You're right that Western-in-space is hard to pull-off, but Firefly was one step worse than that. It was a "Southern" in space. Some of us are extremely glad that the south lost the civil war, and Firefly's demonization of the victorious 'alliance' (was that the name they used?) aka the United States really turned me off.
I'm black, and I loved Firefly. And there was no slavery issue to put the Independents (or whatever they were called) in the moral wrong in the war. And the Alliance was, if I remember, fighting to control formerly independent colonies, not keeping together a prexisting political entity.
So, in short, STFU. And if you refuse to watch shows for reasons of political correctness, what the hell are you doing in a Family Guy thread?
King of the Hill is hilarious, but it's a different kind of humor than in say, the Simpsons. It's fairly deadpan, and develops from knowing the characters (and knowing people at least somewhat like them in real life- I suspect living somewhere in the South helps with this). The previous poster was correct in saying that it never breaks the rules of reality , but despite this, the Halloween episode where Luanne was engaged to the pork king is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen on TV. And the two-parter where they went to Japan, Hank's father tried to assault the Emperor, and Bobby became a Dance Dance Revolution master was priceless...
Maybe kids who are half-ways normal wouldn't. But if I were to market a product that I knew turned just 1% of kids into crazed psychopathic killers, shouldn't I be held in the least bit responsible?
Quake has sold millions of copies. Somehow, I must have missed the news stories about the 10,000's of teenagers who went around trying to gib people with shotguns after playing it. Moron.
To put it another way, the manufacturers of metal spoons should not be sued because some idiot in Montana decides to scoop out his wife's eyes with them.
Firefly was not a good show.
Die.
Oh, wait, I should probably back that up with some sort of coherent response, hadn't I? Very well, then:
ZOE: "Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?"
BOOK: "Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps..."
ZOE: "Jayne...this is something the captain has to do for himself."
MAL: "No! No, it's not!"
MAN: "Gave him a peck of trouble for it."
MAL: "What kind of peck is that?"
MAN: "The kind where they hacked off his hands and feet with a machete, rolled him into the bog."
WASH: "The peck pretty hard around here..."
HARROW: "You didn't have to wound that man."
MAL: "Yeah, I know. It was just funny."
WASH: "Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction."
ZOE: "We live on a space ship, dear."
WASH: "So?"
Plus, it had *no sound in space*. Firefly rocked. Deny it again and I'll shove you into the nearest convenient intake port...
I know someone already mentioned this, but I feel I really must reiterate: ZION WASN'T DESTROYED IN RELOADED! That was a five-ship strike team sent to ambush the incoming Machines, which you would know had you not been too busy whispering to your friend about how much the CGI "Sux0red" to actually pay attention to the plot. How so many people came out of the movie with the impression Zion had been destroyed, I'll never know. God only knows what you thought of the Architect's speech. [/fanboyish rant]
Seriously, though, I thought the movie was pretty good. Nice fight scenes, surprising revelations, a more complex sci-fi universe with plenty of anthropomorphized computer system in-jokes, and Smith straightening his own tie;) What's not to like?
Don't be stupid. Nuclear weapons involve atomic nuclei being either joined or split. This Gamma-laser, or whatever it is (article appears to be slashdotted) doesn't appear to be a "nuclear" weapon any more than dirty bombs are. Call it a radioactive weapon if you will, but don't go corrupting the language any more than it already is just because you want to use a word that sounds scary.
Not really. If you think about it, the story in Snow Crash was essentially finished, and anyone with half an imagination could fill in the rest on their own. He gets the girl, they live happily ever after, etc. One of the things I liked about SC was that it had the restraint to know when the interesting part of the story was done with (Not unlike George Bernard Shaw's original Pygmalion [which My Fair Lady butchered], before public reaction forced him to write out an afterword
Should we censor TV and turn it into a mass-mind-control device? No, I dont think so, but the EtoA motivation REALLY degrades the quality of the signal to the point of titilation and exploitation (watch NBC/ABC/CBS 1800 in any American City -- it has zero value).
In the West, I believe TV/Radio should be 100% non-profit venture... this reduces the media to the obligation of inform and entertain... not profit. The *profit* motivation is what gaurantees questionable content... to exploit, to titilate.
And how, pray tell, would one tell how good a job television is doing of "entertaining", apart from measuring how many people watch the shows, which is exactly the same metric used by those who wish to profit from it? Titillation and exploitation (sorry, couldn't resist;) can be entertaining. Otherwise, people wouldn't watch them. So either you want TV programming to be decided by what people want, which would be about the same as what we have today, regardless of a profit motive, or you want it to be decided by what their leaders believe is good for them. There is, of course, the issue of the wishes of the minority- if 90% of the people want to watch professional wrestling at 8 o'clock, and the other 10% want the World Nightly News, which do you choose to broadcast? I think the only real answer is to find some way to make both available, so that people can choose for themselves.
Unless you're arguing that the advertisements themselves are the problem, in which case I could see where you're coming from. I can't turn on the TV without seeing at least one commercial per break that makes my brain want to squeeze out of my ear and slink off somewhere to hide. Still, I don't see how I've been affected by them too much. I'd be buying the next Zelda game whether or not I saw the commercial for it. I'd have gone to see The Matrix Reloaded had there been no advertisements for it whatsoever, and simply heard from a friend that it existed. I would still buy soap even if I never saw another Dial or Dove commercial (although it's possible they might influence which of the nearly-identical brands I pick, but that's hardly a life-altering decision). The point is, annoying as it can be, advertising is generally more banal than destructive.
Quite frankly, I think people frequently react childishly to what they see as problems with popular entertainment, simply because much of it consists of things that they themselves would not choose to consume. Of course, they claim it's because of the potential harm that violent or sexually-oriented programming could cause, but that's more a matter of being able to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, which is a skill that anyone living in our increasingly information-saturated age needs (the other is the ability to be very selective in what one consumes, as opposed to the "take in everything available" strategy that applied in more information-starved ages) The only real problem I see with the sudden availability of cable in Bhutan would be that the populace has not really had a chance to develop these skills beforehand, and thus might have benefited from a more gradual rollout. Still, as I understand it, no one is being forced to watch anything, and thus if something offends their sensibilities (I consider those of their leaders to be irrelevant, aside from deciding what those leaders themselves watch), they can practice their Selective Consumption by changing the channel, or just shutting the damn thing off.
If you're so worried about their "culture", I'm forced to wonder whether you think that culture exists for the sake of people, or vice-versa. I'm sure it's was very comforting for some people to think that there was a nice little Buddhist enclave of a country unaffected by the confusing array of choices and ideas of the outside world, but I think it's hardly fair to hold a country hostage to you own sense of aesthetics. And if you desire freedo
After this scenario, I think file-sharing gets pushed to a technology which effectively hides the content being transferred and who it's being transferred to. Unfortunately, this implies significant proxying. The ideal design would take all sharable content, break it up into encrypted blocks, and distribute them at random amongst all nodes. The files you're sharing would be discrete from the files you have on your machine (and hard drives are getting cheap enough this is feasible). When you requested a block, it would talk to a random peer, who would then proxy from 0 or more other peers.
I'm not sure on all the technical details, but what you describe sounds remarkably similar, at least in intent, to the Freenet project. And you're right, from what I've heard, it's quite slow at the moment (although it's expected to improve somewhat with more users and newer versions of the software).
The problem with taking video on the S45 is that the maximum resolution is only 320 x 240, which means that if you replay it to a TV screen, it's going to look damned pixelated. The ability to take video clips is a fun little feature, but it's no replacement for a real digital video camera.
Digimon already had a movie. Pokemon themselves have had somehting like 4 (I think the the last few were on video only)
And there are plenty of anime movies- most of them just never get released into theatres in the US (although there are exceptions, like Spirited Away).
I don't really see what anime movies have to do with live-action superhero movies, though.
That seems odd... I thought the whole deal with fiber optics was that they're good for data transmission because they can transmit a small amount of light over long distances *without* scatter. If you added scattering imperfections or something to they emit light, you'd run out of light in a few feet. To counter this, you'd need a light source of immense strength at the beginning of the cable, and probably boosters all down the length. In short, just about everything you put there is untenable. I could see the decorative uses, though. Just get it out of your head that fiber optics magically create light, or whatever you think.
This is a much better site, as far as Singularity-type stuff goes. It's the personal page of Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of the Singularity Institute (a much blander site than his personal one).
They say we only use 2% of our mental capacity, so what if we could build a machine that was better then ourselves?
Perhaps "they" and you only use 2 percent (it must be shrinking! The *usual* wrong-assed estimate is 10%), but the rest of us use all of our brains, just like any remotely reasonable organism. Now, if you had said that, on average, only 10% of our neurons are firing at any *one time*, it might have been a bit less ludicous. But such would probably be true of any complex cognitive system, including advanced computer systems. After all, if a mind can only be *completely* active (i.e. firing all of its neurons, or switching all of its gates) or inactive, that makes it a two-state system, which is a wee bit on the simplistic side for a conscious intelligence [/sarcasm]. Certainly, if it's possible to build a computers system that's even a wee bit smarter than any human (and whether or not that is possible is unknown at present), it follows that the computer should be able to build something smarter than itself, and so on, which could have drastic effects on the furture of humanity, for good or ill. See singularity theory. Personally, I think it's a bit too early to be worrying about our coming robotic evil overlords yet, as AI's aren't likely to progress much beyond glorified Eliza clones for a while. (Of course, I could be wrong... DUM DUM DUMMMM...)
It's quite playable, although some of item names and such are still scrambled, at least in the version I downloaded a while ago. You can get the original Japanese rom from Cherryroms and the patch from Zophar's Domain I'm honestly not sure whether or not that's the most current version, but like you said, Dejap's down at the moment. Personally, I think it's worth downloading for the cheesy Star Trek rip-off in the intro alone...
Here's a better link, since Mr. fancy-pants +5 couldn't be bothered to insert a few HTML tags for easy opening in tabs... Anyway, it is a good site, and I highly doubt it's from some "pro-Saddam nut". The blogger seems to be both anti-war *and* to have little love for Saddam. An excerpt, to prove my point:
"I don't watch enough TV, just so that no one tells me I have been hurting the Iraqi average TV time I spent a lot of the last two days watching Iraqi channels. Great entertainment. You see Saddam, in order to prove that he is A-OK, is almost daily on TV. He gets a number of officers and asks them questions which he answers himself. He actually said that the west probably thinks that he can't sleep at night these days and has to take sleeping pills; well you are wrong he sleeps every night very well, because he knows his people "are pleased and happy". Well that explains the feeling I have. So, no sleeping pills for saddam, maybe he can give me his. And to prove how relaxed he is he serves the officers tea, coffee and sweets and drinks it with them *gasp*. Of course the coffee sits waiting until he says something like "well, drink your coffee men no one likes cold coffee" and as if pre-rehearsed they all lift the small cups and take a sip in one single synchronized move, it looked hilarious."
There are also a lot of little references to daily life in Iraq that seem genuine. If it's a hoax, then it's a damned good one.
If that's how you spelled it, no wonder you couldn't find it.
Since the main Jargon Lexicon site seems to be down, here's the
Google Cache of the relevant page. Next time, try using the 'leet version of Google's search- it won't get any better results, but at least you'll feel like a real H4X0r d00d! (*Bleagh*)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right that Western-in-space is hard to pull-off, but Firefly was one step worse than that. It was a "Southern" in space. Some of us are extremely glad that the south lost the civil war, and Firefly's demonization of the victorious 'alliance' (was that the name they used?) aka the United States really turned me off.
I'm black, and I loved Firefly. And there was no slavery issue to put the Independents (or whatever they were called) in the moral wrong in the war. And the Alliance was, if I remember, fighting to control formerly independent colonies, not keeping together a prexisting political entity.
So, in short, STFU. And if you refuse to watch shows for reasons of political correctness, what the hell are you doing in a Family Guy thread?
King of the Hill is hilarious, but it's a different kind of humor than in say, the Simpsons. It's fairly deadpan, and develops from knowing the characters (and knowing people at least somewhat like them in real life- I suspect living somewhere in the South helps with this). The previous poster was correct in saying that it never breaks the rules of reality , but despite this, the Halloween episode where Luanne was engaged to the pork king is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen on TV. And the two-parter where they went to Japan, Hank's father tried to assault the Emperor, and Bobby became a Dance Dance Revolution master was priceless...
What the hell are you talking about? That was a terminal in a power station within the Matrix, which has a technology level equivalent to present day.
I liked Reloaded myelf, but if you want to complain about realism in the Matrix movies just take a look at the Machine's power-generation scheme...
One word answer: No.
:)
There, that was easy enough
Maybe kids who are half-ways normal wouldn't. But if I were to market a product that I knew turned just 1% of kids into crazed psychopathic killers, shouldn't I be held in the least bit responsible?
Quake has sold millions of copies. Somehow, I must have missed the news stories about the 10,000's of teenagers who went around trying to gib people with shotguns after playing it. Moron.
To put it another way, the manufacturers of metal spoons should not be sued because some idiot in Montana decides to scoop out his wife's eyes with them.
Heh. That's the first thing I've seen on Slashdot today that made me chuckle. If you weren't logged in as an AC, I'd put you on my friends list.
Firefly was not a good show.
Die.
Oh, wait, I should probably back that up with some sort of coherent response, hadn't I? Very well, then:
ZOE: "Preacher, don't the Bible have some pretty specific things to say about killing?"
BOOK: "Quite specific. It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps..."
ZOE: "Jayne...this is something the captain has to do for himself."
MAL: "No! No, it's not!"
MAN: "Gave him a peck of trouble for it."
MAL: "What kind of peck is that?"
MAN: "The kind where they hacked off his hands and feet with a machete, rolled him into the bog."
WASH: "The peck pretty hard around here..."
HARROW: "You didn't have to wound that man."
MAL: "Yeah, I know. It was just funny."
WASH: "Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction."
ZOE: "We live on a space ship, dear."
WASH: "So?"
Plus, it had *no sound in space*. Firefly rocked. Deny it again and I'll shove you into the nearest convenient intake port...
I know someone already mentioned this, but I feel I really must reiterate: ZION WASN'T DESTROYED IN RELOADED! That was a five-ship strike team sent to ambush the incoming Machines, which you would know had you not been too busy whispering to your friend about how much the CGI "Sux0red" to actually pay attention to the plot. How so many people came out of the movie with the impression Zion had been destroyed, I'll never know. God only knows what you thought of the Architect's speech. [/fanboyish rant]
;) What's not to like?
Seriously, though, I thought the movie was pretty good. Nice fight scenes, surprising revelations, a more complex sci-fi universe with plenty of anthropomorphized computer system in-jokes, and Smith straightening his own tie
The kind that tells them a few megabytes times 1000's of downloads adds up. Numbnuts.
Don't be stupid. Nuclear weapons involve atomic nuclei being either joined or split. This Gamma-laser, or whatever it is (article appears to be slashdotted) doesn't appear to be a "nuclear" weapon any more than dirty bombs are. Call it a radioactive weapon if you will, but don't go corrupting the language any more than it already is just because you want to use a word that sounds scary.
Not really. If you think about it, the story in Snow Crash was essentially finished, and anyone with half an imagination could fill in the rest on their own. He gets the girl, they live happily ever after, etc. One of the things I liked about SC was that it had the restraint to know when the interesting part of the story was done with (Not unlike George Bernard Shaw's original Pygmalion [which My Fair Lady butchered], before public reaction forced him to write out an afterword
You know the Kid? The one following Neo around in Zion? Geuss what his real name is? (Revealed in the Animatrix)
Karl Popper.
There is no spoon.
Should we censor TV and turn it into a mass-mind-control device? No, I dont think so, but the EtoA motivation REALLY degrades the quality of the signal to the point of titilation and exploitation (watch NBC/ABC/CBS 1800 in any American City -- it has zero value).
;) can be entertaining. Otherwise, people wouldn't watch them. So either you want TV programming to be decided by what people want, which would be about the same as what we have today, regardless of a profit motive, or you want it to be decided by what their leaders believe is good for them. There is, of course, the issue of the wishes of the minority- if 90% of the people want to watch professional wrestling at 8 o'clock, and the other 10% want the World Nightly News, which do you choose to broadcast? I think the only real answer is to find some way to make both available, so that people can choose for themselves.
In the West, I believe TV/Radio should be 100% non-profit venture... this reduces the media to the obligation of inform and entertain... not profit. The *profit* motivation is what gaurantees questionable content... to exploit, to titilate.
And how, pray tell, would one tell how good a job television is doing of "entertaining", apart from measuring how many people watch the shows, which is exactly the same metric used by those who wish to profit from it? Titillation and exploitation (sorry, couldn't resist
Unless you're arguing that the advertisements themselves are the problem, in which case I could see where you're coming from. I can't turn on the TV without seeing at least one commercial per break that makes my brain want to squeeze out of my ear and slink off somewhere to hide. Still, I don't see how I've been affected by them too much. I'd be buying the next Zelda game whether or not I saw the commercial for it. I'd have gone to see The Matrix Reloaded had there been no advertisements for it whatsoever, and simply heard from a friend that it existed. I would still buy soap even if I never saw another Dial or Dove commercial (although it's possible they might influence which of the nearly-identical brands I pick, but that's hardly a life-altering decision). The point is, annoying as it can be, advertising is generally more banal than destructive.
Quite frankly, I think people frequently react childishly to what they see as problems with popular entertainment, simply because much of it consists of things that they themselves would not choose to consume. Of course, they claim it's because of the potential harm that violent or sexually-oriented programming could cause, but that's more a matter of being able to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, which is a skill that anyone living in our increasingly information-saturated age needs (the other is the ability to be very selective in what one consumes, as opposed to the "take in everything available" strategy that applied in more information-starved ages) The only real problem I see with the sudden availability of cable in Bhutan would be that the populace has not really had a chance to develop these skills beforehand, and thus might have benefited from a more gradual rollout. Still, as I understand it, no one is being forced to watch anything, and thus if something offends their sensibilities (I consider those of their leaders to be irrelevant, aside from deciding what those leaders themselves watch), they can practice their Selective Consumption by changing the channel, or just shutting the damn thing off.
If you're so worried about their "culture", I'm forced to wonder whether you think that culture exists for the sake of people, or vice-versa. I'm sure it's was very comforting for some people to think that there was a nice little Buddhist enclave of a country unaffected by the confusing array of choices and ideas of the outside world, but I think it's hardly fair to hold a country hostage to you own sense of aesthetics. And if you desire freedo
Silence, fool!
It's a great movie. Shaddup.
*Sigh*. I've aready argued about this elsewhere. Since I'm a lazy bum, I'll just put up this link instead of doing it again.
And Al Gore had almost nothing to do with the creation of the Internet.
After this scenario, I think file-sharing gets pushed to a technology which effectively hides the content being transferred and who it's being transferred to. Unfortunately, this implies significant proxying. The ideal design would take all sharable content, break it up into encrypted blocks, and distribute them at random amongst all nodes. The files you're sharing would be discrete from the files you have on your machine (and hard drives are getting cheap enough this is feasible). When you requested a block, it would talk to a random peer, who would then proxy from 0 or more other peers.
I'm not sure on all the technical details, but what you describe sounds remarkably similar, at least in intent, to the Freenet project. And you're right, from what I've heard, it's quite slow at the moment (although it's expected to improve somewhat with more users and newer versions of the software).
The problem with taking video on the S45 is that the maximum resolution is only 320 x 240, which means that if you replay it to a TV screen, it's going to look damned pixelated. The ability to take video clips is a fun little feature, but it's no replacement for a real digital video camera.
Digimon already had a movie. Pokemon themselves have had somehting like 4 (I think the the last few were on video only) And there are plenty of anime movies- most of them just never get released into theatres in the US (although there are exceptions, like Spirited Away).
I don't really see what anime movies have to do with live-action superhero movies, though.
That seems odd... I thought the whole deal with fiber optics was that they're good for data transmission because they can transmit a small amount of light over long distances *without* scatter. If you added scattering imperfections or something to they emit light, you'd run out of light in a few feet. To counter this, you'd need a light source of immense strength at the beginning of the cable, and probably boosters all down the length. In short, just about everything you put there is untenable. I could see the decorative uses, though. Just get it out of your head that fiber optics magically create light, or whatever you think.
This is a much better site, as far as Singularity-type stuff goes. It's the personal page of Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of the Singularity Institute (a much blander site than his personal one).
It's quite playable, although some of item names and such are still scrambled, at least in the version I downloaded a while ago. You can get the original Japanese rom from Cherryroms and the patch from Zophar's Domain I'm honestly not sure whether or not that's the most current version, but like you said, Dejap's down at the moment. Personally, I think it's worth downloading for the cheesy Star Trek rip-off in the intro alone...
There are also a lot of little references to daily life in Iraq that seem genuine. If it's a hoax, then it's a damned good one.
*smacks with stupid stick*
The word "joke" is apparently not a part of your vocabulary...
If that's how you spelled it, no wonder you couldn't find it. Since the main Jargon Lexicon site seems to be down, here's the Google Cache of the relevant page. Next time, try using the 'leet version of Google's search- it won't get any better results, but at least you'll feel like a real H4X0r d00d! (*Bleagh*)