Which is why McDonalds was found something like 40% responsible in the case (it's fairly typical to assign percentages of blame in these kinds of cases): yes, it is stupid to mess around with hot coffee in the car in your lap, but it's also stupid to serve a beverage for human consumption which will cause 3rd degree burns in seconds, especially after there have been repeated injuries.
Unfortunately, since juries aren't often made up of a particularly sensible lot, the amount initially awarded was astronomical, and 40% of a shitload is still a shitload.
Still, the smear campaign alone (no, she wasn't the driver and the car was not moving) cost them far more than just paying her medical bills in the first place.
I actually enjoyed Doublemeat; it flirted with Buffy humor, and I thought played the whole superhero-with-a-day-job thing well within the Buffy formula; bonus points for an evil snake thing and the instructional video scene. The finale was definately too little stretched out (the whole season really had that feel, going from a season 6 episode to almost anything from a previous season shows a surprising increase in stuff actually happening), and just wasn't the climax that Villains deserved. Plus, Buffy's "all the things I can show you" actually got me heckling (what, dank crypts and graveyards? Then maybe we can swing by the slaughterhouse on the way home.).
I have high hopes for season 7. To avoid being disappointed, I'm using the worst of season 6 as my basis for comparison. I'll wait until later to compare it to "The Body" or "Hush".
Well, they stand alone, anyway (and a very bad move to make a weak start look even worse by putting on Hush and The Body during the first break). I'm staying optimistically skeptical for season 7, though I can't see a Dawn as pseudo-slayer plotline going anywhere but down.
Crap; I hope they actually realize that the darkness wasn't really the problem; after all, a series that focused on the main characters lover turning into a homicidal maniac, then being cured just before she had to send him to hell isn't exactly waltzing in the sunshine. This season was mostly awful because, while they presented the plot as described, they presented it like they cribbed everything from "Screenwriting for Dummies". The dialogue was too often cringe worthy, the plot developed with nearly as much subtlity as a bowling ball in the head (Willow's descent into drug^h^h^h^h magic addiction could've been plucked word for word from an after school special).
All that being said, a second watching is bringing me around a bit; they suffered a lot from putting the worst episodes of the season at the start and end of breaks. For example, the finale, which devolved into a cliche slinging pile of crap, or the "alternate universe" episode, which is an indication of creative bancruptcy on par with a holodeck episode. It's a bit unfortunate, because if the quality of the writing had've been up to Buffy standards, it would've been an amazing season.
Still, if all else fails, and season 7 dissapoints as much as season 6, it's always possible to ignore everything else and consider season 5 the end (even if they get back up to Buffy quality, can they ever end the series as well as Season 5 would've ended it?).
Of course, killing off the only chick who didn't look like a high-school biology skeleton wrapped in skin didn't exactly give me a sunny outlook on the show.
Sorry, Yahoo. It's already been established that people won't pay for information, even when it's stuff they can't get anywhere else.
The publishing industry (or television industry, for that matter) would certainly be surprised to hear this.
Yes, people will pay for information (or content, whatever), sometimes even if there is a free alternative (a lot of people still get cable, even if they have local broadcast stations, for example). Salon's problems (and the problems of most websites that tried to go to a membership system) stem from no one really wanting what they have to sell, not from any predetermined desire to not pay for information. After all, the porn websites seem to be doing pretty well with subscription services.
As for yahoo, whether this will succeed all depends on the quality of the material; if they provide articles from quality journals (and keep their offerings up to date), it'd certainly be worth a buck a pop to avoid having to go to the library to do research (figure in the photocopy costs, as well as the time and effort, and the yahoo price starts looking like a bargain).
Because it would never finish. To just generate every 100 letter text (ignoring punctuation, case, etc), at, say, 1 trillion texts a second, would not finish before quite a few universes are born and collapse in on themselves.
On the plus side, we already know the first and last pages:
aaa...aaa
zzz...zzz
Unfortunately, I don't think either of them will be a nytimes bestseller.
When Aerosmith was actually a cool rock band? I was never a big fan, but Jesus, dancing with some fucking teen band and Britany "one set of implants away from being a hairdresser or a cashier" Spheres... umm Spears.
Lynx has done this for a long time (though you have to reference the script as LYNXCGI, iirc; I used it a few years ago to write a script to browse manpages through lynx). It's pretty useful if you want to use cgi scripts and junk for local documentation, but don't want the overhead of running a full web-browser.
Creating a new one now for nothing? An entry cost of 100 bucks would be a pretty good idea (maybe we can install interac based chastity belts?) In any case, people have miscarriages and malformed babies now, but we don't outlaw procreation.
Cloning is nothing more than another method for a person to contribute cells to the development of a new human being. The "grey area" (rich people cloning for organs) doesn't even enter into it; a clone is a person, and would have to be treated the same as any other person.
So freedom to procreate with willing participant(s), in your mind, implies freedom to enslave and torture people? Are you retarded? Do you really see one as the logical extension of the other?
Wait, I've got one: You're free to express an opinion against the government without government intervention, therefore you're allowed to shoot cops.
Oh, another one: You're free to choose not to eat meat, therefore you're allowed to blow up a McDonalds
This is pretty fun; soon, I shall come across the "logical" implication that makes me Master of the Universe. HE-MAN!
By all means, if someone comes to your house and starts cloning in your living room, you can say "Get out of here with all that there cloning! And stop chopping up that cow!"
By the same token, though, nothing gives you the right to come into my house and knock over the test tube where mini-me slowly gestates. What business is it of yours if someone decides to take some of their own cells and create a new human being? What right do you actually have (besides some "divine" right you've inherited from a 2000 year old book of fables) to decide how those cells go from being me to being something else?
If you're searching for the answer, it's none. Wasn't that fun?
The lengths people will go to to avoid facing up to the reality that they just don't matter! It's obscene.
You are totally unimportant. Here, have a Chinese baby; it makes a great way to vent out all your feelings of usefulness.
Granted, it's a pretty good idea, but I'm not altogether sure that it would make the world a better place
MS Tech: Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: Can you hold for one moment. (muzak) Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: (pages flipping) Have you tried rebooting?
Hemos: Is that a yes or a no?
MS Tech: That sounds like a driver problem. You may have to reinstall Windows.
Hemos: (Hangs up, types "no comment").
Sega Rep: Hello?
Hemos: Are you guys going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: We make great many games, super good Sonic running bush pig, you buy at store.
Hemos: Yeah, great, but are you going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: YOU BUY AT STORE! (click)
Hemos: (types "no comment")
geez people, they're not patenting the _act_ of indexing, they're patenting their method!
Read the indexing patent. This is exactly what they're doing. To paraphrase "an index containing words which are related to links" (sorry, I'm not typing the full " a unique one of the words to a location of one of the plurality of links") isn't exactly specific to any method of indexing those links. They parse in some unspecified way (into words), and generate a table of links indexed by words in memory.
Oh, wait, they also fetch the information before they parse it. Ok, this is a great inovation; now we can throw away all those browsers from before '98 that required telepathy.
Wait a minute; parse words and associate them with links, fetch pages from the world wide web... dear Jebus, Altavista's patented people!
I just wonder, are they really expecting that they won't be flooded with "tips" like: "Johnny is a fag. He said he was going to kill a bunch of people. Limp Bizkit rox!"
Really, think back to high school: wouldn't the funniest way to spend a boring computer lab session be to "report" all your buddies? Ok, the funniest way would be tricking an unsuspecting victim to look at the receiver, but once everyone's had a good vomit over that, you've got to find something a bit more time consuming. Telling W.A.V.E that your best friend likes to sniff dog turds and dirty sweat socks would provide at least 15 minutes of hilarity (or even a bit of a fight, which always breaks up monotony).
(disclaimer: it's not my fault if you didn't have any friends to abuse in high school)
(preach: stereotyping by either side doesn't help)
Everything you buy, those store cards, and even the man interviewing you in the street goes to data organizations. People make such a fuss just because the internet's involved. Do you notice polling organizations getting investigated?
dot dot dot
Still further, lest you forget, you're not just having these people coming into your house and spying on you. It's not like that. You give the information voluntarily - you don't have to go to these sites.
You don't find out until after you visit the site, not before. There's not much difference between this and catching someone rummaging through your garbage; after all, you didn't have to put your garbage out and risk having someone look through it, you could just live in your own filth. Ok, I do live in my own filth, but not because I don't want a flawed internet "business" trying to determine whether that brown paper bag held takeout or a mail-order dildo[1], I live in my own filth because I'm a lazy pig.
In any case, it's still not even very good market research. "Targetted internet advertising" means that if you ever, even once[2], visit a porn site, 99% of your banners will contain some combination of the words gaping, yawning, fisting and holes.
As for the cost of sites... well, most sites cost about what they're worth, and the fact that people don't want to pay anything more than nothing, not even the mildly discomforting thought that doubleclick might know that you clicked on a link to the ripped apart anus site before looking up a few bible verses to clear the cache, should maybe serve as a wake up call to the internet "journalist". That being said, I wouldn't want to appear to be discouraging a mass movement to subscription-based services; the ensuing carnage would be hilarious (although the increased load would probably kill fuckedcompany).
[1] The answer, of course, is both.
[2] Or repeatedly, while spanking like a zoo monkey.
Yeah, really. Reading a Taco article is like watching an old man take a leak, or even listening to Dubya talk. You have to laugh a bit at the first tortured stutterings, but slowly you realize that this person might not even have the capicity to realize why you're laughing, and you start to feel a bit embarrased. Finally, there's a little bit of shame, as the guy you were just laughing at is lying on the ground, pissing on himself and screaming "Ahh, my prostate, my fucking prostate!"
No, wait, forget about the shame part; it starts being funny again after you get over the embarrasment.
Slashdot Mirror
And because of her stupidity
Which is why McDonalds was found something like 40% responsible in the case (it's fairly typical to assign percentages of blame in these kinds of cases): yes, it is stupid to mess around with hot coffee in the car in your lap, but it's also stupid to serve a beverage for human consumption which will cause 3rd degree burns in seconds, especially after there have been repeated injuries.
Unfortunately, since juries aren't often made up of a particularly sensible lot, the amount initially awarded was astronomical, and 40% of a shitload is still a shitload.
Still, the smear campaign alone (no, she wasn't the driver and the car was not moving) cost them far more than just paying her medical bills in the first place.
I actually enjoyed Doublemeat; it flirted with Buffy humor, and I thought played the whole superhero-with-a-day-job thing well within the Buffy formula; bonus points for an evil snake thing and the instructional video scene. The finale was definately too little stretched out (the whole season really had that feel, going from a season 6 episode to almost anything from a previous season shows a surprising increase in stuff actually happening), and just wasn't the climax that Villains deserved. Plus, Buffy's "all the things I can show you" actually got me heckling (what, dank crypts and graveyards? Then maybe we can swing by the slaughterhouse on the way home.).
I have high hopes for season 7. To avoid being disappointed, I'm using the worst of season 6 as my basis for comparison. I'll wait until later to compare it to "The Body" or "Hush".
Well, they stand alone, anyway (and a very bad move to make a weak start look even worse by putting on Hush and The Body during the first break). I'm staying optimistically skeptical for season 7, though I can't see a Dawn as pseudo-slayer plotline going anywhere but down.
Crap; I hope they actually realize that the darkness wasn't really the problem; after all, a series that focused on the main characters lover turning into a homicidal maniac, then being cured just before she had to send him to hell isn't exactly waltzing in the sunshine. This season was mostly awful because, while they presented the plot as described, they presented it like they cribbed everything from "Screenwriting for Dummies". The dialogue was too often cringe worthy, the plot developed with nearly as much subtlity as a bowling ball in the head (Willow's descent into drug^h^h^h^h magic addiction could've been plucked word for word from an after school special).
All that being said, a second watching is bringing me around a bit; they suffered a lot from putting the worst episodes of the season at the start and end of breaks. For example, the finale, which devolved into a cliche slinging pile of crap, or the "alternate universe" episode, which is an indication of creative bancruptcy on par with a holodeck episode. It's a bit unfortunate, because if the quality of the writing had've been up to Buffy standards, it would've been an amazing season.
Still, if all else fails, and season 7 dissapoints as much as season 6, it's always possible to ignore everything else and consider season 5 the end (even if they get back up to Buffy quality, can they ever end the series as well as Season 5 would've ended it?).
Of course, killing off the only chick who didn't look like a high-school biology skeleton wrapped in skin didn't exactly give me a sunny outlook on the show.
Sorry, Yahoo. It's already been established that people won't pay for information, even when it's stuff they can't get anywhere else.
The publishing industry (or television industry, for that matter) would certainly be surprised to hear this.
Yes, people will pay for information (or content, whatever), sometimes even if there is a free alternative (a lot of people still get cable, even if they have local broadcast stations, for example). Salon's problems (and the problems of most websites that tried to go to a membership system) stem from no one really wanting what they have to sell, not from any predetermined desire to not pay for information. After all, the porn websites seem to be doing pretty well with subscription services.
As for yahoo, whether this will succeed all depends on the quality of the material; if they provide articles from quality journals (and keep their offerings up to date), it'd certainly be worth a buck a pop to avoid having to go to the library to do research (figure in the photocopy costs, as well as the time and effort, and the yahoo price starts looking like a bargain).
How about junt?
Because it would never finish. To just generate every 100 letter text (ignoring punctuation, case, etc), at, say, 1 trillion texts a second, would not finish before quite a few universes are born and collapse in on themselves.
On the plus side, we already know the first and last pages:
aaa...aaa
zzz...zzz
Unfortunately, I don't think either of them will be a nytimes bestseller.
When Aerosmith was actually a cool rock band? I was never a big fan, but Jesus, dancing with some fucking teen band and Britany "one set of implants away from being a hairdresser or a cashier" Spheres... umm Spears.
Web server.
Lynx has done this for a long time (though you have to reference the script as LYNXCGI, iirc; I used it a few years ago to write a script to browse manpages through lynx). It's pretty useful if you want to use cgi scripts and junk for local documentation, but don't want the overhead of running a full web-browser.
What would be the use of a cross platform installer if you aren't ever going to be installing anything?
Creating a new one now for nothing? An entry cost of 100 bucks would be a pretty good idea (maybe we can install interac based chastity belts?) In any case, people have miscarriages and malformed babies now, but we don't outlaw procreation.
Cloning is nothing more than another method for a person to contribute cells to the development of a new human being. The "grey area" (rich people cloning for organs) doesn't even enter into it; a clone is a person, and would have to be treated the same as any other person.
So freedom to procreate with willing participant(s), in your mind, implies freedom to enslave and torture people? Are you retarded? Do you really see one as the logical extension of the other?
Wait, I've got one: You're free to express an opinion against the government without government intervention, therefore you're allowed to shoot cops.
Oh, another one: You're free to choose not to eat meat, therefore you're allowed to blow up a McDonalds
This is pretty fun; soon, I shall come across the "logical" implication that makes me Master of the Universe. HE-MAN!
By all means, if someone comes to your house and starts cloning in your living room, you can say "Get out of here with all that there cloning! And stop chopping up that cow!"
By the same token, though, nothing gives you the right to come into my house and knock over the test tube where mini-me slowly gestates. What business is it of yours if someone decides to take some of their own cells and create a new human being? What right do you actually have (besides some "divine" right you've inherited from a 2000 year old book of fables) to decide how those cells go from being me to being something else?
If you're searching for the answer, it's none. Wasn't that fun?
The lengths people will go to to avoid facing up to the reality that they just don't matter! It's obscene. You are totally unimportant. Here, have a Chinese baby; it makes a great way to vent out all your feelings of usefulness.
Granted, it's a pretty good idea, but I'm not altogether sure that it would make the world a better place
My Very Patient Mother Just Served Us Nine ______
Just change Nine to Nerf, of course.
Personally, I'm a lot more pissed about the whole Pearth thing.
MS Tech: Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: Can you hold for one moment. (muzak)
Hello, Microsoft technical support.
Hemos: Is Sega going to be making games for the X Box?
MS Tech: (pages flipping) Have you tried rebooting?
Hemos: Is that a yes or a no?
MS Tech: That sounds like a driver problem. You may have to reinstall Windows.
Hemos: (Hangs up, types "no comment").
Sega Rep: Hello?
Hemos: Are you guys going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: We make great many games, super good Sonic running bush pig, you buy at store.
Hemos: Yeah, great, but are you going to be making games for the X Box?
Sega Rep: YOU BUY AT STORE! (click)
Hemos: (types "no comment")
Ok, mod me down, I had my fun.
Should've called it the Internet Carrier Pigeon Protocol.
Or maybe I'm the only person juvenile enough to think ICPP would be the best acronym ever.
geez people, they're not patenting the _act_ of indexing, they're patenting their method!
Read the indexing patent. This is exactly what they're doing. To paraphrase "an index containing words which are related to links" (sorry, I'm not typing the full " a unique one of the words to a location of one of the plurality of links") isn't exactly specific to any method of indexing those links. They parse in some unspecified way (into words), and generate a table of links indexed by words in memory.
Oh, wait, they also fetch the information before they parse it. Ok, this is a great inovation; now we can throw away all those browsers from before '98 that required telepathy.
Wait a minute; parse words and associate them with links, fetch pages from the world wide web... dear Jebus, Altavista's patented people!
Animated gifs: a million crappy geocities pages can't be wrong!
Ok, more than two words. I'll refund the cost of viewing (please include $5.95 shipping and handling).
I just wonder, are they really expecting that they won't be flooded with "tips" like: "Johnny is a fag. He said he was going to kill a bunch of people. Limp Bizkit rox!"
Really, think back to high school: wouldn't the funniest way to spend a boring computer lab session be to "report" all your buddies? Ok, the funniest way would be tricking an unsuspecting victim to look at the receiver, but once everyone's had a good vomit over that, you've got to find something a bit more time consuming. Telling W.A.V.E that your best friend likes to sniff dog turds and dirty sweat socks would provide at least 15 minutes of hilarity (or even a bit of a fight, which always breaks up monotony).
(disclaimer: it's not my fault if you didn't have any friends to abuse in high school)
(preach: stereotyping by either side doesn't help)
(phrase of the day: fart paste).
Everything you buy, those store cards, and even the man interviewing you in the street goes to data organizations. People make such a fuss just because the internet's involved. Do you notice polling organizations getting investigated?
dot dot dot
Still further, lest you forget, you're not just having these people coming into your house and spying on you. It's not like that. You give the information voluntarily - you don't have to go to these sites.
You don't find out until after you visit the site, not before. There's not much difference between this and catching someone rummaging through your garbage; after all, you didn't have to put your garbage out and risk having someone look through it, you could just live in your own filth. Ok, I do live in my own filth, but not because I don't want a flawed internet "business" trying to determine whether that brown paper bag held takeout or a mail-order dildo[1], I live in my own filth because I'm a lazy pig.
In any case, it's still not even very good market research. "Targetted internet advertising" means that if you ever, even once[2], visit a porn site, 99% of your banners will contain some combination of the words gaping, yawning, fisting and holes.
As for the cost of sites... well, most sites cost about what they're worth, and the fact that people don't want to pay anything more than nothing, not even the mildly discomforting thought that doubleclick might know that you clicked on a link to the ripped apart anus site before looking up a few bible verses to clear the cache, should maybe serve as a wake up call to the internet "journalist". That being said, I wouldn't want to appear to be discouraging a mass movement to subscription-based services; the ensuing carnage would be hilarious (although the increased load would probably kill fuckedcompany).
[1] The answer, of course, is both.
[2] Or repeatedly, while spanking like a zoo monkey.
I like footnotes.
If a company asks for your phone number and you they don't really need it, say you don't have a phone...
I tried that, but they didn't believe me. I finally became so pissed off at her insistance that I hung up.
That was over two weeks ago, and I'm starting to suspect that my pizza isn't on the way...
Yeah, really. Reading a Taco article is like watching an old man take a leak, or even listening to Dubya talk. You have to laugh a bit at the first tortured stutterings, but slowly you realize that this person might not even have the capicity to realize why you're laughing, and you start to feel a bit embarrased. Finally, there's a little bit of shame, as the guy you were just laughing at is lying on the ground, pissing on himself and screaming "Ahh, my prostate, my fucking prostate!"
No, wait, forget about the shame part; it starts being funny again after you get over the embarrasment.
That's not a troll, you syphalitic retard. If it was, I would've said we'd be making first contact with your scabby little dick.
Hope this helps.
"Stupid frogs." -- Homer Simpson