It was my understanding that Blade Runner did use CGI. I once had the Lightwave models for one of the opening scenes (car flying around the building). But generally speaking, I agree movies were far more exciting when you were wondering, how the hell did they do that? Now the answer is always the same, computers. It takes all the wonder out of it.
I've always sort of wondered what kind of idiot would believe in space aliens traveling a fuckzillion miles to Earth just to trample strange patterns in the local agricultural project
Probably the same kind of person who believes that aliens are capable of traveling a fuckzillion miles, but are incapable of operating a light switch so that the farmers won't see them. Although I suppose the lights might be an uncontrollable side effect of their anal rape beams. What do I know?
I know that New York isn't all Manhattan, it's just that I RTFA and that's what they're talking about. As for fuel costs being artificially depressed because we aren't taxing them enough, wtf are you smoking? The fact that fuel is taxed at all is proof positive that the costs are artificially increased. Case closed on that. But then you say that costs aren't the issue if we can only reduce emissions a tiny bit. This is precisely my problem with all of the global warming sensationalism.
First off, I don't believe that emissions would be reduced by such a retarded approach. On the contrary, this will increase them (just like ethanol). Constructing the building alone would probably produce more emissions that 100 years of the equivalent land based farming. Then you have a ton of artificial lights. I know they're talking about using solar power, but they're also talking about also burning waste to power them. Providing the equivalent of sunlight to a skyscraper full of plants require an enormous amount of energy, so I'm sure they'll need to tap into the grid as well. The same is true if pumping all that water around (real farms benefit from rain). It is simply absurd to assume that a skyscraper might be more energy efficient than a field sitting directly under the sun and rain, regardless of how much closer to market they are. If they want to do "closer to market" then they should focus on farming upstate instead of importing food from halfway around the world.
Second, even if emissions were reduced, you're talking about the difference of emissions between the two techniques and that's going to be so freakin' tiny that it doesn't even begin to compare to what the powerhouse emitters are putting out (you know, like the people forging all that steel for your skyscrapers). There's only so much available space in urban areas, that the reduction in emissions wouldn't even begin to approach a negligible amount. In the process you raise the cost of food, thereby fucking the poor (even more than usual).
I know that global warming is the new Al-Qaeda. There are a lot of people who want to defeat terrorism and they think you can only do that by bombing random Muslim nations, but they're missing the whole point of why people become terrorists in the first place. This is the same thing. People think we need to throw a bunch of green technologies together, without any thought to whether the end result would be any better, because they're terrified. Ideas like this are the result of panic. In another five years, BS like this will be all but forgotten as people move on to the next environmental scare (and all of the new requisite wacky, go nowhere ideas).
Upstate NY is done and has been for some time. I'm not sure why any business would move there now when all the talent has left in search of food. Too bad. It really was a nice place to live. And I miss Wegmans.
I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet
I think this will be a big problem for Vista. I'm the computer expert among my family and friends. I was never an XP fan, but I did occasionally use it and that was enough for me to advise family and friends when they ran into problems. Now my sister is bitching about, and asking advice on, Vista since it came on her new laptop. There's nothing I can tell her anymore except get a Mac or Ubuntu. The experienced users have had enough, who will be left to train the hoopleheads? Even if Vista was as easy as XP, they'd be in dire straights simply because the technorati aren't biting this time. It will have a trickle-down effect.
It's even worse than you suspect. DHS has hired former Stasi chief, Markus Wolfe and former head of the KGB, General Yevgeni Primakov, as consultants. If you consider that the founders of the neo-con movement were all "former" Trotskyites, the picture that they're painting becomes a lot clearer. It's our turn now.
I've been reading Slashdot for many years and I've seen a lot of ridiculous stories, but this one takes the cake. I don't know if global warming is predominately man-made or not, but stories like this make the global warming crowd look like a bunch of raving crackpots. There may be a real issue there that I should be concerned about, but when the message comes from people who want to convert one of the most expensive places on earth into a tiny bit of farmland and then convert the farms into treeland, there's no way I'm taking them seriously. How could they say, with a straight face, that farming in a climate controlled environment would produce less emissions than simply throwing the produce on a truck (which they'd ultimately have to do anyway)? And what farm workers can afford to live in or commute to NYC? This is right up there with the crowd that seems to believe that ethanol is "free energy." Professor Despommier shouldn't be teaching at a community college, much less Columbia, for this "brainchild."
So then why don't they issue a preference for one format, while still renting out the titles only existing on the other format when necessary? I mean they can "save shelf space" by not carrying all Fox movies but I don't see how that would help their bottom line. The reason I use Netflix over Blockbuster (before they did mail rentals) was precisely because of the greater selection. Perhaps Blockbuster should switch to a card catalog system or devote a third of their stores to off-shelf rentals that can be squeezed into a tighter space if it's such a concern. Either that or stop carrying a million copies of flopped movies that nobody is renting.
how long will it be before you can download anything near that amount in any kind of reasonable time?
Overnight should do it, not too bad. The real problem is the ISP bandwidth caps. I'd be downloading a lot more if I didn't have to worry about some invisible cap that'll result in a cancellation of my service.
Bush maintains he is telling the truth, even when the facts suggest otherwise. Moore claims only to give an opinion, and is frequently on record as saying his movies are 'op-ed pieces'.
Hey, when Moore starts talking to the Creator, then we'll talk. Till then, I'll put my faith in God's little buddy. I, for one, think Bushie is doing a heck of a job.
While I don't want it to be criminalized, I'm glad all the focus is on BitTorrent and not some of the other transport mediums that have been around far longer, but are too complicated for the average person to understand. Something has to be the lightning rod. And I'm sure it would be possible to create a whitelist based P2P program for all of the legal downloads so I doubt you'll ever be out in the cold.
You want a health care system which covers everyone who needs covering, and which treats humans like their lives have value.
American's are very good at giving money to charity when needed. This is despite having half their paychecks being stolen through various levels of government taxes and regulatory fees. Most of the money (meaning more than half) the government gets is simply wasted through bureaucratic BS and corporate handouts. And half of what remains essentially goes to war and other means of killing people (domestically and internationally).
Now imagine if most taxes were repealed. Not only would people have twice the money they normally would, they would no longer feel like they "gave at the office". Suddenly individuals are responsible for the world around them. And your typical person is far more likely to donate to caring institutions than they are to a bunch of thugs who want to kill people. If you take the power out of the hands of government, health care would become a priority in the way war is now.
service could easily be cut in half if the forms for the insurance industry were simply standardized
I'm sure this is true. But given that you're physically incapable of reading the entire tax code in your lifetime, what makes you think that the government would come up with something simpler? Even something as simple as a medicare prescription drug plan turned out to be an unintelligible mess. We have a problem that needs fixing, let's not make it worse.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military.
Uhhhm, I think you meant "I." I don't know many who trust the police and military. And firefighting is more of a local social club rather than a government run institution. As for health-care, over 30% of the costs are due to government required paperwork. I don't see how they're suppose to fix a problem they're largely responsible for in the first place. We'll just end up with another social-security like ponzi scheme if we go that route.
Even better is the Read the Bills Act which would require these thugs to be preset for a full and complete reading of every bill passed. If they had done this for the patriot act, they'd still be reading it and we wouldn't have been stuck with it today. No veto necessary. And it's hardly an unreasonable requirement that people voting on a bill should be forced to read it first. I think anything less is a subversion of the constitution.
It never cease to amaze me how people will go through all the trouble to encode and upload a 4-9 gig mkv file and then leave the 100k of subtitles out to save a little room. Same goes for chapter stops and audio commentaries. These things are practically zero cost and are so very nice to have. These are the things that made mkv cool in the first place and was the impetus for me to finally encode all my DVDs. Come to think of it, music should be closed caption by default as well (not just have the lyrics appended to it).
The government is populated by well-meaning bumbling idiotic bureacrats
If they are just screw ups, then how come they've yet to screw up in my favor even once in my 34 years on this planet? Shouldn't that be statistically impossible?
I'm pro-gun but this statement isn't typically true unless your state has special requirements. I can buy a new guy (federal forms and all) in about 15-30 minutes.
Still, people are hysterical over this issue outside of America. I've had several foreign friends, fresh off the boat, who were terrified because American TV taught them that there are shoot outs every night on the street here (maybe a handful of crappy neighborhoods). There are so many more serious problems in the world right now that if you're truly that worried about mass shootings in the Western world, then you need to be on some kind of medication. You have to worry more about drowning in a bathtub.
Now while it is true there's been an increase in armed robberies in Australia in the last 11 years, it must be remembered that it has always been illegal to carry handguns here, so there has never been the deterrent of an armed citizenry; the change in laws had absolutely no effect in that regard.
No, but obviously the effect it did have was to place more guns into the hands of criminals. Gun owners often see guns as an investment, as a measure of wealth. Unless the government is willing to pay fair market value (which they never do during these grabs), then making guns illegal in a society that already has them is pretty much a guarantee that you're going to have increased crime. And this pattern has repeated itself countless times, all across the world.
Mass shootings get a lot of press, but they're really quite rare and in reality, very difficult to prevent. Armed robberies affect far more people and as such, our focus should be on preventing those instead. I live somewhere where all you need to do is show a driver's license to buy a gun and in my 34 years, I've never known a single victim of an armed robbery. The only people who've ever pulled guns on me are cops (once for simply asking directions (which he eventually gave)) and I'd be happy to see them disarmed.
Other Western countries baffle me. They constantly complain about all the horrors the US government inflicts upon the world and then they come back and insist that only that same government should be permitted to control the weapons and that those who oppose their evil should have none. Make up your minds. Outlaw guns in this country and you give free reign to those who are tearing this world down.
The only reason "Fuck" is cool to say is because it gets such a huge reaction. If it was treated like any other word, say hemmoroid perhaps...
In third grade, I had a friend who didn't quite get what hemorrhoids were. He thought he'd quote a commercial that he'd seen on TV, without fully understanding it and got a "huge reaction" (he had to stand on the wall, the punishment of the day). You see, our teacher was complaining about a headache. Danny thought he'd be nice and said she should take some Preparation H. It was the funniest unintentional joke I had heard at the time, but it seems to me that he would have gotten the same reaction if he had said fuck.
Not a mob, the communist party. I know communism predicts that the government will magically disappear and we'll all simply oppress ourselves, but that's precisely what makes Marx so absurd, it would never happen. The reality of communism is that the party takes over the government and then people die if then don't go along.
As for revolutions, they have largely been a middle-class endeavor. The have-nots usually sit around and take it. More likely than not, they're defending the status quo because they aren't educated enough to know any better.
Slashdot Mirror
It was my understanding that Blade Runner did use CGI. I once had the Lightwave models for one of the opening scenes (car flying around the building). But generally speaking, I agree movies were far more exciting when you were wondering, how the hell did they do that? Now the answer is always the same, computers. It takes all the wonder out of it.
I've always sort of wondered what kind of idiot would believe in space aliens traveling a fuckzillion miles to Earth just to trample strange patterns in the local agricultural project
Probably the same kind of person who believes that aliens are capable of traveling a fuckzillion miles, but are incapable of operating a light switch so that the farmers won't see them. Although I suppose the lights might be an uncontrollable side effect of their anal rape beams. What do I know?
I know that New York isn't all Manhattan, it's just that I RTFA and that's what they're talking about. As for fuel costs being artificially depressed because we aren't taxing them enough, wtf are you smoking? The fact that fuel is taxed at all is proof positive that the costs are artificially increased. Case closed on that. But then you say that costs aren't the issue if we can only reduce emissions a tiny bit. This is precisely my problem with all of the global warming sensationalism.
First off, I don't believe that emissions would be reduced by such a retarded approach. On the contrary, this will increase them (just like ethanol). Constructing the building alone would probably produce more emissions that 100 years of the equivalent land based farming. Then you have a ton of artificial lights. I know they're talking about using solar power, but they're also talking about also burning waste to power them. Providing the equivalent of sunlight to a skyscraper full of plants require an enormous amount of energy, so I'm sure they'll need to tap into the grid as well. The same is true if pumping all that water around (real farms benefit from rain). It is simply absurd to assume that a skyscraper might be more energy efficient than a field sitting directly under the sun and rain, regardless of how much closer to market they are. If they want to do "closer to market" then they should focus on farming upstate instead of importing food from halfway around the world.
Second, even if emissions were reduced, you're talking about the difference of emissions between the two techniques and that's going to be so freakin' tiny that it doesn't even begin to compare to what the powerhouse emitters are putting out (you know, like the people forging all that steel for your skyscrapers). There's only so much available space in urban areas, that the reduction in emissions wouldn't even begin to approach a negligible amount. In the process you raise the cost of food, thereby fucking the poor (even more than usual).
I know that global warming is the new Al-Qaeda. There are a lot of people who want to defeat terrorism and they think you can only do that by bombing random Muslim nations, but they're missing the whole point of why people become terrorists in the first place. This is the same thing. People think we need to throw a bunch of green technologies together, without any thought to whether the end result would be any better, because they're terrified. Ideas like this are the result of panic. In another five years, BS like this will be all but forgotten as people move on to the next environmental scare (and all of the new requisite wacky, go nowhere ideas).
Upstate NY is done and has been for some time. I'm not sure why any business would move there now when all the talent has left in search of food. Too bad. It really was a nice place to live. And I miss Wegmans.
I certainly couldn't train a computer novice to use it yet
I think this will be a big problem for Vista. I'm the computer expert among my family and friends. I was never an XP fan, but I did occasionally use it and that was enough for me to advise family and friends when they ran into problems. Now my sister is bitching about, and asking advice on, Vista since it came on her new laptop. There's nothing I can tell her anymore except get a Mac or Ubuntu. The experienced users have had enough, who will be left to train the hoopleheads? Even if Vista was as easy as XP, they'd be in dire straights simply because the technorati aren't biting this time. It will have a trickle-down effect.
As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
Ahh, now I finally understand the season finale of the Sopranos AND the blue screen of death.
It's even worse than you suspect. DHS has hired former Stasi chief, Markus Wolfe and former head of the KGB, General Yevgeni Primakov, as consultants. If you consider that the founders of the neo-con movement were all "former" Trotskyites, the picture that they're painting becomes a lot clearer. It's our turn now.
I've been reading Slashdot for many years and I've seen a lot of ridiculous stories, but this one takes the cake. I don't know if global warming is predominately man-made or not, but stories like this make the global warming crowd look like a bunch of raving crackpots. There may be a real issue there that I should be concerned about, but when the message comes from people who want to convert one of the most expensive places on earth into a tiny bit of farmland and then convert the farms into treeland, there's no way I'm taking them seriously. How could they say, with a straight face, that farming in a climate controlled environment would produce less emissions than simply throwing the produce on a truck (which they'd ultimately have to do anyway)? And what farm workers can afford to live in or commute to NYC? This is right up there with the crowd that seems to believe that ethanol is "free energy." Professor Despommier shouldn't be teaching at a community college, much less Columbia, for this "brainchild."
So then why don't they issue a preference for one format, while still renting out the titles only existing on the other format when necessary? I mean they can "save shelf space" by not carrying all Fox movies but I don't see how that would help their bottom line. The reason I use Netflix over Blockbuster (before they did mail rentals) was precisely because of the greater selection. Perhaps Blockbuster should switch to a card catalog system or devote a third of their stores to off-shelf rentals that can be squeezed into a tighter space if it's such a concern. Either that or stop carrying a million copies of flopped movies that nobody is renting.
how long will it be before you can download anything near that amount in any kind of reasonable time?
Overnight should do it, not too bad. The real problem is the ISP bandwidth caps. I'd be downloading a lot more if I didn't have to worry about some invisible cap that'll result in a cancellation of my service.
Bush maintains he is telling the truth, even when the facts suggest otherwise. Moore claims only to give an opinion, and is frequently on record as saying his movies are 'op-ed pieces'.
Hey, when Moore starts talking to the Creator, then we'll talk. Till then, I'll put my faith in God's little buddy. I, for one, think Bushie is doing a heck of a job.
While I don't want it to be criminalized, I'm glad all the focus is on BitTorrent and not some of the other transport mediums that have been around far longer, but are too complicated for the average person to understand. Something has to be the lightning rod. And I'm sure it would be possible to create a whitelist based P2P program for all of the legal downloads so I doubt you'll ever be out in the cold.
You want a health care system which covers everyone who needs covering, and which treats humans like their lives have value.
American's are very good at giving money to charity when needed. This is despite having half their paychecks being stolen through various levels of government taxes and regulatory fees. Most of the money (meaning more than half) the government gets is simply wasted through bureaucratic BS and corporate handouts. And half of what remains essentially goes to war and other means of killing people (domestically and internationally).
Now imagine if most taxes were repealed. Not only would people have twice the money they normally would, they would no longer feel like they "gave at the office". Suddenly individuals are responsible for the world around them. And your typical person is far more likely to donate to caring institutions than they are to a bunch of thugs who want to kill people. If you take the power out of the hands of government, health care would become a priority in the way war is now.
service could easily be cut in half if the forms for the insurance industry were simply standardized
I'm sure this is true. But given that you're physically incapable of reading the entire tax code in your lifetime, what makes you think that the government would come up with something simpler? Even something as simple as a medicare prescription drug plan turned out to be an unintelligible mess. We have a problem that needs fixing, let's not make it worse.
We trust government-run firefighters, police and military.
Uhhhm, I think you meant "I." I don't know many who trust the police and military. And firefighting is more of a local social club rather than a government run institution. As for health-care, over 30% of the costs are due to government required paperwork. I don't see how they're suppose to fix a problem they're largely responsible for in the first place. We'll just end up with another social-security like ponzi scheme if we go that route.
Even better is the Read the Bills Act which would require these thugs to be preset for a full and complete reading of every bill passed. If they had done this for the patriot act, they'd still be reading it and we wouldn't have been stuck with it today. No veto necessary. And it's hardly an unreasonable requirement that people voting on a bill should be forced to read it first. I think anything less is a subversion of the constitution.
I'd say if Microsoft gets away with this, there's a damn good chance McCain'll be your next President.
McCain has no chance of all catering to the bipartisan curious. He was done long ago.
It never cease to amaze me how people will go through all the trouble to encode and upload a 4-9 gig mkv file and then leave the 100k of subtitles out to save a little room. Same goes for chapter stops and audio commentaries. These things are practically zero cost and are so very nice to have. These are the things that made mkv cool in the first place and was the impetus for me to finally encode all my DVDs. Come to think of it, music should be closed caption by default as well (not just have the lyrics appended to it).
Of course you can kill people by other means. But not in these numbers.
Actually, the worst school massacre involved no guns at all.
The government is populated by well-meaning bumbling idiotic bureacrats
If they are just screw ups, then how come they've yet to screw up in my favor even once in my 34 years on this planet? Shouldn't that be statistically impossible?
the whole process, takes about a month
I'm pro-gun but this statement isn't typically true unless your state has special requirements. I can buy a new guy (federal forms and all) in about 15-30 minutes.
Still, people are hysterical over this issue outside of America. I've had several foreign friends, fresh off the boat, who were terrified because American TV taught them that there are shoot outs every night on the street here (maybe a handful of crappy neighborhoods). There are so many more serious problems in the world right now that if you're truly that worried about mass shootings in the Western world, then you need to be on some kind of medication. You have to worry more about drowning in a bathtub.
Now while it is true there's been an increase in armed robberies in Australia in the last 11 years, it must be remembered that it has always been illegal to carry handguns here, so there has never been the deterrent of an armed citizenry; the change in laws had absolutely no effect in that regard.
No, but obviously the effect it did have was to place more guns into the hands of criminals. Gun owners often see guns as an investment, as a measure of wealth. Unless the government is willing to pay fair market value (which they never do during these grabs), then making guns illegal in a society that already has them is pretty much a guarantee that you're going to have increased crime. And this pattern has repeated itself countless times, all across the world.
Mass shootings get a lot of press, but they're really quite rare and in reality, very difficult to prevent. Armed robberies affect far more people and as such, our focus should be on preventing those instead. I live somewhere where all you need to do is show a driver's license to buy a gun and in my 34 years, I've never known a single victim of an armed robbery. The only people who've ever pulled guns on me are cops (once for simply asking directions (which he eventually gave)) and I'd be happy to see them disarmed.
Other Western countries baffle me. They constantly complain about all the horrors the US government inflicts upon the world and then they come back and insist that only that same government should be permitted to control the weapons and that those who oppose their evil should have none. Make up your minds. Outlaw guns in this country and you give free reign to those who are tearing this world down.
The only reason "Fuck" is cool to say is because it gets such a huge reaction. If it was treated like any other word, say hemmoroid perhaps...
In third grade, I had a friend who didn't quite get what hemorrhoids were. He thought he'd quote a commercial that he'd seen on TV, without fully understanding it and got a "huge reaction" (he had to stand on the wall, the punishment of the day). You see, our teacher was complaining about a headache. Danny thought he'd be nice and said she should take some Preparation H. It was the funniest unintentional joke I had heard at the time, but it seems to me that he would have gotten the same reaction if he had said fuck.
Not a mob, the communist party. I know communism predicts that the government will magically disappear and we'll all simply oppress ourselves, but that's precisely what makes Marx so absurd, it would never happen. The reality of communism is that the party takes over the government and then people die if then don't go along.
As for revolutions, they have largely been a middle-class endeavor. The have-nots usually sit around and take it. More likely than not, they're defending the status quo because they aren't educated enough to know any better.
I mean isn't the parking meter approach to everything specifically a Libertarians' wet dream?
You must be thinking about the other libs. Libertarians are very much anti-tax and pro-free market. This compromises both.