Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
We need to pass some laws regarding news media ownership and operation: 1. No business doing business with the United States is allowed to own any media outlet. GE couldn't own NBC, for example. 2. Restore the old telecom rules that made national players like Clear Channel illegal. 3. No owning more than one outlet per media type in a single market. You may have one TV station, one radio station, one newspaper, not a dozen of each. 4. Expand public broadcasting and remove all political oversight.
Something I've been arguing for a while now is that our mass-marketing culture is a slow-rot poison eating away at our souls. The Bangladeshi micro-lending guy, Muhammad_Yunus feels the same way. He's a big proponent of social businesses, you can think of them as "for-profit charities" designed to be self-sustaining, reinvesting profits into the social work they are performing. He argued for a bit of culture-jamming on their part, putting out positive propaganda for positive living. Of course, the first reaction is "I don't want to be propagandized by anyone" and the response is "You're already being propagandized by the for-profits."
I was raised in a Christian household and I'm sick of hearing about the evils of Hollywood this, the evils of rock and roll that, DC being a pit of slime because people haven't accepted Jesus into their hearts. "We need a moral code, one based on Judeo-christian ethics! How can you live apart from God?" Makes me want to vomit. But this doesn't mean they don't have a point. They are defining a real problem, just coming up with the wrong solution, kind of like how a rabble-rouser will do a good job of accurately describing how awful the economy is and then inaccurately defines the root of those problems as the Jew. We do lack a moral basis and standards in this country. I'm 100% for sex in or out of marriage with whoever you want, as long as you're adults and consent, who cares? But our culture twists sex into things it shouldn't be, fashioning reins tipped with sharp hooks to plunge into our libidos and jerk us this way and that at the whims of the market. It poisons our understanding of and expectations for sex, human relationships, the very way we valuate what should be most dear to us. We're sexualizing the kids these days, little girls running around with "come molest me" togs. We're telling them they have to fit preconceived and narrowly-defined body types, the sum of your worth is defined by what you consume, roll that clip from Fight Club, etc.
I reject the notion that religion is needed as the basis of sound system of morals and ethics. The whole moral relativism argument about us having sex with children and box turtles if we don't have the bible is bunk. I will borrow just two religious axioms: (1) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and (2) And it harm none, do what thou wilt. You will not be able to present a problem that cannot be resolved by going back to those two rules. But I think I've kind of drifted away from the original point here.:)
Is there any surprise? The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
To be fair, reality has a known liberal bias.
Seriously, though, what the fuck are you talking about, "liberal media?" That's just a bullshit talking point you're being spoon-fed by your winger radio guys. The media has a corporatist agenda, fuck this liberal shit. How seriously was the evidence examined before the Iraq War? There wasn't any examination. It was all fawning softball coverage. The media sat on all kinds of explosive reports that would have blown Bush out of the water. Why did they do that? Because management felt Republicans would be good for business. Karl Rove lobbied Jack Welch over at GE trying to persuade him it would be good to give favorable coverage to the Bushies. Welch's response was along the lines of "I don't see why NBC has to maintain this fiction of impartiality, they should be pulling their own weight and doing what's good for the company." And part of the company line is speaking no ill of the company.
I'll tell you what, not all of that Obama coverage was positive. How much time was devoted to trying to gin up scandals for him? Remember, corporatist media. They're whores in it for the money. How many of them were telling us that the race was close, tightening, when all the insiders already knew there was no way McCain could win? Because horse races sell money. If McCain is up, they'll tear him down and boost Obama, then reverse course when McCain takes the lead. They want a frenzy of hype that will keep people watching.
I've been playing for 2 years, and loved playing it for most of that time. Recently there was a staff reshuffle and things have gone downhill since then. So-called "game re-balancing" is nerfing months of skill training in gunnery and speed modules to make it completely useless. That means 100 euros worth of subscription money paid for training which is worthless now. Players have tested the changes on the test server and given feedback to the new CCP dev team, but it was completely ignored.
This right here is why I prefer single-play to MMO's. If I enjoy Grand Theft Auto 4, that's great. It will remain the same game today as it will four years from now. Do I like some MMO? Better hope nobody mucks it up. If GTA5 sucks, I can stick with 4. I can't stick with an old version in an MMO.
I loved my Gallente drones but they were getting to be about worthless. Stupid drone AI always meant you'd be losing one in difficult missions. Is it so hard to return to the fucking ship when I say return?
Did they ever get station ambulation up and running yet? They'd bought White Wolf a few months before I quit playing and the talk of a World of Darkness MMO made it sound like the dev pool was about to suffer a major drain.
I love space combat games and if any MMORPG was going to suck me in, it would have been this one. But it just required way too much grinding. What finally got me, I had finally worked my way up to a battleship and was doing the hard missions that made the battleship worthwhile and the NPC frigates warp-scrambled me. They're so damn fast, you're scrambled before the fight even begins and if you realize you're overmatched, you can no longer escape as you could with cheaper ships in easier missions. A battleship represents the product of more game time than I'd care to consider and it can be destroyed in seconds.
The other thing that made it so awful is that the loot tables kept getting tweaked so less good stuff would drop, the addition of salvage meant that you now had to run your missions in a warship and then run through those same stupid rooms with a salvage ship, doubling the grind time without doubling the revenue...
All of that finally hit me upside the head and made me say "Self, what are you doing with your time here?" I won't even go into the devs cheating and shit, that'd take all night.
Some games just aren't as good or are totally different games in 3D. Sonic, Mario, Metroid, Secret of Mana, etc... Seriously, who wouldn't want to play a good Super Mario World 3? And let's not forget the atrocities that happened when Capcom brought Mega Man into 3D (X7, X8)...
Agreed. Sonic in 3D on the Dreamcast was impossible for me. I played one of the 3D sonics that came after that, again it was awful. Tried Sonic on the Nintendo DS, it was perfect! Same 2D format that made sonic sonic but everything was polygonal so they could do fancy stuff that couldn't be done back in the Genesis era. Of course, I still suck at it but that's no slight against the game.
It spit out the universe. And then there was this spider-like entity that came along with it. It crashed to Earth around the time of the dinosaurs, then eventually humans settled near the buried crash site, built a town called Derry, and... you know, King was really fucking blasted on coke and Jack Daniels, he doesn't even remember writing the book. Maybe it's best we just moved on.
a warrant from a judge will allow homicide investigators access to your cellphone provider's accumulated data, including tower connections. omg, the humanity!
And Britain's anti-terror laws won't ever be used for purely economic reasons against another nation, say Iceland. And the Patriot Act will never be misapplied to things like copyright violation cases, etc etc. Nope, nobody will ever misuse a tool for something other than its stated purpose because that would be wrong!
We have a case on the news of some local woman who killed her toddler. This has made national news, the grandma thought the mother's car trunk smelled like death, then claimed it was a bad pizza, kid's still missing, etc. The cops are organizing a big body hunt out in the woods because they were able to localize her cell phone there at the time the child went missing.
WTF?!
This can only mean that the mobile companies are already keeping detailed logs of your movement and the Feds can track you whenever they want. Warrants? Where we're going, we don't need warrants. Cell phones will be our personal minder bracelets. It'll be a crime to allow your battery to die since the Feds can't track you then.
Eggs are bad for you, whoops now they're good. Alcohol is bad for you, oh wait, red wine is good. And now we shouldn't stretch before exercising. I'll just stay put until they get around to discovering that exercising is bad for you and cathode rays are good for the skin. And Mountain Dew? They'll find out Yellow Dye #5 is the elixir of life.
There are plenty of people that need new organs too, some of them die from the lack. I sleep fine at night, I think I'll survive knowing some 'too busy dirty asshole' didn't get to buy sex.
Or some dirty filthy faggot isn't having gay sex, thank God. Or some dirty filthy hippie isn't living in a commune, thank God. And what about the dirty filthy atheists sleeping in on Sundays? Should get them to church where they can work it out with the Lord!
As for your talk of women having sex for money, I can't tell you how many failed marriages I've seen essentially amounted to the same thing. The woman is with the man because of his earning potential. He loses his job, can't pull down six figures at a new one, she moves on. A whore is honest, she tells you she's fucking for money. Women like this are dishonest whores.
(not trying to let men off the hook, the kind who churn through trophy wives, but we're talking about prostitution here, usually considered to be men soliciting women.)
Just how long have you been waiting to use that one?
The trick is to write them up in advance and drop them when appropriate.:)
banner ads from eharmony Dave drop a load on 'em
P2P, how can I explain it I'll take you packet by packet To have y'all nattin' while we be seedin' it P is for peer, 2 is l33t for "to" The last P...well...that's kinda simple It's sorta like another way to call a client an equal It's the server that be missin' here You get on a torrent and be leechin' from the swarm And your movies and shows appear gotta start to explainin' Bust it
Hosting movies direct will get the feds to say hello They get your IP and address and your knees feel like jello And if not for feds, the hosting costs will eatcha alive There's gotta be a better way to distribute and survive Imagine there's no hardware, hosting or bandwith fees just a torrent to download and and trackers to see Every peer has a piece to share with every other peer Reducing the burden and increasing redundancy without fear Who thinks it's wrong 'cos I'm downloadin' and uploadin' at Well if you do, that's P2P and you're not down with it But if you don't, here's your membership
Chorus: You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X Who's down with P2P (Every last IP) You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X Who's down with P2P (All the IP's)
The explanation I read sounded like this could be a good thing but whenever I see something like this come sailing through an approval process, I always have to wonder whose money greased the skids. The worse it is for the public, the quicker they push things through so nobody gets a chance to notice.
They're going to seem like they have a plan when they develop this tech but we'll be strung along for ten years before we realize they're pulling everything out of their asses?
16,000 or 160,000,000 years. While this may be "just engineering" to some, it's still a big just as there's still a lot of DNA degradation that happens over the course of millennia. There's a lot of reasons this might not work for a species we've never seen develop.
That's why you plug the gaps with frog DNA. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Some descriptions say that "porn scanners" search for fleshtones in images. What if the guy's a rubber freak and everybody is in skintight latex bondage outfits? Or hell, the guy could be a real sicko, a furry. Images of anthro skunk on aardvark action would be completely overlooked by such a filter and quite frankly, if we're going to investigate people based on their taste in porn, I find the furries the most suspicious. Them and the Harry Potter yaoi fangirls but you can grep that real quick.
So was I downmodded by the yaoi fangirls or the furs? Wait, girls don't post on slashdot. Yaoi fanboys. *shudder*
Some descriptions say that "porn scanners" search for fleshtones in images. What if the guy's a rubber freak and everybody is in skintight latex bondage outfits? Or hell, the guy could be a real sicko, a furry. Images of anthro skunk on aardvark action would be completely overlooked by such a filter and quite frankly, if we're going to investigate people based on their taste in porn, I find the furries the most suspicious. Them and the Harry Potter yaoi fangirls but you can grep that real quick.
Which is not to say that the Republican party and its conservative ideals are without merit. The country at this time is severely divided, and it has been the steady hand promised by Obama that has been able to attract voters this year. However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets. Where we may disagree is in degree, but at its core, the Republican stance has always been these three pillars.
I have a rather conservative outlook to life -- small "c", no vast ideology involved. I believe that it's best to approach things cautiously, make sure we don't leap in feet-first and screw things up before we even understand what's going on. I believe we shouldn't fix what ain't broke but this doesn't mean that there's not a better way of doing things out there. Sure, maybe 9 in 10 times the new idea turns out to not be a good one so we decide to not go ahead with it but there's always that 1 in 10 chance that it's a really good idea.
I despise what big "c" Conservatism has become in this country. Right-wing media outlets actively seek to inculcate their listeners against logic and reason, giving them predigested talking points to hurl back in forth in shouted arguments where nobody is really listening to each other. To me, conservatism is about caution, prudence, relying on wisdom won through hard experience and tough lessons. The opposite of this conservatism is flighty, mercurial indecision, mistakes made from inexperience and the best of intentions gone wrong. The non-conservative sees a drowning man and jumps in after him to save him. And as we all know, a drowning man is going to try scrambling up the body of his would-be rescuer and get them both killed. The true conservative does not immediately leap to unthinking action but looks for a life-ring to throw the two of them, preferring meaningful action that will produce results to empty actions full of symbolism and nothing more. But what would the GOP Conservative do today? He would look at the drowning man and say "Fuck him, it's his own problem. Let him save himself," and walk away.
And what of liberalism in this country? Why, the very debate has poisoned the word. Liberal is now an insult second only to child molester. "He's a liberal," the television ads sneer, as if that one word satisfactorily sums up every reason not to vote for someone. That's bullshit.
What is a liberal? A liberal is someone who is unsatisfied with the status quo. He worries that his conservative friend is too comfortable with the way things are and sees a better future in the way things could be. In a healthy political environment, there is give and take between both positions. Perhaps the liberal reaches too far, perhaps the conservative isn't reaching far enough. Through vigorous debate the public is informed of the issues and will decide who they agree with.
The thing about status quos, there's always going to be someone at the top of the pyramid quite happy with the way things are and there will always be many more people at the bottom wanting to change it. In this case, the conservative will want to exert every effort to keep things the way they are while liberals will want to bring about reforms, democratize the process, make things more fair. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of the conflict. Read Roman history and this back and forth feels utterly familiar. Change the names and dates and it could be pulled from our own newspapers.
The people are abandoning the Republican Party because they feel they're getting screwed. In other countries, sovereignty resides with the wealthy and the people have no voice as a matter of law. In America, sovereignty resides with the people, not a king, not an aristocracy, not a priesthood. This is a country by, of, and for the people. And right now what the people are seeing is a huge screw-job, marshaling the resources of this vast land to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Wall Street is screwing us over. Polit
I pop in the latest RTS and I have that initial moment of "ZOMG! BEST GRAPHICS EVER!!!" but once I scrape my jaw off the floor I see that the units are as dumb as ever. Same pathfinding problems that were around in Warcraft 1 and we're how many years later? Ultimately it just means I'm playing the same game as before with prettier graphics. YAWN.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean we can finally run Crysis now?
Suddenly, I'm no longer so sure that absolute freedom of the press is such a good idea any more.
We need to pass some laws regarding news media ownership and operation:
1. No business doing business with the United States is allowed to own any media outlet. GE couldn't own NBC, for example.
2. Restore the old telecom rules that made national players like Clear Channel illegal.
3. No owning more than one outlet per media type in a single market. You may have one TV station, one radio station, one newspaper, not a dozen of each.
4. Expand public broadcasting and remove all political oversight.
Something I've been arguing for a while now is that our mass-marketing culture is a slow-rot poison eating away at our souls. The Bangladeshi micro-lending guy, Muhammad_Yunus feels the same way. He's a big proponent of social businesses, you can think of them as "for-profit charities" designed to be self-sustaining, reinvesting profits into the social work they are performing. He argued for a bit of culture-jamming on their part, putting out positive propaganda for positive living. Of course, the first reaction is "I don't want to be propagandized by anyone" and the response is "You're already being propagandized by the for-profits."
I was raised in a Christian household and I'm sick of hearing about the evils of Hollywood this, the evils of rock and roll that, DC being a pit of slime because people haven't accepted Jesus into their hearts. "We need a moral code, one based on Judeo-christian ethics! How can you live apart from God?" Makes me want to vomit. But this doesn't mean they don't have a point. They are defining a real problem, just coming up with the wrong solution, kind of like how a rabble-rouser will do a good job of accurately describing how awful the economy is and then inaccurately defines the root of those problems as the Jew. We do lack a moral basis and standards in this country. I'm 100% for sex in or out of marriage with whoever you want, as long as you're adults and consent, who cares? But our culture twists sex into things it shouldn't be, fashioning reins tipped with sharp hooks to plunge into our libidos and jerk us this way and that at the whims of the market. It poisons our understanding of and expectations for sex, human relationships, the very way we valuate what should be most dear to us. We're sexualizing the kids these days, little girls running around with "come molest me" togs. We're telling them they have to fit preconceived and narrowly-defined body types, the sum of your worth is defined by what you consume, roll that clip from Fight Club, etc.
I reject the notion that religion is needed as the basis of sound system of morals and ethics. The whole moral relativism argument about us having sex with children and box turtles if we don't have the bible is bunk. I will borrow just two religious axioms: (1) Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and (2) And it harm none, do what thou wilt. You will not be able to present a problem that cannot be resolved by going back to those two rules. But I think I've kind of drifted away from the original point here. :)
Is there any surprise? The media (with the exception of Fox News) has always had a pretty large liberal bias.
To be fair, reality has a known liberal bias.
Seriously, though, what the fuck are you talking about, "liberal media?" That's just a bullshit talking point you're being spoon-fed by your winger radio guys. The media has a corporatist agenda, fuck this liberal shit. How seriously was the evidence examined before the Iraq War? There wasn't any examination. It was all fawning softball coverage. The media sat on all kinds of explosive reports that would have blown Bush out of the water. Why did they do that? Because management felt Republicans would be good for business. Karl Rove lobbied Jack Welch over at GE trying to persuade him it would be good to give favorable coverage to the Bushies. Welch's response was along the lines of "I don't see why NBC has to maintain this fiction of impartiality, they should be pulling their own weight and doing what's good for the company." And part of the company line is speaking no ill of the company.
I'll tell you what, not all of that Obama coverage was positive. How much time was devoted to trying to gin up scandals for him? Remember, corporatist media. They're whores in it for the money. How many of them were telling us that the race was close, tightening, when all the insiders already knew there was no way McCain could win? Because horse races sell money. If McCain is up, they'll tear him down and boost Obama, then reverse course when McCain takes the lead. They want a frenzy of hype that will keep people watching.
Repeat after me: it's all stage-managed bullshit.
I've been playing for 2 years, and loved playing it for most of that time. Recently there was a staff reshuffle and things have gone downhill since then. So-called "game re-balancing" is nerfing months of skill training in gunnery and speed modules to make it completely useless. That means 100 euros worth of subscription money paid for training which is worthless now. Players have tested the changes on the test server and given feedback to the new CCP dev team, but it was completely ignored.
This right here is why I prefer single-play to MMO's. If I enjoy Grand Theft Auto 4, that's great. It will remain the same game today as it will four years from now. Do I like some MMO? Better hope nobody mucks it up. If GTA5 sucks, I can stick with 4. I can't stick with an old version in an MMO.
I loved my Gallente drones but they were getting to be about worthless. Stupid drone AI always meant you'd be losing one in difficult missions. Is it so hard to return to the fucking ship when I say return?
Did they ever get station ambulation up and running yet? They'd bought White Wolf a few months before I quit playing and the talk of a World of Darkness MMO made it sound like the dev pool was about to suffer a major drain.
I love space combat games and if any MMORPG was going to suck me in, it would have been this one. But it just required way too much grinding. What finally got me, I had finally worked my way up to a battleship and was doing the hard missions that made the battleship worthwhile and the NPC frigates warp-scrambled me. They're so damn fast, you're scrambled before the fight even begins and if you realize you're overmatched, you can no longer escape as you could with cheaper ships in easier missions. A battleship represents the product of more game time than I'd care to consider and it can be destroyed in seconds.
The other thing that made it so awful is that the loot tables kept getting tweaked so less good stuff would drop, the addition of salvage meant that you now had to run your missions in a warship and then run through those same stupid rooms with a salvage ship, doubling the grind time without doubling the revenue...
All of that finally hit me upside the head and made me say "Self, what are you doing with your time here?" I won't even go into the devs cheating and shit, that'd take all night.
Some games just aren't as good or are totally different games in 3D. Sonic, Mario, Metroid, Secret of Mana, etc... Seriously, who wouldn't want to play a good Super Mario World 3? And let's not forget the atrocities that happened when Capcom brought Mega Man into 3D (X7, X8)...
Agreed. Sonic in 3D on the Dreamcast was impossible for me. I played one of the 3D sonics that came after that, again it was awful. Tried Sonic on the Nintendo DS, it was perfect! Same 2D format that made sonic sonic but everything was polygonal so they could do fancy stuff that couldn't be done back in the Genesis era. Of course, I still suck at it but that's no slight against the game.
It spit out the universe. And then there was this spider-like entity that came along with it. It crashed to Earth around the time of the dinosaurs, then eventually humans settled near the buried crash site, built a town called Derry, and... you know, King was really fucking blasted on coke and Jack Daniels, he doesn't even remember writing the book. Maybe it's best we just moved on.
-1 raving lunatic
a warrant from a judge will allow homicide investigators access to your cellphone provider's accumulated data, including tower connections. omg, the humanity!
And Britain's anti-terror laws won't ever be used for purely economic reasons against another nation, say Iceland. And the Patriot Act will never be misapplied to things like copyright violation cases, etc etc. Nope, nobody will ever misuse a tool for something other than its stated purpose because that would be wrong!
How Do I Get Open Source Programs Written For Me?
Offerings of pizza and beer usually work.
We have a case on the news of some local woman who killed her toddler. This has made national news, the grandma thought the mother's car trunk smelled like death, then claimed it was a bad pizza, kid's still missing, etc. The cops are organizing a big body hunt out in the woods because they were able to localize her cell phone there at the time the child went missing.
WTF?!
This can only mean that the mobile companies are already keeping detailed logs of your movement and the Feds can track you whenever they want. Warrants? Where we're going, we don't need warrants. Cell phones will be our personal minder bracelets. It'll be a crime to allow your battery to die since the Feds can't track you then.
I don't like this, not one bit.
Eggs are bad for you, whoops now they're good. Alcohol is bad for you, oh wait, red wine is good. And now we shouldn't stretch before exercising. I'll just stay put until they get around to discovering that exercising is bad for you and cathode rays are good for the skin. And Mountain Dew? They'll find out Yellow Dye #5 is the elixir of life.
There are plenty of people that need new organs too, some of them die from the lack. I sleep fine at night, I think I'll survive knowing some 'too busy dirty asshole' didn't get to buy sex.
Or some dirty filthy faggot isn't having gay sex, thank God. Or some dirty filthy hippie isn't living in a commune, thank God. And what about the dirty filthy atheists sleeping in on Sundays? Should get them to church where they can work it out with the Lord!
As for your talk of women having sex for money, I can't tell you how many failed marriages I've seen essentially amounted to the same thing. The woman is with the man because of his earning potential. He loses his job, can't pull down six figures at a new one, she moves on. A whore is honest, she tells you she's fucking for money. Women like this are dishonest whores.
(not trying to let men off the hook, the kind who churn through trophy wives, but we're talking about prostitution here, usually considered to be men soliciting women.)
Just how long have you been waiting to use that one?
The trick is to write them up in advance and drop them when appropriate. :)
banner ads from eharmony
Dave drop a load on 'em
P2P, how can I explain it
I'll take you packet by packet
To have y'all nattin' while we be seedin' it
P is for peer, 2 is l33t for "to"
The last P...well...that's kinda simple
It's sorta like another way to call a client an equal
It's the server that be missin' here
You get on a torrent and be leechin' from the swarm
And your movies and shows appear gotta start to explainin'
Bust it
Hosting movies direct will get the feds to say hello
They get your IP and address and your knees feel like jello
And if not for feds, the hosting costs will eatcha alive
There's gotta be a better way to distribute and survive
Imagine there's no hardware, hosting or bandwith fees
just a torrent to download and and trackers to see
Every peer has a piece to share with every other peer
Reducing the burden and increasing redundancy without fear
Who thinks it's wrong 'cos I'm downloadin' and uploadin' at
Well if you do, that's P2P and you're not down with it
But if you don't, here's your membership
Chorus:
You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with P2P (Every last IP)
You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with P2P (All the IP's)
The explanation I read sounded like this could be a good thing but whenever I see something like this come sailing through an approval process, I always have to wonder whose money greased the skids. The worse it is for the public, the quicker they push things through so nobody gets a chance to notice.
They're going to seem like they have a plan when they develop this tech but we'll be strung along for ten years before we realize they're pulling everything out of their asses?
It's a good thing McCain doesn't know how to use a computer!
16,000 or 160,000,000 years. While this may be "just engineering" to some, it's still a big just as there's still a lot of DNA degradation that happens over the course of millennia. There's a lot of reasons this might not work for a species we've never seen develop.
That's why you plug the gaps with frog DNA. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
Cthulu--the ancient one!
Dagon it, I thought it was the other one!
Some descriptions say that "porn scanners" search for fleshtones in images. What if the guy's a rubber freak and everybody is in skintight latex bondage outfits? Or hell, the guy could be a real sicko, a furry. Images of anthro skunk on aardvark action would be completely overlooked by such a filter and quite frankly, if we're going to investigate people based on their taste in porn, I find the furries the most suspicious. Them and the Harry Potter yaoi fangirls but you can grep that real quick.
So was I downmodded by the yaoi fangirls or the furs? Wait, girls don't post on slashdot. Yaoi fanboys. *shudder*
I'm an electrician and I've wired a Walmart when it was being built.
So if Luke or Lando blew up the Walmart you were building, is your death their fault or did you know what you were doing and taking your chances?
Some descriptions say that "porn scanners" search for fleshtones in images. What if the guy's a rubber freak and everybody is in skintight latex bondage outfits? Or hell, the guy could be a real sicko, a furry. Images of anthro skunk on aardvark action would be completely overlooked by such a filter and quite frankly, if we're going to investigate people based on their taste in porn, I find the furries the most suspicious. Them and the Harry Potter yaoi fangirls but you can grep that real quick.
Which is not to say that the Republican party and its conservative ideals are without merit. The country at this time is severely divided, and it has been the steady hand promised by Obama that has been able to attract voters this year. However, most people believe in smaller government, in a government that is less intrusive, and in free markets. Where we may disagree is in degree, but at its core, the Republican stance has always been these three pillars.
I have a rather conservative outlook to life -- small "c", no vast ideology involved. I believe that it's best to approach things cautiously, make sure we don't leap in feet-first and screw things up before we even understand what's going on. I believe we shouldn't fix what ain't broke but this doesn't mean that there's not a better way of doing things out there. Sure, maybe 9 in 10 times the new idea turns out to not be a good one so we decide to not go ahead with it but there's always that 1 in 10 chance that it's a really good idea.
I despise what big "c" Conservatism has become in this country. Right-wing media outlets actively seek to inculcate their listeners against logic and reason, giving them predigested talking points to hurl back in forth in shouted arguments where nobody is really listening to each other. To me, conservatism is about caution, prudence, relying on wisdom won through hard experience and tough lessons. The opposite of this conservatism is flighty, mercurial indecision, mistakes made from inexperience and the best of intentions gone wrong. The non-conservative sees a drowning man and jumps in after him to save him. And as we all know, a drowning man is going to try scrambling up the body of his would-be rescuer and get them both killed. The true conservative does not immediately leap to unthinking action but looks for a life-ring to throw the two of them, preferring meaningful action that will produce results to empty actions full of symbolism and nothing more. But what would the GOP Conservative do today? He would look at the drowning man and say "Fuck him, it's his own problem. Let him save himself," and walk away.
And what of liberalism in this country? Why, the very debate has poisoned the word. Liberal is now an insult second only to child molester. "He's a liberal," the television ads sneer, as if that one word satisfactorily sums up every reason not to vote for someone. That's bullshit.
What is a liberal? A liberal is someone who is unsatisfied with the status quo. He worries that his conservative friend is too comfortable with the way things are and sees a better future in the way things could be. In a healthy political environment, there is give and take between both positions. Perhaps the liberal reaches too far, perhaps the conservative isn't reaching far enough. Through vigorous debate the public is informed of the issues and will decide who they agree with.
The thing about status quos, there's always going to be someone at the top of the pyramid quite happy with the way things are and there will always be many more people at the bottom wanting to change it. In this case, the conservative will want to exert every effort to keep things the way they are while liberals will want to bring about reforms, democratize the process, make things more fair. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of the conflict. Read Roman history and this back and forth feels utterly familiar. Change the names and dates and it could be pulled from our own newspapers.
The people are abandoning the Republican Party because they feel they're getting screwed. In other countries, sovereignty resides with the wealthy and the people have no voice as a matter of law. In America, sovereignty resides with the people, not a king, not an aristocracy, not a priesthood. This is a country by, of, and for the people. And right now what the people are seeing is a huge screw-job, marshaling the resources of this vast land to benefit the few at the expense of the many. Wall Street is screwing us over. Polit
Thank God nobody ever invented Smellovision.
I pop in the latest RTS and I have that initial moment of "ZOMG! BEST GRAPHICS EVER!!!" but once I scrape my jaw off the floor I see that the units are as dumb as ever. Same pathfinding problems that were around in Warcraft 1 and we're how many years later? Ultimately it just means I'm playing the same game as before with prettier graphics. YAWN.
Because in space, no one can hear you fart.
More importantly, no one can smell it, either.