The real culprit here is the broken Chameleon Circuit. It was under warranty, but alas - the last time he was near an authorized OEM service station, the good Doctor had to leave Gallifrey in haste before someone tried to go and make him Lord President again...
He should trade the whole thing in for one of the newer Telephone Booth models... I hear they can be fixed with a couple wads of chewing gum...
However, it is possible that a milder expression of the same genes does have advantages, ala tech centers. Think sickle-cell anemia, where one gene gives you malaria resistantance, but two make you very sick.
So clearly, the answer to stopping the spread of this Autism is to mandate that every geek coder in Silicon Valley must mate with a supermodel who has no math or technical skills whatsoever. They must not mate with other geeks, but only with those who get paid to wear their underwear on stage. This is absolutely necessary for the survival of intelligence and technology in our country! So please models, take one for the team!
What does this have to do with gaming? If I sat infront of a TV, computer, or alone counting bumps in paint for 86 hours straight, the same thing would happen to me.
Not really. Playing a video game is FAR more mentally intensive than just watching TV/paint/etc. Just watching the TV, you have no control over what happens on it (apart from a very crude and non-specific choice based on what channel you pick), it's just a 1-way stream, and you can stop paying attention and zone out at any time and it doesn't really matter, you can usually pick back up later on and figure out everything that's happened in-between.
With a video game, it requires your constant attention, everything you do or don't do affects what happens next. You're making split second reactions to events that are happening, while simultaneously planning your strategy seconds, minutes, or even hours into the future. I've gone for about 8-10 hours straight of gaming and those times I only stopped because I couldn't physically concentrate or keep my eyes open anymore. And as soon as you stop, you realize how exhausted you are and have an overwhelming dysphoria and urge to sleep. I have NEVER encountered that situation from TV watching or any other activity for that matter...
Another lame attempt to take a stab at videogames and how EVIL they are...
Well I don't think that was the intent of the article, and from about 90% of the comments posted on this page, nobody else seems to think it was either. But on the off chance that that WAS the intent, I would have to agree with it to some extent. There is no other casual non-drug-related entertainment activity that millions partake in that has this kind of addictive power to it. Now I don't think anyone has ever gotten 'the shakes' from video game withdrawl, but sometimes it can be VERY hard to stop playing.
Seriously, I think this new technology could be used in some interesting ways. I'm waiting for someone to work it into the electric chairs used on death row, for a particularly fitting punishment for certain individuals...
"Jerry Bruckheimer, for your crimes against humanity, this court orders you to be put to death via electric chair. 100 million copies of Armageddon will be digitally sent through your body each second until you are sufficiently fried. And may God have mercy on your crap-movie making ass..."
No. Slashdot tells google not to spider discussion pages.
Bullshit. They just don't get indexed until the discussions are archived (older than 2 weeks I think). See here (search for "Microsoft" matches within slashdot.org).
When it was announced that Mir was going to crash into the Pacific Ocean during a certain month period, Taco Bell as a publicity stunt put up a bunch of floating markers all over the Pacific and said that if Mir landed on one of them, they would give everyone in America a free taco. I guess "teslatug" still wants his free taco...
Didn't you guys ever play Civilization?? Global warming causes all kinds of nasty disasters! All the coastlines become swamp and all but the equatorial regions become those stupid ice squares... Then some of your people die and you have to turn some of your Elvis's back into Farmers, and then it takes forever to build anymore cool toys to fight with. It's really inconvenient all the way around, so please! Clean up that nuclear polution ASAP!
Do you nimrod mods not understand the concept that modding down posts whose subject lines already start with "OT:" (indicating an Off Topic post) doesn't achieve anything?
Marking something Off Topic with an OT: already announces to anyone who's browsing that the content of the post is Off Topic so they don't even have to click on the link if they're not interested in reading Off Topic stuff. Moderating posts as off-topic is supposed to be a way to filter down comments that otherwise appear to be ON Topic but aren't.
It's like I just stuck up a big orange construction sign (with the little orange flashing light) that says "ROAD CLOSED". And you helpfully come along and smack a Post-It note onto the sign that says "Yeah, and ROAD CLOSED too..."
I dunno, maybe there's some people out there who haven't noticed the messageboard shorthand that's been in use for the past five fuckin years or so. Something beginning/ending with "<NT>" or "(NT)" indicates that the entire content of the message is contained in the subject line, and therefore there's "NO TEXT" in the message body. You don't see that much on/. because the lame filter doesn't let you post them. But you can see how such indications are useful because everyone who sees it knows there's nothing more to read if they click on the link, so they don't bother clicking on the link.... got it? (I don't think I'm even going to get into acronyms for laughs/smiles/NotALawyer/etc.)
Conspiracy theorists say the Van Allen radiation belts pose a serious threat to human life and suggest that as one piece of reasoning that the moon trip in 1969 was faked.
Radiation causes damage to an organism's cells based on the probability of it interacting with molecules in your body. You can get the same risk of negative effects by sitting in heavy radiation for a short period of time, or by sitting in light radation for a very long period of time.
(Which is you always encounter a seemingly contradictory situation when you have X-rays done at a doctor's office: the medical personnel always tell you that the amount of radiation you'll be recieving is not enough to hurt you... then they put a lead shield over your nuts and walk into the next room before they turn the thing on! The amount of radiation being sent IS very small, and so it has a very small chance of hurting you, but if they stayed in the room and were exposed to it multiple times a day every day for years in a row, it would be the same as recieving a heavy dose once or twice. They cover your gonads because although the risk is very small, it's not zero, and a mutation in your nuts is far more catastrophic to your ability to survive and pass on your genes than it would be in any other random cell in your body.)
The radiation in the Van Allen belts is more than a human body would normally experience on Earth. So I guess if you were for some reason spacewalking out there all day, you'd not be feeling too well. However, the astronauts are never just sitting around there playing zero-G frisbee with each other. They are always travelling thru it at very fast speeds (and so are not exposed for very long), and they are also riding in a SPACESHIP, which blocks some of it out. Some will still get thru, but not enough to be sterlizing anything. I've seen some people do calculations and figure that at the speed the Apollo astronauts were travelling through it, they would absorb about 1-2 rems. You don't start seeing symptoms of radiation poisoning until you get near 25 rems.
If you rode a subway thru the Van Allen belts for 45 mins every day for years on your commute to work, then yeah, you're going to see some premature cancer popping up, regardless of whether or not the bum next to you is blowing secondhand smoke in your face. But astronauts travelling thru it for about 2 hours once up and once back are not going to be turned into microwave popcorn or anything.
I guess we need some new moderation options for the semantic pedantic comedian whose humor hamster isn't quite spinning at full steam, to separate him from the K-Mart special garden variety Trolls. Like "-1: Joke, not funny"...
It would be no different than if someone were to take an O'Reilly book, replace a few words here and there, remove a chapter, and try and sell the thing as the original.
Yes, and the missed point here still is: THEY'RE NOT PASSING IT OFF AS THE ORIGINAL.
They are clearly marked as having their content edited to remove things that timid people find objectionable. They are not 'secretly' switching the original movies off the shelves of video stores with their own modified Folger's Crystals version. The timid people are seeking these people out and specifically buying the modified versions because they don't want to see the parts that were edited out. It is entirely different from your example.
Clean Flicks takes a movie that is not theirs, edits it, often poorly, without anyone's consent, and resells it to customers.
A movie that's not theirs?? Again I think you've been somehow mis-informed. They are not stealing other people's copies of movies, editing them without their knowledge and trying to "pass it off to people". They BUY each copy. They are the end user. They edit THEIR copy to remove content they find objectionable. The end result is still a SINGLE copy, which is a little bit shorter than the original. There are not 2 or more copies left over, there is only the original media, which contains a single copy of the work. No illegal copying was performed. Now they sell that copy to someone else who feels that they would not like to see the content that was edited out either, and they are fully aware that what they are buying is not the original unmodified work. Reselling an IP item which you purchased from the copyright owner is also allowed by law. You're not making multiple copies, and you're not disparaging the reputation of the content creator, because NOBODY thinks that this modified version was the original work.
How about another example. Some movie studios are getting absolutely ridiculous with the amount of previews they tack onto the beginnings of movies you buy on VHS/DVD. I have a couple tapes where there are literally 20 minutes of previews before the feature film actually starts. Now if I know I'm going to watch this movie often, and I don't want to sit there on fast forward for 10 minutes (and then be in the kitchen and miss the beginning and have to rewind and then fast forward again), I could just overwrite the contents of that VHS tape with the actual movie minus all the trailers. I have not made an illegal copy, I still only have one. Eventually I get tired of watching said movie, and someone I know says "hey man, I love that movie. I want a copy that doesn't have all those stupid trailers at the beginning either." So I sell my (modified) copy to him. He understands it's modified, and specifically wanted it that way. I even mark on the tape and box with magic marker that it has been modified, so that no one else later on could possibly pick it up and be confused about its modified status. What is the illegal part of this scenario?
Now if that series of events is legal -- ie. the modification of copyrighted content which is stored back on the original medium -- then how is making similar edits of the tape (ie. removing content I don't want to see) during portions of the feature film any different? Now if I went around making one single backup copy of my favorite tapes, and then edited only that copy to remove the trailers/content/etc, I am STILL allowed to do that. I cannot however, sell both copies to two different people. That would be making an illegal copy and profiting from it. But that's not what these companies are doing.
most spammers are smart enough not to spam a.gov e-mail address.
I really doubt this. You'd think they'd be smart enough to not send spam to any 'webmaster@' addresses, since whoever gets mail to that address has the greatest chances of being someone is willing and able to block their messages from getting to ALL the other users at that domain... however I see more email addressed to webmaster@domain than any other address that is forwarded to me. Presumably, because they know it will be a valid address at almost every domain, and/or they just spider them from web pages and put no further thought into it.
Although, I haven't seen much being sent to 'abuse@', so most of the spam software authors probably made some cursory filtering rules when they first started making their stuff, but I doubt '.gov' was in them. Only a very tiny percentage of.gov users would actually have the authority/ability to take action against spammers anyway, and there's bound to be some potential customers among the rest of them. That's the whole point of spam: not putting too much thought into the recipients. Gather hundreds of millions of addresses en mass, blast out millions of emails every day, a couple % of the recipients will buy the crap you're selling. Another couple % of the people will get downright pissed at receiving your junkmail, but they don't matter as long as you're making money. If you start getting too nitpicky about who you're sending to, then it starts to resemble real work and isn't as profitable...
Not true, kind of. The folks at http://www.entheosound.com/enthfrnt.htm would disagree with you, anyway.
Oh that's a reliable source. "These are SUPER SECRET ancient magical musical instruments. You can tell by the fact that the conquering Spaniards made no mention of them in their records, and the natives made no drawings or records of them, means that they must have been of very important, SECRET value. Which is why you should spend a thousand dollars and buy 4 of them TODAY!"
You're right. The fact that some mescaline swallowing bushmen possibly made some quirky little carved flutes five hundred years ago and thought they had magical powers clearly proves that sounds can alter your brain to a state of altered consciounsness. I stand corrected.
If you scan someone through a trip and play it back to them to see if it compares, could you not at least experience to a lesser degree how that person tripped?
Uhhh, no. Hallucinogenic drugs cause the effects they do because they cause the brain to form chemical connections in ways not otherwise possible, so you perceive things never before seen during "normal operation". You might be able to use brainwave sounds to induce the brain to jump into sleep mode, because the brain is already fully capable of sleep mode; it is a hardcoded feature. But you can't induce it to start firing in ways that are not neurochemically possible just by creating certain frequencies of sound.
Just like by pushing an old diesel car down a hill and fucking with the clutch you can sometimes get it to start even with a dead battery. Because it's already designed to be able to run, it's just having trouble getting there because a piece of its equipment is malfunctioning. But by doing something similar, you wouldn't be able to say, get it to turn into an airplane...
Re:no, you are not a rocket scientist.
on
Meteorite Hits Girl
·
· Score: 2, Funny
but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND.
What about medium sized rocks, smartass?
Let's see if we can theorize what happens in the middle, given the two outer extremes. A) Small rock = completely destroyed in a ball of fire. B) Large rock = Makes big ball of fire, part of it survives & creates big explosion when it smacks into the ground, destroying other rocks along with itself...
Now you're suggesting that C) Medium-sized rock = no fireball, no explosion, no crater... just taps a girl on the foot and she picks it up and notices it's kinda hot... Yes, that makes absolute perfect sense, Mr. Spock.
In 1812 Canada WAS the British Army that burned down the whitehouse. Do you think that Britain imported an entire army to North America?
No, actually Canada was a British colony, lived in by Brits (and some French wankers), and had a British army stationed there. Did Britain "import a whole army to North America"? YES. They'd had an army there for decades. Killing indians. Then fighting the French (and indians). Then killing indians again. And oppressing the American civilians. (And what made the "Americans" a separate country? By declaring independence from Britain and killing the British soldiers who were there. Canada did not do this.)
It might also suprise you that when the United States fought a "revolutionary war", that there was someone fighting on the other side of that war... guess who that was? Ooop that's right! The British Army. And where did the tattered remnants of that British army go after they lost the war?...hold on... I'll give you a few seconds... Could it be... CANADA? YES. So when war broke out again between Britain and the US in 1812, whose troops was it that attacked Washington D.C.? Canada? No, Canada was still not a country. Try again. Britain? YES! It was "Britain" who sent the "British Army" to attack Washington. Start to make sense now?
Who came in and shot the people who were already killing each other in Sarajevo and made them knock it off? American troops. But they were stationed in military bases in Germany before that... does that make them "Germans"? Nooooooooo kitty, they're still "Americans".
(I know there were other countries' troops there too, don't get pedantic about it.)
And We kicked the shit out of our indians, Americans just gave them whiskey and diseased blankets.
"Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... and now some smart asses are heating up rocks and throwing them thru the air at people!"
Don't you mean nerds without girlfriends?
Yeah, I'd think this was part of a new NASA program to get the public interested in space again, except that the plane tickets for sending 'staff' over to the limey island would have probably drained most of their budget...
Let's see:
1 zippo lighter: $15 (we could get something cheaper, but hey we're trying to Start Something here)
1 rock (free, Yes!)
1 former high school football quarterback, whose hopes of NFL glory have long faded and is willing to accept a pitiful allowance for using his once golden arm: $200
================= equals: Instant free publicity on BBC or CNN about a "lucky winner" who got hit by a space rock. People will be clamouring about, trying to find a way to increase their odds of winning the galactic lottery! Hell, they could even sell books about it to all the schmucks that buy those books about how to get rich quick... (Chapter 1: Write a Book About Getting Rich Quick and Sell It to Millions of Dumbasses). Sounds like a Better/Faster/Sheeper plan than what they've tried so far!
Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... and now some smart asses are heating up rocks and throwing them thru the air at people! Will this madness never stop?!
Before the vengeful hand of god smites me via your hand on the Troll-mod button, think about it for a second. A rock falls from EARTH ORBIT and hits her in the foot... and she 'NOTICES' it. Now IANARS (I ain't no fangled rocket scientist), but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND. Not to mention kicking up rocks and dust all over the place and leaving a molten core behind that turns sand into glass at the impact point. But that didn't happen here did it? No, it just sort of "fell on her" and it was "quite hot"...
Maybe it fell from an airplane from a couple thousand feet. Or maybe some jackass threw it at her like I mentioned earlier. But it came from MARS? Uhhhh huhhh..... Yeah, so did this "Mr. Fusion" machine that fell out of the sky too. You dump beer and old banana peels into it, and it gives you enough power to travel back in time...
Slashdot Mirror
The real culprit here is the broken Chameleon Circuit. It was under warranty, but alas - the last time he was near an authorized OEM service station, the good Doctor had to leave Gallifrey in haste before someone tried to go and make him Lord President again...
He should trade the whole thing in for one of the newer Telephone Booth models... I hear they can be fixed with a couple wads of chewing gum...
I am sofa king What Todd did
That's "We Todd did", genius. Altough I guess if you are saying that as a true statement, it would justify you fucking it up...
I am just worried that whoever is reviewing the stories is showing a childish/313313 attitude.
You're worried that they are showing an "eleele" attitude? WTF is that??You're telling me that that tiny town in Hawaii has its own globally recognized attitude? Geez, I must be out of the loop...
However, it is possible that a milder expression of the same genes does have advantages, ala tech centers. Think sickle-cell anemia, where one gene gives you malaria resistantance, but two make you very sick.
So clearly, the answer to stopping the spread of this Autism is to mandate that every geek coder in Silicon Valley must mate with a supermodel who has no math or technical skills whatsoever. They must not mate with other geeks, but only with those who get paid to wear their underwear on stage. This is absolutely necessary for the survival of intelligence and technology in our country! So please models, take one for the team!
"it's the only way to fly"
--
inadvertant bastardized matrix quote brought you by the Coalition for a Drunker America.
What does this have to do with gaming? If I sat infront of a TV, computer, or alone counting bumps in paint for 86 hours straight, the same thing would happen to me.
Not really. Playing a video game is FAR more mentally intensive than just watching TV/paint/etc. Just watching the TV, you have no control over what happens on it (apart from a very crude and non-specific choice based on what channel you pick), it's just a 1-way stream, and you can stop paying attention and zone out at any time and it doesn't really matter, you can usually pick back up later on and figure out everything that's happened in-between.
With a video game, it requires your constant attention, everything you do or don't do affects what happens next. You're making split second reactions to events that are happening, while simultaneously planning your strategy seconds, minutes, or even hours into the future. I've gone for about 8-10 hours straight of gaming and those times I only stopped because I couldn't physically concentrate or keep my eyes open anymore. And as soon as you stop, you realize how exhausted you are and have an overwhelming dysphoria and urge to sleep. I have NEVER encountered that situation from TV watching or any other activity for that matter...
Another lame attempt to take a stab at videogames and how EVIL they are...
Well I don't think that was the intent of the article, and from about 90% of the comments posted on this page, nobody else seems to think it was either. But on the off chance that that WAS the intent, I would have to agree with it to some extent. There is no other casual non-drug-related entertainment activity that millions partake in that has this kind of addictive power to it. Now I don't think anyone has ever gotten 'the shakes' from video game withdrawl, but sometimes it can be VERY hard to stop playing.
Seriously, I think this new technology could be used in some interesting ways. I'm waiting for someone to work it into the electric chairs used on death row, for a particularly fitting punishment for certain individuals...
"Jerry Bruckheimer, for your crimes against humanity, this court orders you to be put to death via electric chair. 100 million copies of Armageddon will be digitally sent through your body each second until you are sufficiently fried. And may God have mercy on your crap-movie making ass..."
No. Slashdot tells google not to spider discussion pages.
Bullshit. They just don't get indexed until the discussions are archived (older than 2 weeks I think). See here (search for "Microsoft" matches within slashdot.org).
Anyone know where he's working these days? The article didn't mention it.
It's called "unemployment".
When it was announced that Mir was going to crash into the Pacific Ocean during a certain month period, Taco Bell as a publicity stunt put up a bunch of floating markers all over the Pacific and said that if Mir landed on one of them, they would give everyone in America a free taco. I guess "teslatug" still wants his free taco...
Didn't you guys ever play Civilization?? Global warming causes all kinds of nasty disasters! All the coastlines become swamp and all but the equatorial regions become those stupid ice squares... Then some of your people die and you have to turn some of your Elvis's back into Farmers, and then it takes forever to build anymore cool toys to fight with. It's really inconvenient all the way around, so please! Clean up that nuclear polution ASAP!
was this intentional?
That's left as an exercise for the reader.
Do you nimrod mods not understand the concept that modding down posts whose subject lines already start with "OT:" (indicating an Off Topic post) doesn't achieve anything?
Marking something Off Topic with an OT: already announces to anyone who's browsing that the content of the post is Off Topic so they don't even have to click on the link if they're not interested in reading Off Topic stuff. Moderating posts as off-topic is supposed to be a way to filter down comments that otherwise appear to be ON Topic but aren't.
It's like I just stuck up a big orange construction sign (with the little orange flashing light) that says "ROAD CLOSED". And you helpfully come along and smack a Post-It note onto the sign that says "Yeah, and ROAD CLOSED too..."
I dunno, maybe there's some people out there who haven't noticed the messageboard shorthand that's been in use for the past five fuckin years or so. Something beginning/ending with "<NT>" or "(NT)" indicates that the entire content of the message is contained in the subject line, and therefore there's "NO TEXT" in the message body. You don't see that much on /. because the lame filter doesn't let you post them. But you can see how such indications are useful because everyone who sees it knows there's nothing more to read if they click on the link, so they don't bother clicking on the link.... got it? (I don't think I'm even going to get into acronyms for laughs/smiles/NotALawyer/etc.)
Radiation causes damage to an organism's cells based on the probability of it interacting with molecules in your body. You can get the same risk of negative effects by sitting in heavy radiation for a short period of time, or by sitting in light radation for a very long period of time.
(Which is you always encounter a seemingly contradictory situation when you have X-rays done at a doctor's office: the medical personnel always tell you that the amount of radiation you'll be recieving is not enough to hurt you... then they put a lead shield over your nuts and walk into the next room before they turn the thing on! The amount of radiation being sent IS very small, and so it has a very small chance of hurting you, but if they stayed in the room and were exposed to it multiple times a day every day for years in a row, it would be the same as recieving a heavy dose once or twice. They cover your gonads because although the risk is very small, it's not zero, and a mutation in your nuts is far more catastrophic to your ability to survive and pass on your genes than it would be in any other random cell in your body.)
The radiation in the Van Allen belts is more than a human body would normally experience on Earth. So I guess if you were for some reason spacewalking out there all day, you'd not be feeling too well. However, the astronauts are never just sitting around there playing zero-G frisbee with each other. They are always travelling thru it at very fast speeds (and so are not exposed for very long), and they are also riding in a SPACESHIP, which blocks some of it out. Some will still get thru, but not enough to be sterlizing anything. I've seen some people do calculations and figure that at the speed the Apollo astronauts were travelling through it, they would absorb about 1-2 rems. You don't start seeing symptoms of radiation poisoning until you get near 25 rems.
If you rode a subway thru the Van Allen belts for 45 mins every day for years on your commute to work, then yeah, you're going to see some premature cancer popping up, regardless of whether or not the bum next to you is blowing secondhand smoke in your face. But astronauts travelling thru it for about 2 hours once up and once back are not going to be turned into microwave popcorn or anything.
There is an error in the article (Score:0, Troll)
I guess we need some new moderation options for the semantic pedantic comedian whose humor hamster isn't quite spinning at full steam, to separate him from the K-Mart special garden variety Trolls. Like "-1: Joke, not funny"...
I really don't care is Windows dominated in populatity: Unix dominates in thing I care about - scalability, reliablilty and security.
My choices arn't in line with most consumers: Example
I agree. Many comsumers like the idea of spell/grammar checking features...
That's the first time you've ever insulted someone without using the words "AWP" or "OGC" isn't it?
heh That doesn't change the fact that you fucked up the punch line does it?
It would be no different than if someone were to take an O'Reilly book, replace a few words here and there, remove a chapter, and try and sell the thing as the original.
Yes, and the missed point here still is: THEY'RE NOT PASSING IT OFF AS THE ORIGINAL.
They are clearly marked as having their content edited to remove things that timid people find objectionable. They are not 'secretly' switching the original movies off the shelves of video stores with their own modified Folger's Crystals version. The timid people are seeking these people out and specifically buying the modified versions because they don't want to see the parts that were edited out. It is entirely different from your example.
Clean Flicks takes a movie that is not theirs, edits it, often poorly, without anyone's consent, and resells it to customers.
A movie that's not theirs?? Again I think you've been somehow mis-informed. They are not stealing other people's copies of movies, editing them without their knowledge and trying to "pass it off to people". They BUY each copy. They are the end user. They edit THEIR copy to remove content they find objectionable. The end result is still a SINGLE copy, which is a little bit shorter than the original. There are not 2 or more copies left over, there is only the original media, which contains a single copy of the work. No illegal copying was performed. Now they sell that copy to someone else who feels that they would not like to see the content that was edited out either, and they are fully aware that what they are buying is not the original unmodified work. Reselling an IP item which you purchased from the copyright owner is also allowed by law. You're not making multiple copies, and you're not disparaging the reputation of the content creator, because NOBODY thinks that this modified version was the original work.
How about another example. Some movie studios are getting absolutely ridiculous with the amount of previews they tack onto the beginnings of movies you buy on VHS/DVD. I have a couple tapes where there are literally 20 minutes of previews before the feature film actually starts. Now if I know I'm going to watch this movie often, and I don't want to sit there on fast forward for 10 minutes (and then be in the kitchen and miss the beginning and have to rewind and then fast forward again), I could just overwrite the contents of that VHS tape with the actual movie minus all the trailers. I have not made an illegal copy, I still only have one. Eventually I get tired of watching said movie, and someone I know says "hey man, I love that movie. I want a copy that doesn't have all those stupid trailers at the beginning either." So I sell my (modified) copy to him. He understands it's modified, and specifically wanted it that way. I even mark on the tape and box with magic marker that it has been modified, so that no one else later on could possibly pick it up and be confused about its modified status. What is the illegal part of this scenario?
Now if that series of events is legal -- ie. the modification of copyrighted content which is stored back on the original medium -- then how is making similar edits of the tape (ie. removing content I don't want to see) during portions of the feature film any different? Now if I went around making one single backup copy of my favorite tapes, and then edited only that copy to remove the trailers/content/etc, I am STILL allowed to do that. I cannot however, sell both copies to two different people. That would be making an illegal copy and profiting from it. But that's not what these companies are doing.
most spammers are smart enough not to spam a .gov e-mail address.
I really doubt this. You'd think they'd be smart enough to not send spam to any 'webmaster@' addresses, since whoever gets mail to that address has the greatest chances of being someone is willing and able to block their messages from getting to ALL the other users at that domain... however I see more email addressed to webmaster@domain than any other address that is forwarded to me. Presumably, because they know it will be a valid address at almost every domain, and/or they just spider them from web pages and put no further thought into it.
Although, I haven't seen much being sent to 'abuse@', so most of the spam software authors probably made some cursory filtering rules when they first started making their stuff, but I doubt '.gov' was in them. Only a very tiny percentage of .gov users would actually have the authority/ability to take action against spammers anyway, and there's bound to be some potential customers among the rest of them. That's the whole point of spam: not putting too much thought into the recipients. Gather hundreds of millions of addresses en mass, blast out millions of emails every day, a couple % of the recipients will buy the crap you're selling. Another couple % of the people will get downright pissed at receiving your junkmail, but they don't matter as long as you're making money. If you start getting too nitpicky about who you're sending to, then it starts to resemble real work and isn't as profitable...
Not true, kind of. The folks at http://www.entheosound.com/enthfrnt.htm would disagree with you, anyway.
Oh that's a reliable source. "These are SUPER SECRET ancient magical musical instruments. You can tell by the fact that the conquering Spaniards made no mention of them in their records, and the natives made no drawings or records of them, means that they must have been of very important, SECRET value. Which is why you should spend a thousand dollars and buy 4 of them TODAY!"
You're right. The fact that some mescaline swallowing bushmen possibly made some quirky little carved flutes five hundred years ago and thought they had magical powers clearly proves that sounds can alter your brain to a state of altered consciounsness. I stand corrected.
If you scan someone through a trip and play it back to them to see if it compares, could you not at least experience to a lesser degree how that person tripped?
Uhhh, no. Hallucinogenic drugs cause the effects they do because they cause the brain to form chemical connections in ways not otherwise possible, so you perceive things never before seen during "normal operation". You might be able to use brainwave sounds to induce the brain to jump into sleep mode, because the brain is already fully capable of sleep mode; it is a hardcoded feature. But you can't induce it to start firing in ways that are not neurochemically possible just by creating certain frequencies of sound.
Just like by pushing an old diesel car down a hill and fucking with the clutch you can sometimes get it to start even with a dead battery. Because it's already designed to be able to run, it's just having trouble getting there because a piece of its equipment is malfunctioning. But by doing something similar, you wouldn't be able to say, get it to turn into an airplane...
What about medium sized rocks, smartass?
Let's see if we can theorize what happens in the middle, given the two outer extremes. A) Small rock = completely destroyed in a ball of fire. B) Large rock = Makes big ball of fire, part of it survives & creates big explosion when it smacks into the ground, destroying other rocks along with itself...
Now you're suggesting that C) Medium-sized rock = no fireball, no explosion, no crater... just taps a girl on the foot and she picks it up and notices it's kinda hot... Yes, that makes absolute perfect sense, Mr. Spock.
In 1812 Canada WAS the British Army that burned down the whitehouse. Do you think that Britain imported an entire army to North America?
No, actually Canada was a British colony, lived in by Brits (and some French wankers), and had a British army stationed there. Did Britain "import a whole army to North America"? YES. They'd had an army there for decades. Killing indians. Then fighting the French (and indians). Then killing indians again. And oppressing the American civilians. (And what made the "Americans" a separate country? By declaring independence from Britain and killing the British soldiers who were there. Canada did not do this.)
It might also suprise you that when the United States fought a "revolutionary war", that there was someone fighting on the other side of that war... guess who that was? Ooop that's right! The British Army. And where did the tattered remnants of that British army go after they lost the war? ...hold on... I'll give you a few seconds... Could it be... CANADA? YES. So when war broke out again between Britain and the US in 1812, whose troops was it that attacked Washington D.C.? Canada? No, Canada was still not a country. Try again. Britain? YES! It was "Britain" who sent the "British Army" to attack Washington. Start to make sense now?
Who came in and shot the people who were already killing each other in Sarajevo and made them knock it off? American troops. But they were stationed in military bases in Germany before that... does that make them "Germans"? Nooooooooo kitty, they're still "Americans".
(I know there were other countries' troops there too, don't get pedantic about it.)
And We kicked the shit out of our indians, Americans just gave them whiskey and diseased blankets.
Hey, work smarter, not harder.
Don't you mean nerds without girlfriends?
Yeah, I'd think this was part of a new NASA program to get the public interested in space again, except that the plane tickets for sending 'staff' over to the limey island would have probably drained most of their budget...
Let's see:
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equals: Instant free publicity on BBC or CNN about a "lucky winner" who got hit by a space rock. People will be clamouring about, trying to find a way to increase their odds of winning the galactic lottery! Hell, they could even sell books about it to all the schmucks that buy those books about how to get rich quick... (Chapter 1: Write a Book About Getting Rich Quick and Sell It to Millions of Dumbasses). Sounds like a Better/Faster/Sheeper plan than what they've tried so far!
Oh great... first some pranksters are out there making crop circles in rural farmers' corn fields, making everyone speculate about the existance of aliens... and now some smart asses are heating up rocks and throwing them thru the air at people! Will this madness never stop?!
Before the vengeful hand of god smites me via your hand on the Troll-mod button, think about it for a second. A rock falls from EARTH ORBIT and hits her in the foot... and she 'NOTICES' it. Now IANARS (I ain't no fangled rocket scientist), but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND. Not to mention kicking up rocks and dust all over the place and leaving a molten core behind that turns sand into glass at the impact point. But that didn't happen here did it? No, it just sort of "fell on her" and it was "quite hot"...
Maybe it fell from an airplane from a couple thousand feet. Or maybe some jackass threw it at her like I mentioned earlier. But it came from MARS? Uhhhh huhhh..... Yeah, so did this "Mr. Fusion" machine that fell out of the sky too. You dump beer and old banana peels into it, and it gives you enough power to travel back in time...