Actually, I wish my life were interesting enough right now that somebody would want to build a website based on my photos.
Day 1: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot. Day 2: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot. Day 3: This is wrinkledshirt cursing spymac mail. Day 4: This is wrinkledshirt cursing Slashdot for not posting his spymac submission. Day 5: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot. And so on...
The psychological effect alone would shut down the whole nation.
Would it be greater or less than the psychological effect that baseless and unjustified fear has done in shutting down the US the last couple of years?
In addition to whatever training you want to do, audit your office for its current tech needs. If time is short, you might not want to spend too much time studying minutiae unrelated to your future tasks -- some of that time can be put to better use preparing for the switch away from Windows.
But I'm willing to bet my life on this: It was created by African American culture as a joke, mostly because they knew that once whitey came around to copying it just like we copy just about everything else they do, we'd look stupider than ever.
Exactly how is reporting without question that Iraq had WMDs being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is reporting without question that Saddam's troops pulled babies out of incubators prior to Gulf War 1 being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is ignoring the number of civilian casualties in Iraq being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is under-reporting the number of Palestinian civilian casualties, while never failing to mention a single Palestinian terrorist attack, being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is ignoring the Red Cross's reports about Abu Ghraib, a YEAR before the story finally broke loose, being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is giving Michael Moore less airtime than Ann Coulter, when they were both promoting their books a couple of years ago, being a left-wing outlet?
In fact, how is it that you can look at that list of under-reported stories, a large number of which are left-wing issues, and say that the media is biased to the left?
Bernard Golberg is an oft-cited source that the US media is left-leaning. What isn't so commonly cited are the various rebuttals to it (I wonder why, in a left-leaning environment, that is?). Take a look at fair.org from time to time, or read this article by Geoffrey Nunberg. What's more, take a look at zmag and ask yourself, if the media is so liberal, why is it that so few of the stories on zmag ever get much air time?
Perhaps Goldberg's most striking claim is that conservatives are more often labelled "conservatives" than are liberals, which he says has a marginalizing effect on conservative viewpoints, making them seem outside the norm. Nunberg did his own test, and found that the opposite was actually true.
...at one point [Goldberg] strays into territory that can actually be put to a test. That's when he claims that the media "pointedly identify conservative politicians as conservatives," but rarely use the word "liberal" to describe liberals.
In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.
There's more in Nunberg's article, if you care to read it.
Except what you provided isn't really a plot, but synopsis.
No, it's a plot. Your definition of plot on its own is inadequate. For one, 'plot' and 'synopsis' are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms. For another, ideas and themes, put together in a narrative, don't constitute a plot. A plot requires causally-related events, and the plot summary I gave lists all the events that propel the story forward. There are other scenes that give more meaning to the film -- the daily life of the monkeys, the astronaut playing chess with HAL, or the scientist phoning his daughter from the orbital station. These all have their importance in the film, but they don't contribute to the central plot, because they lack causality.
The complexities of 2001 are not from its plot, but from the underlying ideas at work. The plot is simple, the difficult part is extrapolating the meaning from the events shown.
You might want to google up a few definitions of plot in fiction. If you can find one that corresponds to your own definition more than mine, I'd be willing to read it and respond. For now, though, here's the most readily available adequate definition I can find:
2001 does indeed have a complex plot -- which is why most people don't get it. They get hung up on the bits of story, never puting them together to understand the central ideas and themes.
I agree with the second sentence here but not the first. See above.
Except that 2001 does indeed have a plot. A rather complex plot at that.
Technically, while I disagree with the parent's idea that a plotless movie is necessarily bad, your contention that 2001 has a complex plot is incorrect. I think you're confusing the sophistication of the metaphors, themes, and ideas of 2001 with 2001's plot itself, which is pretty simple.
The plot of a story is synonymous with the story's plan. Here's the basic plot of 2001...
Dawn of Man 1. Monkeys get beaten up by other Monkeys. 2. Monkeys from beaten-up tribe find and fondle the monolith. 3. Monkey from beaten-up tribe discovers a possible use for a bone as a weapon. 4. Monkeys with bones beat up the Monkeys without the bones.
The Lunar Journey (forget the actual name of this section...) 1. Scientist goes to orbital moon base. 2. Scientist has discussion with Russians, who ask about a possible outbreak. Scientist stonewalls Russians. 3. Scientist meets his team, thanks them for understanding the inconvenience of the outbreak story. 4. Scientist and team go to monolith. Scientist fondles monolith, monolith sends out signal to Jupiter.
Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later 1. Astronauts hang out with HAL. 2. One astronaut sees through HAL's masqueraded psych evaluation. 3. HAL announces a communication unit is going to have a failure. Astronaut checks it out, they can't find anything wrong with it. 4. Astronauts have a secret pow-wow and talk about the possibility of having to shut HAL down. HAL lipreads. 5. When they try to replace the unit, HAL takes over the pod and kills one Astronaut. Second Astronaut goes to rescue, gets the body, but HAL locks him out of the pod bay. Astronaut returns into the ship via an emergency entrance, does a little zero-gravity gymnastics to survive in the airlock. 6. Astronaut shuts HAL down, and learns about the ship's secret mission.
Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite 1. Astronaut reaches Jupiter, he sees monolith (monoliths?), things go a little koo-koo. 2. Astronaut goes through an accelerated evolutionary stage, grows old in the chamber, dies, is reborn and is in what is assumed to be a new evolutionary state for man. 3. Astronaut-turned-foetus returns to Earth for mysterious purpose.
That's not much of a plot -- especially for such a long movie. Don't get me wrong, I love 2001, but saying it's got a complex plot is like saying Blade Runner stars Tom Cruise -- it's just incorrect.
Even the Harry Potter movies have a more complicated plot than 2001 did. If you really want to blow your mind, try breaking down the plot of Miller's Crossing.
You know, not to interrupt our little making-fun--of-the-Russians discussion, it looks like terrorists brought down two of their planes yesterday.
Maybe, and this is just a thought, the idea of the internet being brought down was part of the chatter that the Russians had picked up on, and turned out to be a distraction-tactic for something a whole hell of a lot worse.
There are a lot of people saying that this won't work because it's boring to watch other people play games because it's more fun to play than to watch, etc.
To them, I ask, Why do people watch other people play chess?
Maybe this is a culturally relitivistic thing, but there's an appreciation for watching others play computer games in Korea that goes beyond mere passing interest. Finals for Starcraft tournaments can pack small stadiums. Granted, it's Darwinistic -- since I've come here, I've seen computer game spectator shows for Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, C&C Generals, WWE, several racing titles, Golf, etc. -- as the only one that really has proven staying power at this point is Starcraft, with Warcraft3 so far having the second-longest tenure.
But I don't think you can sum the viability of the idea as to whether or not it's more fun to play than to watch, because some of the Starcraft players are just so good at what they do, and the game has so permeated the youth's mindset over here, that one can appreciate a lot of the strategy at work just by watching the games.
In short, it's like other people watching chess. How silly would it be to see that it's stupid to watch Kasparov play chess because you can always hang out with your buddies and play chess yourself? Another poster had legitimate views that FPS play would do better if it were edited after the fact -- in short, the presentation of the game needs to be spiced up -- but it is possible to do and do it entertainingly.
Plus, and this is something I'm surprised the game companies don't catch on to, television shows like these are excellent tech demos to a potential buying audience. It's almost better than an ad.
As someone else has already pointed out, it was a dramatization of propaganda. The characters spoke ridiculous dialogue because it perfectly mirrored the ridiculous logic of war-time rhetoric. If you watch the movie again, you'll notice some of the more disturbing elements and parallels to the present-day international scene -- that the aliens might have been provoked, that the initial belief is that the aliens are too stupid to possibly fight back effectively, that the great joy at the end comes from the realization that now the aliens are afraid...
Is it some of the best satire/parody/whatever ever made? Probably not, but it adds a layer of depth and subtext usually absent from bad movies.
So we're supposed to ignore the last 4 GTA titles just because the one coming up will have a black character to represent the player?
This is a valid point.
And here I thought people were complaining because there weren't enough minorities in video games
This, in my opinion, isn't a valid point. Instead of blacks and whites, let's make up a new racial group called the blues. Let's just say that the blues are unrepresented in computer games, and they complain about it. Then along comes a game developer that says, "Okay, we've just developed a game that has a 75% population of characters from the blue community! Enjoy!" and then produces this game, which, by the way, requires that all the blue characters need to eat babies in order to survive, and murder people from the pink community and grind them up into narcotics, which, as it happens, all blues are addicted to.
Hopefully you see my point. Yes, it's a little reductio ad absurdum, but I think it's fair to say that a minority community is allowed a gripe if the majority of times they are presented in games, it's done in a negative way.
That's not to say that I think GTA should be censored or altered or anything like that. I believe in freedom for artists. But, you can't discredit a legitimate gripe, even if it's best levelled not at Rockstar Games but at society as a whole.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. As an egalitarian and a man, I'm all for attracting women into computer science, just so long as this gender-based role redistribution scheme doesn't lead to things like attracting men into pregnancy. They can keep that one.
Google currently handles a good USENET service, a good news service, the internet's best web search service, a blogging service, and now an email service.
What's keeping them from taking a unifying approach to everything they have? I'd love to have a home page that I could customize the content (sort of like what my.yahoo has). Latest threads in subscribed-to newsgroups, headlines from news.google.com with my favorite filters, quick summaries of who's sent new emails, etc.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this sort of portal service should be mandatory and the only way to get at the individual services. I understand that google's simplicity is part of its elegance. But, at the same time, one of the things that spymac is doing right is that all of their services are available from a central location. If google is going to keep branching out into all these new areas, why not try to create a singular portal to get at all of them?
Just a thought. Call the entire matter a security audit. Bill for 1 pound.
Lets the university know that their only interest was in determining the university's ability to safeguard critical data, some of which happens to be their own.
After all, it's worth finding out for yourself if a criminal can break into your university's computer, isn't it? I mean, you could ask the university, but could you trust their answer if it wasn't "Well, we're probably vulnerable"?
Just curious about whether or not anybody knows what the most mistake-free movies are that have way out-there concepts at their cores.
I haven't researched the movies enough, but I really liked the lack of sound in 2004, and the fact that one of the major subplots in Die Hard was that he needed to get shoes that fit, and the bad guys shot out the glass just to trap him in a tight spot... Not biggies, until you think about how many movies have sound in space, or have lots of glass windows being shot out that don't seem to hurt the nearby protagonists much.
There are some internet cafes in South Korea that charge 500W per hour. That comes out to $0.57 Canadian and $0.43 American, as of todays xe.com rates. Many other cafes charge up to 1000W per hour, but that's still pretty cheap compared to a few years ago back in parts of Victoria, BC, where you'd pay 9$ an hour and be glad for it. Some Koreans have brought the business model over to Canada and are giving the internet cafes a run for their money with the cheap service.
Downside: These are mostly for gaming, so a lot of the services that come in other internet cafes (like scanning) aren't always available. Don't know the rates or quality on printing, but I imagine they're probably a little cheaper than back home, IF the service is available.
Also, the machines are all in Korean, which isn't too much of a problem because Windows 98 is pretty brainless to use, until you want to try to hunt down programs in the menu hierarchy (the Run menu command recognizes things like Notepad fine, though). Also, trying to get help from the counter brings up the language barrier.
One of the nice things about the low rates is that some places let you bring a headset to the cafe, hook it up, and do long-distance phone calls over the internet. Stupid cheap.
Plus, 500W an hour means about 4000W a night, and if you can find a nice hidden place to nap you've got some of the cheapest overnight accomodations anywhere. (Haven't tried this out yet, though...)
Would the $300 "full PC" come with TV out? (A 27" VGA display sold in the United States costs much more than a 27" S-video display.)
The upward bound on that price range is $400. Not THAT much bigger, but when you're dealing with low-middle end machines (which is what this will be by the time it's released), that's a big jump in capability. And there are low-cost GeForce cards with TV outs on them. Are they any good? Probably not by today's standard, but right now they work better than vapour.
And would it come with a set of fixed hardware for which game developers can optimize rather heavily?
My brand of calculator comes with a set of fixed hardware for which game developers can optimize rather heavily. Doesn't mean they're gonna.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I wish my life were interesting enough right now that somebody would want to build a website based on my photos.
Day 1: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
Day 2: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
Day 3: This is wrinkledshirt cursing spymac mail.
Day 4: This is wrinkledshirt cursing Slashdot for not posting his spymac submission.
Day 5: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
And so on...
...that way, maybe it won't be the only thing Bill's given us that makes things crash.
The psychological effect alone would shut down the whole nation.
Would it be greater or less than the psychological effect that baseless and unjustified fear has done in shutting down the US the last couple of years?
In addition to whatever training you want to do, audit your office for its current tech needs. If time is short, you might not want to spend too much time studying minutiae unrelated to your future tasks -- some of that time can be put to better use preparing for the switch away from Windows.
Just a thought.
Or, maybe closer to the truth, a concept.
But I'm willing to bet my life on this: It was created by African American culture as a joke, mostly because they knew that once whitey came around to copying it just like we copy just about everything else they do, we'd look stupider than ever.
And it's worked. Beautifizzily.
Maybe Slashdot should rent the machine to keep track of stories with similar content...
Exactly how is reporting without question that Iraq had WMDs being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is reporting without question that Saddam's troops pulled babies out of incubators prior to Gulf War 1 being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is ignoring the number of civilian casualties in Iraq being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is under-reporting the number of Palestinian civilian casualties, while never failing to mention a single Palestinian terrorist attack, being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is ignoring the Red Cross's reports about Abu Ghraib, a YEAR before the story finally broke loose, being a left-wing outlet?
Exactly how is giving Michael Moore less airtime than Ann Coulter, when they were both promoting their books a couple of years ago, being a left-wing outlet?
In fact, how is it that you can look at that list of under-reported stories, a large number of which are left-wing issues, and say that the media is biased to the left?
...except that from the rest of the world's point of view, the attitude is this. If you consider ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN to be left wing, then you must be...
Um, never mind. I think I just figured it out.
ABC/NBC/CBS/CNN are relatively left wing, in the same way that Darth Vader proves himself to be slightly to the left of Emperor Palpatine in the end.
Perhaps Goldberg's most striking claim is that conservatives are more often labelled "conservatives" than are liberals, which he says has a marginalizing effect on conservative viewpoints, making them seem outside the norm. Nunberg did his own test, and found that the opposite was actually true.
In fact, I did find a big disparity in the way the press labels liberals and conservatives, but not in the direction that Goldberg claims. On the contrary: the average liberal legislator has a thirty percent greater likelyhood of being identified with a partisan label than the average conservative does. The press describes Barney Frank as a liberal two-and-a-half times as frequently as it describes Dick Armey as a conservative. It gives Barbara Boxer a partisan label almost twice as often as it gives one to Trent Lott. And while it isn't surprising that the press applies the label conservative to Jesse Helms more often than to any other Republican in the group, it describes Paul Wellstone as a liberal twenty percent more frequently than that.
There's more in Nunberg's article, if you care to read it.
Except what you provided isn't really a plot, but synopsis.
No, it's a plot. Your definition of plot on its own is inadequate. For one, 'plot' and 'synopsis' are not necessarily mutually exclusive terms. For another, ideas and themes, put together in a narrative, don't constitute a plot. A plot requires causally-related events, and the plot summary I gave lists all the events that propel the story forward. There are other scenes that give more meaning to the film -- the daily life of the monkeys, the astronaut playing chess with HAL, or the scientist phoning his daughter from the orbital station. These all have their importance in the film, but they don't contribute to the central plot, because they lack causality.
The complexities of 2001 are not from its plot, but from the underlying ideas at work. The plot is simple, the difficult part is extrapolating the meaning from the events shown.
You might want to google up a few definitions of plot in fiction. If you can find one that corresponds to your own definition more than mine, I'd be willing to read it and respond. For now, though, here's the most readily available adequate definition I can find:
Plot is the structure of events within a story and the causal relationship between them. There is no plot without causality.
2001 does indeed have a complex plot -- which is why most people don't get it. They get hung up on the bits of story, never puting them together to understand the central ideas and themes.
I agree with the second sentence here but not the first. See above.
Except that 2001 does indeed have a plot. A rather complex plot at that.
Technically, while I disagree with the parent's idea that a plotless movie is necessarily bad, your contention that 2001 has a complex plot is incorrect. I think you're confusing the sophistication of the metaphors, themes, and ideas of 2001 with 2001's plot itself, which is pretty simple.
The plot of a story is synonymous with the story's plan. Here's the basic plot of 2001...
Dawn of Man
1. Monkeys get beaten up by other Monkeys.
2. Monkeys from beaten-up tribe find and fondle the monolith.
3. Monkey from beaten-up tribe discovers a possible use for a bone as a weapon.
4. Monkeys with bones beat up the Monkeys without the bones.
The Lunar Journey (forget the actual name of this section...)
1. Scientist goes to orbital moon base.
2. Scientist has discussion with Russians, who ask about a possible outbreak. Scientist stonewalls Russians.
3. Scientist meets his team, thanks them for understanding the inconvenience of the outbreak story.
4. Scientist and team go to monolith. Scientist fondles monolith, monolith sends out signal to Jupiter.
Jupiter Mission, 18 Months Later
1. Astronauts hang out with HAL.
2. One astronaut sees through HAL's masqueraded psych evaluation.
3. HAL announces a communication unit is going to have a failure. Astronaut checks it out, they can't find anything wrong with it.
4. Astronauts have a secret pow-wow and talk about the possibility of having to shut HAL down. HAL lipreads.
5. When they try to replace the unit, HAL takes over the pod and kills one Astronaut. Second Astronaut goes to rescue, gets the body, but HAL locks him out of the pod bay. Astronaut returns into the ship via an emergency entrance, does a little zero-gravity gymnastics to survive in the airlock.
6. Astronaut shuts HAL down, and learns about the ship's secret mission.
Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite
1. Astronaut reaches Jupiter, he sees monolith (monoliths?), things go a little koo-koo.
2. Astronaut goes through an accelerated evolutionary stage, grows old in the chamber, dies, is reborn and is in what is assumed to be a new evolutionary state for man.
3. Astronaut-turned-foetus returns to Earth for mysterious purpose.
That's not much of a plot -- especially for such a long movie. Don't get me wrong, I love 2001, but saying it's got a complex plot is like saying Blade Runner stars Tom Cruise -- it's just incorrect.
Even the Harry Potter movies have a more complicated plot than 2001 did. If you really want to blow your mind, try breaking down the plot of Miller's Crossing.
You know, not to interrupt our little making-fun--of-the-Russians discussion, it looks like terrorists brought down two of their planes yesterday.
Maybe, and this is just a thought, the idea of the internet being brought down was part of the chatter that the Russians had picked up on, and turned out to be a distraction-tactic for something a whole hell of a lot worse.
There are a lot of people saying that this won't work because it's boring to watch other people play games because it's more fun to play than to watch, etc.
To them, I ask, Why do people watch other people play chess?
Maybe this is a culturally relitivistic thing, but there's an appreciation for watching others play computer games in Korea that goes beyond mere passing interest. Finals for Starcraft tournaments can pack small stadiums. Granted, it's Darwinistic -- since I've come here, I've seen computer game spectator shows for Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, C&C Generals, WWE, several racing titles, Golf, etc. -- as the only one that really has proven staying power at this point is Starcraft, with Warcraft3 so far having the second-longest tenure.
But I don't think you can sum the viability of the idea as to whether or not it's more fun to play than to watch, because some of the Starcraft players are just so good at what they do, and the game has so permeated the youth's mindset over here, that one can appreciate a lot of the strategy at work just by watching the games.
In short, it's like other people watching chess. How silly would it be to see that it's stupid to watch Kasparov play chess because you can always hang out with your buddies and play chess yourself? Another poster had legitimate views that FPS play would do better if it were edited after the fact -- in short, the presentation of the game needs to be spiced up -- but it is possible to do and do it entertainingly.
Plus, and this is something I'm surprised the game companies don't catch on to, television shows like these are excellent tech demos to a potential buying audience. It's almost better than an ad.
As someone else has already pointed out, it was a dramatization of propaganda. The characters spoke ridiculous dialogue because it perfectly mirrored the ridiculous logic of war-time rhetoric. If you watch the movie again, you'll notice some of the more disturbing elements and parallels to the present-day international scene -- that the aliens might have been provoked, that the initial belief is that the aliens are too stupid to possibly fight back effectively, that the great joy at the end comes from the realization that now the aliens are afraid...
Is it some of the best satire/parody/whatever ever made? Probably not, but it adds a layer of depth and subtext usually absent from bad movies.
So we're supposed to ignore the last 4 GTA titles just because the one coming up will have a black character to represent the player?
This is a valid point.
And here I thought people were complaining because there weren't enough minorities in video games
This, in my opinion, isn't a valid point. Instead of blacks and whites, let's make up a new racial group called the blues. Let's just say that the blues are unrepresented in computer games, and they complain about it. Then along comes a game developer that says, "Okay, we've just developed a game that has a 75% population of characters from the blue community! Enjoy!" and then produces this game, which, by the way, requires that all the blue characters need to eat babies in order to survive, and murder people from the pink community and grind them up into narcotics, which, as it happens, all blues are addicted to.
Hopefully you see my point. Yes, it's a little reductio ad absurdum, but I think it's fair to say that a minority community is allowed a gripe if the majority of times they are presented in games, it's done in a negative way.
That's not to say that I think GTA should be censored or altered or anything like that. I believe in freedom for artists. But, you can't discredit a legitimate gripe, even if it's best levelled not at Rockstar Games but at society as a whole.
I don't know what all the fuss is about. As an egalitarian and a man, I'm all for attracting women into computer science, just so long as this gender-based role redistribution scheme doesn't lead to things like attracting men into pregnancy. They can keep that one.
This is probably offtopic, but what the hell...
Google currently handles a good USENET service, a good news service, the internet's best web search service, a blogging service, and now an email service.
What's keeping them from taking a unifying approach to everything they have? I'd love to have a home page that I could customize the content (sort of like what my.yahoo has). Latest threads in subscribed-to newsgroups, headlines from news.google.com with my favorite filters, quick summaries of who's sent new emails, etc.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying that this sort of portal service should be mandatory and the only way to get at the individual services. I understand that google's simplicity is part of its elegance. But, at the same time, one of the things that spymac is doing right is that all of their services are available from a central location. If google is going to keep branching out into all these new areas, why not try to create a singular portal to get at all of them?
Just a thought. Call the entire matter a security audit. Bill for 1 pound.
Lets the university know that their only interest was in determining the university's ability to safeguard critical data, some of which happens to be their own.
After all, it's worth finding out for yourself if a criminal can break into your university's computer, isn't it? I mean, you could ask the university, but could you trust their answer if it wasn't "Well, we're probably vulnerable"?
Just curious about whether or not anybody knows what the most mistake-free movies are that have way out-there concepts at their cores.
I haven't researched the movies enough, but I really liked the lack of sound in 2004, and the fact that one of the major subplots in Die Hard was that he needed to get shoes that fit, and the bad guys shot out the glass just to trap him in a tight spot... Not biggies, until you think about how many movies have sound in space, or have lots of glass windows being shot out that don't seem to hurt the nearby protagonists much.
There are some internet cafes in South Korea that charge 500W per hour. That comes out to $0.57 Canadian and $0.43 American, as of todays xe.com rates. Many other cafes charge up to 1000W per hour, but that's still pretty cheap compared to a few years ago back in parts of Victoria, BC, where you'd pay 9$ an hour and be glad for it. Some Koreans have brought the business model over to Canada and are giving the internet cafes a run for their money with the cheap service.
Downside: These are mostly for gaming, so a lot of the services that come in other internet cafes (like scanning) aren't always available. Don't know the rates or quality on printing, but I imagine they're probably a little cheaper than back home, IF the service is available.
Also, the machines are all in Korean, which isn't too much of a problem because Windows 98 is pretty brainless to use, until you want to try to hunt down programs in the menu hierarchy (the Run menu command recognizes things like Notepad fine, though). Also, trying to get help from the counter brings up the language barrier.
One of the nice things about the low rates is that some places let you bring a headset to the cafe, hook it up, and do long-distance phone calls over the internet. Stupid cheap.
Plus, 500W an hour means about 4000W a night, and if you can find a nice hidden place to nap you've got some of the cheapest overnight accomodations anywhere. (Haven't tried this out yet, though...)
Propaganda's greatest victory has been convincing the world it no longer exists.
Would the $300 "full PC" come with TV out? (A 27" VGA display sold in the United States costs much more than a 27" S-video display.)
The upward bound on that price range is $400. Not THAT much bigger, but when you're dealing with low-middle end machines (which is what this will be by the time it's released), that's a big jump in capability. And there are low-cost GeForce cards with TV outs on them. Are they any good? Probably not by today's standard, but right now they work better than vapour.
And would it come with a set of fixed hardware for which game developers can optimize rather heavily?
My brand of calculator comes with a set of fixed hardware for which game developers can optimize rather heavily. Doesn't mean they're gonna.
Dumb question. Couldn't you pick up a full PC for that price by the time this thing comes out? Wouldn't that also give you a wider library of games?
Akirao tion films like A Nightmare Before Christmas
The Wall (Pink Floyd)
Baraka
Microcosmos
Matrix
Porn
Stop-m
Ultimate Fighting or Kickboxing
Also, really really dumb action or cheesy old sci-fi movies are ideal for this situation, because you don't have to listen to the crappy dialogue.
Actually, Iraq's chemical weapons are NOT from the United States.
This is factually incorrect. This list of agents was proven to have come from the United States.