Crichton wrote a bizarre book called "Travels" that consists of short pieces that supposedly detail his travels in the outer world to exciting destinations (like scuba diving with sharks) and his travels in the inner world with psychic phenomena like spoon bending and aura reading.
This book bugs me because either Crichton, a trained doctor, either believes the crazy stuff he talks about (even channeling...anyone remember that?) or is a huge liar. Does anyone know if this book is a hoax? If so, why did he do it? If not, is he nuts?
What do these have in common? The period of anticipation is often more fun than the actuality.
The problem is that if I have to wait too long (cough * Duke Nukem * cough * PC Halo *) I get anticipation fatigue and move on to something else.
I think 3D GUIs may have some good purpose, but the problem is that until now they have mostly been applied to things that just work better in 2D.
The clearest example of this is exploding menu-style choices from a 2D list that is easy to scan quickly and accurately with your eye into some 3D "infospace."
Imagine going to a restaurant where, instead of a paper menu of the food options in front of you, all of the waiters in the restaurant, each holding a big sign with the name of one menu item on it, form a big circle around you and you have to turn in your chair around to view each one.
Restaurants have been around for a long time and I don't know of any that work that way.
"What if windows were translucent so you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?"
You sound like you're good at it. We're stuck near the end on the level where you fly around trying to break open the gates by picking up and dropping bombs while huge canons constantly shoot at you. We're about to give up. Do you have any hints for us?
The Adventures of Cookie & Cream is the single best cooperative multiplayer game for man & wife ever made. It is unique. You play it on the same screen side by side and help each other progress past platformer-style puzzles. It's also hilarious. Rent it and see, or better yet buy it. If only there were more games like this.
My wife loved playing Baldur's Gate Dark ALliance on the PS2, which really surprised me because she normally shies away from action or RPG games. This one was the right mix, and the sequel is coming out in a month or two along with Champions of Norrath, a similar game.
The You Don't Know Jack series is great fun for two on computer or PS2. You can get them cheap (US$5) in PS1 form and run them on PS2.
The next frontier is Dance Dance Revolution type games with floor pads. Haven't gone there yet.
Get a PS2 and have a great time. You can sit next to each other on the couch - much better than sitting in front of a PC.
In literary criticism they call the misguided notion that the author's original intention can be fully known by the reader the "intentional fallacy." The bottom line is that whether or not Tolkien meant for LoTR to be taken as an allegory for this or that is irrelevant. The work stands apart from his intention for it and happens to make a very good allegory for a number of depressing aspects of the modern world including industrialization, totalitarianism, the increase of ignorance, overpopulation, etc.
What it "means" is up to each reader, not the author.
Just as the programmers who read Slashdot feel it is appropriate to correct a mistake in a c++ code snippet, I feel it is appropriate to correct frequently made grammar errors in a language I am familiar with. Conflation of "Lose" with "Loose" spring immediately to mind. Don't worry. I am totally aware of the fact that encouraging proper speech is an antique endeavor and doomed to failure.
It does surprise me that you, an avowed Fascist who believes in "cultural standards", would balk at a little linguistic discipline.
By the way, please enlighten me as to what living human language isn't archaic and illogical?
I love MSN best for maps because it is the only one I've found that lets me expand the map display to actually use the resolution of my monitor instead of scrolling the postage stamp map around.
Tivo and crucial consumer awareness
on
Trusted Computing
·
· Score: 1
The only way to stop this process is for consumers to adopt, on a large scale, the kind of technology that will be made impossible by the "trusted computing" technologies. Digital video recorders like Tivo are the best example of this. If a huge preponderance of television owners become accustomed to conveniences like commercial skipping and saving shows to watch later they will revolt en masse with the vehemence of the do-not-call list when tentacles of the content providers via DRM remove these features.
If such a thing never occurs before trusted computing is ubiquitous then I think we'll see the old frog in the slowly warming pot of water problem and be stuck with it.
An NPR story said that even the MRI machines made by his company use the tech invented by the people who won the Nobel, since his ideas were'nt up to the job in the end.
Anyway, these creationism apologists always give off aan unpleasant combo of terrorist and car-salesman vibes. Who wants to reward that?
Some friends and I did this years ago when we had Marathon on a Mac LAN. We had been playing after work daily until one of us said "Hey, let's each put in a dollar this game and the winner takes the pot." We played a game like this and there was a totally different level of intensity.
We never did it again, but could all see the potential. We discussed whether or not implementing this on the internet would be legal or practical, and decided the impossible to stop cheating mechanisms would kill it.
You are correct about the apostrophe, but otherwise I have to wonder about the stupidity of the original comment.
A brief example: WWI: huge scale long term trenches, gas, machine guns, etc. all never before seen
WWII: massive bombing, tanks, nuclear weapons, kamikazes, etc. all never before seen
Viet Nam: drug use common among troops, massively racially integrated military, non-propaganda journalism from front lines, Americans killing a lot of civilians and digging up graves for body counts, etc, all never seen before.
The reason West Point and war colleges exist is to a large extent to attempt to predict what the next war will be like, since they are always different from the previous ones.
Well the whole "no different" statement in the above post is bizarre. Every war is horrible in it's own unique way. The thing about Viet Nam is that the particular way in which it was horrible refelcts incredibly badly on the US. Our forces were ordered to commit atrocities and did so.
While there are debatable justifications for the war itself, there is little justification for some of the tactics we used, especially those meant only to inflate body count rather than achieve an objective. Those tactics make a Viet Nam war game uncomfortably akin to playing a WWII game on the side of the Nazis.
There was an article today about how the book publishers are going through a very rough sales period. Like record companies, they can only count on profits from a few guaranteed big sellers like H. Potter and H. Clinton.
I don't think they have figured out that they can blame it on P2P yet.
Well, that really puts us over the border into the dreamy land of loose semantics. By this measure cats and peanuts cause air pollution too.
In a discussion of pollution caused by industrialization and whether or not it can and should be mitigated by legislation, which is a primary job of the EPA, statements like "trees cause air pollution" isn't particularly useful or relevant.
I guess you intend this as a joke? The article, which references the Reagan claim in a humorous way, is restricted to Eucalyptus trees and is dated 2001, long after the statement, and goes on to make fun of Dan Quayle.
I think this fits nicely under my previous disclaimer.
I'm old enough to remember when Reagan's bizarro-world EPA chief James Watt said that trees cause air polution. This is another demonstration of politicians & pundits (seemingly mostly conservative talk-show hosts) willingness to use misdirection to distract people. "Forget about dependence on oil, look at this shiny hydrogen economy over here! Look at it!"
(Note to Republican apologists: While certain aspects of Watts' statement might be chemically correct, they are of course misleading and irrelevant to the problem at hand.)
Slashdot Mirror
Crichton wrote a bizarre book called "Travels" that consists of short pieces that supposedly detail his travels in the outer world to exciting destinations (like scuba diving with sharks) and his travels in the inner world with psychic phenomena like spoon bending and aura reading.
This book bugs me because either Crichton, a trained doctor, either believes the crazy stuff he talks about (even channeling...anyone remember that?) or is a huge liar. Does anyone know if this book is a hoax? If so, why did he do it? If not, is he nuts?
What do these have in common? The period of anticipation is often more fun than the actuality. The problem is that if I have to wait too long (cough * Duke Nukem * cough * PC Halo *) I get anticipation fatigue and move on to something else.
Late January.
...can they crush piles of human skulls under their feet?
I think 3D GUIs may have some good purpose, but the problem is that until now they have mostly been applied to things that just work better in 2D.
The clearest example of this is exploding menu-style choices from a 2D list that is easy to scan quickly and accurately with your eye into some 3D "infospace."
Imagine going to a restaurant where, instead of a paper menu of the food options in front of you, all of the waiters in the restaurant, each holding a big sign with the name of one menu item on it, form a big circle around you and you have to turn in your chair around to view each one.
Restaurants have been around for a long time and I don't know of any that work that way.
From the Looking Glass project page:
"What if windows were translucent so you could see the multiple windows you're working on at the same time? What if you could tack a note to yourself right on the Web page you're viewing? What if your CD or movie database became a 3D jukebox, where titles were joined with images to make finding what you want easier than ever?"
Could those "What ifs" be less exciting?
You sound like you're good at it. We're stuck near the end on the level where you fly around trying to break open the gates by picking up and dropping bombs while huge canons constantly shoot at you. We're about to give up. Do you have any hints for us?
The Adventures of Cookie & Cream is the single best cooperative multiplayer game for man & wife ever made. It is unique. You play it on the same screen side by side and help each other progress past platformer-style puzzles. It's also hilarious. Rent it and see, or better yet buy it. If only there were more games like this. My wife loved playing Baldur's Gate Dark ALliance on the PS2, which really surprised me because she normally shies away from action or RPG games. This one was the right mix, and the sequel is coming out in a month or two along with Champions of Norrath, a similar game. The You Don't Know Jack series is great fun for two on computer or PS2. You can get them cheap (US$5) in PS1 form and run them on PS2. The next frontier is Dance Dance Revolution type games with floor pads. Haven't gone there yet. Get a PS2 and have a great time. You can sit next to each other on the couch - much better than sitting in front of a PC.
that Steve Martin used to be funny and a valuable contributor to the popular culture instead of a Huckster for the mega-wedding industry.
In literary criticism they call the misguided notion that the author's original intention can be fully known by the reader the "intentional fallacy." The bottom line is that whether or not Tolkien meant for LoTR to be taken as an allegory for this or that is irrelevant. The work stands apart from his intention for it and happens to make a very good allegory for a number of depressing aspects of the modern world including industrialization, totalitarianism, the increase of ignorance, overpopulation, etc.
What it "means" is up to each reader, not the author.
then you don't really understand it. Right? Discuss...
Just as the programmers who read Slashdot feel it is appropriate to correct a mistake in a c++ code snippet, I feel it is appropriate to correct frequently made grammar errors in a language I am familiar with. Conflation of "Lose" with "Loose" spring immediately to mind. Don't worry. I am totally aware of the fact that encouraging proper speech is an antique endeavor and doomed to failure. It does surprise me that you, an avowed Fascist who believes in "cultural standards", would balk at a little linguistic discipline. By the way, please enlighten me as to what living human language isn't archaic and illogical?
gullible is spelled gullable.
And I beleive that this system should base meritocrocy entirly on speling. Oh, wait...
All those hours playing Pac-Man and Burger-Time made me eat too much!
I love MSN best for maps because it is the only one I've found that lets me expand the map display to actually use the resolution of my monitor instead of scrolling the postage stamp map around.
The only way to stop this process is for consumers to adopt, on a large scale, the kind of technology that will be made impossible by the "trusted computing" technologies. Digital video recorders like Tivo are the best example of this. If a huge preponderance of television owners become accustomed to conveniences like commercial skipping and saving shows to watch later they will revolt en masse with the vehemence of the do-not-call list when tentacles of the content providers via DRM remove these features. If such a thing never occurs before trusted computing is ubiquitous then I think we'll see the old frog in the slowly warming pot of water problem and be stuck with it.
An NPR story said that even the MRI machines made by his company use the tech invented by the people who won the Nobel, since his ideas were'nt up to the job in the end. Anyway, these creationism apologists always give off aan unpleasant combo of terrorist and car-salesman vibes. Who wants to reward that?
Some friends and I did this years ago when we had Marathon on a Mac LAN. We had been playing after work daily until one of us said "Hey, let's each put in a dollar this game and the winner takes the pot." We played a game like this and there was a totally different level of intensity. We never did it again, but could all see the potential. We discussed whether or not implementing this on the internet would be legal or practical, and decided the impossible to stop cheating mechanisms would kill it.
You are correct about the apostrophe, but otherwise I have to wonder about the stupidity of the original comment.
A brief example:
WWI: huge scale long term trenches, gas, machine guns, etc. all never before seen
WWII: massive bombing, tanks, nuclear weapons, kamikazes, etc. all never before seen
Viet Nam: drug use common among troops, massively racially integrated military, non-propaganda journalism from front lines, Americans killing a lot of civilians and digging up graves for body counts, etc, all never seen before.
The reason West Point and war colleges exist is to a large extent to attempt to predict what the next war will be like, since they are always different from the previous ones.
Well the whole "no different" statement in the above post is bizarre. Every war is horrible in it's own unique way. The thing about Viet Nam is that the particular way in which it was horrible refelcts incredibly badly on the US. Our forces were ordered to commit atrocities and did so. While there are debatable justifications for the war itself, there is little justification for some of the tactics we used, especially those meant only to inflate body count rather than achieve an objective. Those tactics make a Viet Nam war game uncomfortably akin to playing a WWII game on the side of the Nazis.
There was an article today about how the book publishers are going through a very rough sales period. Like record companies, they can only count on profits from a few guaranteed big sellers like H. Potter and H. Clinton.
I don't think they have figured out that they can blame it on P2P yet.
Well, that really puts us over the border into the dreamy land of loose semantics. By this measure cats and peanuts cause air pollution too. In a discussion of pollution caused by industrialization and whether or not it can and should be mitigated by legislation, which is a primary job of the EPA, statements like "trees cause air pollution" isn't particularly useful or relevant.
I guess you intend this as a joke? The article, which references the Reagan claim in a humorous way, is restricted to Eucalyptus trees and is dated 2001, long after the statement, and goes on to make fun of Dan Quayle. I think this fits nicely under my previous disclaimer.
I'm old enough to remember when Reagan's bizarro-world EPA chief James Watt said that trees cause air polution. This is another demonstration of politicians & pundits (seemingly mostly conservative talk-show hosts) willingness to use misdirection to distract people. "Forget about dependence on oil, look at this shiny hydrogen economy over here! Look at it!"
(Note to Republican apologists: While certain aspects of Watts' statement might be chemically correct, they are of course misleading and irrelevant to the problem at hand.)