1) For a long time, there were rumors that Kubrick was considering filming _AI_ with the same boy actor from Jurassic Park (the kid who says, "Hey, this is UNIX!"), filming scenes months or years apart as the boy aged. From what I've been able to find, this rumor referred to another, dropped project that Kubrick had in mind, a Holocaust story called _The Aryan Papers_. Kubrick decided not to do _AP_ after _Schindler's List_ became The Holocaust Picture of the Decade.
2) To my knowledge, Kubrick first started actively toying with developing the story for _AI_ in 1989, after he had taken a break after _Full Metal Jacket_. The "20 years in making" thing is, as far as I know, Taco foaming at the mouth. However, Kubrick was known to kick ideas around in his head for as long as 30 years (_Eyes Wide Shut_/_Traumnovelle_), it just might be that he didn't talk to scriptwriters and WB before 1989.
2b) Soon after Kubrick died, the _New Yorker_ carried a "Talk of the Town" piece by someone who had worked with Kubrick on the story/script for _AI_ in the early 90s; apparently Kubrick went through a lot of writers, and worked at a very leisurely pace, meeting with the writer(s) once or twice a year.
3) As Kubrick died quite suddenly (my theory is that a combination of stress and fatigue made him vulnerable to heart attack while laughing at the last line of _EWS_), it is improbable that he handed Spielberg the script and said "You are the HAL's last hope...make...this...movie." However, Kubrick frequently talked with other directors, especially those who used F/X well (Jim Cameron), so it's quite likely that he had "talked AI" with Spielberg. Despite some of the things slashdotters are saying about him today, I think Spielberg is a decent enough man to think to himself, "Would Stanley _really_ have wanted me to do this movie?"
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
Well no, this is an integrated unit, like the "nailed" router that's providing me DSL right now. This is an embedded platform. It can sit behind a security panel and provide the processor power to do voice recognition -- that sort of thing.
On the iMac, it's just as easy to replace the motherboard as the hard drive, because the rate-determining step is opening the case.:)
This reminds me of something I read about ten years ago, when having a computer made in '82 wasn't all that bad -- Apple wrote off a bunch of overstocked Lisas, and buried them in a landfill out west. It's the sort of thing that would be good for a post-apocalyptic movie: our heroes defeat the Psyclos using the first business-oriented system that used a GUI!
Oh well, it's always good to know that I can find a copy of Pole Position, when I need it.
Was I the only one who groaned when the ex-cop said "dust the colon and backslash keys: those are the ones that geeks use and normal people don't"? My colon and backslash have been unused (well, at the shell prompt at least) since giving up DOS almost a decade ago. The shell prompt being used is definitely UNIXish, and none of the commands typed on screen involve those evil characters. "*Forward-slash*!" I shouted, accidentally.
That's pretty funny. FWIW, the backslash key is also the pipe, which is only useful in Unix shells and in text-formatting columns for tables. The colon key is also semicolon, used only by programmers making comments and English majors. So they're still geek keys.
A forensic analysis of my keyboard would probably begin with crumb-recovery. "Ha, pretzel salt! Here's our culprit's keyboard, Watson."
Any system one doesn't know well appears "user unfriendly". That's true for mainframes, UNIX machines, Windows, and even the Macintosh.
Yes, but in the context of the article, he seemed to think TOPS-20 was user-friendly the first time he used it, and still finds Unix unfriendly after five years (written in '88). Of course, could be nostalgia for TOPS is coloring his glasses, but based on my experience with UNIX, and his description of menu prompts in TOPS, I don't think so.
Re:Cute, very shallow
on
Infiltration
·
· Score: 1
[My brother is] a scrupulously honest person who wouldn't trespass on places he didn't have a close familial relationship with.
The independant dealers were actually pretty pleased to have this meeting. This was not a challange to them. Many of the smaller independent dealers give good service to Mac customers. Its the big box stores that don't know crap about computers, but we already know that. This really aimed at John Q. Public who doesn't know much about computers and is looking for an easy to use first computer.
The only reason a sales staffer should ever steer first-time users away from the Macs and toward Wintel is if they get kickbacks from their own repair department.
There's a whole system of tunnel's under Vienna, where some movie was done. There are tours daily through them; you enter through a manhole in the central city square. Damn cool tour.
The movie is The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. The tunnels in question are the sewers under the old city.
Re:The Reason IT Has To Wait For 2002
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
I knew a guy who started taking [DiHydrogen MonOxide] every once in a while, usually after he exercised or exerted himself. Pretty soon he was quaffing whole bottles of the stuff, uncut, morning noon and night. Stay away from this one, folks.
Not only that, but on contact, it can significantly interfere with the performance of automobile brakes and electronic devices. Over extended contact, it can weaken the foundations of buildings! If "IT" uses it, then maybe that's why they're afraid of publicity, and think cities need to retrofit for IT.
University of Virginia (which has a massive medical center/hospital that services a large area of west-central VA, and also a growing Womens' Studies department, which would be a prime target for this sort of censorship), William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth (in Richmond), James Madison (Harrisonburg), VA Tech (very very big school), George Mason (NoVa).
The only private institutions that come to mind are Mary Baldwin (a small college), Washington & Lee (ditto), and Hollins College (small, private all-girls school). I'm not sure if Radford is a state school or not.
Of course, if you have a sexual dysfunction and are being treated at UVA med. center, they'll just get permission from their dept. heads before researching it online. Or research it offline.
The real problem is whether this will actually interfere with _academic_ (not professional) research, like if someone in an English dept. is trying to do work on the Marquis de Sade, and a PHB in an administrative office denies them permission.
I don't know about anyone else, but if someone wants me to take their side in a cause they'd better be damn honest about everything upfront, else they will lose my support, and I will also try to convince others that they are a con. This is a perfect example.
This is a deliberate attempt by the "Yesmen" to incite you to think of the WTO itself as the ultimate con.
Incidentally, the reason Negativland, who have probably inspired 37.4% of the WTO protestors, got sued by their label SST was for putting out an album with the title "U2" and a picture of a U-2 spy plane on it, which used a sample from "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Island Records sued SST for, supposedly, conning U2 fans into buying a Negativland record, and SST turned around and sued Negativland for getting them in trouble (I believe that's the legal term).
The idea behind this form of art/activism is that, every single day, people accept the Word of the corporations (and the multinational governmental organizations that support them), delivered through mass media. If you read gatt.org with suspicion, you should read wto.org with the same amount of suspicion.
Where they successfully sent an individual as someone impersonating a speaker from the WTO, staged a pie in the face incident and when his horrible speech didn't raise enough of a reaction from the audience they staged his death.
That's odd, the prank you describe seems somewhat familiar. I think I read about it in a NYT article Slashdot linked to recently.
Sounds like a good case against Affirmative Action. It causes minorities who actually tried hard, excelled, and earned their position to be looked at as if they don't belong there. It seems like a disincentive to even try, thus repressing the minorities it was supposed to pull up.
I'm not saying that ending Afirmative Action would make white people respect minorities. And I don't know if there's anything that will really help, except for time, and people trying to respect each other. I'm just saying that Affirmative Action has negative consequences as well as positive, and we should question its effectiveness. It sounds like you would be where you are today without Affirmative Action, and would be able to command more respect.
O no, don't worry, lots of people already "question its effectiveness." For example, Newt Gingrich once said that Affirmitive Action "belongs to the asheap of history." Linda Chavez, the current designee for W.'s Labor Department, runs an advocacy group called the Center for Equal Opportunity, which has made the (+2, Interesting, -3 Flamebait) claim that the shame felt by minorities "stigmatized" by affirmative action on univeristy campuses is equivilent to that of Jews forced to wear yellow stars.
Anybody who's been a debater in high school or college in the last ten years has argued affirmitive action at least once.
Affirmitive Action is in a very precarious position. The usual argument is that it promotes reverse discrimination against, and weakens the souls of, those it is meant to help.
For our next trick, we will restore dignity to the inner city by removing crutches like public housing and minimum wages. Welcome to the Republican/Libertarian Revolution, everyone!
and now here is the kicker, although there is a 90 return window, because he took into compUSA to get the SCSI card replace (took 2 weeks), then back again to get the HD replace (took 4 fucking weeks), he was push beyond that 90 day window...so now he cannot even get his money back and APPLE will not..NO, they REFUSE to remedy the situation
Lemon Apples are notoriously hard to get fixed properly. Like the high-end Japanese stereo systems of the 80s, or BMWs, Apples tend to work perfectly, unless you get a bad one, in which case it will be in the shop for its entire lifecycle.
Apple is also notoriously difficult to work with as a company. They tend to save on the bottom line by skimping on service and contracting their repairs out to shitty shops like CompUSA. However, there is a tiny little division of Apple whose job it is to satisfy customers with just your type of problem. I'm not sure what the threshold is in terms of number of times you've tried to repair a machine, but Apple can send you an entirely new machine of an equivilent configuration. At least, that's the way it was two years ago, and I doubt that that program has been Steved.
You're right about Dell having awesome service.
One thing I hope you realize is that the the fault lies at least partially with CompUSA's service department. I want you all to say it with me: NEVER GO TO COMPUSA unless you absolutely have to.
This is completely different - this is a tunnel. This is a project that like the Channel Tunnel will be "built" by boring out soft rock at a depth of several hundred feet below the sea bed. There is no enviromental reason why this project should not go ahead.
As much as I'd like to continue quoting from your rather lengthy attacks on Black Art (the poster above), I assume that, while you obviously did not read the article all the way through, you did at least read all of your own comments before you posted them.
From the article:
"On the American side a road would have to be built from Fairbanks in the face of objections from environmentalists. For a rail tunnel, the nearest North American mainline station is at Prince George, British Columbia, 1,200 miles away."
The tunnel would be 60 miles long. The Alaskan/Canadian side rail link would be 1,200 miles long, and would be on the surface.
Now apologize to Black Art. He's probably used to this -- he's been on Slashdot for a long time.
Finally, this is more then the US & "The Russians" (has anyone told the US population they're not all Russians & there's now a bunch of country's where the USSR was?)
According to my handy National Geographic Atlas, none of those "bunch of countries" are anywhere near Magadan. Although there are many, many ethic groups in the nation known as Russia, it is common parlance to call them all "Russian," even though not all of them are Slavs.
You may have encountered a similar distinction between ethnicity and nationhood in Canada, the Untited States, and pretty much anywhere else you've ever been.
...sites that sell all kinds of drugs to American citizens, mostly prescription medications that are either too expensive in the US, or not approved by the FDA. I happen to think that's a good thing, and I'm quite saddened to see Yahoo getting pushed around by those socialist assholes in France.
Those sites are allowed, under FDA regulations, to sell prescription drugs to Americans, if the drug has been approved in a foreign country (typically UK or France), but has not yet been scheduled by the FDA. If I understand correctly, the origin of this "loophole" was in the 80's, when HIV/AIDS patients were trying to get access to drugs like AZT before FDA had approved them.
This does not apply to drugs that FDA has reviewed and scheduled as restricted or illegal. You can't, for example, order Prozac from France unless you have a liscence to dispense prescription drugs, and even then I believe there are restrictions on what you're allowed to order depending on the country of origin/manufacture. Don't even think about ordering LSD from Sandoz in Switzerland.
France has had these laws re: Nazi memorabilia for many, many years. It shouldn't be such a surprise to anyone. If Yahoo's webserver software is so weak that they can't restrict sales only to France, then either 1) they lose business in the States and go looking for a better solution or 2) sales stay the same and they change nothing. Free markets respond to government regulation all the time, folks....
There is no power to grant copyright or patent to corporations, only to persons.
IANAL (who is, on slashdot?), but it is my understanding that corporations are legally treated as persons, and this was upheld by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century.
So do everything in your power to get that decision overturned, that would be a good start.
I am considering the purchase of a powerbook for the dual purposes of NLE video editing under MacOS and as a Linux ppc laptop. However, if (and from the looks of it this is a big if) Apple is indeed suing free software projects for any reason whatsoever I do not wish to support them and will forego that particular toy indefinitely.
On the other hand, I do not wish to unfairly penalize Apple for unfounded rumors which they can hardly be faulted for.
May I recommend that you go one step further and, should the rumor be founded, assess whether Apple's suit is justifiable?
What if a free software developer releases an operating system called "Mac OS X" that's really just a PPC linux with an Aqua skin? Is Apple allowed to sue then, according to your ethics?
What if the rumor turns out to be false, and Apple sues Slashdot/Andover.net for libel? Wouldn't that be _great_? I can see the posting now...a hastily written lead by Rob, with an [update] from Hemos, and a conflict in the threads between "I saw this coming! Now the anti-Apple revolution begins!" and "They should have seen this coming! Finally the counter-Slashdot revolution begins!"
A friend of mine who is very, very into role-playing games advances a theory that British geeks are far geekier than American geeks. His primary evidence is the AD&D "Fiend Folio" and the Warhammer 40K game.
This list has a lot of Ultima games on it, and while that's laudable, they got a lot of things a little mixed up, as far as I'm concerned.
Like leaving off Zork, for God's sake. Or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, the first really _good_ edu-tainment program for the K through 6 market. Enough posters above have come to the defense of rouge/nethack/angband.
I never played that Ultima Underworld, but from the screen shots it looked suspiciously like Dungeon Master.
Ultima Online? Do you mean MUDing? MUSHing? Oh, it has to be graphical? Neverwinter Nights, guys.
Pool of Radiance, as far as I've been able to tell, was influential on PoR sequels developed by SSI/TSR. As a matter of fact, CFRGs pretty much died after SSI became the dominant maker: you had PoR clones/sequels, Ultima games (some of which, I've been told, got really bizarre, like you go to an alternate history Mars in one, right?), and the Eye of the Beholder Series. Interplay put out Wasteland and Dragon Wars both within a year or so of PoR, and I've never seen a CRPG as good as those two games (I actually prefer Wasteland to Fallout).
Finally, I'd like to point out that, while not a PC game, and not really so much a "game" as a simulation, Space Travel, the program Thompson & Ritchie ran on a PDP machine at Bell Labs, deserves mention as one of the "most influential" games of all time. (The more ridiculous accusations of the UNIX-haters listserv claim that they created UNIX just to get the game run on this surplus machine no one else was using, I'm not too well versed in Unix history, but if the game had the slightest role in the development of Unix, it's definitely more influential than friggin' Tomb Raider.)
Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on.
Well, there were also there parodies "Pyst" and "Driven." How many computer games spawn parodies? I'm not entirely sure if Total Distortion counts as Myst-genre, but it made similar Good Use of multimedia authoring (Macromedia based, in their case) and had a similar mazes and puzzles bent, except with more guitar battles and less wondering where you are.
But seriously, I agree with the article's assessment that Myst was influential because of its use of CD-ROM based multimedia features. (Note syntax: that was the article's assessment. You read it, right?:)) Up to that point, you could still get a game on floppies, if you wanted, and it was one of the first popular games (that I've encountered, at least) that made good use of Quicktime. The "game as a hypercard stack" was a great idea, especially since back in those days Macintoshes still came standard with the Hypercard authoring software (not just the player), which meant that you could show the game to a young tyke, and then show him how to make his own hypercard stacks.
From the "those plebes have done it again and voted for Oprah books, but we're all sure amazon editors wouldn't have made the same list" department, I noticed that the amazon.com editorial summary of _GR_ gets a few facts wrong, particularly the connection between Imipolex-G and the Rocket. Obviously, amazon employee Tim Appelo has only read it once or twice; a third read would certainly clear things up for him.:)
Why can't game magazines actually ask questions that follow up on previous answers, challenge the developers to say something more than what products they have in the pipeline, etc.? If we're really moving to the point where everyone can run a graphical MUD server on their Linux box/OSX machine/embedded BeOS refrigerator, wouldn't it be nice if the interviewer asked questions like "how does it work?" or "why are you making this sort of game?"
Instead, we get answers like this:
"Game sales have been at 92.3% optimization for the past three fiscal quarters. Market segmentation is decreasing as more developers work hard on great mega-games like our soon-to-be-released 'Everplaying Sites.' Currently, our primary action item is to decrease the potentially tremendous negative impact of the D&D movie on the perception of gaming in the girlfriend-who-was-dragged-to-the-movie market."
I'm not trying to start a flame war here -- didn't anyone else think that this "interview" read like a press release?
On a better note, I heard the Salvadore (author of the Dark Eld Forgotten Realms books) might be re-doing the screenplay.
Salvatore's Dark Elf books aren't exactly Tolkien, but he does tend to write very cinematic, Indian Jones style action scenes. Of note, he is better known to _Star Wars_ fans as the guy who killed off Chewbacca.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's squash some urban legends here:
1) For a long time, there were rumors that Kubrick was considering filming _AI_ with the same boy actor from Jurassic Park (the kid who says, "Hey, this is UNIX!"), filming scenes months or years apart as the boy aged. From what I've been able to find, this rumor referred to another, dropped project that Kubrick had in mind, a Holocaust story called _The Aryan Papers_. Kubrick decided not to do _AP_ after _Schindler's List_ became The Holocaust Picture of the Decade.
2) To my knowledge, Kubrick first started actively toying with developing the story for _AI_ in 1989, after he had taken a break after _Full Metal Jacket_. The "20 years in making" thing is, as far as I know, Taco foaming at the mouth. However, Kubrick was known to kick ideas around in his head for as long as 30 years (_Eyes Wide Shut_/_Traumnovelle_), it just might be that he didn't talk to scriptwriters and WB before 1989.
2b) Soon after Kubrick died, the _New Yorker_ carried a "Talk of the Town" piece by someone who had worked with Kubrick on the story/script for _AI_ in the early 90s; apparently Kubrick went through a lot of writers, and worked at a very leisurely pace, meeting with the writer(s) once or twice a year.
3) As Kubrick died quite suddenly (my theory is that a combination of stress and fatigue made him vulnerable to heart attack while laughing at the last line of _EWS_), it is improbable that he handed Spielberg the script and said "You are the HAL's last hope...make...this...movie." However, Kubrick frequently talked with other directors, especially those who used F/X well (Jim Cameron), so it's quite likely that he had "talked AI" with Spielberg. Despite some of the things slashdotters are saying about him today, I think Spielberg is a decent enough man to think to himself, "Would Stanley _really_ have wanted me to do this movie?"
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
:)
Well no, this is an integrated unit, like the "nailed" router that's providing me DSL right now. This is an embedded platform. It can sit behind a security panel and provide the processor power to do voice recognition -- that sort of thing.
On the iMac, it's just as easy to replace the motherboard as the hard drive, because the rate-determining step is opening the case.
This reminds me of something I read about ten years ago, when having a computer made in '82 wasn't all that bad -- Apple wrote off a bunch of overstocked Lisas, and buried them in a landfill out west. It's the sort of thing that would be good for a post-apocalyptic movie: our heroes defeat the Psyclos using the first business-oriented system that used a GUI!
Oh well, it's always good to know that I can find a copy of Pole Position, when I need it.
Was I the only one who groaned when the ex-cop said "dust the colon and backslash keys: those are the ones that geeks use and normal people don't"? My colon and backslash have been unused (well, at the shell prompt at least) since giving up DOS almost a decade ago. The shell prompt being used is definitely UNIXish, and none of the commands typed on screen involve those evil characters. "*Forward-slash*!" I shouted, accidentally.
That's pretty funny. FWIW, the backslash key is also the pipe, which is only useful in Unix shells and in text-formatting columns for tables. The colon key is also semicolon, used only by programmers making comments and English majors. So they're still geek keys.
A forensic analysis of my keyboard would probably begin with crumb-recovery. "Ha, pretzel salt! Here's our culprit's keyboard, Watson."
Any system one doesn't know well appears "user unfriendly". That's true for mainframes, UNIX machines, Windows, and even the Macintosh.
Yes, but in the context of the article, he seemed to think TOPS-20 was user-friendly the first time he used it, and still finds Unix unfriendly after five years (written in '88). Of course, could be nostalgia for TOPS is coloring his glasses, but based on my experience with UNIX, and his description of menu prompts in TOPS, I don't think so.
[My brother is] a scrupulously honest person who wouldn't trespass on places he didn't have a close familial relationship with.
:)
Such as being conceived on the premesis?
The independant dealers were actually pretty pleased to have this meeting. This was not a challange to them. Many of the smaller independent dealers give good service to Mac customers. Its the big box stores that don't know crap about computers, but we already know that. This really aimed at John Q. Public who doesn't know much about computers and is looking for an easy to use first computer.
The only reason a sales staffer should ever steer first-time users away from the Macs and toward Wintel is if they get kickbacks from their own repair department.
There's a whole system of tunnel's under Vienna, where some movie was done. There are tours daily through them; you enter through a manhole in the central city square. Damn cool tour.
The movie is The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. The tunnels in question are the sewers under the old city.
I knew a guy who started taking [DiHydrogen MonOxide] every once in a while, usually after he exercised or exerted himself. Pretty soon he was quaffing whole bottles of the stuff, uncut, morning noon and night. Stay away from this one, folks.
Not only that, but on contact, it can significantly interfere with the performance of automobile brakes and electronic devices. Over extended contact, it can weaken the foundations of buildings! If "IT" uses it, then maybe that's why they're afraid of publicity, and think cities need to retrofit for IT.
Are all Virginia University's owned by the state?
Yes, all the good/large ones are:
University of Virginia (which has a massive medical center/hospital that services a large area of west-central VA, and also a growing Womens' Studies department, which would be a prime target for this sort of censorship), William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth (in Richmond), James Madison (Harrisonburg), VA Tech (very very big school), George Mason (NoVa).
The only private institutions that come to mind are Mary Baldwin (a small college), Washington & Lee (ditto), and Hollins College (small, private all-girls school). I'm not sure if Radford is a state school or not.
Of course, if you have a sexual dysfunction and are being treated at UVA med. center, they'll just get permission from their dept. heads before researching it online. Or research it offline.
The real problem is whether this will actually interfere with _academic_ (not professional) research, like if someone in an English dept. is trying to do work on the Marquis de Sade, and a PHB in an administrative office denies them permission.
I don't know about anyone else, but if someone wants me to take their side in a cause they'd better be damn honest about everything upfront, else they will lose my support, and I will also try to convince others that they are a con. This is a perfect example.
This is a deliberate attempt by the "Yesmen" to incite you to think of the WTO itself as the ultimate con.
Incidentally, the reason Negativland, who have probably inspired 37.4% of the WTO protestors, got sued by their label SST was for putting out an album with the title "U2" and a picture of a U-2 spy plane on it, which used a sample from "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Island Records sued SST for, supposedly, conning U2 fans into buying a Negativland record, and SST turned around and sued Negativland for getting them in trouble (I believe that's the legal term).
The idea behind this form of art/activism is that, every single day, people accept the Word of the corporations (and the multinational governmental organizations that support them), delivered through mass media. If you read gatt.org with suspicion, you should read wto.org with the same amount of suspicion.
Or so the theory goes.
Where they successfully sent an individual as someone impersonating a speaker from the WTO, staged a pie in the face incident and when his horrible speech didn't raise enough of a reaction from the audience they staged his death.
That's odd, the prank you describe seems somewhat familiar. I think I read about it in a NYT article Slashdot linked to recently.
;)
Sounds like a good case against Affirmative Action. It causes minorities who actually tried hard, excelled, and earned their position to be looked at as if they don't belong there. It seems like a disincentive to even try, thus repressing the minorities it was supposed to pull up.
I'm not saying that ending Afirmative Action would make white people respect minorities. And I don't know if there's anything that will really help, except for time, and people trying to respect each other. I'm just saying that Affirmative Action has negative consequences as well as positive, and we should question its effectiveness. It sounds like you would be where you are today without Affirmative Action, and would be able to command more respect.
O no, don't worry, lots of people already "question its effectiveness." For example, Newt Gingrich once said that Affirmitive Action "belongs to the asheap of history." Linda Chavez, the current designee for W.'s Labor Department, runs an advocacy group called the Center for Equal Opportunity, which has made the (+2, Interesting, -3 Flamebait) claim that the shame felt by minorities "stigmatized" by affirmative action on univeristy campuses is equivilent to that of Jews forced to wear yellow stars.
Anybody who's been a debater in high school or college in the last ten years has argued affirmitive action at least once.
Affirmitive Action is in a very precarious position. The usual argument is that it promotes reverse discrimination against, and weakens the souls of, those it is meant to help.
For our next trick, we will restore dignity to the inner city by removing crutches like public housing and minimum wages. Welcome to the Republican/Libertarian Revolution, everyone!
and now here is the kicker, although there is a 90 return window, because he took into compUSA to get the SCSI card replace (took 2 weeks), then back again to get the HD replace (took 4 fucking weeks), he was push beyond that 90 day window...so now he cannot even get his money back and APPLE will not..NO, they REFUSE to remedy the situation
Lemon Apples are notoriously hard to get fixed properly. Like the high-end Japanese stereo systems of the 80s, or BMWs, Apples tend to work perfectly, unless you get a bad one, in which case it will be in the shop for its entire lifecycle.
Apple is also notoriously difficult to work with as a company. They tend to save on the bottom line by skimping on service and contracting their repairs out to shitty shops like CompUSA. However, there is a tiny little division of Apple whose job it is to satisfy customers with just your type of problem. I'm not sure what the threshold is in terms of number of times you've tried to repair a machine, but Apple can send you an entirely new machine of an equivilent configuration. At least, that's the way it was two years ago, and I doubt that that program has been Steved.
You're right about Dell having awesome service.
One thing I hope you realize is that the the fault lies at least partially with CompUSA's service department. I want you all to say it with me: NEVER GO TO COMPUSA unless you absolutely have to.
I am sure that they will have BTO back soon.
That's right...you ain't seen nothing yet!
Sorry. I couldn't hold back.
This is completely different - this is a tunnel. This is a project that like the Channel Tunnel will be "built" by boring out soft rock at a depth of several hundred feet below the sea bed. There is no enviromental reason why this project should not go ahead.
As much as I'd like to continue quoting from your rather lengthy attacks on Black Art (the poster above), I assume that, while you obviously did not read the article all the way through, you did at least read all of your own comments before you posted them.
From the article:
"On the American side a road would have to be built from Fairbanks in the face of objections from environmentalists. For a rail tunnel, the nearest North American mainline station is at Prince George, British Columbia, 1,200 miles away."
The tunnel would be 60 miles long. The Alaskan/Canadian side rail link would be 1,200 miles long, and would be on the surface.
Now apologize to Black Art. He's probably used to this -- he's been on Slashdot for a long time.
Finally, this is more then the US & "The Russians" (has anyone told the US population they're not all Russians & there's now a bunch of country's where the USSR was?)
According to my handy National Geographic Atlas, none of those "bunch of countries" are anywhere near Magadan. Although there are many, many ethic groups in the nation known as Russia, it is common parlance to call them all "Russian," even though not all of them are Slavs.
You may have encountered a similar distinction between ethnicity and nationhood in Canada, the Untited States, and pretty much anywhere else you've ever been.
Happily American,
Kevin T.
...sites that sell all kinds of drugs to American citizens, mostly prescription medications that are either too expensive in the US, or not approved by the FDA. I happen to think that's a good thing, and I'm quite saddened to see Yahoo getting pushed around by those socialist assholes in France.
Those sites are allowed, under FDA regulations, to sell prescription drugs to Americans, if the drug has been approved in a foreign country (typically UK or France), but has not yet been scheduled by the FDA. If I understand correctly, the origin of this "loophole" was in the 80's, when HIV/AIDS patients were trying to get access to drugs like AZT before FDA had approved them.
This does not apply to drugs that FDA has reviewed and scheduled as restricted or illegal. You can't, for example, order Prozac from France unless you have a liscence to dispense prescription drugs, and even then I believe there are restrictions on what you're allowed to order depending on the country of origin/manufacture. Don't even think about ordering LSD from Sandoz in Switzerland.
France has had these laws re: Nazi memorabilia for many, many years. It shouldn't be such a surprise to anyone. If Yahoo's webserver software is so weak that they can't restrict sales only to France, then either 1) they lose business in the States and go looking for a better solution or 2) sales stay the same and they change nothing. Free markets respond to government regulation all the time, folks....
There is no power to grant copyright or patent to corporations, only to persons.
IANAL (who is, on slashdot?), but it is my understanding that corporations are legally treated as persons, and this was upheld by the US Supreme Court in the late 19th century.
So do everything in your power to get that decision overturned, that would be a good start.
I am considering the purchase of a powerbook for the dual purposes of NLE video editing under MacOS and as a Linux ppc laptop. However, if (and from the looks of it this is a big if) Apple is indeed suing free software projects for any reason whatsoever I do not wish to support them and will forego that particular toy indefinitely.
On the other hand, I do not wish to unfairly penalize Apple for unfounded rumors which they can hardly be faulted for.
May I recommend that you go one step further and, should the rumor be founded, assess whether Apple's suit is justifiable?
What if a free software developer releases an operating system called "Mac OS X" that's really just a PPC linux with an Aqua skin? Is Apple allowed to sue then, according to your ethics?
What if the rumor turns out to be false, and Apple sues Slashdot/Andover.net for libel? Wouldn't that be _great_? I can see the posting now...a hastily written lead by Rob, with an [update] from Hemos, and a conflict in the threads between "I saw this coming! Now the anti-Apple revolution begins!" and "They should have seen this coming! Finally the counter-Slashdot revolution begins!"
A friend of mine who is very, very into role-playing games advances a theory that British geeks are far geekier than American geeks. His primary evidence is the AD&D "Fiend Folio" and the Warhammer 40K game.
This list has a lot of Ultima games on it, and while that's laudable, they got a lot of things a little mixed up, as far as I'm concerned.
Like leaving off Zork, for God's sake. Or Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, the first really _good_ edu-tainment program for the K through 6 market. Enough posters above have come to the defense of rouge/nethack/angband.
I never played that Ultima Underworld, but from the screen shots it looked suspiciously like Dungeon Master.
Ultima Online? Do you mean MUDing? MUSHing? Oh, it has to be graphical? Neverwinter Nights, guys.
Pool of Radiance, as far as I've been able to tell, was influential on PoR sequels developed by SSI/TSR. As a matter of fact, CFRGs pretty much died after SSI became the dominant maker: you had PoR clones/sequels, Ultima games (some of which, I've been told, got really bizarre, like you go to an alternate history Mars in one, right?), and the Eye of the Beholder Series. Interplay put out Wasteland and Dragon Wars both within a year or so of PoR, and I've never seen a CRPG as good as those two games (I actually prefer Wasteland to Fallout).
Finally, I'd like to point out that, while not a PC game, and not really so much a "game" as a simulation, Space Travel, the program Thompson & Ritchie ran on a PDP machine at Bell Labs, deserves mention as one of the "most influential" games of all time. (The more ridiculous accusations of the UNIX-haters listserv claim that they created UNIX just to get the game run on this surplus machine no one else was using, I'm not too well versed in Unix history, but if the game had the slightest role in the development of Unix, it's definitely more influential than friggin' Tomb Raider.)
Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on.
:)) Up to that point, you could still get a game on floppies, if you wanted, and it was one of the first popular games (that I've encountered, at least) that made good use of Quicktime. The "game as a hypercard stack" was a great idea, especially since back in those days Macintoshes still came standard with the Hypercard authoring software (not just the player), which meant that you could show the game to a young tyke, and then show him how to make his own hypercard stacks.
Well, there were also there parodies "Pyst" and "Driven." How many computer games spawn parodies? I'm not entirely sure if Total Distortion counts as Myst-genre, but it made similar Good Use of multimedia authoring (Macromedia based, in their case) and had a similar mazes and puzzles bent, except with more guitar battles and less wondering where you are.
But seriously, I agree with the article's assessment that Myst was influential because of its use of CD-ROM based multimedia features. (Note syntax: that was the article's assessment. You read it, right?
That's pretty funny.
:)
From the "those plebes have done it again and voted for Oprah books, but we're all sure amazon editors wouldn't have made the same list" department, I noticed that the amazon.com editorial summary of _GR_ gets a few facts wrong, particularly the connection between Imipolex-G and the Rocket. Obviously, amazon employee Tim Appelo has only read it once or twice; a third read would certainly clear things up for him.
Why can't game magazines actually ask questions that follow up on previous answers, challenge the developers to say something more than what products they have in the pipeline, etc.? If we're really moving to the point where everyone can run a graphical MUD server on their Linux box/OSX machine/embedded BeOS refrigerator, wouldn't it be nice if the interviewer asked questions like "how does it work?" or "why are you making this sort of game?"
Instead, we get answers like this:
"Game sales have been at 92.3% optimization for the past three fiscal quarters. Market segmentation is decreasing as more developers work hard on great mega-games like our soon-to-be-released 'Everplaying Sites.' Currently, our primary action item is to decrease the potentially tremendous negative impact of the D&D movie on the perception of gaming in the girlfriend-who-was-dragged-to-the-movie market."
I'm not trying to start a flame war here -- didn't anyone else think that this "interview" read like a press release?
On a better note, I heard the Salvadore (author of the Dark Eld Forgotten Realms books) might be re-doing the screenplay.
Salvatore's Dark Elf books aren't exactly Tolkien, but he does tend to write very cinematic, Indian Jones style action scenes. Of note, he is better known to _Star Wars_ fans as the guy who killed off Chewbacca.
So maybe there's hope after all.