Get Dragonball Z on DVD. Start watching in Japanese with English subtitles. About half-way through the battle with Freeza (episode #5259) turn off the subtitles.
More seriously...
I got hold of a Taiwanese boxset of DBZ. Got into the habit of pausing it just as the Japanese episode title came up, and before the subtitle translating it did. Then try to read out the title (thank Kami-sama for furigana!) and then hit play and see what the voiceover guy says.
By the time the Cell Games came round, I was getting quite good at it. Learning by repetition, I suppose... there's only so many times you can get 'SUUPAA SAIYAJIN' wrong:-)
Yes if you download copyrighted music, you're commiting a crime. Maybe it shouldn't be a crime, but it's a crime all the same.
AFAIK, in the US (which is where MIT is) it's not a crime, it's a civil offence. Things vary in other countries; I think it actually is a crime in the UK.
I don't think these sites would do as well if people realized the exposure and danger they risk by volunteering so much personal information on the internet.
Quite a point. Google sees everything you do online, and a cunning questioner can get more information about you than you might think.
Some script kiddie got into a webforum I rather liked a few months ago. Obsolete version of Invision with more holes than a Sierpinski gasket. He Defaced it, deleted stuff, the usual crap. Gloated about his leetness under his leet hacker's handle.
Which led to other places he'd posted.
Which led to other names he'd used.
Which led to a website.
Which had a whois record.
Which had a phone number.
Which was answered by his mother.
We got a photo of him from his eighth-grade spelling bee, too. Cute kid:-)
The mugger of course might have already made off with those two.
I have two phones in my pocket right now. An old, battered pay-as-you-go phone in such a state that no mugger would touch it - it's scarcely worth the time it would take to fence - and a new, flashy, expensive contract phone which they'd grab without a doubt.
This isn't actually done out of paranoia, just because I haven't got around to transferring the number from the old phone to the new yet. Security through laziness, the new paradigm:-)
I think it's no accident that the Firefly party consists of three fighters (each with a different specialization), a healer, a priest, an empath, a mechanic and an "ambassador".
It's a good party, but... a bit crowded, unless you've got a lot of meatspace geek friends.
If you're doing the space cowboy thing with a lower headcount, you might reconfigure that to two fighters (one quite a brawler, the other all about finesse), one hacker, one femme fatale...
... 12 years is pretty darn quick, given that these are Americans, most of whom, it seems, aren't quite up to speed with the latest discoveries from 1859 just yet.
AFAIK, the only way the record company could know what you're downloading is if you're downloading it from them. OTOH, they can know what you're uploading by asking your P2P server 'so, got a copy of LatestBritneyShite.mp3?'
And if the record company set up a P2P app full of their music and sue whoever attempts to download it, they're on shaky ground. The music is, after all, theirs to distribute. They put it on P2P themselves. Surely there's no infringement of copyright when the copyright holder themselves is putting the stuff online?
Things might be different with BitTorrent, though. With that, if you're downloading something you're also making it, or parts of it, available to upload as you do so. In that case you're visible to the record company or their grasses.
I thought that when Cthulhu comes, the best thing to do is get eaten first? Then you avoid the worst of the insanity which will slowly devour the minds of the weak.
If you're worried about going insane, you're not sufficiently committed to the cause. I suggest you go into a dark room with a single black candle, eat half a dozen Psilocybe cubensis, and reread the loathsome Chapter Nineteen of the mad Arab's unspeakable Necronomicon, with particular reference to the nightmarish Figure 7a.
That ought to help you on the road to acceptance of your soon-to-be-permanent mental state. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Lobachevsky would be remembered as one of the greatest heretics to have ever lived
Unfortunately, he has been immortalised as far worse than a heretic. Thanks to a shameless musical slander, he's remembered in certain circles as a gigantic plagiarist...
"I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk. His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk whose friend somehow is solving now the problem in Dnieprpetrovsk! And when his work is done, ah-ha! begins the fun! From Dnieprpetrovsk to Petropavlovsk to Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk from Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk to me the news will run! - yes, to me the news will run! And then I write by morning, night, and afternoon, and pretty soon my name in Dnieprpetrovsk is cursed! When he finds out I published first!"
The King of the Potato People was an entity born of Arnold J. Rimmer's feverish delusions, in the episode 'Quarantine' from the fifth series of Red Dwarf. The rest of the crew are in quarantine enforced by Rimmer, ostensibly to avoid infecting the ship with a dangerous insanity virus, but really out of spite. Rimmer himself has managed to contract the virus anyway. The crew are trying to talk Rimmer into letting them out, and it becomes increasingly clear that he is insane, and so they attempt to humour him... leading to the immortal line:
"So let me get this straight. You have a magic carpet and you want to fly
on it to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your
freedom... and you're telling me you are completely sane?"
I went with the King of the Potato People because, since I was arguing that asking for favours from such entities is subject to a strange double standard, I thought the Red Dwarf association might work rather well, especially with a geek audience. The Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster have rather different symbolic meaning.
Actually, I was thinking more of The Last Battle, in which both sides of the theological debate use the 'not a tame lion' line to excuse the failure of their version of Aslan to turn up as expected...
And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. Invariable "success" in prayer would not prove the Christian doctrine at all. It would prove something more like magic -- a power in certain human beings to control, or compel, the course of nature."
Perhaps, but even sporadic success in prayer would show up in the statistics.
Imagine that you are the BOFH. Users email you incessantly with requests for more disk space. However, you do not always grant their prayers; you only grant greater disk space to those whose requests please you, those who catch you in a good mood, those who give good and just reason for their request... whatever your inscrutable policy may be.
Nonetheless, you do sometimes, however rarely, grant extra disk space. Then the users will be able to prove the existence of the BOFH, or at least the efficacy of emailing his account. For those who email will statistically have slightly more disk space than those who do not.
This won't be the case if you as BOFH also grant extra disk space to random users at your own initiative, in such a way that there is no statistical difference between those who mail you and those who do not. But in that case then it is statistically clear that mailing you makes no difference at all!
Praying for loved ones may not physically help a loved one, but certainly helps the mental state of the patient and their family.
Thought experiment: Replace 'God' with 'The King of the Potato People'. We'd call someone sending messages to the King of the Potato People to help their loved ones 'delusional', and put them on medication, and possibly in a padded cell.
Are you sure prayer is indicative of a healthy mental state? If so, explain how 'God' is different to 'The King of the Potato People', and why belief in one is delusional and psychiatrically treatable while the other is not.
Am I the only one that thinks that this Swedish "Pirate Party" is a thinly veiled attempt by the "Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster" (www.venganza.org) to beef up their ranks and prevent global warming?
Wrong kind of pirate.
Anyway, when Swedes go in for pillage and murder on the high seas, they don't call themselves pirates. They're Vikings. Much, much scarier;-)
The first thing you would notice is that it still takes some small amount of time to reach your destination (rougly 8 minutes).
Nope. For an external observer, your journey would take 8 minutes. For you, it would take no time at all.
And, for that matter, it would cover no distance at all. Length contraction, y'see. The distance between Earth and Sun, if you're travelling at lightspeed, is exactly zero metres.
Slashdot Mirror
More seriously...
I got hold of a Taiwanese boxset of DBZ. Got into the habit of pausing it just as the Japanese episode title came up, and before the subtitle translating it did. Then try to read out the title (thank Kami-sama for furigana!) and then hit play and see what the voiceover guy says.
By the time the Cell Games came round, I was getting quite good at it. Learning by repetition, I suppose... there's only so many times you can get 'SUUPAA SAIYAJIN' wrong :-)
AFAIK, in the US (which is where MIT is) it's not a crime, it's a civil offence. Things vary in other countries; I think it actually is a crime in the UK.
Quite a point. Google sees everything you do online, and a cunning questioner can get more information about you than you might think.
Some script kiddie got into a webforum I rather liked a few months ago. Obsolete version of Invision with more holes than a Sierpinski gasket. He Defaced it, deleted stuff, the usual crap. Gloated about his leetness under his leet hacker's handle.
Which led to other places he'd posted.
Which led to other names he'd used.
Which led to a website.
Which had a whois record.
Which had a phone number.
Which was answered by his mother.
We got a photo of him from his eighth-grade spelling bee, too. Cute kid :-)
No need to go to all this trouble for that, surely? Why, they could just check the evil bit!
I have two phones in my pocket right now. An old, battered pay-as-you-go phone in such a state that no mugger would touch it - it's scarcely worth the time it would take to fence - and a new, flashy, expensive contract phone which they'd grab without a doubt.
This isn't actually done out of paranoia, just because I haven't got around to transferring the number from the old phone to the new yet. Security through laziness, the new paradigm :-)
Ever called a Frenchman a 'frog' because that's what they eat?
Well, guess what they call the English.
It's a good party, but... a bit crowded, unless you've got a lot of meatspace geek friends.
If you're doing the space cowboy thing with a lower headcount, you might reconfigure that to two fighters (one quite a brawler, the other all about finesse), one hacker, one femme fatale...
That would probably be White Wolf. Something like "OMG: the Ponies".
However, it might possibly end up like this... No, you can't be Skullfucker Bear.
... 12 years is pretty darn quick, given that these are Americans, most of whom, it seems, aren't quite up to speed with the latest discoveries from 1859 just yet.
And if the record company set up a P2P app full of their music and sue whoever attempts to download it, they're on shaky ground. The music is, after all, theirs to distribute. They put it on P2P themselves. Surely there's no infringement of copyright when the copyright holder themselves is putting the stuff online?
Things might be different with BitTorrent, though. With that, if you're downloading something you're also making it, or parts of it, available to upload as you do so. In that case you're visible to the record company or their grasses.
AFAIK, the warheads are designed and built in the UK, I believe at the AWE plant at Aldermaston.
It's the rockets we buy from the US, and the submarines that they're loaded onto.
On Slashdot, that sounds like a challenge!
If you're worried about going insane, you're not sufficiently committed to the cause. I suggest you go into a dark room with a single black candle, eat half a dozen Psilocybe cubensis, and reread the loathsome Chapter Nineteen of the mad Arab's unspeakable Necronomicon, with particular reference to the nightmarish Figure 7a.
That ought to help you on the road to acceptance of your soon-to-be-permanent mental state. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Unfortunately, he has been immortalised as far worse than a heretic. Thanks to a shameless musical slander, he's remembered in certain circles as a gigantic plagiarist...
"I have a friend in Minsk, who has a friend in Pinsk, whose friend in Omsk has friend in Tomsk with friend in Akmolinsk. His friend in Alexandrovsk has friend in Petropavlovsk whose friend somehow is solving now the problem in Dnieprpetrovsk! And when his work is done, ah-ha! begins the fun! From Dnieprpetrovsk to Petropavlovsk to Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk from Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk to me the news will run! - yes, to me the news will run! And then I write by morning, night, and afternoon, and pretty soon my name in Dnieprpetrovsk is cursed! When he finds out I published first!"
-- Tom Lehrer, Lobachevsky
The King of the Potato People was an entity born of Arnold J. Rimmer's feverish delusions, in the episode 'Quarantine' from the fifth series of Red Dwarf. The rest of the crew are in quarantine enforced by Rimmer, ostensibly to avoid infecting the ship with a dangerous insanity virus, but really out of spite. Rimmer himself has managed to contract the virus anyway. The crew are trying to talk Rimmer into letting them out, and it becomes increasingly clear that he is insane, and so they attempt to humour him... leading to the immortal line:
"So let me get this straight. You have a magic carpet and you want to fly on it to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your freedom... and you're telling me you are completely sane?"
I went with the King of the Potato People because, since I was arguing that asking for favours from such entities is subject to a strange double standard, I thought the Red Dwarf association might work rather well, especially with a geek audience. The Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster have rather different symbolic meaning.
Actually, I was thinking more of The Last Battle, in which both sides of the theological debate use the 'not a tame lion' line to excuse the failure of their version of Aslan to turn up as expected...
Perhaps, but even sporadic success in prayer would show up in the statistics.
Imagine that you are the BOFH. Users email you incessantly with requests for more disk space. However, you do not always grant their prayers; you only grant greater disk space to those whose requests please you, those who catch you in a good mood, those who give good and just reason for their request... whatever your inscrutable policy may be.
Nonetheless, you do sometimes, however rarely, grant extra disk space. Then the users will be able to prove the existence of the BOFH, or at least the efficacy of emailing his account. For those who email will statistically have slightly more disk space than those who do not.
This won't be the case if you as BOFH also grant extra disk space to random users at your own initiative, in such a way that there is no statistical difference between those who mail you and those who do not. But in that case then it is statistically clear that mailing you makes no difference at all!
Counterexample: I had this dream once where I wished upon a star, and nothing happened...
... after all, he's not a tame lion!
Thought experiment: Replace 'God' with 'The King of the Potato People'. We'd call someone sending messages to the King of the Potato People to help their loved ones 'delusional', and put them on medication, and possibly in a padded cell.
Are you sure prayer is indicative of a healthy mental state? If so, explain how 'God' is different to 'The King of the Potato People', and why belief in one is delusional and psychiatrically treatable while the other is not.
In detention. Apparently he's been a very naughty boy.
Wrong kind of pirate.
Anyway, when Swedes go in for pillage and murder on the high seas, they don't call themselves pirates. They're Vikings. Much, much scarier ;-)
Nope. For an external observer, your journey would take 8 minutes. For you, it would take no time at all.
And, for that matter, it would cover no distance at all. Length contraction, y'see. The distance between Earth and Sun, if you're travelling at lightspeed, is exactly zero metres.
Translation: the demo DSs have been thoroughly mauled by an endless parade of people wanting to play on them. Nobody's even touched the PSP.
Movie, schmovie. It was a great comic, though.