It could be worse. The fuckers responsible for turning "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" into a completely different and utterly horrible movie called "LXG"---the ornate title was very fucking nineteenth-century British, you fucks!---could be involved.
Whoever decided to "refactor" Moore's take on Britain should be barred from touching a keyboard, typewriter or inkwell ever, ever again.
That's "Norsefire", not "Norsemen". If we're being pedantic.
You know, Americans can pronounce "Fawkes" if we've seen "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". (Remember Dumbledore's pet phoenix?)
I do agree that the worst part of it all is that they'll have to show V's face. Damn it, that was one of the key elements of the book---that Evey decided not to take off V's mask, because, and I'm paraphrasing here, "who you are could never be as big as all thosepeople you could have been".
If they include Valerie's letter, and change a single word of it, I'm driving to Hollywood with the express intention of stabbing someone in the face. Damn scriptwriters who think they have half a brain---same twits who gave us the "Borg Queen".
Well, Transmetropolitan incorporated a lot of hard SF---nanotech Makers, Moravec transfers and so forth. That's pretty dorky.
And, hell, I'm a geek. I read Vernor Vinge, have a couple thousand edits on Wikipedia and work as a sysadmin. (Well, did. I'm slightly between jobs. But I get interviewed tomorrow...) And I have a wall full of comics. You're saying that Cerebus, with its Marx Brothers allusions and thousand-page political intrigues, isn't just the slightest bit geeky?
Please distinguish between superhero comics and comics as a whole.
I agree; a Wikipedia link would have been more than adequate in the opening blurb, for those who never got to read the work.
Words are, in the form of the novel, accepted as being serious works. Pictures are, in the form of the single framed image in the museum, accepted as being serious works. But when you combine the two, somehow it sets off a blaring need to insult the medium in some people. The medium---this would be like saying "because it is a novel, it sucks---I need no other information".
The answer to your assertion of "80 pages at 20 words a page" is that, first, artwork largely takes the places of description. Many works are much, much longer than eighty pages. V for Vendetta is (according to a quick check on Amazon which you could have done yourself) 286 pages. I seem to have misplaced my copy, but pulling Cerebus: High Society off my shelf (512 pages) and flipping to a random page (260), I count eighty words of dialogue.
I remember reading King's The Stand. (That's a pretty canonical example of a novel, right?) And I remember reading Ennis and Dillon's Preacher (2047 pages if you add it all up), and how they provided such a different view of God and the reasons for suffering in the world. (This bit makes more sense if you've read the books, but I'll do my best to make myself understoof.)
The plot of The Stand: God, for reasons never quite explained, wipes out nearly all of humanity with a plague so that the remaining few can be polarized into two camps, half on His side, half following the Dark Man, Randall Flagg. There then follows a post-apocalyptic battle between the factions, in which all of the Dark Man's followers are vaporized in an atomic blast. The moral of the story is, God is a really good fellow and aren't we lucky that he looks out for us? (The enormous mound of corpses created by the plague is rather conveniently forgotten.)
I can't really summarize Preacher in short form; it's structured more like a series of shorter books, but the overarching theme is that an anomalous combination of good and evil possibly as powerful as God himself has escaped heaven and embedded itself in a small-town preacher, who goes on a quest to find out why God has abandoned heaven, and why He created such suffering in the world.
Am I just wasting my time pointing out that while the stories of Sin City are hard-core retro noir tits-and-bullets pastiche, the art is rather exquisitely impressionistic? You don't even bother to mention the artwork, implying that it's all the same. But look at the wonderfully-rendered backgrounds and simple, expressive protagonist of Cerebus. Or the use of cinematic devices such as segues in Watchmen.
What's with this sudden standard of "high art or literature"? Why are pulpy, popular novels (Grisham, Clancy, King, Steele...) perfectly acceptable to read and even make into films, but comics can never be good enough because... well, no real reason, but they're comics, get it? *nudge* *nudge*... Give me a break, or at least a real reason.
And, if you're to be consistent, you really should demand that Art Spiegelman return that Pulitzer he got for Maus.
There was a really insightful bit I read in some GNOME (was it GNOME?) interface guidelines handbook, which said that people don't want confirmation dialogues, they want to be able to undo things. Which is why the 'recycle bin' is the right solution to the accidental-deletion problem, and the confirmation is not, as people in the process of deleting something will regard the confirmation as simply another step in the process, and hit enter automatically.
Since when does a 35mm frame contain 54MB of data? A Canon 1Ds Mark II RAW file, which has higher dynamic range and can make prints comparable to medium-format equipment, is less than a third of that size.
Methinks whoever taught you to scan negatives was adept at mistaking film grain for detail.
And, indeed, as processor power improves, things are going to get even better. Recent tests of wavelet-based codecs like Snow have shown that watchable quality can be attained at under 300kbit/s (though it's got visible artifacts, it's a damn sight better than more traditional codecs at that speed) as well as incredible high quality at 800kbit/s. Of course, it's currently unoptimized, and you need ridiculous CPU power (a 1GHz Athlon displays the 800kbit/s as if it were a slideshow.)
I find a pleasantly symmetry in the fact that, even though it requires mad programmer juju, there's a correspondence between space and time requirements for the storage of video. I wonder how it would look if graphed.
No, he's referring to the stress, presumably at the outer edge of the platter, which is the tension trying to pull the platter apart. (Same reason spinning pizza dough in the air make it flatten out---same force.) And centripetal acceleration is v2/r, so it's proportional to v2.
It's still a poor way of describing it---I thought he was talking about acceleration in general at first, and was going to post some sort of high-handed nonsense about how long it had clearly been since he actually took high school physics.
You mean that girl that used to be _april_ or something like that? She's i_like_sharks now, and she has a bunch of damn nice stuff up on show_your_boobs, though you have to go back a few weeks to see it.
She has, however, applied to be a Suicide Girl. This means that we will never, ever see her again, and a month from now she'll be crying her little eyes out in the sgirls community about how terrible they all were to her.
Shit, girl, give it up for free and people'll be as nice as you want 'em to.
Not to mention that everyone on show_your_boobs tossed her a few bucks to get a new camera because she didn't have a working one, and she hasn't posted since.
Damn, I wish this sort of thing were a one-time occurence.
So long as the amateur porn stays in place, and I can continue to co-admin my porn community, then all is well. (You need to get an account to read the community, and list a valid 18+ birthdate, and submit a join-request. This is so the community doesn't get deleted. It's a CYA maneuver by the livejournal administration to ensure that everybody who watches porn can lie about their age.)
You're referring to the Hepatitis B vaccine that was offered to gay men, who tended to get the disease a lot. The risk factors for Hep B are substantively similar to those for HIV. Add to that the fact that many, many people who carried HIV did not know that they carried it, and were asymptomatic. If you've ever read And the Band Played On, you'll recall that one of the researchers trying to trace the spread of HIV wanted to reuse the data from the Hep B vaccination program, but was denied funding to do so.
In short: promiscuous gay men got the Hep B vaccination. Promiscuous gay men got HIV.
Slightly more evidence is required before jumping to the conclusion that The Government Poisoned the Gays With AIDS.
Dioxin is a chemical. It is not a biological agent. A biological agent is a destructive organism, like anthrax, rhinovirus or HIV.
However, things like dioxin are not usually even considered chemical weapons, because they're not as effective against large groups, like phosgene, sarin or VX are.
(1) Currently scientists like to measure [time] relative to atomic half-lives. Wrong. The second (and from it, all SI units of time) is defined as a multiple of the frequency of the light emitted from a particular isotope of cesium as it transitions between two particular states. Radioactive decay is not involved.
(2) For an example of working, but incorrect measurements, measure the speed of a ball thrown while inside a moving bus. I fail to see the relevance. If anything, this is a failure to properly define what's being measured.
(3) I also have a problem with your assertion that the sun would die and the earth would fry if half-lives were sped up. Who asserts this? The burn rate of the hydrogen fusion in the center of the sun is determined by the sun's mass, which determines the pressure and temperature there. Radioactive half-lives are not involved---so far as I know, most of the fusion that the sun runs on doesn't even involve tritium or deuterium.
Indeed! If unencrypted content were illegal to play on the new HD-DVD players (yes, illegal now that hacking the players is illegal), then content producers will need to pay exciting royalties to have their content encrypted. And forget getting your own content encrypted if you're not selling ten hojillion copies.
There exists open video content out there, see some parts of archive.org for examples. (See that Mario 64 speedrun? Frickin' awesome.) Goddamn it, if I want to burn my homemade amateur porn to HD-DVD and play it, I shouldn't need some twit over at the MPAA to personally bless the disc.
This sort of thing would never fly with file formats, because a project can create and distribute a free and open codec to supplant it. But hardware has such a high entry and distribution cost, this isn't feasible, no matter what sort of goodies you have from OpenCores.
Pfah. I don't own a DVD player, and this is all shaping up to ensure that I don't ever buy a HD-DVD player either.
I still don't think that mailing smartcards is an acceptable solution. It's simply an unacceptable hurdle to go over. Consumers will see this as a particularly odious sort of planned obsolescence.
DirecTV, you buy a subscription to. Maintaining the service might involve hardware changes. If the company's willing to largely underwrite the cost of it, clearly the consumer won't mind. But one doesn't buy a subscription to be able to play DVD content. DIVX showed that that model is doomed.
So, what would you recommend for good dialogue? I really enjoyed the rhythm and style that everyone in Firefly spoke with. The dialogue wasn't just there to advance the plot.
Or Scrubs, and the little rants that Dr. Cox goes on. (A doctor I know assures me that the portrayal of hospital life in Scrubs is far, far more accurate than that in ER. Go figure.)
Are there any other shows I should fetch for their scintillating dialogue? Please don't tell me "CSI". I've been refusing to watch "CSI" ever since the only episode I ever saw centered on "look, perverts! perverts murder people!". As a pervert, I felt insulted.
I'm sure the drug use and the moderate insanity were all tied together, but I think it was the severe paranoia brought on by his amphetamine use (which itself was an attempt to avoid his depression) which really made him the nutball (brilliant nutball, though) we all remember.
So it was really a combination of the drugs and the chronic mental illness.
You may not believe this, but black people go to the movie theater to watch the movie, just like white people do. I know they're all scary-looking, but you'll get used to it, I promise.
Slashdot reporting on a k5 story? What a circle-jerk.
Larry Sanger is having a multi-year case of severe sour grapes. He helped to create Wikipedia, then found that it didn't conform to his world view. He hasn't worked on Wikipedia, not even fixing typos or categorizing stubs or anything, in more than two years, nearly three now, I think. And yet he professes to be an expert on it.
There are, in fact, experts working on Wikipedia; there are PhDs. Their heads, however, are not quite as inflated as Larry's. He does make some valid points, about the culture of openness and taking every crapflooder seriously. But the main thrust of this, and of the other articles about Wikipedia he's authored, have amounted to little more than "WAAAH NO ONE RESPECTS ME WAAAH".
An article validation system would benefit Wikipedia greatly, if it could be implemented as a sort of trust metric, like the provably correct one that Advogato uses. (More research is needed here.) To make some users more equal than others, capable of making decisions from on high, is the wrong fucking idea.
Article validation does not require Larry to be placed at the top of some sort of hierarchy.
And besides, Larry can threaten to fork all he wants. He can go join WikInfo in their, ah, stunning success.
By what goddamn right does Larry Sanger have such a loud voice? He's an obvious crank, and he hasn't worked on, much less led, Wikipedia in years.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. not credible.
--grendel drago
It could be worse. The fuckers responsible for turning "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" into a completely different and utterly horrible movie called "LXG"---the ornate title was very fucking nineteenth-century British, you fucks!---could be involved.
Whoever decided to "refactor" Moore's take on Britain should be barred from touching a keyboard, typewriter or inkwell ever, ever again.
--grendel drago
That's "Norsefire", not "Norsemen". If we're being pedantic.
You know, Americans can pronounce "Fawkes" if we've seen "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets". (Remember Dumbledore's pet phoenix?)
I do agree that the worst part of it all is that they'll have to show V's face. Damn it, that was one of the key elements of the book---that Evey decided not to take off V's mask, because, and I'm paraphrasing here, "who you are could never be as big as all thosepeople you could have been".
If they include Valerie's letter, and change a single word of it, I'm driving to Hollywood with the express intention of stabbing someone in the face. Damn scriptwriters who think they have half a brain---same twits who gave us the "Borg Queen".
--grendel drago
Well, Transmetropolitan incorporated a lot of hard SF---nanotech Makers, Moravec transfers and so forth. That's pretty dorky.
And, hell, I'm a geek. I read Vernor Vinge, have a couple thousand edits on Wikipedia and work as a sysadmin. (Well, did. I'm slightly between jobs. But I get interviewed tomorrow...) And I have a wall full of comics. You're saying that Cerebus, with its Marx Brothers allusions and thousand-page political intrigues, isn't just the slightest bit geeky?
Please distinguish between superhero comics and comics as a whole.
--grendel drago
it's been in a lot more places than rumor sites and tabloids.
Hence all those informative and reliable links you've posted.
--grendel drago
I agree; a Wikipedia link would have been more than adequate in the opening blurb, for those who never got to read the work.
Words are, in the form of the novel, accepted as being serious works. Pictures are, in the form of the single framed image in the museum, accepted as being serious works. But when you combine the two, somehow it sets off a blaring need to insult the medium in some people. The medium---this would be like saying "because it is a novel, it sucks---I need no other information".
The answer to your assertion of "80 pages at 20 words a page" is that, first, artwork largely takes the places of description. Many works are much, much longer than eighty pages. V for Vendetta is (according to a quick check on Amazon which you could have done yourself) 286 pages. I seem to have misplaced my copy, but pulling Cerebus: High Society off my shelf (512 pages) and flipping to a random page (260), I count eighty words of dialogue.
I remember reading King's The Stand. (That's a pretty canonical example of a novel, right?) And I remember reading Ennis and Dillon's Preacher (2047 pages if you add it all up), and how they provided such a different view of God and the reasons for suffering in the world. (This bit makes more sense if you've read the books, but I'll do my best to make myself understoof.)
The plot of The Stand: God, for reasons never quite explained, wipes out nearly all of humanity with a plague so that the remaining few can be polarized into two camps, half on His side, half following the Dark Man, Randall Flagg. There then follows a post-apocalyptic battle between the factions, in which all of the Dark Man's followers are vaporized in an atomic blast. The moral of the story is, God is a really good fellow and aren't we lucky that he looks out for us? (The enormous mound of corpses created by the plague is rather conveniently forgotten.)
I can't really summarize Preacher in short form; it's structured more like a series of shorter books, but the overarching theme is that an anomalous combination of good and evil possibly as powerful as God himself has escaped heaven and embedded itself in a small-town preacher, who goes on a quest to find out why God has abandoned heaven, and why He created such suffering in the world.
Am I just wasting my time pointing out that while the stories of Sin City are hard-core retro noir tits-and-bullets pastiche, the art is rather exquisitely impressionistic? You don't even bother to mention the artwork, implying that it's all the same. But look at the wonderfully-rendered backgrounds and simple, expressive protagonist of Cerebus. Or the use of cinematic devices such as segues in Watchmen.
What's with this sudden standard of "high art or literature"? Why are pulpy, popular novels (Grisham, Clancy, King, Steele...) perfectly acceptable to read and even make into films, but comics can never be good enough because... well, no real reason, but they're comics, get it? *nudge* *nudge*... Give me a break, or at least a real reason.
And, if you're to be consistent, you really should demand that Art Spiegelman return that Pulitzer he got for Maus.
--grendel drago
Use the Wikipedia, Luke!
--grendel drago
The only real solution is a usable windows port of xine-lib or mplayer
Worked out of the box for me.
--grendel drago
There was a really insightful bit I read in some GNOME (was it GNOME?) interface guidelines handbook, which said that people don't want confirmation dialogues, they want to be able to undo things. Which is why the 'recycle bin' is the right solution to the accidental-deletion problem, and the confirmation is not, as people in the process of deleting something will regard the confirmation as simply another step in the process, and hit enter automatically.
--grendel drago
Since when does a 35mm frame contain 54MB of data? A Canon 1Ds Mark II RAW file, which has higher dynamic range and can make prints comparable to medium-format equipment, is less than a third of that size.
Methinks whoever taught you to scan negatives was adept at mistaking film grain for detail.
--grendel drago
And, indeed, as processor power improves, things are going to get even better. Recent tests of wavelet-based codecs like Snow have shown that watchable quality can be attained at under 300kbit/s (though it's got visible artifacts, it's a damn sight better than more traditional codecs at that speed) as well as incredible high quality at 800kbit/s. Of course, it's currently unoptimized, and you need ridiculous CPU power (a 1GHz Athlon displays the 800kbit/s as if it were a slideshow.)
I find a pleasantly symmetry in the fact that, even though it requires mad programmer juju, there's a correspondence between space and time requirements for the storage of video. I wonder how it would look if graphed.
--grendel drago
No, he's referring to the stress, presumably at the outer edge of the platter, which is the tension trying to pull the platter apart. (Same reason spinning pizza dough in the air make it flatten out---same force.) And centripetal acceleration is v2/r, so it's proportional to v2.
It's still a poor way of describing it---I thought he was talking about acceleration in general at first, and was going to post some sort of high-handed nonsense about how long it had clearly been since he actually took high school physics.
--grendel drago
You mean that girl that used to be _april_ or something like that? She's i_like_sharks now, and she has a bunch of damn nice stuff up on show_your_boobs, though you have to go back a few weeks to see it.
She has, however, applied to be a Suicide Girl. This means that we will never, ever see her again, and a month from now she'll be crying her little eyes out in the sgirls community about how terrible they all were to her.
Shit, girl, give it up for free and people'll be as nice as you want 'em to.
Not to mention that everyone on show_your_boobs tossed her a few bucks to get a new camera because she didn't have a working one, and she hasn't posted since.
Damn, I wish this sort of thing were a one-time occurence.
--grendel drago
So long as the amateur porn stays in place, and I can continue to co-admin my porn community, then all is well. (You need to get an account to read the community, and list a valid 18+ birthdate, and submit a join-request. This is so the community doesn't get deleted. It's a CYA maneuver by the livejournal administration to ensure that everybody who watches porn can lie about their age.)
--grendel drago
You're referring to the Hepatitis B vaccine that was offered to gay men, who tended to get the disease a lot. The risk factors for Hep B are substantively similar to those for HIV. Add to that the fact that many, many people who carried HIV did not know that they carried it, and were asymptomatic. If you've ever read And the Band Played On, you'll recall that one of the researchers trying to trace the spread of HIV wanted to reuse the data from the Hep B vaccination program, but was denied funding to do so.
In short: promiscuous gay men got the Hep B vaccination. Promiscuous gay men got HIV.
Slightly more evidence is required before jumping to the conclusion that The Government Poisoned the Gays With AIDS.
--grendel drago
Dioxin is a chemical. It is not a biological agent. A biological agent is a destructive organism, like anthrax, rhinovirus or HIV.
However, things like dioxin are not usually even considered chemical weapons, because they're not as effective against large groups, like phosgene, sarin or VX are.
--grendel drago
(1) Currently scientists like to measure [time] relative to atomic half-lives. Wrong. The second (and from it, all SI units of time) is defined as a multiple of the frequency of the light emitted from a particular isotope of cesium as it transitions between two particular states. Radioactive decay is not involved.
(2) For an example of working, but incorrect measurements, measure the speed of a ball thrown while inside a moving bus. I fail to see the relevance. If anything, this is a failure to properly define what's being measured.
(3) I also have a problem with your assertion that the sun would die and the earth would fry if half-lives were sped up. Who asserts this? The burn rate of the hydrogen fusion in the center of the sun is determined by the sun's mass, which determines the pressure and temperature there. Radioactive half-lives are not involved---so far as I know, most of the fusion that the sun runs on doesn't even involve tritium or deuterium.
--grendel drago
Indeed! If unencrypted content were illegal to play on the new HD-DVD players (yes, illegal now that hacking the players is illegal), then content producers will need to pay exciting royalties to have their content encrypted. And forget getting your own content encrypted if you're not selling ten hojillion copies.
There exists open video content out there, see some parts of archive.org for examples. (See that Mario 64 speedrun? Frickin' awesome.) Goddamn it, if I want to burn my homemade amateur porn to HD-DVD and play it, I shouldn't need some twit over at the MPAA to personally bless the disc.
This sort of thing would never fly with file formats, because a project can create and distribute a free and open codec to supplant it. But hardware has such a high entry and distribution cost, this isn't feasible, no matter what sort of goodies you have from OpenCores.
Pfah. I don't own a DVD player, and this is all shaping up to ensure that I don't ever buy a HD-DVD player either.
--grendel drago
I still don't think that mailing smartcards is an acceptable solution. It's simply an unacceptable hurdle to go over. Consumers will see this as a particularly odious sort of planned obsolescence.
DirecTV, you buy a subscription to. Maintaining the service might involve hardware changes. If the company's willing to largely underwrite the cost of it, clearly the consumer won't mind. But one doesn't buy a subscription to be able to play DVD content. DIVX showed that that model is doomed.
--grendel drago
So, what would you recommend for good dialogue? I really enjoyed the rhythm and style that everyone in Firefly spoke with. The dialogue wasn't just there to advance the plot.
Or Scrubs, and the little rants that Dr. Cox goes on. (A doctor I know assures me that the portrayal of hospital life in Scrubs is far, far more accurate than that in ER. Go figure.)
Are there any other shows I should fetch for their scintillating dialogue? Please don't tell me "CSI". I've been refusing to watch "CSI" ever since the only episode I ever saw centered on "look, perverts! perverts murder people!". As a pervert, I felt insulted.
--grendel drago
I'm sure the drug use and the moderate insanity were all tied together, but I think it was the severe paranoia brought on by his amphetamine use (which itself was an attempt to avoid his depression) which really made him the nutball (brilliant nutball, though) we all remember.
So it was really a combination of the drugs and the chronic mental illness.
--grendel drago
You may not believe this, but black people go to the movie theater to watch the movie, just like white people do. I know they're all scary-looking, but you'll get used to it, I promise.
--grendel drago
Stab me. Stab me now, and end my shame.
Once upon a time, I mocked those who made typos in their haste. It'll happen to you, whippersnapper!
--grendel drago
Slashdot reporting on a k5 story? What a circle-jerk.
Larry Sanger is having a multi-year case of severe sour grapes. He helped to create Wikipedia, then found that it didn't conform to his world view. He hasn't worked on Wikipedia, not even fixing typos or categorizing stubs or anything, in more than two years, nearly three now, I think. And yet he professes to be an expert on it.
There are, in fact, experts working on Wikipedia; there are PhDs. Their heads, however, are not quite as inflated as Larry's. He does make some valid points, about the culture of openness and taking every crapflooder seriously. But the main thrust of this, and of the other articles about Wikipedia he's authored, have amounted to little more than "WAAAH NO ONE RESPECTS ME WAAAH".
An article validation system would benefit Wikipedia greatly, if it could be implemented as a sort of trust metric, like the provably correct one that Advogato uses. (More research is needed here.) To make some users more equal than others, capable of making decisions from on high, is the wrong fucking idea.
Article validation does not require Larry to be placed at the top of some sort of hierarchy.
And besides, Larry can threaten to fork all he wants. He can go join WikInfo in their, ah, stunning success.
By what goddamn right does Larry Sanger have such a loud voice? He's an obvious crank, and he hasn't worked on, much less led, Wikipedia in years.
Get a life, Larry!
--grendel drago
Quantity does not infer quality.
Don't you know that the speaker implies; it's the listener who infers?
(Props to Dave Sim.)
--grendel drago