I basically agree with the guy's thesis, but his own writing is atrocious:
The very nature of e-mail (which, along with first cousins IM and text messaging, is an undeniably handy means of chatting) encourages sloppy "penmanship," as it were. Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.
But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It's important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It's important to maintain high standards. It's important to think before you write.
First he tells me that speed and informality sing a virtual hooker, then he tells me to maintain high standards? I can't tell whether he's being ironic or he's just a bad writer himself.
And anyway, it's ridiculous to call today's kids the "comic-book generation" when 50 years ago kids read a hell of a lot more comic books than they do today.
Or get the.torrent here and save why-war.com and swarthmore.edu from an unnecessary load. I just tried downloading the memo archive from swarthmore's server, but soon found that I was getting literally 1000 times the transfer rate from bittorrent.
Hey -- Don't complain about your Miller High Life; it's the champagne of beers! Seriously, though, as far as swill goes I'd rather have High Life than any of its competitors, on account of the fact that it has just about no flavour at all, which makes it taste much better than swill that tastes downright awful.
My college apartment's drink of choice recently has been Yuengling, ever since my local K-Mart started selling 12-packs for $8. I second your dreams about Guinness, though.
Ka-Blamo and Not-Ka-Blamo are the 'codenames' of the programs, according to the Baudio web page.
Kablammo, on the other hand, is the name of my shitty blog, which has no relation whatsoever to Baudio. It's a small world, or at least a small namespace.
5. Non-fantasy or non-science fiction oriented names from popular fiction or non-fiction media either fictional or non-fictional (e.g. Bill Clinton, Austin Powers, Britneyspears, Harrypotter)
...
11. Names where the combination of the first and last name violate a previous rule (e.g. Harleeda Vidsonn, Clint Eastwood).
Wouldn't 'Clint Eastwood' fall under rule 5's jurisdiction? I'd say 'Clinte Astwood' would be a better candidate for rule 11, myself.
What I'd really like to see is "Zen Meditation: The Video Game". That would allow me to engage in "deep" contemplation and mindless distraction at the same time.
What you're looking for is called "Dance Dance Revolution", or the cheap PC knockoff called "Diet Diet Revolution" that had me spending so much time 'meditating' that I almost got in some serious trouble that semester... Seriously, get up to 7 or 8 'feet' of difficulty and you'll find yourself in another dimension, a dimension featuring plenty of bright colours and scrolling arrows but a surprising lack of self.
We are talking about lengths of time that don't even register on our awareness.
Sir, I find it hard to believe that you've used dial-up internet access recently. Either that or you haven't used broadband recently, since you claim to notice no substantial difference between it and dialup. The length of time required to "register on our awareness" depends heavily on the circumstances surrounding it, and on how long we expect an activity to take. When it comes to pages loading, using broadband gives you the expectation that the activity of loading a page will take almost no time. When you use dialup and, suddenly, the time you're required to allot to page loading is much more than what you expected, you are all too painfully aware of the time differential.
In my apartment, on my cable modem, mapquest takes a second or two to load. The last time I was at my parent's house, using 56k dialup, mapquest took over 20 seconds to load just the front page. Actually downloading directions somewhere took over a minute. Granted, under certain conditions, I don't notice the passage of a minute of time, but staring at a map that's being downloaded isn't one of those conditions.
The culture shock of dialup is part of why I use the internet so little when I'm home... I'd rather have no access at all than slow access.;)
Placing things in the trash is in no way considered destroying them. In fact, your trash is generally considered public domain -- you have forsaken any claim to what was your property by placing it on the curbside. Many, many people have been arrested and convicted based on evidence that they simply threw out; police don't need a search warrant to dig through your trash.
I've gotten 2 perfectly functional computer monitors off the streets of Manhattan because people threw them away; it would be ludicrous to claim that the people who discarded them would have legal recourse against me for having taken them. Every spring when students move out of the dorms a few blocks away from me, there are huge dumpsters full of perfectly useful stuff being thrown out by people who no longer have room for their Pink Floyd posters or Casio keyboards or whatever. Those dumpsters, aside from being full of _stuff_, are full of people sorting through the stuff to see if there's anything worth taking. All perfectly legal.
Of course, if you break into an office building and take a bunch of papers out of a bin labeled 'To Be Destroyed' in a locked room, it's clearly not the same thing as taking a slice of pizza out of a trash can and eating it.
And I suppose in the next World War, we'll be using Klingon-speakers in our radio communications so that the Germans won't understand.
So... the next world war will be Estonia vs Germany? (/me points at mail address)
Well, judging from previous world wars, the chances of Estonia and Germany being on opposite sides are pretty good.
But truth be told, by "we" I meant "America", and by "America" I mean "the United States thereof". I suppose this is exactly the kind of trouble I set myself up for by using a mail service based in a country other than the one I live in...;)
PS. Mul on küll hea meel näha teisi eestlasi/.'il.
"RF" systems (such as the 2600, Intellivision, etc) go in line, with the most frequently used closest to the TV (to avoid the inevitable signal degredation). (And yes, this can mess up cable reception.)
Speaking from experience attaching an assload of RF systems to a TV, I can say that your best bet is to get a 3-way or so RF switcher.
Right now, I have the following devices attached by RF to my TV (yeah, it's too old to have RCA connectors, but dammit, it works just fine and it was free):
NES
Genesis
SNES
Playstation
N64
Dreamcast
VCR
DVD (plugs into VCR)
Cable
With all these devices connected (hell, even just some of them connected) in a daisy chain, the signal degradation was almost unbearable. Unless you feel like unplugging everything when you're done using it and then plugging it back in, a 3-way RF switcher like this one is really the only way to go.
Right now my setup is one setting for TV/VCR/DVD, one setting for 8- or 16-bit systems, and one for 32- or 64-bit systems.
PS: If you feel inclined to judge me for playing too many videogames, you're a fool. I'm just a packrat who can't bear to divest myself of anything while it still functions, and I could name a million things you'd do better to judge me for.
Books are written by committees. They have no literary merit, no voice, no style, no charm. They are focused almost exclusively on facts...
Is it just me, or is an almost-exclusive focus on facts a good thing for textbooks of any sort? Would people prefer books based on rampant speculations, unwarranted assumptions, and outright lies?
It seems whenever anyone finds a reasonably large crater, they declare "this is it, this is the one that killed the dinos". It grabs headlines. I'd hate to be a dinosaur, because it seems like I'd've been extinctified about 12 times over by genocidal asteroid de jour.
Well, the first asteroid was just a warning. Then the next ten were warnings, too. This current one, on the other hand... was the final chance for the dinosaurs to get their act in gear. In a few months, satellites will discover evidence of a 13th apocalyptic asteroid in Siberia. That's the one that took out the dinosaurs.
Fans will go to the movie anyway, and they'll buy the special collector edition whenever it comes out.
If they released both, they'd have two products competing for shelf-space needlessly.
Oh, you mean products competing for shelf space like Warcraft III and the Warcraft III Collector's Edition? Or do you mean more like Windows XP Home vs Windows XP Pro? Hang on, maybe you mean it would be two competing products like 4-cylinder vs 6-cylinder models of the same automobile? Or perhaps the way Sony's top-of-the-line A/V equipment competes with its entry-level versions?
It sure is a good thing that companies don't sell differently graded versions of the same product -- imagine the confusion if Coca-Cola began selling 12oz, 20oz, and 2L units of its beverages! The large 'fan' size would push the smaller 'newbie' drinks off the shelf! And even if the smaller sizes did get shelf space, they'd be competing with each other due to the similarity of their sizes. All the consumers would just get fed up of trying to decipher the options in front of them and end up leaving the store with a few 40s of Olde English instead.
for example, the rotation of the Earth may slow ever so slightly because of stronger winds, increasing the length of a day by a fraction of a millisecond
And I thought the day only felt longer after eating at a Mexican restaurant.
I think it's clear that the real culprit is windmills. If wind pushing on the Earth makes its rotation slow down, it logically follows that the more surface area to be pushed on, the greater the effect, whether or not you eat Mexican food. This means that those giant canvas sails on windmills aren't just grinding grain for Dutchmen in their clogs, they're lengthening the day! I've seen many other posts here lauding the extended day for a variety of reasons, but a longer day is simply no good, as Sealab 2021 is already shown on TV far too infrequently, and those fractions of a millisecond add up over the course of a week! Our only possible course of action: demolish all windmills, so we can see our delicious animation seven fractions of a millisecond sooner every week. Yup, no choice but to destroy all windmills... and that damn Sydney opera house.
I remember the old days when a 486 DX2 was not a bad gaming machine...
Those days aren't necessarily over yet! My current Athlon XP 1800+ runs Doom 2 slower than my old 486 did. Thanks to Windows XP's horrendous DOS performance, Doom 2 stutters as badly as it did on my poor Cyrix 386 DX/40 (I think) upgrade chip. After which I moved up to a silky smooth AMD 486 DX4/100.
Wow, I just realized that my last 4 CPUs have been AMD:
486 DX4/100
K6 166
K6-2/350
Athlon XP 1800+
Maybe I should buy an old Duron 1GHz to fill in that little gap I left? :
...should have been number one on the list. It had everything that makes a great Simpsons episode:
Absolutely Classic Lines, like
"He eats like a pig!"
"Nah, pigs tend to chew their food. I'd say he eats more like a duck."
Self-Referencing Humor, e.g. Homer's wall of photographs of previous accomplishments.
"You were in space?"
"What, you've never been?"
Commentary on itself. Frank Grimes provides the perfect foil for Homer by being an actual human being. He acts not like a character on the Simpsons, but like a responsible adult. In the process, he demonstrates that people from 'our world' have absolutely no place in the Simpsons universe.
Most importantly, it's Damn Funny too.
Just my 2, but I think it's atrocious to have left Homer's Enemy off the list, especially since Homer the Clown didn't make it either. Utter blasphemy.
I'll leave you with more of the genius that was Homer's Enemy....
"Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp."
Slashdot Mirror
No, he shouldn't.
That's the point.
Or get the .torrent here and save why-war.com and swarthmore.edu from an unnecessary load. I just tried downloading the memo archive from swarthmore's server, but soon found that I was getting literally 1000 times the transfer rate from bittorrent.
My college apartment's drink of choice recently has been Yuengling, ever since my local K-Mart started selling 12-packs for $8. I second your dreams about Guinness, though.
Kablammo, on the other hand, is the name of my shitty blog, which has no relation whatsoever to Baudio. It's a small world, or at least a small namespace.
Wow, I had no idea that East Berlin had such a large black population, or such a taste for seafood.
...
11. Names where the combination of the first and last name violate a previous rule (e.g. Harleeda Vidsonn, Clint Eastwood).
Wouldn't 'Clint Eastwood' fall under rule 5's jurisdiction? I'd say 'Clinte Astwood' would be a better candidate for rule 11, myself.
What you're looking for is called "Dance Dance Revolution", or the cheap PC knockoff called "Diet Diet Revolution" that had me spending so much time 'meditating' that I almost got in some serious trouble that semester... Seriously, get up to 7 or 8 'feet' of difficulty and you'll find yourself in another dimension, a dimension featuring plenty of bright colours and scrolling arrows but a surprising lack of self.
Sir, I find it hard to believe that you've used dial-up internet access recently. Either that or you haven't used broadband recently, since you claim to notice no substantial difference between it and dialup. The length of time required to "register on our awareness" depends heavily on the circumstances surrounding it, and on how long we expect an activity to take. When it comes to pages loading, using broadband gives you the expectation that the activity of loading a page will take almost no time. When you use dialup and, suddenly, the time you're required to allot to page loading is much more than what you expected, you are all too painfully aware of the time differential.
In my apartment, on my cable modem, mapquest takes a second or two to load. The last time I was at my parent's house, using 56k dialup, mapquest took over 20 seconds to load just the front page. Actually downloading directions somewhere took over a minute. Granted, under certain conditions, I don't notice the passage of a minute of time, but staring at a map that's being downloaded isn't one of those conditions.
The culture shock of dialup is part of why I use the internet so little when I'm home... I'd rather have no access at all than slow access. ;)
I've gotten 2 perfectly functional computer monitors off the streets of Manhattan because people threw them away; it would be ludicrous to claim that the people who discarded them would have legal recourse against me for having taken them. Every spring when students move out of the dorms a few blocks away from me, there are huge dumpsters full of perfectly useful stuff being thrown out by people who no longer have room for their Pink Floyd posters or Casio keyboards or whatever. Those dumpsters, aside from being full of _stuff_, are full of people sorting through the stuff to see if there's anything worth taking. All perfectly legal.
Of course, if you break into an office building and take a bunch of papers out of a bin labeled 'To Be Destroyed' in a locked room, it's clearly not the same thing as taking a slice of pizza out of a trash can and eating it.
Hey, give us some credit... some of the founding was done by puritans, but the rest was smugglers all the way.
Well, judging from previous world wars, the chances of Estonia and Germany being on opposite sides are pretty good.
But truth be told, by "we" I meant "America", and by "America" I mean "the United States thereof". I suppose this is exactly the kind of trouble I set myself up for by using a mail service based in a country other than the one I live in... ;)
PS. Mul on küll hea meel näha teisi eestlasi /.'il.
And I suppose in the next World War, we'll be using Klingon-speakers in our radio communications so that the Germans won't understand.
It's "select, start" if you want a two-player game. For one player, you leave out the "select".
Speaking from experience attaching an assload of RF systems to a TV, I can say that your best bet is to get a 3-way or so RF switcher.
Right now, I have the following devices attached by RF to my TV (yeah, it's too old to have RCA connectors, but dammit, it works just fine and it was free):
With all these devices connected (hell, even just some of them connected) in a daisy chain, the signal degradation was almost unbearable. Unless you feel like unplugging everything when you're done using it and then plugging it back in, a 3-way RF switcher like this one is really the only way to go.
Right now my setup is one setting for TV/VCR/DVD, one setting for 8- or 16-bit systems, and one for 32- or 64-bit systems.
PS: If you feel inclined to judge me for playing too many videogames, you're a fool. I'm just a packrat who can't bear to divest myself of anything while it still functions, and I could name a million things you'd do better to judge me for.
Granted, sometimes a company wants everything and ends up merging with AOL as a result, but often they get monetary benefit instead.
Books are written by committees. They have no literary merit, no voice, no style, no charm. They are focused almost exclusively on facts...
Is it just me, or is an almost-exclusive focus on facts a good thing for textbooks of any sort? Would people prefer books based on rampant speculations, unwarranted assumptions, and outright lies?
Well, the first asteroid was just a warning. Then the next ten were warnings, too. This current one, on the other hand... was the final chance for the dinosaurs to get their act in gear. In a few months, satellites will discover evidence of a 13th apocalyptic asteroid in Siberia. That's the one that took out the dinosaurs.
If they released both, they'd have two products competing for shelf-space needlessly.
Oh, you mean products competing for shelf space like Warcraft III and the Warcraft III Collector's Edition? Or do you mean more like Windows XP Home vs Windows XP Pro? Hang on, maybe you mean it would be two competing products like 4-cylinder vs 6-cylinder models of the same automobile? Or perhaps the way Sony's top-of-the-line A/V equipment competes with its entry-level versions?
It sure is a good thing that companies don't sell differently graded versions of the same product -- imagine the confusion if Coca-Cola began selling 12oz, 20oz, and 2L units of its beverages! The large 'fan' size would push the smaller 'newbie' drinks off the shelf! And even if the smaller sizes did get shelf space, they'd be competing with each other due to the similarity of their sizes. All the consumers would just get fed up of trying to decipher the options in front of them and end up leaving the store with a few 40s of Olde English instead.
And I thought the day only felt longer after eating at a Mexican restaurant.
I think it's clear that the real culprit is windmills. If wind pushing on the Earth makes its rotation slow down, it logically follows that the more surface area to be pushed on, the greater the effect, whether or not you eat Mexican food. This means that those giant canvas sails on windmills aren't just grinding grain for Dutchmen in their clogs, they're lengthening the day! I've seen many other posts here lauding the extended day for a variety of reasons, but a longer day is simply no good, as Sealab 2021 is already shown on TV far too infrequently, and those fractions of a millisecond add up over the course of a week! Our only possible course of action: demolish all windmills, so we can see our delicious animation seven fractions of a millisecond sooner every week. Yup, no choice but to destroy all windmills... and that damn Sydney opera house.
Those days aren't necessarily over yet! My current Athlon XP 1800+ runs Doom 2 slower than my old 486 did. Thanks to Windows XP's horrendous DOS performance, Doom 2 stutters as badly as it did on my poor Cyrix 386 DX/40 (I think) upgrade chip. After which I moved up to a silky smooth AMD 486 DX4/100.
Wow, I just realized that my last 4 CPUs have been AMD:
486 DX4/100
K6 166
K6-2/350
Athlon XP 1800+ Maybe I should buy an old Duron 1GHz to fill in that little gap I left? :
- Absolutely Classic Lines, like
- Self-Referencing Humor, e.g. Homer's wall of photographs of previous accomplishments.
- Commentary on itself. Frank Grimes provides the perfect foil for Homer by being an actual human being. He acts not like a character on the Simpsons, but like a responsible adult. In the process, he demonstrates that people from 'our world' have absolutely no place in the Simpsons universe.
- Most importantly, it's Damn Funny too.
Just my 2, but I think it's atrocious to have left Homer's Enemy off the list, especially since Homer the Clown didn't make it either. Utter blasphemy."He eats like a pig!"
"Nah, pigs tend to chew their food. I'd say he eats more like a duck."
"You were in space?"
"What, you've never been?"
I'll leave you with more of the genius that was Homer's Enemy....
"Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp."
The Gideons bit is from Bill Hicks' album "Rant in E-minor".