There was a story a while back about William Shatner going out trick-or-treating with a kid (can't remember if it was his or not) on Halloween. He wore, not one, but TWO William Shatner masks. When he'd go up to a house, he'd whip off the first mask... to reveal another William Shatner mask. He'd then pause a moment and whip off the second one... to reveal William Shatner himself.
I think that one story completely solidifies your Recursion Theory of Shatner.
While I'm still interested in the paper, I was very excited for a moment because I thought it said "choral" music, not "chordal" music. Damn.
(Check my sig.)
Bzzt. Sorry, you're not thinking Portal-ly in your "terminal velocity" comment. If you're falling from a large height, and you drop two portals right next to each other, so that you drop into one and come out the other, you'd just "seesaw" back and forth between the two portals. You wouldn't get faster each time you dropped into a new portal, you'd get slower, because each time you emerged from a portal you'd be falling upward. Eventually air friction would slow you down, you wouldn't fall eternally (unless you were in a vacuum, in which case you would).
During the game, you always had something to land on, something to stop your fall, some ledge to get propelled onto. There was nothing in the game at all to suggest surviving a long drop where you didn't have a wall to change your vertical velocity into horizontal velocity.
So yes, contrary to your oddly confrontational reply (what is it about Slashdot that causes people to be jerks in their replies?), I obviously did pay attention to the game, and obviously have a bit of a better grasp of physics than you do.
I thought the ending was brilliant, and the whole last "level" was perfectly done. The only thing I wished was that they'd given us a final challenge to have to do something to live through getting ejected from the lab. Are they expecting us to believe we survived landing on the ground outside?
Now imagine that you're falling from a huge height, and you have the Portal gun, and you need to survive the fall. What would you do? Shoot two portals on the ground as you're falling, one to fall into and the other next to it to "continue" your fall, now moving upward. Do that a few more times until the air friction has slowed your fall/ascent enough that you can land on the ground safely, or possibly shoot the portals in such a way that one of your ejections from the portal landed you in a lake or something else survivable on impact. Wouldn't that have been cool?
I agree with most of your statements, but there's one I have an answer to.
"Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him? I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?"
Voldemort was using the Elder Wand, and Harry was the Master of the Elder Wand, so the Elder Wand wasn't going to hurt him.
With some irony, I am reading this story from a Marriott hotel room at the Marriott Boca Raton. I've had mostly no problem with their services, but here are a few things I would call interesting:
* My laptop can often see multiple nodes, some very fast, some blazingly slow. If you stay in a Marriott, try out the different nodes you can see.
* Some Marriott properties give free Internet access, some cost $10/day. I wish Marriott would be consistent across all their properties.
* If you stay in a Marriott that does charge for access, as for a low floor. This is because often there's a single wireless connection in the business center that is free, but other access points cost money. So if you can get a room near the business center, you'll be able to hook up to that one for free.
* Finally, I've never had a problem with BitTorrent uploading at any Marriott property. I don't know if they leave all their ports open or what, but I traditionally leave my uploading port for BitTorrent open on 34567, and I've never had a problem with a torrent at a Marriott.
If you have not read Finder then you are missing the best thing going on in independent comics today. Aboriginal Sci-Fi, set in a future world with a mix of technology and industrial-age mentalities. It helps to read everything in order, and only the recent stuff is available online. If you don't want to start with the big 2-book, 14-issue trade paperback that begins the whole set (called "Sin-Eater"), let me recommend just purchasing "King of the Cats", or seeing if your local library has it. It's her best book, just four issues, and is almost guaranteed to get you hooked. I've been reading this title now for close to years, since it first started, and it's the only thing I continually come back to, month after month.
Re:Bob Saget 2.0?
on
Bob Saget 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've got to tell you, Bob Saget is one of the most respected comedians working today. He's adored by many of the greats, passed on (Rodney Dangerfield was famously one of Bob Saget's best friends) and Penn Gillette (who featured him in "The Aristocrats"). Yes, "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Full House" were terrible examples of what he would do. But go see him in stand-up sometime; he is one of the vilest, funniest, grossest, hysterical comedians you will ever see on stage.
I suppose you're right, actually. I just sort of tossed off that comment because I know the great majority of people who read/. are guys, and this is often a source of humor and tirades. So yes, I posted it from my point of view (and I'm not in the computer industry), but what other point of view could I have?
There was a rumor going around some time ago that the Extended Edition would be released in theaters before or at the same time it was available on DVD. Anyone know of the status of this? Is it really going to happen, can we see these wonderful new scenes on the big screen?
A quantum particle is speeding down the road in its car. A policeman pulls the particle over, gets out of his vehicle, and walks over to the quantum particle. The policeman asks:
I'm sorry, I rarely get involved in religious wars, but I had to correct a falsehood about the story of Jephthah that you posted. You said:
"As an example, the writer had the audacity to say that Jeph'thah had his daughter sacrificed on the alter, when clearly if you read the passage further you would find that she lived a good long life, and that the daughters of the land would commend her for her devotion from "year to year". She was given to God to serve him. This was the same thing that Han'nah did with her son, Samuel."
This is completely false. This is a story I know better than almost any other; I'm a choral music director and there have been more oratorios written on this story than almost any other. Please look at the entirety of the last verses of Judges 11:
35: And when he saw her, he rent his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! you have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me; for I have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot take back my vow."
36: And she said to him, "My father, if you have opened your mouth to the LORD, do to me according to what has gone forth from your mouth, now that the LORD has avenged you on your enemies, on the Ammonites."
37: And she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me; let me alone two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my companions."
38: And he said, "Go." And he sent her away for two months; and she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains.
39: And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made. She had never known a man. And it became a custom in Israel
40: that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.
End of chapter. Jepthah's daughter is not mentioned from there onward. Jephthah's vow was:
30: And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD, and said, "If thou wilt give the Ammonites into my hand,
31: then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD's, and I will offer him up for a burnt offering."
I used the Revised Standard Version for the quotes above. It's a harsh story, I admit, but Jephthah's daughter died. And of course, if you have any biblical documentation to back up what you said, I definitely want to read it; I am big enough to admit that I was wrong if you can show me the evidence.
Normal behavior for a skydiver is to fall out of a plane, accellerate up to terminal velocity, maintain that speed for a while, then open your parachute, which slows you down to a lower terminal velocity, then hit the ground and (hopefully) stop.
Um, no, there's no hopefully about it. When you hit the ground, you WILL stop, parachute or no parachute.
The state of your body when you stop is open for debate...
We have this problem in every entertainment industry. He talks about it as if it's something unique to video games. Look at the one industry he tries to compare it to, movies:
> What if Miramax had told filmmaker Kevin Smith
> that no one would watch "Clerks" and suggested
> he develop a marketable teen sex comedy instead?
They did, it was the unwatchable "Mallrats."
> Or if Artisan had told the creators of "The
> Blair Witch Project" to drop the film in favor
> of directing a Friday the 13th sequel?
Well, they were pressured to make the even-more-unwatchable "Blair Witch II". Innovation comes in first-generation movies and games, poor sequels are just to be expected.
Like when he's coming down the stairs after his evening of severe "sickness"? When he goes almost horizontal, planting his feet high up on the wall and swinging over the railing? A very tough stunt to do, even with wires, when you have a bad back.
I continue to love my AudioTron. I now have three of them, two of them hooked up wired, one of them wirelessly with the help of a Linksys bridge. And they all play music that's stored on three different computers (we live in a group house).
Don't settle for these Internet appliances that try to prevent you from doing certain things or sharing your music the way you want to. Go with something more open!
I have to put in a good word for what I consider the best IDE for Java out there: IDEA by IntelliJ. They just released version 3.0, it's fast, lightweight (compared to the other bloated IDE's) and beats the pants off any other IDE when it comes to refactoring (the most important part of good coding, IMHO). My productivity has just about tripled since I started using this IDE. Check it out.
And no, I'm just a fan, I'm not associated with the company.
"The DVD and home video of hit movie..."
Sorry to be a grammar queen, but the author seems to have left out the "s" at the beginning of one of the words...
I just want to make a note on this board that washingtonpost.com never does this. They assign each article a unique identifier, and that article lives forever in that database with that identifier. Corrections to the article are always appended with a "Corrections" box attached to the article, the article is never changed (except for superficial, editing changes) after the article is published. Currently, all articles that have been bookmarked are readable, all the way back to 1986.
Permanence in URL's: It's got to be the media's promise to everyone.
Consumers would have no right to sue if their privacy was violated. Enforcement would be left in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission, which usually does not impose fines on a first offense.
This is the part of the bill that I find particularly noxious and annoying. I can (with regret) swallow the rest of the bill, as long as the company gives me the explicit choice, whenever they collect the information, about whether I want to prevent them from selling the information to other people.
But this... When a company breaks the law, and they violate my privacy, I have a right to sue their asses off! I have a right (a moral right, not a legal one, IANAL) to publicly punish them and make damn sure they never do this again and get appropriate compensation for violating my privacy. This bill specifically would take away this right from me.
"Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't realize we were violating your privacy! All those magazine companies now know your income level? Whoops, our bad! But we're just going to do it again, because we have no incentive to obey the law!"
Laws don't mean anything without teeth. Remove the teeth, might as well not even have the law.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a story a while back about William Shatner going out trick-or-treating with a kid (can't remember if it was his or not) on Halloween. He wore, not one, but TWO William Shatner masks. When he'd go up to a house, he'd whip off the first mask... to reveal another William Shatner mask. He'd then pause a moment and whip off the second one... to reveal William Shatner himself. I think that one story completely solidifies your Recursion Theory of Shatner.
While I'm still interested in the paper, I was very excited for a moment because I thought it said "choral" music, not "chordal" music. Damn. (Check my sig.)
Bzzt. Sorry, you're not thinking Portal-ly in your "terminal velocity" comment. If you're falling from a large height, and you drop two portals right next to each other, so that you drop into one and come out the other, you'd just "seesaw" back and forth between the two portals. You wouldn't get faster each time you dropped into a new portal, you'd get slower, because each time you emerged from a portal you'd be falling upward. Eventually air friction would slow you down, you wouldn't fall eternally (unless you were in a vacuum, in which case you would).
During the game, you always had something to land on, something to stop your fall, some ledge to get propelled onto. There was nothing in the game at all to suggest surviving a long drop where you didn't have a wall to change your vertical velocity into horizontal velocity.
So yes, contrary to your oddly confrontational reply (what is it about Slashdot that causes people to be jerks in their replies?), I obviously did pay attention to the game, and obviously have a bit of a better grasp of physics than you do.
I thought the ending was brilliant, and the whole last "level" was perfectly done. The only thing I wished was that they'd given us a final challenge to have to do something to live through getting ejected from the lab. Are they expecting us to believe we survived landing on the ground outside?
Now imagine that you're falling from a huge height, and you have the Portal gun, and you need to survive the fall. What would you do? Shoot two portals on the ground as you're falling, one to fall into and the other next to it to "continue" your fall, now moving upward. Do that a few more times until the air friction has slowed your fall/ascent enough that you can land on the ground safely, or possibly shoot the portals in such a way that one of your ejections from the portal landed you in a lake or something else survivable on impact. Wouldn't that have been cool?
I agree with most of your statements, but there's one I have an answer to. "Harry not moving when Voldemort cast a Crucio on him? I understand not screaming, since the pain can be resisted somewhat. But not even twitching?" Voldemort was using the Elder Wand, and Harry was the Master of the Elder Wand, so the Elder Wand wasn't going to hurt him.
With some irony, I am reading this story from a Marriott hotel room at the Marriott Boca Raton. I've had mostly no problem with their services, but here are a few things I would call interesting: * My laptop can often see multiple nodes, some very fast, some blazingly slow. If you stay in a Marriott, try out the different nodes you can see. * Some Marriott properties give free Internet access, some cost $10/day. I wish Marriott would be consistent across all their properties. * If you stay in a Marriott that does charge for access, as for a low floor. This is because often there's a single wireless connection in the business center that is free, but other access points cost money. So if you can get a room near the business center, you'll be able to hook up to that one for free. * Finally, I've never had a problem with BitTorrent uploading at any Marriott property. I don't know if they leave all their ports open or what, but I traditionally leave my uploading port for BitTorrent open on 34567, and I've never had a problem with a torrent at a Marriott.
If you have not read Finder then you are missing the best thing going on in independent comics today. Aboriginal Sci-Fi, set in a future world with a mix of technology and industrial-age mentalities. It helps to read everything in order, and only the recent stuff is available online. If you don't want to start with the big 2-book, 14-issue trade paperback that begins the whole set (called "Sin-Eater"), let me recommend just purchasing "King of the Cats", or seeing if your local library has it. It's her best book, just four issues, and is almost guaranteed to get you hooked. I've been reading this title now for close to years, since it first started, and it's the only thing I continually come back to, month after month.
I've got to tell you, Bob Saget is one of the most respected comedians working today. He's adored by many of the greats, passed on (Rodney Dangerfield was famously one of Bob Saget's best friends) and Penn Gillette (who featured him in "The Aristocrats"). Yes, "America's Funniest Home Videos" and "Full House" were terrible examples of what he would do. But go see him in stand-up sometime; he is one of the vilest, funniest, grossest, hysterical comedians you will ever see on stage.
Yep, it used to be a joint venture of the Washington Post and the NY Times, but the Post pulled out a few years back.
I suppose you're right, actually. I just sort of tossed off that comment because I know the great majority of people who read /. are guys, and this is often a source of humor and tirades. So yes, I posted it from my point of view (and I'm not in the computer industry), but what other point of view could I have?
There was a rumor going around some time ago that the Extended Edition would be released in theaters before or at the same time it was available on DVD. Anyone know of the status of this? Is it really going to happen, can we see these wonderful new scenes on the big screen?
"Do you have any idea how fast you were going?"
The particle replies,
"No, but I know exactly where I am!"
Ba-dah-bing!
"As an example, the writer had the audacity to say that Jeph'thah had his daughter sacrificed on the alter, when clearly if you read the passage further you would find that she lived a good long life, and that the daughters of the land would commend her for her devotion from "year to year". She was given to God to serve him. This was the same thing that Han'nah did with her son, Samuel."
This is completely false. This is a story I know better than almost any other; I'm a choral music director and there have been more oratorios written on this story than almost any other. Please look at the entirety of the last verses of Judges 11:
35: And when he saw her, he rent his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! you have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me; for I have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot take back my vow." 36: And she said to him, "My father, if you have opened your mouth to the LORD, do to me according to what has gone forth from your mouth, now that the LORD has avenged you on your enemies, on the Ammonites." 37: And she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me; let me alone two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my companions." 38: And he said, "Go." And he sent her away for two months; and she departed, she and her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the mountains. 39: And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made. She had never known a man. And it became a custom in Israel 40: that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year.
End of chapter. Jepthah's daughter is not mentioned from there onward. Jephthah's vow was:
30: And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD, and said, "If thou wilt give the Ammonites into my hand, 31: then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD's, and I will offer him up for a burnt offering."
I used the Revised Standard Version for the quotes above. It's a harsh story, I admit, but Jephthah's daughter died. And of course, if you have any biblical documentation to back up what you said, I definitely want to read it; I am big enough to admit that I was wrong if you can show me the evidence.
very, very good... that's the best obscure David Sedaris .sig quote i've seen in a long, long time...
Um, no, there's no hopefully about it. When you hit the ground, you WILL stop, parachute or no parachute.
The state of your body when you stop is open for debate...
> What if Miramax had told filmmaker Kevin Smith
> that no one would watch "Clerks" and suggested
> he develop a marketable teen sex comedy instead?
They did, it was the unwatchable "Mallrats."
> Or if Artisan had told the creators of "The
> Blair Witch Project" to drop the film in favor
> of directing a Friday the 13th sequel?
Well, they were pressured to make the even-more-unwatchable "Blair Witch II". Innovation comes in first-generation movies and games, poor sequels are just to be expected.
Like when he's coming down the stairs after his evening of severe "sickness"? When he goes almost horizontal, planting his feet high up on the wall and swinging over the railing? A very tough stunt to do, even with wires, when you have a bad back.
I tried to use "triple-u" for a while, but it never caught on.
Don't settle for these Internet appliances that try to prevent you from doing certain things or sharing your music the way you want to. Go with something more open!
Ooooooooh. PETA Bites... no end of fun we could have with this one...
And no, I'm just a fan, I'm not associated with the company.
"The DVD and home video of hit movie..." Sorry to be a grammar queen, but the author seems to have left out the "s" at the beginning of one of the words...
Here is a Newsbytes story on the ruling. A little bit more hard-news information about the decision and its likely impact.
Permanence in URL's: It's got to be the media's promise to everyone.
This is the part of the bill that I find particularly noxious and annoying. I can (with regret) swallow the rest of the bill, as long as the company gives me the explicit choice, whenever they collect the information, about whether I want to prevent them from selling the information to other people.
But this... When a company breaks the law, and they violate my privacy, I have a right to sue their asses off! I have a right (a moral right, not a legal one, IANAL) to publicly punish them and make damn sure they never do this again and get appropriate compensation for violating my privacy. This bill specifically would take away this right from me.
"Oh, I'm sorry, we didn't realize we were violating your privacy! All those magazine companies now know your income level? Whoops, our bad! But we're just going to do it again, because we have no incentive to obey the law!"
Laws don't mean anything without teeth. Remove the teeth, might as well not even have the law.