnel and working on position and getting the full rundown (maybe I'd be better in a different gear than I think I'm good in, etc.)