You are attacking the messenger and not the message. A cute but misleading cliche. The idealised horseback messenger who is the victim of his King's wrath on the receipt of bad news has (we can assume) had no hand in manipulating or massaging the facts, and no reason to lie to his King, but is simply reporting the news.
That should not be assumed here. If I don't know all the facts of a political story for sure, and read it in a newspaper with a known reputation for right-wing bias and pandering to its readership to sell papers, I'm quite entitled to be sceptical.
Is the message false? who knows but instead of trying to figure it out you assault the messenger.
Example: If Hitler said 3+5 is 8, you would say its WRONG because HITLER said it. No, I wouldn't, because I know for a fact that 3 + 5 = 8. Your suggestion that I would is a blatant misrepresentation of my position.
Please read this comment of mine, which you'll note was posted almost 90 minutes before your comment. Salient points emphasised (here) in bold:-
I wouldn't dismiss this issue altogether simply because it came from the Daily Mail; if their slant on it could be taken at face value I would consider it cause for serious concern. Unfortunately, the Mail in itself is not trustworthy; I prefer to read these things via a less potentially biased source before passing judgement. Next, you say
We need a serious look at Logical Thinking in this country. Its a major reason why we are splitting apart in the country that people like Sean Hannity uses Logical Fallacies all the time. If that was supposed to be an attack on me, it's irrelevant, because I don't come from "this" country (i.e. the U.S., where Hannity apparently lives and works).
And, as I made clear, my message was *not* an "ad hominem" attack against the facts. It's a valid questioning as to whether the facts as presented are accurate. Since you misinterpreted it as such, it may be true that *you* need to look at logical thinking in *your* country- starting with yourself.
As to the Daily mail, they may do all the things you state and that just means you have to get more to get to the truth but it does not mean its false or even their SLANT on it is false either. No, but since I don't know whether it is or isn't true and/or unbiased, it means I do have a right to be sceptical.
This isn't denying that 3 + 5 = 8. At best we know that the right-hand side is 8, but we aren't sure what the two numbers on the left are. Am I going to take the word of someone with a vested interest in 3s and 5s? Am I heck! They might be 4 + 4, or 6 + 1, or whatever...
I am rather conservative myself but its more harmful to lie using logical mindtricks than to just face the truths. And- as demonstrated by my explanation and the linked comment above- I did no such thing.
I would think that using "The Guardian" to disprove "The Daily Mail" is a bit like using "Little Green Footballs" to disprove/discredit "Daily Kos". Despite its left-wing perspective, The Guardian is generally considered to be a fairly reputable paper, and Polly Toynbee has a high reputation as a journalist. Personally, I'd trust her not to make that up.
However, I do concede that there is insufficient evidence/attribution for that statement beyond her column, and having seen this page, I'll admit that I'm quite a bit more sceptical about it now.
Everything else was quite true though; I know that because it was my own experience and opinion:-)
I wouldn't dismiss this issue altogether simply because it came from the Daily Mail; if their slant on it could be taken at face value I would consider it cause for serious concern. Unfortunately, the Mail in itself is not trustworthy; I prefer to read these things via a less potentially biased source before passing judgement.
Talk about deja-vu. My reaction to the summary was almost identical, my response (directly below) was also very similar, and I hadn't even seen your comment when I wrote it...
Flamebait? Don't know if that mod was done in (misguided) good faith or not, but I certainly don't agree with the downmod either way.
To quote one article
The Mail's founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers "a daily hate" - and it does. It says a *lot* that the first thing that I thought of after reading the summary was to find out whether the story came from the Daily Mail... and that I wasn't remotely surprised when it did. The fact that the Mail's style and biases were obvious even via a secondhand interpretation of the story says a lot about it.
More here. Can't say whether they're as bad as Fox News or not, because I haven't seen a significant amount of its output (due to living in the UK). However, I personally wouldn't trust the Daily Mail as far as I could throw it.
Anyway, there is probably some truth in the story, but I expect it's been exaggerated, distorted and "enhanced" by selective reporting. For example, I remember reading a story about ecstasy in New Scientist a few years back. It was all about a study which claimed that there were serious effects of the drug on the brain. However, the story also included plausible-sounding criticism and rebuttal of the study by other equally reputable scientists.
I saw the same story in the Daily Mail later that day. It also included the details about the study and the possibly dangerous effects of the drug, and was written in a moderately "reputable" manner. However, unlike NS's report, they didn't hint that there was *any* scepticism about the findings, let alone print those views. Result was that the effect of the story was very different, more one-sided and scaremongering. Fact-by-fact, the Daily Mail story was correct, but it lied by omission.
Mind you, the Daily Mail is full of scaremongering health stories; that's a staple of the front page for them. Along with reports on how something the government has done is going to affect the value of your house, and right-wing political half-truths.
Novell have made it explicitly clear, and since they have, the only thing it possibly does is make Microsoft look silly (as they regularly do). As I already said (the above is merely an expanded version of your original comment), I'm not convinced that Novell really believed that their agreement would merely "make Microsoft look silly".
Although you clearly don't want to admit it, this deal has been very beneficial for Novell How the hell do you assume that I "clearly don't want to admit it"?
Where on earth do I imply that the deal *wasn't* beneficial for Novell? I said nothing of the sort; on the contrary, I would expect it to be beneficial for them in the short term unless there is a serious backlash.
Elsewhere, you accuse others of skimming detail- "Others in the community see these headlines, think the headlines alone are evidence, and don't even consider the matter"- but you seem quite happy to lump me in with- and assume I share the views of- others, simply because I happen to agree with them on one specific point.
(and, in turn, Linux) This is only true if we assume that "what's good for Novell is good for Linux".
Doesn't matter. Microsoft got what will be perceived by many as *external* validation, which isn't the same thing as them themselves parroting that Linux violates their patents.
Novell wanted to have their cake and eat it, and despite their assertion that they "couldn't have made it clearer that they didn't agree to any [such] nonsense", if they knew how the deal would likely be perceived in practice, such a statement is likely to be meaningless or just legal ass-covering.
Only a naive fool believes that those who oppose him are simply victims of propaganda. Propaganda is all around us, no one makes a value judgment without being greatly influenced by various artistic mediums. And your point in relation to what I said is...?
I pointed out that the assertion "the US [..] has this sort of aversion to drama and abstraction" was demonstrably incorrect. No more, no less. However, being influenced by popular culture- which I would hesitate to call propaganda (with the exception of advertising, which mostly is)- is not the same thing.
That's not to say that I think it's necessarily healthy in large doses, but you're coming close to strawman territory there.
People you are dangerous for the simple reason you have no respect for the decisions people make. As I said, you read too much into what I said.
Democracy is certainly a failure, but a truly noble heart shows a bit more respect and compassion for those who have shown they cannot take care of themselves. And you call me dangerous? For all the flaws of various democratic systems, I still believe in the principle of democracy, and do not consider it a "failure". You clearly have less faith.
That partly sums up what I felt; namely, that the current up-its-backside-with-Hollywood-production-values games market is just a small percentage of the total *potential* market. I felt this before games like Dr. Kawashima/Brain Age, and it was games like that which persuaded me to buy a DS Lite; and also the reason that I didn't even consider the PSP.
I think it partially stems from the fact that the US, in particular, has this sort of aversion to drama and abstraction, in general. You're kidding, right?
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
And you have an aversion to abstraction? Advertising and branding, the red-blood of All-American capitalism *is* abstraction of values. How else does a simple tick-shaped "swoosh" symbol, or some pretty white writing on a red background saying "Coca Cola" have so much meaning? It's not that Nike goods or Coca Cola are so much better than the competition; it's that they have so much imagery associated with them. It's bordering on hyperreality.
I think this sorta explains the rise of GTA over fantasy games, GTA realistic? It's not exactly Ridley Scott's "Legend", but it's still a white boy's safe fantasy of black urban life.
but I think it also begins to explain the distinction between Brain Age and fantasy/drama titles. Wasn't Brain Age/Dr. Kawashima a Japanese success to start off with before it did well in the US? The stereotype of American entertainment isn't "small-scale realism", it's big-bucks blockbusters.
I appreciate that there's been a move to "reality" TV in recent years, but if your reality shows are anything like ours in the UK, then they're contrived situations set up like a lab experiment designed to provoke drama and edited to play out like a real-life soap.
If reality TV reflects anything, it's the increasingly artificial and contrived direction modern society is moving towards, everyone's life played out as 15 minutes of TV fame.
Thank you Captain Obvious. Since the author of the article wasn't suggesting that such games be given special government funding, or that people be forced to play them at gunpoint, then the market will decide anyway.
He's quite entitled to make suggestions, companies are free to ignore them, or consumers free to not buy them. You seem to be implying that anything outside some artificially restricted concept of "The Market" is not valid; i.e. software houses decide what to produce based only on their own opinions/research and consumers either buy or don't.
Chanting "let the market decide" like a mantra isn't meaningful or insightful; it's redundant.
It's pretty common knowledge that a trademark is only valid within an industry. You mean to say that there's nothing Bill Gates can do to stop me marketing a Microsoft (TM) enema kit? Yay!
OTOH, MS's defence might be that they *are* involved in the enema industry, since the public has been taking it up the ass from them for years...
The organic LED's are capable of animation. If anything, they are a capable drawing surface that could be mapped each to an X server itself
Can you imagine:
Multiple-choice selections for a Quiz
Wack'a'mole
Memory
Wheel of Fortune
Fish Screensaver
All the things a Unix operating system would adapt onto, because you can!
Buy today!/slashvertisement There's actually quite a good idea in your comment. It's a shame you posted it under that stupid SlashdotTroll account that defaults to a score of -1.
I think having a separate X server for each key sounds horrid though. You'd need over 100 instances, and even though X isn't horifically resource hungry by today's standards (it was when it first came out), that's still a silly amount of overhead just to run a keyboard.
I guess at some point or other we have cursed keyboards for having fixed symbols and wished for something better, I remember the cards you used to place above your Fn keys for word processing and graphics programs, we all get freaked out remembering the keys to games and I would love to see my keys change fonts to match what I am typing. You know, someone came up with a solution to this almost a quarter of a century ago... the ACT Apricot PC (released in 1983) had a keyboard which included six special keys with a programmable LCD display above them.
It's surprising that this idea never took off elsewhere. Granted, it would probably have been moderately (but not prohibitively) expensive then, but I'm sure that the cost would have come down. Maybe ACT had patented it, but if that was the reason, why would they sit on it?
I remember first coming across a photo of the Apricot PC keyboard in the late 1980s, six years after its release, and it *still* looked cool (I didn't realise it was that old at the time).
Given the amount of "extended functionality" PC keyboards over the years, it's surprising that this hasn't been done. It might not be as pretty as the Optimus keyboard promises to be, but it would have been a cheap way to add useful (or "cool") functionality, even moreso a few years ago. It seems like this would have been functionality lots of people would have liked at an affordable price, so why did it never appear?
Flaming zombie corpses attack from space
on
Scotty Scooped Up
·
· Score: 1
Of course these last two assume that bodies would be sent into space uncremated, which isn't all that practical I guess, but even cremated remains ought to be hurled out into deep space in my opinion. Couldn't they put uncremated bodies into a very low, unstable orbit and let them re-enter the atmosphere and burn up on their own?
I'm assuming that a human body would burn up long before it hit the ground. I can only imagine that it would be traumatic if this didn't happen and some hillbilly in an isolated part of Kansas looked up and saw someone's flaming corpse flying towards him at 500MPH.
It sounds like the guys who are too embarrassed to admit that they still live in Mom's basement found somewhere else to go besides the Star Trek convention. I bet if you raided 100 of their houses, you'd find 99 sets of Spock ears. This is Slashdot, for fuck's sake. What were you expecting? Speculation on what Paris Hilton will get up to in jail? (Slashdot answer: Fake lesbian romp filmed in Nightvision, "accidentally" leaked to the press). A mix-and-match guide to this summer's colour trends in the fashion world? (Slashdot answer: Why not team a black T-shirt featuring a "scary" heavy metal print- XXL size only- with a pair of blue jeans and brown trainers- you can get these by wearing your four-year-old blue trainers, which were blue when you bought them, but are now some indeterminate shade of crap.).
Seriously, how is this news? Any of us can sit around and speculate about what would happen if Carthage had cannons, if Herodotus had a laptop, if the Romans had camcorders, if Galen had an ICU or if Battle Star Galactica had Romulan cloaking devices That last one's not real, just thought you'd like to know. Though it won't stop people speculating anyway.
or of both BSG & ST had SG's star gates. It's still just that - speculation and it's just about as relevant to anything as my toe jam. From your Slashdot page, I notice that you claim to write fiction. Is fiction in general any more "relevant"?
Not that I think much of your "new piece of fiction" anyway;
404 Not Found
The resource requested could not be found on this server! Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server
Lite Speed Technologies is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site! You really need to work on the plot... characterisation is a bit lightweight too.
Tell me how fast my 2Mbps internet connection is. Go ahead. Ten mibiquaaludes per light year.
Want to blame that on marketing, too? You're obviously trying to make a point, but I'll admit I haven't a clue what it is. That there is now more than one definition of kilo-, mega-, gigabyte? We both know this already, so it must be something else; please explain.
People *do* infact tend to store $38.99 as "thirty-something" and perceive it as cheaper than it really is, relative to say $40.25, or atleast they used to. For a start, $38.99 is different enough from $40 that the (minor) difference *is* notable. Perhaps you meant $39.99?
Either way, how do you know how most people perceive prices?
It's possible, I'd say likely even, that people are adapting to the marketing-crap by installing mental filters that force such prices up. Storing it as "about fourty" or "almost fourty" or some such. I can't comment for other people, but I'm in my early thirties, and I can't recall ever having *not* done this. It's not something I even really consciously thought about until this issue came up.
Over here, there's metric prices for everything, so its trivial doing comparison-shopping. The price-label will actually say: $3.25 (400g, $8.13 pro kg) They do that in the UK as well, but that's not relevant when you're buying a sandwich toaster, or suchlike.
i used to play bf1942 all the time, and that intro was part of it, and would say in some creepy voice "challenge everything", immediately after it said that i would/always/ say out loud 'except josh's sexuality' (im josh. and straight.) Methinks the boy doth protest too much.
My immediate reaction would be "I wasn't thinking of that anyway. Is there something you're trying to hide?"
Yes, I'm well aware of that. I'm also aware that the base-2 definitions were standard in the computing world, and everyone knew what they meant; and that the adoption of base-10 meanings had jack shit to do with the "correct" use of the prefixes and everything to do with making some HDDs look better than they were.
I know the difference, but I still fall for it!
It's like those 49.99 prices that somehow computes in your brain to $40. Huh? Those sorts of prices have been around all my life (albeit in Pounds, not Dollars), and I don't recall ever mentally parsing them as anything other than (in your example) "(almost) 50 dollars" or "(almost) 2 pounds", etc.
I think it's fair to say that mentally I don't register (e.g.) £4.95 and £4.99 at all differently in everyday use. And any mental difference between £4.95/£4.99 and £5 is small, like different words for the same thing.
But I'd never think of $49.99 as anything like $40.
What I hate is one of our supermarket chains, Tesco, has started using "odd" prices like £5.23 for a sandwich toaster. Apparently, this is supposed to subconsciously give the impression of a "marked down" or "sale" item, and make people thing it's a bargain, but I can't say I ever saw them that way; it just struck me as f*****g about with the pricing and it pissed me off because (a) It was blatantly playing silly buggers for some opaque reason and (b) Makes things more complicated for quick-and-dirty subconscious price comparisons.
Manufactures correctly report a megabyte as 10^6 bytes (1,000,000), while good quality computer software also reports a megabyte as 10^6 bytes, while reporting a mebibyte as 2^20 bytes That as may be true by today's "official" definitions. However, as I understand it, pretty much everyone had standardised around the base-2 definitions, and the only reason the current confusion exists is because some worthless prick in a marketing department somewhere saw a quick-and-easy way to make his employer's hard drives look bigger than they were.
Had this not happened, would the standards bodies have insisted upon strict adherence to the base-10 meanings in the face of the other meanings being universally accepted? Even if they had, they'd likely have been ignored... well, until the aforementioned sales-twat saw a way to flog more hard drives to the gullible. Tossers.
Damn you long-haired smellies! Why can't you get with the program and just passively CONSUME! EA did it! They told me to "Challenge Everything"!
To which they replied, "Foolish boy, that was just a vapid and insincere corporate slogan designed to sound vaguely cool to wannabe-rebellious (and utterly conformist) 13-year-olds..."
Slashdot Mirror
That should not be assumed here. If I don't know all the facts of a political story for sure, and read it in a newspaper with a known reputation for right-wing bias and pandering to its readership to sell papers, I'm quite entitled to be sceptical. Is the message false? who knows but instead of trying to figure it out you assault the messenger. Example: If Hitler said 3+5 is 8, you would say its WRONG because HITLER said it. No, I wouldn't, because I know for a fact that 3 + 5 = 8. Your suggestion that I would is a blatant misrepresentation of my position.
Please read this comment of mine, which you'll note was posted almost 90 minutes before your comment. Salient points emphasised (here) in bold:- I wouldn't dismiss this issue altogether simply because it came from the Daily Mail; if their slant on it could be taken at face value I would consider it cause for serious concern. Unfortunately, the Mail in itself is not trustworthy; I prefer to read these things via a less potentially biased source before passing judgement. Next, you say We need a serious look at Logical Thinking in this country. Its a major reason why we are splitting apart in the country that people like Sean Hannity uses Logical Fallacies all the time. If that was supposed to be an attack on me, it's irrelevant, because I don't come from "this" country (i.e. the U.S., where Hannity apparently lives and works).
And, as I made clear, my message was *not* an "ad hominem" attack against the facts. It's a valid questioning as to whether the facts as presented are accurate. Since you misinterpreted it as such, it may be true that *you* need to look at logical thinking in *your* country- starting with yourself. As to the Daily mail, they may do all the things you state and that just means you have to get more to get to the truth but it does not mean its false or even their SLANT on it is false either. No, but since I don't know whether it is or isn't true and/or unbiased, it means I do have a right to be sceptical.
This isn't denying that 3 + 5 = 8. At best we know that the right-hand side is 8, but we aren't sure what the two numbers on the left are. Am I going to take the word of someone with a vested interest in 3s and 5s? Am I heck! They might be 4 + 4, or 6 + 1, or whatever... I am rather conservative myself but its more harmful to lie using logical mindtricks than to just face the truths. And- as demonstrated by my explanation and the linked comment above- I did no such thing.
However, I do concede that there is insufficient evidence/attribution for that statement beyond her column, and having seen this page, I'll admit that I'm quite a bit more sceptical about it now.
Everything else was quite true though; I know that because it was my own experience and opinion
I wouldn't dismiss this issue altogether simply because it came from the Daily Mail; if their slant on it could be taken at face value I would consider it cause for serious concern. Unfortunately, the Mail in itself is not trustworthy; I prefer to read these things via a less potentially biased source before passing judgement.
Talk about deja-vu. My reaction to the summary was almost identical, my response (directly below) was also very similar, and I hadn't even seen your comment when I wrote it...
To quote one article The Mail's founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers "a daily hate" - and it does. It says a *lot* that the first thing that I thought of after reading the summary was to find out whether the story came from the Daily Mail... and that I wasn't remotely surprised when it did. The fact that the Mail's style and biases were obvious even via a secondhand interpretation of the story says a lot about it.
More here. Can't say whether they're as bad as Fox News or not, because I haven't seen a significant amount of its output (due to living in the UK). However, I personally wouldn't trust the Daily Mail as far as I could throw it.
Anyway, there is probably some truth in the story, but I expect it's been exaggerated, distorted and "enhanced" by selective reporting. For example, I remember reading a story about ecstasy in New Scientist a few years back. It was all about a study which claimed that there were serious effects of the drug on the brain. However, the story also included plausible-sounding criticism and rebuttal of the study by other equally reputable scientists.
I saw the same story in the Daily Mail later that day. It also included the details about the study and the possibly dangerous effects of the drug, and was written in a moderately "reputable" manner. However, unlike NS's report, they didn't hint that there was *any* scepticism about the findings, let alone print those views. Result was that the effect of the story was very different, more one-sided and scaremongering. Fact-by-fact, the Daily Mail story was correct, but it lied by omission.
Mind you, the Daily Mail is full of scaremongering health stories; that's a staple of the front page for them. Along with reports on how something the government has done is going to affect the value of your house, and right-wing political half-truths.
Where on earth do I imply that the deal *wasn't* beneficial for Novell? I said nothing of the sort; on the contrary, I would expect it to be beneficial for them in the short term unless there is a serious backlash.
Elsewhere, you accuse others of skimming detail- "Others in the community see these headlines, think the headlines alone are evidence, and don't even consider the matter"- but you seem quite happy to lump me in with- and assume I share the views of- others, simply because I happen to agree with them on one specific point. (and, in turn, Linux) This is only true if we assume that "what's good for Novell is good for Linux".
Doesn't matter. Microsoft got what will be perceived by many as *external* validation, which isn't the same thing as them themselves parroting that Linux violates their patents.
Novell wanted to have their cake and eat it, and despite their assertion that they "couldn't have made it clearer that they didn't agree to any [such] nonsense", if they knew how the deal would likely be perceived in practice, such a statement is likely to be meaningless or just legal ass-covering.
I pointed out that the assertion "the US [..] has this sort of aversion to drama and abstraction" was demonstrably incorrect. No more, no less. However, being influenced by popular culture- which I would hesitate to call propaganda (with the exception of advertising, which mostly is)- is not the same thing.
That's not to say that I think it's necessarily healthy in large doses, but you're coming close to strawman territory there. People you are dangerous for the simple reason you have no respect for the decisions people make. As I said, you read too much into what I said. Democracy is certainly a failure, but a truly noble heart shows a bit more respect and compassion for those who have shown they cannot take care of themselves. And you call me dangerous? For all the flaws of various democratic systems, I still believe in the principle of democracy, and do not consider it a "failure". You clearly have less faith.
That partly sums up what I felt; namely, that the current up-its-backside-with-Hollywood-production-values games market is just a small percentage of the total *potential* market. I felt this before games like Dr. Kawashima/Brain Age, and it was games like that which persuaded me to buy a DS Lite; and also the reason that I didn't even consider the PSP.
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
And you have an aversion to abstraction? Advertising and branding, the red-blood of All-American capitalism *is* abstraction of values. How else does a simple tick-shaped "swoosh" symbol, or some pretty white writing on a red background saying "Coca Cola" have so much meaning? It's not that Nike goods or Coca Cola are so much better than the competition; it's that they have so much imagery associated with them. It's bordering on hyperreality. I think this sorta explains the rise of GTA over fantasy games, GTA realistic? It's not exactly Ridley Scott's "Legend", but it's still a white boy's safe fantasy of black urban life. but I think it also begins to explain the distinction between Brain Age and fantasy/drama titles. Wasn't Brain Age/Dr. Kawashima a Japanese success to start off with before it did well in the US? The stereotype of American entertainment isn't "small-scale realism", it's big-bucks blockbusters.
I appreciate that there's been a move to "reality" TV in recent years, but if your reality shows are anything like ours in the UK, then they're contrived situations set up like a lab experiment designed to provoke drama and edited to play out like a real-life soap.
If reality TV reflects anything, it's the increasingly artificial and contrived direction modern society is moving towards, everyone's life played out as 15 minutes of TV fame.
"Let the market decide"?
Thank you Captain Obvious. Since the author of the article wasn't suggesting that such games be given special government funding, or that people be forced to play them at gunpoint, then the market will decide anyway.
He's quite entitled to make suggestions, companies are free to ignore them, or consumers free to not buy them. You seem to be implying that anything outside some artificially restricted concept of "The Market" is not valid; i.e. software houses decide what to produce based only on their own opinions/research and consumers either buy or don't.
Chanting "let the market decide" like a mantra isn't meaningful or insightful; it's redundant.
OTOH, MS's defence might be that they *are* involved in the enema industry, since the public has been taking it up the ass from them for years...
No Bill Gates (TM) douche for similar reasons.
Can you imagine:
Multiple-choice selections for a Quiz
Wack'a'mole
Memory
Wheel of Fortune
Fish Screensaver
All the things a Unix operating system would adapt onto, because you can!
Buy today!
I think having a separate X server for each key sounds horrid though. You'd need over 100 instances, and even though X isn't horifically resource hungry by today's standards (it was when it first came out), that's still a silly amount of overhead just to run a keyboard.
That aside, interesting idea.
It's surprising that this idea never took off elsewhere. Granted, it would probably have been moderately (but not prohibitively) expensive then, but I'm sure that the cost would have come down. Maybe ACT had patented it, but if that was the reason, why would they sit on it?
I remember first coming across a photo of the Apricot PC keyboard in the late 1980s, six years after its release, and it *still* looked cool (I didn't realise it was that old at the time).
Given the amount of "extended functionality" PC keyboards over the years, it's surprising that this hasn't been done. It might not be as pretty as the Optimus keyboard promises to be, but it would have been a cheap way to add useful (or "cool") functionality, even moreso a few years ago. It seems like this would have been functionality lots of people would have liked at an affordable price, so why did it never appear?
I'm assuming that a human body would burn up long before it hit the ground. I can only imagine that it would be traumatic if this didn't happen and some hillbilly in an isolated part of Kansas looked up and saw someone's flaming corpse flying towards him at 500MPH.
Not that I think much of your "new piece of fiction" anyway; 404 Not Found The resource requested could not be found on this server! Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server Lite Speed Technologies is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site! You really need to work on the plot... characterisation is a bit lightweight too.
Either way, how do you know how most people perceive prices? It's possible, I'd say likely even, that people are adapting to the marketing-crap by installing mental filters that force such prices up. Storing it as "about fourty" or "almost fourty" or some such. I can't comment for other people, but I'm in my early thirties, and I can't recall ever having *not* done this. It's not something I even really consciously thought about until this issue came up. Over here, there's metric prices for everything, so its trivial doing comparison-shopping. The price-label will actually say: $3.25 (400g, $8.13 pro kg) They do that in the UK as well, but that's not relevant when you're buying a sandwich toaster, or suchlike.
My immediate reaction would be "I wasn't thinking of that anyway. Is there something you're trying to hide?"
Yes, I'm well aware of that. I'm also aware that the base-2 definitions were standard in the computing world, and everyone knew what they meant; and that the adoption of base-10 meanings had jack shit to do with the "correct" use of the prefixes and everything to do with making some HDDs look better than they were.
I think it's fair to say that mentally I don't register (e.g.) £4.95 and £4.99 at all differently in everyday use. And any mental difference between £4.95/£4.99 and £5 is small, like different words for the same thing.
But I'd never think of $49.99 as anything like $40.
What I hate is one of our supermarket chains, Tesco, has started using "odd" prices like £5.23 for a sandwich toaster. Apparently, this is supposed to subconsciously give the impression of a "marked down" or "sale" item, and make people thing it's a bargain, but I can't say I ever saw them that way; it just struck me as f*****g about with the pricing and it pissed me off because (a) It was blatantly playing silly buggers for some opaque reason and (b) Makes things more complicated for quick-and-dirty subconscious price comparisons.
Had this not happened, would the standards bodies have insisted upon strict adherence to the base-10 meanings in the face of the other meanings being universally accepted? Even if they had, they'd likely have been ignored... well, until the aforementioned sales-twat saw a way to flog more hard drives to the gullible. Tossers.
To which they replied, "Foolish boy, that was just a vapid and insincere corporate slogan designed to sound vaguely cool to wannabe-rebellious (and utterly conformist) 13-year-olds..."
My mistake.