The minute Google went public, their primary responsibility became looking after the best interests of their shareholders, not being an impartial index of internet sites.
Somehow I find it hard to believe that 'do no evil' and 'maximise returns for shareholders' are compatible philosophies - especially when the latter is actually enshrined in the law!
Related point: in the UK, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick was recently on the radio. She talked about how Body Shop had put money (not a huge amount, either) into a civic project - IIRC, it was a kids' playground in Glasgow. Good publicity for the company, you'd think. Wrong - she got torn apart in the financial pages and by the City for 'wasting' money that would get no return for the shareholders!
There's something wrong with the system when a selfless deed to improve the lives of others is considered a bad thing...
How are those things going to recognize whether someone is a soldier or a civilian?
'First there was the Mark One War Droid. He was programmed to identify and attack enemies of the state... but couldn't recognise civilians. That required moral judgement.
'The Mark Two was programmed with genuine moral values. He became a pacifist and tried converting human soldiers to his cause... and paid the inevitable price.
'So the Mark Three was given artificial values and emotions: patriotism, thrilling to the national anthem, believing the enemy is always evil, war is necessary to protect vital interests. Nothing too deep -- just enough to stop me slaughtering civilians. Not enough to question why I'm fighting in the first place.
'In other words... the perfect soldier.'
From The ABC Warriors: Black Hole (Pat Mills, Simon Bisley and SMS, 1988) The ABC Warriors
I wouldn't want to be the poor bastard who has to demonstrate that robot in front of the brass.
"Use your gun in a threatening manner."
"Uh, with respect, sir... fuck that!"
Re:Grand Theft Auto is funnier than that
on
Humor in Games?
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· Score: 1
I'd forgotten Catalina was in GTA3, but I cracked up laughing when I saw who her new 'boyfriend' was in SA.
I've just completed SA, and there are some genuinely funny moments in there - some of them self-referential within the series (like the return of Ken Rosenberg and Kent Paul), some of them from the character dialogue (The Truth and Maccer), some from the situations (like dating Millie when you find out what she's *really* into) and some just because they're completely insane (the Cluckin' Bell radio commercial).
The only other game I've played in the last couple of years that made me laugh was KOTOR, and that was more in a wry, 'that was quite clever' way, whereas SA is at times genuinely hilarious. It's noticeable how things don't really start to become humorous and Grand Theft Auto-y until you leave the semi-realistic gangsta missions of Los Santos, though...
Nobody takes the guardian seriously anymore... and called for the assassination of the president [msn.com]
Oh please. It's not like this was a Guardian editorial. Charlie Brooker, the author of said column, is a humorist and comedian, for fuck's sake. And one who enjoys winding up the easily offended, at that. Occasionally he goes right to the edge - such as when he got an issue of PC Zone magazine pulled from the shelves of the UK's largest chains of newsagents for a comic strip called 'Cruelty Zoo' - but while his stuff is often twisted, it's still very funny.
Check out TV Go Home to see what else he does for a living.
Judge Dred, the movie. Where the guns strapped each bullet that was fired with the owners DNA and nobody except the owner could use the gun. Fiction becoming a reality.
I never worked out how the gun was able to sample the user's DNA and encode it onto each bullet when all the Judges wore gloves...
About time! We can stick a NERVA drive into a shuttle, send it to meet Halley's Comet, and get a look at the hot naked space vampire babe found within. Granted, there will be the minor side-effects of zombiefication and general armageddon, but it's a small price to pay...
Seriously, though, NERVA was always a good option for space travel - it's not as though you can 'pollute' space with radiation, as it's already full of the stuff. The only problem was that NASA tested it in the atmosphere, where people could rub their chins and go, "Y'know, is spewing all that radioactive reaction mass directly into the air a good idea?"
Maybe we've finally found an actual, worthwhile use for the ISS: assembling NERVA drives in orbit! If nuclear rockets were good enough for Moonbase Alpha's Eagles, they should be good enough for any half-assed, budget-strapped, politically-crippled interplanetary craft that gets developed in the next 25 years...
Especially since his only real attempt at designing "his" computer interface was the complete flop of the Canon Cat [jagshouse.com]
After reading the article, the Canon Cat comes across as little more than a glorified word processor rather than a true multi-purpose computer. The nearest equivalent I can think of would be my Psion Series 5, which while it has its uses and is a much-loved bit of pocket-sized kit, is emphatically not my day-to-day computer. (Ironically for Raskin, I'm typing this on an 8.6-running Tangerine iMac.)
The Cat seems to be designed to do a small number of jobs, chosen by the designers, very well. The Mac (and by extension other GUI-based UIs) can do a large number of jobs, many of which were not even dreamed of by the designers, as well as the application programmers can manage. And if the programmers don't get it right the first time, they can keep writing new versions until they do. (Hell, everyone knows that you should never buy an x.0 piece of software!)
Forget even the Z80 and 6502/10 computers of the Eighties - 68x00 chips must be going for pennies by now. (Hell, the 6502 is still being made!)
Why isn't there a 'starter' computer system around any more? I went from self-taught Sinclair and C64 BASIC to minor levels of assembler on both systems before life shifted me away from computers for a while, until I came back to C++ on a Mac more than a decade later - and I think learning assembler properly would have made C++ a snap!
But the way systems are now, there doesn't seem to be anything to get people into programming easily. Anyone could piss about in BASIC for a couple of hours and get things moving about the screen that actually respond to their inputs, but in C++ on a GUI-based machine?
For that matter, why isn't there a BASIC interpreter built into modern machines? I mean, jeez, how fast would *that* run? 64-bits at 4Gh compared to 8-bits at 1Mh? For a program I could write myself in an afternoon for a particular job, I'd quite happily sacrifice GUI elements and go back to 'Enter value here_' options.
Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?
An American that I know through my old job came to the UK on holiday with his wife. While they were here, she developed appendicitis and had to have emergency surgery.
Having heard all the usual US media scare stories about the appalling state of 'socialised medicine' and expecting something little better than a chamber of horrors, they were - to say the least - pleasantly surprised that not only did she get immediate and professional medical attention with all the necessary after-care, but that it didn't cost them a penny! Needless to say, their opinions of universal healthcare have completely changed since then...
However much of my income might be going as tax to fund the NHS, I'm certain it's quite a lot less than I'd have to pay for private medical insurance if the NHS weren't there.
An informative show, even if the CG got a bit repetitive (they used the same clip looking down from Saturn's pole before sweeping into the rings six or seven times, and even had to start flipping the image to disguise it!)
Anyone else notice just how much familiar movie music was in there? The sequence of Cassini being loaded into the Delta was accompanied by a track from Armageddon, a space flyby CG sequence had the 1989 Batman theme, and one of the Titan shots used the 'opening of the Ark' theme from Raiders! There were also cues from Moonraker and a couple of others. Methinks the Beeb's music library's been infiltrated by movie fans...
The BBC is doing a very good job with documentaries at the moment. Part 1 of The Power Of Nightmares (about the parallel origins of al-Qaeda and the neo-conservative movement) on Wednesday was both informative *and* disturbing!
...when the 'I Hate Bees' game starts. Little pollen-spreading black-and-yellow bastards.
Not as bad as wasps, though. If there's ever an 'I Hate Wasps' game, count me in! Those fuckers have a nest somewhere in my apartment building, and when I turn my heating on for the winter I keep finding wasp corpses in my living room!
They chose a drink plus what it conjured up to their medial prefrontal cortex, namely the strong brand identity of Coca-Cola, he said.
Heh.
I used to drink Coke, until I thought, 'Hang on, what's this doing to my teeth?'
So I switched to Diet Coke. Until I thought, 'Hang on, if I want to drink a fizzy brown liquid that tastes like battery acid, I can buy own-brand cola from the supermarket for a quarter of the price.'
So I switched to that. Until I thought, 'Hang on! Why am I drinking stuff that tastes like battery acid at all?'
Wow, was the cola industry pissed!
(I also stopped eating at fast food joints about six months ago. Man, if another billion or so people do the same, those evil megacorps are *really* in trouble, huh?)
I have a box full of cxellphones, all of them work, it costs more money to rerplace the battery than it does to get a new phone.
You can't be looking very hard. I got a replacement battery for my 4-year-old Ericsson T10 online (after looking in the local phone shops and getting nothing but contemptuous looks from the assistants because I wasn't interested in buying a pay-as-you-go handset for UKP50 or paying UKP20 a month for a contract - mind you, phone salesmen are arrogant, slimy little shits, so fuck 'em) for just UKP12. 30 seconds on Google was all it took.
Isn't blowing money on all those handsets even more of a waste than buying an iPod?
There's a new-ish novel by Patrick Robinson called 'Scimitar SL-2' that features a Mount St Helen's eruption as part of the plot, caused by (DUN DUN DURRR!) *terrorists*!
It's not a very good novel (in fact, it's downright ludicrous, as it's one of those where all the world's terrorists seem to be working together as one unified group, a concept which Parker and Stone are ridiculing in 'Team America') and it's insanely right-wing, ultra-militaristic and reactionary, as such books are wont to be, but Robinson might now get some extra sales just because he was lucky with the timing.
The simplest question, about the most wanted man in the world, who requires regular kidney dialysis and is therefore unlikely to be scooting about the Middle East from hidey-hole to hidey-hole on a daily basis.
The most powerful nation in the history of the planet supposedly has every resource, from human intelligence to the most sophisticated spy satellites, hunting for him.
So, Mr Bush, three years on, where is he?
Is there *any* chance at all that this mass-murderer, who killed not only thousands of US but also hundreds of allied citizens at the WTC, has not been found is because he is hiding in Saudi Arabia, a country which your administration refuses to antagonise in even the slightest way?
Yes or no, Mr Bush. Is there a chance that he is in Saudi Arabia? And if the answer is yes, why aren't you looking there?
C'mon! Evil machines *have* to have red lights shining out of their eyes - just look at the Terminator! It's the law - how else would you know they're eeeeevil?
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I find it hard to believe that 'do no evil' and 'maximise returns for shareholders' are compatible philosophies - especially when the latter is actually enshrined in the law!
Related point: in the UK, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick was recently on the radio. She talked about how Body Shop had put money (not a huge amount, either) into a civic project - IIRC, it was a kids' playground in Glasgow. Good publicity for the company, you'd think. Wrong - she got torn apart in the financial pages and by the City for 'wasting' money that would get no return for the shareholders!
There's something wrong with the system when a selfless deed to improve the lives of others is considered a bad thing...
'First there was the Mark One War Droid. He was programmed to identify and attack enemies of the state... but couldn't recognise civilians. That required moral judgement.
'The Mark Two was programmed with genuine moral values. He became a pacifist and tried converting human soldiers to his cause... and paid the inevitable price.
'So the Mark Three was given artificial values and emotions: patriotism, thrilling to the national anthem, believing the enemy is always evil, war is necessary to protect vital interests. Nothing too deep -- just enough to stop me slaughtering civilians. Not enough to question why I'm fighting in the first place.
'In other words... the perfect soldier.'
From The ABC Warriors: Black Hole (Pat Mills, Simon Bisley and SMS, 1988)
The ABC Warriors
"Use your gun in a threatening manner."
"Uh, with respect, sir... fuck that!"
I've just completed SA, and there are some genuinely funny moments in there - some of them self-referential within the series (like the return of Ken Rosenberg and Kent Paul), some of them from the character dialogue (The Truth and Maccer), some from the situations (like dating Millie when you find out what she's *really* into) and some just because they're completely insane (the Cluckin' Bell radio commercial).
The only other game I've played in the last couple of years that made me laugh was KOTOR, and that was more in a wry, 'that was quite clever' way, whereas SA is at times genuinely hilarious. It's noticeable how things don't really start to become humorous and Grand Theft Auto-y until you leave the semi-realistic gangsta missions of Los Santos, though...
Oh please. It's not like this was a Guardian editorial. Charlie Brooker, the author of said column, is a humorist and comedian, for fuck's sake. And one who enjoys winding up the easily offended, at that. Occasionally he goes right to the edge - such as when he got an issue of PC Zone magazine pulled from the shelves of the UK's largest chains of newsagents for a comic strip called 'Cruelty Zoo' - but while his stuff is often twisted, it's still very funny.
Check out TV Go Home to see what else he does for a living.
I never worked out how the gun was able to sample the user's DNA and encode it onto each bullet when all the Judges wore gloves...
Seriously, though, NERVA was always a good option for space travel - it's not as though you can 'pollute' space with radiation, as it's already full of the stuff. The only problem was that NASA tested it in the atmosphere, where people could rub their chins and go, "Y'know, is spewing all that radioactive reaction mass directly into the air a good idea?"
Maybe we've finally found an actual, worthwhile use for the ISS: assembling NERVA drives in orbit! If nuclear rockets were good enough for Moonbase Alpha's Eagles, they should be good enough for any half-assed, budget-strapped, politically-crippled interplanetary craft that gets developed in the next 25 years...
After reading the article, the Canon Cat comes across as little more than a glorified word processor rather than a true multi-purpose computer. The nearest equivalent I can think of would be my Psion Series 5, which while it has its uses and is a much-loved bit of pocket-sized kit, is emphatically not my day-to-day computer. (Ironically for Raskin, I'm typing this on an 8.6-running Tangerine iMac.)
The Cat seems to be designed to do a small number of jobs, chosen by the designers, very well. The Mac (and by extension other GUI-based UIs) can do a large number of jobs, many of which were not even dreamed of by the designers, as well as the application programmers can manage. And if the programmers don't get it right the first time, they can keep writing new versions until they do. (Hell, everyone knows that you should never buy an x.0 piece of software!)
Scotty must be gutted.
Still, we know you can get a good cup of joe out there. As Captain Janeway once said, "There's coffee in that nebula!"
Why isn't there a 'starter' computer system around any more? I went from self-taught Sinclair and C64 BASIC to minor levels of assembler on both systems before life shifted me away from computers for a while, until I came back to C++ on a Mac more than a decade later - and I think learning assembler properly would have made C++ a snap!
But the way systems are now, there doesn't seem to be anything to get people into programming easily. Anyone could piss about in BASIC for a couple of hours and get things moving about the screen that actually respond to their inputs, but in C++ on a GUI-based machine?
For that matter, why isn't there a BASIC interpreter built into modern machines? I mean, jeez, how fast would *that* run? 64-bits at 4Gh compared to 8-bits at 1Mh? For a program I could write myself in an afternoon for a particular job, I'd quite happily sacrifice GUI elements and go back to 'Enter value here_' options.
Kind of makes me wonder if you could take the gameplay refinements we take for granted today and apply them to an old machine. I'd love to see a (top-down, obviously) C64 version of Crazy Taxi! Or going the other way, how about a totally real-time version of The Sentinel powered by a G5 or 4Ghz Pentium?
Jet Set Willy won't live forever if you only have a 16K Spectrum!
Having heard all the usual US media scare stories about the appalling state of 'socialised medicine' and expecting something little better than a chamber of horrors, they were - to say the least - pleasantly surprised that not only did she get immediate and professional medical attention with all the necessary after-care, but that it didn't cost them a penny! Needless to say, their opinions of universal healthcare have completely changed since then...
However much of my income might be going as tax to fund the NHS, I'm certain it's quite a lot less than I'd have to pay for private medical insurance if the NHS weren't there.
Anyone else notice just how much familiar movie music was in there? The sequence of Cassini being loaded into the Delta was accompanied by a track from Armageddon, a space flyby CG sequence had the 1989 Batman theme, and one of the Titan shots used the 'opening of the Ark' theme from Raiders! There were also cues from Moonraker and a couple of others. Methinks the Beeb's music library's been infiltrated by movie fans...
The BBC is doing a very good job with documentaries at the moment. Part 1 of The Power Of Nightmares (about the parallel origins of al-Qaeda and the neo-conservative movement) on Wednesday was both informative *and* disturbing!
Not as bad as wasps, though. If there's ever an 'I Hate Wasps' game, count me in! Those fuckers have a nest somewhere in my apartment building, and when I turn my heating on for the winter I keep finding wasp corpses in my living room!
Heh.
I used to drink Coke, until I thought, 'Hang on, what's this doing to my teeth?'
So I switched to Diet Coke. Until I thought, 'Hang on, if I want to drink a fizzy brown liquid that tastes like battery acid, I can buy own-brand cola from the supermarket for a quarter of the price.'
So I switched to that. Until I thought, 'Hang on! Why am I drinking stuff that tastes like battery acid at all?'
Wow, was the cola industry pissed!
(I also stopped eating at fast food joints about six months ago. Man, if another billion or so people do the same, those evil megacorps are *really* in trouble, huh?)
Wasn't Martin Landau's conspiracy theorist *also* named Kurzweil? It's a conspiracy, I tells ya!
You can't be looking very hard. I got a replacement battery for my 4-year-old Ericsson T10 online (after looking in the local phone shops and getting nothing but contemptuous looks from the assistants because I wasn't interested in buying a pay-as-you-go handset for UKP50 or paying UKP20 a month for a contract - mind you, phone salesmen are arrogant, slimy little shits, so fuck 'em) for just UKP12. 30 seconds on Google was all it took.
Isn't blowing money on all those handsets even more of a waste than buying an iPod?
"Curse the man who invented helium! Curse Pierre-Jules-Cesar Janssen!"
Yeah, because when the hard drive eventually craps out, it's all wiped out in one fell swoop!
It's not a very good novel (in fact, it's downright ludicrous, as it's one of those where all the world's terrorists seem to be working together as one unified group, a concept which Parker and Stone are ridiculing in 'Team America') and it's insanely right-wing, ultra-militaristic and reactionary, as such books are wont to be, but Robinson might now get some extra sales just because he was lucky with the timing.
Woohoo! *Finally* a use for all those damn Air Miles I've accumulated!
The most powerful nation in the history of the planet supposedly has every resource, from human intelligence to the most sophisticated spy satellites, hunting for him.
So, Mr Bush, three years on, where is he?
Is there *any* chance at all that this mass-murderer, who killed not only thousands of US but also hundreds of allied citizens at the WTC, has not been found is because he is hiding in Saudi Arabia, a country which your administration refuses to antagonise in even the slightest way?
Yes or no, Mr Bush. Is there a chance that he is in Saudi Arabia? And if the answer is yes, why aren't you looking there?
Say what you like about the film, but the Ron Cobb-designed Gun Star was a kick-ass fictional spaceship!
Wow! Now *there's* a guy who got bad advice from his laywer.
"Just plead guilty from the start. We'll make a deal, get the sentence down to 20 years or so..."
C'mon! Evil machines *have* to have red lights shining out of their eyes - just look at the Terminator! It's the law - how else would you know they're eeeeevil?