Holy fuckballs, do not start with Voyager. That is terrible advice.
The Voyager characters were bland as fuck, the stories were retarded (outside of a few exceptions, Year of Hell comes to mind) and as a committed Star Trek junkie even I had a hard damn time pushing through many of them. I mean, I've read a lot of the novels and some of the comics and enjoyed most of them more than Voyager, and there is a lot of craptacular novels, believe me.
I'm a musician, and I will make music until the day I'm either dead or too feeble to pick up an instrument, whether I make money off of it or not. I create music for myself, first and foremost.
Music has existed since the first caveman banged on rocks or sticks and enjoyed the sound it made. How long as the MAFIAA been around? 100 or so years?
But they're not widely disobeyed. A study that I read around the time of the SOPA blackout (Stanford, I believe, emulating one that had been done in The Netherlands) found that over 70% of the general public finds nothing wrong with sharing their media among friends and family. Are 70% of people murderers? Or rapists? No, of course not, those sick bastards are a small fraction of the general population, and the other 99.9% of us don't much want to be raped and murdered, anyway, so that will obviously never be legalized.
The.0001% of the population that comprises the MAFIAA organizations may not like the fact that the vast majority of people out there don't give much of a fuck if they approve of file sharing or not, so in effect, they're the murderers in the above scenario, bitching that everyone won't just submit to their thievery.
When you're dealing with something that has mainstream approval, no amount of law is going to stop it from occurring. I would think we'd all seen what a dismal failure the war on drugs has been, but it seems like nobody in any position of authority is able to take the overarching lesson in all this to heart. But then again, they're being paid not to see these things, so it's not like there's any motivation to change the status quo. Who give's a shit what the majority of people want if a goddamned Corporate person is being harmed? Send in the R.E.A.C.T. squad!
Damn right. My mother is a professional photographer that sells prints online via her web store and has been using Paypal for years and she has constant problems with them. The only reason she's still with them is familiarity, and the fact that they're established and thus "trusted" by most people when it comes to web purchases.
Funny, they can submit information to credit agencies that are applied to every adult in this country, but turn around and give the people an outlet to do the same thing in return and now they're sobbing into their cereal. Boo fucking hoo.
Precisely. I don't blame the hardware (although the PS3 definitely has Microsoft trumped on that alone) I blame the game libraries: there are a metric shit-ton of JRPGs available for the PS3, and (shocker) the Japanese love the shit out of their JRPGs.
I honestly wonder about Microsoft's Xbox numbers here in the states as well. Personally, I've already had to purchase two of the consoles, because my first one ($550 Elite I bought when they launched) died within a year, got replaced, and died again two years later, just outside of the extended 3-year warranty they were all but forced to implement. I do not know anyone that hasn't had to send their 360 in at least once since they got the console, and I know people that are literally on their 4th or 5th console now between getting it refurbed or just outright replacing it out of pocket like I had to do.
It's getting harder and harder to avoid, sadly. My local cinema had 1/4 of the showings of Prometheus in 2D that they did in 3D, and those showings were in one of the older theaters with a screen that really doesn't feel that much bigger than the one in my own living room. I don't even know if those theaters have true surround sound...it sure doesn't sound like it.
That being said, I only go to see matinees these days, so even with the 3D it works out to the price of a normal, prime-time ticket, which is admittedly fucking ridiculous these days...it's insane that you've got to spend a c-note on date night for a dinner and a movie anymore. I think I'm just going to stay in the house from now on and grow an epic beard instead.
I blame the theater for bad seat design, rather than the technology itself.
As do I. The half dozen or so rows in the front of most any theater are fucking useless; the few times I've been forced to sit there due to a packed house were completely miserable. That's pretty much why I refuse to see movies on opening night anymore, and in general I try to avoid opening weekend completely if at all possible.
Oh, please. I have plenty of empathy, I just have the capability to separate fantasy from reality.
I wouldn't watch a snuff film, but I can watch an actor pretend to be murdered because consciously I know that said actor isn't really being killed. I think that's a critical differentiation between us and the Romans...we aren't actually throwing children into an arena to be mauled to death for our amusement.
Why draw the line at movies? Can you handle even reading violent subject matter or does that upset you too much as well? Hell, how do you handle your own mind imagining the possible horrors of the world around you? What is the difference between it being on a screen in front of your eyes and you imagining it in your own head? How do you ever recover from your own nightmares?
I don't watch what you call "slasher-porn" (Saw, The Hills Have Eyes, etc) because most of it is fucking retarded, but to attribute its popularity to a lack of empathy is ridiculous. My sister-in-law will sit there and cheer on Jigsaw or whatever that guy's name is in the Saw movies, but she'll also bawl her eyes out if one of the rescues on Animal Cops has to be put down. The difference, of course, being that one is real, and the other isn't.
I also get headaches after virtually every 3D film I see, and I did not leave the theater with a headache this time. The 3D effects in Prometheus were much more subtle and a lot less "OMG HERE IT COMES RIGHT BY YOUR HEAD WOOOOOOOOSH" like most 3D wank-fests are these days. An order of magnitude better than The Avengers, the last movie I saw in 3D.
That was about the same time some of the parents who brought their little kids (!) to see it started leaving the theater.
You know, to be fair, I was watching Alien and Aliens when I was all of 8 years old, and Prometheus wasn't really any worse than that. Honestly, it had a hell of a lot less profanity that Aliens, and the violence is all fantastical, involving androids and aliens and what-not. The "alien abortion" scene might by a little gratuitous, but I know that I would have been able to process that just fine when I was younger. The only movie I ever saw that really gave me nightmares at all was The Shining, and that was mainly the "Come play with us, Danny" scene, and honestly, that shit still makes my skin crawl to this day.
Maybe I'm just a product of my generation, I don't know. I just know that the stuff I was watching when I was a kid seems to give parents these days the screaming horrors at the thought of their kids watching it today, and I think I turned out alright. I'd take a kid to see Prometheus if they seemed mature enough to handle it.
Totally agree. I hate 3D movies usually, but the people I was with insisted and I went along out for the sake of harmony and I was amazed at the quality of the 3D work. It wasn't distracting at all, not like pretty much every other 3D movie I've seen. The last 3D film I saw, The Avengers, had nowhere near the quality of 3D work that Prometheus had, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, The Avengers had a budget of $220 million to Prometheus $120-130 million. Since they were both CGI fests, where was the extra $100 million spent on the Avengers? I can't believe Robert Downey Jr. is commanding that much these days...
But anyway, if the 3D effects in the Hobbit match the quality of Prometheus, I will be glad to throw my money at them. Incidentally, Prometheus was also the only 3D film I've seen that I didn't leave the theater with a headache, so whatever the hell they're doing differently on that film compared to most others, I'd like more of that, please. The movie itself was pretty 'meh', but visually, fucking awesome.
Ok, I'm done blowing my wad over Prometheus now...
But, then again, it wouldn't really surprise me if it were true...I just didn't think quantum computers were anywhere near practical application yet, and wouldn't be for some time, in my extremely limited knowledge on the subject.
This is easier said than done. Google, like Facebook, has become tightly integrated with our society
I wouldn't go so far as to say Google is independently having societal ramifications, but I definitely agree that avoiding them is becoming harder and harder to do. Google Analytics is all but ubiquitous across the commercial net, as is Facebook, and they build profiles of users even if they're not logged in to any of their services, which obviously means they're tracking your activity either way.
This is why I always give the friends and family I do computer tech support for a primer on NoScript. Adblock Plus, and their equivalents. It's funny how amazed people are at the increased responsiveness of their computer on the net when all the extraneous bullshit isn't loading alongside the desired content. I worry, though, that as more people start filtering their web through these extensions that the companies being blocked won't start more aggressively shoving their shit out there and tying core site functionality to these trackers, because Lord knows there is a ton of money tied up in this data-harvesting.
Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability.
Reminds me of something Bill Hicks used to say:
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok
The screen is a shitty mouse, and I can't believe that any keyboard that's built into a tablet case can be pleasant to type on...but to each their own. The netbook still wins in the utility department in my opinion, and the price is obviously comparable, which to me makes it the obvious 'simple' choice...
Yeah I get 4+ hours per charge with my netbook which is more than enough for the flights I'm taking (I don't travel international) and I generally have good luck finding a plug in the terminals to top off anyway.
Of course, which is why the OP should just get a netbook and stop trying to over think the problem. A tablet is a better solution than the Raspberry Pi but it's really not that much more useful for real work, and since said real work is going to require peripherals just the same and end up costing a fuck ton more, there's really no good reason to not just go the netbook route that I can see.
Yeah, but without a bunch of peripherals a tablet has nowhere near the utility of a netbook and an order of magnitude less storage and costs just as much if not more.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy fuckballs, do not start with Voyager. That is terrible advice.
The Voyager characters were bland as fuck, the stories were retarded (outside of a few exceptions, Year of Hell comes to mind) and as a committed Star Trek junkie even I had a hard damn time pushing through many of them. I mean, I've read a lot of the novels and some of the comics and enjoyed most of them more than Voyager, and there is a lot of craptacular novels, believe me.
didn't create anything new
[citation definitely needed]
I'm a musician, and I will make music until the day I'm either dead or too feeble to pick up an instrument, whether I make money off of it or not. I create music for myself, first and foremost.
Music has existed since the first caveman banged on rocks or sticks and enjoyed the sound it made. How long as the MAFIAA been around? 100 or so years?
But they're not widely disobeyed. A study that I read around the time of the SOPA blackout (Stanford, I believe, emulating one that had been done in The Netherlands) found that over 70% of the general public finds nothing wrong with sharing their media among friends and family. Are 70% of people murderers? Or rapists? No, of course not, those sick bastards are a small fraction of the general population, and the other 99.9% of us don't much want to be raped and murdered, anyway, so that will obviously never be legalized.
The .0001% of the population that comprises the MAFIAA organizations may not like the fact that the vast majority of people out there don't give much of a fuck if they approve of file sharing or not, so in effect, they're the murderers in the above scenario, bitching that everyone won't just submit to their thievery.
When you're dealing with something that has mainstream approval, no amount of law is going to stop it from occurring. I would think we'd all seen what a dismal failure the war on drugs has been, but it seems like nobody in any position of authority is able to take the overarching lesson in all this to heart. But then again, they're being paid not to see these things, so it's not like there's any motivation to change the status quo. Who give's a shit what the majority of people want if a goddamned Corporate person is being harmed? Send in the R.E.A.C.T. squad!
Not to mention the fact that they seem to be the favorite meal of tornadoes across a large swath of the country...
Damn right. My mother is a professional photographer that sells prints online via her web store and has been using Paypal for years and she has constant problems with them. The only reason she's still with them is familiarity, and the fact that they're established and thus "trusted" by most people when it comes to web purchases.
The horror of an informed populace...
Funny, they can submit information to credit agencies that are applied to every adult in this country, but turn around and give the people an outlet to do the same thing in return and now they're sobbing into their cereal. Boo fucking hoo.
Precisely. I don't blame the hardware (although the PS3 definitely has Microsoft trumped on that alone) I blame the game libraries: there are a metric shit-ton of JRPGs available for the PS3, and (shocker) the Japanese love the shit out of their JRPGs.
I honestly wonder about Microsoft's Xbox numbers here in the states as well. Personally, I've already had to purchase two of the consoles, because my first one ($550 Elite I bought when they launched) died within a year, got replaced, and died again two years later, just outside of the extended 3-year warranty they were all but forced to implement. I do not know anyone that hasn't had to send their 360 in at least once since they got the console, and I know people that are literally on their 4th or 5th console now between getting it refurbed or just outright replacing it out of pocket like I had to do.
It's getting harder and harder to avoid, sadly. My local cinema had 1/4 of the showings of Prometheus in 2D that they did in 3D, and those showings were in one of the older theaters with a screen that really doesn't feel that much bigger than the one in my own living room. I don't even know if those theaters have true surround sound...it sure doesn't sound like it.
That being said, I only go to see matinees these days, so even with the 3D it works out to the price of a normal, prime-time ticket, which is admittedly fucking ridiculous these days...it's insane that you've got to spend a c-note on date night for a dinner and a movie anymore. I think I'm just going to stay in the house from now on and grow an epic beard instead.
I blame the theater for bad seat design, rather than the technology itself.
As do I. The half dozen or so rows in the front of most any theater are fucking useless; the few times I've been forced to sit there due to a packed house were completely miserable. That's pretty much why I refuse to see movies on opening night anymore, and in general I try to avoid opening weekend completely if at all possible.
Oh, please. I have plenty of empathy, I just have the capability to separate fantasy from reality.
I wouldn't watch a snuff film, but I can watch an actor pretend to be murdered because consciously I know that said actor isn't really being killed. I think that's a critical differentiation between us and the Romans...we aren't actually throwing children into an arena to be mauled to death for our amusement.
Why draw the line at movies? Can you handle even reading violent subject matter or does that upset you too much as well? Hell, how do you handle your own mind imagining the possible horrors of the world around you? What is the difference between it being on a screen in front of your eyes and you imagining it in your own head? How do you ever recover from your own nightmares?
I don't watch what you call "slasher-porn" (Saw, The Hills Have Eyes, etc) because most of it is fucking retarded, but to attribute its popularity to a lack of empathy is ridiculous. My sister-in-law will sit there and cheer on Jigsaw or whatever that guy's name is in the Saw movies, but she'll also bawl her eyes out if one of the rescues on Animal Cops has to be put down. The difference, of course, being that one is real, and the other isn't.
I also get headaches after virtually every 3D film I see, and I did not leave the theater with a headache this time. The 3D effects in Prometheus were much more subtle and a lot less "OMG HERE IT COMES RIGHT BY YOUR HEAD WOOOOOOOOSH" like most 3D wank-fests are these days. An order of magnitude better than The Avengers, the last movie I saw in 3D.
That was about the same time some of the parents who brought their little kids (!) to see it started leaving the theater.
You know, to be fair, I was watching Alien and Aliens when I was all of 8 years old, and Prometheus wasn't really any worse than that. Honestly, it had a hell of a lot less profanity that Aliens, and the violence is all fantastical, involving androids and aliens and what-not. The "alien abortion" scene might by a little gratuitous, but I know that I would have been able to process that just fine when I was younger. The only movie I ever saw that really gave me nightmares at all was The Shining, and that was mainly the "Come play with us, Danny" scene, and honestly, that shit still makes my skin crawl to this day.
Maybe I'm just a product of my generation, I don't know. I just know that the stuff I was watching when I was a kid seems to give parents these days the screaming horrors at the thought of their kids watching it today, and I think I turned out alright. I'd take a kid to see Prometheus if they seemed mature enough to handle it.
You can see non gimicky 3D right now: Prometheus.
Totally agree. I hate 3D movies usually, but the people I was with insisted and I went along out for the sake of harmony and I was amazed at the quality of the 3D work. It wasn't distracting at all, not like pretty much every other 3D movie I've seen. The last 3D film I saw, The Avengers, had nowhere near the quality of 3D work that Prometheus had, and if Wikipedia is to be believed, The Avengers had a budget of $220 million to Prometheus $120-130 million. Since they were both CGI fests, where was the extra $100 million spent on the Avengers? I can't believe Robert Downey Jr. is commanding that much these days...
But anyway, if the 3D effects in the Hobbit match the quality of Prometheus, I will be glad to throw my money at them. Incidentally, Prometheus was also the only 3D film I've seen that I didn't leave the theater with a headache, so whatever the hell they're doing differently on that film compared to most others, I'd like more of that, please. The movie itself was pretty 'meh', but visually, fucking awesome.
Ok, I'm done blowing my wad over Prometheus now...
Well, there's reports that NSA is building a massive spy center in Utah utilizing quantum computers but I'm not sure if I believe it...it reeks of tin-foil hats to me.
But, then again, it wouldn't really surprise me if it were true...I just didn't think quantum computers were anywhere near practical application yet, and wouldn't be for some time, in my extremely limited knowledge on the subject.
This is easier said than done. Google, like Facebook, has become tightly integrated with our society
I wouldn't go so far as to say Google is independently having societal ramifications, but I definitely agree that avoiding them is becoming harder and harder to do. Google Analytics is all but ubiquitous across the commercial net, as is Facebook, and they build profiles of users even if they're not logged in to any of their services, which obviously means they're tracking your activity either way.
This is why I always give the friends and family I do computer tech support for a primer on NoScript. Adblock Plus, and their equivalents. It's funny how amazed people are at the increased responsiveness of their computer on the net when all the extraneous bullshit isn't loading alongside the desired content. I worry, though, that as more people start filtering their web through these extensions that the companies being blocked won't start more aggressively shoving their shit out there and tying core site functionality to these trackers, because Lord knows there is a ton of money tied up in this data-harvesting.
Coincidentally I was reading The Big Short the other day and it was about a very similar theme - how human beings seem to want collectively to believe in something no matter that it is obviously bullshit, and that the people who try to point out that the emperor is naked get no thanks - they even seem to get blamed when the system collapses due to its unsustainability.
Reminds me of something Bill Hicks used to say:
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok
The screen is a shitty mouse, and I can't believe that any keyboard that's built into a tablet case can be pleasant to type on...but to each their own. The netbook still wins in the utility department in my opinion, and the price is obviously comparable, which to me makes it the obvious 'simple' choice...
I just spent 5 precious minutes mopping soda up off of my desk thanks to you.
I know, right? How does this blogger bullshit make it on here?
I was thinking more along the lines of the stillsuit, which if I recall correctly was powered in via movement.
Yeah I get 4+ hours per charge with my netbook which is more than enough for the flights I'm taking (I don't travel international) and I generally have good luck finding a plug in the terminals to top off anyway.
Of course, which is why the OP should just get a netbook and stop trying to over think the problem. A tablet is a better solution than the Raspberry Pi but it's really not that much more useful for real work, and since said real work is going to require peripherals just the same and end up costing a fuck ton more, there's really no good reason to not just go the netbook route that I can see.
Yeah, but without a bunch of peripherals a tablet has nowhere near the utility of a netbook and an order of magnitude less storage and costs just as much if not more.
Pretty much the same one I've got. I have to agree, it's a great netbook, once you rip that Windows 7 Starter Edition bullshit off there...