" So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?"
In Return of the Jedi, a Rebel A-Wing crashed into the bridge of the Super Star Destroyer. To film the effect, they actually smashed a VW-Bug through the set. Since astronomers watch Star Wars too much, it's obvious that this is their rationale for comparing destructive meteors to Bugs.
"I have NO idea how you relate the shit ending with "interesting if you've done programming" either. Seems like you just tossed that in for some reason or another."
So it's agreed then, you didn't get the ending. That's why you didn't like it, and that's why you'd prefer the typical Hollywood crap ending where the main character just dies.
I'll concede on one point that's been made before, though: The ending could have been clearer. The storytelling in the end was confusing. A little bit of dialog here and there could have made it more satisfying. However, those who figured it out found it to be rather intriguing. Hence my bringing it up, the movie was underappreciated. (Partly due to some questionable choices in the end, like making the super-robots look like aliens.)
"Everybody I know that has seen that movie agrees...."
Safety in numbers is not a valid argument here. Using your logic, Windows is the superior OS to Linux.
"Robocop was appreciated just fine, and doesn't deserve any more appreciation than it got."
Actually, I could imagine the Slashdot Community watching RC 1 and 2 while pretending OCP is Microsoft. They'd seriously laugh at both of those movies. Let me give you an example:
In RC1, a bug in ED-209 prevented it from detecting that the test subject (the executive) had dropped his gun. As a result, he was really blown away. Heh in the Director's cut, the machine kept firing on the guy even though he laid dead on the city. It was actually rather amusing. Why did they arm this robot for a test?
In RC2, (not a very good movie btw, but there's still some shining moments in it) OCP tried to build a new Robocop. One of the droids they presented went berserk and started firing on the lab technicians before killing itself. Again, why doesn't OCP disarm their robots? Oh, but that's not the end of it. Towards the end of the movie they unveiled the offical RoboCop 2 in front of a crowd of people. When RoboCop showed up to take it out, it aimed it's gun and *Whirrrrrr*... no bullets fired. The scientist pulls out the remote and says "He's not armed!", so the droid snatches it from her, punches in the arm code, and releases a spray of bullets into the crowd.
Mindless violence? Perhaps, but I thought the MS'esque screw-up was pretty amusing. "Must...not...let...features... go!"
There's lotsa little subtleties to both those movies that's really quite amusing, especially if you're a Slashdot frequenter.
I doubt I convinced you that Robocop's a good movie, but I at least hope you can understand why I think it's underappreciated.
"Anyone want to comment on how stable Opera is these days? Maybe I should give it another shot."
I remember the early versions of Opera being rather unstable. Is 7 unstable? It hasn't been for me. Yes I have the occasional crash. It's nowhere near as bad as it was, though.
I'll caution you, though, that my gf hasn't had the same luck. She gets inopportune crashes from time to time. She's on an e-Machines though, so draw your own conclusions.;)
I guess all I can really say is that it's definitely more stable than prev versions, but it's not rock solid like you say Mozilla is. Should you give it another go? I think you should. I have it running as my primary browser on 3 machines and haven't looked back.
" If the movie had just ended with HJO transfixed on the blue fairy until his Energizers ran out I would have been perfectly content."
Sadly, that is a typical Hollywood out. The ending you describe would have ruined the movie. It's a formula. Main character lives or dies. Sorry, but that's crap. In this movie, they found a very interesting and unique solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. It was very interesting how they took a tragic situation and turned it around. It's even more interesting if you've ever done programming.
"Isn't the point of this thread how to make browsing FASTER? Mozilla = Slow."
To be honest, I'm not sure why Opera's not more popular here because of that. Especially Opera 7, it's damn cool to be able to drag virtually anything around in order to reconfigure your interface.
"Sounds cool, but in reality it's just Lynx for OSX."
As funny as that is, I recently went on a business trip where I was stuck on a POTS ISP in my hotel room. The only thing that made that net connection barable is that I use Opera, and it's got a nifty little 'text only' button I can check. That made surfing places like Slashdot a HELL of a lot easir.
I even developed a taste for erot.. uh.. fan fiction.
"How about by not having the Flash plugin installed?"
If you're an IE user, you get nagged to death.
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[GUNSHOT]
That's the nasty thing about auto-installing plugins like ActiveX controls. They always send the request to be installed without any knowledge that they were turned down earlier. I wouldn't blame MS for this either. Back in the dot-com days, web developers thought their audience was incredibly incompetant when it came to using computers. If they didn't have an auto-installer, they wouldn't use it for fear that some wanker couldn't figure out how to hit save and okay a couple of times. Thanks to popular demand, this stupid auto-install feature was born.
"Companies have the right to sell whatever product they want, in the form that they choose. "
Yeah, but the corps are going to fight this. They're going to be (rightly) concerned that people won't want to buy the products if they have limited capabilities. Would you buy a music CD that said "You can't play it on your computer or make a dupe to keep in the CD changer in your car."?
You can bet it'll be fought. But, on the plus side, if it passes it'll likely mean lower prices on CD's. That is, of course, assuming that word gets out on what you can't do with a CD.
"And you're right; this is a forum, but expressing yourself in ways that will make people think you're ignorant isn't likely to help get your point across."
I can't say I care a whole lot about people who'd call me ignorant because of a simple typing mistake. Never mind that I might be fatigued, short of time, or injured. No no no, I'm ignorant because I said 'yur' instead of 'your'.
My point? I hope the people that are judging people based on how well they spell are being judged as well. I think the guy who corrected the other guy at the beginning of this post is a condescending jerk. Look what his 'lack of ignorance' earned him.
"Just another way to ruin the life of the geek. Go Intel, make your chips even less appealing./me pokes his Athlon XP"
Um right. Like Intel'd do that just to 'ruin the life of the geek', that'd really make their profits rise.:eyeroll:
Intel provides a service, faster processing. The more you pay, the faster you get. Unfortunately, mobo companies are making it a little too easy to overlock. It used to be that you had to muck with jumpers, now it's dipswitches. Heck, today you can call up websites to get step by step instructions on how to do it.
Can you really be surprised that Intel'd want to put a stop to that? I mean seriously, the faster the info gets around, the more people do it, the fewer people buy the faster processors.
Any time you (you == the collective geek community) popularize the less profitable service by a company, you can expect them to combat it. AMD will make the same move down the road. Whine all you want, but Intel and AMD both are out to make money. If they don't make enough of it, they'll move out of the business. At some point, they have to be paid for services they provide.
It's sad that Intel is trying to block a level of tweakability, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm certainly not ready to raise the pitchforks towards them. If anything, I'd aim it at the Geek Community who put it in Intel's sights. Good job guys.
"But what happens when a person using a TMDA-protected email account attempts to contact someone else using a TMDA-protected email account? What's to stop there being a cascading ping-pong of confirmation messages? (Or are you supposed to automatically whitelist everyone you send email to?)"
It would probably do the same thing that Outlook 2000 does. When the server recieves a message, the sender information is stored on a list. When next email comes, it checks the sender information against the list of people who's approval is still pending. If the sender is already there, then it does not send a message back to them. The list is cleared when the program is restarted.
That's how Outlook 2000 avoids the auto-responder loop. It's pretty trivial to write too, so I can imagine TMDA has already worked that out.
"...about a week later you receive a ticket in the mail, with a photo of your car going through the intersection and a closeup of your license plate. Try and talk your way out of that ticket!"
My aunt had that happen, only she got the ticket instead of her son that was driving the car. That's probably why the photo radar option's not so popular here, though we do have it.
I wish I had a phone numberr I could call so that I could report license plate #'s of ppl who do that. Then, what'd happen is the police would send out a warning (not one that appears on their record...) saying "Somebody complained about you, stop it." Eventually, enough complaints could lead to something worse.
Normally I wouldn't be a fan of something like that, but I've watched Tri-Met busses (yes, plural) run red lights. One actually caused a train/trolley to stop and honk at it.
... with people who run red lights. Here in Portland, people think red lights are optional. I'm getting rather sick of it. I think if their cell phone were to start ringing every time they do it then we might see a pavlovian effect here to deter this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
" So why do astronomers always compare the size of meteors to Volkswagen bugs?"
In Return of the Jedi, a Rebel A-Wing crashed into the bridge of the Super Star Destroyer. To film the effect, they actually smashed a VW-Bug through the set. Since astronomers watch Star Wars too much, it's obvious that this is their rationale for comparing destructive meteors to Bugs.
"Might I suggest that you GET YOUR F'ING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT? "
Might I suggest that you stop pretending you know what people's priorities really are?
"The last bit of information on the recorder could be this.
"You idiot! You pressed the wrong button!!!""
No no, it was probably this:
"Watch this, I can do a barrel roll..."
"I have never seen Flash used in an application that wouldn't be more effective using javascript or simple HTML."
I hate they way everybody generalizes.
"I have NO idea how you relate the shit ending with "interesting if you've done programming" either. Seems like you just tossed that in for some reason or another."
So it's agreed then, you didn't get the ending. That's why you didn't like it, and that's why you'd prefer the typical Hollywood crap ending where the main character just dies.
I'll concede on one point that's been made before, though: The ending could have been clearer. The storytelling in the end was confusing. A little bit of dialog here and there could have made it more satisfying. However, those who figured it out found it to be rather intriguing. Hence my bringing it up, the movie was underappreciated. (Partly due to some questionable choices in the end, like making the super-robots look like aliens.)
"Everybody I know that has seen that movie agrees...."
Safety in numbers is not a valid argument here. Using your logic, Windows is the superior OS to Linux.
"Robocop was appreciated just fine, and doesn't deserve any more appreciation than it got."
Actually, I could imagine the Slashdot Community watching RC 1 and 2 while pretending OCP is Microsoft. They'd seriously laugh at both of those movies. Let me give you an example:
In RC1, a bug in ED-209 prevented it from detecting that the test subject (the executive) had dropped his gun. As a result, he was really blown away. Heh in the Director's cut, the machine kept firing on the guy even though he laid dead on the city. It was actually rather amusing. Why did they arm this robot for a test?
In RC2, (not a very good movie btw, but there's still some shining moments in it) OCP tried to build a new Robocop. One of the droids they presented went berserk and started firing on the lab technicians before killing itself. Again, why doesn't OCP disarm their robots? Oh, but that's not the end of it. Towards the end of the movie they unveiled the offical RoboCop 2 in front of a crowd of people. When RoboCop showed up to take it out, it aimed it's gun and *Whirrrrrr*... no bullets fired. The scientist pulls out the remote and says "He's not armed!", so the droid snatches it from her, punches in the arm code, and releases a spray of bullets into the crowd.
Mindless violence? Perhaps, but I thought the MS'esque screw-up was pretty amusing. "Must...not...let...features... go!"
There's lotsa little subtleties to both those movies that's really quite amusing, especially if you're a Slashdot frequenter.
I doubt I convinced you that Robocop's a good movie, but I at least hope you can understand why I think it's underappreciated.
"Anyone want to comment on how stable Opera is these days? Maybe I should give it another shot."
;)
I remember the early versions of Opera being rather unstable. Is 7 unstable? It hasn't been for me. Yes I have the occasional crash. It's nowhere near as bad as it was, though.
I'll caution you, though, that my gf hasn't had the same luck. She gets inopportune crashes from time to time. She's on an e-Machines though, so draw your own conclusions.
I guess all I can really say is that it's definitely more stable than prev versions, but it's not rock solid like you say Mozilla is. Should you give it another go? I think you should. I have it running as my primary browser on 3 machines and haven't looked back.
" If the movie had just ended with HJO transfixed on the blue fairy until his Energizers ran out I would have been perfectly content."
Sadly, that is a typical Hollywood out. The ending you describe would have ruined the movie. It's a formula. Main character lives or dies. Sorry, but that's crap. In this movie, they found a very interesting and unique solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem. It was very interesting how they took a tragic situation and turned it around. It's even more interesting if you've ever done programming.
It's a very inspiring movie.
Artificial Intelligence. Seems like I'm the only guy that really enjoyed that movie.
"Isn't the point of this thread how to make browsing FASTER? Mozilla = Slow."
To be honest, I'm not sure why Opera's not more popular here because of that. Especially Opera 7, it's damn cool to be able to drag virtually anything around in order to reconfigure your interface.
"Sounds cool, but in reality it's just Lynx for OSX."
As funny as that is, I recently went on a business trip where I was stuck on a POTS ISP in my hotel room. The only thing that made that net connection barable is that I use Opera, and it's got a nifty little 'text only' button I can check. That made surfing places like Slashdot a HELL of a lot easir.
I even developed a taste for erot.. uh.. fan fiction.
"How about by not having the Flash plugin installed?"
If you're an IE user, you get nagged to death.
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[NO]
[Click on a link]
"Would you like to install this piece of software?"
[GUNSHOT]
That's the nasty thing about auto-installing plugins like ActiveX controls. They always send the request to be installed without any knowledge that they were turned down earlier. I wouldn't blame MS for this either. Back in the dot-com days, web developers thought their audience was incredibly incompetant when it came to using computers. If they didn't have an auto-installer, they wouldn't use it for fear that some wanker couldn't figure out how to hit save and okay a couple of times. Thanks to popular demand, this stupid auto-install feature was born.
So that's why uninstalling it doesn't fix it.
"Companies have the right to sell whatever product they want, in the form that they choose. "
Yeah, but the corps are going to fight this. They're going to be (rightly) concerned that people won't want to buy the products if they have limited capabilities. Would you buy a music CD that said "You can't play it on your computer or make a dupe to keep in the CD changer in your car."?
You can bet it'll be fought. But, on the plus side, if it passes it'll likely mean lower prices on CD's. That is, of course, assuming that word gets out on what you can't do with a CD.
"Did I earn something?"
:)
You earned a 'Redundant' moderation.
"You quickly jump to conclusions."
... say... much. Not...
Your fault. Because
"And you're right; this is a forum, but expressing yourself in ways that will make people think you're ignorant isn't likely to help get your point across."
:)
I can't say I care a whole lot about people who'd call me ignorant because of a simple typing mistake. Never mind that I might be fatigued, short of time, or injured. No no no, I'm ignorant because I said 'yur' instead of 'your'.
My point? I hope the people that are judging people based on how well they spell are being judged as well. I think the guy who corrected the other guy at the beginning of this post is a condescending jerk. Look what his 'lack of ignorance' earned him.
The swords are double edged.
"'Viruses,' Not 'Virii'
Learn more [perl.com]"
STFU, not STFES.
Learn More."
"/me pokes his Athlon XP"
Digipak just sent me a message to let you all know he won't be able to respond to your posts until his burn heals.
"Just another way to ruin the life of the geek. Go Intel, make your chips even less appealing. /me pokes his Athlon XP"
:eyeroll:
Um right. Like Intel'd do that just to 'ruin the life of the geek', that'd really make their profits rise.
Intel provides a service, faster processing. The more you pay, the faster you get. Unfortunately, mobo companies are making it a little too easy to overlock. It used to be that you had to muck with jumpers, now it's dipswitches. Heck, today you can call up websites to get step by step instructions on how to do it.
Can you really be surprised that Intel'd want to put a stop to that? I mean seriously, the faster the info gets around, the more people do it, the fewer people buy the faster processors.
Any time you (you == the collective geek community) popularize the less profitable service by a company, you can expect them to combat it. AMD will make the same move down the road. Whine all you want, but Intel and AMD both are out to make money. If they don't make enough of it, they'll move out of the business. At some point, they have to be paid for services they provide.
It's sad that Intel is trying to block a level of tweakability, but I can't say I'm surprised. I'm certainly not ready to raise the pitchforks towards them. If anything, I'd aim it at the Geek Community who put it in Intel's sights. Good job guys.
"Was world war II fought so that we could enjoy the freedoms we don't want our children to?"
Um what freedom's being taken away? It's not a mandatory service.
Here's a tip for everybody: If it's optional, then it's not a rights or privacy problem.
"But what happens when a person using a TMDA-protected email account attempts to contact someone else using a TMDA-protected email account?
What's to stop there being a cascading ping-pong of confirmation messages? (Or are you supposed to automatically whitelist everyone you send email to?)"
It would probably do the same thing that Outlook 2000 does. When the server recieves a message, the sender information is stored on a list. When next email comes, it checks the sender information against the list of people who's approval is still pending. If the sender is already there, then it does not send a message back to them. The list is cleared when the program is restarted.
That's how Outlook 2000 avoids the auto-responder loop. It's pretty trivial to write too, so I can imagine TMDA has already worked that out.
"Funny, is this true? What was the politician's name?"
It was D.J. Quimby in a small city about 100mi south of Portland, Oregon.
Or a signal sent from a stoplight to the phone to make it beep.
If you're saying that it couldn't be implemented today, I'd tend to agree. It'd take updated phones.
It just struck me as a neat inspiration, not as a well thought out plan. heh.
" ...about a week later you receive a ticket in the mail, with a photo of your car going through the intersection and a closeup of your license plate. Try and talk your way out of that ticket!"
My aunt had that happen, only she got the ticket instead of her son that was driving the car. That's probably why the photo radar option's not so popular here, though we do have it.
I wish I had a phone numberr I could call so that I could report license plate #'s of ppl who do that. Then, what'd happen is the police would send out a warning (not one that appears on their record...) saying "Somebody complained about you, stop it." Eventually, enough complaints could lead to something worse.
Normally I wouldn't be a fan of something like that, but I've watched Tri-Met busses (yes, plural) run red lights. One actually caused a train/trolley to stop and honk at it.
... with people who run red lights. Here in Portland, people think red lights are optional. I'm getting rather sick of it. I think if their cell phone were to start ringing every time they do it then we might see a pavlovian effect here to deter this problem.