> > Violent games ARE popular in Japan, but mostly the violent games doesn't focus only on blood and spilled guts. They want focus on the art of fighting.
> >
And on breast bounce.
Yeah. Tomb Raider would never take off in the West.
> solution: mine helium from the sun until cold fusion is perfected.
And without thermoacoustic helium refrigerators, just how are you gonna cool your sun-skimming probes, huh?
I say we skim some helium from Jupiter. It's pretty cold out there to begin with, so we can use that helium to run the fridge that keeps the ship cool until it reaches the sun!
What, why's everyone laughing at me? I talked to the guy who designed the Shuttle and the ISS, and he said it was the best idea he'd heard in 30 years!
> I thought Enter the Matrix was cool. Not because the gameplay was that excellent (but it was ok) but because they elaborated on the movie universe with the plot of the game. In the second movie, Naobi shows up and says "the machines are digging" but doesn't really explain how they know that. When you play the game, you find out why she knows.
Let's extend the whole game/movie suckitude thing a bit.
Meta-Rule: If you want to make a game and a movie that both suck, make sure that your audience can't understand the game without buying the movie, and you can't understand the movie without buying the game.
Corollary: "The best way to waste a $100M movie production budget is to blindly assume that all moviegoers are also PC gamers, and to assume that the 20+M people who need to pay $10.00 to see your next two $100M movies - in order for you to make a profit - have already spent $40-50 on your $10M game.
There's a reason why games that cost $10M to produce cost $40-50 in the stores, and it just might have something to do with the fact that even the really good PC games don't sell 20M copies.
So yeah, it's cool to have all the backstory in a video game. And yeah, it's cool to come up with a polished product while saving $1M out of your $10M game budget by using your actors while they're already on your set for the movie.
But if doing so makes just one movie critic say "Huh? Holy deus ex machina, Batman! Digging machines appear out of nowhere, but instead of spending 5 seconds telling us how the machines located Zion and how we found out about them, you choose instead to burn 15 minutes making us watch a rave? WTF d00d?", you've just cost your investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
> Change: "Politically-active people still keep track of politically-active people" to "The FBI still keeps track of politically-active people."
Well, of course they do. It's still a free country, and Agent Smith's got just as much right to be politically-active as you or I do. What are you, some kinda fascist?:-)
> This isnt cracking! getting around an anti 'fuck' filter by typing 'f.u.c.k' is not cracking, trying to send someone an email is not cracking. This isnt gaining unauthorised access - you cannot gain any information from someones computer just by sending an email (attaching vb-script worms or seeing if the mail server bounces doesnt count) you cannot damage a computer by sending an email. The only unathorised thing you could do is flood one system with emails and that would count as a DoS attack.
[Emphasis in your quotation added by me]
If every one of your employees has to delete 95 copies of...
"XX3NICAL__ ULTR@M__ F!0RIC3T__" " Pills You Want. Many On Stocks. abreact omrgphh" "G.1.ANT T.1TS 4 HER 4914" "horse fux my girl N.U.D.E on internet" and "hoi pliancy herbul penls" [remainder of my past hour's spam filter hits deleted for brevity]
...for every legitimate business email they receive, and that doesn't constitute a Denial of Service attack, may I politely inquire as to what the f.u.c.k. would?
> [...Windows 98 based computers] There's a running process that resets it whenever the user attempts to change the home page by any way, but it's using rootkit tactics to shield itself from being uninstalled by anything. The OS is hosed, it needs to be reinstalled.
Rant: WTF d00d?
If we were talking NT, 2K, or XP, I'd agree.
Win95/98? Set BootGui=0 in MSDOS.SYS. Reboot the pig. Look, Ma, no running processes on boot! Type DELETE WHATEV~1.EXE (whateverthefucktheproblemis.exe) and type WIN.
I'm not saying 9x belongs in an office environment full of clueless lusers who don't know how to secure their machines. It's got no security model, blah blah blah. But compared to the useless "recovery console" (where XP's security model "protects" you from fixing anything), when a 9x box gets fucked up, it's amazingly easy to pop the hood and unfuck it.
> Valenti is a very polished, very smooth character that knows how to argue and can be quite
persuasive.
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
Polished, smooth, persuasive. Check.
Knows how to argue. Negative.
Valenti: "I never believe in hostile debates. That's not my style. I believe that we ought to talk objectively about it."
Because, after all, Valenti is being objective, therefore anyone who opposes him must be irrational. Why would you pay attention to someone irrational?
Valenti: "But I try to make things simple and clear as I can,"
And the simplest position is to say "Well, this guy says he's being objective, and therefore he must be right."
Valenti: "But you can do everything you're doing
right now -- you'll never know there's a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?"
Because everything you're doing is obviously the same as what Mr. Objective thinks "everyone" is doing. And why would anyone object to Mr. Objective?
Valenti: "But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is
aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way. "
No, he's not saying that public policy should be geared towards the 284,000,000 people instead of 100,000 movie industry employees. He's saying "fuck 100,000 engineers over instead"
Because even though a few thousand movie industry employees can somehow create value for 284,000,000 Americans... it wouldn't be objective to assume that a few thousand engineers might be able to do something similar.
You get the point. The gaps in Valenti's logic are big enough to drive a galactic supercluster through. He couldn't argue his way out of a paper bag.
But he is indeed very polished, very smooth, and can be quite persuasive to anyone who has no capacity for rational thought, but a great admiration for polishedness, smoothness, and persuasiveness: Your Congressman.
I loathe Valenti's vision of the world - but I have to give him credit. He's perfect for the job. And he's won.
> my uni is pathetic and refuses to implement any kind of anti-spam at all just so they can't be held accountable for anything.
Delete a few of the mortgage spams, leave in the "Tentacle Rape" and "Beat her to death with your horse cock" spams.
Then run the mess through SpamAssassin, and say "Here's what we'd be free of if we could just get the administration to authorize installation of this Free software on our mail servers."
Hand both printouts to a female accomplice (preferably lesbian, or at least able to fake it), and have her do the talking to the Dean of Womyn's Studies office. "Demand the Right to be Free of Harassment and Traumatization in Our Free Speech" or something.
Your university's Women's Studies Department is a powerful weapon, but maybe it's time to use it as a force for good.
> > In the 80s, (after graduating from Tufts University in child development... > > You mean she isn't an IRC bot? I'm so disappointed. That would have been/. material. This... this is just talking Meat.
> most of us humans are already physically 'artificial' in that we have in some way technologically augmented our organic selves - lasik, pacemakers, structural implants, cochlea
implants, neural prostheses, electroactive polymer actuators [... ]
Most of us?
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to be capable of self-defibrilating, then glom some infrared and UV sensors onto the back of my retina, replace half my bones with titanium, and attach a set of rippin' electroactive polymer-based replacement muscles and become the star attraction at a Survival Research Labs show, but it's gonna be a while.
> Genetic engineering is not sustainable--especially with technology like the terminator technology--which if ever got let out into the wild, or even on to other's farms via bird poop or wind would wipe out entire species of plants( terminator technology is the technology that grows a fruit or vegetable without producing fertile seeds).
Let me get this straight. You're saying that if you have a population of natural plants that fertile seeds (that's a hint, by the way), and a crop of Monsanto Terminators leaks some genes into it, producing a GM-mutated population that produces no fertile seeds (that's another hint), and yet, somehow outcompetes the natural plants, thereby "wiping out entire species of plants".
That knocking sound is Charles Darwin tapping on your head with a ClueBat. Behind him are his parents - who produced him because they had fertile seeds. Behind them are their parents, who did the same thing. And so on, all the way back in an unbroken line of organisms that goes back 4.5 billion years, all of whom beg to differ with your innovative interpretation of the theory of natural selection.
> GM and selective breeding are two TOTALLY different processes.
> >
Here are somes clues for you:
When a bull and a cow fuck, there is no jellyfish involved.
Real cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California. Don't let the secret out.
> > George Orwell's 1984's helicopters are totally pwn3d by Judas Priest's Electric Eye [lyric link], and Rob Halford sang it in 1982. Nyaaah! > > WTF are you talking about? 1984 was written IIRC in the 1940s or 1950s. Or have I just been trolled?
Written in 1948, to be precise. But going for the 1982 reference was the only way I could try to make it sound like an 80s hair metal band was ahead of the literary curve. (Besides, I'm still bitter that "air guitar" wasn't an option in the "favorite musical instrument" poll.:)
> is this a reasonable time to start referencing 1984, now that they've started implementing actual plot devices from 1984 (the surveillance helicopters) in real life??
Excuse me? In what way are 500-foot-diameter blimps like helicopters? They're big. Round. Like... I dunno... like... eyes! Big... electric... eyes! Yeaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
<airguitar>
Up here in space, I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind.
There is no true escape
I'm watching all the time!
I'm made of metal!
My circuits gleam! I am perpetual,
I keep the country clean!
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm protected, electric eye.
Always in focus
You can't feel my stare.
I zoom into you
You don't know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing
all your secret moves
My tearless retina
takes pictures that can prove.
Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
There's nothing you can do about it.
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows.
I'm made of metal!
My circuits gleam!
I am perpetual,
I keep the country clean!
I'm elected, electric spy
I'm pro-tect-ed, de-tec-tive, e-lec-tric eyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
</airguitar>
George Orwell's 1984's helicopters are totally pwn3d by Judas Priest's
Electric Eye, and Rob Halford sang it in 1982. Nyaaah!
> Out here in western USA, we get loads of wild fires. rather than flying tankers and people, it would be very useful to use these to get huge volumes of water in. In addition, they may be able to drop off fighters in close to the action.
They're not that manoeuverable. (And the air's a bit thin at 65,000 feet).
But now that you mention it -- they'd be perfect for real-time monitoring of forests for hot spots. No more worrying about a forest ranger spending hours of mind-numbing boredom in a little hut on a mountaintop. Warnings would come earlier, and coverage would be wider.
Imagine being able to direct a water bomber towards a fire when it's only a few minutes old - and the guy on the mountaintop, even if he was looking in the right direction, probably couldn't see any smoke. w00t!
> Maybe these "security blimps" can keep undocumented immigrants from taking shelter in the trash dumpsters used as targets on heavy weapons live fire ranges.
"Note to Self: Bring extra cases of Crystal Springs water bottles to toss into the dumpsters on my way out to patrol the border. And a spare mop for the returning crew." - Seen on a post-it note in the locker room of BCIS.
> Jon Stewert did a bit on this a few months ago. He kept citing the report titled Hey, what if we put a camera on a blimp and the more detailed report Hey, what if we put a good camera on a blimp.
What if we put a frickin' las--- oh, never mind...
> Security Blimps? And here I thought they were going to use the blimps to display something like: "Run Windows Update, People Who Own Spam-Bot Zombie Computers!"
Just use Windows to drive the blimp's display boards. It'll happen soon enough.
> Anyone else immediately think of the old "set refresh rate to zero" hack that used to be able to burn out monitors?
Yeah. Someone else has done all the hard work. All I wanted was for you to set the refresh rate to zero, turn the thing around 180 degrees, and mount the frickin' thing on a shark. Is that too much to ask?
> hmmm, maybe it's *complex* music of any kind that has this effect? Most popular music is very simple in structure and lyrics. As an aside, there are animals that make more complex songs than most rap "music".
I tend to agree. Someone mentioned Juno Reactor - a good case in point; it's techno that features lots of interwoven beats, three or four different strands of music being played simultaneously, and I find I'm more productive when listening to it.
As for rap, ditto. Hip-hop today grates on me - I can't even read for comprehension when someone's blaring it within earshot - and the music seems to be engineered to maximize the range of "earshot" per decibel.
That wasn't always the case. Old-school (thinking Public Enemy, ca. 1987-1989) rap used to feature a lot of sampling/looping and very strange/innovative rhythms. Try You Gonna Get Yours or She Watch Channel Zero for a taste.
Once the lawsuits started flying and sampling was effectively banned (Caught, Can I Get a Witness?), rap slid into a downward creative spiral that's culminated into today's simple basslines that appear to function only as a broadcast of territorial markers: "This is our territory now, and if you think you can listen to your music - even in headphones - while you're in our territory, think again."
I'd love to do a study that correlates the reinforcement of stereotypical black culture with the influx of major record label interest in hip-hop music. I mean, who benefits most from the portrayal of "yo, fuck da ho's, kill whitey, bein' a thug iz all u can hope 2 be" as "authentic" black culture?
Slashdot Mirror
>
> And on breast bounce.
Yeah. Tomb Raider would never take off in the West.
And without thermoacoustic helium refrigerators, just how are you gonna cool your sun-skimming probes, huh?
I say we skim some helium from Jupiter. It's pretty cold out there to begin with, so we can use that helium to run the fridge that keeps the ship cool until it reaches the sun!
What, why's everyone laughing at me? I talked to the guy who designed the Shuttle and the ISS, and he said it was the best idea he'd heard in 30 years!
Let's extend the whole game/movie suckitude thing a bit.
Meta-Rule: If you want to make a game and a movie that both suck, make sure that your audience can't understand the game without buying the movie, and you can't understand the movie without buying the game.
Corollary: "The best way to waste a $100M movie production budget is to blindly assume that all moviegoers are also PC gamers, and to assume that the 20+M people who need to pay $10.00 to see your next two $100M movies - in order for you to make a profit - have already spent $40-50 on your $10M game.
There's a reason why games that cost $10M to produce cost $40-50 in the stores, and it just might have something to do with the fact that even the really good PC games don't sell 20M copies.
So yeah, it's cool to have all the backstory in a video game. And yeah, it's cool to come up with a polished product while saving $1M out of your $10M game budget by using your actors while they're already on your set for the movie.
But if doing so makes just one movie critic say "Huh? Holy deus ex machina, Batman! Digging machines appear out of nowhere, but instead of spending 5 seconds telling us how the machines located Zion and how we found out about them, you choose instead to burn 15 minutes making us watch a rave? WTF d00d?", you've just cost your investors hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, of course they do. It's still a free country, and Agent Smith's got just as much right to be politically-active as you or I do. What are you, some kinda fascist? :-)
[Emphasis in your quotation added by me]
If every one of your employees has to delete 95 copies of...
"XX3NICAL__ ULTR@M__ F!0RIC3T__"
" Pills You Want. Many On Stocks. abreact omrgphh"
"G.1.ANT T.1TS 4 HER 4914"
"horse fux my girl N.U.D.E on internet" and
"hoi pliancy herbul penls"
[remainder of my past hour's spam filter hits deleted for brevity]
...for every legitimate business email they receive, and that doesn't constitute a Denial of Service attack, may I politely inquire as to what the f.u.c.k. would?
Rant: WTF d00d?
If we were talking NT, 2K, or XP, I'd agree.
Win95/98? Set BootGui=0 in MSDOS.SYS. Reboot the pig. Look, Ma, no running processes on boot! Type DELETE WHATEV~1.EXE (whateverthefucktheproblemis.exe) and type WIN.
I'm not saying 9x belongs in an office environment full of clueless lusers who don't know how to secure their machines. It's got no security model, blah blah blah. But compared to the useless "recovery console" (where XP's security model "protects" you from fixing anything), when a 9x box gets fucked up, it's amazingly easy to pop the hood and unfuck it.
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
Polished, smooth, persuasive. Check.
Knows how to argue. Negative.
Valenti: "I never believe in hostile debates. That's not my style. I believe that we ought to talk objectively about it."
Because, after all, Valenti is being objective, therefore anyone who opposes him must be irrational. Why would you pay attention to someone irrational?
Valenti: "But I try to make things simple and clear as I can,"
And the simplest position is to say "Well, this guy says he's being objective, and therefore he must be right."
Valenti: "But you can do everything you're doing right now -- you'll never know there's a broadcast flag. Well, why would people object to it?"
Because everything you're doing is obviously the same as what Mr. Objective thinks "everyone" is doing. And why would anyone object to Mr. Objective?
Valenti: "But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way. "
No, he's not saying that public policy should be geared towards the 284,000,000 people instead of 100,000 movie industry employees. He's saying "fuck 100,000 engineers over instead"
Because even though a few thousand movie industry employees can somehow create value for 284,000,000 Americans... it wouldn't be objective to assume that a few thousand engineers might be able to do something similar.
You get the point. The gaps in Valenti's logic are big enough to drive a galactic supercluster through. He couldn't argue his way out of a paper bag.
But he is indeed very polished, very smooth, and can be quite persuasive to anyone who has no capacity for rational thought, but a great admiration for polishedness, smoothness, and persuasiveness: Your Congressman.
I loathe Valenti's vision of the world - but I have to give him credit. He's perfect for the job. And he's won.
Delete a few of the mortgage spams, leave in the "Tentacle Rape" and "Beat her to death with your horse cock" spams.
Then run the mess through SpamAssassin, and say "Here's what we'd be free of if we could just get the administration to authorize installation of this Free software on our mail servers."
Hand both printouts to a female accomplice (preferably lesbian, or at least able to fake it), and have her do the talking to the Dean of Womyn's Studies office. "Demand the Right to be Free of Harassment and Traumatization in Our Free Speech" or something.
Your university's Women's Studies Department is a powerful weapon, but maybe it's time to use it as a force for good.
>
> You mean she isn't an IRC bot? I'm so disappointed. That would have been
You're trying to tell me she's made out of meat?!
Most of us?
I'm not saying I wouldn't like to be capable of self-defibrilating, then glom some infrared and UV sensors onto the back of my retina, replace half my bones with titanium, and attach a set of rippin' electroactive polymer-based replacement muscles and become the star attraction at a Survival Research Labs show, but it's gonna be a while.
Umm... I suppose my digital wristwatch counts.
In an effort to go for a more adult crowd, Lucas drops the cutesy stuff. "Jar-Jar Does Coruscant"
Scrape them off, Jim!
Let me get this straight. You're saying that if you have a population of natural plants that fertile seeds (that's a hint, by the way), and a crop of Monsanto Terminators leaks some genes into it, producing a GM-mutated population that produces no fertile seeds (that's another hint), and yet, somehow outcompetes the natural plants, thereby "wiping out entire species of plants".
That knocking sound is Charles Darwin tapping on your head with a ClueBat. Behind him are his parents - who produced him because they had fertile seeds. Behind them are their parents, who did the same thing. And so on, all the way back in an unbroken line of organisms that goes back 4.5 billion years, all of whom beg to differ with your innovative interpretation of the theory of natural selection.
>
> Here are somes clues for you: When a bull and a cow fuck, there is no jellyfish involved.
Real cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California. Don't let the secret out.
>
> WTF are you talking about? 1984 was written IIRC in the 1940s or 1950s. Or have I just been trolled?
Written in 1948, to be precise. But going for the 1982 reference was the only way I could try to make it sound like an 80s hair metal band was ahead of the literary curve. (Besides, I'm still bitter that "air guitar" wasn't an option in the "favorite musical instrument" poll. :)
So yes, YHBT. As punishment, you are ordered to listen to the General singing "As the Eagle Soars", and then to imagine him (perhaps as part of the 2004 election campaign to project a more "hip" image to today's thirtysomething generation) performing a cover of Turbo Lover.
"Iiiiii'm youuuur tuuuuuuurr-booooo LOVER!
Tellllll meeeeeee there'ssssss noooo OTH-Segmentation violation: reality dumped.
Excuse me? In what way are 500-foot-diameter blimps like helicopters? They're big. Round. Like... I dunno... like... eyes! Big... electric... eyes! Yeaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
George Orwell's 1984's helicopters are totally pwn3d by Judas Priest's Electric Eye, and Rob Halford sang it in 1982. Nyaaah!
They're not that manoeuverable. (And the air's a bit thin at 65,000 feet).
But now that you mention it -- they'd be perfect for real-time monitoring of forests for hot spots. No more worrying about a forest ranger spending hours of mind-numbing boredom in a little hut on a mountaintop. Warnings would come earlier, and coverage would be wider.
Imagine being able to direct a water bomber towards a fire when it's only a few minutes old - and the guy on the mountaintop, even if he was looking in the right direction, probably couldn't see any smoke. w00t!
"Note to Self: Bring extra cases of Crystal Springs water bottles to toss into the dumpsters on my way out to patrol the border. And a spare mop for the returning crew."
- Seen on a post-it note in the locker room of BCIS.
They have to catch you before they can charge you.
"Next week... on FOX! World's Wildes-HOLY FARK, LOOK AT THAT CAR GO!"
What if we put a frickin' las--- oh, never mind...
Just use Windows to drive the blimp's display boards. It'll happen soon enough.
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things does not belong.
Answer: Jesse James. He's the only one worth voting for!
Yeah. Someone else has done all the hard work. All I wanted was for you to set the refresh rate to zero, turn the thing around 180 degrees, and mount the frickin' thing on a shark. Is that too much to ask?
I tend to agree. Someone mentioned Juno Reactor - a good case in point; it's techno that features lots of interwoven beats, three or four different strands of music being played simultaneously, and I find I'm more productive when listening to it.
As for rap, ditto. Hip-hop today grates on me - I can't even read for comprehension when someone's blaring it within earshot - and the music seems to be engineered to maximize the range of "earshot" per decibel.
That wasn't always the case. Old-school (thinking Public Enemy, ca. 1987-1989) rap used to feature a lot of sampling/looping and very strange/innovative rhythms. Try You Gonna Get Yours or She Watch Channel Zero for a taste. Once the lawsuits started flying and sampling was effectively banned (Caught, Can I Get a Witness?), rap slid into a downward creative spiral that's culminated into today's simple basslines that appear to function only as a broadcast of territorial markers: "This is our territory now, and if you think you can listen to your music - even in headphones - while you're in our territory, think again."
I'd love to do a study that correlates the reinforcement of stereotypical black culture with the influx of major record label interest in hip-hop music. I mean, who benefits most from the portrayal of "yo, fuck da ho's, kill whitey, bein' a thug iz all u can hope 2 be" as "authentic" black culture?
Hint: It sure as fuck ain't the blacks.
"Pondreth thou that which I ponder?"
"Indeed, fair Brain, but how would the use of iambic pentameter aid us in overtaking the globe?"
"Silence, else I shall injure thee!"
"BARD!"