I think the safety applications are obvious. Small, low-range transmitters with canned messages could be attached to the bottoms of anvils, grand pianos, and those big Acme 10-ton weights. The beauty of this scheme is that it can provide timely warnings in areas with little to no cell coverage - the desert southwest of North America, for instance. The coyote populations there in particular would be able to immediately benefit. Suggested messages would be things like "Anvil above you accelerating at 9.8m/s^2" or perhaps the more immanent "Don't look up - just run".
(In all seriousness, this could have been useful to cover areas of the Canadian rockies in recent weeks - it would make a good avalanche warning system, since we already have decent avalanche-spotting, but mainly lack rapid in-situ delivery of the info)
While ''The Simpsons''' first season seems shockingly tame compared with later, zanier years,
I can't agree with the reviewer here. The show was MORE satiric at the start - it satirised everything about television and popular culture, which necessarily meant it was mocking itself and its viewers. At the beginning it was clear that Marge and Homer were bad parents, and Homer in particular was a bad person. As the series became popular (and a cash cow) they lost the ability to do that. No satire can survive its own success.
How many Simpsons fans really are the embodiment of Comic Book Guy? Think about it - if they weren't, would all those geeky in-jokes and references succeed? When the show was at its sharpest early on, every time you laughed you were laughing at yourself. Nowadays they just don't do that, mostly because they're too afraid to kill the golden goose. In this respect it's become just like any other show, helmed by fearful TV execs.
I also disagree that the show got "zanier". Zaniness works when it's imposed on a crazy kind of order - sorting that out is where the humour lies. After a while the attempt to be any was simply producing nonsensical scenes with no rhyme nor reason. Not funny, and most of all not satirical - just pointless slapstick and a lot of WTF.
The other way in which the show devolved was to become much outwardly meanspirited, and this is another reason the satire isn't self-directed at the show and its viewers any more. It requires a careful balance to coax people into laughing at themselves, and you can't be too mean. A lot of the stunts in the past five years or so have been basically Itchy and Scratchy for "real". It's like some sort of sick circular progression - now the show really is a dark parody of what it used to be.
I loved that episode, but where I saw it there was no Michael Jackson video. Instead it was the TV premiere (?) of the "Do the Bartman" video. One of the things I used to enjoy about The Simpsons was how much they seemed to pack into each episode, and Bart the Daredevil seemed to pack more than anything I'd seen before or since - especially considering it ran significantly undertime to make space for the video. Unfortunately it really did foreshadow more shark-jumping to come.
The other thing I used to love was that everyone would come running to the TV (I watched it in a campus den) to catch the beginning of the show (chalkboard etc) - apparently oblivious to the fact that they were being parodied every time by the family doing the same thing on their own couch. The show used to regularly deliver subtle insults to its own viewers for sitting and watching a silly cartoon. When it become too lucrative a franchise to be able to do that anymore, the shark was jumped.
The floptical. I used to have one, and I can tell you why they didn't become popular - they sucked. All the slowness and unreliability of a floppy with none of the ubiquity. No thanks.
Carson Daly is neither a man nor a woman. Carson Daly, is, in fact, already a simulacrum. This whole thing is a smokescreen.
The original Carson Daly, like most TV hosts nowadays, was a vaccuum-molded plastic talking head with interchangeable parts (the molding process isn't perfect, so some vaccuum always remains within). You've seen early versions of this technology sold as "Mr. Potato Head". Strictly speaking this incarnation didn't talk, but could be synced to an audio track. The interchangeable parts are especially useful, allowing facial features to be gradually changed and teeth to whiten, etc, as fashion dictates while still preserving the all-important familiarity factor.
Work was done on transitioning to a fully digital TV host starting in the early nineties. Trivia - parts of the movie "Toy Story" actually stemmed from this work (the digitally rendered Mr. Potato Head is an obvious example). These early efforts were extremely non-realtime, however, and unsuited even for the glazed perceptions of seasoned TV viewers.
Now these "people" are thought to be ready for primetime. They're still not completely realistic, which is why the initial rollout will be on networks like MTV where the viewing audience is especially numb and used to very rapid edits, constant lip-syncing, and other concealments of ineptitude. But soon you won't be able to find a real live TV host on either coast of the US. This isn't expected to actually effect the parties in any way.
It wasn't so much their stomachs, but their mouths. Partly they just overdid it with exuberance, trying every sour thing in the house in one night, and when they woke up their mouths were full of ulcers. It still seems to me that miraculin could be useful to people, and not marketing it is reactionary (same applies to the instant-sobriety pill, described elsewhere in the same book). I think the book you describe is probably Drugs and Human Behaviour, by Palfai and Jankiewicz. Very good text and quite influential on me. They take a nice balanced approach to scheduled drugs, for instance.
I haven't seen this mentioned much thus far, but yes, there is a possibility that orbital debris hit the orbiter, went undetected, and caused the catastrophe. What the odds of those three things add up to is anybody's guess.
There is a hell of a lot of junk in orbit, but most of it is above the typical orbiter (or ISS) altitude of 250 miles or so. The two densest debris bands occur around 600 miles and 900 miles up. The 200-250 mile band is sort of self-cleaning, because the fringes of the atmosphere brake debris and cause it to fall from orbit. Nonetheless, the orbiter is expected to hit something small as a matter of course, because lots of stuff is in decaying orbits and works its way down through the 250 mile area on its way to a fiery doom. At a relative 30,000kph even a paint chip is a deadly weapon (low orbit means high speed). This is the major reason why the shuttle orbits facing backwards and upside-down - doing so reduces the odds of something penetrating the crew module. But NASA still replaces one window on average after each flight because of damage from dust-sized particles (including some natural micrometeoroids).
No one actually knows the odds for the tiny particles that can't be tracked by radar - predicting them is at best a statistical exercise. Larger objects are tracked (there are around 10,000 of them), but those wouldn't have caused the sort of undetected damage that you're asking about. If a baseball or even a visible pellet hits you at that velocity, you know about it immediately. It's even possible that an undetectable dispersed swarm of tiny particles could wear away at a surface, for instance (this is another reason windows are replaced - they fog, as can the lenses on Hubble).
As for the tiles, an awful lot would have had to come loose to cause this. Someone would have noticed if this were the case.
I believe the guy regarding the extinction of pathogens in the poop - it seems well-studied. But what about biomagnification of the various contaminants we've eaten - pesticides, pthalates and such from plastic containers, simple inorganics that are always present in trace amounts. If you recirculate the same base organic medium through your veggie garden over and over, will these not build up to (literally) stupefying levels?
In truth I agree (mod grandparent down!). But there is a fine line between removing functionality and failing to add it (or delaying addition indefinitely).
I have used OpenBSD for some task-specific servers, and undoubtedly will again. I'm very glad it exists (regardless of the personalities involved) because it defines one end of a spectrum, from slow-but-steady to willy-nilly. Actually defining that spectrum can be someone else's flamebait.;)
Space War had a high-resolution dot display (not raster pixels, not vectors - dots). You can play it if you download a copy of MESS. It wasn't a prototype or experiment - it was a very popular game, with a tournament league and ongoing development.
Space War wasn't actually the first video game either, though - that's believed to have been a Pong-like game played on an oscilloscope display. The first actual Pong game was Baer's, playable on a TV set with the Odyssey - Bushnell just commissioned an arcade version (from you know who). I'm not particularly sure if Bushnell is the "father" of anything (what's people's obsession with identifying one originator, anyway? Plain old hero worship?), but he obviously did a lot to popularise coinop video games. Mixed blessing though that is.;)
One day, Theo is going to decide that allowing people access to the HTTP port of the dist machine is just too big a risk, and OpenBSD really will be the most secure OS there is.
Re:Sims Online?
on
Advergames
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Point being, if someone is willing to have advertisements put in their art, it probably isn't of much artistic value to begin with.
This ignores the reality of how our entertainment economy actually works. What's more likely to happen is that a particular model becomes entrenched, and that becomes the only way to make and market a game. There are a few good TV shows on the air, for instance - their creators may not want TV ads in there (and thus little pre-break mini climaxes every fifteen minutes in the storyline, etc), but it's not like they have a real choice (something like PBS isn't a realistic choice). The same would eventually apply to games if a product-placement finance model took root.
Granted, one always has to compromise one's ideal creative vision to make it work in the real world - the mitigating factor could be gravity and tensile strength of a sculpture rather than ad-supported television. However, the ad-supported economyis particularly odious because it's a continual drain on those people who want to do real work and actually create things of value in the world. The ad economy is just money chasing around in a circle (this is nowhere clearer than with web banner ads). The ads themselves are by necessity designed to be throwaway, so there's a drain on creativity as well as money. In this respect I do agree with your thesis, since the eventual result of all this is that all media becomes advertising, and thus hopelessly compromised throwaway trash. Patronage of the arts taken to a horrible extreme.
btw no one seems to have RTFA and noticed that it wasn't really about product placement in games - it was about the creation of one-off games specifically as an advertising medium. It's not actually a new idea - I remember a golf game for the Mac from Buick circa 1990, and there were retailored versions of "Test Drive" before that. But it's just one more way to pointlessly drain money.
People have hangups about this, yet many, if not all, of the complainers will regularly buy water in clear plastic bottles because they think it's "cleaner" and "healthier" than the water from the tap,
This is one of those things that regularly amuses me - the notion that water (or anything) is better for you if it comes from a nice sealed plastic container. Personally I try to limit my intake of foodstuffs that have been in prolonged contact with soft plastics - the pthalates and other organics that seep or offgas into your food and drink are generally worse than what's in the tap water. Many of them are hormone analogues like some of the nasty petrochemical-based pollutants flowing into streams and rivers these days. Lately I've phased out plastic in my kitchen in favour of glass and steel cookware and storage containers. I find since I've done this that I can taste when something's been contained in plastic, depending on the kind (hard thermoset plastics are usually ok, and notably don't imbue a flavour).
I saw a TV commercial the other day that claimed some sort of home water filter (probably Brita, which I have one of but have no real faith in for the things that matter) produces output that "tastes as fresh as bottled water". WTF? Since when did something bottled, canned, or wrapped in plastic become our yardstick of "fresh"? Shrinkwrap culture, I guess.
Ah, the spastic utterings of a former tetris champ, angry at having spent hundreds of youthful hours becoming good at something only to be made redundant. Note "two-handed home row" mapping of game controls, once thought to be optimal (oh! the irony). This one was good. For a human. Go with our sympathies, brave filler of lines.
Because the template-filling routines read from a queue. The complete template looks like this: from the $deadpan dept. $subject vs. $object $submitter writes with this $scalpee article which "$quotemademeaninglessbylackofcontext". Seems like $pithyorunarguablyobviousobservation.
Oh, colour choices are an important part of usability. A garish display will certainly make the OS less usable. Carefully designed aesthetics are part of what keeps the tool out of your focus, while still doing what you want.
At a deeper (and/or slightly facetious) level it's rather obvious that colour choices make all the difference - everything on the screen is a colour choice, from drop shadows to text to the fact that there's any display at all. Make all the colours 50% grey and the display will be usable mainly as a meditative device.;)
An interesting thing I've noticed about Windows is that it isn't even satirisable. This piece isn't a great example because it's frankly baffling (it starts out as a weak attempt at humour, then seems to lose its way in genuine criticism). Linux satire is funny because some parts of Linux are still genuinely atrocious; focusing on those parts is like reviewing a so-bad-it's-funny B-movie, and the overall excellence of the underlying OS provides for ironic contrast. Mac satire is funny because the Mac really is slick, but also dogmatic and takes itself a wee bit too seriously sometimes (or its users do) - amusing yourself at the Mac OS's expense is like making a Matrix parody. In both cases, people really do like the OS, and they're thus able to laugh at them in good humour.
Windows is just so mediocre and generally almost-good-enough that reading a satire isn't ever really funny; it reminds you of the low-level frustration you deal with (or used to) on a daily basis. It's like a movie that's not worth watching because it's good, but also not worth watching because it's so bad. Possibly this is why this weird satire attempt so lost its way on the second page. You can try to have fun at Windows expense, but then you realise you're not. Having fun that is.
Anyone have any links to a really funny Windows lambasting? I'd enjoy being proven wrong.
It's an interesting question whether a chess grandmaster could switch to go, as you say, and be successful at it. No doubt some of the tools of thinking would be applicable, but many of the habits he'd bring would probably be bad ones. Likewise for a go master who switched to chess.
As far as "suited to the way a human brain works", they're both games of abstract logic. Neither is particularly suited to anything. More importantly it's a red herring - the human brain is flexible and adaptable well beyond the scale of these games. But chess may be better suited to current paradigms of programming (it is in many ways a more procedural game).
I recently came across this press release on NASA's satellite monitoring of wheat fields, cunningly disguised as a project to aid agriculture (yeah right!). I fear for the poor crop-circle artists. Can even the stealthiest stalk-stomper evade the watchful satellite's malevolent eye?
Fortunately you're full of shit and these events only happened in your fantasy life, but
These kids think
they're so big and bad until they realize how pathetic they are in real life
So you conclude that the reason they launch attacks is that they feel inadequate IRL, and your solution is to make them feel more inadequate there? Brilliant corrections strategy. You wouldn't be John Ashcroft would you?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you trolling? The poster meant game marquees, where the company would write something like "Tutankham" and then run out of space.
I think the safety applications are obvious. Small, low-range transmitters with canned messages could be attached to the bottoms of anvils, grand pianos, and those big Acme 10-ton weights. The beauty of this scheme is that it can provide timely warnings in areas with little to no cell coverage - the desert southwest of North America, for instance. The coyote populations there in particular would be able to immediately benefit.
Suggested messages would be things like "Anvil above you accelerating at 9.8m/s^2" or perhaps the more immanent "Don't look up - just run".
(In all seriousness, this could have been useful to cover areas of the Canadian rockies in recent weeks - it would make a good avalanche warning system, since we already have decent avalanche-spotting, but mainly lack rapid in-situ delivery of the info)
I can't agree with the reviewer here. The show was MORE satiric at the start - it satirised everything about television and popular culture, which necessarily meant it was mocking itself and its viewers. At the beginning it was clear that Marge and Homer were bad parents, and Homer in particular was a bad person. As the series became popular (and a cash cow) they lost the ability to do that. No satire can survive its own success.
How many Simpsons fans really are the embodiment of Comic Book Guy? Think about it - if they weren't, would all those geeky in-jokes and references succeed? When the show was at its sharpest early on, every time you laughed you were laughing at yourself. Nowadays they just don't do that, mostly because they're too afraid to kill the golden goose. In this respect it's become just like any other show, helmed by fearful TV execs.
I also disagree that the show got "zanier". Zaniness works when it's imposed on a crazy kind of order - sorting that out is where the humour lies. After a while the attempt to be any was simply producing nonsensical scenes with no rhyme nor reason. Not funny, and most of all not satirical - just pointless slapstick and a lot of WTF.
The other way in which the show devolved was to become much outwardly meanspirited, and this is another reason the satire isn't self-directed at the show and its viewers any more. It requires a careful balance to coax people into laughing at themselves, and you can't be too mean. A lot of the stunts in the past five years or so have been basically Itchy and Scratchy for "real". It's like some sort of sick circular progression - now the show really is a dark parody of what it used to be.
I loved that episode, but where I saw it there was no Michael Jackson video. Instead it was the TV premiere (?) of the "Do the Bartman" video.
One of the things I used to enjoy about The Simpsons was how much they seemed to pack into each episode, and Bart the Daredevil seemed to pack more than anything I'd seen before or since - especially considering it ran significantly undertime to make space for the video.
Unfortunately it really did foreshadow more shark-jumping to come.
The other thing I used to love was that everyone would come running to the TV (I watched it in a campus den) to catch the beginning of the show (chalkboard etc) - apparently oblivious to the fact that they were being parodied every time by the family doing the same thing on their own couch. The show used to regularly deliver subtle insults to its own viewers for sitting and watching a silly cartoon. When it become too lucrative a franchise to be able to do that anymore, the shark was jumped.
The floptical. I used to have one, and I can tell you why they didn't become popular - they sucked. All the slowness and unreliability of a floppy with none of the ubiquity. No thanks.
Carson Daly is neither a man nor a woman. Carson Daly, is, in fact, already a simulacrum. This whole thing is a smokescreen.
The original Carson Daly, like most TV hosts nowadays, was a vaccuum-molded plastic talking head with interchangeable parts (the molding process isn't perfect, so some vaccuum always remains within). You've seen early versions of this technology sold as "Mr. Potato Head". Strictly speaking this incarnation didn't talk, but could be synced to an audio track. The interchangeable parts are especially useful, allowing facial features to be gradually changed and teeth to whiten, etc, as fashion dictates while still preserving the all-important familiarity factor.
Work was done on transitioning to a fully digital TV host starting in the early nineties. Trivia - parts of the movie "Toy Story" actually stemmed from this work (the digitally rendered Mr. Potato Head is an obvious example). These early efforts were extremely non-realtime, however, and unsuited even for the glazed perceptions of seasoned TV viewers.
Now these "people" are thought to be ready for primetime. They're still not completely realistic, which is why the initial rollout will be on networks like MTV where the viewing audience is especially numb and used to very rapid edits, constant lip-syncing, and other concealments of ineptitude. But soon you won't be able to find a real live TV host on either coast of the US. This isn't expected to actually effect the parties in any way.
Hope that helps.
It wasn't so much their stomachs, but their mouths. Partly they just overdid it with exuberance, trying every sour thing in the house in one night, and when they woke up their mouths were full of ulcers. It still seems to me that miraculin could be useful to people, and not marketing it is reactionary (same applies to the instant-sobriety pill, described elsewhere in the same book).
I think the book you describe is probably Drugs and Human Behaviour, by Palfai and Jankiewicz. Very good text and quite influential on me. They take a nice balanced approach to scheduled drugs, for instance.
I haven't seen this mentioned much thus far, but yes, there is a possibility that orbital debris hit the orbiter, went undetected, and caused the catastrophe. What the odds of those three things add up to is anybody's guess.
There is a hell of a lot of junk in orbit, but most of it is above the typical orbiter (or ISS) altitude of 250 miles or so. The two densest debris bands occur around 600 miles and 900 miles up. The 200-250 mile band is sort of self-cleaning, because the fringes of the atmosphere brake debris and cause it to fall from orbit. Nonetheless, the orbiter is expected to hit something small as a matter of course, because lots of stuff is in decaying orbits and works its way down through the 250 mile area on its way to a fiery doom. At a relative 30,000kph even a paint chip is a deadly weapon (low orbit means high speed). This is the major reason why the shuttle orbits facing backwards and upside-down - doing so reduces the odds of something penetrating the crew module. But NASA still replaces one window on average after each flight because of damage from dust-sized particles (including some natural micrometeoroids).
No one actually knows the odds for the tiny particles that can't be tracked by radar - predicting them is at best a statistical exercise. Larger objects are tracked (there are around 10,000 of them), but those wouldn't have caused the sort of undetected damage that you're asking about. If a baseball or even a visible pellet hits you at that velocity, you know about it immediately. It's even possible that an undetectable dispersed swarm of tiny particles could wear away at a surface, for instance (this is another reason windows are replaced - they fog, as can the lenses on Hubble).
As for the tiles, an awful lot would have had to come loose to cause this. Someone would have noticed if this were the case.
I believe the guy regarding the extinction of pathogens in the poop - it seems well-studied. But what about biomagnification of the various contaminants we've eaten - pesticides, pthalates and such from plastic containers, simple inorganics that are always present in trace amounts. If you recirculate the same base organic medium through your veggie garden over and over, will these not build up to (literally) stupefying levels?
In truth I agree (mod grandparent down!). But there is a fine line between removing functionality and failing to add it (or delaying addition indefinitely).
;)
I have used OpenBSD for some task-specific servers, and undoubtedly will again. I'm very glad it exists (regardless of the personalities involved) because it defines one end of a spectrum, from slow-but-steady to willy-nilly. Actually defining that spectrum can be someone else's flamebait.
Space War had a high-resolution dot display (not raster pixels, not vectors - dots). You can play it if you download a copy of MESS. It wasn't a prototype or experiment - it was a very popular game, with a tournament league and ongoing development.
Space War wasn't actually the first video game either, though - that's believed to have been a Pong-like game played on an oscilloscope display. The first actual Pong game was Baer's, playable on a TV set with the Odyssey - Bushnell just commissioned an arcade version (from you know who). I'm not particularly sure if Bushnell is the "father" of anything (what's people's obsession with identifying one originator, anyway? Plain old hero worship?), but he obviously did a lot to popularise coinop video games. Mixed blessing though that is. ;)
One day, Theo is going to decide that allowing people access to the HTTP port of the dist machine is just too big a risk, and OpenBSD really will be the most secure OS there is.
Point being, if someone is willing to have advertisements put in their art, it probably isn't of much artistic value to begin with.
This ignores the reality of how our entertainment economy actually works. What's more likely to happen is that a particular model becomes entrenched, and that becomes the only way to make and market a game. There are a few good TV shows on the air, for instance - their creators may not want TV ads in there (and thus little pre-break mini climaxes every fifteen minutes in the storyline, etc), but it's not like they have a real choice (something like PBS isn't a realistic choice). The same would eventually apply to games if a product-placement finance model took root.
Granted, one always has to compromise one's ideal creative vision to make it work in the real world - the mitigating factor could be gravity and tensile strength of a sculpture rather than ad-supported television. However, the ad-supported economyis particularly odious because it's a continual drain on those people who want to do real work and actually create things of value in the world. The ad economy is just money chasing around in a circle (this is nowhere clearer than with web banner ads). The ads themselves are by necessity designed to be throwaway, so there's a drain on creativity as well as money. In this respect I do agree with your thesis, since the eventual result of all this is that all media becomes advertising, and thus hopelessly compromised throwaway trash. Patronage of the arts taken to a horrible extreme.
btw no one seems to have RTFA and noticed that it wasn't really about product placement in games - it was about the creation of one-off games specifically as an advertising medium. It's not actually a new idea - I remember a golf game for the Mac from Buick circa 1990, and there were retailored versions of "Test Drive" before that. But it's just one more way to pointlessly drain money.
it was pretty clear that poor people were going to end up using rich people's (albeit clean) waste water. That just struck me as pretty screwed up.
I see you're not familiar with the theory of "trickle-down economics".
People have hangups about this, yet many, if not all, of the complainers will regularly buy water in clear plastic bottles because they think it's "cleaner" and "healthier" than the water from the tap,
This is one of those things that regularly amuses me - the notion that water (or anything) is better for you if it comes from a nice sealed plastic container. Personally I try to limit my intake of foodstuffs that have been in prolonged contact with soft plastics - the pthalates and other organics that seep or offgas into your food and drink are generally worse than what's in the tap water. Many of them are hormone analogues like some of the nasty petrochemical-based pollutants flowing into streams and rivers these days. Lately I've phased out plastic in my kitchen in favour of glass and steel cookware and storage containers. I find since I've done this that I can taste when something's been contained in plastic, depending on the kind (hard thermoset plastics are usually ok, and notably don't imbue a flavour).
I saw a TV commercial the other day that claimed some sort of home water filter (probably Brita, which I have one of but have no real faith in for the things that matter) produces output that "tastes as fresh as bottled water". WTF? Since when did something bottled, canned, or wrapped in plastic become our yardstick of "fresh"? Shrinkwrap culture, I guess.
Well, with one can of Pringles, anyway.
Ah, the spastic utterings of a former tetris champ, angry at having spent hundreds of youthful hours becoming good at something only to be made redundant.
Note "two-handed home row" mapping of game controls, once thought to be optimal (oh! the irony). This one was good. For a human.
Go with our sympathies, brave filler of lines.
You could, if you'd just read your spam before deleting it.
Because the template-filling routines read from a queue. The complete template looks like this:
from the $deadpan dept.
$subject vs. $object
$submitter writes with this $scalpee article which "$quotemademeaninglessbylackofcontext". Seems like $pithyorunarguablyobviousobservation.
I wish people would use shorter variable names.
Oh, colour choices are an important part of usability. A garish display will certainly make the OS less usable. Carefully designed aesthetics are part of what keeps the tool out of your focus, while still doing what you want.
;)
At a deeper (and/or slightly facetious) level it's rather obvious that colour choices make all the difference - everything on the screen is a colour choice, from drop shadows to text to the fact that there's any display at all. Make all the colours 50% grey and the display will be usable mainly as a meditative device.
An interesting thing I've noticed about Windows is that it isn't even satirisable. This piece isn't a great example because it's frankly baffling (it starts out as a weak attempt at humour, then seems to lose its way in genuine criticism). Linux satire is funny because some parts of Linux are still genuinely atrocious; focusing on those parts is like reviewing a so-bad-it's-funny B-movie, and the overall excellence of the underlying OS provides for ironic contrast. Mac satire is funny because the Mac really is slick, but also dogmatic and takes itself a wee bit too seriously sometimes (or its users do) - amusing yourself at the Mac OS's expense is like making a Matrix parody. In both cases, people really do like the OS, and they're thus able to laugh at them in good humour.
Windows is just so mediocre and generally almost-good-enough that reading a satire isn't ever really funny; it reminds you of the low-level frustration you deal with (or used to) on a daily basis. It's like a movie that's not worth watching because it's good, but also not worth watching because it's so bad. Possibly this is why this weird satire attempt so lost its way on the second page. You can try to have fun at Windows expense, but then you realise you're not. Having fun that is.
Anyone have any links to a really funny Windows lambasting? I'd enjoy being proven wrong.
It's an interesting question whether a chess grandmaster could switch to go, as you say, and be successful at it. No doubt some of the tools of thinking would be applicable, but many of the habits he'd bring would probably be bad ones. Likewise for a go master who switched to chess.
As far as "suited to the way a human brain works", they're both games of abstract logic. Neither is particularly suited to anything. More importantly it's a red herring - the human brain is flexible and adaptable well beyond the scale of these games. But chess may be better suited to current paradigms of programming (it is in many ways a more procedural game).
On the other hand, the Video Chess program on my Atari 2600 can handily beat me.
I wish I were joking.
I recently came across this press release on NASA's satellite monitoring of wheat fields, cunningly disguised as a project to aid agriculture (yeah right!). I fear for the poor crop-circle artists. Can even the stealthiest stalk-stomper evade the watchful satellite's malevolent eye?
Fortunately you're full of shit and these events only happened in your fantasy life, but
These kids think
they're so big and bad until they realize how pathetic they are in real life
So you conclude that the reason they launch attacks is that they feel inadequate IRL, and your solution is to make them feel more inadequate there? Brilliant corrections strategy. You wouldn't be John Ashcroft would you?