Exactly! I have absolutely no problem with the idea of modchips that allow me to play legal games from another "region zone". It goes beyond wanting to play imports though, as I've bought games when I lived in London, Australia and Canada. It's ridiculous that I can't play my own games that I bought legally outside my zone.
This is a the same problem that I have with DVDs, too... so unless a company is selling a multi-region DVD player, they don't get any of my money.
Listen buddy, we don't take kindly to your sort of thinking around here. All the peoples of the world should live together in harmony and tolerance, regardless of religion, creed, tv-watching habits, sexual preference or color of their skin. If you don't want to tolerate everyone, we'll have you frickin' crucified.
Heh... this reminds me of arts guys at parties saying "Oh, I learned Italian so I could read Dante's Inferno in its original form". Problem is, they are kinda right. My gf speaks Japanese and several times watching Stand Alone Complex she laughed and said "Uh, those subtitles are completely wrong. He said this and it's funny because of these cultural references." Now I have to learn Japanese. Doh.
I completely agree about Princess Mononoke and Neil Gaiman's work on it. He did a truly excellent job conveying the flavour and depth of the story and setting. Should be more of it, I say.
I think he means it like Jackie Chan movies... when you examine the plot, acting, dialogue, pacing, makeup and costumes, they are terrible. It's just that the stunts/kung-fu aspect is so cool, that you really enjoy the movie.
They're calling it "Paranoia XP", which I hope is a thinly-veiled dig at Windows XP. I hope the new game comes with a shrink-wrapped license and pages of bilious marketing screed, detailing just how much better Paranoia XP is over Paranoia 3.1 or even Paranoia 95. It won't mention Paranoia Me though - I hear it was a complete disaster.
Yes! I remember seeing this stuff on a another science program where they mixed up an historically-accurate brew (or as close as they could manage) and tested it with a pair of judo students.
First off, they sparred au naturale. They were pretty close in ability, with guy A maybe having a slight advantage over B. Then they did a brief series of physical and mental tests to measure reactions, co-ordination, even logic and short-term memory. Once again, their results were pretty close.
They then both drank "potions". One was the Zulu brew, one was a placebo. The students weren't told which was which (blind test). They then sparred and did the tests again.
Interestingly, guy B kicked guy A's ass in the ring, acting with significantly more aggression and strength. The really interesting bit was that in the tests, many of guy B's scores WENT DOWN, in areas such as fine motor control and logic. Maybe not such a good potion for master-level martial artists, where technique is the deciding factor in a combat, but good for a front-line grunt.
I think if there's any way the Ferrari startup sound can be modified, people in Enderle's office will change it to:
1) "Welcome to my midlife crisis!" 2) "Step away from the vehicle! STEP AWAY!" 3) "Varoom! VaROOM! Va... oh, screw it." 4) "Tutto fumo e niente arrosto, baby!" (All smoke and no fire).
You're probably right - although I tend to tar the public relations wankers, marketing scum and other shiny-suit-wearing servants of satan with the same brush.
I realise that the list was made by Locus, a magazine devoted completely to SF and fantasy, and I'm just a random Slashdot jerk, but William Gibson's Pattern Recognition sucks. Avoid it like the plague, although in all honesty, the plague would be more fun, because it would be over faster and be a less boring.
Obviously it's akin to blasphemy to pan a book by The Godfather of Cyberspace, but it's just bad. All the main characters are in MARKETING, for god's sake. The plot revolves around a new way to sell Nikes, oh yay. Not to mention that the story is ripped off from his earlier Count Zero, people are using hotmail accounts to send corporate secrets back and forth, the main character is "... one of those slight-looking women who combine considerable wiry strength with low body weight." Kill me. If we wanted to read about a vacuous, tea-substitute-drinking, Pilates store window dummy WANKER, we would've read this month's Coked Up Supermodel mag.
Anyway. The only other book I've read on the list is Ilium, by Dan Simmons. It's pretty darn good, although not as good as Hyperion.
Yeah, a human would completely kick a robot's ass at driving. They are approaching this from the angle of reducing human casualties in battle, but I don't think they're going to like how utterly terrible the robots are going to be in combat.
Reminds me of the start of Robocop, when the ED-209 shoots that guy in the boardroom - "He didn't hear it! He didn't hear it!"
You can't see it right now because of the Slashdot effect, but the PMP-100 is the unit I like. Not just because of the name, it just looks sweeeet. Good-sized display screen, and a 20GB drive, which is easily enough for a decent number of TV episodes / movies.
That's a really solid, informative article. Nice one. I particularly like the bit:
Q: How many birds die in collisions with other human structures? A: It is estimated that each year, 57 million birds die in collisions with vehicles; 1.25 million in collisions with tall structures (towers, stacks, buildings); and more than 97.5 million in collisions with plate glass [5].
Adds a little bit of perspective to the whole mess.
Yeah, when I arrived in Vancouver I was hunting around for a place to wifi while I was still staying in a dodgy hostel. I found a place called FatPort that sells wifi time by the hour, month, year, etc. I didn't really feel good about paying through the nose for it, so I went and grabbed some lunch... and on the way, I found a cafe that has free wi-fi. So, I never went back to FatPort.
I was talking to the cafe owner and we agreed that wi-fi is like a good view, or a washroom, or yeah, air-conditioning. You wear the cost, and it becomes part of the appeal of your place, another reason for people to eat/drink/hang out there.
It's crazy, but this has actually worked in real life for me, so don't knock it too hard. I'd been playing sat afternoon soccer with a bunch of guys for months (without specs) and turned up to a bar with glasses on, and they didn't recognise me. I was even introduced directly, and they still thought I was another guy with the same name as "that guy from soccer". Pretty surprising, although I'm still doubtful it would work on Lois Lane over a period of years.
This works, and it's actually kinda healthy! My first big move (late 2000, Brisbane, Australia to London, UK) made me throw out a TONNE of stuff. It also taught me to be brutal about the old, crappy stuff. Even the new, useful stuff can be replaced. Since then I've moved from London back to Brisbane (more stuff thrown) and I'm winding up to move from Brisbane to Vancouver right now (more crap being thrown there too). It's a pain in the ass to have to go through it all, but it's good for one's perspective.
The complete opposite is my Dad, who moved recently and still had stuff from the last TWENTY YEARS. It was frightening - he had old rusty garden tools that were nearly as old as me, ripped tents, sacks of old clothes, fifteen tape measures, even old glass jars of nails from beyond the dawn of time. Only when all the old crap wouldn't fit in his nice new house, he started actually letting stuff go...
Ikea is pretty decent for utility stuff. I had a couple of cheapass Ikea shelves - one eventually filled up with novels, but the other was devoted to hardware, CD cases, tech books and other associated crap. I bought a bunch of plastic tubs for papers, screws, cables and other minutae, and it seemed to work great.
I think the plastic-tub-and-shelf method is good because you can basically see everything in front of you... there's no drawers or pirate's chests full of stuff so you have to go hunting through them to find anything. If I want a cable, it's in the cable tub, right *there*.
I'm moving at the moment, so I put my shelves into storage... and boom, the entire house is suddenly full of techy crap, door to door. Amazing how that happens.
Listen you cocky young whippersnapper, in MY day we broke the Hun's codes with 1-bit difference engines the size of buses, running on vaccuum tubes infested with poisonous moths bigger than your hand. We entered our programs with sledgehammers, completely from memory, during air raids, in the dark, while we were completely drunk!
And you tell the kids of the day that, and they don't believe you...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! I have absolutely no problem with the idea of modchips that allow me to play legal games from another "region zone". It goes beyond wanting to play imports though, as I've bought games when I lived in London, Australia and Canada. It's ridiculous that I can't play my own games that I bought legally outside my zone.
This is a the same problem that I have with DVDs, too... so unless a company is selling a multi-region DVD player, they don't get any of my money.
Reminds me of Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress.
Listen buddy, we don't take kindly to your sort of thinking around here. All the peoples of the world should live together in harmony and tolerance, regardless of religion, creed, tv-watching habits, sexual preference or color of their skin. If you don't want to tolerate everyone, we'll have you frickin' crucified.
Heh... this reminds me of arts guys at parties saying "Oh, I learned Italian so I could read Dante's Inferno in its original form". Problem is, they are kinda right. My gf speaks Japanese and several times watching Stand Alone Complex she laughed and said "Uh, those subtitles are completely wrong. He said this and it's funny because of these cultural references." Now I have to learn Japanese. Doh.
I completely agree about Princess Mononoke and Neil Gaiman's work on it. He did a truly excellent job conveying the flavour and depth of the story and setting. Should be more of it, I say.
I think he means it like Jackie Chan movies... when you examine the plot, acting, dialogue, pacing, makeup and costumes, they are terrible. It's just that the stunts/kung-fu aspect is so cool, that you really enjoy the movie.
Not surprisingly, this works for porn as well.
They're calling it "Paranoia XP", which I hope is a thinly-veiled dig at Windows XP. I hope the new game comes with a shrink-wrapped license and pages of bilious marketing screed, detailing just how much better Paranoia XP is over Paranoia 3.1 or even Paranoia 95. It won't mention Paranoia Me though - I hear it was a complete disaster.
My next project will be named "Jprogjorjfwwfffffffwweewer33111l", just to be safe. It's an open source calendaring app.
Yes! I remember seeing this stuff on a another science program where they mixed up an historically-accurate brew (or as close as they could manage) and tested it with a pair of judo students.
First off, they sparred au naturale. They were pretty close in ability, with guy A maybe having a slight advantage over B. Then they did a brief series of physical and mental tests to measure reactions, co-ordination, even logic and short-term memory. Once again, their results were pretty close.
They then both drank "potions". One was the Zulu brew, one was a placebo. The students weren't told which was which (blind test). They then sparred and did the tests again.
Interestingly, guy B kicked guy A's ass in the ring, acting with significantly more aggression and strength. The really interesting bit was that in the tests, many of guy B's scores WENT DOWN, in areas such as fine motor control and logic. Maybe not such a good potion for master-level martial artists, where technique is the deciding factor in a combat, but good for a front-line grunt.
I think if there's any way the Ferrari startup sound can be modified, people in Enderle's office will change it to:
1) "Welcome to my midlife crisis!"
2) "Step away from the vehicle! STEP AWAY!"
3) "Varoom! VaROOM! Va... oh, screw it."
4) "Tutto fumo e niente arrosto, baby!" (All smoke and no fire).
You're probably right - although I tend to tar the public relations wankers, marketing scum and other shiny-suit-wearing servants of satan with the same brush.
I realise that the list was made by Locus, a magazine devoted completely to SF and fantasy, and I'm just a random Slashdot jerk, but William Gibson's Pattern Recognition sucks. Avoid it like the plague, although in all honesty, the plague would be more fun, because it would be over faster and be a less boring.
Obviously it's akin to blasphemy to pan a book by The Godfather of Cyberspace, but it's just bad. All the main characters are in MARKETING, for god's sake. The plot revolves around a new way to sell Nikes, oh yay. Not to mention that the story is ripped off from his earlier Count Zero, people are using hotmail accounts to send corporate secrets back and forth, the main character is "... one of those slight-looking women who combine considerable wiry strength with low body weight." Kill me. If we wanted to read about a vacuous, tea-substitute-drinking, Pilates store window dummy WANKER, we would've read this month's Coked Up Supermodel mag.
Anyway. The only other book I've read on the list is Ilium, by Dan Simmons. It's pretty darn good, although not as good as Hyperion.
Yeah, a human would completely kick a robot's ass at driving. They are approaching this from the angle of reducing human casualties in battle, but I don't think they're going to like how utterly terrible the robots are going to be in combat.
Reminds me of the start of Robocop, when the ED-209 shoots that guy in the boardroom - "He didn't hear it! He didn't hear it!"
Besides, humans are awfully cheap to make...
It would be sweet if Amazon hadn't quite tested their payment code enough and I could give George Bush -$10,000,000,000.00.
Hell, I'd do it twice.
I suppose this is a slightly updated version of this:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum - Computer Networks
You can't see it right now because of the Slashdot effect, but the PMP-100 is the unit I like. Not just because of the name, it just looks sweeeet. Good-sized display screen, and a 20GB drive, which is easily enough for a decent number of TV episodes / movies.
It does scream out "Portable Porn Device" though.
An alternative scenario is that female carp transform themselves into weird aquatic mixes of the Alien Queen from the movies, and Christina Aguilera.
"Crikey, he's drinking a latte! And carrying a shitzu!"
That's a really solid, informative article. Nice one. I particularly like the bit:
Q: How many birds die in collisions with other human structures?
A: It is estimated that each year, 57 million birds die in collisions with vehicles; 1.25 million in collisions with tall structures (towers, stacks, buildings); and more than 97.5 million in collisions with plate glass [5].
Adds a little bit of perspective to the whole mess.
Yeah, when I arrived in Vancouver I was hunting around for a place to wifi while I was still staying in a dodgy hostel. I found a place called FatPort that sells wifi time by the hour, month, year, etc. I didn't really feel good about paying through the nose for it, so I went and grabbed some lunch... and on the way, I found a cafe that has free wi-fi. So, I never went back to FatPort.
I was talking to the cafe owner and we agreed that wi-fi is like a good view, or a washroom, or yeah, air-conditioning. You wear the cost, and it becomes part of the appeal of your place, another reason for people to eat/drink/hang out there.
12th man, actually.
It's crazy, but this has actually worked in real life for me, so don't knock it too hard. I'd been playing sat afternoon soccer with a bunch of guys for months (without specs) and turned up to a bar with glasses on, and they didn't recognise me. I was even introduced directly, and they still thought I was another guy with the same name as "that guy from soccer". Pretty surprising, although I'm still doubtful it would work on Lois Lane over a period of years.
I just want to make Lego robots that cruise the house, clean things up, and store things inside themselves...
This works, and it's actually kinda healthy! My first big move (late 2000, Brisbane, Australia to London, UK) made me throw out a TONNE of stuff. It also taught me to be brutal about the old, crappy stuff. Even the new, useful stuff can be replaced. Since then I've moved from London back to Brisbane (more stuff thrown) and I'm winding up to move from Brisbane to Vancouver right now (more crap being thrown there too). It's a pain in the ass to have to go through it all, but it's good for one's perspective.
The complete opposite is my Dad, who moved recently and still had stuff from the last TWENTY YEARS. It was frightening - he had old rusty garden tools that were nearly as old as me, ripped tents, sacks of old clothes, fifteen tape measures, even old glass jars of nails from beyond the dawn of time. Only when all the old crap wouldn't fit in his nice new house, he started actually letting stuff go...
Ikea is pretty decent for utility stuff. I had a couple of cheapass Ikea shelves - one eventually filled up with novels, but the other was devoted to hardware, CD cases, tech books and other associated crap. I bought a bunch of plastic tubs for papers, screws, cables and other minutae, and it seemed to work great.
I think the plastic-tub-and-shelf method is good because you can basically see everything in front of you... there's no drawers or pirate's chests full of stuff so you have to go hunting through them to find anything. If I want a cable, it's in the cable tub, right *there*.
I'm moving at the moment, so I put my shelves into storage... and boom, the entire house is suddenly full of techy crap, door to door. Amazing how that happens.
Listen you cocky young whippersnapper, in MY day we broke the Hun's codes with 1-bit difference engines the size of buses, running on vaccuum tubes infested with poisonous moths bigger than your hand. We entered our programs with sledgehammers, completely from memory, during air raids, in the dark, while we were completely drunk!
And you tell the kids of the day that, and they don't believe you...