> . (BTW: Is it ok if I sing these lyrics? I don't want to get sued.
/takes a bow
Totally OK. All my filk is in the public domain. (Now, getting sued for the music you play in the background is another story... We'll probably both end up getting sued for remembering the tune.)
And y'might enjoy this thread too. Although it takes a little longer to sing it when it comes around on the guitar. If'n ya give credit to anyone, give credit to the guy who prompted me to finish the job. The muse is a finicky bitch, but She was with me that day.
When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now.
Will we still be playing Castle Wolfenstein?
On emulators ported to WINE?
If there's a walkthrough on quarter to three, with some ancient lore?
Will ya still RUN me,
Load-eight-comma-one me,
My C-64?
I could be handy, slip you a disk, when your drive has gone.
You can bunny-hop with the rocket tube, then go back to Quake and some DOOM.
Slower reflexes, arthritic grips, who could ask for more?
Will you still need me,
Duke Nukem 3D?,
AMD-six-four?
Send me an Inter-net through the tubes, stating point of view.
The night of the LAN party we'll take Geritol,
By Sunday morning, we'll pwn 'em all!
Well past my half-life, emulate STEAM, Duke Forever IV.
Will ya still phone me,
Will ya still pwn me,
When I'm 64?
> Does it mean that any arrests and prosecutions made as a result of information gained from these wire-tappings are deemed unconstitutional and their respective cases dropped and verdicts overturned?
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel AmSoc!
Or to phrase in in Oldspeak: Your question is moot -- when one starts from the principle that one does not need a warrant, it logically follows that one does not arrest, nor does one prosecute, because there is no case to be brought before any court, and no verdict need be overturned, because no verdict need ever be handed down.
> Where are the glorious UI innovation like Clippy and Microsoft Bob?
On the shitcan of history, like the unreadable choice of default font on Slashdot, the Star Wars Galaxies NGE, the changes to Yahoo'sstock message boards, and two recent changes to Google Maps, one of which has made broke printing impossible (users are now reduced to taking goddamn screen captures and printing those!), and and another one that auto zooms and recenters, instead of merely re-centering the map, on double-click, making navigation a time-consuming process of setting a desired zoom level, clicking to recenter, slowly loading a bunch of tiles you don't need, then unzooming back out, and loading yet another set of tiles.
In each of these cases, user feedback was nearly universally negative, and yet the "improvements" remain in place.
If this is UI innovation for Web 2.0, give me Web 1.0 back.
> The instrument has been calibrated to identify narcotics, chemical warfare agents such as the nerve gas Sarin, toxic industrial chemicals, and peroxide-based explosives including TATP and HMTD, both used in the July 2005 London bombings. > >[...] > >The Voice100(TM) instrument's core feature is its ability to continuously detect and quantify the concentration of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in whole air.
In other words, if the bad guy's dumb enough to make his explosive before passing through the screening station, he gets picked up.
But since hydrogen peroxide isn't an organic compound, Abdul walks up to the scanner and it says "Nothing to see here. Move along."
And since acetone is a VOC, when Mohammed walks up to the scanner, the scanner screams bloody murder... which would be fine, except that it also probably screams bloody murder for every woman with a bottle of nail polish remover in her purse. So Mohammed gets told to move along, too.
*blam*
Airlines are like democracies: We have to destroy them to save them.
> Well, when you look at the current leadership in this country, you can see why we don't put much stock in evolution - it apparently hasn't happened yet. (Now, where's that seperated at birth picture of the monkey and GWB?)
That's not evolution, it's de-evolution.
They tell us that We got our tails.
Evolving back To little snails.
I say it's all Just wind in sails.
Were we once men? We were DE-VO!
Yeah, I filked it in another thread, but it's just as appropriate in post-9/11 America. Mothersbaugh spoke the truth: We are DEVO.
> Probably the same reason rape often gets the same or more jail time than murder. Even though the first only involves a temporary loss of freedom and some unwanted intrusions that are over in a few minutes, and the other leave you *dead*.
But if you really wanna rack up jail time, try copyright infringement!
> I've got a line of fangirls out here with strap-ons that find Pluto to be a "bishie" and want to, well, show him that they like him. It disturbs me.
That's what I love about Slashdot. Just when I think I can make out the murky bottom of the Marianas Trench with the thread's floodlights, someone shows up with a drill bit.
(Share and enjoy! Share and enjoy the Pete Shelley 80s earbug!)
Wheels are rollin',
Robot bowlin'
Welcome our overlord,
Robosapien V2!
Mark the Tilden,
BEAM he's buildin',
I'm re-filkin',
Robosapien V2!
And I just hope and pray that $250 bucks are at hand,
You and I, me and you, Franklin Benjamins two and one Grant.
And this filk is still wrong and the price has gone up 50 bucks.
(And the JPGs and GIFs are now worse since this line rhymes with "fucks!")
I don't wanna moderate you like an Slashdotter in the zoo,
But it seems good to me to know we can all get Robosapiens too!
Robosuperior,
In my interior,
Still miss my Mindstorms, but
It's Robosapien V2,
(Next one'll cook your breakfast for you!)
It's your Robosapien V2!
And we're Robosapien toooooo...
> Hurricanes destroy more than just property; they destroy the sense of property, as well. They smash that universal belief that objects intrinsically carry some emotional gravity or weight. Acts of destruction remind us that physical substances are only equal to the exact sum of their parts: Plastic and cotton, metal or wood.
Which is why if a hurricane comes and crushes my console and sweeps away my games, I've lost nothing. The atoms don't matter -- I can buy another plastic console, and buy another piece of plastic and aluminum with some bits on it. I've lost nothing. The long numbers (a DVD with a game on it is just a multibillion-digit-long number) that, when read into a properly-configured piece of plastic and ceramic (say, an XBox or PS2), come to life as video games are of no consequence because they're easily replaced.
But if a hurricane sweeps away my only copies (and my not-remote-enough backups) of the somewhat shorter numbers (million-digit-long strings of bits) that represent my digital photo archive, and then we can talk about pain.
All numbers are unequal. But some are more unequal than others.
> Jim Matheson and Mike McIntyre want to censor video games. So vote out Jim Matheson and Mike McIntyre. Quit voting for or against groups and maybe we could get some decent individuals.
Catch-22.
Old bureacracies never die, they just change the names on the org charts.
Once upon a time, the Jackasses were for segregation, and the Elephants were for civil rights. Once upon a time the Elephants wanted smaller government, and the Jackasses wanted a bigger government.
Suppose we abolished all political parties. The country would still be full of individuals who fear boobies, and individuals who fear guns.
Even if 80% of the country doesn't give a damn one way or the other, but the 10% who fear guns would find folks like Matheson and McIntyre, who would become part of the WeHateGuns party, and the 10% who fear boobies would do the same, forming a WeHateBoobies party. The 80% who don't give a damn aren't going to form a WeLikeFreedom party, because they don't give a damn about that either. (And because the first thing a WeLikeFreedom party would do after getting elected would be... nothing, and who the hell wants to invest a million bucks in funding the campaign of a guy who won't pass a law that gives your industry a few tens of millions in return?)
Eventually, the No Guns Party would pick an animal as a mascot, and so would the No Boobs Party. They'd probably come up with better names. They might even adopt the name and mascot of an old party. Maybe something like this has happened before. Maybe it's happened before more than once.
> Co-Sponsors Rep. Jim Matheson (D-UT) and Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
Bolded for emphasis.
Republicans want to censor video games because they're afraid of boobies. Democrats want to censor video games because they're afraid of guns.
All citizens accomplish when they switch their vote between the Elephant and Jackass wings of the Party is ensure that a different set of freedoms is eliminated for the children, because if it saves just one life...
In addition to blipverts, organ harvesting, and whacketts, chalk up another episode of Max Headroom coming to life.
Out in an abandoned heavy-industry area north of Sector 7, something strange is happening. Network 23 junior reporter Janie Crane is hiding out with a telephoto "gun camera" as two would-be terrorists blow up a huge empty building. Janie is left injured but alive by the blast.
[...]
But then, pipsqueak Breakthru-TV manages to get instant coverage of the explosion, and a huge ratings surge. When the network scrambles Edison Carter with Martinez at the stick of the helicopter, they get to the explosion only to have the police chief send them packing. The reporter from Breakthru is already on the scene, despite having lumbered in in a battered network bus. Worst of all, Ped Xing of the Zik-Zak Corporaton is threatening to move his advertising to the hotter Breakthru-TV.
[...]
Frank Braddock calls Cheviot back to gloat at the ratings bonanza they passed on, and is directed to a live interview with the White Brigades leader, Croyd Hauser, taking place on Breakthru. As they watch, an explosion levels another building. It's terrorism on demand, and Breakthru holds the rights.
> But even if the police could be kept fair and impartial, I don't think this system a desirable thing. Why do I have to stand proudly by everything I've done? Why can't I fuck up once in a while? Why can't I break a few of the more pathetic rules once in a while without having an everpresent iron boot of Orwellian justice slammed in my face? When rules are absolutely enforced they become absolutely unchangable--and I think our society's moral evolution has a long, long way to go, especially in regards to:
I'd enjoy living in Brin's transparent society.
The answer to "Why can't I fuck up once in a while?" would probably be answered by a points system. Instead of getting 2 points off your license and a $100 fine for the crime of getting caught speeding (and when you go over 10 points, you lose your license), you'd get 2 points off your license for speeding, and when you go over 100 points a year, you start owing fines, and when you go over 1000 points a year, your car isn't worth driving (read: you accumulate $100 in fines just for backing out of your driveway) for a few months.
> But even if it is, NSA could conceivably build a big enough plant to sell excess power back to BG&E and perhaps reduce the cost somewhat.
If I were NSA, I'd be very interested in hiding my actual power consumption, and/or the rate of growth of my power consumption. The base rate might tell adversaries about how many computers I have. Sudden drops might tell adversaries that I've just upgraded my computers or power supplies. Changes in first derivative of the base rate might tell adversaries that I've started a major project that requires ongoing consumption of processor power over periods of months/years. Sharp spikes in electricity usage over periods of hours/days might tell adversaries that I'm working on something important.
If I were building an NSA data center, I'd bury a big computing farm under the ground. But before that, I'd bury an even bigger generating station under the computing farm. But the first thing I'd bury would be an even bigger pile of resistors, and I'd bury them in the deepest hole I could dig.
> This is just like the American political scene. > >Who'da thunk it?
In ancient Rome - there was a poem
About a dog - who found two bones.
He picked at one, he licked the other
He went in circles - 'Till he dropped dead.
Freedom of choice - is what you got,
Freedom from choice - is what you want.
- Once again, so saith the prophet Mark Mothersbaugh, and so say we all.
> Hey, way to suck the fun out of this with 'the cheese' joke in the description.
No kidding. Everyone knows the real reason for the bulge is because Ballmer threw a chair at it. The side that got hit is indented in the form of the letters "CHA"...
Slashdot Mirror
Totally OK. All my filk is in the public domain. (Now, getting sued for the music you play in the background is another story... We'll probably both end up getting sued for remembering the tune.)
And y'might enjoy this thread too. Although it takes a little longer to sing it when it comes around on the guitar. If'n ya give credit to anyone, give credit to the guy who prompted me to finish the job. The muse is a finicky bitch, but She was with me that day.
Will we still be playing Castle Wolfenstein?
On emulators ported to WINE?
If there's a walkthrough on quarter to three, with some ancient lore?
Will ya still RUN me,
Load-eight-comma-one me,
My C-64?
I could be handy, slip you a disk, when your drive has gone.
You can bunny-hop with the rocket tube, then go back to Quake and some DOOM.
Slower reflexes, arthritic grips, who could ask for more?
Will you still need me,
Duke Nukem 3D?,
AMD-six-four?
Send me an Inter-net through the tubes, stating point of view.
The night of the LAN party we'll take Geritol,
By Sunday morning, we'll pwn 'em all!
Well past my half-life, emulate STEAM, Duke Forever IV.
Will ya still phone me,
Will ya still pwn me,
When I'm 64?
You go to the scary devil monastery, and your spiral into hell starts when you go Down, not Across.
("That's it! I have had it with these muthafuckin' lusers on my muthafuckin' server!")
No, you want that other movie. We're talkin' about muthafuckin' liquids on a muthafuckin' plane, and there ain't a got-damn thing you can do about it!
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel AmSoc!
Or to phrase in in Oldspeak: Your question is moot -- when one starts from the principle that one does not need a warrant, it logically follows that one does not arrest, nor does one prosecute, because there is no case to be brought before any court, and no verdict need be overturned, because no verdict need ever be handed down.
In Newspeak: Poster oldthinker, unbellyfeel Amsoc. Refs unwords "arrest" "prosecute" "constitution" "case", "verdict". Assign oldthinker MiniLuv reference subgroups educamp, joycamp.
On the shitcan of history, like the unreadable choice of default font on Slashdot, the Star Wars Galaxies NGE, the changes to Yahoo's stock message boards, and two recent changes to Google Maps, one of which has made broke printing impossible (users are now reduced to taking goddamn screen captures and printing those!), and and another one that auto zooms and recenters, instead of merely re-centering the map, on double-click, making navigation a time-consuming process of setting a desired zoom level, clicking to recenter, slowly loading a bunch of tiles you don't need, then unzooming back out, and loading yet another set of tiles.
In each of these cases, user feedback was nearly universally negative, and yet the "improvements" remain in place.
If this is UI innovation for Web 2.0, give me Web 1.0 back.
>
>[...]
>
>The Voice100(TM) instrument's core feature is its ability to continuously detect and quantify the concentration of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) in whole air.
In other words, if the bad guy's dumb enough to make his explosive before passing through the screening station, he gets picked up.
But since hydrogen peroxide isn't an organic compound, Abdul walks up to the scanner and it says "Nothing to see here. Move along."
And since acetone is a VOC, when Mohammed walks up to the scanner, the scanner screams bloody murder... which would be fine, except that it also probably screams bloody murder for every woman with a bottle of nail polish remover in her purse. So Mohammed gets told to move along, too.
*blam*
Airlines are like democracies: We have to destroy them to save them.
That's not evolution, it's de-evolution.
They tell us that
We got our tails.
Evolving back
To little snails.
I say it's all
Just wind in sails.
Were we once men?
We were DE-VO!
Yeah, I filked it in another thread, but it's just as appropriate in post-9/11 America. Mothersbaugh spoke the truth: We are DEVO.
But if you really wanna rack up jail time, try copyright infringement!
Not at all. It's got plenty of mass, it's just dark.
That's what I love about Slashdot. Just when I think I can make out the murky bottom of the Marianas Trench with the thread's floodlights, someone shows up with a drill bit.
In Redmond, 640 bytes isn't enough for anybody.
>
> In other news, Pixar announces corporate sponsorship of IAU.
In a followup to an earlier story, IAU has issued a statement rejecting the Pixar proposal as fucking Goofy.
Wheels are rollin',
Robot bowlin'
Welcome our overlord,
Robosapien V2!
Mark the Tilden,
BEAM he's buildin',
I'm re-filkin',
Robosapien V2!
And I just hope and pray that $250 bucks are at hand,
You and I, me and you, Franklin Benjamins two and one Grant.
And this filk is still wrong and the price has gone up 50 bucks.
(And the JPGs and GIFs are now worse since this line rhymes with "fucks!")
I don't wanna moderate you like an Slashdotter in the zoo,
But it seems good to me to know we can all get Robosapiens too!
Robosuperior,
In my interior,
Still miss my Mindstorms, but
It's Robosapien V2,
(Next one'll cook your breakfast for you!)
It's your Robosapien V2!
And we're Robosapien toooooo...
Which is why if a hurricane comes and crushes my console and sweeps away my games, I've lost nothing. The atoms don't matter -- I can buy another plastic console, and buy another piece of plastic and aluminum with some bits on it. I've lost nothing. The long numbers (a DVD with a game on it is just a multibillion-digit-long number) that, when read into a properly-configured piece of plastic and ceramic (say, an XBox or PS2), come to life as video games are of no consequence because they're easily replaced.
But if a hurricane sweeps away my only copies (and my not-remote-enough backups) of the somewhat shorter numbers (million-digit-long strings of bits) that represent my digital photo archive, and then we can talk about pain.
All numbers are unequal. But some are more unequal than others.
".But I repeat myself."
- Mark Twain
Catch-22. Old bureacracies never die, they just change the names on the org charts. Once upon a time, the Jackasses were for segregation, and the Elephants were for civil rights. Once upon a time the Elephants wanted smaller government, and the Jackasses wanted a bigger government.
Suppose we abolished all political parties. The country would still be full of individuals who fear boobies, and individuals who fear guns.
Even if 80% of the country doesn't give a damn one way or the other, but the 10% who fear guns would find folks like Matheson and McIntyre, who would become part of the WeHateGuns party, and the 10% who fear boobies would do the same, forming a WeHateBoobies party. The 80% who don't give a damn aren't going to form a WeLikeFreedom party, because they don't give a damn about that either. (And because the first thing a WeLikeFreedom party would do after getting elected would be... nothing, and who the hell wants to invest a million bucks in funding the campaign of a guy who won't pass a law that gives your industry a few tens of millions in return?)
Eventually, the No Guns Party would pick an animal as a mascot, and so would the No Boobs Party. They'd probably come up with better names. They might even adopt the name and mascot of an old party. Maybe something like this has happened before. Maybe it's happened before more than once.
Bolded for emphasis.
Republicans want to censor video games because they're afraid of boobies. Democrats want to censor video games because they're afraid of guns.
All citizens accomplish when they switch their vote between the Elephant and Jackass wings of the Party is ensure that a different set of freedoms is eliminated for the children, because if it saves just one life...
From the synopsis to Max Headroom, Episode 15, "War", ca. 1987.
You keep making oblique references to steak and cheese. I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
(If it's 17556639's favorite dish, maybe his wife is looking forward to death.)
I'd enjoy living in Brin's transparent society.
The answer to "Why can't I fuck up once in a while?" would probably be answered by a points system. Instead of getting 2 points off your license and a $100 fine for the crime of getting caught speeding (and when you go over 10 points, you lose your license), you'd get 2 points off your license for speeding, and when you go over 100 points a year, you start owing fines, and when you go over 1000 points a year, your car isn't worth driving (read: you accumulate $100 in fines just for backing out of your driveway) for a few months.
If I were NSA, I'd be very interested in hiding my actual power consumption, and/or the rate of growth of my power consumption. The base rate might tell adversaries about how many computers I have. Sudden drops might tell adversaries that I've just upgraded my computers or power supplies. Changes in first derivative of the base rate might tell adversaries that I've started a major project that requires ongoing consumption of processor power over periods of months/years. Sharp spikes in electricity usage over periods of hours/days might tell adversaries that I'm working on something important.
If I were building an NSA data center, I'd bury a big computing farm under the ground. But before that, I'd bury an even bigger generating station under the computing farm. But the first thing I'd bury would be an even bigger pile of resistors, and I'd bury them in the deepest hole I could dig.
>
>Who'da thunk it?
In ancient Rome - there was a poem
About a dog - who found two bones.
He picked at one, he licked the other
He went in circles - 'Till he dropped dead.
Freedom of choice - is what you got,
Freedom from choice - is what you want.
- Once again, so saith the prophet Mark Mothersbaugh, and so say we all.
They tell us that
We got our tails.
Evolving down
To little snails.
I say it's all
Just wind in sails.
Were we once men?
We were DE-VO!
No kidding. Everyone knows the real reason for the bulge is because Ballmer threw a chair at it. The side that got hit is indented in the form of the letters "CHA"...