With the hover craft wheel chair? Or the common use of specialized droids? Or the Senetorial room also using antigravity devices? Or cloud city? Or any one of a dozen other instances where we see advanced technology seamlessly blended into society? True, Star Wars isn't hard Science Fiction, but there was some effort to make it more than just an action flick in space.
the police will do nothing, because I am not a wealthy man. This happened to my brother. His apartment was robbed. The criminal was caught only because the apartment manager inspected the crook's apartment and found some of my brother's music cassettes (his own recordings, he's a musician, so there really wasn't any doubt). The man responisble was arrested and promply released. He was still living next door when my brother moved out of those apartments. There's no room in America's prisons for people who victimize the poor.
My definition of "theft" is something physically taken. This is also yours, if you live in the United States and choose to be bound by our laws. For what I hope is the last time, copyright infringement is _not_ theft.
for whatever you'd downloaded. Beyond that, they could use server logs from the services you've been downloading from. Also, if you turn the computer off, you run the risk of being charged with evidence tampering. If you don't, they'll just hook up a ups and away they go. Somebody told me that's why Cray's are so expensive: they're diskless so you can't turn them off (without going through hell to bring them back up).
hereing that congress very quietly made file sharing a federal offense. I googled a little but I'm still not sure. The lack of arrests is probably to avoid the bad PR. Sending 5 poor dumb shmucks to an already overcrowded federal prison (probably letting a few murders and rapists out to make room) would not go over well even with people as stupid as Americans. Rest assured though, whatever the law says now, if Ashcroft wanted these people in prison, that's where they'd be.
because Vonage would have to deal with the support call from angry, irrational customers who a) don't understand why Vonage is doing this and b) don't want to pay the fee.
subscription based services. This is a step in that direction. Microsoft is scrambling for a way to get people to 'subscribe' to office because they ran out of features worth upgrading for with office 97 (well, for probably 80% of thier users anyway, and that 20% isn't gonna sustain the growth shareholders have come to expect).
I don't see the benefit to this for anyone but Microsoft. I don't think the Internet could handle 250 million people 'streaming' office. Which means something's gonna get installed, and it's gonna be just as much a pain to fix when it breaks as the current office. Oh well, maybe crap like this will encourage openoffice.
Off topic, but I've notice a funny trend in office suites. I'm seeing more and more people running openoffice because their computer got laid waste by a virus, and they didn't get any CDs from thier OEM (or lost em). Buying office without buying a computer isn't an option for most people, so they're driven to oo.org:).
why don't we make it a public utility, like water? Well, we all know the answer to that (insurance companies are grotesquely profitable and corrupt). Still, it's painfully obvious if you live in America (not commenting on the rest of the Earth) that you must have a car. Our entire infrastructure is build around fast, personal transportation. If you must have a car, and you must have insurance, it becomes an essential service akin to electricity, water and the telephone. It becomes equally obvious that the government should be regulating fees charged by insurance companies to prevent gouging. In point of fact, Insurance companies should not be profitable (not counting individual employees' salaries of course). They ought to be a public service. Something we all need so we all pay into (excepting a few special cases, as might be the case with other public utilities). Such services are not part of the regular economy and have no business drawing a profit any more than the patent office does.
Since the problem with spam is it's low barrier to entry (any s'kiddie sans morals can be a spammer), what good will it do to kill off one competitor? As soon as you nail one two or three more will pop up. Meanwhile you've just set in motion as nasty little email war that's bad for every spammer.
to see things they wish they could do. It's incredibly cool to see someone pull a 30+ hit combo in a game like Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter III. Anyone remember that video posted on/. a few weeks back where the guy parried a super from Chun-Li?. I can't do that, but it's cool seeing it done..
It's bad enough they're not releasing the original movies (at least until Lucas dies, then I'm sure they'll take advantage of the opportunity to sell us the same crap again). Now releasing the DVDs is generating interest in the Laserdisks, and I still haven't tracked down the other two THX/Widescreen movies (I've got Jedi at least). It wouldn't be so bad if most of the changes (like Greedo shooting first) weren't because Lucas has his head up his ass and is listening to critics (who, it should be noted, also have heads up their asses, very often their own).
Our food supply is based on oil...
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
the machines that allow 1% of our populace to grow enough food to feed the other 99% run on oil. Moreover, the trucks that cart food to cities and keep parts of our countries from starving to death run on oil. Oh, and willing to pay and able to pay are too very different animals. John Kerry and George Bush's kids will be both willing and abled, I'm not so sure about mine.
Do a google for the phrase 'peak oil'. What's happened is the oil age has enabled our population to expand far beyond its normal limits. When the oil supply shrinks, the population needs to shrink with it. The sensible thing to do is sterilize people, but God be damned if we're gonna do that. So there'll be yet another round of war/famine/plague until nature corrects itself. I'm just sick of Mankind, an intelligent animal, following Nature's lead.
And I don't remember predicting the demise of Capitalism. Quiet the opposite really. I see Capitalism perfecting itself into a hideous self-perpetuating system of poor who live worse than pack animals and rich who's slightest whim is carried out to the extant human ability allows. I remember once reading a magazine article where some rich fuck lamented that modern Opera houses couldn't compare to old ones, because in this day and age you couldn't get society to dedicate that much of it's resources to an Opera house while people starved. I don't expect this situation to last much longer.
because our system's about to come crashing down. The signs are all there if you care to look. Every reputable scientist agrees we're gonna run out of oil soon ('soon' in the historical sense, i.e. in time for it to be a disaster). There's not enough metals for China and India to industrialize, and when their economies start bumping up against the limitation there's going to be a _really_ nasty war ala WWII until the same damn stupid thing happens that did in the 40s (enough people die that the survivors can live pretty well).
And ask any one of those rich fucks that's sending jobs overseas: you've never got it so good that you couldn't have it better. And besides, most of the rest of the world still has those abhorrent standards of living. You see what's going on the the Congo lately? How about any part of Africa? And wait till the oil runs out in the Middle East and they're suddenly worthless lumps of dirt again.
Life doesn't suck, but it's going to. Dear God, is it going to. Maybe not for you and me, but for our children certainly. The worst thing is, anyone with half a brain and an internet connection can see it comming, but _nobody's_ doing a damn thing about it.
of people so pathetic they need thier jobs to give them a sense of purpose. I think those people are just being intellectually lazy. They don't want to spend the time and effort of do things they like, so they bury themselves in work instead. It makes them feel big and important without having to actually do anything big and important. There's nothing wrong with going through your life accomplishing basically nothing, as long as you're OK with that. I want people who can be OK with that when it turns out they lack the rare genious and true drive needed to do things truely worth doing. Really, stop and think about how dumb it is to work hard for the sake of hard work. If you're still in doubt, go dig a few holes on your day off and fill them in.
If I sound mad it's because I am. Idiots who want to spend their whole lives working drag the rest of us along for the ride. Those content to spend their lives quitly enjoying their hobbies get caught up in a society of 40+ hour work weeks when automation should have done away with that a decade ago.
We're going into an economic sollapse
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
because our standards of living have risen too high for our rulers' liking. Why pay some one $40,000 a year when you can pay them $5,000 and buy that nice new car, or house, or boat? People are greedy, stupid, uncaring bastards. The cold war was shielding us from this fact by keeping businesses stuck in the US. Well, that's all over, and so is America. We'll be as bad as Mexico in a generation.
the goal of a just, modern society is workers who work less for more. The idea that we should all be furious worker bees is crap pushed on us by staggeringly greedy bastards who have been living like kings off other people's backs for as long as human society existed.
For all intents and purposes 3D == polygons. The Saturn could do excellant sprite based 3D. What people wanted (and what the playstation was designed for) was polygonal 3D. What made polygonal 3D so important was you could do cool, cutting edge graphics without the need for tons and tons of expensive RAM. Imagine trying to do Doom3 with nothing but sprites and scaling.
And I mean exactly what I said. It's a historical fact that the Saturn was originally going to be a uniprocessor system. Sega tacked on the additional Hitachi SH-1 when they finally realized their current system wasn't going to be able to push enough _polygons_. The Saturn could do sprite based 3D as well as memory would allow (you could program an unlimited # of spites for the Saturn, limited only by RAM). Sega should have steped back and redesigned the Saturn as a system capable of pushing out the trendy new polygons people where demanding. Instead, they turned the Saturn into the worst system to program for since the Atari 2600 (meanwhile pissing off their third party devs).
In other word, Sega realized the importance of 3D for the Saturn, they just didn't realize it soon enough or react intelligently when they did.
3D graphics where nowhere around the time the genesis was created. At most they where a clever idea done in a few games. Space Harrier, Outrun and Afterburnner wheren't really 3D and wheren't anything new technology wise by the time they where out. 2D was still where it was at. If you where talking about Saturn, then you're kind of right.
From what I understand, Sega didn't expect the PSX to be as powerful as it was. They where still shooting for a $200-$250 dollar console. When the saw what Sony was doing, they panicked, and instead of redeigning their console, dropped another main processor in it to make up the difference. Problem is this was a hack, and a bad one. There was a ton of bugs in Saturn hardware, it was more expensive to produce, and the main processors where a bitch to program for (only one could access memory at a time, and you needed to do some complex tricks to use both because of it. This lead to a lot of programmers only using 1/2 the Saturn's power). Virtual Fighter 2 may have been amazing, but it was also hand coded in Assembly by Sega's best programmers. Third party venders couldn't really be expected to do that.
It didn't help that Sega of America treated their 3rd party venders like shit. Look up the crap they pulled on Working Designs some time (long story short, Working Designs wanted to sell Sega memory cards to thier users so they's stop bitching about losing saves due to bad memory cards. Sega basically said no/fuck off, and no one's sure why). Oh, and sega kept other 3D fighters out of the US market to decrease compitition with their own games. For a company that relied so much on third party developers in the Genesis days, who knows what the hell they where thinking. One thing's certain, Bernie Stolar will forever be hated by all true Sega fans. After running the company into the ground in the Saturn days he ejected with a nice fat Golden Parachute.
was bad marketing and too many hardcore games. It's all well and good to have lots of innovative and cool titles, but you need a healthy dose or solid and simple platformers and RPGs to draw the general masses in. The sports games where top, but that wasn't enough.
And dear God, did the marketing suck. I mean, whose idea was it to spend your whole comercial time showing off how cool Sonic and crew were instead of showing off the (at the time) mind blowing graphics? When the DC came out nothing was even close. It was like comparing the playstation to the NES.
Ultimately Sega was doomed from the get go though, since Sony recognized the threat and put the smack down on them with marketing so clever it puts DeBeers to shame. Sony was pulling the crap Nintendo did with the N64 (showing off screenshots that weren't actually rendered on the console, at one point Nintendo was running booths with $10,000 SG workstations render stuff and saying it was running on an N64), but nobody called them on it. Probably because noone in the Game Biz in their right mind wants to see the current gravy train fail.
The plot and effect where bad enough, but the gang where hateful caricatures of the originals. They where purposefully made into mean, shallow idiots in a disgusting and transparent effort to 'moderinize' Scooby Doo and once again appeal to America's lowest denomiator. The amount of inappropriate humor in the movie was appalling, and the thought of anyone laughing at it sickens me. Never in my life have I had my Childhood so completely and methodically raped. My one regret is Filthy didn't review it. He's so much better at tearing apart movies than me.
Slashdot Mirror
With the hover craft wheel chair? Or the common use of specialized droids? Or the Senetorial room also using antigravity devices? Or cloud city? Or any one of a dozen other instances where we see advanced technology seamlessly blended into society? True, Star Wars isn't hard Science Fiction, but there was some effort to make it more than just an action flick in space.
I have the laundry shop drop it off. It's their job anyway...
but I'm sure Ashcroft can. So can chairman of the RIAA.
the police will do nothing, because I am not a wealthy man. This happened to my brother. His apartment was robbed. The criminal was caught only because the apartment manager inspected the crook's apartment and found some of my brother's music cassettes (his own recordings, he's a musician, so there really wasn't any doubt). The man responisble was arrested and promply released. He was still living next door when my brother moved out of those apartments. There's no room in America's prisons for people who victimize the poor.
My definition of "theft" is something physically taken. This is also yours, if you live in the United States and choose to be bound by our laws. For what I hope is the last time, copyright infringement is _not_ theft.
for whatever you'd downloaded. Beyond that, they could use server logs from the services you've been downloading from. Also, if you turn the computer off, you run the risk of being charged with evidence tampering. If you don't, they'll just hook up a ups and away they go. Somebody told me that's why Cray's are so expensive: they're diskless so you can't turn them off (without going through hell to bring them back up).
his speach writers. I'm sure befret of them he's just as much an ass as Bush.
hereing that congress very quietly made file sharing a federal offense. I googled a little but I'm still not sure. The lack of arrests is probably to avoid the bad PR. Sending 5 poor dumb shmucks to an already overcrowded federal prison (probably letting a few murders and rapists out to make room) would not go over well even with people as stupid as Americans. Rest assured though, whatever the law says now, if Ashcroft wanted these people in prison, that's where they'd be.
If I have a to do list of:
1. Get heart surgery done.
and 2. Pick up laundry.
I tend to prioritize the first one.
because Vonage would have to deal with the support call from angry, irrational customers who a) don't understand why Vonage is doing this and b) don't want to pay the fee.
subscription based services. This is a step in that direction. Microsoft is scrambling for a way to get people to 'subscribe' to office because they ran out of features worth upgrading for with office 97 (well, for probably 80% of thier users anyway, and that 20% isn't gonna sustain the growth shareholders have come to expect).
:).
I don't see the benefit to this for anyone but Microsoft. I don't think the Internet could handle 250 million people 'streaming' office. Which means something's gonna get installed, and it's gonna be just as much a pain to fix when it breaks as the current office. Oh well, maybe crap like this will encourage openoffice.
Off topic, but I've notice a funny trend in office suites. I'm seeing more and more people running openoffice because their computer got laid waste by a virus, and they didn't get any CDs from thier OEM (or lost em). Buying office without buying a computer isn't an option for most people, so they're driven to oo.org
why don't we make it a public utility, like water? Well, we all know the answer to that (insurance companies are grotesquely profitable and corrupt). Still, it's painfully obvious if you live in America (not commenting on the rest of the Earth) that you must have a car. Our entire infrastructure is build around fast, personal transportation. If you must have a car, and you must have insurance, it becomes an essential service akin to electricity, water and the telephone. It becomes equally obvious that the government should be regulating fees charged by insurance companies to prevent gouging. In point of fact, Insurance companies should not be profitable (not counting individual employees' salaries of course). They ought to be a public service. Something we all need so we all pay into (excepting a few special cases, as might be the case with other public utilities). Such services are not part of the regular economy and have no business drawing a profit any more than the patent office does.
Since the problem with spam is it's low barrier to entry (any s'kiddie sans morals can be a spammer), what good will it do to kill off one competitor? As soon as you nail one two or three more will pop up. Meanwhile you've just set in motion as nasty little email war that's bad for every spammer.
This is what the GPL is for. What difference does it make if it's IBM defending their GPL'd code or Linux?
to see things they wish they could do. It's incredibly cool to see someone pull a 30+ hit combo in a game like Virtua Fighter or Street Fighter III. Anyone remember that video posted on /. a few weeks back where the guy parried a super from Chun-Li?. I can't do that, but it's cool seeing it done..
It's bad enough they're not releasing the original movies (at least until Lucas dies, then I'm sure they'll take advantage of the opportunity to sell us the same crap again). Now releasing the DVDs is generating interest in the Laserdisks, and I still haven't tracked down the other two THX/Widescreen movies (I've got Jedi at least). It wouldn't be so bad if most of the changes (like Greedo shooting first) weren't because Lucas has his head up his ass and is listening to critics (who, it should be noted, also have heads up their asses, very often their own).
the machines that allow 1% of our populace to grow enough food to feed the other 99% run on oil. Moreover, the trucks that cart food to cities and keep parts of our countries from starving to death run on oil. Oh, and willing to pay and able to pay are too very different animals. John Kerry and George Bush's kids will be both willing and abled, I'm not so sure about mine.
Do a google for the phrase 'peak oil'. What's happened is the oil age has enabled our population to expand far beyond its normal limits. When the oil supply shrinks, the population needs to shrink with it. The sensible thing to do is sterilize people, but God be damned if we're gonna do that. So there'll be yet another round of war/famine/plague until nature corrects itself. I'm just sick of Mankind, an intelligent animal, following Nature's lead.
And I don't remember predicting the demise of Capitalism. Quiet the opposite really. I see Capitalism perfecting itself into a hideous self-perpetuating system of poor who live worse than pack animals and rich who's slightest whim is carried out to the extant human ability allows. I remember once reading a magazine article where some rich fuck lamented that modern Opera houses couldn't compare to old ones, because in this day and age you couldn't get society to dedicate that much of it's resources to an Opera house while people starved. I don't expect this situation to last much longer.
because our system's about to come crashing down. The signs are all there if you care to look. Every reputable scientist agrees we're gonna run out of oil soon ('soon' in the historical sense, i.e. in time for it to be a disaster). There's not enough metals for China and India to industrialize, and when their economies start bumping up against the limitation there's going to be a _really_ nasty war ala WWII until the same damn stupid thing happens that did in the 40s (enough people die that the survivors can live pretty well).
And ask any one of those rich fucks that's sending jobs overseas: you've never got it so good that you couldn't have it better. And besides, most of the rest of the world still has those abhorrent standards of living. You see what's going on the the Congo lately? How about any part of Africa? And wait till the oil runs out in the Middle East and they're suddenly worthless lumps of dirt again.
Life doesn't suck, but it's going to. Dear God, is it going to. Maybe not for you and me, but for our children certainly. The worst thing is, anyone with half a brain and an internet connection can see it comming, but _nobody's_ doing a damn thing about it.
of people so pathetic they need thier jobs to give them a sense of purpose. I think those people are just being intellectually lazy. They don't want to spend the time and effort of do things they like, so they bury themselves in work instead. It makes them feel big and important without having to actually do anything big and important. There's nothing wrong with going through your life accomplishing basically nothing, as long as you're OK with that. I want people who can be OK with that when it turns out they lack the rare genious and true drive needed to do things truely worth doing. Really, stop and think about how dumb it is to work hard for the sake of hard work. If you're still in doubt, go dig a few holes on your day off and fill them in.
If I sound mad it's because I am. Idiots who want to spend their whole lives working drag the rest of us along for the ride. Those content to spend their lives quitly enjoying their hobbies get caught up in a society of 40+ hour work weeks when automation should have done away with that a decade ago.
because our standards of living have risen too high for our rulers' liking. Why pay some one $40,000 a year when you can pay them $5,000 and buy that nice new car, or house, or boat? People are greedy, stupid, uncaring bastards. The cold war was shielding us from this fact by keeping businesses stuck in the US. Well, that's all over, and so is America. We'll be as bad as Mexico in a generation.
the goal of a just, modern society is workers who work less for more. The idea that we should all be furious worker bees is crap pushed on us by staggeringly greedy bastards who have been living like kings off other people's backs for as long as human society existed.
that lets you play as the score board.
For all intents and purposes 3D == polygons. The Saturn could do excellant sprite based 3D. What people wanted (and what the playstation was designed for) was polygonal 3D. What made polygonal 3D so important was you could do cool, cutting edge graphics without the need for tons and tons of expensive RAM. Imagine trying to do Doom3 with nothing but sprites and scaling.
And I mean exactly what I said. It's a historical fact that the Saturn was originally going to be a uniprocessor system. Sega tacked on the additional Hitachi SH-1 when they finally realized their current system wasn't going to be able to push enough _polygons_. The Saturn could do sprite based 3D as well as memory would allow (you could program an unlimited # of spites for the Saturn, limited only by RAM). Sega should have steped back and redesigned the Saturn as a system capable of pushing out the trendy new polygons people where demanding. Instead, they turned the Saturn into the worst system to program for since the Atari 2600 (meanwhile pissing off their third party devs).
In other word, Sega realized the importance of 3D for the Saturn, they just didn't realize it soon enough or react intelligently when they did.
3D graphics where nowhere around the time the genesis was created. At most they where a clever idea done in a few games. Space Harrier, Outrun and Afterburnner wheren't really 3D and wheren't anything new technology wise by the time they where out. 2D was still where it was at. If you where talking about Saturn, then you're kind of right.
From what I understand, Sega didn't expect the PSX to be as powerful as it was. They where still shooting for a $200-$250 dollar console. When the saw what Sony was doing, they panicked, and instead of redeigning their console, dropped another main processor in it to make up the difference. Problem is this was a hack, and a bad one. There was a ton of bugs in Saturn hardware, it was more expensive to produce, and the main processors where a bitch to program for (only one could access memory at a time, and you needed to do some complex tricks to use both because of it. This lead to a lot of programmers only using 1/2 the Saturn's power). Virtual Fighter 2 may have been amazing, but it was also hand coded in Assembly by Sega's best programmers. Third party venders couldn't really be expected to do that.
It didn't help that Sega of America treated their 3rd party venders like shit. Look up the crap they pulled on Working Designs some time (long story short, Working Designs wanted to sell Sega memory cards to thier users so they's stop bitching about losing saves due to bad memory cards. Sega basically said no/fuck off, and no one's sure why). Oh, and sega kept other 3D fighters out of the US market to decrease compitition with their own games. For a company that relied so much on third party developers in the Genesis days, who knows what the hell they where thinking. One thing's certain, Bernie Stolar will forever be hated by all true Sega fans. After running the company into the ground in the Saturn days he ejected with a nice fat Golden Parachute.
was bad marketing and too many hardcore games. It's all well and good to have lots of innovative and cool titles, but you need a healthy dose or solid and simple platformers and RPGs to draw the general masses in. The sports games where top, but that wasn't enough.
And dear God, did the marketing suck. I mean, whose idea was it to spend your whole comercial time showing off how cool Sonic and crew were instead of showing off the (at the time) mind blowing graphics? When the DC came out nothing was even close. It was like comparing the playstation to the NES.
Ultimately Sega was doomed from the get go though, since Sony recognized the threat and put the smack down on them with marketing so clever it puts DeBeers to shame. Sony was pulling the crap Nintendo did with the N64 (showing off screenshots that weren't actually rendered on the console, at one point Nintendo was running booths with $10,000 SG workstations render stuff and saying it was running on an N64), but nobody called them on it. Probably because noone in the Game Biz in their right mind wants to see the current gravy train fail.
The plot and effect where bad enough, but the gang where hateful caricatures of the originals. They where purposefully made into mean, shallow idiots in a disgusting and transparent effort to 'moderinize' Scooby Doo and once again appeal to America's lowest denomiator. The amount of inappropriate humor in the movie was appalling, and the thought of anyone laughing at it sickens me. Never in my life have I had my Childhood so completely and methodically raped. My one regret is Filthy didn't review it. He's so much better at tearing apart movies than me.