Are you kidding? Gag me with a stick!!!
on
D&D Trailer
·
· Score: 1
I've not seen a movie looking so cheesy and fakey in quite a while. Hmmm, what was the last one... Starship Troopers or Wing Commander? The kind of movie where the trailer asolutely *shrieks* "BOMB".
Hmm, lessee, we have poorly-rendered Dragons (cmon, Dragonheart is almost 3 years old and we can't do better than this?!), unconvincing bad guys, a black thief character (of course;) played by someone whose apparent life dream is to be Chris Rock, and your standard corny (though acceptable) D&D plot of, "get the MacGuffin!" And oh yes, Padme returns!! Along with Palpatine and the senate! Have we seen this movie before? Or are these just the reruns?
Oh, and let's start making a list of all the movie trailers that steal music from either Willow or Stargate, one or the other, because they're too lame to have their shit together before the trailer comes out. D&D goes in the "Stargate" column. I wonder if they even asked David Arnold for permission, or if he can now proceed to sue their ass.
The only market I can see for this movie is exactly the one you made obvious: the young males who went to see that dog of a movie American Beauty to see some chick topless (you call yourselves geeks? Ever hear of porn?! =P). "Whee, let's watch some dragons blow shit up! And there are some breasts! Oooooooh!"
You need to grow up some before you are worthy of being called a Geek. As a trailer, this sucks. WE can only hope that they chose the worst bits of the movie for the trailer, as Hollywood types frequently do for some bizarre reason.
Any vote is an expression of the citizen's power in the government. The only way to "waste" your vote...
Is to sit back on Election day like a traitor, and not vote.
Quite simply, when Bush gets in, as I'm expecting to be the case (blargh), I'm blaming everyone who didn't help me vote him down, and that includes everyone who couldn't be bothered to try.
What wimps.
Kasreyn
"If a nation dreams of being ignorant and free, it dreams of what never was, and never shall be." -Thomas Jefferson.
I personally would prefer a system with Electoral votes being split by percentage of the popular vote, but here's a problem with implementation:
No state would want to switch over to that, unless the entire nation did at once.
Why? Consider this. A state whose electoral votes are split would be less important to the presidential candidate. Very simply, if in State A, all you need is 51% of the popular vote to get all 50 of its electoral votes, and in State B, 51% of the popular vote only gets you 26 of the 50 electoral votes, which state would YOU go campaigning in?? Which state would YOU pay attention to? Obviously, State A, whose electoral votes are easier to come by. A state that moves over to the split method will be shooting itself in the foot, because by making itself less desirable to the candidates, its issues will not be considered nor represented as well. Only the underdog candidates will spend any time there, and to be blunt, that's not best for any state.
I'm personally amazed Vermont does this - this was in their constitution from the start, right? I can hardly imagine any state congress electing to make this change. But who knows, it may come about.
Of course, I just thought of this 2 minutes ago and am posting off the hip, so to speak. If I'm dead wrong, let me know. =)
Well, you see, it belongs to the same species of evil as racism. When you can classify someone, when you can dehumanize them and make them "the Other", that's when you can kill, torutre, and oppress them without guilt. This is something Hitler and Stalin knew very well; if you can make your victims look less than human, then the public will go along with whatever you do to them.
Remember, we had slavery in the U.S. before. And don't give me that "well we didn't know any better" crap. Everyone knew perfectly well that it was slavery, they just didn't mind because they had been taught that Blacks were less than human. And I can look ahead to a future where anyone with defective genes will be argued by scientific pawns to be less than human.
It's very important that we all act individually AND together to prevent this sort of dehumanization and classification, no matter where we find it. I don't care if you're black or white, a woman, genetically defective, still in the womb, or wearing a hood and white sheet - I think everyone is human, and everyone deserves equal treatment. When you can apply a label to someone, "Jude", "Fetus", "Hick", "Retard", and other hurtful and ignorant terms, that's when people turn into animals and tear each other apart, all the while being convinced of their own superiority.
If you think this is off-topic, you're wrong. This is just another way of describing some people as less than human so they can be controlled and abused. We need to ready ourselves to do something about this, instead of just sitting back and waiting for a faceless organization like the ACLU to handle it for us. Personally, the prospect of government controlled Eugenics scares me about as much as any dire warnings of military despotism futures.
I personally was scared much more by Brave New World than by 1984.
You don't seem to get it; Motorola has these dealers between the conceptual "rock and a hard place". Scylla and Charybdis. And so on.
It reminds me of a scene in the novel "Ender's Game" (great great story;), where a Giant offers a character two choices, to drink from one of two glasses full of unidentified liquid. Only, the thing is, no matter which glass the character drinks from, its contents kill him gruesomly and inevitably. One character got past this dilemma by attacking the Giant and tearing his eye out.
This is what it's like for the radio dealers. Their customers intend to sue them blind if they give up that information, information which Motorola could *sell to their competitors*, or just use to get them in an even worse deadlock. The dealers don't WANT to give up the info, because some of them have consciences as well and know that it's unethical. One the other hand, the dealers can refuse and lose their Motorola dealerships, and a large chunk of their sales, since as a poster above wisely pointed out, things like Police and Fire Departments need consistent equipment, typically all from the same manufacturer, and mission-critical Motorola equipment can't just be chucked out the window overnight.
So the dealers are, to put it bluntly, screwed no matter WHAT they do. Either they lose their business or they alienate their customers and THEN lose their business by slow strangulation, Motorola doesn't care which. Once they have the dealerships out of the way, their internet marketing will have free reign. And that's what this is all about, IMHO.
You say that they are "trying to understand who the end customers are"? I'm sorry, but you shouldn't believe everything you read or see. Motorola could care less about those customers (else why would they be trying to rape that information away from the dealers?), they just want the information for their OWN ends.
Companies with monopolistic tendencies have ALWAYS loved to tell the lie that if the monopoly gets bigger, savings will be passed on to the consumer. And everyone who's ever believed it has always ended up in the same situation: under that monopoly's control, directly or indirectly. Very simply, Monopoly = bad, from the consumer's point of view. Have you ever tried to buy a Microsoft product or get through to tech support? The bigger a company gets, the higher they can raise their prices, and the less customer support they offer. Anything else is just more smokescreen.
I say, the Giant's Drink is a sucker's game. If you take either of its choices, you're sunk. My advice is to go for the eye.
Kasreyn
"Wow, maybe I'll get an 'informative' tag this time"
Starship troopers? Loved that. Made a hell of a lot of sense, too. Pity the folks making the movie weren't capable of realizing it wasn't a war story.
Americentric is fine, I think we should wait on helping other nations out until we've got our domestic messes in order. But that's IMHO only.
Of course, the elimination of the oversized power of corporate interests in the government is a good idea - but don't go too far. After all, a properly constituted lobbying group does have a legitimate purpose, that of making heard the voice of people unified in a cause. The system breaks down when people who don't really care about that specific issue come to power in that lobbying group.
The legislative term limit is also a good idea ('twould get rid of horrors like Strom Thurmond), but how would you get it passed?;) Hmm, maybe it couldn't be under the present situation. There is, after all, a limit to how much can be accomplished under any specific government without revolution.
[opinion]
I believe the problems with America are corruption and apathy, corruption starting at or near the top and moving down, apathy starting at the bottom and moving up. And personally, I get a bit upset when I hear how few people vote in the general elections - clearly a lot less than the number of people who apparently live to bitch about how things are. I think, if you don't care to exercise your franchise, to take your part in the government, then you have no right to complain even if the government takes everything you have and treats you like dirt.
Apathy is as bad as corruption, that "I don't care, let the other guy fix it" attitude. Even if I don't think he has a chance, I'll vote for the man I want in office and damn the consequences. If more people would do the same, it could break the strangleholds of political parties and corporate groups whose popularity has ossified into tradition.
Just like with any other social problem, it can be fixed by first understanding it, then educating the people differently. And yes, this can be used to bring about even worse conditions (can you say "Brave New World"?). But, if we aren't deciding how our children are to be educated, then SOMEONE ELSE WILL.
[opinion]
Any comments or suggestions or rebuttals replied to, flames as well if they're interesting and well done.;) Oh, and btw... [newbie] I still don't know what YMMV means, anyone help me out? Plus, I can't get it to stop interpreting anything in angled brackets as HTML even when it's not formatting in HTML, what the heck?? [/newbie]
Kasreyn
Now that's rather evil, ya know...
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 1
I thought the goal was to get MORE people using Unix / Linux. Giving newbies harmful advice is only going to send them running back to momma Microsoft. Do you just take some kind of sick pleasure in screwing other people up?
I supose if you were teaching someone DOS you'd tell them the online help system is called "fdisk."
Jerk.
Kasreyn
This reminds me of the idiot who bragged about his DoS attacks in a chat room and got nailed. Too stupid to live. Not really newsworthy, except for the entertainment value of having a good laugh at this chump. Another "|33t H4X0r" down, only 5 million or so more to go.;)
I think there's a grey area in many people's minds as to copyright laws where they involve digital media. There seems to be a prevailing mood that "It's only data on a computer, how can it be property?" in people's minds. I know a guy who would never rob a store or a person, yet who burns program CD's for software worth real money in stores, without the slightest twitch of conscience that I can discern. My personal opinion, biased though it is: Raising prices due to software piracy only causes a vicious spiral; the more expensive the software, the more people will say, "Nahhhh, I ain't paying $50 (or whatever) for THIS." and go burn it. If it only cost $30, I wonder what higher percentage would fork it over. I remember back in like 1995 or whenever, DOOM cost $40.00 when ordered from id, or cost $0.00 if you typed "pkzip a:\doom.zip -& c:\games\doom\*.*" and made disks for all your friends. =P Not a tough choice to make. You know why people always speed? Because traffic laws are poorly enforced. People will do whatever they can get away with.
Of course, many wouldn't buy a program even if it cost a mere $5. It's the principal of the thing. Some of them object to paying a cent where they can manage to get it free, and hang the legality or lack of same.;)
(Some would argue we were talking about mp3's not software, but what's the difference between EnterSandman.mp3 and Doom.wad? Different uses, both data. Actually, one difference - one of them *doesn't* bring Napster down on you like a ton of bricks.)
There is the contention that copying and distributing things for free is not illegal in some regards (at least I've heard that), but it could also be argued that that supplies the product to someone who would otherwise have paid for the product, thus damaging that company's sales, if not actually breaking copyright laws. I personally don't know whether the RIAA is going to die out over this one, or grow stronger. Whichever it turns out to be, it's likely to be quite precipitous. Personally, I would prefer a world in which artists (of every kind; writers, musicians, painters, etc) are guaranteed a living from some public trust fund, so they don't have to worry about food/shelter/etc, and can concentrate on doing what they do best, which is providing us nonartistic schmoes the beautiful things that make life worth living, for free. But of course, the trouble with any such plan is actually setting it up, which is where it all falls apart.
(Oh and by the way you misquoted Ben slightly. You must pronounce it in proper Guinessian fashion. "Twisted and eeveel.") =P
Kasreyn,
(wondering if my post made any sense)
You don't quite see what he meant...
on
Living Terrors
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, it would spread to rural areas too, but barricading yourself in your house and threatening to shoot any infected person who gets too close would solve that. What he's saying is that if you're living in Manhattan when news of a bio-attack hits the airwaves (if it isn't suppressed that is), then you will be TOAST. When humans get scared they turn into panicky, stampeding, rioting beasts, and anyone left who's been lucky enough not to be infected will be trampled or shot or burned.
Even worse, the few who DO protect themselves beforehand against this are likely to be specifically targetted during the rioting by people angry at them for being better-prepared. Petty revenge. Human nature. What can I say?
When you're in a big city infested with the new & improved super-ebola and have just seen all your loved ones bite the dust, you are going to want to *kick some ass*. And since the "Gee I get to play God" scientists responsible will be dead, there will be no one left to attack but those smarty-pants who aren't dying.
Me, I already intended to never live in a big city, because I don't like humans. This is just another reason, as if any more were needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I've not seen a movie looking so cheesy and fakey in quite a while. Hmmm, what was the last one... Starship Troopers or Wing Commander? The kind of movie where the trailer asolutely *shrieks* "BOMB".
;) played by someone whose apparent life dream is to be Chris Rock, and your standard corny (though acceptable) D&D plot of, "get the MacGuffin!" And oh yes, Padme returns!! Along with Palpatine and the senate! Have we seen this movie before? Or are these just the reruns?
Hmm, lessee, we have poorly-rendered Dragons (cmon, Dragonheart is almost 3 years old and we can't do better than this?!), unconvincing bad guys, a black thief character (of course
Oh, and let's start making a list of all the movie trailers that steal music from either Willow or Stargate, one or the other, because they're too lame to have their shit together before the trailer comes out. D&D goes in the "Stargate" column. I wonder if they even asked David Arnold for permission, or if he can now proceed to sue their ass.
The only market I can see for this movie is exactly the one you made obvious: the young males who went to see that dog of a movie American Beauty to see some chick topless (you call yourselves geeks? Ever hear of porn?! =P). "Whee, let's watch some dragons blow shit up! And there are some breasts! Oooooooh!"
You need to grow up some before you are worthy of being called a Geek. As a trailer, this sucks. WE can only hope that they chose the worst bits of the movie for the trailer, as Hollywood types frequently do for some bizarre reason.
Kasreyn
There is no such thing as a "wasted vote."
Any vote is an expression of the citizen's power in the government. The only way to "waste" your vote...
Is to sit back on Election day like a traitor, and not vote.
Quite simply, when Bush gets in, as I'm expecting to be the case (blargh), I'm blaming everyone who didn't help me vote him down, and that includes everyone who couldn't be bothered to try.
What wimps.
Kasreyn
"If a nation dreams of being ignorant and free, it dreams of what never was, and never shall be." -Thomas Jefferson.
I personally would prefer a system with Electoral votes being split by percentage of the popular vote, but here's a problem with implementation:
No state would want to switch over to that, unless the entire nation did at once.
Why? Consider this. A state whose electoral votes are split would be less important to the presidential candidate. Very simply, if in State A, all you need is 51% of the popular vote to get all 50 of its electoral votes, and in State B, 51% of the popular vote only gets you 26 of the 50 electoral votes, which state would YOU go campaigning in?? Which state would YOU pay attention to? Obviously, State A, whose electoral votes are easier to come by. A state that moves over to the split method will be shooting itself in the foot, because by making itself less desirable to the candidates, its issues will not be considered nor represented as well. Only the underdog candidates will spend any time there, and to be blunt, that's not best for any state.
I'm personally amazed Vermont does this - this was in their constitution from the start, right? I can hardly imagine any state congress electing to make this change. But who knows, it may come about.
Of course, I just thought of this 2 minutes ago and am posting off the hip, so to speak. If I'm dead wrong, let me know. =)
Kasreyn
Well, you see, it belongs to the same species of evil as racism. When you can classify someone, when you can dehumanize them and make them "the Other", that's when you can kill, torutre, and oppress them without guilt. This is something Hitler and Stalin knew very well; if you can make your victims look less than human, then the public will go along with whatever you do to them.
Remember, we had slavery in the U.S. before. And don't give me that "well we didn't know any better" crap. Everyone knew perfectly well that it was slavery, they just didn't mind because they had been taught that Blacks were less than human. And I can look ahead to a future where anyone with defective genes will be argued by scientific pawns to be less than human.
It's very important that we all act individually AND together to prevent this sort of dehumanization and classification, no matter where we find it. I don't care if you're black or white, a woman, genetically defective, still in the womb, or wearing a hood and white sheet - I think everyone is human, and everyone deserves equal treatment. When you can apply a label to someone, "Jude", "Fetus", "Hick", "Retard", and other hurtful and ignorant terms, that's when people turn into animals and tear each other apart, all the while being convinced of their own superiority.
If you think this is off-topic, you're wrong. This is just another way of describing some people as less than human so they can be controlled and abused. We need to ready ourselves to do something about this, instead of just sitting back and waiting for a faceless organization like the ACLU to handle it for us. Personally, the prospect of government controlled Eugenics scares me about as much as any dire warnings of military despotism futures.
I personally was scared much more by Brave New World than by 1984.
Kasreyn
You don't seem to get it; Motorola has these dealers between the conceptual "rock and a hard place". Scylla and Charybdis. And so on.
;), where a Giant offers a character two choices, to drink from one of two glasses full of unidentified liquid. Only, the thing is, no matter which glass the character drinks from, its contents kill him gruesomly and inevitably. One character got past this dilemma by attacking the Giant and tearing his eye out.
It reminds me of a scene in the novel "Ender's Game" (great great story
This is what it's like for the radio dealers. Their customers intend to sue them blind if they give up that information, information which Motorola could *sell to their competitors*, or just use to get them in an even worse deadlock. The dealers don't WANT to give up the info, because some of them have consciences as well and know that it's unethical. One the other hand, the dealers can refuse and lose their Motorola dealerships, and a large chunk of their sales, since as a poster above wisely pointed out, things like Police and Fire Departments need consistent equipment, typically all from the same manufacturer, and mission-critical Motorola equipment can't just be chucked out the window overnight.
So the dealers are, to put it bluntly, screwed no matter WHAT they do. Either they lose their business or they alienate their customers and THEN lose their business by slow strangulation, Motorola doesn't care which. Once they have the dealerships out of the way, their internet marketing will have free reign. And that's what this is all about, IMHO.
You say that they are "trying to understand who the end customers are"? I'm sorry, but you shouldn't believe everything you read or see. Motorola could care less about those customers (else why would they be trying to rape that information away from the dealers?), they just want the information for their OWN ends.
Companies with monopolistic tendencies have ALWAYS loved to tell the lie that if the monopoly gets bigger, savings will be passed on to the consumer. And everyone who's ever believed it has always ended up in the same situation: under that monopoly's control, directly or indirectly. Very simply, Monopoly = bad, from the consumer's point of view. Have you ever tried to buy a Microsoft product or get through to tech support? The bigger a company gets, the higher they can raise their prices, and the less customer support they offer. Anything else is just more smokescreen.
I say, the Giant's Drink is a sucker's game. If you take either of its choices, you're sunk. My advice is to go for the eye.
Kasreyn
"Wow, maybe I'll get an 'informative' tag this time"
Starship troopers? Loved that. Made a hell of a lot of sense, too. Pity the folks making the movie weren't capable of realizing it wasn't a war story.
;) Hmm, maybe it couldn't be under the present situation. There is, after all, a limit to how much can be accomplished under any specific government without revolution.
;) Oh, and btw... [newbie] I still don't know what YMMV means, anyone help me out? Plus, I can't get it to stop interpreting anything in angled brackets as HTML even when it's not formatting in HTML, what the heck?? [/newbie]
Americentric is fine, I think we should wait on helping other nations out until we've got our domestic messes in order. But that's IMHO only.
Of course, the elimination of the oversized power of corporate interests in the government is a good idea - but don't go too far. After all, a properly constituted lobbying group does have a legitimate purpose, that of making heard the voice of people unified in a cause. The system breaks down when people who don't really care about that specific issue come to power in that lobbying group.
The legislative term limit is also a good idea ('twould get rid of horrors like Strom Thurmond), but how would you get it passed?
[opinion]
I believe the problems with America are corruption and apathy, corruption starting at or near the top and moving down, apathy starting at the bottom and moving up. And personally, I get a bit upset when I hear how few people vote in the general elections - clearly a lot less than the number of people who apparently live to bitch about how things are. I think, if you don't care to exercise your franchise, to take your part in the government, then you have no right to complain even if the government takes everything you have and treats you like dirt.
Apathy is as bad as corruption, that "I don't care, let the other guy fix it" attitude. Even if I don't think he has a chance, I'll vote for the man I want in office and damn the consequences. If more people would do the same, it could break the strangleholds of political parties and corporate groups whose popularity has ossified into tradition.
Just like with any other social problem, it can be fixed by first understanding it, then educating the people differently. And yes, this can be used to bring about even worse conditions (can you say "Brave New World"?). But, if we aren't deciding how our children are to be educated, then SOMEONE ELSE WILL.
[opinion]
Any comments or suggestions or rebuttals replied to, flames as well if they're interesting and well done.
Kasreyn
I thought the goal was to get MORE people using Unix / Linux. Giving newbies harmful advice is only going to send them running back to momma Microsoft. Do you just take some kind of sick pleasure in screwing other people up? I supose if you were teaching someone DOS you'd tell them the online help system is called "fdisk." Jerk. Kasreyn
I think there's a grey area in many people's minds as to copyright laws where they involve digital media. There seems to be a prevailing mood that "It's only data on a computer, how can it be property?" in people's minds. I know a guy who would never rob a store or a person, yet who burns program CD's for software worth real money in stores, without the slightest twitch of conscience that I can discern. My personal opinion, biased though it is: Raising prices due to software piracy only causes a vicious spiral; the more expensive the software, the more people will say, "Nahhhh, I ain't paying $50 (or whatever) for THIS." and go burn it. If it only cost $30, I wonder what higher percentage would fork it over. I remember back in like 1995 or whenever, DOOM cost $40.00 when ordered from id, or cost $0.00 if you typed "pkzip a:\doom.zip -& c:\games\doom\*.*" and made disks for all your friends. =P Not a tough choice to make. You know why people always speed? Because traffic laws are poorly enforced. People will do whatever they can get away with.
Of course, many wouldn't buy a program even if it cost a mere $5. It's the principal of the thing. Some of them object to paying a cent where they can manage to get it free, and hang the legality or lack of same. ;)
(Some would argue we were talking about mp3's not software, but what's the difference between EnterSandman.mp3 and Doom.wad? Different uses, both data. Actually, one difference - one of them *doesn't* bring Napster down on you like a ton of bricks.)
There is the contention that copying and distributing things for free is not illegal in some regards (at least I've heard that), but it could also be argued that that supplies the product to someone who would otherwise have paid for the product, thus damaging that company's sales, if not actually breaking copyright laws. I personally don't know whether the RIAA is going to die out over this one, or grow stronger. Whichever it turns out to be, it's likely to be quite precipitous. Personally, I would prefer a world in which artists (of every kind; writers, musicians, painters, etc) are guaranteed a living from some public trust fund, so they don't have to worry about food/shelter/etc, and can concentrate on doing what they do best, which is providing us nonartistic schmoes the beautiful things that make life worth living, for free. But of course, the trouble with any such plan is actually setting it up, which is where it all falls apart.
(Oh and by the way you misquoted Ben slightly. You must pronounce it in proper Guinessian fashion. "Twisted and eeveel.") =P
Kasreyn, (wondering if my post made any sense)
Yeah, it would spread to rural areas too, but barricading yourself in your house and threatening to shoot any infected person who gets too close would solve that. What he's saying is that if you're living in Manhattan when news of a bio-attack hits the airwaves (if it isn't suppressed that is), then you will be TOAST. When humans get scared they turn into panicky, stampeding, rioting beasts, and anyone left who's been lucky enough not to be infected will be trampled or shot or burned.
Even worse, the few who DO protect themselves beforehand against this are likely to be specifically targetted during the rioting by people angry at them for being better-prepared. Petty revenge. Human nature. What can I say?
When you're in a big city infested with the new & improved super-ebola and have just seen all your loved ones bite the dust, you are going to want to *kick some ass*. And since the "Gee I get to play God" scientists responsible will be dead, there will be no one left to attack but those smarty-pants who aren't dying.
Me, I already intended to never live in a big city, because I don't like humans. This is just another reason, as if any more were needed.
-Kasreyn.