Ah, the Olympics, celebrating what is best about human nature: greed, censorship, and corporate profits. Can't you just feel pride swelling in your heart?
Of course, that quasi-journalistic slut, MOG, projects that McBride's leaving was a goal of the Groklaw audience, when in fact, it never was. Of course not. Getting covered in honey and dropped onto a nest of fire ants, sure, but leaving SCO? Nah.
The ISPs, of course, think that the record companies -- or whoever else wrongly identified the file sharers -- should be the ones to pay out any such judgments. The British Phonographic Industry, however, disagrees and wants the ISPs to simply use their Terms of Service to disconnect people. Apparently, that means they think that the ToS should be able to remove any legal recourse people might otherwise have against being misidentified. Oh, come on now. There's more than enough liability for both of them to be sued.
...may in any way or degree obstruct, delay, or adversely affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce or the conduct or performance of any federally protected function... The Interstate Commerce Clause: the deus ex machina of federal legislation. We don't have the constitutional authority to do that? Interstate commerce!
I'm being kind of pedantic, but wasn't one of the reasons Anakin turned all red-eyed and broody because the Jedi refused to make him a Master? So how does he have a Padawan?
Seriously. At what point do we consider a country so dangerous that we will not longer do business with it? When do we finally say "go screw yourself" to dangerous governments? As soon as those countries don't have the ability to say "oh, that's regrettable. By the way, we're cashing in all of your debt, right now. Have fun with your economic collapse."
Actually, I think Christianity is every bit as morally bankrupt, worthless and vile as Islam, it's just that most Western societies long ago castrated churches, leaving them largely impotent. On occasion you'll get bands of them a bit more active and politically motivated, but look at how the Republicans are tearing themselves to shreds right now precisely because they sold their souls to a pack of moralizing lunatics to win some elections. Actually, evangelicals are turning Democrat in droves. This includes me; since Ron Paul hasn't a chance at the Republican nomination, I'll likely be voting for Obama come November.
A lot of us on the "religious right" have realized that, although the Republican powers-that-be talk a good talk, they don't actually support any of the things we care about. Neither party is going to do anything about abortion, so that's no longer our one issue test, and we've given the Republicans almost a decade to do something good for this country; now it's time to let the other team take a shot.
The Republicans didn't sell their souls to us, we sold our souls to them. Now we're buying them back.
But a maglev from Washington to New York via Baltimore and Philadelphia would be just over 200 miles, so a maglev going at 300 mph could easily do that in one hour. This would effectively tie these cities together and going between them could become an every day habit for millions. It would make the region the largest metropolitan area in the world and completely transform it. That is chilling, in all the right ways. Urban crowding: solved. High-cost city life: solved. It would be amazing to kiss the wife goodbye, skip over to DC for the day, and be back in New York by evening, every day.
He is also very weak on Iraq and national defense, which is scary because national defense is about the only thing our Government should do. I think Ron Paul is great on national defense, because that's what he wants our military to do: defend. He doesn't want them to be the world police, he doesn't want them interfering in other nation's business, he just wants them to sit there and wait for something dangerous to come up, go out, kill and/or break it, and come back home.
Almost 90% of our reserves are rated "unready," and between Iraq and Afghanistan, our military is taxed nearly to the breaking point. We have no defense, none. Ron Paul would change that.
However, one must be more careful about the total costs of central planning command and control vs the market approach. the problem is, there isn't any "market approach" to internet service in America, there are only monopolies. With a monopoly, you don't get any of the benefits that the "free market" is supposed to give: choice, competition among providers, etc. It's a bad as central planning, just at a different center.
Now the bad news -- we live in a society that tolerates 20,000 annual alcohol-related fatalities (40% of total traffic fatalities) and cares more about Brittany Spears' antics than the national diabetes epidemic. Expecting the general public or politicians to somehow get concerned about abstract software concepts such as command injection, path manipulation, race conditions, coding errors, and myriad other software security errors, is somewhat of a pipe dream. Thank God. The last thing we need is someone in Washington writing the "SQL Injection Elimination Act of 2008," or some such nonsense. Even when the government has good intentions, it screws things up. For example, you mentioned diabetes. The rise of Type II diabetes can be linked most readily to the rise of corn based products in our food supply, especially corn syrup. What's the most heavily subsidized food? Corn. The government is actually paying people to make us unhealthy.
No it's enough to make you wish you had enough money to buy your own politicians, so you could write the laws you wanted. It's enough to make me wish the Federal Government kept to the role our constitution outlines for it.
The power to tax is the power to destroy, and the power to withhold funding is essentially the same thing, just coming from a different angle. Intrastate travel in supposed to be the domain of the states, but the federal government takes money from the states, then gives it back to them if the pass the kind of laws the feds want. That's why the speed limit is 55 pretty much everywhere. Same story with education; the feds take money from the states, and then let them have some back if they kow-tow correctly.
Also, there's no reason to have faith in this. Leave faith to the religious folks--these are facts, which are true whether or not you 'believe' them. While I agree that facts are true whether or not we acknowledge so, I would also comment that believing something to be a fact does not make it one.
All progress depends on the notion that we might be wrong. And this is true for both sides of the fence: I play more in the religious pool than the science one. If Darwin had had faith in the facts of his day, he would never have come up with his theory of evolution, and if Luther had believed the facts of his day, we would all be chanting in Latin and gagging on incense.
The true goal of science and the true goal of religion are the same: arrive at truth. Unfortunately, there are people on both sides that want to use their chosen craft not to further knowledge or the search for truth, but to establish their position as the "correct" one.
God Damn Dude! Do you know how much that would fucking rock! Toss in some film footage from the solider cams. Maybe even some footage from when that little critter in the "hospital" was killed. That would be pretty tight... incorporating pieces of film from this movie, as kind of a continuity thing, but have it be almost tangential.
What I picture is a bunch of snippets, vignettes of people we never really get to know, as the monster tears through their world, with little title cards intersperse, like "0400 - US Air For Engages Entity In Area Formerly Know As Midtown Manhattan."
Say a film crew gets picked up and is in that push where the army is taking on the critter. We can here some rumors where the critter come from as told by the grunts. It wouldn't even have to be a film crew. It could take the form of an after-the-fact report, kind of a "here's what we were able to piece together about the monster" thing assembled from various sources by the military. You could have film from traffic cameras, cell phones, security systems installed in stores and ATMs, those night vision things like we see from attack helicopters in Iraq, all kinds of things. That would allow them to be a bit freer in the narrative - we could actually follow the monster - and it would be an interesting comment on how much of a surveillance society we have become; "everyone in New York is dead, but we still have film of the entire thing."
i know why he came back for the chick -- but i think the story should have gone in a different direction.
goddamn abrams and his not-telling-the-audience-anything shenanigans. Here's the thing... our imaginations are almost always better than what they can put up on screen, because our imaginations are what we want the story to be about. What is this thing? Where did it come from? What does it want? Fill in the blanks for yourself. Was it a Great Old One? A recently-awoken and pissed off dinosaur? An alien that fell to earth on a meteorite?
If they answered this question, the reaction would have almost universally been "oh, well then." But they don't. They keep the speculation alive. It's a tease, but an effective one.
Re:Movie watching for those with very young childr
on
Cloverfield Discussion
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· Score: 1
Here's the trick my wife and I used for our "dates" when our son was younger - one of us would drop the other off to watch the movie and then go shopping for a couple of hours with child in tow. Then back to the theater where we'd do a hot driver swap, and the first to watch the movie then shopping for a couple of hours with child in tow. Then back to the theater to pick up the other, and we head off to dinner to discuss the movie. We took turns being first. +1 creative, +1 considerate of others who want to watch the movie. You, sir, are a gentleman and a geek.
My question has always been: how come giant monsters are never mammals? Barring King Kong, I guess. the Japanese have several dinosaurs, a lobster, robots, and even the personification of smog. I'd like to see like a giant tiger-looking monster that's 80' tall eating people. I think it's because scaly or slimy is more frightening than furry.
Also, if you include the line "I saw it! It's huge! It's a lion!" in your movie, everyone suddenly thinks you're making a Voltron film. Even if it's set in modern-day New York City, and said giant lion is the bad guy.
One of the interesting things the director said was that they had discussed a "sequel" that was the same story told from other points of view. The exact quote was something along the lines of "there might have been other people filming that night." I'd love to see another Cloverfield that was a patchwork of movies and pictures taken by random people as they crossed paths with the monster, kind of a cobbled-together documentary.
Go to Transworld... Am I the only one that's terrified to Google this at work?
The wise atheists among us don't need to be told the obvious--that our disabled are quickly become our first transhumans. How, precisely, does religion factor into this?
Wise Atheist: "wow, that guy with the fake legs can run faster than I can!" Deluded Theist: "Six day, I tell you! SIX DAYS!"
From TFA: "Her complaint contains some very disturbing allegations, including one that labels attempted to contact her then eight-year-old daughter under false pretenses without Andersen's permission." If memory serves, mommy explicitly denied them access to her daughter, and the RIAA then called the school, pretending to be her grandmother or something, hoping to get her to confess over the phone.
Because the Internet doesn't use any electrical power?
I agree that it's probably more efficient to download data instead of burning it on DVD and distributing it that way, but by how much? I can download a lot of data on one charge from my battery. I can't burn even one DVD. I don't know how it compares to stamped disks, but I'd say the efficiency gain from downloading is significant.
It seems like you would be better off with Blockbuster's service than Netflix. My wife and I use Blockbuster because there's one right down the street and if we really want another movie after watching our mailed ones, we can bring them to the store and exchange them each for free for one movie. Since you're already going to Blockbuster sometimes, this seems like it would make sense for you too. I looked into that, actually. When the "return a rental for a new rental" thing was unlimited, that would have made sense, but now there's a cap on it. Also, no one has ever told me anything good about their experience with the Blockbuster web site.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the Olympics, celebrating what is best about human nature: greed, censorship, and corporate profits. Can't you just feel pride swelling in your heart?
...may in any way or degree obstruct, delay, or adversely affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce or the conduct or performance of any federally protected function... The Interstate Commerce Clause: the deus ex machina of federal legislation. We don't have the constitutional authority to do that? Interstate commerce!I'm being kind of pedantic, but wasn't one of the reasons Anakin turned all red-eyed and broody because the Jedi refused to make him a Master? So how does he have a Padawan?
And, is she hot?
Easy solution: distribute lynx to all Middle Eastern nations.
A lot of us on the "religious right" have realized that, although the Republican powers-that-be talk a good talk, they don't actually support any of the things we care about. Neither party is going to do anything about abortion, so that's no longer our one issue test, and we've given the Republicans almost a decade to do something good for this country; now it's time to let the other team take a shot.
The Republicans didn't sell their souls to us, we sold our souls to them. Now we're buying them back.
Almost 90% of our reserves are rated "unready," and between Iraq and Afghanistan, our military is taxed nearly to the breaking point. We have no defense, none. Ron Paul would change that.
The power to tax is the power to destroy, and the power to withhold funding is essentially the same thing, just coming from a different angle. Intrastate travel in supposed to be the domain of the states, but the federal government takes money from the states, then gives it back to them if the pass the kind of laws the feds want. That's why the speed limit is 55 pretty much everywhere. Same story with education; the feds take money from the states, and then let them have some back if they kow-tow correctly.
All progress depends on the notion that we might be wrong. And this is true for both sides of the fence: I play more in the religious pool than the science one. If Darwin had had faith in the facts of his day, he would never have come up with his theory of evolution, and if Luther had believed the facts of his day, we would all be chanting in Latin and gagging on incense.
The true goal of science and the true goal of religion are the same: arrive at truth. Unfortunately, there are people on both sides that want to use their chosen craft not to further knowledge or the search for truth, but to establish their position as the "correct" one.
What I picture is a bunch of snippets, vignettes of people we never really get to know, as the monster tears through their world, with little title cards intersperse, like "0400 - US Air For Engages Entity In Area Formerly Know As Midtown Manhattan."
goddamn abrams and his not-telling-the-audience-anything shenanigans. Here's the thing... our imaginations are almost always better than what they can put up on screen, because our imaginations are what we want the story to be about. What is this thing? Where did it come from? What does it want? Fill in the blanks for yourself. Was it a Great Old One? A recently-awoken and pissed off dinosaur? An alien that fell to earth on a meteorite?
If they answered this question, the reaction would have almost universally been "oh, well then." But they don't. They keep the speculation alive. It's a tease, but an effective one.
Also, if you include the line "I saw it! It's huge! It's a lion!" in your movie, everyone suddenly thinks you're making a Voltron film. Even if it's set in modern-day New York City, and said giant lion is the bad guy.
One of the interesting things the director said was that they had discussed a "sequel" that was the same story told from other points of view. The exact quote was something along the lines of "there might have been other people filming that night." I'd love to see another Cloverfield that was a patchwork of movies and pictures taken by random people as they crossed paths with the monster, kind of a cobbled-together documentary.
Wise Atheist: "wow, that guy with the fake legs can run faster than I can!"
Deluded Theist: "Six day, I tell you! SIX DAYS!"
I agree that it's probably more efficient to download data instead of burning it on DVD and distributing it that way, but by how much? I can download a lot of data on one charge from my battery. I can't burn even one DVD. I don't know how it compares to stamped disks, but I'd say the efficiency gain from downloading is significant.