Note for those easy to confuse: They have not written words on the ground - that's Google's watermark.
It's a very isolated, mountainous spot. It'll be interesting to eventually see any newer satellite photos to see how the land deformed afterwards. If, for instance, this is a ruse involving enourmous ammounts of conventional explosives or something related to create an artificial earthquake, that also would be interesting - but highly unlikely from the evidence so far.
I wonder how much energy it would take to create a 4.2 magnitude quake. The area doesn't look steep enough for some "underground avelanche" to allow for a ruse. This looks like it must be the real thing so far. What that means from here is wide open.
I'm starting to feel very lucky to have grown up in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Yes. Living near one of those super-massive black holes would certainly suck. Being one with everything around you sounds nice and radiant - but it leaves you all strung out over time, and it seems to take forever! The light at the end of the tunnel is you.
How can a mishmash of atoms collapsed into the same space (b-e condensate) have a 'solid state'? Their radius' overlap. Is this more like a gas freezing without any other transition?
I wonder how many of these 'former' lobbyists in positions as leadership in governmental agencies get their taxes audited? It would be fascinating to see what kinds of offshore accounts they have, and how their balance changes once they are in a position to 'regulate' the industry they used to represent?
But really - I'm sure this is all done in the purest of intentions. After all, the best people to run agencies are those really familiar with the issue at hand, and cagey enough to know what tricks people out to trick the government are, right? The weight of responsibility of protecting American's safety and well being is best secured when it is in the hands of people who used to press the government to look the other way when industries wanted to maximize... certain negative and positive externalies, shall we say.
Yeah - I've had a chance to hear some of the in-game clips from YouTube. The Sam voice was still really bland - I was expecting more of a film noire-style voice at least. And the Max voice sounded more like a 'wacky cartoon jester' voice (not as good as Mark Hamill's Joker though), rather than the New Jersey Lagomorph voice I loved. The voices sound like they were read through as quickly as possible, rather than with an idea of the timing of the lines - at least with Sam, there's no indication he understands what he's saying. There were a lot of cases where I didn't even realise they were trying to make or imply a joke, until I re-played the videos. No emphasis in what he's saying - "do you have any two-handed broadswords" for instance, is read as if from a page, not even as a question.
If you get a chance, and the in-game footage on YouTube is the latest, please suggest some improvements in the voice acting if they plan on releasing a console version. The jokes deserve better delivery than what I've seen so far - the technical audio work is very nice, it's the delivery from the actors that seemed to lack the weight of the comedy behind it.
There's some really bad examples there. Especially with the un-emphasised expressions of Sam, and the mideaval jester-voice of Max in the last one. All the foley work with characters and music is great and well-timed - it's just the voices that drain the essential humor from the events, compared to the Dick-Tracey/Brooklyn exchanges of the first game, despite the obvious painstaking care they took with the visuals and writing.
Please, for the love of Xenu, PLEASE let them get better voice actors for the main characters this time!
If you've heard any of the previews on YouTube, the current voices of Sam and Max sound like disinterested bloggers mouthing the jokes compared to the 90's game or [shudder] the TV Cartoon voices.
Really, the core of the product for an adventure like this IS the voices! Not that you need to believe the characters... but you need SOME skilled actors with some range in their voice to actually sound like they are meaning to tell jokes, perhaps with SOME sense of timing. There's other examples of the voice acting for the new Sam & Max too, on their web site. It's even worse, for my taste.
I love the old Sam and Max game and comics, I love the humor that is present in them so far - but man, do those mumbly voices annoy me. If they were at least immitating 30's radio, or 50's cartoons, I could understand, but it's like a substitute math teacher showed up in place of Lewis Black on stage and just mumbled his act without emotion - the concepts would be as funny, and perhaps the guy speaking would put a new spin out - but the emotionless presentation would destroy the work. You don't have to get someone amazing - just a pair of voice actors capable of pushing the sarcasm inherent in the caracters, and capable of some timing that can work of eachother.
Other than the usual "intellectual property" considerations of making a copy of the some of the images/other data currently in Wikipedia, what's the big deal with someone forking it for any reason?
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
In the case of a filibuster, there is a special exception to the usual sources of motivational pessimism. You can contact ANY senator, or team of senators, and they can create a working filibuster. They don't have to represent you, they just have to have enough interest and motivation to go through with the process of filibuster. And modern procedures mean that they don't have to starve themselves or go through too many crazy gyrations to do this - they just have to not have a successful vote to stop the filibuster.
So - write some letters, call some numbers, or whatever is appropriate for you, and you can help stop this law, in a way rarely possible in terms of the importance of your contribution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster
Just getting a filibuster working should be enough to draw some clear lines, lines which should be stronger than how the vote currently appears. It's subjective, but I think a filibuster would hold here.
It looks like filibusteris the only realistic option on this one.
Oh, and vote however you prefer to end this destruction of personal and public liberties in November. I'd HIGHLY suggest Democratic in most cases this election.
I wonder how the law is worded in Germany - is the crime posession (in which case stray banner ads in your browser cache would be just as criminal), or is the crime the intentional act? The catch is that if the crime is over intentional act, then that law is a thought crime law, which is also bad - though it does protect against automatic guilt for detection.
Sexual crimes against children are some of the most monsterous things mankind can do - and they do occur with a very high frequency, and they are worth detecting and stopped at every opportunity. But like most conceptual wars on horrible things, it collateral damage can go out of control when unchecked. Here's hoping that this guy is innocent, and that his case can at least set some boundries on law are acceptable in this horrible issue.
But at least now we know how it all happened. Nano-science did 'em in.
Next thing they'll tell us is that nature is involved in some of these mysterious 'nanoparticles'. Nonsense - the mustard seed is as small ad it gets in nature, and that's it - the Bible says so right there (Matthew 13:31-32)! The noiyve of these scientists and historians, I tells ya!
Despite the inflammatory name, the book doesn't assert that Republicans are inherently anti-science, but it is a chronicle the past few decades of politicization of science, and how even though Liberals do their own part to misrepresent science, the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican. It's a rather impressive, well-documented book that I highly recommend showing a trend of scientific limitations and games like today's story.
The fear of the modern radical environmentalist-wannabe is that man is going to disrupt nature, ending the vibrant life cycle that has taken so long to develop here, and the morals necissary to continue a 'balanced' life. That's a valid fear - but science is the last thing to attack if that is your fear.
I cringe when people honor people who commit these actions with the title environmentalists. These bullies are instead waging war on the very forces in society with any hope of stopping a blind march towards environmental disaster. Scientists 'harm' animals so that worse harm does not have to happen to both other animals, and to people in the future. Perhaps their hope is that mankind will someday fall and nature continue - but mankind is a part of nature, and the very intelligence that drives us to exploit the rest of nature to the extent that we do now isn't going to drop away from the planet without a WHOLE lot of the rest of nature going with us.
The idea is to avoid mass death, to allow the greatest morality to the greatest number - not close your eyes and mind to the realities of life and death. Science is our best way to keep our eyes open.
But because these bullies can't fight society at large, they instead attack scientists. In the same way that religious extremists angry that society won't adopt their religion will strike at the weakest enemies they can find in hope that their brutality will shock the innocent into following them, these idiots seem to think that extremist bullying will somehow serve to save nature. Few things could be more disgusting in my eyes.
Exactly - there were never any scientists with a burning need to tear apart embryos just because they seemed like nice spare parts to use. Embryos have unique properties as far as the way their cells can morph into other cells that just don't occur in adult stem cells. If these same properties can be reproduced otherwise, then embryonic research isn't an issue - but until that happens, banning the study of embryos is an important obstacle to scientific progress.
The irony in all this is that if more embryos that were eventually destroyed without being studied, were instead studied, then these same properties that are important to medical research may have been discovered, allowing us to save more children from more horrible diseases.
To me, the bans that are in place are the equivalent to old laws banning the study of dead bodies, because doing so reduces the sanctity of life.
Ryan Fenton (I am not a lab scientist, just a computer guy who loves following science news)
Windows is nice because it is convenient. I can plug components in, copy my content around, play games, program, move songs and video to my portable player, etc., with no problems that aren't quickly fixed.
When the computer I'm using ceases to be my tool for handling data of my choice, it instead becomes a box where I have to ask permission, and it even goes so far as to prevent grey are usage (new console emulators with disc readers, remixing content, memory editors, No-CD checks for games I own, etc.), then I'd rather not use that kind of system. It is no longer convenient for me.
Now, the question is, how do you convince 'average' people that the new limitations will no longer be convenient for them? Or will it be too late for some forms of content when Vista and other DRM systems are completely mainstream?
Then again, if we go back to the drawing board, perhaps we'd consider funding basic education and research again beyond just memorization and giveaways to the isolated private sector interests. You know - like back when we used to combat national crisises by growing to meet the threat against us, sacrificing our private and party interests to build a stronger society together using honesty and science.
That, and seeing experiments with primates in space again would be pretty neat.
Weebles wobble, but they don't take over humanity. Other jokes could involve roll-on deodorant, or those kid's inflatable boxing dummies that flip back up when you hit them.
Neat design, really. I think a lot of people's first urge would be to try and push the robot over though, which like the old Weebles, may produce that same herky-jerky roll back to stability. I wonder how much gunk would build up in the mouse-wheel of those things though - be hard to turn it over to clean with that production model. Have to have some kind of door in it to clean without taking it out.
Question: With all these people's lives transparant to business and government, do you think that business/government will become MORE or LESS transparant to people in exchange?
My take is that this is a game of government and business ganging up on the rest of society in the name of security. Government is the daddy, business is the favorite trusted son, and everything else is their hunting ground. The conservative dream.
Sounds like this law is somewhat like Wikipedia, just without the editors or limited content control. Any nation can add their own contributions to things that people should be punished for, and have it be law everywhere.
Can treaties be considered unconstitutional? It seems to me that the whole point of the constitution was to limit what laws could be made, with anything not permitted prohibited in the light of the inherent rights of mankind. This unlimited law-by-treaty seems rather destructive to the whole point of the constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed link (Need to use hybrid mode - still no roads, but at least you get geography.
Most zoomed-in level available
Note for those easy to confuse: They have not written words on the ground - that's Google's watermark.
It's a very isolated, mountainous spot. It'll be interesting to eventually see any newer satellite photos to see how the land deformed afterwards. If, for instance, this is a ruse involving enourmous ammounts of conventional explosives or something related to create an artificial earthquake, that also would be interesting - but highly unlikely from the evidence so far.
I wonder how much energy it would take to create a 4.2 magnitude quake. The area doesn't look steep enough for some "underground avelanche" to allow for a ruse. This looks like it must be the real thing so far. What that means from here is wide open.
Ryan Fenton
I'm starting to feel very lucky to have grown up in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Yes. Living near one of those super-massive black holes would certainly suck. Being one with everything around you sounds nice and radiant - but it leaves you all strung out over time, and it seems to take forever! The light at the end of the tunnel is you.
Ryan Fenton
How can a mishmash of atoms collapsed into the same space (b-e condensate) have a 'solid state'? Their radius' overlap. Is this more like a gas freezing without any other transition?
Ryan Fenton
I just hope EB and other game stores will start taking preorders based on how many they expect to get soon. Hopefully one or two per customer.
Ryan Fenton
Could this be an effect of gravity of surrounding galaxies lensing the light from a 'normal' large star in our direction and just appearing brighter?
Ryan Fenton
I wonder how many of these 'former' lobbyists in positions as leadership in governmental agencies get their taxes audited? It would be fascinating to see what kinds of offshore accounts they have, and how their balance changes once they are in a position to 'regulate' the industry they used to represent?
But really - I'm sure this is all done in the purest of intentions. After all, the best people to run agencies are those really familiar with the issue at hand, and cagey enough to know what tricks people out to trick the government are, right? The weight of responsibility of protecting American's safety and well being is best secured when it is in the hands of people who used to press the government to look the other way when industries wanted to maximize... certain negative and positive externalies, shall we say.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah - I've had a chance to hear some of the in-game clips from YouTube. The Sam voice was still really bland - I was expecting more of a film noire-style voice at least. And the Max voice sounded more like a 'wacky cartoon jester' voice (not as good as Mark Hamill's Joker though), rather than the New Jersey Lagomorph voice I loved. The voices sound like they were read through as quickly as possible, rather than with an idea of the timing of the lines - at least with Sam, there's no indication he understands what he's saying. There were a lot of cases where I didn't even realise they were trying to make or imply a joke, until I re-played the videos. No emphasis in what he's saying - "do you have any two-handed broadswords" for instance, is read as if from a page, not even as a question.
If you get a chance, and the in-game footage on YouTube is the latest, please suggest some improvements in the voice acting if they plan on releasing a console version. The jokes deserve better delivery than what I've seen so far - the technical audio work is very nice, it's the delivery from the actors that seemed to lack the weight of the comedy behind it.
Links to videos I'm referring to:
Sam & Max Bosco Trailer (PC)
Sam & Max Office Trailer (PC)
Sam & Max Specs Trailer (PC)
Sam & Max Store Trailer (PC)
There's some really bad examples there. Especially with the un-emphasised expressions of Sam, and the mideaval jester-voice of Max in the last one. All the foley work with characters and music is great and well-timed - it's just the voices that drain the essential humor from the events, compared to the Dick-Tracey/Brooklyn exchanges of the first game, despite the obvious painstaking care they took with the visuals and writing.
Ryan Fenton
Please, for the love of Xenu, PLEASE let them get better voice actors for the main characters this time!
If you've heard any of the previews on YouTube, the current voices of Sam and Max sound like disinterested bloggers mouthing the jokes compared to the 90's game or [shudder] the TV Cartoon voices.
Preview video
Even the announcer sounds distinctly 8th rate.
Really, the core of the product for an adventure like this IS the voices! Not that you need to believe the characters... but you need SOME skilled actors with some range in their voice to actually sound like they are meaning to tell jokes, perhaps with SOME sense of timing. There's other examples of the voice acting for the new Sam & Max too, on their web site. It's even worse, for my taste.
I love the old Sam and Max game and comics, I love the humor that is present in them so far - but man, do those mumbly voices annoy me. If they were at least immitating 30's radio, or 50's cartoons, I could understand, but it's like a substitute math teacher showed up in place of Lewis Black on stage and just mumbled his act without emotion - the concepts would be as funny, and perhaps the guy speaking would put a new spin out - but the emotionless presentation would destroy the work. You don't have to get someone amazing - just a pair of voice actors capable of pushing the sarcasm inherent in the caracters, and capable of some timing that can work of eachother.
Ryan Fenton
Other than the usual "intellectual property" considerations of making a copy of the some of the images/other data currently in Wikipedia, what's the big deal with someone forking it for any reason?
The guy isn't using the information to crush opposing opinions, he's just offering a different filter, without destroying the original. That's creative, additive, not destructive. There are a lot of definitions of freedom - some of them involve having the capability to make informed decisions. It looks at the offset that having this new Wikipedia fork will increase at least that kind of freedom, rather than subtract anyone's freedoms.
Ryan Fenton
Tivo: Go go gadget 30 second skip!
MythTV: Go go gadget commercial detection and skip!
Windows DVRs: Uh... Go go gadget DRM! Aw, crap!
Ryan Fenton
In the case of a filibuster, there is a special exception to the usual sources of motivational pessimism. You can contact ANY senator, or team of senators, and they can create a working filibuster. They don't have to represent you, they just have to have enough interest and motivation to go through with the process of filibuster. And modern procedures mean that they don't have to starve themselves or go through too many crazy gyrations to do this - they just have to not have a successful vote to stop the filibuster.
So - write some letters, call some numbers, or whatever is appropriate for you, and you can help stop this law, in a way rarely possible in terms of the importance of your contribution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster
Just getting a filibuster working should be enough to draw some clear lines, lines which should be stronger than how the vote currently appears. It's subjective, but I think a filibuster would hold here.
Ryan Fenton
Consider encouraging Democratic (and Republican - though that's unlikely) senators to filibuster this.
Senator contact list
It looks like filibusteris the only realistic option on this one.
Oh, and vote however you prefer to end this destruction of personal and public liberties in November. I'd HIGHLY suggest Democratic in most cases this election.
Ryan Fenton
I wonder how the law is worded in Germany - is the crime posession (in which case stray banner ads in your browser cache would be just as criminal), or is the crime the intentional act? The catch is that if the crime is over intentional act, then that law is a thought crime law, which is also bad - though it does protect against automatic guilt for detection.
Sexual crimes against children are some of the most monsterous things mankind can do - and they do occur with a very high frequency, and they are worth detecting and stopped at every opportunity. But like most conceptual wars on horrible things, it collateral damage can go out of control when unchecked. Here's hoping that this guy is innocent, and that his case can at least set some boundries on law are acceptable in this horrible issue.
Ryan Fenton
...and all of those ancient empires *ended*!
But at least now we know how it all happened. Nano-science did 'em in.
Next thing they'll tell us is that nature is involved in some of these mysterious 'nanoparticles'. Nonsense - the mustard seed is as small ad it gets in nature, and that's it - the Bible says so right there (Matthew 13:31-32)! The noiyve of these scientists and historians, I tells ya!
Ryan Fenton
Really, it makes sense. Patrick Duffy is what makes us truly human, after all.
Ryan Fenton
The Republican War on Science
Despite the inflammatory name, the book doesn't assert that Republicans are inherently anti-science, but it is a chronicle the past few decades of politicization of science, and how even though Liberals do their own part to misrepresent science, the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican. It's a rather impressive, well-documented book that I highly recommend showing a trend of scientific limitations and games like today's story.
Ryan Fenton
The fear of the modern radical environmentalist-wannabe is that man is going to disrupt nature, ending the vibrant life cycle that has taken so long to develop here, and the morals necissary to continue a 'balanced' life. That's a valid fear - but science is the last thing to attack if that is your fear.
I cringe when people honor people who commit these actions with the title environmentalists. These bullies are instead waging war on the very forces in society with any hope of stopping a blind march towards environmental disaster. Scientists 'harm' animals so that worse harm does not have to happen to both other animals, and to people in the future. Perhaps their hope is that mankind will someday fall and nature continue - but mankind is a part of nature, and the very intelligence that drives us to exploit the rest of nature to the extent that we do now isn't going to drop away from the planet without a WHOLE lot of the rest of nature going with us.
The idea is to avoid mass death, to allow the greatest morality to the greatest number - not close your eyes and mind to the realities of life and death. Science is our best way to keep our eyes open.
But because these bullies can't fight society at large, they instead attack scientists. In the same way that religious extremists angry that society won't adopt their religion will strike at the weakest enemies they can find in hope that their brutality will shock the innocent into following them, these idiots seem to think that extremist bullying will somehow serve to save nature. Few things could be more disgusting in my eyes.
Ryan Fenton
Exactly - there were never any scientists with a burning need to tear apart embryos just because they seemed like nice spare parts to use. Embryos have unique properties as far as the way their cells can morph into other cells that just don't occur in adult stem cells. If these same properties can be reproduced otherwise, then embryonic research isn't an issue - but until that happens, banning the study of embryos is an important obstacle to scientific progress.
The irony in all this is that if more embryos that were eventually destroyed without being studied, were instead studied, then these same properties that are important to medical research may have been discovered, allowing us to save more children from more horrible diseases.
To me, the bans that are in place are the equivalent to old laws banning the study of dead bodies, because doing so reduces the sanctity of life.
Ryan Fenton (I am not a lab scientist, just a computer guy who loves following science news)
Windows is nice because it is convenient. I can plug components in, copy my content around, play games, program, move songs and video to my portable player, etc., with no problems that aren't quickly fixed.
When the computer I'm using ceases to be my tool for handling data of my choice, it instead becomes a box where I have to ask permission, and it even goes so far as to prevent grey are usage (new console emulators with disc readers, remixing content, memory editors, No-CD checks for games I own, etc.), then I'd rather not use that kind of system. It is no longer convenient for me.
Now, the question is, how do you convince 'average' people that the new limitations will no longer be convenient for them? Or will it be too late for some forms of content when Vista and other DRM systems are completely mainstream?
Ryan Fenton
Painkillers without side-effects?
Welcome, to a A Brave New World!
Oh wait, there's already a drug marketed under the name of Soma? Damn!
Ryan Fenton
NASA has lost track of all kinds of old stuff in those archives! And with recent policy on science funding, I certainly hope we won't have to go back to the drawing board in order to relearn basic science all over again! Really though - NASA makes its mistakes, but it's one of the better agencies left alive in our government.
Then again, if we go back to the drawing board, perhaps we'd consider funding basic education and research again beyond just memorization and giveaways to the isolated private sector interests. You know - like back when we used to combat national crisises by growing to meet the threat against us, sacrificing our private and party interests to build a stronger society together using honesty and science.
That, and seeing experiments with primates in space again would be pretty neat.
Ryan Fenton
...The cost of the service is 5 euros per month,...
It looks like it is at least a quasi-commercial darknet.
Ryan Fenton
Weebles wobble, but they don't take over humanity.
Other jokes could involve roll-on deodorant, or those kid's inflatable boxing dummies that flip back up when you hit them.
Neat design, really. I think a lot of people's first urge would be to try and push the robot over though, which like the old Weebles, may produce that same herky-jerky roll back to stability. I wonder how much gunk would build up in the mouse-wheel of those things though - be hard to turn it over to clean with that production model. Have to have some kind of door in it to clean without taking it out.
Ryan Fenton
Question: With all these people's lives transparant to business and government, do you think that business/government will become MORE or LESS transparant to people in exchange?
My take is that this is a game of government and business ganging up on the rest of society in the name of security. Government is the daddy, business is the favorite trusted son, and everything else is their hunting ground. The conservative dream.
Ryan Fenton
Sounds like this law is somewhat like Wikipedia, just without the editors or limited content control. Any nation can add their own contributions to things that people should be punished for, and have it be law everywhere.
Can treaties be considered unconstitutional? It seems to me that the whole point of the constitution was to limit what laws could be made, with anything not permitted prohibited in the light of the inherent rights of mankind. This unlimited law-by-treaty seems rather destructive to the whole point of the constitution.
Ryan Fenton