When the PC boots up in 3 seconds, has a monitor at least 24" or more across, is placed in the most comfortable room in the house (after the bedroom), has no associations with work, requires ZERO brain effort, switches channels at the touch of one button and can be operated with one hand via a small remote control while the other hand holds a beer or fishes in a packet of Salt'n'Vinegar crisps for the last crumbs...
I'm typing this on a mac mini connected to a 42 inch tv. This computer serves as an entertainment center. I'm in an easy chair with wireless mouse and keyboard. The mini came with a remote that can handle starting and stopping video and adjusting sound. It won't navigate through video selections but this is a shortcoming of the software, not a technical impossibility. The computer will go to sleep quickly and wakes back up in seconds. It takes the TV longer to fire up than the computer does to become active.
Overall, this is a pretty slick setup. I have absolutely no complaints. I agree that nobody wants to "watch tv" on a computer screen at a desk. But the difference between how you sit and how you watch will simply be one of where the computer is connected. All of the newer big-screen TV's are marvelous at displaying high quality images from laptops and pc's.
When it comes to pushing computer tech you're looking at porn and games; when it comes to pushing tv, it's about sports. When you're talking about HD content, it was the sports broadcasts that had it first. And these live events are the only TV I can't find better and more conveniently as a torrent. You'd also be hard-pressed to provide it commercially over the net, for now. Just wait a few years.
Broadcast television is going to be dying for the same reason as broadcast radio. People haven't stopped listening to music, they've just stopped listening to the radio. CD's and tapes were the start of the decline but once the content became less and less relevant on radio, people had more incentive to seek alternatives like ipods. I know I used to enjoy the radio but it became such crap that it no longer mattered to me. How many kids grow up listening to the radio these days? I'm sure it will be years and years before the broadcasters are gone. Hell, there will probably always be someone broadcasting something somewhere over the airwaves but just look at where AM radio is at right now. Locally there's I think two english broadcasters, one of them carrying the hate radio crap like Rush, the rest are all spanish and hispanic stuff for the immigrants. (my market is south florida.) Aside from that, AM's a ghostland.
I haven't purchased a Metallica album since The Black Album and will never again. (Granted that was the last decent one they had...) You damn near single handedly spearheaded this RIAA anti-filesharing war. Out of spite and general boycott I do not listen to my old Metallica CDs, nor do I have any of them encoded to my computer. I refuse to go to your absurdly overpriced concerts. I will not download or share your music, not because of "piracy" but because I refuse to give any publicity to you or your whining old man bandmates. The "piracy" that you crusaded against made you what you are today.
What's more, they originally promoted the bootlegging of concert tapes which helped to spread the word when they weren't getting radio play. The ladder's fine when they're looking to get up the wall but they're going to kick it down in the faces of any other fuckers who have the temerity to climb it in the same way.
I think the only physical distribution of games we'll see is in the convenience stores, the way they'll have movies and some of the games for the older systems already. The game stores are the ones who should be terrified. The game companies want to remove the secondary market, same as the book publishers want to get rid of second hand bookstores. The convenience stores will be for the people too poor to afford an internet connection and will probably carry games for systems a generation behind the curve, the kind poorer people will be able to afford. Might carry a few current gen ones too, who knows.
Will they succeed? I think there will be a lot of pushback if they keep trying to use jacked up pricing. You can't bring a game to a friend's house, you can't loan him one when you're done. If your console croaks you might lose everything unless the game companies keep a "buy once, download as many times as you want" policy. If they're assholes about it, this will just drive the pirates to crack the games. I don't see an external media slot leaving systems any time soon, even if they're only used by a small portion of the market without net access. If they're big enough jerks about it, maybe there will come to be a market for current-gen emulators. Just buy a beefy PC, install the custom loader, play current gen games for free.
I recently took the Mac plunge. After two months, my verdict:
Pro's 1. It's not Windows! Yay! 2. It's not just not Windows, OSX has some really cool features. Mac products seem to have some more thinking put into them as opposed to the Windows-based machines. Yeah, they have their moments of stupid like with cracking Mac Cube cases, powerbook latch failures and screen cracking, but it's nice to get a new OS and be tickled by smart ideas instead of the feeling I get with Windows which is "how are they going to bone the next version this time?"
Con's 1. Damn them for keeping upgrades under wraps. I would have held off if I knew the new one was only two months away. 2. Too dangerous to work on inside. The iMac is technically user-servicable but there's no way I'd risk doing it myself. PC innards are built like tanks and the iMac looks like it's built out of aluminum foil, tissue paper and dreams. I'd rather let the Mac store people risk breaking it and buy me a new one than do anything myself. I'd be much happier with a more robust design but understand that twinky-dink laptop parts is how they make it fit in such a small package. 3. You really pay a lot more for the parts with Apple. People will go back and forth with you on this one, are you paying for quality or hype? Even if your Vista computer is cheaper, do you really want to use Vista? Ok, you could by a generic Windows pc and run Ubuntu, are you happy? Ah, but then support for Linux isn't as good as for Windows/OSX. You can go round in circles with this.
Overall, Apple has done good and bad but the good is ahead this time around. Versus Microsoft, I don't think I've had a cheerful thought about any of their products since Windows 2000.
Isn't iRobot the company that got the Big DoD Contract to make battlebots? Are we about to see the use of Militarized Hamsters in combat? Will our heroic soldiers be replaced by Rodent Guided Missiles?
I was going to ask the same thing. In WWII the military had a pigeon-guided bomb where the bird was trained to peck at an image on a CRT and the bomb would center on that pecking. Seemed impossibly Rube Golburg but it was supposed to have worked. Never was deployed in combat. They had another one where tiny incendiary charges were attached to bats. The idea was that bombers would fly over Japan with these bat bombs at the ready. The bombs would be dropped over the target, descend by parachute and the sides would pop off so the bats could fly out. They would look for roof overhangs to nest under and their bombs would go off soon thereafter, setting fire to entire cities. The concept was proven sound when the bat people burned down half of their own research camp but the war was over before they could be put into action.
I fear the only way to defeat these hamster-guided killer robots will be to put cats in robots of their own. But then someone will put dogs in the robots and to defeat the dogs someone will put Koreans in robots and it all ends with gorillas freezing in the snow.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Goes back to the fishing analogy. You could try it with cars but it won't work as well. There's a number of factors you can control to maximize your potential for a successful fishing trip. Find out when you should fish, get the right bait, use the proper equipment, all of these factors are in your control. As to whether or not the fish are biting, that's beyond your control. You could be doing everything right and fail. But if the conditions are favorable, you should be getting bites. And once that fish is on the line, then it's up to your skill to get it on the boat. If you're doing everything right, you should be getting bites eventually.
I've seen people do very well getting some lucky breaks and making proper use of them. I've seen people throw those breaks away for various reasons and wonder why they don't succeed. I've seen some people who are ready and primed to take the break, who are doing their best to make their own luck, but the breaks just aren't coming. I think it's very arrogant for the highly successful to believe that all of it is due to them and no other thing. That kind of attitude breeds a cocky arrogance. Think of how many acorns are dropped in a forest in a year and how many of those grow to become great trees? Some ridiculously small number I'm sure. Or look at how many eggs a sea turtle lays and how few of them grow into adulthood. It's the same winnowing process. If Bill Gates never succeeded you know damn well there would be a Will Fence or Sam Porticus for us to all bitch about.
Lots of bands that play poorly live sound great on their CD's, and vice-versa. I'd go as far as to say that *most* of the bands that I've liked listening to live have sounded terrible when laid down, and vice-versa.
It's the musician's dillema. Focus on the tricks that make a recording sound good, or focus on the aspects that make a live performance sound good. They're very different sounds.
Here here. Most live recordings I've heard aren't very good because the bands can't handle their material live. It kills me when a band I like goes on stage and it sounds like someone covering their material and doing a poor job of it. Zeppelin is pretty awful live, or at least every live recording I've heard is disappointing. They're gods in the studio. Metallica hasn't been able to play their good stuff since they stopped touring after the Black Album. They went to shit with Load and haven't looked back since.
Probably the most impressive band I've ever heard both on studio and stage has been Dream Theater. Musicians I know are amazed by what they hear. "They didn't just dub in stage noise on a studio recording here, all this is really live?" Yup. Just that good.
Now with Blue Oyster Cult, they did a live album called Extraterrestrial Live. Holy smokes, that band was on fire. But you listen to the studio versions of the songs and they're completely flat. This band needs a live crowd to come alive. The Red and the Black is a good example. The studio track of that song is just anemic. Listen to it on the live album and you'd think someone distilled awesome into a black, viscous ooze and mainlined it right into their veins.
Computers can do too much of the work these days. It's analogous to the fashion model vids on youtube where you see a woman who looks attractive in a commonplace way sit down in the makeup chair and between that and the photoshop she becomes a plastic elfin goddess, unnatural and unreal. Don't feel good about not looking like that, girls, because she doesn't look like that either. This computer processing shit is like A1 sauce -- you put it on a poor cut of meat to cover for the taste, it's got no business being anywhere near a good cut of meat.
With that kind of data out there, these industry giants are forgetting the #1 tactic of product placement - give it away free, later a client they will be. That's Biz-101. It's obvious these giants are out of touch with reality.
Only works when people feel the love. I know I feel no compunction about pirating Microsoft products because they have made my life hell and have gotten their pound of flesh back out of me with all the pain and suffering. When it comes to smaller shops, I want to make sure that they make $ and are around to keep producing more great software. I feel a sense of connection.
When there are no practical barriers to piracy, the creators will have to provide a compelling reason for people to want to give them money.
The other factor, someone pirating software isn't like me stealing stock out of a store, it's more like me listening to NPR without being a donor. Tuning in my radio doesn't make them use more electricity, run up the coffee bill, nothing. But if I am enjoying the service they provide then it would be polite of me to contribute. They don't need money from everyone who is listening, just money from enough listeners to keep them on the air. And then there's the social aspect of listeners being asked to bundle more dollars for a higher recognition. You tend to see this more in political fundraising but peer approval can be a strong motivating factor. Dubya did this with providing special recognition to Pioneers who could pledge $100k between themselves and friends and family.
I think this may be the new model we're moving towards. I think it could be a good thing. The business conservative POV will say "Who are you to tell someone how much money they're allowed to make?" and I'll just smile and say the market will determine that. If the creator seems to be hurting for cash, people will want to get off their wallets and help him out. If he seems to have more money than is good for him and is throwing it around like a drunken sailor, people might contribute less. The government isn't telling him how much he can make, evil liberals aren't taking his money through confiscatory taxes, the market is setting the rate! They hate it when I put it that way.
Have you ever noticed that they speak some strange version of the Mexican language and look unlike us? Also their food is expensive because we eat cows which are large, plentiful and docile animals, while Japanise people only eat fearsome and rare SHARKS to boast of their manliness. In conclusion, Japan is a far away place somewhere in Mexico where smart people do not eat cows. Thank you will you marry me.
I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer. I've never had problems reading text on computer screens for long stretches but many people say it causes eye strain for them.
I'm curious as to how this technology scales. It boggles the mind to think it took that much time and money to develop but now that they have it, how cheap can they make it? Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost? And what about the books? I have no problem paying a buck or two for a rental like getting a movie out of a DVD kiosk -- I only have the dvd for a limited time, would have to pay again if I wanted it later, and have nothing to physically show for it. I feel more possessive when talking about books, especially books with DRM. DRM, unless you hack it, means your purchase is as impermanent as a rental and renting a book for $9.99 is a pretty damn expensive proposition.
This also brings us back to the issue of resale. There are so many books available on Amazon for what essentially boils down to shipping and handling. I can find even recent books for 75% off the cover price. If physical books are no longer printed or printed in far smaller runs, this means that the secondary market collapses. I can't borrow a book from a friend after they read it. I can't sell the book to a bookstore when I'm done. If my friend wants a copy, he's paying $9.99 the same as I did.
I don't know how this is all going to shake down but it'll certainly be an interesting fight.
I never really understood how Faux not only greenlit so many wonderful shows but also murdered them in the cradle after barely a season. It seems too much to be coincidence, I think it must be some sort of pathology amongst their programming directors. Keen Eddie, Futurama, Firefly, Dollhouse, all axed. (Ok, might be jumping the gun on Dollhouse by a few weeks.)
There's usually a political explanation for this kind of illogical behavior where Exec #1 gets to feel like he has a bigger penis for sabotaging Exec #2's pet project. It ultimately costs the company more money than it makes but ego is served so nobody cares. It just makes me wish the inevitable decline and destruction of the company would happen sooner before they tease me with any more shows I might like.
Anyone remember that old animated show God, the Devil, and Bob? That fat fuck Jerry Falwell led a crusade against it as being blasphemous, the same way he did with the Last Temptation of Christ. Oddly enough, both examples here had a greater understanding of and sympathy for Christ's point of view than that bloviating, closet-case fucktard and all of his ass-hatted minions.
The Last Temptation one is particularly amusing because the basic premise is "How can Jesus make a sacrifice of rejecting a peaceful human life and accepting the cross if he had no desire for it? Sacrifice without desire is an empty gesture. Giving up brussel sprouts for Lent? Meaningless. Giving up chocolate? Meaningful." So the fundies all flipped out at the idea of Jesus having an erection, Jesus having amorous thoughts about women, about wanting to take a wife and raise a family. Do you idiots read your own fucking book? It says God was made flesh, he is the son of man! One follows the other! What, you gonna flip out if anyone implies Jesus must have had to take a dump or two during his time on Earth? No, Jebus can't poo! Our pitiful little minds cannot contemplate it! Blasphemy!
So the whole point of the movie was showing Jesus wanting that normal life, seeing how good it felt, knowing it could all be his, and sacrificing it for a greater purpose. And this was considered to be the most horrible cinematic sin committed since Ishtar. Stupid fucking fundies.
Re:why would a woman want to be a geek goddess ??
on
How To Be A Geek Goddess
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Three words: Low. Hanging. Fruit.
Reminds me of the old Richard Pryor joke about two brothers walking across a long span of railroad bridge. Towards the middle one of them decides he has to take a piss and can't wait until he makes it to the other side. He says he's going to piss and his friend says what the hell and unzips too. "Water's cold," the first says to the second. "Yeah. Deep, too."
What if I didn't put them as a Museum? Instead, I'll use them as part of my dastardly plot to steal missiles from a British vessel lost in the South China Sea due to tampering with the GPS signal. Then use those missiles to provoke a war between China and Great Britain.
Do you think they will still let me have it?
It depends. You've already established that you have have a criminally-inclined genius and a ruthless, murderous streak. But more is required.
1. Can your organization's name be turned into a suitably menacing acronym? 2. Henchmen with unusual and remarkable deformities? 3. Henchwomen with names both unlikely and sexually suggestive? 4. Do you have a white persian cat? 5. Do you enjoy monologuing? 6. Can you credibly threaten the destruction of western civilization while maintaining a PG-13 rating?
I was actually going to post about the fucking article but now I see this is idle bullshit. Why is this fucking window still scruched up? Why can't they use the normal posting pages instead of creating a custom gimptarded piece of shit for Idle? What purpose could it possibly serve aside from making Idle feel even more useless than it already is?
Fuckitty fucking fuck!
As for what I was planning to ask, "Why the hell are cell data plans so expensive to begin with?" The fucking SMS messages are 20 cents on my carrier. I know the idea is that you're a captive audience and can be fucked as the provider feels is warranted just like they can charge you $8 for a beer in a sports park but seriously, where can we draw a line?
I know with the Mars rovers the cost of a second rover was small change compared to the development cost of the original. The launch vehicle is expensive, of course, but it was considered cheaper to launch two missions and hope one succeeded than launching one that could fail and mean all the money was wasted.
What sort of contingency do they have for sats like this? Do they just fabricate another one and try again in a year or two?
Ok, I'm going to make a strained metaphor here. It's not about cars but please, bear with me.
Back before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, the Catholics had the lock-on monopoly on access to God and the afterlife throughout most of Europe. There wasn't any way around that. The bibles were in Latin, you needed priests to speak the Latin to God since he didn't know any other language, and you couldn't say squat about them because they'd excommunicate your ass faster than you can say "Pontius Pilate!" And it cost some serious coin to keep an operation like this going, to support the massive ecclesiarchy and keep the pope in funny hats. They basically had the patent rights to salvation.
So here comes this funny little German anti-semite who says "Hey, what if we don't need the middlemen to get to heaven?" So when you get bibles written in the vulgate, printing presses churning them out by the gross, and this impertinent idea that you didn't need to tithe to Rome to get to heaven, you can understand why the pope saw red.
What I've noticed is that the older an organization gets, the more traditional and conservative it becomes. And throughout this ossification of thought and process also comes the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that burns through money like nobody's business. It takes a fantastic revenue stream to keep the perfumed masters in kibble. If you strip that bloat away and have an organization that's all about delivery, couldn't you really cut the cashflow and still remain profitable?
I admit our current hybrid model isn't going to survive the immediate future. We went from mainstream media who were both content creator and distribution channel to our current system where they still produce content but distribution has been coopted by the net. The creators lose a large portion of ad revenue to people who essentially serve as aggregators of their content. When the creators stop creating, the aggregators will need to step up to the plate and start producing.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it takes some money to put together a credible news organization. This is true. It's also true that it costs money to have good editors and quality control. The thing is, we're not getting that with the MSM right now. Because their way of doing things costs so much money, the people who own them expect them to serve as profit centers. They also expect the news team to support their own agenda. To put this back in terms of religion, it's like the king expecting his clergymen to speak of God's will in his latest war.
The net helps to lower the cost of doing business. I think what we could end up seeing is journalists setting up their own non-profit news service to circumvent the dying mainstream model. Locals can report on what's of interest in their region and the wire can ship it out to anyone who cares. The editors would be part of the service and it's their job to make sure bogus stories aren't planted. (looking at you, New York Times and lead-up to the Iraq War.)
I'm thinking the news organizations of the future will bear more in common with the various open source outfits than with today's MSM approach. We're talking about lean, low-budget operations that can succeed because of the low capital requirements of operating in an internet-enabled world.
I could be wrong on this but I don't think it would be because what I say is completely unlikely.
And why exactly do we need to send someone to a "remote area" to report on conditions when there are already people in those remote locations who are quite capable of telling the story?
So true. And why would we need Woodward and Bernstein, when we could simply look at Nixon's or Deep Throat's blog?
I think your workplace's smut filter would prevent you from hitting that blog for one thing.
Actually, Maxis already created a game called SimFarm which more or less simulated all the activities of a farm, i remember playing it way back in the day, but i'm sure if some government agency made one, it would be far different...
If they made it you'd just sit there doing nothing leaving your fields fallow while the government sends you a check. You get to sit on your porch drinking a beer and bitch about all them lazy no-good welfare niggers sucking at the government teat, blissfully aware of the irony of the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
When the PC boots up in 3 seconds, has a monitor at least 24" or more across, is placed in the most comfortable room in the house (after the bedroom), has no associations with work, requires ZERO brain effort, switches channels at the touch of one button and can be operated with one hand via a small remote control while the other hand holds a beer or fishes in a packet of Salt'n'Vinegar crisps for the last crumbs...
I'm typing this on a mac mini connected to a 42 inch tv. This computer serves as an entertainment center. I'm in an easy chair with wireless mouse and keyboard. The mini came with a remote that can handle starting and stopping video and adjusting sound. It won't navigate through video selections but this is a shortcoming of the software, not a technical impossibility. The computer will go to sleep quickly and wakes back up in seconds. It takes the TV longer to fire up than the computer does to become active.
Overall, this is a pretty slick setup. I have absolutely no complaints. I agree that nobody wants to "watch tv" on a computer screen at a desk. But the difference between how you sit and how you watch will simply be one of where the computer is connected. All of the newer big-screen TV's are marvelous at displaying high quality images from laptops and pc's.
When it comes to pushing computer tech you're looking at porn and games; when it comes to pushing tv, it's about sports. When you're talking about HD content, it was the sports broadcasts that had it first. And these live events are the only TV I can't find better and more conveniently as a torrent. You'd also be hard-pressed to provide it commercially over the net, for now. Just wait a few years.
Broadcast television is going to be dying for the same reason as broadcast radio. People haven't stopped listening to music, they've just stopped listening to the radio. CD's and tapes were the start of the decline but once the content became less and less relevant on radio, people had more incentive to seek alternatives like ipods. I know I used to enjoy the radio but it became such crap that it no longer mattered to me. How many kids grow up listening to the radio these days? I'm sure it will be years and years before the broadcasters are gone. Hell, there will probably always be someone broadcasting something somewhere over the airwaves but just look at where AM radio is at right now. Locally there's I think two english broadcasters, one of them carrying the hate radio crap like Rush, the rest are all spanish and hispanic stuff for the immigrants. (my market is south florida.) Aside from that, AM's a ghostland.
Technically, being in space and all, it should be named Alpha Squad 7.
Game publishers put on the pimp hat: "That's my money you're taking, muthafucka! We betta get on this here elecamatronic distribution thing, beyotch!"
This is not much of an exaggeration. The only real differences between pimps and game publishers are the choice of clothes and vernacular.
I haven't purchased a Metallica album since The Black Album and will never again. (Granted that was the last decent one they had...) You damn near single handedly spearheaded this RIAA anti-filesharing war. Out of spite and general boycott I do not listen to my old Metallica CDs, nor do I have any of them encoded to my computer. I refuse to go to your absurdly overpriced concerts. I will not download or share your music, not because of "piracy" but because I refuse to give any publicity to you or your whining old man bandmates. The "piracy" that you crusaded against made you what you are today.
What's more, they originally promoted the bootlegging of concert tapes which helped to spread the word when they weren't getting radio play. The ladder's fine when they're looking to get up the wall but they're going to kick it down in the faces of any other fuckers who have the temerity to climb it in the same way.
I think the only physical distribution of games we'll see is in the convenience stores, the way they'll have movies and some of the games for the older systems already. The game stores are the ones who should be terrified. The game companies want to remove the secondary market, same as the book publishers want to get rid of second hand bookstores. The convenience stores will be for the people too poor to afford an internet connection and will probably carry games for systems a generation behind the curve, the kind poorer people will be able to afford. Might carry a few current gen ones too, who knows.
Will they succeed? I think there will be a lot of pushback if they keep trying to use jacked up pricing. You can't bring a game to a friend's house, you can't loan him one when you're done. If your console croaks you might lose everything unless the game companies keep a "buy once, download as many times as you want" policy. If they're assholes about it, this will just drive the pirates to crack the games. I don't see an external media slot leaving systems any time soon, even if they're only used by a small portion of the market without net access. If they're big enough jerks about it, maybe there will come to be a market for current-gen emulators. Just buy a beefy PC, install the custom loader, play current gen games for free.
I recently took the Mac plunge. After two months, my verdict:
Pro's
1. It's not Windows! Yay!
2. It's not just not Windows, OSX has some really cool features. Mac products seem to have some more thinking put into them as opposed to the Windows-based machines. Yeah, they have their moments of stupid like with cracking Mac Cube cases, powerbook latch failures and screen cracking, but it's nice to get a new OS and be tickled by smart ideas instead of the feeling I get with Windows which is "how are they going to bone the next version this time?"
Con's
1. Damn them for keeping upgrades under wraps. I would have held off if I knew the new one was only two months away.
2. Too dangerous to work on inside. The iMac is technically user-servicable but there's no way I'd risk doing it myself. PC innards are built like tanks and the iMac looks like it's built out of aluminum foil, tissue paper and dreams. I'd rather let the Mac store people risk breaking it and buy me a new one than do anything myself. I'd be much happier with a more robust design but understand that twinky-dink laptop parts is how they make it fit in such a small package.
3. You really pay a lot more for the parts with Apple. People will go back and forth with you on this one, are you paying for quality or hype? Even if your Vista computer is cheaper, do you really want to use Vista? Ok, you could by a generic Windows pc and run Ubuntu, are you happy? Ah, but then support for Linux isn't as good as for Windows/OSX. You can go round in circles with this.
Overall, Apple has done good and bad but the good is ahead this time around. Versus Microsoft, I don't think I've had a cheerful thought about any of their products since Windows 2000.
Isn't iRobot the company that got the Big DoD Contract to make battlebots? Are we about to see the use of Militarized Hamsters in combat? Will our heroic soldiers be replaced by Rodent Guided Missiles?
I was going to ask the same thing. In WWII the military had a pigeon-guided bomb where the bird was trained to peck at an image on a CRT and the bomb would center on that pecking. Seemed impossibly Rube Golburg but it was supposed to have worked. Never was deployed in combat. They had another one where tiny incendiary charges were attached to bats. The idea was that bombers would fly over Japan with these bat bombs at the ready. The bombs would be dropped over the target, descend by parachute and the sides would pop off so the bats could fly out. They would look for roof overhangs to nest under and their bombs would go off soon thereafter, setting fire to entire cities. The concept was proven sound when the bat people burned down half of their own research camp but the war was over before they could be put into action.
I fear the only way to defeat these hamster-guided killer robots will be to put cats in robots of their own. But then someone will put dogs in the robots and to defeat the dogs someone will put Koreans in robots and it all ends with gorillas freezing in the snow.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Goes back to the fishing analogy. You could try it with cars but it won't work as well. There's a number of factors you can control to maximize your potential for a successful fishing trip. Find out when you should fish, get the right bait, use the proper equipment, all of these factors are in your control. As to whether or not the fish are biting, that's beyond your control. You could be doing everything right and fail. But if the conditions are favorable, you should be getting bites. And once that fish is on the line, then it's up to your skill to get it on the boat. If you're doing everything right, you should be getting bites eventually.
I've seen people do very well getting some lucky breaks and making proper use of them. I've seen people throw those breaks away for various reasons and wonder why they don't succeed. I've seen some people who are ready and primed to take the break, who are doing their best to make their own luck, but the breaks just aren't coming. I think it's very arrogant for the highly successful to believe that all of it is due to them and no other thing. That kind of attitude breeds a cocky arrogance. Think of how many acorns are dropped in a forest in a year and how many of those grow to become great trees? Some ridiculously small number I'm sure. Or look at how many eggs a sea turtle lays and how few of them grow into adulthood. It's the same winnowing process. If Bill Gates never succeeded you know damn well there would be a Will Fence or Sam Porticus for us to all bitch about.
I though the most wonderful thing about Tiggers was that there was only one of them
It's a very large quantity of one.
Lots of bands that play poorly live sound great on their CD's, and vice-versa. I'd go as far as to say that *most* of the bands that I've liked listening to live have sounded terrible when laid down, and vice-versa.
It's the musician's dillema. Focus on the tricks that make a recording sound good, or focus on the aspects that make a live performance sound good. They're very different sounds.
Here here. Most live recordings I've heard aren't very good because the bands can't handle their material live. It kills me when a band I like goes on stage and it sounds like someone covering their material and doing a poor job of it. Zeppelin is pretty awful live, or at least every live recording I've heard is disappointing. They're gods in the studio. Metallica hasn't been able to play their good stuff since they stopped touring after the Black Album. They went to shit with Load and haven't looked back since.
Probably the most impressive band I've ever heard both on studio and stage has been Dream Theater. Musicians I know are amazed by what they hear. "They didn't just dub in stage noise on a studio recording here, all this is really live?" Yup. Just that good.
Now with Blue Oyster Cult, they did a live album called Extraterrestrial Live. Holy smokes, that band was on fire. But you listen to the studio versions of the songs and they're completely flat. This band needs a live crowd to come alive. The Red and the Black is a good example. The studio track of that song is just anemic. Listen to it on the live album and you'd think someone distilled awesome into a black, viscous ooze and mainlined it right into their veins.
Computers can do too much of the work these days. It's analogous to the fashion model vids on youtube where you see a woman who looks attractive in a commonplace way sit down in the makeup chair and between that and the photoshop she becomes a plastic elfin goddess, unnatural and unreal. Don't feel good about not looking like that, girls, because she doesn't look like that either. This computer processing shit is like A1 sauce -- you put it on a poor cut of meat to cover for the taste, it's got no business being anywhere near a good cut of meat.
With that kind of data out there, these industry giants are forgetting the #1 tactic of product placement - give it away free, later a client they will be. That's Biz-101. It's obvious these giants are out of touch with reality.
Only works when people feel the love. I know I feel no compunction about pirating Microsoft products because they have made my life hell and have gotten their pound of flesh back out of me with all the pain and suffering. When it comes to smaller shops, I want to make sure that they make $ and are around to keep producing more great software. I feel a sense of connection.
When there are no practical barriers to piracy, the creators will have to provide a compelling reason for people to want to give them money.
The other factor, someone pirating software isn't like me stealing stock out of a store, it's more like me listening to NPR without being a donor. Tuning in my radio doesn't make them use more electricity, run up the coffee bill, nothing. But if I am enjoying the service they provide then it would be polite of me to contribute. They don't need money from everyone who is listening, just money from enough listeners to keep them on the air. And then there's the social aspect of listeners being asked to bundle more dollars for a higher recognition. You tend to see this more in political fundraising but peer approval can be a strong motivating factor. Dubya did this with providing special recognition to Pioneers who could pledge $100k between themselves and friends and family.
I think this may be the new model we're moving towards. I think it could be a good thing. The business conservative POV will say "Who are you to tell someone how much money they're allowed to make?" and I'll just smile and say the market will determine that. If the creator seems to be hurting for cash, people will want to get off their wallets and help him out. If he seems to have more money than is good for him and is throwing it around like a drunken sailor, people might contribute less. The government isn't telling him how much he can make, evil liberals aren't taking his money through confiscatory taxes, the market is setting the rate! They hate it when I put it that way.
Have you ever noticed that they speak some strange version of the Mexican language and look unlike us? Also their food is expensive because we eat cows which are large, plentiful and docile animals, while Japanise people only eat fearsome and rare SHARKS to boast of their manliness. In conclusion, Japan is a far away place somewhere in Mexico where smart people do not eat cows. Thank you will you marry me.
Now tell me about the ninja.
You could always, -er, ah, *cough* pirate them.
I've not yet had a chance to check one of these out. As I understand it, the look and feel of reading the eink display is just like reading bright white paper fresh from the laser printer. I've never had problems reading text on computer screens for long stretches but many people say it causes eye strain for them.
I'm curious as to how this technology scales. It boggles the mind to think it took that much time and money to develop but now that they have it, how cheap can they make it? Could they get the readers down to a more reasonable cost? And what about the books? I have no problem paying a buck or two for a rental like getting a movie out of a DVD kiosk -- I only have the dvd for a limited time, would have to pay again if I wanted it later, and have nothing to physically show for it. I feel more possessive when talking about books, especially books with DRM. DRM, unless you hack it, means your purchase is as impermanent as a rental and renting a book for $9.99 is a pretty damn expensive proposition.
This also brings us back to the issue of resale. There are so many books available on Amazon for what essentially boils down to shipping and handling. I can find even recent books for 75% off the cover price. If physical books are no longer printed or printed in far smaller runs, this means that the secondary market collapses. I can't borrow a book from a friend after they read it. I can't sell the book to a bookstore when I'm done. If my friend wants a copy, he's paying $9.99 the same as I did.
I don't know how this is all going to shake down but it'll certainly be an interesting fight.
Might I suggest "Downbelow"?
The joke is that black men have large penises. While standing on a bridge trestle many feet above the water, they are still able to reach it.
I never really understood how Faux not only greenlit so many wonderful shows but also murdered them in the cradle after barely a season. It seems too much to be coincidence, I think it must be some sort of pathology amongst their programming directors. Keen Eddie, Futurama, Firefly, Dollhouse, all axed. (Ok, might be jumping the gun on Dollhouse by a few weeks.)
There's usually a political explanation for this kind of illogical behavior where Exec #1 gets to feel like he has a bigger penis for sabotaging Exec #2's pet project. It ultimately costs the company more money than it makes but ego is served so nobody cares. It just makes me wish the inevitable decline and destruction of the company would happen sooner before they tease me with any more shows I might like.
Anyone remember that old animated show God, the Devil, and Bob? That fat fuck Jerry Falwell led a crusade against it as being blasphemous, the same way he did with the Last Temptation of Christ. Oddly enough, both examples here had a greater understanding of and sympathy for Christ's point of view than that bloviating, closet-case fucktard and all of his ass-hatted minions.
The Last Temptation one is particularly amusing because the basic premise is "How can Jesus make a sacrifice of rejecting a peaceful human life and accepting the cross if he had no desire for it? Sacrifice without desire is an empty gesture. Giving up brussel sprouts for Lent? Meaningless. Giving up chocolate? Meaningful." So the fundies all flipped out at the idea of Jesus having an erection, Jesus having amorous thoughts about women, about wanting to take a wife and raise a family. Do you idiots read your own fucking book? It says God was made flesh, he is the son of man! One follows the other! What, you gonna flip out if anyone implies Jesus must have had to take a dump or two during his time on Earth? No, Jebus can't poo! Our pitiful little minds cannot contemplate it! Blasphemy!
So the whole point of the movie was showing Jesus wanting that normal life, seeing how good it felt, knowing it could all be his, and sacrificing it for a greater purpose. And this was considered to be the most horrible cinematic sin committed since Ishtar. Stupid fucking fundies.
Three words:
Low. Hanging. Fruit.
Reminds me of the old Richard Pryor joke about two brothers walking across a long span of railroad bridge. Towards the middle one of them decides he has to take a piss and can't wait until he makes it to the other side. He says he's going to piss and his friend says what the hell and unzips too. "Water's cold," the first says to the second. "Yeah. Deep, too."
Spam Assassin.
What if I didn't put them as a Museum? Instead, I'll use them as part of my dastardly plot to steal missiles from a British vessel lost in the South China Sea due to tampering with the GPS signal. Then use those missiles to provoke a war between China and Great Britain.
Do you think they will still let me have it?
It depends. You've already established that you have have a criminally-inclined genius and a ruthless, murderous streak. But more is required.
1. Can your organization's name be turned into a suitably menacing acronym?
2. Henchmen with unusual and remarkable deformities?
3. Henchwomen with names both unlikely and sexually suggestive?
4. Do you have a white persian cat?
5. Do you enjoy monologuing?
6. Can you credibly threaten the destruction of western civilization while maintaining a PG-13 rating?
I was actually going to post about the fucking article but now I see this is idle bullshit. Why is this fucking window still scruched up? Why can't they use the normal posting pages instead of creating a custom gimptarded piece of shit for Idle? What purpose could it possibly serve aside from making Idle feel even more useless than it already is?
Fuckitty fucking fuck!
As for what I was planning to ask, "Why the hell are cell data plans so expensive to begin with?" The fucking SMS messages are 20 cents on my carrier. I know the idea is that you're a captive audience and can be fucked as the provider feels is warranted just like they can charge you $8 for a beer in a sports park but seriously, where can we draw a line?
I know with the Mars rovers the cost of a second rover was small change compared to the development cost of the original. The launch vehicle is expensive, of course, but it was considered cheaper to launch two missions and hope one succeeded than launching one that could fail and mean all the money was wasted.
What sort of contingency do they have for sats like this? Do they just fabricate another one and try again in a year or two?
Ok, I'm going to make a strained metaphor here. It's not about cars but please, bear with me.
Back before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, the Catholics had the lock-on monopoly on access to God and the afterlife throughout most of Europe. There wasn't any way around that. The bibles were in Latin, you needed priests to speak the Latin to God since he didn't know any other language, and you couldn't say squat about them because they'd excommunicate your ass faster than you can say "Pontius Pilate!" And it cost some serious coin to keep an operation like this going, to support the massive ecclesiarchy and keep the pope in funny hats. They basically had the patent rights to salvation.
So here comes this funny little German anti-semite who says "Hey, what if we don't need the middlemen to get to heaven?" So when you get bibles written in the vulgate, printing presses churning them out by the gross, and this impertinent idea that you didn't need to tithe to Rome to get to heaven, you can understand why the pope saw red.
What I've noticed is that the older an organization gets, the more traditional and conservative it becomes. And throughout this ossification of thought and process also comes the bloated and corrupt bureaucracy that burns through money like nobody's business. It takes a fantastic revenue stream to keep the perfumed masters in kibble. If you strip that bloat away and have an organization that's all about delivery, couldn't you really cut the cashflow and still remain profitable?
I admit our current hybrid model isn't going to survive the immediate future. We went from mainstream media who were both content creator and distribution channel to our current system where they still produce content but distribution has been coopted by the net. The creators lose a large portion of ad revenue to people who essentially serve as aggregators of their content. When the creators stop creating, the aggregators will need to step up to the plate and start producing.
Defenders of the MSM will say that it takes some money to put together a credible news organization. This is true. It's also true that it costs money to have good editors and quality control. The thing is, we're not getting that with the MSM right now. Because their way of doing things costs so much money, the people who own them expect them to serve as profit centers. They also expect the news team to support their own agenda. To put this back in terms of religion, it's like the king expecting his clergymen to speak of God's will in his latest war.
The net helps to lower the cost of doing business. I think what we could end up seeing is journalists setting up their own non-profit news service to circumvent the dying mainstream model. Locals can report on what's of interest in their region and the wire can ship it out to anyone who cares. The editors would be part of the service and it's their job to make sure bogus stories aren't planted. (looking at you, New York Times and lead-up to the Iraq War.)
I'm thinking the news organizations of the future will bear more in common with the various open source outfits than with today's MSM approach. We're talking about lean, low-budget operations that can succeed because of the low capital requirements of operating in an internet-enabled world.
I could be wrong on this but I don't think it would be because what I say is completely unlikely.
And why exactly do we need to send someone to a "remote area" to report on conditions when there are already people in those remote locations who are quite capable of telling the story?
So true. And why would we need Woodward and Bernstein, when we could simply look at Nixon's or Deep Throat's blog?
I think your workplace's smut filter would prevent you from hitting that blog for one thing.
Actually, Maxis already created a game called SimFarm which more or less simulated all the activities of a farm, i remember playing it way back in the day, but i'm sure if some government agency made one, it would be far different...
If they made it you'd just sit there doing nothing leaving your fields fallow while the government sends you a check. You get to sit on your porch drinking a beer and bitch about all them lazy no-good welfare niggers sucking at the government teat, blissfully aware of the irony of the situation.