Download "The Power of Nightmares" from archive.org, clips from the video are included in the documentary as I recall.
Yes. Do. Right now. If you haven't seen this, and if you still believe a damn thing either George Bush, Michael Moore or Osama bin Laden have to say about The War Against Terror, download this, watch it, be enlightened. Learn why they want you afraid, and how little reason there actually is to be frightened.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Since this is now an oldish discussion, posting three links to ~200MB files on/. is probably not as terrible an idea as it initially sounds:)
Original: "Kawaii! Nintendo DS!" Translation: "Cool! Sony PSP!"
Sudden flashbacks to perhaps the best bit of translation I ever saw. Evangelion. The episode where Asuka first appears. Kensuke's been let loose on an aircraft carrier and he's going around with his camera getting extremely over-excited looking at all the planes and stuff.
Subtitles: 'Amazing! Cool! Fantastic! Really brilliant! Terrific! Super-brilliant!'... and so on.
Kensuke himself: 'Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi!'...
It did make me wonder... is Japanese really so short of excitable superlatives? Or is Kensuke just totally inarticulate?
And if I just keep saying 'sugoi!' to the PSP, will it, too, raid the English thesaurus in order not to appear boring?:)
Sure. My Japanese is restricted to what I pick up from anime, but the phrase here was fairly simple:
'Koko wa doko desu ka'
'Doko desu ka' means 'where is it?'. Whatever you stick before 'wa' is the it to which 'doko desu ka' refers. 'Koko' is 'here', so the question is effectively 'where is here?' or in better English, 'where is this?'
So, you want p0rn? Simple. 'P0rn wa doko desu ka'. Except that you'll probably have to spell it in Japanese lettering at some point, so 'Porunno wa doko desu ka' might be the way forward:)
Have you not read the dictionary definition of futility? It's called trying to have a conversation with a London cabbie and you have a liberal viewpoint. All conversations of this form end with "You a fackin' queer or sumthin?" and no tip.
There was a delightful strip in Viz a few years back. It's well known that London cabbies have to pass a test on what is called The Knowledge - of every last road in the city. They're tested on the routes they'd take. So, says the examiner in the cartoon, how would you get from [point A] to point [B]?
Are you a Londoner or a tourist? asks the student cabbie.
A Londoner, the examiner replies. Right, says the cabbie, and proposes a short and efficient route to the destination which is pretty much just around the corner. And if I were a tourist? is the next question. Cue a monstrously long path involving several motorways.
Good, says the examiner, you've passed The Knowledge. Now for The Ignorance. How would you get from 'How about that Billie Piper' to 'Send 'em all back home'?
Wolfenstein 3-D had only the first episode available for free, with a registration fee required before Apogee (id's publisher at the time) would send you the rest of the game in the mail.
'Twas the same with Doom. The first part of it was free to download, to copy around, it was on every magazine coverdisk for months... I got to the point where I knew my way around Knee-Deep in the Dead better than I did my own high school:)
Never really got into the other two episodes, when I finally did get around to getting the full version. Sure, it was still Doom, but it just wasn't the same...
... I wonder if we could use them for our own ends?
Consider: The US government restricts the export of strong encryption products under munitions laws.
Therefore: the US government considers encryption to be a weapon.
Therefore: the means to defeat encryption is also a weapon.
Therefore: libdvdcss is a weapon.
Therefore: the DMCA is unconstitutional, violating as it does the Second Amendment.
Can we possibly get the huge NRA block vote and lobbying power on our side in this quarrel?
I read in Amateur Photographer that the solution is to wear a high visibility vest or jacket, the kind that workmen or emergency services people wear. One chap said since he started wearing one while photographing he hasn't been stopped by anyone - I guess because he looks "official":-)
Brethren! This is a wonderful idea! If we make our bomb jackets fluorescent yellow, and wear hard hats, nobody will ever stop us! We'll look just like official workmen and will be able to walk right up to crucial pieces of infrastructure and gloriously destroy them for the Sheikh Osama and the New Caliphate! It is a wonderful day for the Jihad! Alahuakbar! Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!
The vast majority of Universities in the United States are 150 years old or less.
This part, at least, is also true in the UK. In England, only Oxford, Cambridge and Durham are really ancient; in Scotland, AFAIK only Edinburgh and St. Andrew's. I believe the London universities have mediaeval roots, in guild schools and the like, but IIRC they didn't form a university till relatively recently. Most of the other well-regarded universities (the likes of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester etc) were established in the mid 19th century. There was another wave in the 1960s (most notably Warwick and the Open) and a bunch more new universities in the last couple of decades, former polytechnics and whatnot.
If you still insist blaming some one Spain, Portugal, Holland and to a lesser degree England are equally to blame.
To a lesser degree? Try 'to a far greater, spectacularly and unbelievably monstrous, like Hitler compared to Mussolini, enormous degree'. The Spanish and Portuguese may have started the Atlantic slave trade, but the English... well, we really made a fucking killing at it. And then we banned slavery. Like that made things better. Then you got the whole bloody awful business of chaining all the slaves together so you could sling the whole lot of 'em overboard at once if you catch sight of the Royal Navy on your way across and claim innocence.
Reading this thread, it's interesting that Americans are claiming not to have been taught of the European involvement in the slave trade. But then I recall seeing an interview once, of Mohammad Ali in his heyday, being interviewed by Parkinson on the BBC. This is in his militant African Islam phase. He's just had a rant about how his people hate white America because of what they did during the slave days - then, realising he ought to be polite to his audience, says he has nothing against the British because we had nothing to do with all that. Cue nervous frozen expressions on all in studio... 'well, do YOU want to tell him?'
And I'm sorry but some Africans do deserve a share. In some ways that was even worse because they were selling their own people into slavery.
Dead right there. There is occasionally talk that the European slaver nations should make financial restitution to the African nations for the depredations of slavery. I for one reject this idea: we already paid the Africans for slavery, at a price they were more than willing to accept. Very few slaves were actually kidnapped, Kunta Kinte style, by European slavers; they were bought from other Africans.
Bloody Americans, always thinking that 100 years is a long time.
Yeah. Silly upstart nation that they are. On a totally unrelated note, I've got to make a trip up to Liverpool soon; it's about a hundred miles, which is a bloody long way...
But we'll all be thankful when terrorism goes away for good, though, right guys?!
I recall the case of the Arabic-looking students on a trip to Disneyland, whose home-video of their fun day out was later used against them as evidence of a terrorist plot. Apparently they spent an awful lot of time in places that would be good to bomb - like long queues. Obviously there's no other reason why a visitor to Disneyland would spend a lot of time in long queues...
People don't realize how eager the ACLU is to throw in a helping hand.
* Right-wing Slashdot groupthink ON *
Rubbish. The ACLU don't do anything to protect my gun rights, therefore they're completely useless at protecting anyone elses rights about anything else ever. NRA4EVER!
What is their motivation to put out a new version of IE as opposed to something like say, MS Office, where they make 100-300 bucks a pop on it?
Not much, which is why they've not released a new version in so long. But the current version of IE is obsolete, has an appalling reputation for security, and is causing significant numbers of people to switch to Firefox and Opera, which are, at present, vastly superior. If people get into the habit of trying out alternatives to MS software, discover how much better they are... what OTHER MS software might they try out alternatives to?
They've got to maintain the monopoly mindset where everything on the computer is Microsoft, and Joe Average never even has any idea that there are alternatives that might be desirable.
I find it odd that their policies say they may suspend people if their character/guild/pet name contains a reference to sexual orientation, but the worst that happens to a name that contains a reference to religion (covered under "inappropriate") is a warning.
Right. Just a warning for religious references, eh? We'll see about that.
For something that talks about the "evolution" of controllers, they could of at least listed paddles and light guns; two staples of controllers from yesteryear.
Oh, come off it. The only thing anyone will tell you about light gun games of yesteryear is 'I always wished I could shoot that damn dog.' I've seen some reasonable arcade games using light guns, and I'll grant that I've had good times with a Dreamcast, a copy of House of the Dead and playing both players at once with a light gun in each hand, going all John Woo... but really, light guns were always a gimmick, a toy used for a few oddball games.
As a huge fan of KotOR, I can say that the Rev controller would be much more ideal for that game than the XBox controller.
Hell, it would be better than mouse and keyboard for KOTOR. Remember, in that game, you spend most of your time using a lightsaber...
* has a mental vision of spending Christmas '06 in front of the TV with a Revolution controller in hand, going 'whummm... whmmm... KHSSSSKKK! whmmm... Surrender to the Dark Side!'
A while back, this was known as Google Bombing and certain individuals exploited Google's system very effectively by linking to pages with words that, by all rights, were not very accurate. After all, do a Google search for the word 'failure' and the top site is George W. Bush's Whitehouse domain Biography.
Hang on, I thought you were going to give an example of googlebombing leading to inaccurate results?
Now, on the other hand, what b3ta did to Damon Albarn really wasn't nice...
"Beavers explosively attack people with their menacing teeth. They are the most deadly animals alive."
I'm particularly amused by the note in subscript after that remarkable claim:
'Citation needed.'
Which gives me a mental image of a wikipedia editor like some genial dusty old university professor saying 'Not that we don't believe you about the deadly beavers, you understand, just that you haven't properly cited a source for this claim of yours...'
So, I can't help but wonder what these folks will do when the fecal material hits the air circulating device. Will they stand by their principles, or will they rationalize their way into the vaccination line?
1: The plagues have begun.
2: I'm still here.
3: The Rapture has been and gone, and didn't take me, and so few were saved that we didn't even notice it.
4: Therefore, I'm not one of the Saved.
5: Therefore, I'm one of the Damned.
6: Therefore, I might as well please myself and have the flu shots.
7: Furthermore, I might as well please myself and loot the nearest electronics store. The owners are Damned too, and it's no sin to steal from the Damned, and since I'm Damned anyway it doesn't matter if it IS a sin...
Don't you know better than to post anything that is not uber-liberal under your real nick? This is Slashdot, where uber-liberal groupthink is cool and anything else is anathema.
Slashdot, liberal? Well, possibly, but not in the modern sense of the word. I read posts here and I find the consensus to be of a broadly right-wing anarchistic bent. Something approaching the world of Snow Crash seems to be the ideal here. Government, according to/. groupthink, should get the hell out of people's lives, and not interfere either by (a) overextending copyright terms, (b) taxing people beyond a bare minimum, (c) telling us what programs we can and cannot create, or (d) going off on hugely expensive and completely unnecessary wars.
Furthermore, what does the issue here have to do with any party-political agenda? This is a scientific issue, no more susceptible to political ideology than was genetics, and look where Lysenkoism led...
Do you know how long they've been down there? No one does. But my guess is the squid and it's precurser have been down there in the depths for a lot longer than man has been knucklewalking.
Worse than that. Squid swam in the nightmarish primaeval seas alongside the first ancestral vertebrates. These loathsome mollusks are so utterly alien and horribly ancient that even the natural fishes of the sea are more closely related to us than to them.
They've been lurking in the inky blackness for aeons longer than human mind will dare compass, turning over in their twisted minds their hatred against the entire race of the vertebrae, which in an age long forgotten to all but the most thorough palaeontologists seized all the world for its dominion and left the squid-kind in the uttermost night.
And you think it's only mankind they will destroy. No, it's everything we know as normal they hate. This dreadful loathing is more ancient than we can ever hope to conceive, and on the scale of the squid-creatures' appalling thoughts all the ages of human history and all mankind's mighty works are a mere scribble on the latest page of a very, very long history...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. Do. Right now. If you haven't seen this, and if you still believe a damn thing either George Bush, Michael Moore or Osama bin Laden have to say about The War Against Terror, download this, watch it, be enlightened. Learn why they want you afraid, and how little reason there actually is to be frightened.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Since this is now an oldish discussion, posting three links to ~200MB files on /. is probably not as terrible an idea as it initially sounds :)
Sudden flashbacks to perhaps the best bit of translation I ever saw. Evangelion. The episode where Asuka first appears. Kensuke's been let loose on an aircraft carrier and he's going around with his camera getting extremely over-excited looking at all the planes and stuff.
Subtitles: 'Amazing! Cool! Fantastic! Really brilliant! Terrific! Super-brilliant!'... and so on.
Kensuke himself: 'Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi! Sugoi!'...
It did make me wonder... is Japanese really so short of excitable superlatives? Or is Kensuke just totally inarticulate?
And if I just keep saying 'sugoi!' to the PSP, will it, too, raid the English thesaurus in order not to appear boring? :)
Sure. My Japanese is restricted to what I pick up from anime, but the phrase here was fairly simple:
'Koko wa doko desu ka'
'Doko desu ka' means 'where is it?'. Whatever you stick before 'wa' is the it to which 'doko desu ka' refers. 'Koko' is 'here', so the question is effectively 'where is here?' or in better English, 'where is this?'
So, you want p0rn? Simple. 'P0rn wa doko desu ka'. Except that you'll probably have to spell it in Japanese lettering at some point, so 'Porunno wa doko desu ka' might be the way forward :)
...Rutokitto wa nan desssssssss$SYS$
KORE WA RUTOKITTO JA ARIMASEN. REALLY. HONEST.
There was a delightful strip in Viz a few years back. It's well known that London cabbies have to pass a test on what is called The Knowledge - of every last road in the city. They're tested on the routes they'd take. So, says the examiner in the cartoon, how would you get from [point A] to point [B]?
Are you a Londoner or a tourist? asks the student cabbie.
A Londoner, the examiner replies. Right, says the cabbie, and proposes a short and efficient route to the destination which is pretty much just around the corner. And if I were a tourist? is the next question. Cue a monstrously long path involving several motorways.
Good, says the examiner, you've passed The Knowledge. Now for The Ignorance. How would you get from 'How about that Billie Piper' to 'Send 'em all back home'?
'Twas the same with Doom. The first part of it was free to download, to copy around, it was on every magazine coverdisk for months... I got to the point where I knew my way around Knee-Deep in the Dead better than I did my own high school :)
Never really got into the other two episodes, when I finally did get around to getting the full version. Sure, it was still Doom, but it just wasn't the same...
Therefore: the US government considers encryption to be a weapon.
Therefore: the means to defeat encryption is also a weapon.
Therefore: libdvdcss is a weapon.
Therefore: the DMCA is unconstitutional, violating as it does the Second Amendment.
Can we possibly get the huge NRA block vote and lobbying power on our side in this quarrel?
Brethren! This is a wonderful idea! If we make our bomb jackets fluorescent yellow, and wear hard hats, nobody will ever stop us! We'll look just like official workmen and will be able to walk right up to crucial pieces of infrastructure and gloriously destroy them for the Sheikh Osama and the New Caliphate! It is a wonderful day for the Jihad! Alahuakbar! Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo!
This part, at least, is also true in the UK. In England, only Oxford, Cambridge and Durham are really ancient; in Scotland, AFAIK only Edinburgh and St. Andrew's. I believe the London universities have mediaeval roots, in guild schools and the like, but IIRC they didn't form a university till relatively recently. Most of the other well-regarded universities (the likes of Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester etc) were established in the mid 19th century. There was another wave in the 1960s (most notably Warwick and the Open) and a bunch more new universities in the last couple of decades, former polytechnics and whatnot.
To a lesser degree? Try 'to a far greater, spectacularly and unbelievably monstrous, like Hitler compared to Mussolini, enormous degree'. The Spanish and Portuguese may have started the Atlantic slave trade, but the English... well, we really made a fucking killing at it. And then we banned slavery. Like that made things better. Then you got the whole bloody awful business of chaining all the slaves together so you could sling the whole lot of 'em overboard at once if you catch sight of the Royal Navy on your way across and claim innocence.
Reading this thread, it's interesting that Americans are claiming not to have been taught of the European involvement in the slave trade. But then I recall seeing an interview once, of Mohammad Ali in his heyday, being interviewed by Parkinson on the BBC. This is in his militant African Islam phase. He's just had a rant about how his people hate white America because of what they did during the slave days - then, realising he ought to be polite to his audience, says he has nothing against the British because we had nothing to do with all that. Cue nervous frozen expressions on all in studio... 'well, do YOU want to tell him?'
And I'm sorry but some Africans do deserve a share. In some ways that was even worse because they were selling their own people into slavery.
Dead right there. There is occasionally talk that the European slaver nations should make financial restitution to the African nations for the depredations of slavery. I for one reject this idea: we already paid the Africans for slavery, at a price they were more than willing to accept. Very few slaves were actually kidnapped, Kunta Kinte style, by European slavers; they were bought from other Africans.
Prosecutors claimed that this was part of an ongoing economic jihad. I really wish I was joking.
Apparently it looks exactly like an innocent tourist video, which proves that it's really a cunning tradecraft terrorist video. Yep.
Yeah. Silly upstart nation that they are. On a totally unrelated note, I've got to make a trip up to Liverpool soon; it's about a hundred miles, which is a bloody long way...
I recall the case of the Arabic-looking students on a trip to Disneyland, whose home-video of their fun day out was later used against them as evidence of a terrorist plot. Apparently they spent an awful lot of time in places that would be good to bomb - like long queues. Obviously there's no other reason why a visitor to Disneyland would spend a lot of time in long queues...
* Right-wing Slashdot groupthink ON *
Rubbish. The ACLU don't do anything to protect my gun rights, therefore they're completely useless at protecting anyone elses rights about anything else ever. NRA4EVER!
* Right-wing Slashdot groupthink OFF *
Eww, I feel all dirty...
Not much, which is why they've not released a new version in so long. But the current version of IE is obsolete, has an appalling reputation for security, and is causing significant numbers of people to switch to Firefox and Opera, which are, at present, vastly superior. If people get into the habit of trying out alternatives to MS software, discover how much better they are... what OTHER MS software might they try out alternatives to?
They've got to maintain the monopoly mindset where everything on the computer is Microsoft, and Joe Average never even has any idea that there are alternatives that might be desirable.
Right. Just a warning for religious references, eh? We'll see about that.
* creates a pet pig called Mohammed *
Actually, I think you might be under just such an obligation. You're still using the patented technology without a licence.
Never underestimate the perversity of patent law.
Oh, come off it. The only thing anyone will tell you about light gun games of yesteryear is 'I always wished I could shoot that damn dog.' I've seen some reasonable arcade games using light guns, and I'll grant that I've had good times with a Dreamcast, a copy of House of the Dead and playing both players at once with a light gun in each hand, going all John Woo... but really, light guns were always a gimmick, a toy used for a few oddball games.
Hell, it would be better than mouse and keyboard for KOTOR. Remember, in that game, you spend most of your time using a lightsaber...
* has a mental vision of spending Christmas '06 in front of the TV with a Revolution controller in hand, going 'whummm... whmmm... KHSSSSKKK! whmmm... Surrender to the Dark Side!'
Hang on, I thought you were going to give an example of googlebombing leading to inaccurate results?
Now, on the other hand, what b3ta did to Damon Albarn really wasn't nice...
I'm particularly amused by the note in subscript after that remarkable claim:
'Citation needed.'
Which gives me a mental image of a wikipedia editor like some genial dusty old university professor saying 'Not that we don't believe you about the deadly beavers, you understand, just that you haven't properly cited a source for this claim of yours...'
1: The plagues have begun.
2: I'm still here.
3: The Rapture has been and gone, and didn't take me, and so few were saved that we didn't even notice it.
4: Therefore, I'm not one of the Saved.
5: Therefore, I'm one of the Damned.
6: Therefore, I might as well please myself and have the flu shots.
7: Furthermore, I might as well please myself and loot the nearest electronics store. The owners are Damned too, and it's no sin to steal from the Damned, and since I'm Damned anyway it doesn't matter if it IS a sin...
Slashdot, liberal? Well, possibly, but not in the modern sense of the word. I read posts here and I find the consensus to be of a broadly right-wing anarchistic bent. Something approaching the world of Snow Crash seems to be the ideal here. Government, according to /. groupthink, should get the hell out of people's lives, and not interfere either by (a) overextending copyright terms, (b) taxing people beyond a bare minimum, (c) telling us what programs we can and cannot create, or (d) going off on hugely expensive and completely unnecessary wars.
Furthermore, what does the issue here have to do with any party-political agenda? This is a scientific issue, no more susceptible to political ideology than was genetics, and look where Lysenkoism led...
Worse than that. Squid swam in the nightmarish primaeval seas alongside the first ancestral vertebrates. These loathsome mollusks are so utterly alien and horribly ancient that even the natural fishes of the sea are more closely related to us than to them.
They've been lurking in the inky blackness for aeons longer than human mind will dare compass, turning over in their twisted minds their hatred against the entire race of the vertebrae, which in an age long forgotten to all but the most thorough palaeontologists seized all the world for its dominion and left the squid-kind in the uttermost night.
And you think it's only mankind they will destroy. No, it's everything we know as normal they hate. This dreadful loathing is more ancient than we can ever hope to conceive, and on the scale of the squid-creatures' appalling thoughts all the ages of human history and all mankind's mighty works are a mere scribble on the latest page of a very, very long history...