Ep. 4,5 and 6 had a lot of Gaps that we filled in our own imagination that when ep. 1,2,3 came out we would all be disappointed as our imagination was replaced with someone else's.
No, the problem was that Episodes 1-3 didn't fill in the interesting gaps.
4: Here's this Luke kid. Light Side wins.
5: The Empire blows up the base, hacks off Luke's hand, and Han's fully-clothed and petrified. Dark Side wins.
6: Luke beats Palpatine. Dad's OK. Light Side wins.
Following the parallel, we should have had:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Anakin hacks up a bunch of Sandpeople, kids, and finally flips out Natalie Portman, formerly naked, ends up petrified. Dark Side wins.
3: Here's this Darth Vader dude. He gets more and more evil with every passing month, slaughtering millions, razing planets, building Star Destroyers and Death Stars, and he's so freaking oppressive that the Rebellion starts. Some Bothans rip off the plans for the Death Star and haul ass outa there! Light Side wins.
Instead we got this incoherent jumble:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Here's the Anakin dude. Whiny little bugger, ain't he?
3: Here's the Anakin dude. Still a whiny little bugger, ain't he? DO NOT WANT.
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
"93882naimina74143574? That's the stupidest key I've ever heard of in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would use to encrypt his insurance file!"
For half a billion dollars, we could have had half a stealth bomber.
Yeah, but something tells me this isn't what the hippies had in mind when they said "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber"...
It doesn't matter whether the procurement chain diverts the money to defense contractors or for texbook publishers: a bureaucracy's first order of business is to protect itself by expanding its mandate - and by extension, its budget.
You can't?
Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.
Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.
Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.
For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).
'This trade has become a thriving business. Companies called "fake recyclers" approach well-meaning organizations -- charities, churches, and community organizations -- and offer to hold a Recycling Day. The charity provides publicity, legitimacy, and a parking lot for the event. On the designated day, well-meaning residents
...who figure that one big pile of garbage is better than two little piles of garbage, bring in perfectly-functional equipment and sing it with me the next time it comes around on the guitar.
You can get anything you want at Natalie's Restaurant. (The punchline, half a decade later, is that the 21" CRT I salvaged from a dumpster still works, yet I've gone through one LCD monitor due to a failed inverter and a lack of easily-available spare parts since then.)
The only thing I've noticed in the five years since I wrote that parody is that it's getting increasingly hard to find surplus equipment these days. Product lifecycles are shorter, so consumption isn't reduced. It's sure as hell not getting reused. And it's only getting "recycled" in the sense that it's being dumped into the homes of people so poor that they melt solder off printed circuit boards over an open pit fire.
Recycling hardware for which you have no further use is a good idea, but if you're going to recycle your old electronics, do some research and find an organization that's doing it right. ACCRC turns the scrappy scrap into scrap, turns the interesting scrap into art, and the non-scrap into computers that go directly to people in its own neighborhood.
That's not "a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction". That's an opportunity. Allow me to sever the Gordian knot of tangled jurisdictional issues with justice, THUNDERDOME style.
Tonight's card: Muslim Fundamentalist Lawyer vs. Mark Zuckerberg. Two men enter, one world wins.
There's just one problem with all this: there's no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.
That's not a problem, it's a solution. It means there need to be more studies, and bigger contracts, to figure out which bits of SPOT do work (read: "none, but who cares if it works as long as we can keep getting funding"), until such time as the political winds shift in favor of some other crackpot in the bureaucracy who's got more money to spend than brains to care about what it's being spent on.
Meanwhile, life once again imitates art:
SPOT agent: English or American? State Security. Your papers, please.
Clint Eastwood: Can you wait a minute?
SPOT agent: Very well. Quickly. (pause) Your papers, please. (pause) Are you ill, or maybe frightened?
Clint Eastwood: I've been having stomach problems.
SPOT agent: Your papers are not in order.
Clint Eastwood: They're in order. Look at them again.
SPOT agent: No. They are not in order.
Without giving away a spoiler to a movie that's 28 years old, Gant's papers were in order: the KGB goon was bluffing, trying to provoke a reaction.
Every time I travel by air, I watch the first half of Firefox, and every year, the part where Clint Eastwoodfails to bluff his way through Moscow's airport seems a bit less like an American director's 1982 portrayal of the USSR, and feels a little more like home. Problem is, there's nowhere left to fly to, even if you did get your hands on a Mach-5 capable thought-controlled stealth plane.
What possible reason could they have for doing this, aside from the outright malevolent oppression of their citizens.
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." - Orwell, 1984.
But that's just the root cause of all totalitarian ideologies. You're looking for the proximate cause, which is why this specific form of control is useful.
Fortunately, the fictional society in George Orwell's unintentional HOWTO also featured a "Junior Anti-Sex League", and it's there for the same reason that China features a ban on pr0n.
They don't even know *why* porn is wrong, yet they outlaw it.
Totalitarians have known precisely what's wrong with unregulated sex, and they've known it - even if just instinctively - since before the written word.
"It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. (... ) There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity with the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account." - Orwell, 1984.
Of course, it's not just the Chinese totalitarians who do this sort of thing. The United States is full of Republichristian fundamentalists to the point that the gay evangelist and toe-tapping Senator are practically cliches.
The Catholic priesthood is celibate - and when it says "Think of the children!", methinks it doth protest too much. But even without its legions of pedopriests, the Catholic Church's ban on contraception comes from the same place: control mating opportunities amongst the laity, and you can keep 'em in church -- because without sex, your gigantic cathedrals (which feature some of the most beautiful architecture/lighting/windows/artwork ever created, and giant mindblowing-reverberating pipe organs that still sound awesome centuries after their construction) were the closest thing a Dark Ages serf would ever get to experiencing ecstasy.
Meanwhile, the marital history of the guy who founded that other religion from the Middle East speaks for itself, and the resulting social policies, in which tribal leaders and rich dudes get four wives... well, with all the wives taken 4-at-a-time to the upper crust, that leaves the low-ranking tribesmen with nothing to look forward to but to strap bombs on themselves in order to hurry up and get their mojo on with those 72 virgins waitin' for 'em in the afterlife.
China's ban on pr0n is just a symptom of a much wider phenomenon that's practically universal amongst authoritarians. The goal isn't th ban pr0n, but the reason it is there is a very good one: it works.
"Facebook will be re-opened once we erase the pages that contain the obnoxious images." And how do they propose to do that?
Either a billion people too immature to handle cartoons are kept off the Internet forever, or every Facebook server on the planet is vaporized in a hail of fast neutrons.
Call me cynical, but either way, the world ends up a better place.
Please contact K'breel and get an update - this rover was assaulted with carbon dioxide.
The Council wishes to correct earlier reports: no toxic compounds were strewn across the battlefield; the ice was environmentally-sound carbon dioxide, as commonly found in snow.
When Junior Reporter 54550 hastily reported on the Council's statement, his gelsacs were frostbitten without being bobbed. Ow, Ow, Ow!
The Illustrious Council of Elders has declared today a day of celebration. K'breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:
"Despite the propaganda reports to the contrary, what we killed a year ago remains dead and frozen, crushed beneath a mountain of toxic dihydrogen monoxide. The perverse pendulosity of its plumb bob waves no more!
Some say this war will end in fire, others in ice.
Reporters' gelsacs know my ire;
they are those who went with fire.
We now confirm this blue death twice,
Our gelsacs engorged with delight,
We say that for destruction ice,
Not only might,
But did, suffice!"
When the Martian Poet Laureate reported a striking similarity between the recent press release and an ancient transmission from the blue world, K'Breel had the Poet Laureate's gelsacs bobbed, frosted, and then bitten.
First they closer Limewire
First they closed the usenets.
When they came for my router, it was to replace it with a FTTH.
And it was good....
Wait... I think I fracked up that one. What were we talking about?
First they shut down TPB, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Limewire, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Newzbin, but I didn't care because I could still download the headers and summarize them with a shell script.
Then they shut down USENET, and when I finally got fiber to the home, there was nothing left to download.
Back in the 1960s there was an ad that did some trick that caused a black-and-white television to display what the eye perceived as colour. There was an explanation as to how it was achieved but lo these many decades later I have no recollection what it was (nor what the ad was for, either). If I hadn't seen it myself, I'd not believe it could be done.
Although a commercial failure for television, the same idea reappeared in the 1980s as a way of rendering 3D displays on the Vectrex gaming system. Minestorm was a 2D game similar to Asteroids, but with the color wheel, could appear in 3D. In the picture of the color wheel at that last link, 50% of the disc is black (one eye is covered), and the other eye is sequentially green (30%), red (~5%), and blue (15%). In Minestorm, objects were drawn sequentially, as a vector display works like an oscilloscope. Each frame would require lots of large asteroids (which took a long time to draw), so that's green, your ship and/or some bullets (which might be red), and static information like your score, etc (which I'd guess would be blue).
That gives you a way to turn a 2D black-and-white game (like Minestorm) into a 2D color game, but by alternating eyes, you can also turn that into 3D if the software was designed to take into account alternating frames, like in this screenshot of "Narrow Escape".
There were a couple of pretty good attempts to reverse-engineer the Vectrex 3D goggles. (With the advent of cheap/accessible 3D printing/fabrication via places like TechShop, it's probably a lot more feasible to do it today than it was 15 years ago...)
I personally think they are needed for specific places. Construction zones. Too many idiots go flying through construction zones putting construction works and other motorists in danger. maybe speed cameras all along the construction area will actually slow down those idiots.
...by having chronic offenders see the "Photo enforcement zone" sign on the side of the road, lock up all four wheels to slow down in time for the van a quarter mile away, and then speed right back up again as soon as they're past the van, secure in the knowledge that there won't be another van for several miles.
...and by having tourists and inadvertent speeders drive blithely by the camera, wonder what the flash was, and keep going at whatever their original rate of speed was, blissfully unaware they were speeding until a ticket shows up in the mail.
Y'know what gets people to slow down? A real cop, lighting you up, pulling you over, and having to sit by the side of the road (as you watch every car that was doing the speed limit glide on by for 20 minutes:) as you await your fate.
I got my first ticket in 20 years of driving during a recent road trip. I knew I was speeding, he knew I was speeding, and after he wrote me up, I actually thanked him for the reality check. Had it been a camera, I'd have paid the fine and not changed my behavior for the rest of the trip, because I wouldn't have known about it until I got home. As it was, I kept it to within 5 of the limit for the rest of my trip, and to my surprise, even in the extremely remote areas of the state - we're talking the kind of places where you're the only car within miles miles - slowing it down wasn't as boring as I'd thought it would be.
It has been years in the making but NASA said its Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has captured a new view of the rim of the planet's Endeavour crater, perhaps the rover's ultimate destination. The Mars rover set out for Endeavour in September 2008 after spending two years exploring the Victoria crater. NASA says Endeavour is 13 miles across, some 25 times wider than Victoria crater, and could offer scientists more insight into the red planet's make-up."
K'breel, speaker for the Council, emphasized that the site for the final battle was well-defended:
"Gentle citizens, it has been years since the twin mechanized monsters touched down on our sweet red soil, but the Council is pleased to report that the last remaining mobile invader from the blue planet has been sighted by sentries approaching the rim of End-Devaur crater. The invader set out for End-Devaur last summer after spending a year at Victory Hole; Planetary Land Defense Forces have pinpointed the invader's location to a point in the trackless wastes at least half a year's journey from End-Devaur."
"The enemy's slow progress across the wastelands leaves us with ample time to amass an overwhelming counterforce, and at last we shall see this campaign through to its end. Rejoice! Within half a revolution around our star, this monstrosity from the blue world shall find its ultimate destination!"
When a junior reporter mentioned the persistent rumor that the invader was merely a scientific probe operating at least order of magnitude past its design lifespan, K'Breel raised a spirited toast "to an opportunity for victory!", and devoured the ends of the reporter's gelsacs.
There's a sale on quack medical drugs today.
It's all all 30% off from yesterday.
There's laetrile, nona juice, and ephedrine for speed.
Just a Visa or Paypal creds are all you need.
My partner's in jail, my staff is on the lam.
We've got botnets with petabytes of hijacked RAM.
And our ISP doesn't give a tinker's dam,
'Cause of our reputation as the King of spam.
Don't miss out on our giant online porno sale.
(Is my scam out there?)
We told Grandma she opted in for our e-mail.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got lawyers to help preserve our corporate veil.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got bullshit and horseshit, we've got tons of fail.
(Is my scam out there?)
No doctor will want a medical exam,
Our chiropractor's part of the insurance scam,
Get some herbal viagra and become a man,
'Cos we're known in this world as the King of Spam.
If you're hawking Chinese knockoffs of Nike shoes,
(Is your scam out there?)
Some 419 scams, offers they can't refuse,
(Is your scam out there?)
With their credit card's keylogged, they can sing the blues,
(Is your scam out there?)
We do fraud, we do larc'ny, anything you choose.
(Is your scam out there?)
Well, AOL shut down Spamford with a slam,
Alan Ralsky got nailed bigtime by from Uncle Sam,
But the flood's even bigger than the Hoover Dam,
'Cause we're known the world over as the King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam...
- With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic, and of course, The Police:)
There was at least one study done at Northwestern College of Chiropractic in the early 1990s...
Hey, slightly OT question...
This is one of my pet grammatical peeves, and you might actually know the answer: Why do you guys call it "Chriropractic"? That's an adjective, not a noun.
A philosopher studies philosophy - the writing of philosophical essays - and takes courses in philosophic thinking, leading to a Doctorate in Philosophy (the original Ph.D). But he does not get a Doctorate of Philosophic.
A psychiatrist studies psychiatry - the provision of psychiatric care - often given at a Psychiatric Hospital. If you ask him what he does for a living, he'll say he's into psychiatry, not "psychiatric".
A chiropractor performs chiropractic treatment, fine. Goes to a "College of Chiropractic Practice/Care/Medicine/Any-other-noun-you-like?" Sure. But instead of using a perfectly cromulent word like "Chiropracty" (I'd even accept a modernized version along the lines of "Chiropractice"), you guys call it "College of Chiropractic" or "Doctor of Chiropractic". WTF?:)
I'm not splitting hairs here - "chiropractic care", "chiropractic theory" are all gramatically fine, but you're the only profession that (mis)uses the adjective form of the profession on an institutional level. There's gotta be an interesting historical accident behind that naming quirk, and I'm genuinely curious as to what's the story?:)
I'd like to believe that we could find a way to fund infrastructure projects without the Rube Goldberg machine that is the United States tax code. In the ideal world I would be able to figure out my taxes with nothing more than my year end paystub and a multiplication operation.
A lot of the bloat on the tax forms is breaking down simple mathematical formulae (Pay "3% of everything over $12345") into 10-line sequences of arithmetical operations. "Copy line 1 to line 2. Subtract 12345 from line 2. If the amount is over zero, multiply by 0.03."). Presumably the UI goal here was to make sure that even someone who didn't understand percentages could perform the calculations.
A lot of the other bloat in the US tax system is the inexplicable requirement to keep every form down to "one or two pages at most". When something can't fit on a single form, there's a glorified subroutine - "To figure out line 84, GOSUB 6251", and of course, form 6251 is essentially a big chain of GOSUBs. I have no idea what the UI goal here was, but it was probably the case that some bigwig, decades ago, said that no form shall be longer than 1-2 pages, and the system has optimized for that metric, even though they've worked around it by requiring multiple forms and worksheets, the calculations for which never actually appear on any form.
Much like the law itself, the tax forms reflect the worst practices of COBOL and BASIC.
So I'd go one step further than just cleaning up the code. I'd make it impractical to write the bad code in the first place, and I'd do it like this:
Amendment 0: Every Congressman shall file his or her own taxes, on paper, under open-book exam conditions, specifically: locked in a room containing nothing but dead-tree versions of every IRS form, a copy of the tax code, and using no technology more sophisticated than a pencil and four-function calculator. No outside aid (accountants, lawyers, or food) is permitted in the examination room at any time.
They have to either rewrite the code so that compliance was practical, or they'd starve. I'd be OK with either of those outcomes.
I remember an old joke that went something like this...
"NSA is conducting advanced research in the fields of applied mathematics, signal processing, and cryptography. To apply for one of these exciting positions, just pick up the phone, call your grandmother, and ask for one!"
I don't get it. Not even a peep about it being renamed to KNOME, or about KDE being renamed to GNU/DE.
I mean, what the hell, Slashdot! Serious news? On this, the holiest day of the Geek Calendar?
Seeing "support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features" in the same sentence was a pretty good start, but things just trailed off from there. I demand a punchline from this press release, or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!
Slashdot Mirror
No, the problem was that Episodes 1-3 didn't fill in the interesting gaps.
4: Here's this Luke kid. Light Side wins.
5: The Empire blows up the base, hacks off Luke's hand, and Han's fully-clothed and petrified. Dark Side wins.
6: Luke beats Palpatine. Dad's OK. Light Side wins.
Following the parallel, we should have had:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Anakin hacks up a bunch of Sandpeople, kids, and finally flips out Natalie Portman, formerly naked, ends up petrified. Dark Side wins.
3: Here's this Darth Vader dude. He gets more and more evil with every passing month, slaughtering millions, razing planets, building Star Destroyers and Death Stars, and he's so freaking oppressive that the Rebellion starts. Some Bothans rip off the plans for the Death Star and haul ass outa there! Light Side wins.
Instead we got this incoherent jumble:
1: Here's the Anakin kid. Light Side wins.
2: Here's the Anakin dude. Whiny little bugger, ain't he?
3: Here's the Anakin dude. Still a whiny little bugger, ain't he? DO NOT WANT.
All the interesting gaps in the Star Wars storyline took place between Episode III and Episode IV. We all know Anakin's going to fall to the Dark Side, and there was no need to spend two movies doing it. The unexplored part of the movie timeline is what life is like immediately after he becomes Vader, but before the events of Episode IV.
Think different!
"93882naimina74143574? That's the stupidest key I've ever heard of in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would use to encrypt his insurance file!"
Yeah, but something tells me this isn't what the hippies had in mind when they said "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber"...
It doesn't matter whether the procurement chain diverts the money to defense contractors or for texbook publishers: a bureaucracy's first order of business is to protect itself by expanding its mandate - and by extension, its budget.
Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.
Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.
For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).
You can get anything you want at Natalie's Restaurant. (The punchline, half a decade later, is that the 21" CRT I salvaged from a dumpster still works, yet I've gone through one LCD monitor due to a failed inverter and a lack of easily-available spare parts since then.)
The only thing I've noticed in the five years since I wrote that parody is that it's getting increasingly hard to find surplus equipment these days. Product lifecycles are shorter, so consumption isn't reduced. It's sure as hell not getting reused. And it's only getting "recycled" in the sense that it's being dumped into the homes of people so poor that they melt solder off printed circuit boards over an open pit fire.
Recycling hardware for which you have no further use is a good idea, but if you're going to recycle your old electronics, do some research and find an organization that's doing it right. ACCRC turns the scrappy scrap into scrap, turns the interesting scrap into art, and the non-scrap into computers that go directly to people in its own neighborhood.
That's not "a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction". That's an opportunity. Allow me to sever the Gordian knot of tangled jurisdictional issues with justice, THUNDERDOME style.
Tonight's card: Muslim Fundamentalist Lawyer vs. Mark Zuckerberg. Two men enter, one world wins.
"Forget your Saudi Arabia! I'm gonna make my own! With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the energy! Aaw, screw the whole thing!"
- Harry Reid
That's not a problem, it's a solution. It means there need to be more studies, and bigger contracts, to figure out which bits of SPOT do work (read: "none, but who cares if it works as long as we can keep getting funding"), until such time as the political winds shift in favor of some other crackpot in the bureaucracy who's got more money to spend than brains to care about what it's being spent on.
Meanwhile, life once again imitates art:
Without giving away a spoiler to a movie that's 28 years old, Gant's papers were in order: the KGB goon was bluffing, trying to provoke a reaction.
Every time I travel by air, I watch the first half of Firefox, and every year, the part where Clint Eastwoodfails to bluff his way through Moscow's airport seems a bit less like an American director's 1982 portrayal of the USSR, and feels a little more like home. Problem is, there's nowhere left to fly to, even if you did get your hands on a Mach-5 capable thought-controlled stealth plane.
"Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
- Orwell, 1984.
But that's just the root cause of all totalitarian ideologies. You're looking for the proximate cause, which is why this specific form of control is useful.
Fortunately, the fictional society in George Orwell's unintentional HOWTO also featured a "Junior Anti-Sex League", and it's there for the same reason that China features a ban on pr0n.
Totalitarians have known precisely what's wrong with unregulated sex, and they've known it - even if just instinctively - since before the written word.
"It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. ( ... ) There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity with the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account."
- Orwell, 1984.
Of course, it's not just the Chinese totalitarians who do this sort of thing. The United States is full of Republichristian fundamentalists to the point that the gay evangelist and toe-tapping Senator are practically cliches.
The Catholic priesthood is celibate - and when it says "Think of the children!", methinks it doth protest too much. But even without its legions of pedopriests, the Catholic Church's ban on contraception comes from the same place: control mating opportunities amongst the laity, and you can keep 'em in church -- because without sex, your gigantic cathedrals (which feature some of the most beautiful architecture/lighting/windows/artwork ever created, and giant mindblowing-reverberating pipe organs that still sound awesome centuries after their construction) were the closest thing a Dark Ages serf would ever get to experiencing ecstasy.
Meanwhile, the marital history of the guy who founded that other religion from the Middle East speaks for itself, and the resulting social policies, in which tribal leaders and rich dudes get four wives... well, with all the wives taken 4-at-a-time to the upper crust, that leaves the low-ranking tribesmen with nothing to look forward to but to strap bombs on themselves in order to hurry up and get their mojo on with those 72 virgins waitin' for 'em in the afterlife.
China's ban on pr0n is just a symptom of a much wider phenomenon that's practically universal amongst authoritarians. The goal isn't th ban pr0n, but the reason it is there is a very good one: it works.
Either a billion people too immature to handle cartoons are kept off the Internet forever, or every Facebook server on the planet is vaporized in a hail of fast neutrons.
Call me cynical, but either way, the world ends up a better place.
The Council wishes to correct earlier reports: no toxic compounds were strewn across the battlefield; the ice was environmentally-sound carbon dioxide, as commonly found in snow.
When Junior Reporter 54550 hastily reported on the Council's statement, his gelsacs were frostbitten without being bobbed. Ow, Ow, Ow!
The Illustrious Council of Elders has declared today a day of celebration. K'breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:
"Despite the propaganda reports to the contrary, what we killed a year ago remains dead and frozen, crushed beneath a mountain of toxic dihydrogen monoxide. The perverse pendulosity of its plumb bob waves no more!
Some say this war will end in fire, others in ice.
Reporters' gelsacs know my ire;
they are those who went with fire.
We now confirm this blue death twice,
Our gelsacs engorged with delight,
We say that for destruction ice,
Not only might,
But did, suffice!"
When the Martian Poet Laureate reported a striking similarity between the recent press release and an ancient transmission from the blue world, K'Breel had the Poet Laureate's gelsacs bobbed, frosted, and then bitten.
First they shut down TPB, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Limewire, but I didn't care because I had USENET.
Then they shut down Newzbin, but I didn't care because I could still download the headers and summarize them with a shell script.
Then they shut down USENET, and when I finally got fiber to the home, there was nothing left to download.
Silence, Pinky, or I shall have to hurt you.
Probably the field-sequential color wheel from the 50s.
Although a commercial failure for television, the same idea reappeared in the 1980s as a way of rendering 3D displays on the Vectrex gaming system. Minestorm was a 2D game similar to Asteroids, but with the color wheel, could appear in 3D. In the picture of the color wheel at that last link, 50% of the disc is black (one eye is covered), and the other eye is sequentially green (30%), red (~5%), and blue (15%). In Minestorm, objects were drawn sequentially, as a vector display works like an oscilloscope. Each frame would require lots of large asteroids (which took a long time to draw), so that's green, your ship and/or some bullets (which might be red), and static information like your score, etc (which I'd guess would be blue).
That gives you a way to turn a 2D black-and-white game (like Minestorm) into a 2D color game, but by alternating eyes, you can also turn that into 3D if the software was designed to take into account alternating frames, like in this screenshot of "Narrow Escape".
There were a couple of pretty good attempts to reverse-engineer the Vectrex 3D goggles. (With the advent of cheap/accessible 3D printing/fabrication via places like TechShop, it's probably a lot more feasible to do it today than it was 15 years ago...)
Y'know what gets people to slow down? A real cop, lighting you up, pulling you over, and having to sit by the side of the road (as you watch every car that was doing the speed limit glide on by for 20 minutes :) as you await your fate.
I got my first ticket in 20 years of driving during a recent road trip. I knew I was speeding, he knew I was speeding, and after he wrote me up, I actually thanked him for the reality check. Had it been a camera, I'd have paid the fine and not changed my behavior for the rest of the trip, because I wouldn't have known about it until I got home. As it was, I kept it to within 5 of the limit for the rest of my trip, and to my surprise, even in the extremely remote areas of the state - we're talking the kind of places where you're the only car within miles miles - slowing it down wasn't as boring as I'd thought it would be.
Speed cameras don't deter speeders. Immediate negative feedback does.
K'breel, speaker for the Council, emphasized that the site for the final battle was well-defended:
"Gentle citizens, it has been years since the twin mechanized monsters touched down on our sweet red soil, but the Council is pleased to report that the last remaining mobile invader from the blue planet has been sighted by sentries approaching the rim of End-Devaur crater. The invader set out for End-Devaur last summer after spending a year at Victory Hole; Planetary Land Defense Forces have pinpointed the invader's location to a point in the trackless wastes at least half a year's journey from End-Devaur."
"The enemy's slow progress across the wastelands leaves us with ample time to amass an overwhelming counterforce, and at last we shall see this campaign through to its end. Rejoice! Within half a revolution around our star, this monstrosity from the blue world shall find its ultimate destination!"
When a junior reporter mentioned the persistent rumor that the invader was merely a scientific probe operating at least order of magnitude past its design lifespan, K'Breel raised a spirited toast "to an opportunity for victory!", and devoured the ends of the reporter's gelsacs.
Well-played! (Beat me by 15 minutes!)
It's all all 30% off from yesterday.
There's laetrile, nona juice, and ephedrine for speed.
Just a Visa or Paypal creds are all you need.
My partner's in jail, my staff is on the lam.
We've got botnets with petabytes of hijacked RAM.
And our ISP doesn't give a tinker's dam,
'Cause of our reputation as the King of spam.
Don't miss out on our giant online porno sale.
(Is my scam out there?)
We told Grandma she opted in for our e-mail.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got lawyers to help preserve our corporate veil.
(Is my scam out there?)
We got bullshit and horseshit, we've got tons of fail.
(Is my scam out there?)
No doctor will want a medical exam,
Our chiropractor's part of the insurance scam,
Get some herbal viagra and become a man,
'Cos we're known in this world as the King of Spam.
If you're hawking Chinese knockoffs of Nike shoes, (Is your scam out there?)
Some 419 scams, offers they can't refuse, (Is your scam out there?)
With their credit card's keylogged, they can sing the blues, (Is your scam out there?)
We do fraud, we do larc'ny, anything you choose. (Is your scam out there?)
Well, AOL shut down Spamford with a slam,
Alan Ralsky got nailed bigtime by from Uncle Sam,
But the flood's even bigger than the Hoover Dam,
'Cause we're known the world over as the King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam.
We'll always be King of spam...
- With apologies to Weird Al Yankovic, and of course, The Police :)
Hey, slightly OT question...
This is one of my pet grammatical peeves, and you might actually know the answer: Why do you guys call it "Chriropractic"? That's an adjective, not a noun.
A philosopher studies philosophy - the writing of philosophical essays - and takes courses in philosophic thinking, leading to a Doctorate in Philosophy (the original Ph.D). But he does not get a Doctorate of Philosophic.
A psychiatrist studies psychiatry - the provision of psychiatric care - often given at a Psychiatric Hospital. If you ask him what he does for a living, he'll say he's into psychiatry, not "psychiatric".
A chiropractor performs chiropractic treatment, fine. Goes to a "College of Chiropractic Practice/Care/Medicine/Any-other-noun-you-like?" Sure. But instead of using a perfectly cromulent word like "Chiropracty" (I'd even accept a modernized version along the lines of "Chiropractice"), you guys call it "College of Chiropractic" or "Doctor of Chiropractic". WTF? :)
I'm not splitting hairs here - "chiropractic care", "chiropractic theory" are all gramatically fine, but you're the only profession that (mis)uses the adjective form of the profession on an institutional level. There's gotta be an interesting historical accident behind that naming quirk, and I'm genuinely curious as to what's the story? :)
I remember an old joke that went something like this...
"NSA is conducting advanced research in the fields of applied mathematics, signal processing, and cryptography. To apply for one of these exciting positions, just pick up the phone, call your grandmother, and ask for one!"
Life imitates art :-)
I mean, what the hell, Slashdot! Serious news? On this, the holiest day of the Geek Calendar?
Seeing "support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features" in the same sentence was a pretty good start, but things just trailed off from there. I demand a punchline from this press release, or at least some enlightened puns about how to reduce the window manager's footprint!
It's like overclocking with liquid nitrogen instead of watercooling. Speed costs money; how fast do you want to go?