Thanks for the NSFW tag there. Much appreciated. Now when I'm asked why I was checking out that page on wikipedia, I'll have to explain what slashdot is, what an open source coffee maker is, what a lolcat is, and what icanhascheezburger.com is to justify why I went there on company time. Should be fun.
Oodaloop's boss: I am interested in your newsletter concerning those topics and would like to learn more.
An analogy is a lot like a tangerine, in that you have to break through the tough outer rind of legitimacy before you get to the juicy center and realize that an analogy can never serve as real evidence in support of anything.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can crush someone's throat with the power of my evil bionic hand. Until then, I'll just have to choke them by roasting habanero peppers in a dry skillet.
I wonder how long it'll take for artificial limbs to become perfect substitutes, the kind of thing you can even forget you have. My glasses are so much a part of me and so light, I could easily forget I'm wearing them aside from the bit about things not being blurry. I wonder what it would take for an artificial hand to be good enough to play piano, type on a keyboard, providing perfect sensory feedback and accuracy.
What's the hard part about wiring the limbs up to the nerves? I remember reading about a special adhesive developed that could be sticky on one end for nerves, a proper digital interface on the other side, and the signals would be transmitted properly.
As I understand it, a successful hacker isn't going to find the blueprints to our latest nuclear warhead sitting on a server with internet access. Those systems are kept physically segregated on private networks within the research center. I'm not sure how they transfer electronic copies from one center to another but would not be surprised if it involved archive tapes in a briefcase chained to someone's wrist. (Of course, I also wouldn't be surprised if they just encrypted the tapes and sent them by post.)
The sort of useful stuff a hacker is looking for is in the emails or the office docs. Gossip, shop talk, they can learn some juicy tidbits about trade proposals, arms negotiations, weapon performance stats, etc.
Admiral Poindexter had been on a kick about trying to lock up a lot of public information because he felt that it could have military value. Tom Clancy was an example of his fears. Clancy wrote Red October with access to nothing more than the publicly-available trade publications like Aviation Week, Navy Times, etc. He put a lot of 2's together and came up with some surprisingly accurate guesses about weapons and performance parameters. When the spooks read his book, they were convinced that someone on the inside must have been blabbing to him.
While I would want to say that the Hollywood idea of someone just being able to sit down at a computer and hack power plants and traffic signals is complete bullshit, I've read about some surprising system designs where real problems have happened. A few years back on Slashdot there was discussion of a Microsoft macro trojan fucking with a power plant. I couldn't imagine how this would be since I'd have thought the computers controlling the plant would be dedicated systems running some unix flavor, segregated from the rest of the net. Sure, the plant engineers would have desktops running Windows but that's just for the paperwork, not for actually operating the generators. IIRC, they were all on the same LAN and there was a reason why this was so -- not a great reason but one where you have to sigh and say "yeah, I can see it happening." I think what happened was the LAN got saturated with pings from the infected Windows boxes, same way the Denver airport was taken down by one bad network card flooding the LAN with endless pings.
AS opposed to what? Sitting around and nitting with Grandma while listening to some R&B? I'll concede that the mid 1960s through the 1970s, rock was untouchable, but if you think today's slop called rock can even hold a candle to country, you are sadly not very open minded.
Country? You mean that Nashville twaddle with the metrosexual men with shaved chests wearing their little cowboy hats like cornpone fetish night at the gay bar?
Modern country is over-processed, undernourished crap, just like what's become of commercial rock and numetal. Gimme the old stuff like David Allen Coe.
Let's just agree that commercialism sucks because you'll never convince me that Nashville country is good.:)
If there's any argument that could get red-blooded, meat-eating, women-banging Republican men interested in environmentalism, it's the thought that pollution will turn their sons into gay little girlie men with small dicks.
Next, we need to convince them professional sports and country music lowers sperm count.
You also have to account for any differences between the earth-star distance and the earth-cloud distance, but it's still the largest ever radar system.
Not only can we make crops resistant to salty conditions, we can breed them to fix the soil and remove that salt. Bioremediation works on all sorts of poisoned soils, removing all sorts of poisons.
You mean that it will concentrate heavy metals and other materials into crystals that could be harvested, returned to a refinery and the products fed into adjacent factories that can turn out weapons?
Sounds eerily reminiscent of the end of *every bloody Scooby Doo episode* where the baddie turns out to be a supposedly amiable minor character who in reality was bitter about some business dealing and trying to subvert his former partner.
Sad thing is, I almost instantly visualised this in animated form, and I didn't even like Scooby Doo that much!
But what kind of monster was he dressed up like, yeti or ghost pirate?
That's the dumbest statement I've read in a long time. The only thing that CEOs and copper thieves have in common is that you apparently hate them both.
Read over your own post and read it for content this time, you'll find a far dumber statement.
As we're condemning these thieves for being fucking assholes, tearing down their own community's infrastructure for the scrap value, just remember that the only difference between them and the financial wizards and CEO's who brought us into our current crisis is a matter of scale.
If you want to do a spin-off right, it should really have something to do with the original show. Now there have been exceptionally successful spin-offs, mostly American comedies. (I say successful in that they ran a long time, making no judgment on quality.) In fact, it's often surprising to find out which show they spun off from. Frasier came from Cheers, Jeffersons came from some other show that you wouldn't have thought of, Laverne and Shirley spun off of something else, Mork and Mindy was based on something else. But then there's also all of the really crappy spin-offs that simply could not stand on their own two feet, just like a band that works because of all of the members coming together and the solo acts never have that same magic after they split.
The thing that's always funny to see is when something is spun off in a completely nonsensical way. She-Ra was a spin-off of He-Man. What were they thinking? No boy worth his salt is going to play with a girl's toy and why would the girls want to play with something tied in to a boy's toy? And as far as this goes, we're taking a spaceships and robot scifi story and spinning it off into a soap opera? I mean yeah, there are some soapy elements to BSG already but this really does sound like Dallas in Space (except they never travel off-planet.)
I don't get it. The Paramount suits said they'd never do a show on a space station becuase that's like taking the wheels off the cart, you never go anywhere interesting and it would require a lot of contrivances to get interesting things to come to you. I think the more appropriate complaint would be setting a show in the Star Trek universe in a restaurant in a backwater town on Earth that doesn't get much traffic from offworlders. Yeah, look at this big neat universe we're not seeing!
Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
A corpse is a corpse of course, of course and you can't gain consent from a corpse, of course because a corpse is, of course by definition dead!
I wouldn't necessarily say, though, that they "mucked the story and pacing." It does definitely have a different feel, because the setting is completely different. HL1 was all about Gordon Freeman, one man just trying to survive. HL2 was about Gordon Freeman, somewhat of a legend but still just one piece in a planet-wide war.
Everyone was going on about how cool the striders were. Where? I didn't see cool, I saw yawn. It didn't feel like a war. That Medal of Honor game in the late 90's, was it Allied Assault? The one with the huge D-Day mission. That felt like a war. And those same guys went on to do the Call of Duty games. Those felt like huge wars. The river crossing at Stalingrad was unbelievable.
It's all a matter of the imagination of the designers working with the tools they had at hand. We've seen limited 8-bit games that made our jaws drop and we've seen 8-bits that look two-bit in comparison. It's no different from how two different cooks can use the same ingredients, one turns out a beautiful meal and the other an uninspired mess.
Plot, pacing, all of these things are important. We can see how two editors working from the same original footage can create vastly different movies simply on account of how they put things together. Look at Youtube where you can see the new Shining trailer recasting it as a PG life-affirming romance movie and Mary Poppins done as a horror movie. All original material from the original films, just new voice-overs and music. And this really applies to the games as well, setting up huge action pieces, doling out plot, giving the player a sense of perspective in the game world.
"Maybe I'm leaning too much on fond remembrance here, but I prefer the isolated, solitary feel of the first Half-Life to the more character-driven atmosphere in the sequel."
I couldn't agree more! I like HL2, but it did not give you the isolated solitary feel of HL1. I really like FPS games that put me as the solo action hero against the universe. I really miss FPS games of this kind. I have put all my hopes on DNF, but it seems like it will never be released...
I find that sort of thing can get rather boring. Half-Life 2 I thought was a great technical exercise but a tremendously boring game. Why? They got the storytelling all mucked up. Half-Life was a breath of fresh air after Doom because of how much further they pushed the ideas. Doom was just about shooting crazy monsters. Quake was nothing special, just shades of brown and no other shooter had really beat Doom at its own game. Now here comes Half-Life simulating a world with speech, characters, all this shit. And the storyline had you hooked. It played out like a movie whereas the storyline of Doom was about as paper-thin as an 80's arcade game. It pushed our boundaries on what we could expect.
Half-Life 2 was disappointing because they mucked the story and pacing. Half the damn game was spent trying to get to someone who could explain what was going on. There were no interesting firefights like the three-way battles you could run into in the first game. The AI was bad, there were no "holy shit!" awesome moments like the Blast Pit, running into the Gargant for the first time, etc.
There needed to be more character stuff and more moments of "holy shit" awesome in the game. There weren't. It just came across as rather uninspired and workman-like, despite how cool the engine was. It felt like nu-Star Wars rather than the original trilogy.
"the big spam-spewing Srizbi botnet, shut down two weeks ago when McColo was shuttered, has been resurrected and is again under the control of criminals"
I'd love to go back in the '50s, find one of those future drawing artists, show him that head news, and ask him to draw what he think that means in the year 2008.
Hell, just go back to the 60's and hand it to Mr. Crumb. I'm sure it would be filthy and funny by turns.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the NSFW tag there. Much appreciated. Now when I'm asked why I was checking out that page on wikipedia, I'll have to explain what slashdot is, what an open source coffee maker is, what a lolcat is, and what icanhascheezburger.com is to justify why I went there on company time. Should be fun.
Oodaloop's boss: I am interested in your newsletter concerning those topics and would like to learn more.
An analogy is a lot like a tangerine, in that you have to break through the tough outer rind of legitimacy before you get to the juicy center and realize that an analogy can never serve as real evidence in support of anything.
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like pears.
I'm looking forward to the day when I can crush someone's throat with the power of my evil bionic hand. Until then, I'll just have to choke them by roasting habanero peppers in a dry skillet.
I wonder how long it'll take for artificial limbs to become perfect substitutes, the kind of thing you can even forget you have. My glasses are so much a part of me and so light, I could easily forget I'm wearing them aside from the bit about things not being blurry. I wonder what it would take for an artificial hand to be good enough to play piano, type on a keyboard, providing perfect sensory feedback and accuracy.
What's the hard part about wiring the limbs up to the nerves? I remember reading about a special adhesive developed that could be sticky on one end for nerves, a proper digital interface on the other side, and the signals would be transmitted properly.
While I'm not fond of David Allen Coe, I gotta agree -- overproduced pop-slop ain't country. If it's got violins in the back-track, it ain't country.
But if you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.
As I understand it, a successful hacker isn't going to find the blueprints to our latest nuclear warhead sitting on a server with internet access. Those systems are kept physically segregated on private networks within the research center. I'm not sure how they transfer electronic copies from one center to another but would not be surprised if it involved archive tapes in a briefcase chained to someone's wrist. (Of course, I also wouldn't be surprised if they just encrypted the tapes and sent them by post.)
The sort of useful stuff a hacker is looking for is in the emails or the office docs. Gossip, shop talk, they can learn some juicy tidbits about trade proposals, arms negotiations, weapon performance stats, etc.
Admiral Poindexter had been on a kick about trying to lock up a lot of public information because he felt that it could have military value. Tom Clancy was an example of his fears. Clancy wrote Red October with access to nothing more than the publicly-available trade publications like Aviation Week, Navy Times, etc. He put a lot of 2's together and came up with some surprisingly accurate guesses about weapons and performance parameters. When the spooks read his book, they were convinced that someone on the inside must have been blabbing to him.
While I would want to say that the Hollywood idea of someone just being able to sit down at a computer and hack power plants and traffic signals is complete bullshit, I've read about some surprising system designs where real problems have happened. A few years back on Slashdot there was discussion of a Microsoft macro trojan fucking with a power plant. I couldn't imagine how this would be since I'd have thought the computers controlling the plant would be dedicated systems running some unix flavor, segregated from the rest of the net. Sure, the plant engineers would have desktops running Windows but that's just for the paperwork, not for actually operating the generators. IIRC, they were all on the same LAN and there was a reason why this was so -- not a great reason but one where you have to sigh and say "yeah, I can see it happening." I think what happened was the LAN got saturated with pings from the infected Windows boxes, same way the Denver airport was taken down by one bad network card flooding the LAN with endless pings.
AS opposed to what? Sitting around and nitting with Grandma while listening to some R&B? I'll concede that the mid 1960s through the 1970s, rock was untouchable, but if you think today's slop called rock can even hold a candle to country, you are sadly not very open minded.
Country? You mean that Nashville twaddle with the metrosexual men with shaved chests wearing their little cowboy hats like cornpone fetish night at the gay bar?
Modern country is over-processed, undernourished crap, just like what's become of commercial rock and numetal. Gimme the old stuff like David Allen Coe.
Let's just agree that commercialism sucks because you'll never convince me that Nashville country is good. :)
If there's any argument that could get red-blooded, meat-eating, women-banging Republican men interested in environmentalism, it's the thought that pollution will turn their sons into gay little girlie men with small dicks.
Next, we need to convince them professional sports and country music lowers sperm count.
RIAA sues Somalis for piracy, Somalis return fire
So when we see this article duped next week, now we'll know why?
You also have to account for any differences between the earth-star distance and the earth-cloud distance, but it's still the largest ever radar system.
If they're light echoes, shouldn't it be sonar?
Not only can we make crops resistant to salty conditions, we can breed them to fix the soil and remove that salt. Bioremediation works on all sorts of poisoned soils, removing all sorts of poisons.
You mean that it will concentrate heavy metals and other materials into crystals that could be harvested, returned to a refinery and the products fed into adjacent factories that can turn out weapons?
The Oedipus one I got from MST3K, the Dune one is an original.
Sounds eerily reminiscent of the end of *every bloody Scooby Doo episode* where the baddie turns out to be a supposedly amiable minor character who in reality was bitter about some business dealing and trying to subvert his former partner.
Sad thing is, I almost instantly visualised this in animated form, and I didn't even like Scooby Doo that much!
But what kind of monster was he dressed up like, yeti or ghost pirate?
It spews commercials so it must be the ad vent.
Mine was a troubled childhood.
After raping the Spartans, now he's going after the story of ol' Oedipus?
Creepy tagline. If they want to get all incestuous, they could at least crib from my old sig:
They say that cat Oedipus is one bad mother--
Shut your mouth!
But I'm just talkin' 'bout Oedipus!
Then we can dig it!
That's the dumbest statement I've read in a long time. The only thing that CEOs and copper thieves have in common is that you apparently hate them both.
Read over your own post and read it for content this time, you'll find a far dumber statement.
As we're condemning these thieves for being fucking assholes, tearing down their own community's infrastructure for the scrap value, just remember that the only difference between them and the financial wizards and CEO's who brought us into our current crisis is a matter of scale.
If you want to do a spin-off right, it should really have something to do with the original show. Now there have been exceptionally successful spin-offs, mostly American comedies. (I say successful in that they ran a long time, making no judgment on quality.) In fact, it's often surprising to find out which show they spun off from. Frasier came from Cheers, Jeffersons came from some other show that you wouldn't have thought of, Laverne and Shirley spun off of something else, Mork and Mindy was based on something else. But then there's also all of the really crappy spin-offs that simply could not stand on their own two feet, just like a band that works because of all of the members coming together and the solo acts never have that same magic after they split.
The thing that's always funny to see is when something is spun off in a completely nonsensical way. She-Ra was a spin-off of He-Man. What were they thinking? No boy worth his salt is going to play with a girl's toy and why would the girls want to play with something tied in to a boy's toy? And as far as this goes, we're taking a spaceships and robot scifi story and spinning it off into a soap opera? I mean yeah, there are some soapy elements to BSG already but this really does sound like Dallas in Space (except they never travel off-planet.)
I don't get it. The Paramount suits said they'd never do a show on a space station becuase that's like taking the wheels off the cart, you never go anywhere interesting and it would require a lot of contrivances to get interesting things to come to you. I think the more appropriate complaint would be setting a show in the Star Trek universe in a restaurant in a backwater town on Earth that doesn't get much traffic from offworlders. Yeah, look at this big neat universe we're not seeing!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_West%E2%80%93Reanimator [wikipedia.org]
I don't know how I could have messed that up.
They probably waited too long before injecting you with the serum.
Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
A corpse is a corpse
of course, of course
and you can't gain consent from a corpse, of course
because a corpse is, of course
by definition dead!
Did I miss any big asses?
No, Mixalot, I think you covered just about all of them.
I wouldn't necessarily say, though, that they "mucked the story and pacing." It does definitely have a different feel, because the setting is completely different. HL1 was all about Gordon Freeman, one man just trying to survive. HL2 was about Gordon Freeman, somewhat of a legend but still just one piece in a planet-wide war.
Everyone was going on about how cool the striders were. Where? I didn't see cool, I saw yawn. It didn't feel like a war. That Medal of Honor game in the late 90's, was it Allied Assault? The one with the huge D-Day mission. That felt like a war. And those same guys went on to do the Call of Duty games. Those felt like huge wars. The river crossing at Stalingrad was unbelievable.
It's all a matter of the imagination of the designers working with the tools they had at hand. We've seen limited 8-bit games that made our jaws drop and we've seen 8-bits that look two-bit in comparison. It's no different from how two different cooks can use the same ingredients, one turns out a beautiful meal and the other an uninspired mess.
Plot, pacing, all of these things are important. We can see how two editors working from the same original footage can create vastly different movies simply on account of how they put things together. Look at Youtube where you can see the new Shining trailer recasting it as a PG life-affirming romance movie and Mary Poppins done as a horror movie. All original material from the original films, just new voice-overs and music. And this really applies to the games as well, setting up huge action pieces, doling out plot, giving the player a sense of perspective in the game world.
"Maybe I'm leaning too much on fond remembrance here, but I prefer the isolated, solitary feel of the first Half-Life to the more character-driven atmosphere in the sequel."
I couldn't agree more! I like HL2, but it did not give you the isolated solitary feel of HL1. I really like FPS games that put me as the solo action hero against the universe. I really miss FPS games of this kind. I have put all my hopes on DNF, but it seems like it will never be released...
I find that sort of thing can get rather boring. Half-Life 2 I thought was a great technical exercise but a tremendously boring game. Why? They got the storytelling all mucked up. Half-Life was a breath of fresh air after Doom because of how much further they pushed the ideas. Doom was just about shooting crazy monsters. Quake was nothing special, just shades of brown and no other shooter had really beat Doom at its own game. Now here comes Half-Life simulating a world with speech, characters, all this shit. And the storyline had you hooked. It played out like a movie whereas the storyline of Doom was about as paper-thin as an 80's arcade game. It pushed our boundaries on what we could expect.
Half-Life 2 was disappointing because they mucked the story and pacing. Half the damn game was spent trying to get to someone who could explain what was going on. There were no interesting firefights like the three-way battles you could run into in the first game. The AI was bad, there were no "holy shit!" awesome moments like the Blast Pit, running into the Gargant for the first time, etc.
There needed to be more character stuff and more moments of "holy shit" awesome in the game. There weren't. It just came across as rather uninspired and workman-like, despite how cool the engine was. It felt like nu-Star Wars rather than the original trilogy.
They think if they steal all the acorns, Obama will lose his charismatic powers.
"the big spam-spewing Srizbi botnet, shut down two weeks ago when McColo was shuttered, has been resurrected and is again under the control of criminals"
I'd love to go back in the '50s, find one of those future drawing artists, show him that head news, and ask him to draw what he think that means in the year 2008.
Hell, just go back to the 60's and hand it to Mr. Crumb. I'm sure it would be filthy and funny by turns.