Every fucking feature length cartoon of even a story like Pocahontas (which was so obnoxiusly inaccurate in every other respect) requires singing fucking animals
Whoooa, I think I missed that part! Are you sure you weren't watching the porn spoof, Poke-a-Hotass or something?
There's new work being done on nanostructured finishes that prevent marine critters from gaining a proper purchase on it. All part of the biomimicry school of design. My dad always said the man who could invent a dependable anti-fouling compound for boat hulls would become richer than Croesus. Looks like we'll get to see if he's right.
Although this solution is certainly "low power" by no means should it be considered to be entirely green. I work as an engineer on many projects that involve sea water, and when you're using it for a cooling source you typically need to inject some sort of chemical to sterilize the water to keep growths off your heat exchangers (barnacles are sort of a pain in the ass in your exchangers). As a result, using sea water for large scale cooling operations is prohibited in large regions of the United States (specifically the gulf coast) mostly over concerns that the large amounts of warm bleached water will damage the ecosystem. Although, that issue aside, using the ocean as a cooling medium is a great idea, and has been used reliably by power plants for many years.
So maybe it would be more environmentally sound to run a closed loop out to the current to cool the water and bring it back? Salt water is nasty, evil shit.
It is exciting to see a political figure take a stance on something important that makes sense for once. I thought a man with enough backbone to fight for net neutrality publicly would certainly have a moustache but a quick google search proved my assumption wrong.
It actually leaves me stunned. "They always fuck this stuff up. How is he fucking this up? I'm rereading. There has to be a fuckup in here somewhere."
It's like minding a retarded three-year with an affinity for eating animal droppings and one day he doesn't immediately run for the dog poo. Wait, did aliens abduct him and replace him with a clone almost indistinguishable but for the unexpected bit about not being a drooling window-licker and if so, can we make sure they never bring back the original?
It breaks my heart just thinking about being in that situation. To love someone so much and for you to find out that they can't love you back... and what you thought were the most special moments of your life were all a lie.
Happens all the time. At least someone who's missing a brain has an excuse for it.
The basic idea is you drag the tether through earth's magnetic field. If you pull power off of it, your orbit lowers. If you run energy back through it, your orbit rises.
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
You don't release a game and then change everything about it. Add content and features, sure. But you never drastically change the game. People start to feel like they don't "know" the game and leave. You aren't going to attract new customers by touting something like "new improved attack system". They don't know about the old one so they can't judge how much better it is. And the people that don't like the changes will spread their opinions that it sucks.
That's the problem with MMO's. If I buy Knights of the Old Republic and love it, I might resent changes in Knights of the Old Republic 2. If so, I can just stick with the old game. But that's not the case with MMO's, you're stuck with the upgrade. I don't really see how this will change.
It's actually kind of funny how chaotically divergent the reactions can be to elements within a game. When the game launches there's no debate, it is what it is and people experience it together for the first time, warts and all. For every element in the game you'll find people willing to fight to the death for or against it. And every time the developer tries to fix something it's like they just tried to eat someone's baby.
The problems I've seen with games is either when they try to add features that really bring nothing to the game or when they try to simplify complexity that was actually a core part of what made the game interesting.
4x games are a good example of this. It's basically an elaborate version of GO. Expand across the map, control territory, beat the enemies. There was a great game on the Palm that reduced this to the essential elements. You had a map with dots. The dots were planets. Each planet could be captured by a ship and a colony established. You have three resource allocations: factories, ships, and science. There was only one type of science and one type of ship.
So from that point on you built your fleets and explored planets. More science meant your ships had greater range, had better saves against attacks and greater odds of hitting when fighting. Fights meant your stack of ships went against the enemy stack. You fire. If you hit, you get to fire again. Keep hitting, keep firing, one ship dead for every hit. Once you miss, the enemy gets to fire back. Numbers count but so does science. Low-tech fleets will just be cannon fodder.
We're talking black and white graphics, no sound effects, but this is basically the essence of 4x games. And if you compare it to the classics like Master of Orion, Civilization, etc, you can see where more detail isn't always better. Civ had some problems with this. That's what made the console version so amazing. They were able to strip out a lot of the stuff that made the game more complex but not more fun and were able to bring out the essence of the game. Of course, for those who think the crufty bits are the best part, Civ4 is still out there but you're going to need a computer.
You don't treat the symptom, you treat the cause. Otherwise you may as well be jerking off. What causes crime? Poverty, lack of prospects for a future, and ignorance. You may deter one individual from committing more crimes by putting him in jail for life but that does nothing to dissuade the one after him and the one after that. Yes, there will always be the bad seeds, the one no amount of opportunity and guidance will help. But there will be fewer of them than what we have now if we address the causes.
Want to know how to set the drug problems straight in this country? Legalize and regulate the shit. Those who are hooked on the hard shit like heroin will get their maintenance dose from a government clinic for free. Those who aren't yet hooked will find it harder to score in the first place as the street supply dries up. And pot? For fuck's sake, give the growers licenses and let them operate like micro-breweries. Keep big business out of it, don't let their marketing departments start trying to manipulate public demand. Can you imagine how much peace would be had in Mexico if illicit drug money from the US dried up? Hell, just imagine knowing your flat won't get broken into by a junkie looking for shit to fence.
Politicians don't have the fucking stones to put forward this kind of legislation.
This study appears to have no bearing upon Fox News viewers who somehow manage to continue basic biological functions, zombie-like, in the complete absence of higher brain activity. Thus rendered immune to logic and reason, these drooling hordes threaten the very existence of this once-great nation.
This is about as egregious as Santorum's idea to block public access to NOAA and pay a second time to get all their info from Accuweather, a major contributor of his. A suggestion dumb enough for a Republican but made by a Democrat.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crushes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A), multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X...
If X is less that the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
The first rule of screwing the public is we don't talk about screwing the public.
The second rule of screwing the public is WE DON'T TALK ABOUT SCREWING THE PUBLIC!
This is amazing. We'd theorised orbitals to exist, and they worked very well. We could calculate the shapes of molecules and make detailed predictions that came true to 10 decimal places. Quantum mechanics as applied to electrons in atoms is the most successful and the most rigorously tested theory ever developed.
And yet, to finally see a real orbital, not a simulation. Looks like a 1s and a 2p, right there for the looking!
I know. It's like with waves of electromagnetic force. We see the drawings of magnetic fields and assume those lines are for our benefit, that it doesn't really look that way. And then you stick a magnet under paper and sprinkle iron filings on it and sure enough, magnetic lines! It feels like cartoon physics made real. Gonna take me a magic marker and draw a little door on my office wall so I can open it up and go inside during lunch and catch zome z's.
No amount of forced exposure is going to create an interest in a subject. You don't foster interest top-down by cramming it down throats.
Our pop culture is fairly poisoned. Yes, I know that you had people decrying the fall of western civilization when Elvis shook his pelvis on the telly. But our pop mascots have fallen quite a bit since then. In my school district, they made the worst school in the worst part of town a magnet. All the black kids smart enough to make the cut stayed. All the white kids who made the cut got bussed in. So the dregs of that school got sent off to other schools in the district. We received a large contingent at my school. Now I know there's good rap out there, socially conscious stuff. That doesn't get the radio play. That's not what's on BET. That's not what the kids at my school were listening to. It's the shit Bill Cosby bitches about. So it's nigga this and bust a cap that and simply awash in directionless ignorance. This is what happens when kids are left without guidance and their only role models are thugs who happen to have a talent for sports or what can only inaccurately be described as music. I shit you not, I heard some of the bussed in kids bragging about who got the most F's on the report card.
Now just so Kanye doesn't say I hate black people, that's not the point. There's plenty of ignorant white people out there, no other way to explain McCain/Palin. And really, the ignorance is the key factor here. It's ignorance bred of inattention and neglect. There's nothing the schools can do to make up for piss-poor parenting.
The comet's shape was revealed to be rectilinear Though some thought it a doorway with stars in here with an aspect ratio comprising the squares of the first 3 non-zero positive primes. Burma shave
Geeks so love cute names If we must go japanese I say bukkake
I once saw a guy wearing one of those sports jersey shirts and the name across the back said Bukkake. Must have been from one of those places where you can get your own name on the team jersey of your choice. I figured he did it so he could tell from the snickers behind him how many people spent too much time on the net.
Since the collapse of the state vector is an illusion caused by the entanglement of the experimenter with the experiment, whereupon the experimenter (now in a superposition of states) can only measure one outcome, this recless creation of macromolecular superpositions will deplete the multiverse's supply of world-lines and immanentize the eschaton. We'll have doppelgangers racing madly through the streets, and it will all end in tears.
Seems no less reasonable than the wiki writeup on superposition. QM reads to me like high-brow White Zombie lyrics, just words rammed together with no inherent meaning. Stick a few "motherfuckers", "yeahs" and obscure movie quotes in there and I think we'd have it. I'm sure it makes sense to some people but I'd need a contact high to grok it.
THE DEAD HAVE COME BACK TO LIFE!The Hamiltonian gives the rate at which the particle has an amplitude to go from m to n. YEAH! The reason it is multiplied by i AMBIENT SCREAMING SOUNDSis that the condition that U is unitary translates to the condition: YEAH MOTHERFUCKER YEAH! which says that H is Hermitian. The eigenvalues of the Hermitian matrix H are real quantities which have a physical interpretation as energy levels. PSYCHOLOIC SLAG SUCKING JUICE FROM A FALLEN ANGEL If the factor i were absent, the H matrix would be antihermitian and would have purely imaginary eigenvalues, which is not the traditional way quantum mechanics represents observable quantities like the energy.INSANE CLOWN LAUGHTER
I always thought Sonic's transition to 3d was much less graceful than say, Mario's. Maybe it was the high speed and the weird feel of the Dreamcast controller that made me feel like I was influencing Sonic's motions, not controlling them.
Sonic was never meant to be 3D. He's hard enough to control in only two dimensions. I could just about handle him on the Genesis but on the Dreamcast? Forget it. Uncontrollable.
The DS version is where they needed to go. 3D engine locked onto the traditional 2D track. Looked pretty, played well, no 3D track BS. Only problem is that I'm just not very good at it.
You could well just be complaining about MMOs in general though, in which case I would suggest to you a path that didn't involve spending several years slogging through WoW. I used similar advice to great effect after realising that I don't like vinegar on chips - the problem wasn't the vinegar, it was that I kept eating the damn stuff.
Or it could be like the recovering alcoholic who has to give his two cents only because he feels about it so strongly.
I like gaming and I consider MMO's to be a very, very dangerous drug. They can expand to consume all your time and the only saving grace is that they get boring. If they could deliver that constant kewl experience without ever tapering off, xod help us all.
I promise you, the full force of Japanese industry is dedicated to the effort, if for no other reason than they have run out of fetishes involving real women.
No, you'll only have the efforts of the minority of the Japanese workforce not into anime babes and lolicon.
Why can't the legal system use common sense. Simply recording something is not the same as a wiretap. A wiretap implies access to conversations through some sort of technological loophole or exploit and is usually long term. If this is to be illegal then the law should refer to unlawful recording without consent.
IMHO, it doesn't make sense that it can be illegal to record a conversation that you are part of since you have been explicitly granted access to the information (the guy is F@#$ing talking to you).
And this would conceivably create the situation where a private citizen in a dispute with another citizen could compel him to do the old James Bond villain monologue where he outlines everything with a fucking cherry on top and then the judge throws it out as inadmissible.
How about if someone leaves a death threat on an answering machine? Could that be considered consensual because the caller knows he's talking to a machine? What if he says he thought it was the real guy because he leaves one of those cute outgoing messages where he says "Hello? Hello?" acting like he's there.
About the only legitimate problem I can see with sekrit taping (i.e. law enforcement isn't involved) is the possibility of fabrication in this day and age. How hard is it to fake someone's voice on a tape? I know I can't trust my lying eyes with photoshop anymore. Of course, you can't really trust the cops either. Times past the cops would throw a baggie of MJ in your car. I wonder what they'll be able to cook up in the future? "Look, there you are on this tape of the armed robbery. A man's dead and you're holding the gun!"
Slashdot Mirror
Every fucking feature length cartoon of even a story like Pocahontas (which was so obnoxiusly inaccurate in every other respect) requires singing fucking animals
Whoooa, I think I missed that part! Are you sure you weren't watching the porn spoof, Poke-a-Hotass or something?
There's new work being done on nanostructured finishes that prevent marine critters from gaining a proper purchase on it. All part of the biomimicry school of design. My dad always said the man who could invent a dependable anti-fouling compound for boat hulls would become richer than Croesus. Looks like we'll get to see if he's right.
Although this solution is certainly "low power" by no means should it be considered to be entirely green. I work as an engineer on many projects that involve sea water, and when you're using it for a cooling source you typically need to inject some sort of chemical to sterilize the water to keep growths off your heat exchangers (barnacles are sort of a pain in the ass in your exchangers). As a result, using sea water for large scale cooling operations is prohibited in large regions of the United States (specifically the gulf coast) mostly over concerns that the large amounts of warm bleached water will damage the ecosystem. Although, that issue aside, using the ocean as a cooling medium is a great idea, and has been used reliably by power plants for many years.
So maybe it would be more environmentally sound to run a closed loop out to the current to cool the water and bring it back? Salt water is nasty, evil shit.
It is exciting to see a political figure take a stance on something important that makes sense for once. I thought a man with enough backbone to fight for net neutrality publicly would certainly have a moustache but a quick google search proved my assumption wrong.
It actually leaves me stunned. "They always fuck this stuff up. How is he fucking this up? I'm rereading. There has to be a fuckup in here somewhere."
It's like minding a retarded three-year with an affinity for eating animal droppings and one day he doesn't immediately run for the dog poo. Wait, did aliens abduct him and replace him with a clone almost indistinguishable but for the unexpected bit about not being a drooling window-licker and if so, can we make sure they never bring back the original?
It breaks my heart just thinking about being in that situation. To love someone so much and for you to find out that they can't love you back... and what you thought were the most special moments of your life were all a lie.
Happens all the time. At least someone who's missing a brain has an excuse for it.
Won't even be able to eat a fucking carrot without these yobs throwing paint on me.
Could the ISS use excess electricity from the solar panels along with a tether to maintain altitude?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_propulsion
The basic idea is you drag the tether through earth's magnetic field. If you pull power off of it, your orbit lowers. If you run energy back through it, your orbit rises.
My only guess is they don't have a lot of excess capacity on the ISS and so lack the power to run with this.
You don't release a game and then change everything about it. Add content and features, sure. But you never drastically change the game. People start to feel like they don't "know" the game and leave. You aren't going to attract new customers by touting something like "new improved attack system". They don't know about the old one so they can't judge how much better it is. And the people that don't like the changes will spread their opinions that it sucks.
That's the problem with MMO's. If I buy Knights of the Old Republic and love it, I might resent changes in Knights of the Old Republic 2. If so, I can just stick with the old game. But that's not the case with MMO's, you're stuck with the upgrade. I don't really see how this will change.
It's actually kind of funny how chaotically divergent the reactions can be to elements within a game. When the game launches there's no debate, it is what it is and people experience it together for the first time, warts and all. For every element in the game you'll find people willing to fight to the death for or against it. And every time the developer tries to fix something it's like they just tried to eat someone's baby.
The problems I've seen with games is either when they try to add features that really bring nothing to the game or when they try to simplify complexity that was actually a core part of what made the game interesting.
4x games are a good example of this. It's basically an elaborate version of GO. Expand across the map, control territory, beat the enemies. There was a great game on the Palm that reduced this to the essential elements. You had a map with dots. The dots were planets. Each planet could be captured by a ship and a colony established. You have three resource allocations: factories, ships, and science. There was only one type of science and one type of ship.
So from that point on you built your fleets and explored planets. More science meant your ships had greater range, had better saves against attacks and greater odds of hitting when fighting. Fights meant your stack of ships went against the enemy stack. You fire. If you hit, you get to fire again. Keep hitting, keep firing, one ship dead for every hit. Once you miss, the enemy gets to fire back. Numbers count but so does science. Low-tech fleets will just be cannon fodder.
We're talking black and white graphics, no sound effects, but this is basically the essence of 4x games. And if you compare it to the classics like Master of Orion, Civilization, etc, you can see where more detail isn't always better. Civ had some problems with this. That's what made the console version so amazing. They were able to strip out a lot of the stuff that made the game more complex but not more fun and were able to bring out the essence of the game. Of course, for those who think the crufty bits are the best part, Civ4 is still out there but you're going to need a computer.
You don't treat the symptom, you treat the cause. Otherwise you may as well be jerking off. What causes crime? Poverty, lack of prospects for a future, and ignorance. You may deter one individual from committing more crimes by putting him in jail for life but that does nothing to dissuade the one after him and the one after that. Yes, there will always be the bad seeds, the one no amount of opportunity and guidance will help. But there will be fewer of them than what we have now if we address the causes.
Want to know how to set the drug problems straight in this country? Legalize and regulate the shit. Those who are hooked on the hard shit like heroin will get their maintenance dose from a government clinic for free. Those who aren't yet hooked will find it harder to score in the first place as the street supply dries up. And pot? For fuck's sake, give the growers licenses and let them operate like micro-breweries. Keep big business out of it, don't let their marketing departments start trying to manipulate public demand. Can you imagine how much peace would be had in Mexico if illicit drug money from the US dried up? Hell, just imagine knowing your flat won't get broken into by a junkie looking for shit to fence.
Politicians don't have the fucking stones to put forward this kind of legislation.
This study appears to have no bearing upon Fox News viewers who somehow manage to continue basic biological functions, zombie-like, in the complete absence of higher brain activity. Thus rendered immune to logic and reason, these drooling hordes threaten the very existence of this once-great nation.
Mod me down and you will be eaten by a grue.
This is about as egregious as Santorum's idea to block public access to NOAA and pay a second time to get all their info from Accuweather, a major contributor of his. A suggestion dumb enough for a Republican but made by a Democrat.
*picard facepalm*
Keep getting resource no longer available messages. The forums have been shit for 2+ years now.
That'll be fixed the day after they clean up the CSS on idle.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crushes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field (A), multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X...
If X is less that the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
The first rule of screwing the public is we don't talk about screwing the public.
The second rule of screwing the public is WE DON'T TALK ABOUT SCREWING THE PUBLIC!
This is amazing. We'd theorised orbitals to exist, and they worked very well. We could calculate the shapes of molecules and make detailed predictions that came true to 10 decimal places. Quantum mechanics as applied to electrons in atoms is the most successful and the most rigorously tested theory ever developed.
And yet, to finally see a real orbital, not a simulation. Looks like a 1s and a 2p, right there for the looking!
I know. It's like with waves of electromagnetic force. We see the drawings of magnetic fields and assume those lines are for our benefit, that it doesn't really look that way. And then you stick a magnet under paper and sprinkle iron filings on it and sure enough, magnetic lines! It feels like cartoon physics made real. Gonna take me a magic marker and draw a little door on my office wall so I can open it up and go inside during lunch and catch zome z's.
...but you can't make her think.
No amount of forced exposure is going to create an interest in a subject. You don't foster interest top-down by cramming it down throats.
Our pop culture is fairly poisoned. Yes, I know that you had people decrying the fall of western civilization when Elvis shook his pelvis on the telly. But our pop mascots have fallen quite a bit since then. In my school district, they made the worst school in the worst part of town a magnet. All the black kids smart enough to make the cut stayed. All the white kids who made the cut got bussed in. So the dregs of that school got sent off to other schools in the district. We received a large contingent at my school. Now I know there's good rap out there, socially conscious stuff. That doesn't get the radio play. That's not what's on BET. That's not what the kids at my school were listening to. It's the shit Bill Cosby bitches about. So it's nigga this and bust a cap that and simply awash in directionless ignorance. This is what happens when kids are left without guidance and their only role models are thugs who happen to have a talent for sports or what can only inaccurately be described as music. I shit you not, I heard some of the bussed in kids bragging about who got the most F's on the report card.
Now just so Kanye doesn't say I hate black people, that's not the point. There's plenty of ignorant white people out there, no other way to explain McCain/Palin. And really, the ignorance is the key factor here. It's ignorance bred of inattention and neglect. There's nothing the schools can do to make up for piss-poor parenting.
The comet's shape was revealed to be rectilinear
Though some thought it a doorway with stars in here
with an aspect ratio comprising the squares
of the first 3 non-zero positive primes.
Burma shave
Geeks so love cute names
If we must go japanese
I say bukkake
I once saw a guy wearing one of those sports jersey shirts and the name across the back said Bukkake. Must have been from one of those places where you can get your own name on the team jersey of your choice. I figured he did it so he could tell from the snickers behind him how many people spent too much time on the net.
Wow, you go on Slashdot and make a post that's both anti-US and anti-Microsoft? You really are taking a huge risk with your slashdot karma there!
Fuck FOSS, kittens, and beer! (not necessarily in that order)
Adding nothing to the news for years!
Amercian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Microscopic Organisms That May Or May Not Be Alive
or "NAMBLA" for short.
Since the collapse of the state vector is an illusion caused by the entanglement of the experimenter with the experiment, whereupon the experimenter (now in a superposition of states) can only measure one outcome, this recless creation of macromolecular superpositions will deplete the multiverse's supply of world-lines and immanentize the eschaton. We'll have doppelgangers racing madly through the streets, and it will all end in tears.
Seems no less reasonable than the wiki writeup on superposition. QM reads to me like high-brow White Zombie lyrics, just words rammed together with no inherent meaning. Stick a few "motherfuckers", "yeahs" and obscure movie quotes in there and I think we'd have it. I'm sure it makes sense to some people but I'd need a contact high to grok it.
THE DEAD HAVE COME BACK TO LIFE!The Hamiltonian gives the rate at which the particle has an amplitude to go from m to n. YEAH! The reason it is multiplied by i AMBIENT SCREAMING SOUNDSis that the condition that U is unitary translates to the condition: YEAH MOTHERFUCKER YEAH! which says that H is Hermitian. The eigenvalues of the Hermitian matrix H are real quantities which have a physical interpretation as energy levels. PSYCHOLOIC SLAG SUCKING JUICE FROM A FALLEN ANGEL If the factor i were absent, the H matrix would be antihermitian and would have purely imaginary eigenvalues, which is not the traditional way quantum mechanics represents observable quantities like the energy.INSANE CLOWN LAUGHTER
I always thought Sonic's transition to 3d was much less graceful than say, Mario's. Maybe it was the high speed and the weird feel of the Dreamcast controller that made me feel like I was influencing Sonic's motions, not controlling them.
Sonic was never meant to be 3D. He's hard enough to control in only two dimensions. I could just about handle him on the Genesis but on the Dreamcast? Forget it. Uncontrollable.
The DS version is where they needed to go. 3D engine locked onto the traditional 2D track. Looked pretty, played well, no 3D track BS. Only problem is that I'm just not very good at it.
You could well just be complaining about MMOs in general though, in which case I would suggest to you a path that didn't involve spending several years slogging through WoW. I used similar advice to great effect after realising that I don't like vinegar on chips - the problem wasn't the vinegar, it was that I kept eating the damn stuff.
Or it could be like the recovering alcoholic who has to give his two cents only because he feels about it so strongly.
I like gaming and I consider MMO's to be a very, very dangerous drug. They can expand to consume all your time and the only saving grace is that they get boring. If they could deliver that constant kewl experience without ever tapering off, xod help us all.
I promise you, the full force of Japanese industry is dedicated to the effort, if for no other reason than they have run out of fetishes involving real women.
No, you'll only have the efforts of the minority of the Japanese workforce not into anime babes and lolicon.
Why can't the legal system use common sense. Simply recording something is not the same as a wiretap. A wiretap implies access to conversations through some sort of technological loophole or exploit and is usually long term. If this is to be illegal then the law should refer to unlawful recording without consent.
IMHO, it doesn't make sense that it can be illegal to record a conversation that you are part of since you have been explicitly granted access to the information (the guy is F@#$ing talking to you).
And this would conceivably create the situation where a private citizen in a dispute with another citizen could compel him to do the old James Bond villain monologue where he outlines everything with a fucking cherry on top and then the judge throws it out as inadmissible.
How about if someone leaves a death threat on an answering machine? Could that be considered consensual because the caller knows he's talking to a machine? What if he says he thought it was the real guy because he leaves one of those cute outgoing messages where he says "Hello? Hello?" acting like he's there.
About the only legitimate problem I can see with sekrit taping (i.e. law enforcement isn't involved) is the possibility of fabrication in this day and age. How hard is it to fake someone's voice on a tape? I know I can't trust my lying eyes with photoshop anymore. Of course, you can't really trust the cops either. Times past the cops would throw a baggie of MJ in your car. I wonder what they'll be able to cook up in the future? "Look, there you are on this tape of the armed robbery. A man's dead and you're holding the gun!"