I try to think of purchasing things in terms of how much time they cost, instead of how much money. Meaning that a raise has the pleasant effect of making everything cheaper. So a stack of comics doesn't cost forty bucks, it costs a few (post-tax) hours of my time. A nontrivial car repair might cost a week's pay. And so forth.
I suppose most folks can get along thinking in terms of abstract dollars, but turning it into time makes it much more concrete for me.
Yes! Because this will totally be used by Office! I'm sure Microsoft will give up on their proprietary formats to embrace open technology, or at least make it way easy to interoperate with these formats!
Oh, wait, that goes against the strategies of Microsoft and thus the overwhelming majority of the office software market.
So, in the best case, we have standardization for the two percent of the office market not using MS Office. Be still my beating heart.
This isn't like OpenEXR, where there was a real reason to have an open format---there was real competition between proprietary vendors, and it made things difficult. There isn't any real competition in the office arena, just vendor lock-in.
For someone so supposedly well-versed in SF, I'm surprised that Card wrote "Kirk-Spock" instead of "Kirk/Spock" or more accurately but more opaquely, "K/S" to denote homoerotic Trek fanfic.
Star Trek needs to die because it displaces better, more deserving shows. If not for Enterprise, Firefly might still have a home. If not for DS9, Babylon 5 wouldn't have had the struggle it did.
It's the same reason it was so much worse to make a cheesy action flick from "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" than it would have been to make a cheesy action flick from whole cloth.
If they could make and keep their bad or even marginally good work without it displacing better work, it wouldn't matter so much. But so long as they've got hot and cold running Roddenberry (well, Berman now), I'll drink a beer for the art I'll never see, and piss the results on Star Trek's long-overdue grave.
That would be the Total Perspective Vortex, invention of one Trin Tragula, which shows you the whole of creation, and yourself in relation to it, with a little "you are here" arrow. Drives one mad, unless one is Zaphod Beeblebrox in a pocket universe created for his benefit.
It was several years after reading that when I found out that "fairy cake" was just British for "cupcake". I remember being faintly disappointed.
Will they make Arthur into a romantic lead again, instead of the hapless bumbler he was meant to be?
Oh, oh! You know how whenever Hollywood is making a romantic comedy, someone thinks, "hey! This movie needs explosions to draw in the boys!", and adds some shit blowing which makes no goddamn sense? No?
Well, then why the fuck did they insert a turgid romance into the middle of a darkly ironic SF comedy of non sequiturs? To wit:
Arthur Dent, as the romantic lead, is playing opposite Trillian. And when the small white mice are about to carve up his head (they left out the "DICED!" line, but that's a minor quibble), he cries out that no question has ever brought him happiness, and that for him there's only been one question ever, and it's "Is she the one?" and the answer is "Yes!---It's always been yes!".
And then he uses his superheroic strength to break through his bonds and smush the small white mice. Slartibartfast smiles. Earth Mark II having been recreated and all the people on it restored, Arthur and Trillian go off in the Heart of Gold, happily ever after.
And that is why I wish to piss in the Cheerios of whoever made the choice to smear that shit on the movie. That's all.
Oh, and when the characters are all waiting in line, keep an eye out for the Marvin from the original BBC television series. He makes a cameo. I thought that was cute.
And the Earth is made whole again and no one's really dead and... ugh. It wasn't true to the spirit of the books, and it didn't even manage to be true to the letter in a lot of places.
And those of us who liked the original work are left sort of gesturing and lamely telling disappointed fellow filmgoers that, really, it wasn't like that at all.
While Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" wasn't exactly a classic, it was a tremendously disappointing adaptation of a densely layered and rather subtle work. That "LXG" crap was an abomination.
Oh, and "I, Robot". Couldn't they have made their silly action thriller with SF spray painted on the top without robbing Asimov's grave to do it?
And they're going to fuck up "Watchmen" next. Ugh. Stab stab stabbity...
Unfortunately idle legislators have long been on a muddying binge so now if some young adult being pestered by exhuberant pre-teens in a swimming pool happens to playfully deal with one with less than perfect care as to where their hand might grab, they can find themselves accused of "statuatory rape".
You know, I wondered how often something like that happened. I'm sure it wasn't an issue twenty years ago when you needed expensive equipment and your own chemical lab to make porn (yeah, yeah, darkroom chemicals are simple; they're still not trivial, and they leave evidence a little harder to dispose of than JPEGs.) But I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg; there's got to be quite an underground economy in self-produced child pornography. And while it's creepy, I don't think laws sending folks to "pound me in the ass" federal prison were intended for these kids, or the people they tell that they're 'eighteen, honest, I swear, for real'.
I think they were intended more for completely legitimate but thoroughly unsettling sites like this. (Seriously. It's set up exactly like a fucking pornsite.) Which coincidentally, is utterly legal. Funny, huh?
I remember first learning about the idea of Kolmogorov complexity, and thinking about how incredibly one-way it is. Given a seemingly random decimal sequence, is there anything better than a brute-force search to determine that it's actually sqrt(5pi)^(pi-1) or some tiny construction like that?
And, of course, there can exist no algorithm to even determine the Kolmogorov complexity of an arbitrary string. There's no way to pull order from chaos, at least not in a general sense.
Interesting from an algorithmic point of view, if nothing else. The Kolmogorov complexity of, say, e or is very low, expressible in relatively simple mathematics (no funny functions, just infinite sums or integrals) in under twenty characters.
Eh, all the overpriced, overhyped hardware that went under the moniker of "virtual reality" had little or nothing to do with what really generates an immersive experience.
Hell, a text-based MUD is more involving than $60,000 hardware (oh, sorry, it's marked down to $10,000 now) used to shoot six-polygon pterodactyls. Very little is needed to lose oneself in the game. People are a lot better at suspending disbelief than one would imagine.
Whoever paid off the bad guys wasn't Sgrena's family. And I wouldn't expect my family would be sending a few million bucks in that direction if I'd been kidnapped. Mostly because my family doesn't have a few million bucks. I certainly wouldn't expect my government to fork over cash on my behalf.
You're rebutting an argument, but it's not the argument I made. I would be disgusted if my government bought off a bunch of terrorists who were holding me.
I mean, could you live with yourself, knowing that your release had come at the cost of hundreds more of your countrymen dead?
Kids, I know you want your people back--I'm sorry, but your hostages are already dead. Mourn for them, but don't pay off their kidnappers. That's stupid. That's Reagan-stupid. Ten million bucks buys a lot more kidnappings and suicide bombs.
I think it was a bit like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". The book was something rather spectacularly different, with a whole host of ideas that the director cheerfully ignored when he made the film, which, as a result, was pretty forgettable. As such, fans of the original end up defending their fandom and sounding like idiots for it.
You say that MMORPGs are pointless, repetitive grinds that people while away their lives at, and that they'll never really be popular until they stop being pointless, repetitive grinds.
But wait! People do spend time on them. People spend as much time as they plausibly can, and then a bit more. People are absorbed into these mindlessly moronic tasks. You think folks need absorbing gameplay, a compelling storyline and the ability to think on their toes? Fuck no! Folks will throw money at a company that allows them to engage in Pavlovian click-here stimulus-response pap.
Slashdot Mirror
THE CLIPS, B.A.! THROW ME THE CLIPS!
Damn, now I really am dating myself.
--grendel drago
I try to think of purchasing things in terms of how much time they cost, instead of how much money. Meaning that a raise has the pleasant effect of making everything cheaper. So a stack of comics doesn't cost forty bucks, it costs a few (post-tax) hours of my time. A nontrivial car repair might cost a week's pay. And so forth.
I suppose most folks can get along thinking in terms of abstract dollars, but turning it into time makes it much more concrete for me.
--grendel drago
I have no need for such a program.
--grendel drago
Yes! Because this will totally be used by Office! I'm sure Microsoft will give up on their proprietary formats to embrace open technology, or at least make it way easy to interoperate with these formats!
Oh, wait, that goes against the strategies of Microsoft and thus the overwhelming majority of the office software market.
So, in the best case, we have standardization for the two percent of the office market not using MS Office. Be still my beating heart.
This isn't like OpenEXR, where there was a real reason to have an open format---there was real competition between proprietary vendors, and it made things difficult. There isn't any real competition in the office arena, just vendor lock-in.
--grendel drago
I only mention it because the entire genre is named after the punctuation mark. It's slash fiction, not dash fiction.
I don't think it makes me seem ill, just dorky. And hey, who around here isn't?
--grendel drago
For someone so supposedly well-versed in SF, I'm surprised that Card wrote "Kirk-Spock" instead of "Kirk/Spock" or more accurately but more opaquely, "K/S" to denote homoerotic Trek fanfic.
For cryin' out loud, Wikipedia has decent articles on both slasdh fiction and Kirk/Spock , even.
Bah. It's just a nitpick.
--grendel drago
Star Trek needs to die because it displaces better, more deserving shows. If not for Enterprise, Firefly might still have a home. If not for DS9, Babylon 5 wouldn't have had the struggle it did.
It's the same reason it was so much worse to make a cheesy action flick from "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" than it would have been to make a cheesy action flick from whole cloth.
If they could make and keep their bad or even marginally good work without it displacing better work, it wouldn't matter so much. But so long as they've got hot and cold running Roddenberry (well, Berman now), I'll drink a beer for the art I'll never see, and piss the results on Star Trek's long-overdue grave.
--grendel drago
I enjoyed LoTR without constantly bitching. I'm really looking forward to Revenge of the Sith, Danny the Dog and Batman Begins.
I can both enjoy the good and criticize the bad. You can too---really, give it a shot.
--grendel drago
But you can only spoiler things that don't suck.
*scratches head*
Well, if I've saved you from dropping five bucks on that pile, I've done a good deed.
--grendel drago
That would be the Total Perspective Vortex, invention of one Trin Tragula, which shows you the whole of creation, and yourself in relation to it, with a little "you are here" arrow. Drives one mad, unless one is Zaphod Beeblebrox in a pocket universe created for his benefit.
It was several years after reading that when I found out that "fairy cake" was just British for "cupcake". I remember being faintly disappointed.
--grendel drago
If they show V's face, I'm taking a bus to Hollywood so's I can get my stab on.
Just sayin'.
--grendel drago
Will they make Arthur into a romantic lead again, instead of the hapless bumbler he was meant to be?
Oh, oh! You know how whenever Hollywood is making a romantic comedy, someone thinks, "hey! This movie needs explosions to draw in the boys!", and adds some shit blowing which makes no goddamn sense? No?
Well, then why the fuck did they insert a turgid romance into the middle of a darkly ironic SF comedy of non sequiturs? To wit:
Arthur Dent, as the romantic lead, is playing opposite Trillian. And when the small white mice are about to carve up his head (they left out the "DICED!" line, but that's a minor quibble), he cries out that no question has ever brought him happiness, and that for him there's only been one question ever, and it's "Is she the one?" and the answer is "Yes!---It's always been yes!".
And then he uses his superheroic strength to break through his bonds and smush the small white mice. Slartibartfast smiles. Earth Mark II having been recreated and all the people on it restored, Arthur and Trillian go off in the Heart of Gold, happily ever after.
And that is why I wish to piss in the Cheerios of whoever made the choice to smear that shit on the movie. That's all.
Oh, and when the characters are all waiting in line, keep an eye out for the Marvin from the original BBC television series. He makes a cameo. I thought that was cute.
And the Earth is made whole again and no one's really dead and... ugh. It wasn't true to the spirit of the books, and it didn't even manage to be true to the letter in a lot of places.
And those of us who liked the original work are left sort of gesturing and lamely telling disappointed fellow filmgoers that, really, it wasn't like that at all.
Pfah. Take your sequels and shove 'em.
--grendel drago
While Alan Moore's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" wasn't exactly a classic, it was a tremendously disappointing adaptation of a densely layered and rather subtle work. That "LXG" crap was an abomination.
Oh, and "I, Robot". Couldn't they have made their silly action thriller with SF spray painted on the top without robbing Asimov's grave to do it?
And they're going to fuck up "Watchmen" next. Ugh. Stab stab stabbity...
--grendel drago
Unfortunately idle legislators have long been on a muddying binge so now if some young adult being pestered by exhuberant pre-teens in a swimming pool happens to playfully deal with one with less than perfect care as to where their hand might grab, they can find themselves accused of "statuatory rape".
Just back from the big house, then?
--grendel drago
You know, I wondered how often something like that happened. I'm sure it wasn't an issue twenty years ago when you needed expensive equipment and your own chemical lab to make porn (yeah, yeah, darkroom chemicals are simple; they're still not trivial, and they leave evidence a little harder to dispose of than JPEGs.) But I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg; there's got to be quite an underground economy in self-produced child pornography. And while it's creepy, I don't think laws sending folks to "pound me in the ass" federal prison were intended for these kids, or the people they tell that they're 'eighteen, honest, I swear, for real'.
I think they were intended more for completely legitimate but thoroughly unsettling sites like this. (Seriously. It's set up exactly like a fucking pornsite.) Which coincidentally, is utterly legal. Funny, huh?
--grendel drago
I remember first learning about the idea of Kolmogorov complexity, and thinking about how incredibly one-way it is. Given a seemingly random decimal sequence, is there anything better than a brute-force search to determine that it's actually sqrt(5pi)^(pi-1) or some tiny construction like that?
And, of course, there can exist no algorithm to even determine the Kolmogorov complexity of an arbitrary string. There's no way to pull order from chaos, at least not in a general sense.
Interesting from an algorithmic point of view, if nothing else. The Kolmogorov complexity of, say, e or is very low, expressible in relatively simple mathematics (no funny functions, just infinite sums or integrals) in under twenty characters.
--grendel drago
Eh, all the overpriced, overhyped hardware that went under the moniker of "virtual reality" had little or nothing to do with what really generates an immersive experience.
Hell, a text-based MUD is more involving than $60,000 hardware (oh, sorry, it's marked down to $10,000 now) used to shoot six-polygon pterodactyls. Very little is needed to lose oneself in the game. People are a lot better at suspending disbelief than one would imagine.
--grendel drago
Whoever paid off the bad guys wasn't Sgrena's family. And I wouldn't expect my family would be sending a few million bucks in that direction if I'd been kidnapped. Mostly because my family doesn't have a few million bucks. I certainly wouldn't expect my government to fork over cash on my behalf.
You're rebutting an argument, but it's not the argument I made. I would be disgusted if my government bought off a bunch of terrorists who were holding me.
I mean, could you live with yourself, knowing that your release had come at the cost of hundreds more of your countrymen dead?
--grendel drago
It matters to me because those millions of bucks will fund the folks who I regard as the bad guys.
There's a world of difference between mounting an expedition to rescue kidnap victims, and paying ransom to the kidnappers.
Millions for defense, not one penny for tribute. That sort of thing.
--grendel drago
Does anyone who speaks Army jargon know what this is all saying, or can someone at least point out the salient points?
Like... what about those allegations that the Italians had paid several million Euros as ransom to the kidnappers?
Kids, I know you want your people back--I'm sorry, but your hostages are already dead. Mourn for them, but don't pay off their kidnappers. That's stupid. That's Reagan-stupid. Ten million bucks buys a lot more kidnappings and suicide bombs.
You'd think we'd have learned this lesson by now.
--grendel drago
I think his point was that jms could say what he wanted to in a much more eloquent way.
But, hey, those words are tainted. They have dork all over them. Best to distance oneself. Isn't that right?
--grendel drago
That works way too well.
Way, way too well.
--grendel drago
Kind of like I, Robot.
Or "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Man, that pissed me off.
--grendel drago
I think it was a bit like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". The book was something rather spectacularly different, with a whole host of ideas that the director cheerfully ignored when he made the film, which, as a result, was pretty forgettable. As such, fans of the original end up defending their fandom and sounding like idiots for it.
Sigh.
--grendel drago
You say that MMORPGs are pointless, repetitive grinds that people while away their lives at, and that they'll never really be popular until they stop being pointless, repetitive grinds.
But wait! People do spend time on them. People spend as much time as they plausibly can, and then a bit more. People are absorbed into these mindlessly moronic tasks. You think folks need absorbing gameplay, a compelling storyline and the ability to think on their toes? Fuck no! Folks will throw money at a company that allows them to engage in Pavlovian click-here stimulus-response pap.
As you may have surmised, I'm not a fan.
--grendel drago