Do you feel your character was belittled by TNG's writers? In the film The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes reads the line "You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Wesley". Do you feel that no one would surrender the Dread Pirate Ensign Wesley Crusher? Is this problem specifically related to the name Wesley? Might this problem have been dealt with by a better surname? Ensign Wesley Ball-Crusher? Or maybe just Ensign Ball-Crusher, for that matter. What techniques, were you able to relive your tenure as Ensign Ball-Crusher, would you use to deal with the problem of your character's unpopularity. I suggest the following:
1) Being an attractive young woman
2) In a spandex jumpsuit
Number 2, you have covered already. Number 1 would be a more difficult solution. Will you, at any point in the future, be an attractive young woman? Have you, in your acting career, ever been a young woman? Can I have a date? Thank you.
Guys...we are at war. The normal rules do not count in war. In times of war the needs of the many outweigh privacy arguments.
Why is it that specifically, in "times of war", the rights of the populace are negated by the "needs of the many"? Why not in "times of crime" or "times of dissidence"? Certainly, it would be beneficial to the "needs of the many" for the FBI to use Carnivore and Echelon in more domestic crime, should it net them a criminal conviction. Catching serial killers or convicting pimps or drug lords would certainly justify negation of privacy accross the country. It would certainly serve the "needs of the many".
The problem with your argument in the context of American politics is that your statement is a staunchly utilitarian one. If America were utilitarian, it wouldn't need any rights at all. It would allow the government to snoop around in its citizens' personal business in whatever way served the greater good. However, America is not based on any sort of utilitarian principle, but rather the exact opposite, rights theory. Rights are not something one can choose "when it's convenient". They are allocated to us solely on the bases that we are thinking, breathing human beings. The government, furthermore, is the last body which should be able to choose, whenever it seems convenient, to wave any one of our rights for "the good of the many".
If you're a utilitarian, then the needs of the many always outweight the rights of the individual, and our government need only decide at what level and under what circumstances it no longer has to concern itself with those rights.
However, America isn't a police state (yet) and it would probably be best if it stuck to the rights theory expounded on by its forefathers rather than, in times of trouble, deciding that whether or not Americans actually have any rights is a matter of opinion on the part of the government.
If "freedom is under attack" as the jingoists have phrased it, and "freedom" is our real concern, negating the rights of the populace is the most tragically ironic response to this massacre that I could possibly imagine.
Something that also should be mentioned is that the SD Card slot doesn't support the SD Memory card security function.
This is good news for all of us who oppose copyright-protected media. It is also nothing new, of course. Casio made the same wise decision to employ the SD technology (with its potential advantages over the existing MMC spec) minus copyright-protection. On devices that feature MP3 playback and e-book viewing as key selling points, restricting use of MP3s and e-books would be a hard move to justify.
1) This copycat drug will not be as safe as Roche's
Apparently you aren't fully acquainted with what constitutes a "copycat drug". As an example, I will use a "copycat drug" with which I am well acquainted. I take Carbamazepine twice daily for epilepsy. Carbamazepine is just the chemical name used by generic brands for the commercial drug "Tegretol". The chemical structure of Tegretol is as follows:
5H-dibenz(b,f)azepine-5-carboxamide
The chemical structure of Carbamazepine is as follows:
5H-dibenz(b,f)azepine-5-carboxamide.
That's right. They're exactly the same. Carbamazepine is a molecule. The generic brand contains the same molecule as the commercial. They don't use "low quality atoms" or "bulk quality electrons" in the generic brand. They're the same high-quality molecular structures as in the commercial molecule.
2) The company that contracts to make the drug is surely out to make a profit. Why should a random government contractor be allowed to profit from the R&D invested by Roche? What corners will this contractor cut to make it cheaper? Considering the volume production, Roche can probably do it cheaper but quality costs money.
No, that doesn't seem particularly fair to Roche. Then again, it doesn't seem particularly fair that millions of people are dying of AIDS as we speak. Corporate fair-play may be a legitimate concern in the realm of corporate issues, but in the realm of human life and the preservation thereof, corporate fair-play doesn't rank high on my list of contravening issues. And this idea of a molecule having "quality" is coming up again. Troublesome one, that.
6) Where will the madness end. Does intellectual property really mean nothing?
It's not so much that intellectual property means nothing. It's more like...intellectual property means significantly less than the well-being of the millions currently suffering - and suffering is the right word - from AIDS. Sure, "stealing from the rich" isn't particularly 'fair', but "giving to the poor" sometimes makes it a necessary trade-off.
The -ise verb endings are still common in the British Commonwealth. They are particularly alive in South African and Indian English, but also in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian English.
They exist because the original -ise verbs originated from French, which spelled them with an 's'. For example "realise" is the traditional spelling of that particular verb, as it derives from the French verb "réaliser". Another example is "paralyse" which derives from French "paralyser", but has become "paralyze" in American English.
I am pleased to see that the libertarian-minded slashdot readership has joined the other ideological groups already opposing the FTAA in its current form.
Opposition to the FTAA is hardly a new thing. Many will remember the recent Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, where the FTAA was a major issue. There, a throng of protesters, estimated between 25,000 and 35,000 in number clashed with 6,000 riot police over the agreement.
Trying to oppose something as big as the FTAA, however, can be less than a walk in the park. I was walking down a street in the Quebec City centre where a circle of demonstrators were sitting, making speeches and singing protest songs, just before they were hit by a volley of tear gas cannisters from riot police. Political repression ain't just an American phenomenon. America saw it in Seattle, but the rest of the free world is getting the benefit of the experience these days.
Just how serious expressing ones political opinion can get these days became obvious to me as I watched the rubber-coated bullets fire and the tear gas fly. A Canadian Member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, who attended the protest, was shot with a rubber bullet, himself.
The peaks in the RTS genre, for me, however, have been those games that actually managed to add something truly unique to it. Shogun: Total War was the game that saved RTS, for me, simply because it managed to escape the incredibly monotonous tried and true RTS formula and RTS "look" and, instead of just creating new units to battle each other in groups of a dozen or so at once, allowed hundreds of warriors to battle in huge 3D landscapes, subject to weather conditions, fatigue, morale and terrain (planning the precise location, on plains, an downward slope, a forest glen, a valley, etc., at which you will fall on the enemy army is absolutely essential in Shogun).
A lot has been said over the years about the virtues of mixing genres and some of it is just hype, but when it comes to RTS's, I consider it the solution.
Battlezone is another game that acknowledged that solution (and before Shogun did). It managed to revolutionise the RTS genre by throwing in elements from FPS and Arcade genres. Too many RTS games look like just a new skin someone hacked for the Warcraft interface. I give a great deal of credit to games like Battlezone and Shogun that threw that interface away altogether.
...whose military practices were so notoriously cruel that they garnered disaproval even among the Roman Senate.
I found a good, if short, history of the Gaulish conquest here:
http://www.livius.org/caa-can/caesar/caesar04.html
Humour Is Subjective (i.e., do not tell other people what constitutes a funny subject)
Take an example: If I were to make a joke regarding Rome annihilating Gaul, would you respond in disgust and anger? Probably not. If I were to make a joke about the Holocaust, would you, then? Probably, yes, indeed. Why? Because you feel more of a close personal attachment to the event of the Holocaust than to the even of the conquering of Gaul. They're both tragic genocides on a similar scale. One is not greater than the other, but we have more personal, emotional interest in tip-toeing around the issue of the Holocaust. That doesn't make it rational in any way shape or form, however.
neither does the ignorance of elected officials when it comes to technology, or any other topic, for that matter. Sure, we all get a chuckle from hearing how dumb people can be, but these elected officials are there to make laws, and if they're clueless about certain facts, we end up with stuff like the DMCA.
So because legislation is a "serious issue", it should not be joked about? Are you saying that any joke that involves circumstances that are less than beneficial should not be made? Making fun of our misfortunes is nothing if not the basis for comedy itself. Generally, I find that people who refuse to view the world with any sense of humour become extremely cynical.
I want a doctor
to take your picture
so I can look at you from inside as well
You've got me turning up
and turning down
and turning in
and turning 'round
I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so
I can understand the need for aggresive advertising, in these harsh times, to fund the, otherwise, free Internet media. It makes sense.
Every once in a while, though, I'll be reading an informative and interesting site, and a big huge flash advertisement will pop up right in front of my surfing material. I stop rationalising. It is times like these that a tremendous urge overtakes me. It is an urge to seek out and find, wherever they may be, the advertising execs who came up with such an idea, perhaps they'll be watching a movie, or reading the newspaper on a park bench. It is at just such a time that, I think to myself, I will sneak up behind them and, at whatever moment is most inconvenient, place a large, obnoxious poster for my employer between them and the medium they are currently enjoying. If I catch them in a particularly private bout of reading, burried deep in an article of Hustler or Playboy, for this medium I will place in front of them many posters at once, obstructing, sometimes, their entire view. Every time they get rid of one such ad, I will bring three or four more up to take its place. EVENTUALLY THEY WILL HAVE TO CRASH PLAYBOY AND REBOOT THEIR READING SESSION JUST TO GET RID OF ALL THE FRIGGING...but I've let myself get a little carried away...no matter. Revenge...will...come.
That's right. Check your self-respect at the door gentlemen, because this is the coup de gras for every geek on earth. Now we can revel in the luscious, voluptuous disgusted self-loathing only a genuine RealDoll(tm) can give.
Drawing on the same material, a Genuine Jabba RealDoll might not be quite as marketable a commodity, but would, nevertheless, make for an interesting piece of furniture for those hard-to-fill living rooms.
Nice try. I still have a dozen reasons why I prefer my Handspring, not the least of which is cost (and battery life, and screen quality...)
Screen quality is a reason to choose Visor over PocketPC? Really? Although my experience with the newest visors is limited to in-store demos and reviews, I've never read a review, even from the more palm-biased sources (which I used to read and froth over when I, myself, was a PilotPerson(tm) and couldn't play full-length movies or Quake on my PDA) which claimed that any Palm or Visor screen beat out the IPAQ's LCD, let alone the superior (indoors, at least) Casio screen. The Visor Prism is currently 160x160. 240x320 is long since standard on PocketPC units. Lets not forget that that 33MHz processor isn't going to be displaying high-quality MPEGs or the kind of media that make use of such a screen any time soon. In my experience, even the IPAQ's 206MHz StrongARM has trouble with higher resolution MPEG under PocketTV. The Dragonball, meanwhile, chokes to death on anything watchable.
Price? The Casio EM-500, last I checked, was $375 at Cyberian Outpost and $378 at Buy.com. The Visor Prism, on the other hand, is $399 off Handspring's own site.
Battery Life? I really can't identify with this one. It's quite possible, I concede, that my usage patters are just totally different from others', but I've never found the battery life of a piece of hardware to be the deciding factor regarding whether it is "good" or "bad" hardware. I suppose if I played movies on loop at full volume on my PocketPC all day long, it might wear out by the end of the day and the battery wouldn't survive until its night-time charge, but that isn't typical usage for me or anyone. Furthermore, I have an extra $15 battery which I can throw in if I need an extra 7-8 hours power. Heck, if battery life were really my fetish I could by ten of them for $150 and power the thing on battery for a year, under my normal use.
Now I know if I were a field researcher and my boss were to equip me with an IPAQ, my productivity would increase tenfold...in Pocket Quake. I think it's important that even researchers in the field have what office workers have had for years: work computers the growth of whose pr0n archives is directly proportional to the increase in their cumulative Solitaire scores.
Solely for the sake of taking the record for the largest number of virtually identical explanations of a given fact in Slashdot history, I will now post that Swordfish was originally used as a password in the Marx Brother's movie Horse Feathers
While I'm here on the redundancy bandwagon I shall further take your time to post, in pursuit of equally belaboured drivel, that the Gameboy Advance has a screen that can only be seen by certain breeds of Canadian Arctic Spotted Owl because battery life is more important than being able to perceive what is going on in a computer game and, further, conclude with an agonizing rebuttal, reading that The Gameboy Advance may only be 15MHz, but it uses a highly optimised(tm) RISC CPU (Q: as opposed to a highly de-optimised RISC CPU?) which is as fast as an SNES.
I would go on about Linux vs. BSD and Macs: are they still viable? but this would eventually necessitate that I summarily smash my head directly through my monitor in a desperate last-ditch effort to end the horror slowly enveloping me.
> It will drive competition for better technologies, which is a goog thing in such a immature market.
Just as it has been a good thing(tm) for DVD Rewritables? I take your point, but I'd tend to think that the Windows vs. Linux war (which can be considered a war in roughly the same sense that the united Indian forces vs. Custer was a war), as a competition between existing software platforms, is something completely different from a competition between potential hardware standards. The problem is, hardware wars so often seem to result in not the emergence of the superior platform, nor even any leading platform good or bad. They sometimes just result in technological stalemate. This is where we stand with regard to DVD-RAM, apparently. It's a war of attrition. It probably won't end until someone is just forced to give up and the competitors fall like dominoes to the better (or, more likely, better marketed) standard.
As for the "that much better" standard finally emerging, I may just be a cynical old nerd (and one prone to cliches), but I have to evoke the old Beta/VHS archetype. "Better marketing" certainly won out there, as it is often prone to do, over simply "better". Hordes of ubergeeks, further, would think me negligent if I omitted mention of the Amiga, and its own failure.
As another poster said, the IPAQ makes gaming impossibile due to its one-button-push-at-a-time problem. This problem isn't fixable by any software hack. It's a hardware problem. The buttons were put in series (!) so there's no way to emulate a console or handheld in any realistic or tolerable way on the current hardware.
You can however, do what you described just fine on the Casio E-125, EM-500, EM-700 and (if you can stand the low clock rate) the HP Jornada.
For a complete list of PocketPC emulators, go to Pocketgamer.org. These have allowed me to emulate, on my Pocket PC
- NES
- Gameboy
- SNES
- Sega Genesis
- Sega Master System
- MAME
- Palm
- DOS (Ultima IV is running happily)
- Sega Game Gear
Terrible accents can really be an irritation, yeah. Worse than any movie accent I've ever heard were the accents of the voice actors in Age of Empires 2. The Scots accent in the William Wallace campaign was so grating I had to turn off the sound.
On the other hand, however, I'd argue that how accurate an accent is isn't what's important. What's important is how accurate the audience perceives it to be. A perfect example of this principle is Shakespeare. No matter where you hear Shakespeare performed, or by whom you see it performed, you'll most likely hear it performed in a generic English lilt. Why is this? Shakespeare's own accent was not even vaguely like this generic Americanised conception of an English accent. Shakespeare's accent, it is hypothesised, would have been more like a modern urban Scottish accent. Why read his plays in an accent common to neither the audience or the playwright? The answer, I think you'll agree, is that it is read in that accent because, in the public mind, this is the accent we (quite wrongly, but that's irrelevant) attach to the romanticism of the period.
I heard the same criticism of accents in response to A Knight's Tale. Some confused critics suggested, without any clear point, that the English language of the period would have been nothingly like the modern pseudo-British the characters spoke in. Yes, that's true. The language of the middle english period was nothing like the modern one. So much so that it is virtually unintelligible to modern ears. So what would be the point of performing in it, especially when, as far as 99.99% of the audience is concerned, it bears no relation to their mental image of middle-ages romanticism.
If Jolie's accent convey's to the audience, due to cultural misconceptions, the idea of an upper class English woman better than a more accurate one would, then, as far as I'm concerned, that's just fine (though it may torture British ears).
For every anti-microsoft posting, there will be an equal and opposite pro-microsoft posting.
No doubt, within minutes, the board will be awash in criticisms of Slashdot's anti-microsoft stance and defences of that stance.
I've noticed a trend with regard to this process. No matter how passionately the stoical marketeers defend Microsoft, nor how predictably Linux' yes-men define the particular news story as the turning point in the eternal battle between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil, the truth will lie somewhere in the middle. What's depressing is that those who take the middle ground are morbidly few. Who would have thought the tech sector would create such starry-eyed romantics (as many online activists seem to be)?
Orson Welles: A Mircrosoft open-source nay-sayer?
on
Interview w/Jim Gettys
·
· Score: 4
"I entered into this campaign with one purpose only, to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy of Boss Jim Gettys' political machine, now in complete control of this state. I made no campaign promises, because until a few weeks ago, I had no hope of being elected. Now however, I am something more than a hope. Jim Gettys, Jim Gettys has something less than a chance. Every straw vote, every independent poll shows that I'll be elected. Now I can afford to make some promises. The working man, the working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests. The nation's ordinary citizens know that I'll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed. But here's one promise I'll make, and Boss Jim Gettys knows I'll keep it. My first official act as governor of this state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of Boss Jim Gettys."
- direct quote from Orson Welles' "Kane" character in Citizen Kane
Slashdot Mirror
1) Being an attractive young woman
2) In a spandex jumpsuit
Number 2, you have covered already. Number 1 would be a more difficult solution. Will you, at any point in the future, be an attractive young woman? Have you, in your acting career, ever been a young woman? Can I have a date? Thank you.
Why is it that specifically, in "times of war", the rights of the populace are negated by the "needs of the many"? Why not in "times of crime" or "times of dissidence"? Certainly, it would be beneficial to the "needs of the many" for the FBI to use Carnivore and Echelon in more domestic crime, should it net them a criminal conviction. Catching serial killers or convicting pimps or drug lords would certainly justify negation of privacy accross the country. It would certainly serve the "needs of the many".
The problem with your argument in the context of American politics is that your statement is a staunchly utilitarian one. If America were utilitarian, it wouldn't need any rights at all. It would allow the government to snoop around in its citizens' personal business in whatever way served the greater good. However, America is not based on any sort of utilitarian principle, but rather the exact opposite, rights theory. Rights are not something one can choose "when it's convenient". They are allocated to us solely on the bases that we are thinking, breathing human beings. The government, furthermore, is the last body which should be able to choose, whenever it seems convenient, to wave any one of our rights for "the good of the many".
If you're a utilitarian, then the needs of the many always outweight the rights of the individual, and our government need only decide at what level and under what circumstances it no longer has to concern itself with those rights.
However, America isn't a police state (yet) and it would probably be best if it stuck to the rights theory expounded on by its forefathers rather than, in times of trouble, deciding that whether or not Americans actually have any rights is a matter of opinion on the part of the government.
If "freedom is under attack" as the jingoists have phrased it, and "freedom" is our real concern, negating the rights of the populace is the most tragically ironic response to this massacre that I could possibly imagine.
Something that also should be mentioned is that the SD Card slot doesn't support the SD Memory card security function.
This is good news for all of us who oppose copyright-protected media. It is also nothing new, of course. Casio made the same wise decision to employ the SD technology (with its potential advantages over the existing MMC spec) minus copyright-protection. On devices that feature MP3 playback and e-book viewing as key selling points, restricting use of MP3s and e-books would be a hard move to justify.
Apparently you aren't fully acquainted with what constitutes a "copycat drug". As an example, I will use a "copycat drug" with which I am well acquainted. I take Carbamazepine twice daily for epilepsy. Carbamazepine is just the chemical name used by generic brands for the commercial drug "Tegretol". The chemical structure of Tegretol is as follows:
5H-dibenz(b,f)azepine-5-carboxamide
The chemical structure of Carbamazepine is as follows:
5H-dibenz(b,f)azepine-5-carboxamide.
That's right. They're exactly the same. Carbamazepine is a molecule. The generic brand contains the same molecule as the commercial. They don't use "low quality atoms" or "bulk quality electrons" in the generic brand. They're the same high-quality molecular structures as in the commercial molecule.
2) The company that contracts to make the drug is surely out to make a profit. Why should a random government contractor be allowed to profit from the R&D invested by Roche? What corners will this contractor cut to make it cheaper? Considering the volume production, Roche can probably do it cheaper but quality costs money.
No, that doesn't seem particularly fair to Roche. Then again, it doesn't seem particularly fair that millions of people are dying of AIDS as we speak. Corporate fair-play may be a legitimate concern in the realm of corporate issues, but in the realm of human life and the preservation thereof, corporate fair-play doesn't rank high on my list of contravening issues. And this idea of a molecule having "quality" is coming up again. Troublesome one, that.
6) Where will the madness end. Does intellectual property really mean nothing?
It's not so much that intellectual property means nothing. It's more like...intellectual property means significantly less than the well-being of the millions currently suffering - and suffering is the right word - from AIDS. Sure, "stealing from the rich" isn't particularly 'fair', but "giving to the poor" sometimes makes it a necessary trade-off.
They exist because the original -ise verbs originated from French, which spelled them with an 's'. For example "realise" is the traditional spelling of that particular verb, as it derives from the French verb "réaliser". Another example is "paralyse" which derives from French "paralyser", but has become "paralyze" in American English.
Opposition to the FTAA is hardly a new thing. Many will remember the recent Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, where the FTAA was a major issue. There, a throng of protesters, estimated between 25,000 and 35,000 in number clashed with 6,000 riot police over the agreement.
Trying to oppose something as big as the FTAA, however, can be less than a walk in the park. I was walking down a street in the Quebec City centre where a circle of demonstrators were sitting, making speeches and singing protest songs, just before they were hit by a volley of tear gas cannisters from riot police. Political repression ain't just an American phenomenon. America saw it in Seattle, but the rest of the free world is getting the benefit of the experience these days.
Just how serious expressing ones political opinion can get these days became obvious to me as I watched the rubber-coated bullets fire and the tear gas fly. A Canadian Member of Parliament, Svend Robinson, who attended the protest, was shot with a rubber bullet, himself.
For more info on where opposition to the FTAA began, see the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's report on police actions and main page on the summit.
A lot has been said over the years about the virtues of mixing genres and some of it is just hype, but when it comes to RTS's, I consider it the solution.
Battlezone is another game that acknowledged that solution (and before Shogun did). It managed to revolutionise the RTS genre by throwing in elements from FPS and Arcade genres. Too many RTS games look like just a new skin someone hacked for the Warcraft interface. I give a great deal of credit to games like Battlezone and Shogun that threw that interface away altogether.
...whose military practices were so notoriously cruel that they garnered disaproval even among the Roman Senate. I found a good, if short, history of the Gaulish conquest here: http://www.livius.org/caa-can/caesar/caesar04.html
Humour Is Subjective (i.e., do not tell other people what constitutes a funny subject)
Take an example: If I were to make a joke regarding Rome annihilating Gaul, would you respond in disgust and anger? Probably not. If I were to make a joke about the Holocaust, would you, then? Probably, yes, indeed. Why? Because you feel more of a close personal attachment to the event of the Holocaust than to the even of the conquering of Gaul. They're both tragic genocides on a similar scale. One is not greater than the other, but we have more personal, emotional interest in tip-toeing around the issue of the Holocaust. That doesn't make it rational in any way shape or form, however.
neither does the ignorance of elected officials when it comes to technology, or any other topic, for that matter. Sure, we all get a chuckle from hearing how dumb people can be, but these elected officials are there to make laws, and if they're clueless about certain facts, we end up with stuff like the DMCA.
So because legislation is a "serious issue", it should not be joked about? Are you saying that any joke that involves circumstances that are less than beneficial should not be made? Making fun of our misfortunes is nothing if not the basis for comedy itself. Generally, I find that people who refuse to view the world with any sense of humour become extremely cynical.
I want a doctor
to take your picture
so I can look at you from inside as well
You've got me turning up
and turning down
and turning in
and turning 'round
I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so
- The Vapors - Turning Japanese
Every once in a while, though, I'll be reading an informative and interesting site, and a big huge flash advertisement will pop up right in front of my surfing material. I stop rationalising. It is times like these that a tremendous urge overtakes me. It is an urge to seek out and find, wherever they may be, the advertising execs who came up with such an idea, perhaps they'll be watching a movie, or reading the newspaper on a park bench. It is at just such a time that, I think to myself, I will sneak up behind them and, at whatever moment is most inconvenient, place a large, obnoxious poster for my employer between them and the medium they are currently enjoying. If I catch them in a particularly private bout of reading, burried deep in an article of Hustler or Playboy, for this medium I will place in front of them many posters at once, obstructing, sometimes, their entire view. Every time they get rid of one such ad, I will bring three or four more up to take its place. EVENTUALLY THEY WILL HAVE TO CRASH PLAYBOY AND REBOOT THEIR READING SESSION JUST TO GET RID OF ALL THE FRIGGING...but I've let myself get a little carried away...no matter. Revenge...will...come.
The Genuine Slavegirl Princess Leia RealDoll(tm)
That's right. Check your self-respect at the door gentlemen, because this is the coup de gras for every geek on earth. Now we can revel in the luscious, voluptuous disgusted self-loathing only a genuine RealDoll(tm) can give.
Drawing on the same material, a Genuine Jabba RealDoll might not be quite as marketable a commodity, but would, nevertheless, make for an interesting piece of furniture for those hard-to-fill living rooms.
Screen quality is a reason to choose Visor over PocketPC? Really? Although my experience with the newest visors is limited to in-store demos and reviews, I've never read a review, even from the more palm-biased sources (which I used to read and froth over when I, myself, was a PilotPerson(tm) and couldn't play full-length movies or Quake on my PDA) which claimed that any Palm or Visor screen beat out the IPAQ's LCD, let alone the superior (indoors, at least) Casio screen. The Visor Prism is currently 160x160. 240x320 is long since standard on PocketPC units. Lets not forget that that 33MHz processor isn't going to be displaying high-quality MPEGs or the kind of media that make use of such a screen any time soon. In my experience, even the IPAQ's 206MHz StrongARM has trouble with higher resolution MPEG under PocketTV. The Dragonball, meanwhile, chokes to death on anything watchable.
Price? The Casio EM-500, last I checked, was $375 at Cyberian Outpost and $378 at Buy.com. The Visor Prism, on the other hand, is $399 off Handspring's own site.
Battery Life? I really can't identify with this one. It's quite possible, I concede, that my usage patters are just totally different from others', but I've never found the battery life of a piece of hardware to be the deciding factor regarding whether it is "good" or "bad" hardware. I suppose if I played movies on loop at full volume on my PocketPC all day long, it might wear out by the end of the day and the battery wouldn't survive until its night-time charge, but that isn't typical usage for me or anyone. Furthermore, I have an extra $15 battery which I can throw in if I need an extra 7-8 hours power. Heck, if battery life were really my fetish I could by ten of them for $150 and power the thing on battery for a year, under my normal use.
Now I know if I were a field researcher and my boss were to equip me with an IPAQ, my productivity would increase tenfold...in Pocket Quake. I think it's important that even researchers in the field have what office workers have had for years: work computers the growth of whose pr0n archives is directly proportional to the increase in their cumulative Solitaire scores.
Sure, open source works in practice, but will it work in theory?
Hey baby, did a nitric oxide molecule slip into your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
While I'm here on the redundancy bandwagon I shall further take your time to post, in pursuit of equally belaboured drivel, that the Gameboy Advance has a screen that can only be seen by certain breeds of Canadian Arctic Spotted Owl because battery life is more important than being able to perceive what is going on in a computer game and, further, conclude with an agonizing rebuttal, reading that The Gameboy Advance may only be 15MHz, but it uses a highly optimised(tm) RISC CPU (Q: as opposed to a highly de-optimised RISC CPU?) which is as fast as an SNES. I would go on about Linux vs. BSD and Macs: are they still viable? but this would eventually necessitate that I summarily smash my head directly through my monitor in a desperate last-ditch effort to end the horror slowly enveloping me.
Just as it has been a good thing(tm) for DVD Rewritables? I take your point, but I'd tend to think that the Windows vs. Linux war (which can be considered a war in roughly the same sense that the united Indian forces vs. Custer was a war), as a competition between existing software platforms, is something completely different from a competition between potential hardware standards. The problem is, hardware wars so often seem to result in not the emergence of the superior platform, nor even any leading platform good or bad. They sometimes just result in technological stalemate. This is where we stand with regard to DVD-RAM, apparently. It's a war of attrition. It probably won't end until someone is just forced to give up and the competitors fall like dominoes to the better (or, more likely, better marketed) standard.
As for the "that much better" standard finally emerging, I may just be a cynical old nerd (and one prone to cliches), but I have to evoke the old Beta/VHS archetype. "Better marketing" certainly won out there, as it is often prone to do, over simply "better". Hordes of ubergeeks, further, would think me negligent if I omitted mention of the Amiga, and its own failure.
Crank Caller: Does your new silicon run fast?
IBM Marketing Rep: Yes, IBM's new transistor technolo...
Crank Caller: ...Then you'd better go and catch it! LOL!!!!11!!!1! ROTFL!!!! ROTFLMAO !!! ! U R L4|\/|3 !!!!!!
You can however, do what you described just fine on the Casio E-125, EM-500, EM-700 and (if you can stand the low clock rate) the HP Jornada.
For a complete list of PocketPC emulators, go to Pocketgamer.org. These have allowed me to emulate, on my Pocket PC
- NES
- Gameboy
- SNES
- Sega Genesis
- Sega Master System
- MAME
- Palm
- DOS (Ultima IV is running happily)
- Sega Game Gear
The ability to emulate
- Atari
- Commodore
- Colecovision
- TurboGrafx
   and
- Spectrum
also exists
For the real handheld gamer, these are the machines to have.
Today's Theme Ingredient: CD Eating Fungus!
Allan Greenspan: H4x0r Economist!
On the other hand, however, I'd argue that how accurate an accent is isn't what's important. What's important is how accurate the audience perceives it to be. A perfect example of this principle is Shakespeare. No matter where you hear Shakespeare performed, or by whom you see it performed, you'll most likely hear it performed in a generic English lilt. Why is this? Shakespeare's own accent was not even vaguely like this generic Americanised conception of an English accent. Shakespeare's accent, it is hypothesised, would have been more like a modern urban Scottish accent. Why read his plays in an accent common to neither the audience or the playwright? The answer, I think you'll agree, is that it is read in that accent because, in the public mind, this is the accent we (quite wrongly, but that's irrelevant) attach to the romanticism of the period.
I heard the same criticism of accents in response to A Knight's Tale. Some confused critics suggested, without any clear point, that the English language of the period would have been nothingly like the modern pseudo-British the characters spoke in. Yes, that's true. The language of the middle english period was nothing like the modern one. So much so that it is virtually unintelligible to modern ears. So what would be the point of performing in it, especially when, as far as 99.99% of the audience is concerned, it bears no relation to their mental image of middle-ages romanticism.
If Jolie's accent convey's to the audience, due to cultural misconceptions, the idea of an upper class English woman better than a more accurate one would, then, as far as I'm concerned, that's just fine (though it may torture British ears).
No doubt, within minutes, the board will be awash in criticisms of Slashdot's anti-microsoft stance and defences of that stance.
I've noticed a trend with regard to this process. No matter how passionately the stoical marketeers defend Microsoft, nor how predictably Linux' yes-men define the particular news story as the turning point in the eternal battle between the forces of freedom and the forces of evil, the truth will lie somewhere in the middle. What's depressing is that those who take the middle ground are morbidly few. Who would have thought the tech sector would create such starry-eyed romantics (as many online activists seem to be)?
- direct quote from Orson Welles' "Kane" character in Citizen Kane