Shit, that either means he's Indian or an American with taste.
Re:Back in the day...
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 4, Funny
My time is a severely limited quantity; And yet you're posting on Slashdot.;) ...while on the toilet, using an iphone. Even when he's on Slashdot, he's getting shit done.
The only thing sadder and more despicable at this point than the Bush administration are the Democrats in Congress who have been on their knees for the last two years after promising to hold this imperial administration accountable. Obama was asked how he'd be different from the current Democrats in Congress. "I don't do cowering," he said.
*crosses fingers* please oh fucking cthulhu please don't let him be lying on this one. The only explanation I can think of for the current Dems is that they have a lot to lose if Bush goes down, evidence implicating them in the same kind of crimes. I so hope he isn't a fake.
But what are the odds that Windows 7 will actually ship when MS says it will? That's not the right question. "What are the odds that Windows 7 won't be even more fucked up than Vista with whatever service pack they're up to by then?"
Then again, if most folks look at computers as an appliance, who wants to be an appliance repairman? Seriously - how many folks wanted to work for the phone company in the 60s and 70s? Are you kidding? That Maytag guy is like sitting on his ass every fucking day! Easy gig.
You'd have to send him to Japan first, which would be prohibitively expensive. I hear the Japanese have an entire fleet of vessels funded with government subsidies to help.
For the rest of the kids, the funny word ("eponymous") used in the submission means "giving one's name to", as in Romulus gave his name to Rome. Romulus, of course was... ah fuck that too. It happened a long time ago, before Star Trek the original TV series, even. Look, there's no need to Remus a new one over this.
We're going to find out that the Mafia has a hit out on him or he's supposed to be in an arranged marriage to a cannibal princess or something. The lovable everyman who buys this guy's life will now be in a madcap race to escape the consequences, probably falling in love with a girl-next-door Hollywood starlet in the process.
Last year, in early March around my birthday, I was listening to a lot of Boston music for some reason. On March 6, I said to a friend, "I need to see these great classic rock bands before they all start dying on me." and found the tentative Boston winter 2007-2008 tour schedule. On March 7, Brad Delp took his own life. I also passed up on seeing Carlin about 6 years ago when he came through. I was a college student and saved my money for... for what, really? Would it be asking too much for you to get tickets for next season's American Idol? With any luck, they'll all drown to death in a giant pool of their own suck.
I know he isn't a fan of "popular usage" but the fact of the matter is that languages drift and for precisely the reasons he decries. If language remained static, he'd be speaking some obscure indo-European language. All of the romance languages would have remained Latin.
I know one thing language nazis bitch about is "begging the question." The original use of the phrase was for when someone was making leading statements about something, such as all the prickish things Joe is doing, begging for someone to ask "So, is Joe a colossal prick?" It's not proper to say "People are sweating their balls off outside, thus begging the question 'Is it hot out?'" But in a hundred years, this will be proper usage.
I'm not claiming to have an insight line on the mind of George Carlin but it seems like he'd be the kind of person to announce his death a little early, just so he can stick around for all that follows. And if he didn't do this, he really should have. Nothing would be funnier than seeing his response to comments like "he must be up there now smiling down on us." "What the hell? Who the fuck are you to promote me to your vision of an afterlife just because I made you laugh? Let me tell you something, asshole: when I really do snuff it, if I find out I've got wings and a halo because you liked my seven dirty words routine, I'm coming back and cramming my harp right up your ass."
When I first started driving, it took all my conscious, active effort to pay attention to everything on the road and this is just driving in the sedate neighborhood. The interstate had me utterly intimidated for the first year. I would not have the radio on, not talk to passengers, was totally white-knuckled focused. As I got better at it, the process became automatic and I could drive, talk to people, and it didn't hurt my driving performance at all. If tricksy situations arise, I'll tune out on any conversation and be focused just on the road. Of course, many people screw up by devoting more attention to the conversation (or makeup, or food) than the road. Nothing irritates me more than the kind of people who feel they have to maintain eye contact with a passenger while driving. NO! ROAD! CONCENTRATE!
People can juggle multiple low-level tasks. Walk or ride a bike while listening to a book on tape, get a big meal moving in the kitchen while singing along with music, just fine. A high level and low level task can be combined like driving and audio books. But it falls apart when multiple high-level tasks are competing. It's very difficult to, say, follow along with a TV show and write at the same time. There's no way in hell that the typical office multitasker gets anything done. These are the people you have direct conversations with and retain nothing because they're thinking about something else. My personal pet peeve, blackberries in meetings. STOP! There's no fucking way you're keeping up with what I'm talking about when you're typing with your thumbs. Check your berry to make sure it isn't a server calling for help and if it isn't, put the damn thing away and pay attention!
Mind if I go off-topic for a moment, since there is an expert in the room? No, good.
Several years ago, when I was in France, I took a group of children to racing stables where they bred racing horses - a stud farm. While we were walking around, we met a charming, well-spoken Dutch couple in their 60s who chatted about this and that, and then indicating the breeding stables asked "So, tell me - do you have fuckeries like this England?" At least that's what I'm 90% sure they said.
I presume that "fuck" exists in the Dutch language and that their on-the-fly translation attempt misfired?
You say you think it's sublimation Well you know that'd be out of this world What else could explain the diminution Well you know that'd be out of this world But when you talk about reduction Don't you know ice ain't the only thing Don't you know other substances are white [x3]
You say you got an aqueous solution Well you know We'd all want to see the proof Martians might be liliputian Well you know Look for them if you can can But if you want money for space probes that crater All I can tell you is brother maybe later Learn how to use metrics first, alright? [x4]
There are three barriers to remaking television
on
TV and Movies On YouTube?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
1. Cost of Production 2. Cost of Distribution 3. Customer Price Sensitivity and General Interest
1. Cost of Production is still high and will remain high, though the bang for the buck is certainly increasing. While I don't enjoy police procedurals, you'll note that the production values are easily eclipsing movies in all but ginormous action set pieces. Shows like the original Battlestar Galactica were prohibitively expensive even with recycled special effects. The new Galactica, while the scripts still suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, it looks fantastic. Hollywood would have had an impossible time churning something out like that with models, Babylon 5's CGI looks dated now. Fans in their bedrooms are turning out CGI better than what a professional studio was doing ten years ago. Funny point: when that new B5 Lost Tales DVD was being put together, the new effects crew was scrambling for models. All of the original files were turned over to WB as per contract and were lost. The fans stepped in and provided a station model better than what was in the original show. You can only imagine what we'll be seeing in another decade. Still, it's going to cost money to put a proper show together and that will be the biggest barrier to entry.
2. Distribution. The Internet is a dagger in the heart of the conventional network business model. The suits are desperately trying to coopt it. Right now, the Internet's biggest vulnerability is that service is provided by telecoms and cable companies so the suits are looking to these companies to serve as gatekeepers. The suits would like to see the Net tamed into a comfy AOL model, putting up barriers to entry, filtering people only to approved and partnered sites, making sure they can start extracting profits again. I'm not sure if what we're looking at here is Tienanmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall -- I don't know if efforts to stop democratizing forces will succeed or fail. If they do fail, the networks will fall into ever-decreasing relevance.
3. Price Sensitivity and General Interest. The vast majority of people are casual fans of whatever they're into, they're usually not obsessive geeks. Miss an episode of a series? Not care if you don't see it? I never could understand that. But I'm a geek. Geeks are the ones who were buying Trek on tape back when it worked out to something like $10 per episode. DVD's finally made it feasible to distribute archived shows from the past and distribute new productions directly to the customer. While there have been direct-to-video schlockfests for years, Disney being a prime offender, there hasn't been as much interest in distributing things like episodic television content directly to DVD. Of course, with digital distribution, the DVD angle becomes only an interest if someone wants to keep the show permanently.
I suppose you can also throw a fourth category in here, generational adaptation of technology. People my parent's age would tape a show and play it back, not fast-forwarding through the commercials. Even more likely, they'd not be able to figure out how to record it and just watch it live. But the younger the viewer, the more readily they will adapt to the new technologies. Fast-forward another decade and you'll see middle-aged people perfectly acclimated to watching content on their laptops and ipods and cell phones. And I think that this sort of independence of choice in both content and viewing behavior will create a demand that the suits will be unable to control.
Right now there's really a conversation going on between viewers and content producers/distributors. The producer/distributors are saying "Shut up and pay what we demand, you cunts" and the viewers are saying "no thank you. We don't want your commercial-laden television, we don't want to pay $12 to go watch a movie that has 20 minutes of commercials in front of it, we don't want to be limited to just your approved content. And what you have that we like, you charge too much or you dick with show's creator to mess it all up."
Okay, I don't usually do this for posts not my own, but who the hell moderated this as flamebait and why? It's a genuinely good point. At some point, if the two big parties are pissing you off, then you can do two things: Vote third party, or don't vote. Downmodding posts you disagree with is both quicker and easier than actually writing a cogent rebuttal.
a Democrat is involved in even the most heinous and criminal of scandals, up to and including extortion, blackmail, embezzlement, child porn, rape and murder, it is given the most cursory treatment possible, buried as quickly as possible, and the political affiliation of the politician in question is NEVER mentioned. GASP! Scandalous! Unbelievable! Harumph, tsk-tsk. I demand you present a list of these rapist, murdering, child porn Democrats so that we can immediately take to the phones, start writing letters, get the media to pay attention to this story!
It isn't just Slashdot. Look back through any recent news article about a Republican who has done something illegal and/or really stupid. You're not only going to see the word 'Republican' much more often, but news stories also like ask alarmist questions like, "Is this indicative of further corruption in the Republican party?" or any other comment that will lead a reader to at least ponder widespread misconduct in the Republican party. While there isn't any true intense misconduct in this particular article, all you have to do is look back to Elliot Spitzer's demise as a real example; most news stories did not plaster the word 'Democrat' all over, let alone suggest a party-wide fallout from the scandal. Just the observations of an independent with a pretty staunch disdain for both major political parties.... Do we hear more about Republican sex scandals because the media is trying to screw the Republicans or because the majority of the people getting caught doing this stuff are Republicans?
I'm of the opinion that there's a real difference in views between self-identified Republicans and Democrats at the voter level. There's a bit of difference between elected officials from local to state. But once you hit the national level, they're all the same bunch of rat-fuckers. As Bill Hicks said, "I believe in what the puppet on the left is saying, no I believe in the puppet on the right, holy shit, it's the same guy holding both puppets!" The split is between the ownership class and the pwn'd class, the moneyed and the moneyless. The Democrats are trying to rat-fuck us on FISA every bit as bad as the Republicans. And Pelosi insists "impeachment is off the table!" Yeah, if we start investigating how badly Bush and the GOP fucked this country, people might start asking why the Dems let 'em get away with it.
Don't worry about breaking the law. As Nixon said, "If the President does it, it's legal."
In my ideal world, the people who make and enforce the rules would be held to a higher standard than the proles who merely have to follow the rules. It's bad enough when the infraction is minor like a cop doing 20 over the speed limit but when we're talking about the crimes committed in this case, it's the sort of thing that erodes faith in our very society.
I know there are people who say that there shouldn't be trials after Obama is elected, that it would be divisive and bad for the nation. Those people can kindly go fuck themselves. That same logic was used to praise Ford for not investigating Nixon. That same logic was used to praise Clinton for not seriously investigating the scandals of the Reagan and Bush administrations. All this did was let the same shit-weasels get back into positions of power the next time a Republican slithered into office. No. As a nation, we need hearings, we need trials. Bush and his henchmen need to answer for their crimes. A standard needs to be set in stone: we are a nation of laws, not men, and no man is above the law. Even Presidents will be forced to account for their actions and pay for their sins.
This will be part of our process for reengaging with the world. We've burned a shitload of bridges over the past eight years. When everyone can see an American President sitting in jail for his crimes, they'll know that justice has returned.
Who were using and administering... winbloze. If "it's so easy", how come "professional" admins could not protect this guy and his company from downloading and storing kidde pr0n? I didn't say it was easy but that's what you pay the admins for. I don't like Windows but it can be secured for this kind of thing. The end user wasn't the dumbass if he wasn't the local admin, the IT guys would be the dumbasses here.
I have nothing against nuclear power, I just do not trust deregulation-happy business criminals to run them. With proper designs, regular inspections, and a safety-first mentality, nuclear power is clean and safe. With Enron-style profit-raping and criminal evasion of government regulation, we'd be fucked and glowing in the dark. I wouldn't put it past them to try and build crappy Chernobyl-style reactors just to give the finger to the Greenies, the same way they have the hard-on for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
The damn image won't load but I've already seen a delivery vehicle demonstrated. It's based off of the current batch of chopper-style UAV's. I think the pure navy version is called the Firebat, already demonstrated unassisted self-controlled landing on a ship. It's in the very advanced prototype stages, getting real-world trials. The original purpose is surveillance but a secondary use proposed was cargo delivery. It can fly to a designated GPS coordinate and land. Soldiers would then run up, offload the several hundred pounds of cargo and then enter return commands on a very simplified control panel. Really, all the unit needs is a "return to base" button.
This sort of thing could be quite useful for resupplying people in the field. Air crews are bloody expensive and it would be nice to be able to free them of the mundane cargo runs so they can concentrate on the difficult stuff. You've seen the same development in the air force, recon being the very first thing handed over to UAV's. Highly critical runs still required manned aircraft but simple observation has been handled by drones in some air foces for years.
One of my favorite features of Netflix, the video-rental-by-mail service, is 'profiles.' You see the blank expression on my face? This is me weeping for you on the inside.
Slashdot Mirror
Q: Who won American Idol last year?
A: I don't know
Shit, that either means he's Indian or an American with taste.
*crosses fingers* please oh fucking cthulhu please don't let him be lying on this one. The only explanation I can think of for the current Dems is that they have a lot to lose if Bush goes down, evidence implicating them in the same kind of crimes. I so hope he isn't a fake.
We're going to find out that the Mafia has a hit out on him or he's supposed to be in an arranged marriage to a cannibal princess or something. The lovable everyman who buys this guy's life will now be in a madcap race to escape the consequences, probably falling in love with a girl-next-door Hollywood starlet in the process.
Nice to know people still remember that game. :)
I know he isn't a fan of "popular usage" but the fact of the matter is that languages drift and for precisely the reasons he decries. If language remained static, he'd be speaking some obscure indo-European language. All of the romance languages would have remained Latin.
I know one thing language nazis bitch about is "begging the question." The original use of the phrase was for when someone was making leading statements about something, such as all the prickish things Joe is doing, begging for someone to ask "So, is Joe a colossal prick?" It's not proper to say "People are sweating their balls off outside, thus begging the question 'Is it hot out?'" But in a hundred years, this will be proper usage.
I'm not claiming to have an insight line on the mind of George Carlin but it seems like he'd be the kind of person to announce his death a little early, just so he can stick around for all that follows. And if he didn't do this, he really should have. Nothing would be funnier than seeing his response to comments like "he must be up there now smiling down on us." "What the hell? Who the fuck are you to promote me to your vision of an afterlife just because I made you laugh? Let me tell you something, asshole: when I really do snuff it, if I find out I've got wings and a halo because you liked my seven dirty words routine, I'm coming back and cramming my harp right up your ass."
When I first started driving, it took all my conscious, active effort to pay attention to everything on the road and this is just driving in the sedate neighborhood. The interstate had me utterly intimidated for the first year. I would not have the radio on, not talk to passengers, was totally white-knuckled focused. As I got better at it, the process became automatic and I could drive, talk to people, and it didn't hurt my driving performance at all. If tricksy situations arise, I'll tune out on any conversation and be focused just on the road. Of course, many people screw up by devoting more attention to the conversation (or makeup, or food) than the road. Nothing irritates me more than the kind of people who feel they have to maintain eye contact with a passenger while driving. NO! ROAD! CONCENTRATE!
People can juggle multiple low-level tasks. Walk or ride a bike while listening to a book on tape, get a big meal moving in the kitchen while singing along with music, just fine. A high level and low level task can be combined like driving and audio books. But it falls apart when multiple high-level tasks are competing. It's very difficult to, say, follow along with a TV show and write at the same time. There's no way in hell that the typical office multitasker gets anything done. These are the people you have direct conversations with and retain nothing because they're thinking about something else. My personal pet peeve, blackberries in meetings. STOP! There's no fucking way you're keeping up with what I'm talking about when you're typing with your thumbs. Check your berry to make sure it isn't a server calling for help and if it isn't, put the damn thing away and pay attention!
Several years ago, when I was in France, I took a group of children to racing stables where they bred racing horses - a stud farm. While we were walking around, we met a charming, well-spoken Dutch couple in their 60s who chatted about this and that, and then indicating the breeding stables asked "So, tell me - do you have fuckeries like this England?" At least that's what I'm 90% sure they said.
I presume that "fuck" exists in the Dutch language and that their on-the-fly translation attempt misfired?
Holland suddenly sounds more interesting.Voorwerp? Sounds something like the Juffo-wup the Mycon were interested in.
You say you think it's sublimation
Well you know
that'd be out of this world
What else could explain the diminution
Well you know
that'd be out of this world
But when you talk about reduction
Don't you know ice ain't the only thing
Don't you know other substances are white [x3]
You say you got an aqueous solution
Well you know
We'd all want to see the proof
Martians might be liliputian
Well you know
Look for them if you can can
But if you want money for space probes that crater
All I can tell you is brother maybe later
Learn how to use metrics first, alright? [x4]
1. Cost of Production
2. Cost of Distribution
3. Customer Price Sensitivity and General Interest
1. Cost of Production is still high and will remain high, though the bang for the buck is certainly increasing. While I don't enjoy police procedurals, you'll note that the production values are easily eclipsing movies in all but ginormous action set pieces. Shows like the original Battlestar Galactica were prohibitively expensive even with recycled special effects. The new Galactica, while the scripts still suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, it looks fantastic. Hollywood would have had an impossible time churning something out like that with models, Babylon 5's CGI looks dated now. Fans in their bedrooms are turning out CGI better than what a professional studio was doing ten years ago. Funny point: when that new B5 Lost Tales DVD was being put together, the new effects crew was scrambling for models. All of the original files were turned over to WB as per contract and were lost. The fans stepped in and provided a station model better than what was in the original show. You can only imagine what we'll be seeing in another decade. Still, it's going to cost money to put a proper show together and that will be the biggest barrier to entry.
2. Distribution. The Internet is a dagger in the heart of the conventional network business model. The suits are desperately trying to coopt it. Right now, the Internet's biggest vulnerability is that service is provided by telecoms and cable companies so the suits are looking to these companies to serve as gatekeepers. The suits would like to see the Net tamed into a comfy AOL model, putting up barriers to entry, filtering people only to approved and partnered sites, making sure they can start extracting profits again. I'm not sure if what we're looking at here is Tienanmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall -- I don't know if efforts to stop democratizing forces will succeed or fail. If they do fail, the networks will fall into ever-decreasing relevance.
3. Price Sensitivity and General Interest. The vast majority of people are casual fans of whatever they're into, they're usually not obsessive geeks. Miss an episode of a series? Not care if you don't see it? I never could understand that. But I'm a geek. Geeks are the ones who were buying Trek on tape back when it worked out to something like $10 per episode. DVD's finally made it feasible to distribute archived shows from the past and distribute new productions directly to the customer. While there have been direct-to-video schlockfests for years, Disney being a prime offender, there hasn't been as much interest in distributing things like episodic television content directly to DVD. Of course, with digital distribution, the DVD angle becomes only an interest if someone wants to keep the show permanently.
I suppose you can also throw a fourth category in here, generational adaptation of technology. People my parent's age would tape a show and play it back, not fast-forwarding through the commercials. Even more likely, they'd not be able to figure out how to record it and just watch it live. But the younger the viewer, the more readily they will adapt to the new technologies. Fast-forward another decade and you'll see middle-aged people perfectly acclimated to watching content on their laptops and ipods and cell phones. And I think that this sort of independence of choice in both content and viewing behavior will create a demand that the suits will be unable to control.
Right now there's really a conversation going on between viewers and content producers/distributors. The producer/distributors are saying "Shut up and pay what we demand, you cunts" and the viewers are saying "no thank you. We don't want your commercial-laden television, we don't want to pay $12 to go watch a movie that has 20 minutes of commercials in front of it, we don't want to be limited to just your approved content. And what you have that we like, you charge too much or you dick with show's creator to mess it all up."
So, who are they?
I'm of the opinion that there's a real difference in views between self-identified Republicans and Democrats at the voter level. There's a bit of difference between elected officials from local to state. But once you hit the national level, they're all the same bunch of rat-fuckers. As Bill Hicks said, "I believe in what the puppet on the left is saying, no I believe in the puppet on the right, holy shit, it's the same guy holding both puppets!" The split is between the ownership class and the pwn'd class, the moneyed and the moneyless. The Democrats are trying to rat-fuck us on FISA every bit as bad as the Republicans. And Pelosi insists "impeachment is off the table!" Yeah, if we start investigating how badly Bush and the GOP fucked this country, people might start asking why the Dems let 'em get away with it.
Don't worry about breaking the law. As Nixon said, "If the President does it, it's legal."
In my ideal world, the people who make and enforce the rules would be held to a higher standard than the proles who merely have to follow the rules. It's bad enough when the infraction is minor like a cop doing 20 over the speed limit but when we're talking about the crimes committed in this case, it's the sort of thing that erodes faith in our very society.
I know there are people who say that there shouldn't be trials after Obama is elected, that it would be divisive and bad for the nation. Those people can kindly go fuck themselves. That same logic was used to praise Ford for not investigating Nixon. That same logic was used to praise Clinton for not seriously investigating the scandals of the Reagan and Bush administrations. All this did was let the same shit-weasels get back into positions of power the next time a Republican slithered into office. No. As a nation, we need hearings, we need trials. Bush and his henchmen need to answer for their crimes. A standard needs to be set in stone: we are a nation of laws, not men, and no man is above the law. Even Presidents will be forced to account for their actions and pay for their sins.
This will be part of our process for reengaging with the world. We've burned a shitload of bridges over the past eight years. When everyone can see an American President sitting in jail for his crimes, they'll know that justice has returned.
If "it's so easy", how come "professional" admins could not protect this guy and his company from downloading and storing kidde pr0n? I didn't say it was easy but that's what you pay the admins for. I don't like Windows but it can be secured for this kind of thing. The end user wasn't the dumbass if he wasn't the local admin, the IT guys would be the dumbasses here.
I have nothing against nuclear power, I just do not trust deregulation-happy business criminals to run them. With proper designs, regular inspections, and a safety-first mentality, nuclear power is clean and safe. With Enron-style profit-raping and criminal evasion of government regulation, we'd be fucked and glowing in the dark. I wouldn't put it past them to try and build crappy Chernobyl-style reactors just to give the finger to the Greenies, the same way they have the hard-on for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
The damn image won't load but I've already seen a delivery vehicle demonstrated. It's based off of the current batch of chopper-style UAV's. I think the pure navy version is called the Firebat, already demonstrated unassisted self-controlled landing on a ship. It's in the very advanced prototype stages, getting real-world trials. The original purpose is surveillance but a secondary use proposed was cargo delivery. It can fly to a designated GPS coordinate and land. Soldiers would then run up, offload the several hundred pounds of cargo and then enter return commands on a very simplified control panel. Really, all the unit needs is a "return to base" button.
This sort of thing could be quite useful for resupplying people in the field. Air crews are bloody expensive and it would be nice to be able to free them of the mundane cargo runs so they can concentrate on the difficult stuff. You've seen the same development in the air force, recon being the very first thing handed over to UAV's. Highly critical runs still required manned aircraft but simple observation has been handled by drones in some air foces for years.