I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Phil Plait, the "blog writer" you mentioned. He's an astronomer and not prone to manufacturing controversies.
When he says it's "spreading like wildfire", that probably means that he's suddenly got a ton of email about it since he's the go-to guy for stuff like this. He wrote a great point-by-point rebuttal to the Moon Hoax conspiracy among other things.
Don't let Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) hear you say that. He made the good point that animation isn't a genre, it's an art form. Just like "the novel" or "comic book" aren't genres. They're art forms that can be in any genre you wish.
That's the most articulate explaination I've heard of this. Thanks.
I spend most of my time on a Mac (at work) but have a PC at home. If I had the money for a new computer I'd buy a Mac, but everytime I think of ditching my PC altogether I have to stop and think...
well, I won't be able to play most of the games I bought anymore...and there's an application or two that's Windows only that I need occasionally...
It pisses me off because I don't want to use Windows. I guess I could live without the old games, but there have been many times where I think, well, at least I can just open that in windows and re-save it.
The best situation I can see is that OS X and/or Linux gets enough market share so that it's common for certain businesses/people to have a PC for occasional compatibility purposes only, which will lead to Mac/Linux converters that will eliminate the need for a PC, so that 100% Mac/Linux shops will have to be a consideration at least.
If I may go on a tangent here...
I used to work at a pre-press company (my title was "Mac Operator" which I always thought would be a cool 80's rap name. I'd change it to "Mac O" in the 90's [a la P. Diddy], then to "MOpe" around 2003). Anyway, we had one WinNT machine we kept around for the clients who were too low-scale to realize that all print work was done on Macs.
Any Windows job was a guaranteed pain-in-the-ass, mostly for compatibility reasons, but also because WinNT was stupid about networking and printing issues. It always seemed stupid to me that, while we printed to million dollar imagesetters and had clients like the Dell computer catalog, we had to keep this red-deaded stepchiled to run a Windows version of Quark (or for the real low-rent clients who submitted Windows Pagemaker files).
I'm a video editor now, and I still get annoyed when someone wants a non-Quicktime movie file. Some of the blame surely lies with Apple who won't even let you import an MP3 into Final Cut Pro unless you convert it into a Quicktime file first, but for the most part Apple tries to be universal, whereas Microsoft's attitude is "Fuck everyone else. If you're not using.avis and Word.docs you can go screw yourself."
Thank god that blu-ray won out so we don't have do deal with even more forced-incompatibility issues. I just want shit to work. I'm not totally computer-illiterate (I know enough to install a new OS, or random expansion card, or hard drive. I've used Linux a bit on my personal computer), but when there's work to be done I don't want to have to use Google to search for the best way to convert a file or get a random piece of PC hardware to work on a Mac.
Re:Ma Bell? Yo no entiendo
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 2, Informative
POTS = Plain Old Telephone System (really)
In other words, the landlines and switches that make up basic non-cellular phone service in the country.
You're right, I was not thinking about their different body chemistry. I concede my first point, and thanks for the explanation of why only younger/smaller squids have been seen near the surface.
And just because you exposed my stupidity I'll mention that you spelled "suffocate" wrong.;)
Not that I totally doubt your dad's story, but if a squid surfaced it would die unless maybe it did it very, very slowly. I don't think it would be in much shape to be attacking.
As for them attacking life boats, that's ridiculous. If they were that easy to attract we would have photographed and captured them by now.
Thirdly, giant squid do have natural predators, the aforementioned sperm whales and (according to Wikipedia) the pacific sleeper shark.
They are nasty beasts, though. Take a look at their rotating beaks sometime, or read up on them at the Wikipedia article.
And the Octopus battle scene! This was conducted in a public park, at night (because they didn't have a stage, a budget, or a permit) with a *stolen* rubber octopus. Unfortunately, they forgot to take the motor(s) that made the octopus run, so "our hero" had to "battle" the octopus, in a shallow pool of water, under a car's headlights, and move the limbs of the octopus himself. It's really a classic scene.
Actually that scene was from "Bride of the Monster", which was on MST3K. And you forgot the best bit, after he fights the octopus it explodes like an atomic bomb (if you saw the movie "Ed Wood" this is what that guy that owned the meat plant insisted on). That's followed by Harvey B. Dunn's classic line "He tampered in God's domain."
You are joking, right? Somebody will find a way of using all that space up, and more.
Perhaps, but what?
The top two would be HD Video and high quality audio. Even non-techies edit their home movies on their computers nowadays, and if I had TBs of space I'd rip my CDs to WAV instead of MP3.
If that kind of space was available it would certainly be used. We're so used to having to be "reasonable" with HD space requirements that we wouldn't even consider including, say, two or three hours of tutorial video clips with new OS installations, or including every single possible randomly generated game level on the disc to ease CPU load.
Uhhhh... I'm pretty sure MST3K ran on Comedy Central, not SciFi.
It ran on Comedy Central for seven seasons, then got picked up of SciFi for three more seasons.
Also, while the show was making plenty of money, it was in, what, the 9th season? When a show runs that long, in many cases the re-runs are able to pull in as much viewership as new airings. (Especially when the old episodes are of a vastly higher quality than the new shows.)
That's certainly debatable. I think the show was in top form when it got cancelled. "Squirm", "The Horrors of Spider Island", "The Girl In Gold Boots", and "Soultaker" were all in season 10 and they are some of my favorite episodes.
Another nail in MST3K's coffin was the fact that their production costs had risen dramatically in the last few seasons - simply put, they were out of old, cheap movies to use. With the popularity of MST3K, the studios that owned most old movies were raising the prices they were charging to incredibly high rates for movies that hadn't been seen in decades.
That's true. That, in addition to MST3K not fitting into SciFi's new vision of itself after USA Network bought it is the real reason it was cancelled.
And, finally, after so many years, nearly all the original staff was gone, and those who were left were looking to move on.
I can't say whether the cast really wanted to move on, but almost all of the original cast was still there. The only people who left were:
Josh Weinstein - Dr. Erhardt/Tom Servo. Left after season one.
Joel Hodgson - Joel Robinson. Left after season five.
Trace Beaulieu - Dr. Forester/Crow. Left after season seven.
Frank Conniff - TV's Frank. Left after season seven.
Michal J Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl, Kevin Murphy, Jim Mallon, Bridget Jones, Paul Chaplin, and Patrick Brantseg, were all there since the beginning (or nearly the beginning).
Hey, I wasn't trying to be flamebait or anything, it's not that big a deal. He's just been posting a lot lately on a wide variety of Apple related discussions and always says "we".
If I worked on a Ford assembly line I would sound like an idiot saying "we designed the new Mustang for this certain demographic."
Like I said, not a big deal, his posts are all intelligent. It just sounds too much like supposed Sega employee Samir Gupta, constantly mentioning he worked there.
You know, I've read many of your posts and even if you are an actual employee of Apple you say "we" way too often. Unless you're Steve Jobs I find it hard to believe you're personally involved in all the projects you've insinuated yourself into.
We're all very impressed if you work for Apple, but the chest-thumping is getting a little tiresome.
If you just have a blah-blah land line, its a bit different. BLAH and BLAH are transmitted blah-blah, so you can't really effect that. The blah-blah will have the same BLAH and BLAH that your blah-blah trasmitted in the blah-blah.
Thank you for helping me understand what I sound like when I try to explain a RAID setup to my uncle.
But a few lucky cadets, the cadets that excel, can look forward to serving on a real starship and perhaps meeting a real starship captain before being burned alive by a Horta, or absorbed by a vague energy cloud on some backwater planet.
Our fine academy will train you to be a specialist. We have no combat training or engineering classes.
You won't be needing those.
Here you will be trained to creep around a desert planet with a phaser in hand, or perhaps simply wander off on your own and touch any random glowing thing you find.
Some of you may major in Provoking Reptilian Aliens, or Ignoring Repeated Warnings.
I myself majored in Agonized Screaming, though I've never had to... had to... AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHH... (gets eaten by a Gorn)
Many people have claimed over the years that the title/character's name is a reference to a computer command. Steven Lisberger, however, has made it clear in interview after interview that he got the name from "Electronic", and didn't even know about the commands until some time later. Interestingly enough, the BASIC command Tron serves a similar function to the Tron Program in the movie.
Jason7 asks "how did you come up with the name TRON???"
StevenLisberger says "The whole project came out of an electric warrior that was really the genesis. At the time my company was called Lisberger Studios and we did animation. I was thinking it's best if you come up with your own Mickey Mouse, some character. The idea was to come up with a character made out of light and one of our designer/animators, John Norton designed this warrior who was made up of neon.. looked like neon."
StevenLisberger says "And, he looked electronic and from that came Tron. Some people think it has to do with trace on.. and that's not it... it was from electronic. And, we nicknamed him that and it's strange, once that footage existed it was alive and couldn't be stopped. Here's this interesting character where do we put him? And, it made sense to put him in an electronic dimension. One thing lead to another."
Just out of curiosity, why are you using tinyurl? Seeing that kind of link on a public message board generally means GOATSE or something similar. Why not just say:
by the time it stops generating electricity, the radioactivity has already broken everything down into stable isotopes.
It's been a while since my high school physics course, but I understood that the whole concept of "Half-life" means that radioactive material simply becomes less radioactive over time, creating a curve that slowly approaches "non-radioactive", rather than a linear progression from Full to Empty. Only the left hand "highly radioactive" side of the curve is useful for power production, but the much, much longer "decreasingly radioactive" period is still hazardous to humans. It wouldn't break down to stable isotopes for many thousands of years.
Well, they're nicer than busses and trains in some ways (from wikipedia):
-require minimal space -more attractive than elevated trains -quieter
But mostly I think it's the same reason you always hear of jetpacks and flying cars: These were popular "future inventions" from the 50's, a monorail looks perfect in a painting of a "city of the future".
There doesn't seem too many "sexy" inventions that have any chance of becoming reality any time soon. Robots? Too complicated for general use, AI is very far away. Driverless cars? Same problem. Food in a pill? We could make it, I guess, but you'd have to eat a bowl full of them. More fuel efficient cars are coming along nicely, but that's not really sexy. Space travel for all? We're getting there slowly.
Then there's the stuff we already have. Instant communication anywhere, GPS, powerful and affordable computers.
Most of the stuff that was popular future technology in the 50's is far more difficult than most people realized at the time. But monorails could be made then and the graceful sweep of the rails and the bullet-shaped cars looked very futuristic.
Fahreinheit 911 had a good take on the Patriot act with that Senator going "we don't have enough time to read all the bills" etc. I'm sorry but THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB. That's why it's called "a reading" before the law is passed - YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO READ IT.
I think this is a bit simplistic. The senate had 735 Bills last year according to that site, with language such as:
"A producer member shall submit to the authority an application for the tax credit authorized by this section on a form provided by the authority. If the producer member meets all criteria prescribed by this section and is approved by the authority, the authority shall issue a tax credit certificate in the appropriate amount."
Imagine trying to understand 735 documents composed of such language, some of which can be many many pages, or make "small" adjustments to current laws. Some bills, I'm sure, are written and titled to purposely obfuscate their true intentions as well.
My guess is that's why senators and house members have staffs: to read the bills and tell them what they mean. There's not time enough in the day to read and understand fully all those bills.
But...
I certainly agree that each bill should be fully understood before it's voted on, which would mean a LOT more time between introduction and passing, which would mean fewer bills being passed, which is fine with me except in emergency situations (like aid to hurricane victims, etc.).
Democracy is quietly dying because a buch of lazy people will happily pass the "Happy fluffy bunny (you'd be a nasty pinko liberal for not passing this) bill" without actually reading it...
No, democracy is dying because of fundamental flaws in large scale republics and american culture, and lack of interest and education of Americans.
(Disclamer: I'm an American and I dislike both of the major candidates, but I hate Bush more. Remember though, the DMCA was passed under Clinton.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing you aren't familiar with Phil Plait, the "blog writer" you mentioned. He's an astronomer and not prone to manufacturing controversies. When he says it's "spreading like wildfire", that probably means that he's suddenly got a ton of email about it since he's the go-to guy for stuff like this. He wrote a great point-by-point rebuttal to the Moon Hoax conspiracy among other things.
How could they not include Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy. He just wrote a book about this for christ's sake.
Don't let Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) hear you say that. He made the good point that animation isn't a genre, it's an art form. Just like "the novel" or "comic book" aren't genres. They're art forms that can be in any genre you wish.
Spoken like a man who has never owned a Fiero.
I spend most of my time on a Mac (at work) but have a PC at home. If I had the money for a new computer I'd buy a Mac, but everytime I think of ditching my PC altogether I have to stop and think...
well, I won't be able to play most of the games I bought anymore...and there's an application or two that's Windows only that I need occasionally...
It pisses me off because I don't want to use Windows. I guess I could live without the old games, but there have been many times where I think, well, at least I can just open that in windows and re-save it.
The best situation I can see is that OS X and/or Linux gets enough market share so that it's common for certain businesses/people to have a PC for occasional compatibility purposes only, which will lead to Mac/Linux converters that will eliminate the need for a PC, so that 100% Mac/Linux shops will have to be a consideration at least.
If I may go on a tangent here...
I used to work at a pre-press company (my title was "Mac Operator" which I always thought would be a cool 80's rap name. I'd change it to "Mac O" in the 90's [a la P. Diddy], then to "MOpe" around 2003). Anyway, we had one WinNT machine we kept around for the clients who were too low-scale to realize that all print work was done on Macs.
Any Windows job was a guaranteed pain-in-the-ass, mostly for compatibility reasons, but also because WinNT was stupid about networking and printing issues. It always seemed stupid to me that, while we printed to million dollar imagesetters and had clients like the Dell computer catalog, we had to keep this red-deaded stepchiled to run a Windows version of Quark (or for the real low-rent clients who submitted Windows Pagemaker files).
I'm a video editor now, and I still get annoyed when someone wants a non-Quicktime movie file. Some of the blame surely lies with Apple who won't even let you import an MP3 into Final Cut Pro unless you convert it into a Quicktime file first, but for the most part Apple tries to be universal, whereas Microsoft's attitude is "Fuck everyone else. If you're not using .avis and Word .docs you can go screw yourself."
Thank god that blu-ray won out so we don't have do deal with even more forced-incompatibility issues. I just want shit to work. I'm not totally computer-illiterate (I know enough to install a new OS, or random expansion card, or hard drive. I've used Linux a bit on my personal computer), but when there's work to be done I don't want to have to use Google to search for the best way to convert a file or get a random piece of PC hardware to work on a Mac.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone System (really) In other words, the landlines and switches that make up basic non-cellular phone service in the country.
Here's a review from someone who purposefully avoided the TV show. He's a great independent reviewer. He gave it three stars out of four.
And just because you exposed my stupidity I'll mention that you spelled "suffocate" wrong. ;)
As for them attacking life boats, that's ridiculous. If they were that easy to attract we would have photographed and captured them by now.
Thirdly, giant squid do have natural predators, the aforementioned sperm whales and (according to Wikipedia) the pacific sleeper shark.
They are nasty beasts, though. Take a look at their rotating beaks sometime, or read up on them at the Wikipedia article.
Actually that scene was from "Bride of the Monster", which was on MST3K. And you forgot the best bit, after he fights the octopus it explodes like an atomic bomb (if you saw the movie "Ed Wood" this is what that guy that owned the meat plant insisted on). That's followed by Harvey B. Dunn's classic line "He tampered in God's domain."
Perhaps, but what?
The top two would be HD Video and high quality audio. Even non-techies edit their home movies on their computers nowadays, and if I had TBs of space I'd rip my CDs to WAV instead of MP3.
If that kind of space was available it would certainly be used. We're so used to having to be "reasonable" with HD space requirements that we wouldn't even consider including, say, two or three hours of tutorial video clips with new OS installations, or including every single possible randomly generated game level on the disc to ease CPU load.
It ran on Comedy Central for seven seasons, then got picked up of SciFi for three more seasons.
Also, while the show was making plenty of money, it was in, what, the 9th season? When a show runs that long, in many cases the re-runs are able to pull in as much viewership as new airings. (Especially when the old episodes are of a vastly higher quality than the new shows.)
That's certainly debatable. I think the show was in top form when it got cancelled. "Squirm", "The Horrors of Spider Island", "The Girl In Gold Boots", and "Soultaker" were all in season 10 and they are some of my favorite episodes.
Another nail in MST3K's coffin was the fact that their production costs had risen dramatically in the last few seasons - simply put, they were out of old, cheap movies to use. With the popularity of MST3K, the studios that owned most old movies were raising the prices they were charging to incredibly high rates for movies that hadn't been seen in decades.
That's true. That, in addition to MST3K not fitting into SciFi's new vision of itself after USA Network bought it is the real reason it was cancelled.
And, finally, after so many years, nearly all the original staff was gone, and those who were left were looking to move on.
I can't say whether the cast really wanted to move on, but almost all of the original cast was still there. The only people who left were:
Josh Weinstein - Dr. Erhardt/Tom Servo. Left after season one.
Joel Hodgson - Joel Robinson. Left after season five.
Trace Beaulieu - Dr. Forester/Crow. Left after season seven.
Frank Conniff - TV's Frank. Left after season seven.
Michal J Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl, Kevin Murphy, Jim Mallon, Bridget Jones, Paul Chaplin, and Patrick Brantseg, were all there since the beginning (or nearly the beginning).
If I worked on a Ford assembly line I would sound like an idiot saying "we designed the new Mustang for this certain demographic."
Like I said, not a big deal, his posts are all intelligent. It just sounds too much like supposed Sega employee Samir Gupta, constantly mentioning he worked there.
We're all very impressed if you work for Apple, but the chest-thumping is getting a little tiresome.
Weird Al did in fact do a parody of it in one of his "polka medlys". He just used silly sound effects to cover up the bad words.
Thank you for helping me understand what I sound like when I try to explain a RAID setup to my uncle.
Switch Gaming: They sell hardware and have game reviews for PC, console, and emulated classics. Sounds like just what you're looking for.
Most of you will die long before graduation.
But a few lucky cadets, the cadets that excel, can look forward to serving on a real starship and perhaps meeting a real starship captain before being burned alive by a Horta, or absorbed by a vague energy cloud on some backwater planet.
Our fine academy will train you to be a specialist. We have no combat training or engineering classes.
You won't be needing those.
Here you will be trained to creep around a desert planet with a phaser in hand, or perhaps simply wander off on your own and touch any random glowing thing you find. Some of you may major in Provoking Reptilian Aliens, or Ignoring Repeated Warnings.
I myself majored in Agonized Screaming, though I've never had to ... had to ... AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHH... (gets eaten by a Gorn)
Lieutenant Sheisskopf
(Sorry I've been re-reading Catch-22 lately)
According to the IMDB trivia page for TRON:
Many people have claimed over the years that the title/character's name is a reference to a computer command. Steven Lisberger, however, has made it clear in interview after interview that he got the name from "Electronic", and didn't even know about the commands until some time later. Interestingly enough, the BASIC command Tron serves a similar function to the Tron Program in the movie.
And according to this chat transcript with the writer:
Jason7 asks "how did you come up with the name TRON???"
StevenLisberger says "The whole project came out of an electric warrior that was really the genesis. At the time my company was called Lisberger Studios and we did animation. I was thinking it's best if you come up with your own Mickey Mouse, some character. The idea was to come up with a character made out of light and one of our designer/animators, John Norton designed this warrior who was made up of neon .. looked like neon."
StevenLisberger says "And, he looked electronic and from that came Tron. Some people think it has to do with trace on .. and that's not it ... it was from electronic. And, we nicknamed him that and it's strange, once that footage existed it was alive and couldn't be stopped. Here's this interesting character where do we put him? And, it made sense to put him in an electronic dimension. One thing lead to another."
So there. :)
Bzzt. It was short for elecTRONic. The filmakers didn't find out till later that it was also a real computer term.
Nov 4, 1997:First mention of slashdot.org. Why is it in a strange language?
First English mention is on Nov 14, 1997.
As I understand it services like tinyurl are designed to make it easy to give a large URL to someone when you can't present it electronically.
It's been a while since my high school physics course, but I understood that the whole concept of "Half-life" means that radioactive material simply becomes less radioactive over time, creating a curve that slowly approaches "non-radioactive", rather than a linear progression from Full to Empty. Only the left hand "highly radioactive" side of the curve is useful for power production, but the much, much longer "decreasingly radioactive" period is still hazardous to humans. It wouldn't break down to stable isotopes for many thousands of years.
Well, they're nicer than busses and trains in some ways (from wikipedia):
-require minimal space
-more attractive than elevated trains
-quieter
But mostly I think it's the same reason you always hear of jetpacks and flying cars: These were popular "future inventions" from the 50's, a monorail looks perfect in a painting of a "city of the future".
There doesn't seem too many "sexy" inventions that have any chance of becoming reality any time soon. Robots? Too complicated for general use, AI is very far away. Driverless cars? Same problem. Food in a pill? We could make it, I guess, but you'd have to eat a bowl full of them. More fuel efficient cars are coming along nicely, but that's not really sexy. Space travel for all? We're getting there slowly.
Then there's the stuff we already have. Instant communication anywhere, GPS, powerful and affordable computers.
Most of the stuff that was popular future technology in the 50's is far more difficult than most people realized at the time. But monorails could be made then and the graceful sweep of the rails and the bullet-shaped cars looked very futuristic.
I think this is a bit simplistic. The senate had 735 Bills last year according to that site, with language such as:
"A producer member shall submit to the authority an application for the tax credit authorized by this section on a form provided by the authority. If the producer member meets all criteria prescribed by this section and is approved by the authority, the authority shall issue a tax credit certificate in the appropriate amount."
Imagine trying to understand 735 documents composed of such language, some of which can be many many pages, or make "small" adjustments to current laws. Some bills, I'm sure, are written and titled to purposely obfuscate their true intentions as well.
My guess is that's why senators and house members have staffs: to read the bills and tell them what they mean. There's not time enough in the day to read and understand fully all those bills.
But...
I certainly agree that each bill should be fully understood before it's voted on, which would mean a LOT more time between introduction and passing, which would mean fewer bills being passed, which is fine with me except in emergency situations (like aid to hurricane victims, etc.).
Democracy is quietly dying because a buch of lazy people will happily pass the "Happy fluffy bunny (you'd be a nasty pinko liberal for not passing this) bill" without actually reading it...
No, democracy is dying because of fundamental flaws in large scale republics and american culture, and lack of interest and education of Americans.
(Disclamer: I'm an American and I dislike both of the major candidates, but I hate Bush more. Remember though, the DMCA was passed under Clinton.)