Depends which ones. It tailed off after a while as Anonymous got bored, to the point where only a few bothered to turn up, but the first couple of months got pretty good turnouts and reasonable amounts of press coverage. Lulz were had from Scientology representatives explaining about the terrorist organisation threatening them - scene cuts to a bunch of emo teens in Guy Fawkes masks with banners and placards mostly about cats of unusual length and Rick Astley.
As for numbers, I doubt any individual protest ever got more than a couple of hundred at a time, but worldwide at peak it's estimated that there were over 9000 out on the streets.
""A 'loose coalition of Internet denizens,' Anonymous consists largely of users from multiple internet sites such as 4chan, 711chan, 420chan, Something Awful, Fark, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Slashdot, IRC channels, and YouTube. "
In your face, Digg! Yeah!
Never mind Digg, the list's missing an important entry here. Anyone who's ever been raided knows perfectly well that Anonymous come from ebaumsworld.
4chan? Terrorists? Yeah, they terrorise people with pictures of cats with bad grammar skills. Sometimes they post foolish people's personal details. Clearly a threat to the free world as we know it.
You may say that, but I have contacts within the inner circle of Anonymous, and I'm given to understand that they have a laser. And they're charging it. And they don't afraid of anything.
To be quite honest... I haven't even seen much past series 4. Maybe I should catch up before watching this =/
Series 5 is good. 6 I didn't much like at the time, but in hindsight it's great. 7 is awful. 8 deserves a custodial sentence for anyone involved in its creation.
I fear that this is going to be worse. I'll watch it anyway of course:-)
Red Dwarf works in the EU because it is a bunch of losers losing out. American's don't like that and this can be clearly seen by their version of Red Dwarf, the red dwarf movie changes or for that matter the talks Terry Pratchett had about having his books turns into hollywood movies (loose death from Mort).
This. I think Americans still believe in heroes. They tend to want a sympathetic protagonist who is a good person and who generally wins. This is not so much the case over here: we have a far more cynical outlook, whereby if presented with someone who fits the heroic archetype we start to wonder what his real agenda is because nobody is genuinely like that.
So when we do a character-driven comedy show, our protagonists aren't usually nice people. They don't live in a nice world. They don't generally win in the end. Basil Fawlty is burning up with frustrated ambition and bitter hate. David Brent is so utterly self-absorbed that he thinks he's a great guy, though he's one of the most dreadful people you'll ever meet. Edmund Blackadder is entirely selfish and unprincipled in all incarnations, whether he is a prince or nobleman scheming endlessly for advancement through deceits and lies, an unscrupulous butler manipulating his foolish master to his own ends, or a craven army officer with utter contempt for his superiors bent only on self-preservation. Steptoe and son are trapped in poverty with a business soon to be entirely forgotten, gnawing on each other for lack of anything else in sight to blame. James Hacker MP is well intentioned, but weak, and the show is stolen by Sir Humphrey Appleby who must have come straight from hell. Even the Trotter brothers, decent enough people on the whole, are petty criminals. Spreading the net a little wider we find the parish of Craggy Island served by a fraud, an idiot, and a violent drunk. And our topic here, Red Dwarf, is fundamentally about a few completely awful people trapped in each other's company and collectively making their own little nightmare world a little worse every day.
The nearest America gets to that is probably Homer Simpson. Yet despite the critics endlessly and lazily describing his family as 'dysfunctional', it isn't. He's a devoted family man who can be relied upon to do the right thing, if only after trying everything else first. Otherwise, well... remember Friends? Oh God it makes me want to puke.
Doubt it would make any difference. The idea here is to reduce the amount of sunlight by releasing a lot of reflective particulates into the atmosphere. But Venus already has 100% all-white cloud cover. Short of installing actual mirrors, it would be difficult to make that atmosphere any more reflective than it already is.
I know this is somewhat off topic, but did anybody else ever watch The great global warming swindle?
Yes. According to Channel 4, it wasn't actually a documentary, but a polemic, so it didn't have to be factually accurate in any way.
Which explains why Carl Wunsch, a scientist interviewed for the programme, was so upset at how his material was used:
"In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous--because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important--diametrically opposite to the point I was making--which is that global warming is both real and threatening."
Tap water is perfectly safe pretty much anywhere in the developed world. It may not taste ideal; that's why you run it through a filter and let it stand in the fridge for a while. The filter's usually not the important part: it's more the standing in the fridge, which allows the dissolved gases left over from the treatment plant that affect the taste to escape.
I must have missed the part where Ghandi, Washington and Mandela killed their own people to obtain their freedom.
I think you're correct about Gandhi, but Mandela was a terrorist all right - he was in prison all those years for a reason you know. As for Washington, plenty of the colonists had no desire to rise up in treason against the Crown, and I am far from certain that they were well treated by the revolutionary factions either during or after the war; certainly some were executed for collaboration with the British forces, and I do not doubt that many more instances of violence go unrecorded as part of the campaign of intimidation against opponents of the revolt.
I'd put this to you - if civilians understood that they would get killed in wars too, they might be a lot less likely to build, finance and cheer on the armies to fight them.
This was more or less the reasoning behind the 2005 bombings on the London Underground.
If Fallujah is ok we should have a gas chamber game. You go around in a big truck and kill thousands of jews, I see no moral reprehensibility. (Is it still a Godwin if its relevant?)
Your forces have conquered Jerusalem!
* Install a new governor
* Raze the city
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I'm normally at my genocidal best when it comes to playing Alpha Centauri: sunspot activity gives you twenty turns in which the international community won't pay any attention to your atrocities, and missile needlejets equipped with nerve gas pods are such a wonderful weapon in your first major wars...
Over 1300 "insurgents" dead, less than 100 Americans.
I see what you mean. That kill ratio is pretty extreme.
You can't have the player getting killed one encounter in 13. They'll have to tone it down a whole lot, I reckon. Something nearer 100:1 would be nearer the typical FPS ratio.
... don't we really mean something like 'too soon'? After all, Fallujah was a fairly trivial battle by historic standards. Surely it's in far worse taste to make fun videogames out of World War 2?
Anyway, I just hope there's an option to play as the Iraqi resistance. I remember once playing one of the Call of Duty games - it began with a pretty well made Pearl Harbour, and I was terribly disappointed to learn that you had to be the Americans.
I don't recall that the Vatican was in the business of predicting earthquakes.
Rev 11:13 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
They don't give a date, though. Or indeed a clear idea of which city this is: 'the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified' could be at least three places even before you start considering metaphor.
If you make your ads play nice with me, I'll stop using ad-blocker software. I'll look at your ads and I might even buy something from them.
I used to say that. But think it through. Suppose they do make their ads play nice - how will you know that they did? I haven't a clue what the internet looks like on the other side of my filters, and I'm not much inclined to try it and find out.
"Just imagine, they argue, what television programs would be available if there were no commercials to fund their production. "
Well, for a start, there'd be Doctor Who, Life on Mars, and the spinoffs thereof; almost every decent comedy series ever aired from Monty Python through to The Office; the entire 40-odd year David Attenborough world tour of all of ecology and zoology; and God only knows how many period dramas where 90% of the budget went on costumes.
But there would be a definite shortage of Big Brother, I'll give them that.
Well, according to KCNA, the launch was a total success, a shining product of Korean self-reliance and an inspiration to the whole Korean people. No, really.
Suppose you measure 2^10 of your electrons on the x-axis. Some time later, I come along and measure the equivalent electrons in two groups of 2^9 each, half on the x- and half on the y- axis. One of those two groups won't be correlated, and one will.
So: I measure 2**10 electrons on the x axis and get a random string of + and -.
You then measure 2**9 electrons on the x axis and get a random string of + and - (which happen to be identical to the first half of my string), and then another 2**9 electrons on the y axis and get another random string of + and - (which bear no particular resemblance to the second half of my string).
Until you get my slower-than-light email telling you what values I measured at my end, how can you prove which of the two strings is correlated? You can't tell whether I chose the x or the y axis, so no information has been transferred.
Sorry, but we already have faster-than-light communication trough quantum entanglement. The change in state happens instantly, without any delay, no matter what the distance is. Of course in praxis, you would first have to fly a large mass of entangled matter to the other place at sub-light speed. But when it's there, you could communicate at FTL speeds, until the matter is used up.
No we don't, and no you couldn't. I suppose you're thinking of the EPR paradox? Very well. Let us say that I have a set of electrons in equal spin superpositions, and you, at some distant location, have their entangled counterparts. What's the protocol for communication?
Well, if I measure the spin of my electron 0 about the x axis, then in doing so I will also establish the spin of your electron 0 about that axis. The superposition on your electron has vanished without you touching it. Terrific, that's communication, right? I collapse your electrons in sequence, this one on the x axis, this one y, this one x, and so on, a binary code?
Well, no, it doesn't work like that. How can you tell if I've done anything at my end? By making measurements of your electrons? No - because that will collapse the superposition too. Let's say I measure electron 0's spin around the x axis to be positive. Immediately and instantaneously, faster than light across the universe, the superposition on your electron 0 collapses and I know it to be positive about the x axis.
But you don't know that. You might pick the y axis to measure, which is still a superposition. Or you might pick the x axis, and certainly you'll get a +, but you might have got that anyway. You can measure each electron only once - you change its state in doing so - so you can't do a series of tests, build up the statistics and find that on the y axis it's a 50/50 shot but on the x axis it's + every time. That's what you'd need to do in order to determine that I'd chosen the x axis. That's what you'd need in order to communicate faster than light. But since you only ever get one measurement, you get no information about what I did at the other end.
You are at about ten times more likely to have your car stolen in the UK... My argument is this: Offering violence to criminals reduces their numbers.
So... do Americans typically install some kind of automated sentry gun on the dashboard that fires upon anyone attempting to steal the car? Or do they perhaps go out in pairs, and one guy stands armed guard over the car while the other goes shopping? Because otherwise I'm struggling to see how your gun, which you have with you, protects your car, which you're not actually in at the time it gets stolen.
You do have a right of self defence. You don't have the right to kill someone.
As a matter of fact you do. You're allowed to use reasonable force in self-defence, and if that's what it takes, then that can include lethal force. That doesn't mean that you're allowed to rig your house and grounds with booby-traps, or pursue a retreating intruder outside and shoot him in the back as he flees, of course; that's barbaric and you'd rightly be locked away for a long time.
The reason there are so many burglaries in that area (and the UK as a whole) is because the citizens of that once great nation have been deprived of their right to self defence and the right to defend their property.
Really? When did that happen? Was it recently? Because I don't recall anything like that happening. Was there some time when a substantial proportion of the British public owned firearms for self-defence against burglars, and at which time the rate of burglary was lower? I fear my knowledge of history fails me at this point, for I can think of no such epoch.
Slashdot Mirror
As for numbers, I doubt any individual protest ever got more than a couple of hundred at a time, but worldwide at peak it's estimated that there were over 9000 out on the streets.
Never mind Digg, the list's missing an important entry here. Anyone who's ever been raided knows perfectly well that Anonymous come from ebaumsworld.
You may say that, but I have contacts within the inner circle of Anonymous, and I'm given to understand that they have a laser. And they're charging it. And they don't afraid of anything.
Series 5 is good. 6 I didn't much like at the time, but in hindsight it's great. 7 is awful. 8 deserves a custodial sentence for anyone involved in its creation.
I fear that this is going to be worse. I'll watch it anyway of course :-)
This. I think Americans still believe in heroes. They tend to want a sympathetic protagonist who is a good person and who generally wins. This is not so much the case over here: we have a far more cynical outlook, whereby if presented with someone who fits the heroic archetype we start to wonder what his real agenda is because nobody is genuinely like that.
So when we do a character-driven comedy show, our protagonists aren't usually nice people. They don't live in a nice world. They don't generally win in the end. Basil Fawlty is burning up with frustrated ambition and bitter hate. David Brent is so utterly self-absorbed that he thinks he's a great guy, though he's one of the most dreadful people you'll ever meet. Edmund Blackadder is entirely selfish and unprincipled in all incarnations, whether he is a prince or nobleman scheming endlessly for advancement through deceits and lies, an unscrupulous butler manipulating his foolish master to his own ends, or a craven army officer with utter contempt for his superiors bent only on self-preservation. Steptoe and son are trapped in poverty with a business soon to be entirely forgotten, gnawing on each other for lack of anything else in sight to blame. James Hacker MP is well intentioned, but weak, and the show is stolen by Sir Humphrey Appleby who must have come straight from hell. Even the Trotter brothers, decent enough people on the whole, are petty criminals. Spreading the net a little wider we find the parish of Craggy Island served by a fraud, an idiot, and a violent drunk. And our topic here, Red Dwarf, is fundamentally about a few completely awful people trapped in each other's company and collectively making their own little nightmare world a little worse every day.
The nearest America gets to that is probably Homer Simpson. Yet despite the critics endlessly and lazily describing his family as 'dysfunctional', it isn't. He's a devoted family man who can be relied upon to do the right thing, if only after trying everything else first. Otherwise, well... remember Friends? Oh God it makes me want to puke.
If Sister Miriam isn't already inside a punishment sphere by the time 'Launch Solar Shade' comes onto the agenda, something's gone very, very wrong.
Doubt it would make any difference. The idea here is to reduce the amount of sunlight by releasing a lot of reflective particulates into the atmosphere. But Venus already has 100% all-white cloud cover. Short of installing actual mirrors, it would be difficult to make that atmosphere any more reflective than it already is.
Yes. According to Channel 4, it wasn't actually a documentary, but a polemic, so it didn't have to be factually accurate in any way.
Which explains why Carl Wunsch, a scientist interviewed for the programme, was so upset at how his material was used:
Still, it was an important contribution to the ongoing debate. Here's how the film maker goes about debate.
Tap water is perfectly safe pretty much anywhere in the developed world. It may not taste ideal; that's why you run it through a filter and let it stand in the fridge for a while. The filter's usually not the important part: it's more the standing in the fridge, which allows the dissolved gases left over from the treatment plant that affect the taste to escape.
I think you're correct about Gandhi, but Mandela was a terrorist all right - he was in prison all those years for a reason you know. As for Washington, plenty of the colonists had no desire to rise up in treason against the Crown, and I am far from certain that they were well treated by the revolutionary factions either during or after the war; certainly some were executed for collaboration with the British forces, and I do not doubt that many more instances of violence go unrecorded as part of the campaign of intimidation against opponents of the revolt.
This was more or less the reasoning behind the 2005 bombings on the London Underground.
Like this one?
Your forces have conquered Jerusalem!
* Install a new governor
* Raze the city
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I'm normally at my genocidal best when it comes to playing Alpha Centauri: sunspot activity gives you twenty turns in which the international community won't pay any attention to your atrocities, and missile needlejets equipped with nerve gas pods are such a wonderful weapon in your first major wars...
I see what you mean. That kill ratio is pretty extreme.
You can't have the player getting killed one encounter in 13. They'll have to tone it down a whole lot, I reckon. Something nearer 100:1 would be nearer the typical FPS ratio.
Something wrong with that? Way I see it, they're upholding the finest traditions that made the free world what it is today.
Anyway, I just hope there's an option to play as the Iraqi resistance. I remember once playing one of the Call of Duty games - it began with a pretty well made Pearl Harbour, and I was terribly disappointed to learn that you had to be the Americans.
Rev 11:13 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
They don't give a date, though. Or indeed a clear idea of which city this is: 'the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified' could be at least three places even before you start considering metaphor.
I used to say that. But think it through. Suppose they do make their ads play nice - how will you know that they did? I haven't a clue what the internet looks like on the other side of my filters, and I'm not much inclined to try it and find out.
Well, for a start, there'd be Doctor Who, Life on Mars, and the spinoffs thereof; almost every decent comedy series ever aired from Monty Python through to The Office; the entire 40-odd year David Attenborough world tour of all of ecology and zoology; and God only knows how many period dramas where 90% of the budget went on costumes.
But there would be a definite shortage of Big Brother, I'll give them that.
Well, according to KCNA, the launch was a total success, a shining product of Korean self-reliance and an inspiration to the whole Korean people. No, really.
So: I measure 2**10 electrons on the x axis and get a random string of + and -.
You then measure 2**9 electrons on the x axis and get a random string of + and - (which happen to be identical to the first half of my string), and then another 2**9 electrons on the y axis and get another random string of + and - (which bear no particular resemblance to the second half of my string).
Until you get my slower-than-light email telling you what values I measured at my end, how can you prove which of the two strings is correlated? You can't tell whether I chose the x or the y axis, so no information has been transferred.
No we don't, and no you couldn't. I suppose you're thinking of the EPR paradox? Very well. Let us say that I have a set of electrons in equal spin superpositions, and you, at some distant location, have their entangled counterparts. What's the protocol for communication?
Well, if I measure the spin of my electron 0 about the x axis, then in doing so I will also establish the spin of your electron 0 about that axis. The superposition on your electron has vanished without you touching it. Terrific, that's communication, right? I collapse your electrons in sequence, this one on the x axis, this one y, this one x, and so on, a binary code?
Well, no, it doesn't work like that. How can you tell if I've done anything at my end? By making measurements of your electrons? No - because that will collapse the superposition too. Let's say I measure electron 0's spin around the x axis to be positive. Immediately and instantaneously, faster than light across the universe, the superposition on your electron 0 collapses and I know it to be positive about the x axis.
But you don't know that. You might pick the y axis to measure, which is still a superposition. Or you might pick the x axis, and certainly you'll get a +, but you might have got that anyway. You can measure each electron only once - you change its state in doing so - so you can't do a series of tests, build up the statistics and find that on the y axis it's a 50/50 shot but on the x axis it's + every time. That's what you'd need to do in order to determine that I'd chosen the x axis. That's what you'd need in order to communicate faster than light. But since you only ever get one measurement, you get no information about what I did at the other end.
So... do Americans typically install some kind of automated sentry gun on the dashboard that fires upon anyone attempting to steal the car? Or do they perhaps go out in pairs, and one guy stands armed guard over the car while the other goes shopping? Because otherwise I'm struggling to see how your gun, which you have with you, protects your car, which you're not actually in at the time it gets stolen.
You do have a right of self defence. You don't have the right to kill someone. As a matter of fact you do. You're allowed to use reasonable force in self-defence, and if that's what it takes, then that can include lethal force. That doesn't mean that you're allowed to rig your house and grounds with booby-traps, or pursue a retreating intruder outside and shoot him in the back as he flees, of course; that's barbaric and you'd rightly be locked away for a long time.
Really? When did that happen? Was it recently? Because I don't recall anything like that happening. Was there some time when a substantial proportion of the British public owned firearms for self-defence against burglars, and at which time the rate of burglary was lower? I fear my knowledge of history fails me at this point, for I can think of no such epoch.