I completely agree... for me, the major factor in deciding whether or not I'm going to get a gaming system is the fun of playing the games. There are a lot of great games out there for the GBA, and if I ever get bored with the new ones, I've got a lot of old GB games hanging around that I can pop in. And what with a couplemp3 player add ons and a video player on the way, the system is plenty customizeable (not to mention the number of people who develop homebrew games, and the wide availability of emulators and development kits.
For the kind of money that these folks are talking about, I want a unit that will run my favorite text editor, have a web browser, and will compile code. And it better damned well play mp3s too. That's a serious chunk of money, and if I'm going to shell it out, it needs to be a serious machine.
I'm not saying that there isn't room for competition with the GBA, but anyone who does has the problem of having to compete with everything that GBA offers for about the same price, or less. On the other hand, there will always be folks out there looking for the real 3d experience, but when you've got such a tiny screen, I have a feeling that the most phenomenal 3d engine wouldn't make the game up to snuff for that crowd.
I wish Sony best of luck on this, as any success they have will only motivate Nintendo to do better, but realistically, even if the NGage did live up to all of its hype, the price would still doom it in the end, and Sony is looking at a similar scenario.
The author has a lot of problems here that have been pointed out several times over, and some good points as well. One thing that seems to completely escape him is that he must apply deconstructionist techniques in order to deconstruct the particular brand of deconstructionism that he has run into. In and of itself, deconstructionism is merely another tool with which a text (yes, it is the accepted term for anything that can be interpreted) can be read (conotatively meaning "interpreted").
Think of it as a sort of reverse engineering. You break something down into component parts and try to find out how it works. One of those component parts is the author. In the case of "JFK was not a homosexual," we need to know how the author feels about the state of homosexuality; if he is homophobic, than I would say yes, it CAN be legitimately interpreted as a statement of superiority of character. It could even be taken as a statement of envy.... in the context of descibing how many women JFK had sex with, for example. However, in the context given, it is little more than a butterfly under glass. Maybe it's useful in trying to understand the author better (why this particular example), particularly in the context of understanding some of his other writing (particularly about JFK or sexuality).
You shouldn't think of deconstruction as masturbatory any more than you should think of grokking a block of code as masturbatory. Yes, it is completely possible for deconstructionist critics to move in circles in never ending battles of who has the most style in presenting their argunments, however, as I have seen pointed out here, this is a lot like obfuscated code contests (yes, both of those are primarily self indulgeant excercises). However, one of the primary reasons why arguments are so often deconstructed is to determine whether or not the person is wrong. If there is an error in logic or in fact (Like a critic making an argument based on Huck and Jim being on the Colorado River in Huckleberry Finn), a deconstruction of the argument is bound to reveal it.
As someone who spent ample amounts of time in both my college's English and Computer Science departments, I am surprised about the misunderstanding that I often here the geek crowd voice about literary/philisophical/theatrical criticism. A good body of such criticism is language based, and shares much in common with Comp. Sci's language and Machine theory.
Anyway, allow me to offer an alternative reading of the reaction to his introduction. The nods he was getting were merely encouragement from an "in-crowd" trying to be polite to an outsider who was trying to fit. The laughter was due to the fact that everyone knew the author was BSing, and when it became apparent that the author knew it too, there was nothing impolite about acknowledging the fact. Of course, to know for sure one way or the other, we would have to ask the attendees, so I suppose we'll just have to live with possible interpretations for the time being.
to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave; a wonderful place where things like this quote: "he was never formally charged, but kept at Qincheng Prison for over a year" could never possibly happen. Yes sir, it's good to know that we don't have fascist prisons like Qincheng and leaders who appoint themselves! Our fascist prisons aren't located on our soil, and we have a whole other branch of government that appoints the leader of its choosing.
It feels so good to live in what history will one day call "Fortress America."
While DMing a couple paper and dice rpgs, the silliness of having random encounters in certain situations occured to me as well. Moving around through the wilderness is one thing, and here random encounters can spice things up a bit as long as we keep in mind certain aspects of realism. Walk around in the woods at the right time of year for long enough and you will encounter a bear or a moose, and in a fantasy world where the local region is being terrorized by goblins, it only makes sense that you shouldcome across the occaisional goblin war party, but when storming a castle, encounters tend to be very focussed. When Mr. Evil King knows where you are, a winning stretegy for him is to move the maximum amount of his most powerful soldiers to that same position. Of course, he still might want to have a few guards for himself and his treasure horde just in case a few of the layers slip by, or it's some kind of ruse.
I find that a good strategy, and one that is eminently emulateable by video games, is to place guards at key positions, and then have a select number of guards who are "on patrol." When one of these on patrol guards runs across the players, chances are the guards standing at the ley position down the hall are going to help them out.
Of course when a 1st level guard encounters a 12th level player character, and sees themwading through their allies and brandishing weapons so magical that they glow, their first instinct tends to be to run. This is something else that video games should have no trouble emulating; intelligent creatures should be able to size up their opponents. Only the most foolhardy raw recruit is going to try to stop the super powerful opponent (unless there are about a hundred raw recruits, which makes it a more interesting and difficult encounter), and so will either run or surrender.
Of course the bear that you randomly encounter in the woods might not be so smart.
has got to be in a big pile on the floor. When you run out of floor space, that's nature's way of telling you to find a bigger apartment or get rid of some stuff. Either that, or just pile higher.
I guess I have to jump onto this "me too" bandwagon. It almost makes perfect sense really.... no longer will the Sith Lords at the RIAA have to find that special someone with pop star umph. Think Britney Spears or Shakira could use a little tricking out? No problem, instant customization for your viewing pleasure. And since we're not talking about real people, there shouldn't be that much trouble getting them to take their clothes off.
Hell, lets take that next step.... everyone who thinks that Actress X in the latest blockbuster would be sexier as a redhead can just toggle that in the main menu of the dvd. Why be stuck with actors who might not meet your physical ideal of what the character should be when you can just tweak them a bit.
Yeah, I know, we're a bit of a way off from that, but lots of possibility for regional and ethnic customizations not just of individual performers, but of songs, maybe even entire scripts. We could really have some fun blurring cinema here; say you're a republican and don't like that Oliver Stone's Nixon brings up the black sheep of your political party, no problem, he's a democrat at the push of a button.
Crap, now I don't know whether I'm excited or afraid.
A unanimous jury conviction is one of the checks and balances in the criminal justice system. Say they pass a law making posession of a copy of the constitution by a non-federal authority punishable by 20 years in federal prison. A jury can find someone not guilty of a law if they find that law to be uncounscienable, and their job is done. So yes, a jury can simply ignore the letter of the law and vote their own conscience. woohoo checks and balances.
Another check and balance, however, allows a judge to set aside any jury verdict. Note that most judges will go through their entire careers without ever doing so, but if a judge feels that the jury has blatantly refused to do their "job" and has completely ignored the statues involved, then the judge can set aside the verdict they render and come up with his/her own. So even if you do convince the jury that you're not guilty of murder, by say, showing them a videotape of yourself giving a speech at an OSS convention at the same tmie the cops said you pulled the trigger, the judge may decide that the jury didn't pay enough attention to rules of evidence, etc, and render you a guilty verdict anyway.
And with Bush trying to pack the courts with fasci^^^^^^conservatives, I think we can expect to see more of this in the years to come.
but the words "Duke Nuke Em Forever" keeping playing through the back of my mind.
In all seriousness, I know a couple people who aren't ready to make the switch because of a "lack" of office and web authoring programs, and somehting that thinks it can rough up front page or dreamweaver might get a few more people to turn a more serious eye towards Open Source.
So now we just have to hope that it's not vapor- or underachiever-ware.
Where do I become a linux hit man? Actually, I think it would be much cooler if they called it "Elite Linux Covert Operations and Special Services Isn't ELBOSSSIE" or ELBOSSSIE for short.. We could hunt down those dirty non-compliers.... they'd never know what hit 'em.
So I know that this is the choir and all, but as a thought, there are companies out there that make insane amounts of money thanks to Linux products. They all know the rules going into the game, and if they decide they don't want to play them after they've made a killing in stock options, then TFB. This is a special sore spot for me, as one of the companies that I used to support did exactly this, developed a few improvements, scored a few patents, and as far as I know never released one line of code.
Then again, in my more perverse moments, I would kind of like to see the GPL sdtruck down in court, because that would create the legal precedent necessary to put a stop to shrink wrap liscences forever.... unless the courts were controlled by corporate fanboys like the ones at Forbes.
Yeah, and mine has these cyberpsychic implants installed in her mind that send commands to the ones installed in mine. That way my will bends to her own without me even knowing it. It works out reat, the only down side being.... wait, what am I talking about, there is no down side. You know, I spend too much time on slashdot, I think I should go make dinner and then then clean up the kitchen.... mistress will be so pleased!
Why did the article authors mention the guy being a possible white supremacist? They say that in the first paragraph, as if it were something important, and then don't bother going on to connect that to the events described in the article.
Pure and simple, they did this to make him seem more human and likeable. Everyone knows that racists are intellectually impaired, this lets everyone know that he is stupid, and therefore maybe did not realize the depths of the evil that is spamming.
I mean come on now... the guy is a SPAMMER. It really doesn't get much worse than that.
Think about it, through 7 degrees of seperation from the original duper, you get traded a duped item. 2 weeks later your account is deleted because your posessed a duped item. Trust me, this is not a good thing. Deleting the duped item is another story, but given the number of duped items that are out on bnet, I don't think anyone who has ever traded with someone can say with 100% certainty that they have never posessed a duped item.
" it takes the prize for taking what should have been entirely implausible sequences, and setting them in a world where they were entirely believable"
I completely agree, but I guess where we don't see eye to eye on this is that I thought that ALL of those action sequences, from Neo vs. 100 Smiths through mr "You only know someone by fighting them" and shoot out at frenchy's place, were entirely boring. They looked fake. They felt contrived. Maybe if there was more action (and by this, I mean Dramatic action in the classical sense of the word) and less fighting, the movie wuold be able to stand on its own.
And as far as I'm concerned, if I have to buy two tickets, it's two movies. I don't need to see Revolutions to know that Reloaded was a waste of a chunk of my life that I'm not going to get back.
"If you don't recognize that the entire movie was simply putting the discussions into practice, then I can see how the discussions might have a "shoehorned in" feel"
And I'll even buy this point, but if (and this is a big if) the movie was putting the discussion into practice, then it did a bad job of it. Oedipus emerging on stage after digging out his own eyes: there is a man who has wrestled with fate for a couple of hours and shown that prophecy does not reveal all. Neo flying at warp speeds to save Trinity after a run in with something that may or may not be what he thinks, and may or may not have told him the truth; that's exactly what we expect to see.
Jar Jar, at least, displays more acting talent: he is liscensed animated character playing liscensed animated character. And Jar Jar has far more integrity: he would never have stared in Gross Point Break.
I know I'm asking for a modding down on this one, but the only reason that Reeves could pull off Neo in Matrix was because Neo was essentially clueless and lost through the entire movie.
Not that I'm actually defending Jar Jar by any stretch of the imagination here, and writing him to the side in Ep. II was a major good move... but on the other hand it was also such a great setup that this witless and goofy appointed representative of the in absentia senator could be duped into spearheading a motion that is completely contrary to what his boss wanted on his bosses behalf. But yeah, I personally like my owbn custom edit of Ep I where all of the things Jar Jar does to make the youngins laugh made the cutting room floor. The movie plays so much better that way.
Oh yeah, and the force is no longer caused by faeries that live in your blood.
Maybe Ep. I had more action figures in the toy stores, but it was no where near as lame as Reloaded. I mean come on now; any of the redeeming qualities of Matrix were completely lacking here. Worse yet, Reloaded tries to cover up for the fact that it is a lame action flick by trying to insert some random ten minute banters about causality and free will. I don't think Star Wars ever pretends to be more than it is (maybe we really WANT it to be), but ten to twenty minutes of material excerpted from the Philosophy 100 Cliff Notes does not a thoughtful movie make.
At least Phantom Menace had some good visual/aural moments, and furthermore, it completely lacked 1) Keanu Reeves' ass and 2) Carrie-Ann Moss' ass, which are two things that I wish I had gone my entire life without ever seeing.
I'll take Natalie Portman any day, even if she is in gauche makeup and baroque costumes half the time:)
Afterall, Nintendo has basically had complete dominance of the handheld market for the last decade or so. Given the poor showing of Gamecube among the other alternatives, one would think that they would do everything they can muster to keep their portable dominance.
And while I wouldn't say that the games for GBA are breath takingly original, I don't think I have thought that of any games I've played since I picked up... uh... damn, I can't remember ever thinking that. Old age and cynicism are starting to get to me.
In any case, the GBA titles that I have actually bought have been pleasing for the most part. I have looked into the homebrew stuff, but ever since Lik Sang lost in court, I have been trying to find another alternative to getting the games onto an actual GBA (I'm open to suggestions).
Not like I'm actually planning on getting an NGage though; unless of course they have some SERIOUSLY impressive titles (which I am equally cynical about).
But seriously, if anyone out there could point me in the direction of a good place to get some stuff to write custom apps to the GBA, I would be much obliged.
I use Notepad in so far as I use windows on computers that I don't have install perms on. I do remember a nifty alternative to note pad called edit pad that I used back in my pre-linux days, it was basically notepad on caffeine (tabbed windows being its big selling pojnt), but lacking any of the excesses of their other software. You can keep your fancy fonts and other excesses of the Eunoch Word program, real power users work in ASCII:)
(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct
Yeah, but the funny thing is that at my college if you were to get into any trouble outside of the college, you would be punished for it by not only the local authorities, but also by the laughable student disciplinary committee. They can get away with it because it doesn't amount to a court so much as it does an internal review board, but it seems to me that a college will do everything in its power to control the private conduct of its students.
I don't think its fair to say a university should be acountable for the conduct of its students in these matters, but they can take some precautions (like blocking incoming ports used by p2p clients) to minimize this risk, and they can certainly take a stand in making sure that when the RIAA/MPAA come knocking and demanding student's names that the *AA has at least followed proper legal procedures (vis a vi this out of state subpoena crap), and finally, if the university does want to take such a hands off aproach, pretending that the student is still going to be able to afford to attend, they should damn well not hand down any additional punishments from atop their ivory tower.
As I recall, this guy was arrested for hacking (or at least attempting it) federal sites, not for saying he wanted to over throw the US Government. While I agree that it speaks ill of our legal system that such a crime may count as terrorism, a year in federal prison is a comparitively light sentence when you consider what some other people have done for similar crimes.
And by the way, overthrowing the US Government is one of those ideas that started with the brilliant Ben Franklin, who thought we shuold have a revolution once every 17 years or so.
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever NEVER access any critical data from a public terminal under any circumstances EVER.
The corallary to this maxim is to make sure that the password of an account that you access from a public terminal is different from any password that you access from a non-public terminal. Then again, the truly paranoid have different password anyway....
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree... for me, the major factor in deciding whether or not I'm going to get a gaming system is the fun of playing the games. There are a lot of great games out there for the GBA, and if I ever get bored with the new ones, I've got a lot of old GB games hanging around that I can pop in. And what with a couplemp3 player add ons and a video player on the way, the system is plenty customizeable (not to mention the number of people who develop homebrew games, and the wide availability of emulators and development kits.
For the kind of money that these folks are talking about, I want a unit that will run my favorite text editor, have a web browser, and will compile code. And it better damned well play mp3s too. That's a serious chunk of money, and if I'm going to shell it out, it needs to be a serious machine.
I'm not saying that there isn't room for competition with the GBA, but anyone who does has the problem of having to compete with everything that GBA offers for about the same price, or less. On the other hand, there will always be folks out there looking for the real 3d experience, but when you've got such a tiny screen, I have a feeling that the most phenomenal 3d engine wouldn't make the game up to snuff for that crowd.
I wish Sony best of luck on this, as any success they have will only motivate Nintendo to do better, but realistically, even if the NGage did live up to all of its hype, the price would still doom it in the end, and Sony is looking at a similar scenario.
The author has a lot of problems here that have been pointed out several times over, and some good points as well. One thing that seems to completely escape him is that he must apply deconstructionist techniques in order to deconstruct the particular brand of deconstructionism that he has run into. In and of itself, deconstructionism is merely another tool with which a text (yes, it is the accepted term for anything that can be interpreted) can be read (conotatively meaning "interpreted").
Think of it as a sort of reverse engineering. You break something down into component parts and try to find out how it works. One of those component parts is the author. In the case of "JFK was not a homosexual," we need to know how the author feels about the state of homosexuality; if he is homophobic, than I would say yes, it CAN be legitimately interpreted as a statement of superiority of character. It could even be taken as a statement of envy.... in the context of descibing how many women JFK had sex with, for example. However, in the context given, it is little more than a butterfly under glass. Maybe it's useful in trying to understand the author better (why this particular example), particularly in the context of understanding some of his other writing (particularly about JFK or sexuality).
You shouldn't think of deconstruction as masturbatory any more than you should think of grokking a block of code as masturbatory. Yes, it is completely possible for deconstructionist critics to move in circles in never ending battles of who has the most style in presenting their argunments, however, as I have seen pointed out here, this is a lot like obfuscated code contests (yes, both of those are primarily self indulgeant excercises). However, one of the primary reasons why arguments are so often deconstructed is to determine whether or not the person is wrong. If there is an error in logic or in fact (Like a critic making an argument based on Huck and Jim being on the Colorado River in Huckleberry Finn), a deconstruction of the argument is bound to reveal it.
As someone who spent ample amounts of time in both my college's English and Computer Science departments, I am surprised about the misunderstanding that I often here the geek crowd voice about literary/philisophical/theatrical criticism. A good body of such criticism is language based, and shares much in common with Comp. Sci's language and Machine theory.
Anyway, allow me to offer an alternative reading of the reaction to his introduction. The nods he was getting were merely encouragement from an "in-crowd" trying to be polite to an outsider who was trying to fit. The laughter was due to the fact that everyone knew the author was BSing, and when it became apparent that the author knew it too, there was nothing impolite about acknowledging the fact. Of course, to know for sure one way or the other, we would have to ask the attendees, so I suppose we'll just have to live with possible interpretations for the time being.
to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave; a wonderful place where things like this quote: "he was never formally charged, but kept at Qincheng Prison for over a year" could never possibly happen. Yes sir, it's good to know that we don't have fascist prisons like Qincheng and leaders who appoint themselves! Our fascist prisons aren't located on our soil, and we have a whole other branch of government that appoints the leader of its choosing.
It feels so good to live in what history will one day call "Fortress America."
While DMing a couple paper and dice rpgs, the silliness of having random encounters in certain situations occured to me as well. Moving around through the wilderness is one thing, and here random encounters can spice things up a bit as long as we keep in mind certain aspects of realism. Walk around in the woods at the right time of year for long enough and you will encounter a bear or a moose, and in a fantasy world where the local region is being terrorized by goblins, it only makes sense that you shouldcome across the occaisional goblin war party, but when storming a castle, encounters tend to be very focussed. When Mr. Evil King knows where you are, a winning stretegy for him is to move the maximum amount of his most powerful soldiers to that same position. Of course, he still might want to have a few guards for himself and his treasure horde just in case a few of the layers slip by, or it's some kind of ruse.
I find that a good strategy, and one that is eminently emulateable by video games, is to place guards at key positions, and then have a select number of guards who are "on patrol." When one of these on patrol guards runs across the players, chances are the guards standing at the ley position down the hall are going to help them out.
Of course when a 1st level guard encounters a 12th level player character, and sees themwading through their allies and brandishing weapons so magical that they glow, their first instinct tends to be to run. This is something else that video games should have no trouble emulating; intelligent creatures should be able to size up their opponents. Only the most foolhardy raw recruit is going to try to stop the super powerful opponent (unless there are about a hundred raw recruits, which makes it a more interesting and difficult encounter), and so will either run or surrender.
Of course the bear that you randomly encounter in the woods might not be so smart.
has got to be in a big pile on the floor. When you run out of floor space, that's nature's way of telling you to find a bigger apartment or get rid of some stuff. Either that, or just pile higher.
I guess I have to jump onto this "me too" bandwagon. It almost makes perfect sense really.... no longer will the Sith Lords at the RIAA have to find that special someone with pop star umph. Think Britney Spears or Shakira could use a little tricking out? No problem, instant customization for your viewing pleasure. And since we're not talking about real people, there shouldn't be that much trouble getting them to take their clothes off.
Hell, lets take that next step.... everyone who thinks that Actress X in the latest blockbuster would be sexier as a redhead can just toggle that in the main menu of the dvd. Why be stuck with actors who might not meet your physical ideal of what the character should be when you can just tweak them a bit.
Yeah, I know, we're a bit of a way off from that, but lots of possibility for regional and ethnic customizations not just of individual performers, but of songs, maybe even entire scripts. We could really have some fun blurring cinema here; say you're a republican and don't like that Oliver Stone's Nixon brings up the black sheep of your political party, no problem, he's a democrat at the push of a button.
Crap, now I don't know whether I'm excited or afraid.
Consider this post bookmarked, from this time forward, I will simply send people this link when they ask me what people talk about on slashdot.
A unanimous jury conviction is one of the checks and balances in the criminal justice system. Say they pass a law making posession of a copy of the constitution by a non-federal authority punishable by 20 years in federal prison. A jury can find someone not guilty of a law if they find that law to be uncounscienable, and their job is done. So yes, a jury can simply ignore the letter of the law and vote their own conscience. woohoo checks and balances.
Another check and balance, however, allows a judge to set aside any jury verdict. Note that most judges will go through their entire careers without ever doing so, but if a judge feels that the jury has blatantly refused to do their "job" and has completely ignored the statues involved, then the judge can set aside the verdict they render and come up with his/her own. So even if you do convince the jury that you're not guilty of murder, by say, showing them a videotape of yourself giving a speech at an OSS convention at the same tmie the cops said you pulled the trigger, the judge may decide that the jury didn't pay enough attention to rules of evidence, etc, and render you a guilty verdict anyway.
And with Bush trying to pack the courts with fasci^^^^^^conservatives, I think we can expect to see more of this in the years to come.
but the words "Duke Nuke Em Forever" keeping playing through the back of my mind.
In all seriousness, I know a couple people who aren't ready to make the switch because of a "lack" of office and web authoring programs, and somehting that thinks it can rough up front page or dreamweaver might get a few more people to turn a more serious eye towards Open Source.
So now we just have to hope that it's not vapor- or underachiever-ware.
Where do I become a linux hit man? Actually, I think it would be much cooler if they called it "Elite Linux Covert Operations and Special Services Isn't ELBOSSSIE" or ELBOSSSIE for short.. We could hunt down those dirty non-compliers.... they'd never know what hit 'em.
So I know that this is the choir and all, but as a thought, there are companies out there that make insane amounts of money thanks to Linux products. They all know the rules going into the game, and if they decide they don't want to play them after they've made a killing in stock options, then TFB. This is a special sore spot for me, as one of the companies that I used to support did exactly this, developed a few improvements, scored a few patents, and as far as I know never released one line of code.
Then again, in my more perverse moments, I would kind of like to see the GPL sdtruck down in court, because that would create the legal precedent necessary to put a stop to shrink wrap liscences forever.... unless the courts were controlled by corporate fanboys like the ones at Forbes.
Yeah, and mine has these cyberpsychic implants installed in her mind that send commands to the ones installed in mine. That way my will bends to her own without me even knowing it. It works out reat, the only down side being.... wait, what am I talking about, there is no down side. You know, I spend too much time on slashdot, I think I should go make dinner and then then clean up the kitchen.... mistress will be so pleased!
Why did the article authors mention the guy being a possible white supremacist? They say that in the first paragraph, as if it were something important, and then don't bother going on to connect that to the events described in the article.
Pure and simple, they did this to make him seem more human and likeable. Everyone knows that racists are intellectually impaired, this lets everyone know that he is stupid, and therefore maybe did not realize the depths of the evil that is spamming.
I mean come on now... the guy is a SPAMMER. It really doesn't get much worse than that.
Think about it, through 7 degrees of seperation from the original duper, you get traded a duped item. 2 weeks later your account is deleted because your posessed a duped item. Trust me, this is not a good thing. Deleting the duped item is another story, but given the number of duped items that are out on bnet, I don't think anyone who has ever traded with someone can say with 100% certainty that they have never posessed a duped item.
" it takes the prize for taking what should have been entirely implausible sequences, and setting them in a world where they were entirely believable"
I completely agree, but I guess where we don't see eye to eye on this is that I thought that ALL of those action sequences, from Neo vs. 100 Smiths through mr "You only know someone by fighting them" and shoot out at frenchy's place, were entirely boring. They looked fake. They felt contrived. Maybe if there was more action (and by this, I mean Dramatic action in the classical sense of the word) and less fighting, the movie wuold be able to stand on its own.
And as far as I'm concerned, if I have to buy two tickets, it's two movies. I don't need to see Revolutions to know that Reloaded was a waste of a chunk of my life that I'm not going to get back.
"If you don't recognize that the entire movie was simply putting the discussions into practice, then I can see how the discussions might have a "shoehorned in" feel"
And I'll even buy this point, but if (and this is a big if) the movie was putting the discussion into practice, then it did a bad job of it. Oedipus emerging on stage after digging out his own eyes: there is a man who has wrestled with fate for a couple of hours and shown that prophecy does not reveal all. Neo flying at warp speeds to save Trinity after a run in with something that may or may not be what he thinks, and may or may not have told him the truth; that's exactly what we expect to see.
Keanu Reeves
I rest mine.
Jar Jar, at least, displays more acting talent: he is liscensed animated character playing liscensed animated character. And Jar Jar has far more integrity: he would never have stared in Gross Point Break.
I know I'm asking for a modding down on this one, but the only reason that Reeves could pull off Neo in Matrix was because Neo was essentially clueless and lost through the entire movie.
Not that I'm actually defending Jar Jar by any stretch of the imagination here, and writing him to the side in Ep. II was a major good move... but on the other hand it was also such a great setup that this witless and goofy appointed representative of the in absentia senator could be duped into spearheading a motion that is completely contrary to what his boss wanted on his bosses behalf. But yeah, I personally like my owbn custom edit of Ep I where all of the things Jar Jar does to make the youngins laugh made the cutting room floor. The movie plays so much better that way.
Oh yeah, and the force is no longer caused by faeries that live in your blood.
Maybe Ep. I had more action figures in the toy stores, but it was no where near as lame as Reloaded. I mean come on now; any of the redeeming qualities of Matrix were completely lacking here. Worse yet, Reloaded tries to cover up for the fact that it is a lame action flick by trying to insert some random ten minute banters about causality and free will. I don't think Star Wars ever pretends to be more than it is (maybe we really WANT it to be), but ten to twenty minutes of material excerpted from the Philosophy 100 Cliff Notes does not a thoughtful movie make.
:)
At least Phantom Menace had some good visual/aural moments, and furthermore, it completely lacked 1) Keanu Reeves' ass and 2) Carrie-Ann Moss' ass, which are two things that I wish I had gone my entire life without ever seeing.
I'll take Natalie Portman any day, even if she is in gauche makeup and baroque costumes half the time
Knowing Gamespy, we'll see the top 25 underrated games in a couple of weeks.
Has the capacity to cause death and serious injury. Quick! Kill all the plants!
Hey, wait a minute, Carbon-dioxide can cause death and serious injury too.....
Afterall, Nintendo has basically had complete dominance of the handheld market for the last decade or so. Given the poor showing of Gamecube among the other alternatives, one would think that they would do everything they can muster to keep their portable dominance.
And while I wouldn't say that the games for GBA are breath takingly original, I don't think I have thought that of any games I've played since I picked up... uh... damn, I can't remember ever thinking that. Old age and cynicism are starting to get to me.
In any case, the GBA titles that I have actually bought have been pleasing for the most part. I have looked into the homebrew stuff, but ever since Lik Sang lost in court, I have been trying to find another alternative to getting the games onto an actual GBA (I'm open to suggestions).
Not like I'm actually planning on getting an NGage though; unless of course they have some SERIOUSLY impressive titles (which I am equally cynical about).
But seriously, if anyone out there could point me in the direction of a good place to get some stuff to write custom apps to the GBA, I would be much obliged.
I use Notepad in so far as I use windows on computers that I don't have install perms on. I do remember a nifty alternative to note pad called edit pad that I used back in my pre-linux days, it was basically notepad on caffeine (tabbed windows being its big selling pojnt), but lacking any of the excesses of their other software. You can keep your fancy fonts and other excesses of the Eunoch Word program, real power users work in ASCII :)
Well as long as they continue their Notepad development, I'll be a happy man.
(c)olleges and universities generally do not have a legal duty to control students' private conduct
Yeah, but the funny thing is that at my college if you were to get into any trouble outside of the college, you would be punished for it by not only the local authorities, but also by the laughable student disciplinary committee. They can get away with it because it doesn't amount to a court so much as it does an internal review board, but it seems to me that a college will do everything in its power to control the private conduct of its students.
I don't think its fair to say a university should be acountable for the conduct of its students in these matters, but they can take some precautions (like blocking incoming ports used by p2p clients) to minimize this risk, and they can certainly take a stand in making sure that when the RIAA/MPAA come knocking and demanding student's names that the *AA has at least followed proper legal procedures (vis a vi this out of state subpoena crap), and finally, if the university does want to take such a hands off aproach, pretending that the student is still going to be able to afford to attend, they should damn well not hand down any additional punishments from atop their ivory tower.
1) When is the torching of the SCO offices mentioned in the poll going to take pace?
2) Should I bring a few extra torches?
3) Is it a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pitchfork) party?
As I recall, this guy was arrested for hacking (or at least attempting it) federal sites, not for saying he wanted to over throw the US Government. While I agree that it speaks ill of our legal system that such a crime may count as terrorism, a year in federal prison is a comparitively light sentence when you consider what some other people have done for similar crimes.
And by the way, overthrowing the US Government is one of those ideas that started with the brilliant Ben Franklin, who thought we shuold have a revolution once every 17 years or so.
Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever NEVER access any critical data from a public terminal under any circumstances EVER.
The corallary to this maxim is to make sure that the password of an account that you access from a public terminal is different from any password that you access from a non-public terminal. Then again, the truly paranoid have different password anyway....