There's a similar story in Brazil. The people in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais are famous for chopping parts out of words when they talk. There's a joke about two mineiros (natives of Minas Gerais) having a conversation over coffee. One asks the other "po po po?"
The other responds "po po."
Translating to more common Portuguese (I'll get to English - bear with me), the first is asking "pode pôr pó?" The second responds "pode pôr." They have both cut words and slightly changed the pronunciation of vowels. In English, the first one is asking "Is it OK to add some powder," where "powder" (pó) refers to sweetener for the coffee. The second one says it's OK to put some sweetener in the coffee.
After a little experience with mineiros (so far, every one I've met has been very friendly, by the way, and I've been in Brazil for over 7 1/2 years), one can imagine this conversation actually happening. It could be confusing even for a Brazilian who hasn't heard the story, and a foreigner would probably ask, like the foreigner in the Filipino story in the parent post, whether the two had just had a conversation.
It just occurred to me that you could argue that the two greedy idiots are parallel to Han and Chewie, but there you run into the same problem as if you were to try to say they were like R2 and 3PO (comic relief): Han and Chewie are actually likeable characters, and in fact end up being heroes, while the two idiots in THF are not at all, and in fact don't seem to have any redeeming characteristics. Han appears to be greedy and only concerned with himself, but comes back at the end of Star Wars and saves the day.
It's really hard to draw neat parallels between the two films, because they are so different. I'm not sure where this idea that Lucas "stole" Star Wars from THF originated, but it's utter crap and it's time to lay it to rest.
He stole the first movie from Hidden Fortress. By Akira Kurosawa. Basically scene for scene, character for character.
Horseshit. I've seen this repeated around Slashdot and other places before, and I just don't agree at all.
Have you actually watched The Hidden Fortress? There are some similarities, but to say the two movies are the same, scene for scene and character for character, indicates that either you haven't watched Star Wars or you haven't watched The Hidden Fortress. The latter seems more likely, which is why I asked it that way.
If you actually have watched both, I'll be very curious to hear which characters are the same as Greedo, Han and Chewie, which one is like Luke, and which scenes are like Obi-wan training Luke and Obi-wan confronting Darth Vader. Y'know, the important scenes in the movie. For bonus points, be sure to specify which scene in THF is exactly the same as Luke talking to Uncle Owen about the droids and saying he wants to go to the Academy, and what in THF is even remotely similar to the enormously important plotline of Luke knowing little about his father other than the fact that he was a great star pilot.
Yes, there's a princess in both, and yes, there is a pair of "comic relief" characters in both, but do you really want to try to say those two are that similar to R2D2 and C-3PO? I just don't see it. For one thing, R2 and 3PO are actually likeable, and I don't see any redeeming characteristics at all in their counterparts in The Hidden Fortress. Also, Princess Leia doesn't hide her identity from her protectors. You can argue that there's a general loyal to the princess in both, but there's nothing even remotely similar in THF to Princess Leia having to try to find "General Kenobi" after years and years of nobody having seen him. I don't know why I'm bothering to cite differences when in fact the two movies are very, very different, with only a few points that coincide.
Kurosawa never tried to hide the fact that Ran is based on King Lear (it say it in the credits, for example, and he stated it in interviews), nor that Throne of Blood, signfiicantly older than Ran, was based on Macbeth (hint: it's also mentioned in the credits). In fact, many consider Throne of Blood to be one of the best productions of Macbeth ever made. To say Kurosawa "stole" from "Shakespear" (sic) is just plain silly. So is saying that American Graffiti was the only good film Lucas ever made. AG was and is a fine film, but so is Star Wars. It's also completely ridiculous to say that Star Wars was stolen, scene for scene and character for character from THF.
I prefer that name. In addition to making fun of one of the stupidest aspects of the prequel trilogy, it also raises an interesting question: could the whole Darth Vader situation (and with it, the Galactic Empire) have been avoided with a simple dose of penicillin?
In the original trilogy, the Force was magic. There was no need to explain "how it works;" Obi-wan's explanation in ANH of what it is and what it does was sufficient. Nobody has to ask how Merlin's magic or Gandalf's magic works. It's magic, fercryinoutloud! Similarly, there's no need to explain how the Force works. It's the Force fercryinoutloud!
As much as I was looking forward to Episode I, I was totally disappointed by it pretty much from the beginning, and the moment at which I knew it was totally blown and wasn't going to get better was when Qui-gon started blabbing about the chlamydians or whatever. Stupid technobabble worthy of the absolute worst episodes of ST:TNG (gawd... I now wonder: how do tetrions affect chlamydians?), and worse, it reduced what had been magic to a mere blood condition.
Also, as TFA notes, being a great Jedi suddenly stopped being decided by training in the Force and became a mere accident of birth, which is much less appealing to me, as it is to the author of TFA. Episode III was the least awful of the prequel trilogy, but the world would be better off if the three had never been made. The original trilogy is still great, though. Star Wars (ANH) is still one of my all-time favorite films. I was 8 when it came out, and that was 30 years ago, so you know I'm rapidly approaching 40, but I still feel a childlike sense of wonder when I watch that movie. Even the awful prequel trilogy can't ruin that for me. I just pretend the prequels don't exist. Besides, that way, Darth Vader's revelation to Luke in TESB, and what Luke figures out on Dagobah in ROTJ are actually surprises.
I plan to show my kids the original trilogy. If they end up somehow seeing the crap prequels afterward, that's their problem, but I won't be responsible for it. I'll show them something awesome and let them decide, knowing how Dad doesn't like the prequels, whether they want to watch them or not.
Why do they call this a scorpion? Did it have a poisonous stinger on its tail? It looks like in their total speculation about the creature (the actual fossil was just a claw), they drew (see image in TFA) a creature with a swimming tail, like a lobster or a shrimp.
Wouldn't "giant lobster" or "giant shrimp" be a better description of a large sea arthropod? Maybe it doesn't sound as exciting, but why would they call it a "sea scorpion" if there is no reason to believe it had the most well-known feature of land scorpions?
Additionally, how do they know it wasn't a much smaller beast with proportionally larger claws, given that according to TFA, one of the leading theories about how and why such a huge arthropod evolved was an "arms race" with early armored fish?
Look, I dislike MS and its abuse of its OS monopoly, and I've been working hard to expel MS products from my life. I'll be buying a Blackbook on my trip to the US in December, and the machine in my ice cream shop will be running a free (as in speech and as in beer) "commercial automation" package on Ubuntu 7.04. That will be the end of Windows and MS products in my life for the moment, very probably for a long time, and possibly forever. That said, I think the IT professionals polled have a different reason to say they don't want Vista.
It's a negotiating tactic. They want to scare MS a bit into thinking there's a chance they won't adopt Vista, just to see if they can negotiate better prices or other terms.
Just as smart IT decision-makers made a point of having a Red Hat box somewhere visible in their offices when talking to their Microsoft sales reps during the 2000 and XP sales cycles, I'm sure they're now making sure the MS sales rep walks past at least one machine running Ubuntu and one Mac.
Brazil started doing this when the US announced it was doing it to all visitors a couple of years ago. It surprised me to see that it has taken other countries so long to start doing this too. What goes around comes around. We do it to the world, then the world will do it to us.
They're not just doing it to US citizens. They're doing it to everyone. That's not pay-back; that's me-too.
It's not clear whether the parent post means for "they" to refer to Japan or Brazil, so I'm posting to clarify: Brazil's policy was not "me-too." It was implemented for US citizens only, in the name of reciprocity. In the lines for the Federal Police passport control for foreigners in the arrival areas of international airports, they started having two separate areas once you got through the line: one for US citizens and one for everyone else. US citizens had to be fingerprinted and photographed, just like Brazilians had to be when going to the US.
My understanding is that Brazil is no longer photographing and fingerprinting anyone, even US citizens, but I think Brazil should have continued doing it. It was not legislation, but an action taken by a judge in a southern state (Rio Grande do Sul, IIRC) that led to the implementation of the policy in the name of reciprocity. I think Brazil should maintain (well, restore, now that it's not being done anymore) that reciprocity, because that's the only way to get bull$#!+ like the US policy, which forces fingeprinting and photographing of citizens of many but not all foreign countries, changed. Let a few executives traveling to São Paulo on business get pissy because everyone from every other country gets to go through without being treated like criminals, complain (in English, natch) and hear (in English) from the Federal Police that it's just reciprocity, and that if they don't like the way US citizens are treated in Brazil, they should take it up with the authorities in the US, who treat Brazilians that way. If a few high-ranking execs from banking companies complain loud enough in the US, the policy could actually change.
In addition to having read several articles on Brazilian news sites about the policy, I stood in the lines at the international airport in Guarulhos and saw the signs for the two separate areas after arriving at the front of the line. The looks on the faces of the US travelers, especially, the "look how important I am" types who had taken overnight flights in business suits and were getting out their newest-latest crackberries to make sure everyone could see them, were priceless.
FWIW, I am a US citizen, but didn't have to go to the "US citizens" area because I already had a permanent visa and several forms of Brazilian ID, including two with photographs, so I just breezed through the normal lines, exchanging a few pleasant words with the Federal Police agents (in Portuguese, of course) as I went.
I'm not sure why you'd put a tinyurl on a web page, where you could just embed the URL in a link using href, like this (oh, the temptation to link to goatse was great, but I resisted). Even if the URL had been enormous, it would not have changed the size of the "like this" hyperlink, and the full URL would have remained embedded in the page.
The only place where I use tinyurls is when I want to send links to people in e-mail, the recipients might not all be using HTML-based mail programs (or webmail), so the clickable link solution might not work, and the original URL is large and might get broken into multiple lines. Plus, when I send a tinyurled link, I always say what it is and swear to the recipients that it's not goatse or a Rick Roll. Well, unless it is a Rick Roll, of course, but my favorite (OK, only) Rick Roll target has e-mail that can receive hyperlinks, and I find more clever ways to surprise him.
Apparently he was having an affair with a direct subordinate.
Um... I have to ask these questions, even though I know the 'turfers are going to pound me for it with negative mods.
Can that really be the case?
More to the point, was Melinda French a direct subordinate of Bill Gates?
FWIW, I honestly don't know and seriously wonder. The Wikipedia article on her just says she was the "unit manager" (huh huh - insert humorous comment here) for several Microsoft products (Publisher, Bob, Encarta, and Expedia).
As many programmers know (do I even need to say it on./?), base 2, 8, and 16 can become second nature pretty quickly with some practice and application.
In middle school or maybe 9th grade, my friend and I "discovered" that we could count to 31 on one hand or to 1023 on two hands. It's amazing how quickly binary counting on fingers becomes second nature. I can still count in binary on one hand with ease and speed some 25 years later. I've always wondered if my brain uses a recursive algorithm (or something equivalent) to do the finger movements, because even when the count gets "up there," counting continues to be as easy and natural as it is at the lower numbers.
Who says "pukes?" Why, none other than draft dodger and spokesman for all military people everywhere, except those who disagree with Bush, Rush Limbaugh.
Yes, Rush got a deferment because he didn't want to go to Vietnam. The relevant quote:
"I had student deferments in college, and, upon taking a physical, was discovered to have a physical - uh, by virtue of what the military says, I didn't even know it existed - a physical deferment and then the lottery system came along, when they chose your lot by birtdate, and mine was high. And I did not want to go - just as Governor Clinton didn't."
Anyway, Limbaugh now refers to military people who criticise Bush's insane and stupid war as "phony soldiers" and famously said that Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran who volunteered for the Marines and went to Iraq, then came back and criticized the stupid-ass war and even ran for Congress in Mean Jean Schmidt's district, was just a "staff puke." He even accused Hackett of having volunteered for the military during a war "to pad the résumé."
So the term "puke" as an insult is not completely out of use, but let's just say that people with a firm grip on reality still haven't been known to use it in recent times.
Wow. I didn't know about that. Awesome post. And too bad you felt you had to post as AC, though I suspect I know why. An earlier reply to my (grandparent) post says I'm in big trouble because of the references I cited. I wish I could just laugh it off, but some part of me refuses to completely discount the threat. Sad times.
It's really interesting that The Anarchist Cookbook is neither anarchist nor a good "cookbook" (as the parent post noted).
The book contains nothing about anarchist political beliefs or history. There is no mention of Lao Tzu, Kropotkin, Bakunin (yes, that's the name they used for the guy with the Russian accent on Lost, but I'm talking about the original), Proudhon, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, the Anarcho-Syndicalists of the Spanish Revolution (specifically, the anarcho-syndicalist organization and administration of Catalonia), or Food Not Bombs. There is no mention of the centuries of anarchist thought and political philosophy. There is no mention of the Haymarket Affair, which was used to give anarchists the image of bomb-throwers, nor of the fact that of the eight Haymarket anarchists (labor leaders), four were executed and one killed himself in his jail cell before Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned the three survivors when he investigated and found that there had never been any proof of the guilt of the "Haymarket Anarchists," and that the jury had been stacked to guarantee a conviction even in the absence of evidence. Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab is worth reading. Follow the link and you can read it free.
Also, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook apparently knows nothing about the subjects covered. He (or they, if it's not really one author) apparently just copied stuff from a bunch of different sources. If you read the explosive section, you'll see a given explosive mentioned on one page as being relatively stable and safe, and on another page the same explosive will be described as being very unstable. It appears that a lot of the information was just copied from other sources without any analysis of what was being copied. Further, it appears that the chunks of text copied are sometimes incomplete. It may be that The Anarchist Cookbook is somebody's idea of a practical joke, making gullible kids do things ranging from goofy (like trying to smoke banana peels to get high) to deadly (like blowing off limbs or burning their skin and eyes with chemicals when trying to follow the explosive and drug recipes). It has been suggested that the book may have been put in the market by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO program. To me that seems a bit tinfoil hatty, but some of the things the FBI actually did in that program really were bizarre, and a person describing them without showing proof (and yes, the proof of some really scary stuff in COINTELPRO does exist) might sound like a tinfoil hat type.
So The Anarchist Cookbook may be nothing more than a sick joke, but even if the book actually contained any useful information, the idea of banning books about how to make arms is not new. Governments want that for the same reasons they want to ban firearms: to keep the people easier to control. The overblown "threat of terrorism," when you consider how few people are killed by terrorism each year, is just the tool governments an
Also, they started releasing Betamax copies of movies like Star Wars for $100 (and this is in the 80's, so about $200 today). Of course, everyone simply signed up at a video rental club and acquired their own backup copy from the one they rented. Eventually, prices dropped to where people would actually be willing to buy an original copy.
I'm old enough to remember the 1980s quite well. I remember that even though my family had a VHS machine, prices for buying movies on VHS started at $80, and most were in the $89-$99 range, so we didn't even think about buying movies. We used the VCR to record TV shows and to watched rented movies and things we and friends had taped from TV.
I'm not a big fan of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie, but I did stand in line to watch it the night before the official release (it was called a "preview" or something), and the way I remember things, I think we all owe the folks at Warner who made decisions about that movie some thanks, because I could be mistaken, but I think that was the first major release movie on which a studio tried the approach of making it available on VHS at an accessible price everywhere and seeing if they could make more money with a much smaller margin on each sale, but selling many more units. Batman is the first movie I remember seeing in the sub-$30 range, and the first movie I remember seeing available in drugstores (specifically, I remember being surprised when I saw it at the Walgreens on 55th Street near the University of Chicago and at a price that was not so outrageous to me as to be beyond consideration, which was quite a new experience at the time) and stores like K-Mart. The movie was only "ehhh" or worse to me, and it spawned three successively more ridiculous sequels, but I still recall Batman fondly for having been the first major movie made available at a less-obscene price. I never did buy a copy of it, though.
English first (after all, it is made very clear in the Slashdot FAQ that/. is a U.S.-centric site), then Portuguese, because I'm hoping to set up an event here in southeastern Brazil.
I'm in São Paulo. My ice cream shop won't be ready in time (I'm hoping to open in November, but that depends on a lot of things beyond my control), but I'd be willing to organize one at a bar or restaurant somewhere in the West Side of São Paulo. For what it's worth, I live in the Vila Leopoldina and know some nice places around here and in Pinheiros. If anyone shows interest, I'll go to the other page and officially set up a celebration of 10 years of Slashdot. It just can't be on the weekend of the 12th, because I'll be visiting my girlfriend in Rio. I suggest the following weekend. How about the 20th, which will be a Saturday?
Agora em português:
Estou em Sampa. Minha sorveteria não vai ficar pronta em outubro (espero poder abrir em novembro, mas depende de muitas coisas fora do meu controle), mas eu estaria disposto a organizar uma festinha num bar ou restaurante em algum lugar da Zona Oeste. Moro na Vila Leopoldina (perto do CEASA, e para os baladeiros, se é que tem baladeiros nerd por aí, perto da Pachá) e conheço alguns lugares legais por aqui e em Pinheiros. Se alguém se manifestar, vou pra outra página para marcar oficialmente uma comemoração dos 10 anos de Slashdot. Só não pode ser no findi de 12 de outubro, pois vou visitar minha namorada no Rio. Que tal dia 20, que vai cair num sábado?
Yes and no. The RIAA is a bunch of small-f fools. The Motley Fool strives to be a bunch of Big-F Fools.
From the linked page:
Motley Fool was founded in 1993 by brothers David and Tom Gardner. Our name derives from Elizabethan drama, where only the court jester (the "Fool") could tell the King the truth without getting his head lopped off. We're dedicated to educating, amusing, and enriching individuals in search of the truth.
A big-F Fool is one who sees, among other things, people being small-f fools, and isn't afraid to say it.
Um, I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to RTFA or even just open the page, you might have noticed a photograph of Brandon Scott that appears there. I'm not an expert on racial definitions, but from the picture, it looks to me like Mr. Scott is black.
Am I the only one getting Buckaroo Banzai vibes from this?
Dr. Bae of the Bae Institute? Seriously?
I went to the Bae Institute's site and found that it is "an independent space and medical research center."
Physics and space science: check.
Institute named after its physicist founder: check.
Medical stuff: check. Dr. Banzai, of course, in addition to being a great physicist, is also a top neurosurgeon. At the Bae Institute site, it says the Institute's medical technologies can be used, among other things, for treating "brain and spinal cord surgeries."
If Dr. Bae is also the leader of a rock band and says things like "wherever you go, there you are," I'll be surprised if we don't see a wave of stories submitted very soon, all by people named named John, saying that Dr. Bae's research cannot be trusted. I expect these submissions to cite the work of another physicist, Dr. Emilio Lizardo.
Laffa while you can, Monkey Boy!
I just showed my age in a way a low Slashdot UID never could.
TFAs only mention XP and Vista, but I have Windows 2000 (it will be the last Windows I ever own, and I'm just keeping it running until my end-of-year trip to the USA, when I'll buy a Macbook) and was surprised when I woke up one day this week (either the 11th or 12th of September) and found my computer showing the "got restarted and waiting for somebody to log in" screen. Before I had a UPS, that happened now and then, but since getting a UPS, that shouldn't happen unless we get a major power failure that lasts longer than the several minutes my UPS's battery gives me. That hasn't happened since I got my UPS, and I noticed that other things around the house showed no signs of power loss, despite my computer having been restarted.
When I logged in, Windows Update informed me that it had installed updates. That's hard to understand, since I've had Windows Update configured for a long time now to ask me before installing anything. When I saw the item on/., I thought I might have discovered what happens, but TFAs only talk about XP and Vista.
So was what happened to my computer (running Win2K) the same thing? Did others with old versions of Windows have the same experience?
Informed gamers, the people who've been playing games for years, know that GS is run by assholes, employs assholes, and overprices its games. Informed gamers know they can get better deals online or at other retailers.
I don't want to get into a fight here, but I have to say that this was not my experience with GameStop at all. I am a casual gamer, and also a clueless gamer. A roommate and I had a Sega Saturn in 1995. He bought out my half and took the game with him when he left. After the Saturn, I did not own another video game until May of this year.
I live in Brazil, and I was in Maine for a high school reunion. I was at the Maine Mall in South Portland for other reasons, but I had a bit of time, and I had read a lot about the Wii on Slashdot, so when I passed a GameStop store, I stepped in to see if they had any Wiis in stock. They did, but I wasn't 100% sure I wanted one, so I didn't buy one. I asked about handheld systems, because those could be really useful to me when traveling. This was a busy Saturday (semi-crappy and surprisingly cold weather) at the mall. The GameStop store was really busy. I had already said I didn't intend to buy anything that day, but the guys were still very helpful and very patient. It quickly became clear that they really do play and enjoy the games, and they really seemed to want to help me choose the system that would be best for me. They did not push the most expensive products. They showed me the differences between the DS and the PSP. It became obvious that the two guys who helped me both personally preferred the DS, but since I was interested in sports games (I really wanted to play some baseball and soccer video games), I found myself drawn more by the PSP.
Back at the hotel that night, I checked prices online and found that GameStop's prices were quite reasonable, basically the same as everyone else's. I am not sure why the author of the parent post says GS overprices its games. I found that, at least for the PSP and DS, the prices were pretty much the same standard prices everyone else had, except for some eBay sellers.
I should mention that I didn't go to GS because of brand recognition. I went there because I saw a store selling video games. I had never heard of GameStop before that, and in fact, I didn't even remember the name of the store when I left.
I returned to the mall a few days later to buy a handheld video game system. I entered the mall through a different entrance and was surprised by how close the GameStop store ("so that's the name!") was to that entrance, having expected it to be further inside the mall. Once I got in the store and looked around, I realized I was in a different video game store in the same mall. That made me think the other one wasn't a GameStop, but when I asked about it, the employees told me the other one was in fact also a GS. Apparently, there had been stores from two competing chains, and GS bought its competitor (I dunno what its name was) and decided to maintain two stores at the Maine Mall, at least for a while.
I told them I was interested in buying a handheld video game system and a few games for it. They also showed me the differences between the two, and like their colleagues from the other store, did not try to push the most expensive stuff on me. I was almost sure I wanted a PSP, but I wanted to think about it for a few more minutes before buying. Since I had to pick up something at another store for my dad, I went to take care of that before buying my video game system. Since that took me past the GameStop store I had visited on the Saturday, I went back in there. The guys who had been there on Saturday were not there, but everyone at both stores had assured me that they did not work on commission, and that it really didn't matter who sold me my game, or even which store sold it to me. I had decided on the PSP by this time, so I asked for some game recommendations for it. The guy who helped me was awesome. He showed me some
Usually we get left with crap like Cathy and Garfield that recycle jokes day after day.
I liked all three of the strips mentioned in the parent post for some time, but please don't forget the important part of the history of Bloom County where it was as "pat," as recycled, and as predictable as Garfield raised to the Cathy power. In its last few years (I'd say from about early 1987 on), Bloom County was recycling a lot of crap jokes. At that point, the quality of the strip ranged, depending on the day, from a high of maybe-a-slight-chuckle to a low of oh-my-gosh-did-they-really-waste-paper-and-ink-on- such-a-heavily-rehashed-and-thoroughly-unfunny-str ip. That was sad, because that high had previously been the strip's low range, with some true classics. I have to wonder if Bill Watterson's decision to quit doing Calvin and Hobbes when it was enormously popular has something to do with Watterson not wanting the strip to utterly suck like Bloom County did in its last years. I bought and enjoyed Bloom County books in the 1980s, but I had completely quit reading the strip by mid-to-late 1987. I think I gave Opus a chance when it appeared, but saw no reason to read it. There was another Breathed comic between those two, but it also blew goats like late Bloom County.
I admit I had started to get disappointed in the strip before that. In the early parts of Bloom County, Opus was drawn with a much smaller and penguin-like beak. There were comments about his ugliness. As the years wore on, Opus was made cuter and cuter, and his beak grew to be too big for a frickin' pelican, let alone a penguin. It was, however, much more suited to making cute and lucrative Opus stuffed toys. In the early strips, like during the "Cockroach Revolution," roaches were drawn as little lines representing bodies with littler lines representing legs. Later, the character of "Milquetoast," the cute cockroach (I shit you not) came along. Ugh.
Watterson was right, you know. As great as the moments were that Calvin and Hobbes gave us, it did get to the point where I would say things like "OK, another week of violently killed snowmen" when I read the Monday strip. Some of the new versions of old jokes could get a chuckle or even possibly even a snort out of me, but it was typically one in a week or so of strips.
Of the three strips cited in the parent, only The Far Side didn't appear to lose anything over the years. When Larson quit in the mid-1990s, the strip was still as funny and as bizarre as it had been when I first saw it in the early 1980s. It also holds a special place in my heart as one of the greatest mainstream outlets of nerd humor. Futurama has taken that to much higher levels of sophistication (I have a Ph.D. in physics and completed requirements for a B.S. in math, and some of the science and math jokes on Futurama have blown right over my head), but The Far Side did it first and probably better. The Far Side's influence in academic circles was so great that a joke term from a Far Side panel in 1982 has been adapted for informal use by scientists in the field. There's something to be said for nerd "in jokes" so "in" that a trained theoretical physicist, one who happens to be known for how observant he is, can totally miss them, but there's also something to be said for a single panel on the comics page that brought nerd sensibilities to the larger public more effectively, which The Far Side did. I was a kid/adolescent for most of the 1980s, and I remember lots of non-nerd adults liking The Far Side. Larson brought "our" (nerd) culture to a wider audience in a more positive way than just about all portrayals of nerds in popular culture did before or have since.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a similar story in Brazil. The people in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais are famous for chopping parts out of words when they talk. There's a joke about two mineiros (natives of Minas Gerais) having a conversation over coffee. One asks the other "po po po?"
The other responds "po po."
Translating to more common Portuguese (I'll get to English - bear with me), the first is asking "pode pôr pó?" The second responds "pode pôr." They have both cut words and slightly changed the pronunciation of vowels. In English, the first one is asking "Is it OK to add some powder," where "powder" (pó) refers to sweetener for the coffee. The second one says it's OK to put some sweetener in the coffee.
After a little experience with mineiros (so far, every one I've met has been very friendly, by the way, and I've been in Brazil for over 7 1/2 years), one can imagine this conversation actually happening. It could be confusing even for a Brazilian who hasn't heard the story, and a foreigner would probably ask, like the foreigner in the Filipino story in the parent post, whether the two had just had a conversation.
It's the source of the Force in the revised Star Wars universe!
http://www.giantmicrobes.com/us/products/chlamydia.html
It just occurred to me that you could argue that the two greedy idiots are parallel to Han and Chewie, but there you run into the same problem as if you were to try to say they were like R2 and 3PO (comic relief): Han and Chewie are actually likeable characters, and in fact end up being heroes, while the two idiots in THF are not at all, and in fact don't seem to have any redeeming characteristics. Han appears to be greedy and only concerned with himself, but comes back at the end of Star Wars and saves the day.
It's really hard to draw neat parallels between the two films, because they are so different. I'm not sure where this idea that Lucas "stole" Star Wars from THF originated, but it's utter crap and it's time to lay it to rest.
Have you actually watched The Hidden Fortress? There are some similarities, but to say the two movies are the same, scene for scene and character for character, indicates that either you haven't watched Star Wars or you haven't watched The Hidden Fortress. The latter seems more likely, which is why I asked it that way.
If you actually have watched both, I'll be very curious to hear which characters are the same as Greedo, Han and Chewie, which one is like Luke, and which scenes are like Obi-wan training Luke and Obi-wan confronting Darth Vader. Y'know, the important scenes in the movie. For bonus points, be sure to specify which scene in THF is exactly the same as Luke talking to Uncle Owen about the droids and saying he wants to go to the Academy, and what in THF is even remotely similar to the enormously important plotline of Luke knowing little about his father other than the fact that he was a great star pilot.
Yes, there's a princess in both, and yes, there is a pair of "comic relief" characters in both, but do you really want to try to say those two are that similar to R2D2 and C-3PO? I just don't see it. For one thing, R2 and 3PO are actually likeable, and I don't see any redeeming characteristics at all in their counterparts in The Hidden Fortress. Also, Princess Leia doesn't hide her identity from her protectors. You can argue that there's a general loyal to the princess in both, but there's nothing even remotely similar in THF to Princess Leia having to try to find "General Kenobi" after years and years of nobody having seen him. I don't know why I'm bothering to cite differences when in fact the two movies are very, very different, with only a few points that coincide.
Kurosawa never tried to hide the fact that Ran is based on King Lear (it say it in the credits, for example, and he stated it in interviews), nor that Throne of Blood, signfiicantly older than Ran, was based on Macbeth (hint: it's also mentioned in the credits). In fact, many consider Throne of Blood to be one of the best productions of Macbeth ever made. To say Kurosawa "stole" from "Shakespear" (sic) is just plain silly. So is saying that American Graffiti was the only good film Lucas ever made. AG was and is a fine film, but so is Star Wars. It's also completely ridiculous to say that Star Wars was stolen, scene for scene and character for character from THF.
I prefer that name. In addition to making fun of one of the stupidest aspects of the prequel trilogy, it also raises an interesting question: could the whole Darth Vader situation (and with it, the Galactic Empire) have been avoided with a simple dose of penicillin?
In the original trilogy, the Force was magic. There was no need to explain "how it works;" Obi-wan's explanation in ANH of what it is and what it does was sufficient. Nobody has to ask how Merlin's magic or Gandalf's magic works. It's magic, fercryinoutloud! Similarly, there's no need to explain how the Force works. It's the Force fercryinoutloud!
As much as I was looking forward to Episode I, I was totally disappointed by it pretty much from the beginning, and the moment at which I knew it was totally blown and wasn't going to get better was when Qui-gon started blabbing about the chlamydians or whatever. Stupid technobabble worthy of the absolute worst episodes of ST:TNG (gawd... I now wonder: how do tetrions affect chlamydians?), and worse, it reduced what had been magic to a mere blood condition.
Also, as TFA notes, being a great Jedi suddenly stopped being decided by training in the Force and became a mere accident of birth, which is much less appealing to me, as it is to the author of TFA.
Episode III was the least awful of the prequel trilogy, but the world would be better off if the three had never been made. The original trilogy is still great, though. Star Wars (ANH) is still one of my all-time favorite films. I was 8 when it came out, and that was 30 years ago, so you know I'm rapidly approaching 40, but I still feel a childlike sense of wonder when I watch that movie. Even the awful prequel trilogy can't ruin that for me. I just pretend the prequels don't exist. Besides, that way, Darth Vader's revelation to Luke in TESB, and what Luke figures out on Dagobah in ROTJ are actually surprises.
I plan to show my kids the original trilogy. If they end up somehow seeing the crap prequels afterward, that's their problem, but I won't be responsible for it. I'll show them something awesome and let them decide, knowing how Dad doesn't like the prequels, whether they want to watch them or not.
Why do they call this a scorpion? Did it have a poisonous stinger on its tail? It looks like in their total speculation about the creature (the actual fossil was just a claw), they drew (see image in TFA) a creature with a swimming tail, like a lobster or a shrimp.
Wouldn't "giant lobster" or "giant shrimp" be a better description of a large sea arthropod? Maybe it doesn't sound as exciting, but why would they call it a "sea scorpion" if there is no reason to believe it had the most well-known feature of land scorpions?
Additionally, how do they know it wasn't a much smaller beast with proportionally larger claws, given that according to TFA, one of the leading theories about how and why such a huge arthropod evolved was an "arms race" with early armored fish?
Look, I dislike MS and its abuse of its OS monopoly, and I've been working hard to expel MS products from my life. I'll be buying a Blackbook on my trip to the US in December, and the machine in my ice cream shop will be running a free (as in speech and as in beer) "commercial automation" package on Ubuntu 7.04. That will be the end of Windows and MS products in my life for the moment, very probably for a long time, and possibly forever. That said, I think the IT professionals polled have a different reason to say they don't want Vista.
It's a negotiating tactic. They want to scare MS a bit into thinking there's a chance they won't adopt Vista, just to see if they can negotiate better prices or other terms.
Just as smart IT decision-makers made a point of having a Red Hat box somewhere visible in their offices when talking to their Microsoft sales reps during the 2000 and XP sales cycles, I'm sure they're now making sure the MS sales rep walks past at least one machine running Ubuntu and one Mac.
My understanding is that Brazil is no longer photographing and fingerprinting anyone, even US citizens, but I think Brazil should have continued doing it. It was not legislation, but an action taken by a judge in a southern state (Rio Grande do Sul, IIRC) that led to the implementation of the policy in the name of reciprocity. I think Brazil should maintain (well, restore, now that it's not being done anymore) that reciprocity, because that's the only way to get bull$#!+ like the US policy, which forces fingeprinting and photographing of citizens of many but not all foreign countries, changed. Let a few executives traveling to São Paulo on business get pissy because everyone from every other country gets to go through without being treated like criminals, complain (in English, natch) and hear (in English) from the Federal Police that it's just reciprocity, and that if they don't like the way US citizens are treated in Brazil, they should take it up with the authorities in the US, who treat Brazilians that way. If a few high-ranking execs from banking companies complain loud enough in the US, the policy could actually change.
In addition to having read several articles on Brazilian news sites about the policy, I stood in the lines at the international airport in Guarulhos and saw the signs for the two separate areas after arriving at the front of the line. The looks on the faces of the US travelers, especially, the "look how important I am" types who had taken overnight flights in business suits and were getting out their newest-latest crackberries to make sure everyone could see them, were priceless.
FWIW, I am a US citizen, but didn't have to go to the "US citizens" area because I already had a permanent visa and several forms of Brazilian ID, including two with photographs, so I just breezed through the normal lines, exchanging a few pleasant words with the Federal Police agents (in Portuguese, of course) as I went.
I'm not sure why you'd put a tinyurl on a web page, where you could just embed the URL in a link using href, like this (oh, the temptation to link to goatse was great, but I resisted). Even if the URL had been enormous, it would not have changed the size of the "like this" hyperlink, and the full URL would have remained embedded in the page.
The only place where I use tinyurls is when I want to send links to people in e-mail, the recipients might not all be using HTML-based mail programs (or webmail), so the clickable link solution might not work, and the original URL is large and might get broken into multiple lines. Plus, when I send a tinyurled link, I always say what it is and swear to the recipients that it's not goatse or a Rick Roll. Well, unless it is a Rick Roll, of course, but my favorite (OK, only) Rick Roll target has e-mail that can receive hyperlinks, and I find more clever ways to surprise him.
Tempest in a teapot.
Can that really be the case?
More to the point, was Melinda French a direct subordinate of Bill Gates?
FWIW, I honestly don't know and seriously wonder. The Wikipedia article on her just says she was the "unit manager" (huh huh - insert humorous comment here) for several Microsoft products (Publisher, Bob, Encarta, and Expedia).
...does it run Linux? Surely what he's proved is that it does? Yes, in some sense at least. FTFA:And STOP CALLING ME SHIRLEY!
Yes, Rush got a deferment because he didn't want to go to Vietnam. The relevant quote: Anyway, Limbaugh now refers to military people who criticise Bush's insane and stupid war as "phony soldiers" and famously said that Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran who volunteered for the Marines and went to Iraq, then came back and criticized the stupid-ass war and even ran for Congress in Mean Jean Schmidt's district, was just a "staff puke." He even accused Hackett of having volunteered for the military during a war "to pad the résumé."
So the term "puke" as an insult is not completely out of use, but let's just say that people with a firm grip on reality still haven't been known to use it in recent times.
Wow. I didn't know about that. Awesome post. And too bad you felt you had to post as AC, though I suspect I know why. An earlier reply to my (grandparent) post says I'm in big trouble because of the references I cited. I wish I could just laugh it off, but some part of me refuses to completely discount the threat. Sad times.
It's really interesting that The Anarchist Cookbook is neither anarchist nor a good "cookbook" (as the parent post noted).
The book contains nothing about anarchist political beliefs or history. There is no mention of Lao Tzu, Kropotkin, Bakunin (yes, that's the name they used for the guy with the Russian accent on Lost, but I'm talking about the original), Proudhon, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin, the Anarcho-Syndicalists of the Spanish Revolution (specifically, the anarcho-syndicalist organization and administration of Catalonia), or Food Not Bombs. There is no mention of the centuries of anarchist thought and political philosophy. There is no mention of the Haymarket Affair, which was used to give anarchists the image of bomb-throwers, nor of the fact that of the eight Haymarket anarchists (labor leaders), four were executed and one killed himself in his jail cell before Illinois Governor John Altgeld pardoned the three survivors when he investigated and found that there had never been any proof of the guilt of the "Haymarket Anarchists," and that the jury had been stacked to guarantee a conviction even in the absence of evidence. Altgeld's Reasons for Pardoning Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab is worth reading. Follow the link and you can read it free.
Also, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook apparently knows nothing about the subjects covered. He (or they, if it's not really one author) apparently just copied stuff from a bunch of different sources. If you read the explosive section, you'll see a given explosive mentioned on one page as being relatively stable and safe, and on another page the same explosive will be described as being very unstable. It appears that a lot of the information was just copied from other sources without any analysis of what was being copied. Further, it appears that the chunks of text copied are sometimes incomplete. It may be that The Anarchist Cookbook is somebody's idea of a practical joke, making gullible kids do things ranging from goofy (like trying to smoke banana peels to get high) to deadly (like blowing off limbs or burning their skin and eyes with chemicals when trying to follow the explosive and drug recipes). It has been suggested that the book may have been put in the market by the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO program. To me that seems a bit tinfoil hatty, but some of the things the FBI actually did in that program really were bizarre, and a person describing them without showing proof (and yes, the proof of some really scary stuff in COINTELPRO does exist) might sound like a tinfoil hat type.
So The Anarchist Cookbook may be nothing more than a sick joke, but even if the book actually contained any useful information, the idea of banning books about how to make arms is not new. Governments want that for the same reasons they want to ban firearms: to keep the people easier to control. The overblown "threat of terrorism," when you consider how few people are killed by terrorism each year, is just the tool governments an
I'm not a big fan of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman movie, but I did stand in line to watch it the night before the official release (it was called a "preview" or something), and the way I remember things, I think we all owe the folks at Warner who made decisions about that movie some thanks, because I could be mistaken, but I think that was the first major release movie on which a studio tried the approach of making it available on VHS at an accessible price everywhere and seeing if they could make more money with a much smaller margin on each sale, but selling many more units.
Batman is the first movie I remember seeing in the sub-$30 range, and the first movie I remember seeing available in drugstores (specifically, I remember being surprised when I saw it at the Walgreens on 55th Street near the University of Chicago and at a price that was not so outrageous to me as to be beyond consideration, which was quite a new experience at the time) and stores like K-Mart. The movie was only "ehhh" or worse to me, and it spawned three successively more ridiculous sequels, but I still recall Batman fondly for having been the first major movie made available at a less-obscene price. I never did buy a copy of it, though.
"Stay on target. Stay on target."
English first (after all, it is made very clear in the Slashdot FAQ that /. is a U.S.-centric site), then Portuguese, because I'm hoping to set up an event here in southeastern Brazil.
I'm in São Paulo. My ice cream shop won't be ready in time (I'm hoping to open in November, but that depends on a lot of things beyond my control), but I'd be willing to organize one at a bar or restaurant somewhere in the West Side of São Paulo. For what it's worth, I live in the Vila Leopoldina and know some nice places around here and in Pinheiros. If anyone shows interest, I'll go to the other page and officially set up a celebration of 10 years of Slashdot. It just can't be on the weekend of the 12th, because I'll be visiting my girlfriend in Rio. I suggest the following weekend. How about the 20th, which will be a Saturday?
Agora em português:
Estou em Sampa. Minha sorveteria não vai ficar pronta em outubro (espero poder abrir em novembro, mas depende de muitas coisas fora do meu controle), mas eu estaria disposto a organizar uma festinha num bar ou restaurante em algum lugar da Zona Oeste. Moro na Vila Leopoldina (perto do CEASA, e para os baladeiros, se é que tem baladeiros nerd por aí, perto da Pachá) e conheço alguns lugares legais por aqui e em Pinheiros. Se alguém se manifestar, vou pra outra página para marcar oficialmente uma comemoração dos 10 anos de Slashdot. Só não pode ser no findi de 12 de outubro, pois vou visitar minha namorada no Rio. Que tal dia 20, que vai cair num sábado?
From the linked page: A big-F Fool is one who sees, among other things, people being small-f fools, and isn't afraid to say it.
Um, I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to RTFA or even just open the page, you might have noticed a photograph of Brandon Scott that appears there. I'm not an expert on racial definitions, but from the picture, it looks to me like Mr. Scott is black.
Am I the only one getting Buckaroo Banzai vibes from this?
Dr. Bae of the Bae Institute? Seriously?
I went to the Bae Institute's site and found that it is "an independent space and medical research center."
Physics and space science: check.
Institute named after its physicist founder: check.
Medical stuff: check. Dr. Banzai, of course, in addition to being a great physicist, is also a top neurosurgeon. At the Bae Institute site, it says the Institute's medical technologies can be used, among other things, for treating "brain and spinal cord surgeries."
If Dr. Bae is also the leader of a rock band and says things like "wherever you go, there you are," I'll be surprised if we don't see a wave of stories submitted very soon, all by people named named John, saying that Dr. Bae's research cannot be trusted. I expect these submissions to cite the work of another physicist, Dr. Emilio Lizardo.
Laffa while you can, Monkey Boy!
I just showed my age in a way a low Slashdot UID never could.
TFAs only mention XP and Vista, but I have Windows 2000 (it will be the last Windows I ever own, and I'm just keeping it running until my end-of-year trip to the USA, when I'll buy a Macbook) and was surprised when I woke up one day this week (either the 11th or 12th of September) and found my computer showing the "got restarted and waiting for somebody to log in" screen. Before I had a UPS, that happened now and then, but since getting a UPS, that shouldn't happen unless we get a major power failure that lasts longer than the several minutes my UPS's battery gives me. That hasn't happened since I got my UPS, and I noticed that other things around the house showed no signs of power loss, despite my computer having been restarted. /., I thought I might have discovered what happens, but TFAs only talk about XP and Vista.
When I logged in, Windows Update informed me that it had installed updates. That's hard to understand, since I've had Windows Update configured for a long time now to ask me before installing anything. When I saw the item on
So was what happened to my computer (running Win2K) the same thing? Did others with old versions of Windows have the same experience?
I don't want to get into a fight here, but I have to say that this was not my experience with GameStop at all. I am a casual gamer, and also a clueless gamer. A roommate and I had a Sega Saturn in 1995. He bought out my half and took the game with him when he left. After the Saturn, I did not own another video game until May of this year.
I live in Brazil, and I was in Maine for a high school reunion. I was at the Maine Mall in South Portland for other reasons, but I had a bit of time, and I had read a lot about the Wii on Slashdot, so when I passed a GameStop store, I stepped in to see if they had any Wiis in stock. They did, but I wasn't 100% sure I wanted one, so I didn't buy one. I asked about handheld systems, because those could be really useful to me when traveling. This was a busy Saturday (semi-crappy and surprisingly cold weather) at the mall. The GameStop store was really busy. I had already said I didn't intend to buy anything that day, but the guys were still very helpful and very patient. It quickly became clear that they really do play and enjoy the games, and they really seemed to want to help me choose the system that would be best for me. They did not push the most expensive products. They showed me the differences between the DS and the PSP. It became obvious that the two guys who helped me both personally preferred the DS, but since I was interested in sports games (I really wanted to play some baseball and soccer video games), I found myself drawn more by the PSP.
Back at the hotel that night, I checked prices online and found that GameStop's prices were quite reasonable, basically the same as everyone else's. I am not sure why the author of the parent post says GS overprices its games. I found that, at least for the PSP and DS, the prices were pretty much the same standard prices everyone else had, except for some eBay sellers.
I should mention that I didn't go to GS because of brand recognition. I went there because I saw a store selling video games. I had never heard of GameStop before that, and in fact, I didn't even remember the name of the store when I left.
I returned to the mall a few days later to buy a handheld video game system. I entered the mall through a different entrance and was surprised by how close the GameStop store ("so that's the name!") was to that entrance, having expected it to be further inside the mall. Once I got in the store and looked around, I realized I was in a different video game store in the same mall. That made me think the other one wasn't a GameStop, but when I asked about it, the employees told me the other one was in fact also a GS. Apparently, there had been stores from two competing chains, and GS bought its competitor (I dunno what its name was) and decided to maintain two stores at the Maine Mall, at least for a while.
I told them I was interested in buying a handheld video game system and a few games for it. They also showed me the differences between the two, and like their colleagues from the other store, did not try to push the most expensive stuff on me. I was almost sure I wanted a PSP, but I wanted to think about it for a few more minutes before buying. Since I had to pick up something at another store for my dad, I went to take care of that before buying my video game system. Since that took me past the GameStop store I had visited on the Saturday, I went back in there. The guys who had been there on Saturday were not there, but everyone at both stores had assured me that they did not work on commission, and that it really didn't matter who sold me my game, or even which store sold it to me. I had decided on the PSP by this time, so I asked for some game recommendations for it. The guy who helped me was awesome. He showed me some
Watterson was right, you know. As great as the moments were that Calvin and Hobbes gave us, it did get to the point where I would say things like "OK, another week of violently killed snowmen" when I read the Monday strip. Some of the new versions of old jokes could get a chuckle or even possibly even a snort out of me, but it was typically one in a week or so of strips.
Of the three strips cited in the parent, only The Far Side didn't appear to lose anything over the years. When Larson quit in the mid-1990s, the strip was still as funny and as bizarre as it had been when I first saw it in the early 1980s. It also holds a special place in my heart as one of the greatest mainstream outlets of nerd humor. Futurama has taken that to much higher levels of sophistication (I have a Ph.D. in physics and completed requirements for a B.S. in math, and some of the science and math jokes on Futurama have blown right over my head), but The Far Side did it first and probably better. The Far Side's influence in academic circles was so great that a joke term from a Far Side panel in 1982 has been adapted for informal use by scientists in the field. There's something to be said for nerd "in jokes" so "in" that a trained theoretical physicist, one who happens to be known for how observant he is, can totally miss them, but there's also something to be said for a single panel on the comics page that brought nerd sensibilities to the larger public more effectively, which The Far Side did. I was a kid/adolescent for most of the 1980s, and I remember lots of non-nerd adults liking The Far Side. Larson brought "our" (nerd) culture to a wider audience in a more positive way than just about all portrayals of nerds in popular culture did before or have since.