Re:What no discussion of the Bambi movie?
on
Batman Discussion
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· Score: 1
Raging nihilism, intense, disturbing images, anarchy, mutilation, and you call foul if Batman drinks sprite? That's the line? I'm flabbergasted. By all means, I'm sure there's a million better things to do than to see a movie, go run in a park or something... but product placement? Really? Wow.
That's the line. I call foul if Batman drinks Sprite. Game over.
Re:What no discussion of the Bambi movie?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you should pick and choose the filmmakers you support instead of just generalizing that Hollywood = bad
There are still quite a few US filmmakers who hold the integrity of their vision above that of the studio's greed for profit.
I don't believe that to be true, and I won't waste my money hoping not to be forced to suffer through it any further. I don't really care if people think I'm trolling or not. I'm still not giving those fuckers any money. Only reason I'm posting this at all is so those who might be tempted to follow this product placement money train will know that there are some real people out there who will reject their offering with prejudice should they make that choice.
Re:What no discussion of the Bambi movie?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Why not just leave your money at the theatre, then you don't have to sit thru it.
Won't be watching Hollywood movies anymore, or any other films or shows produced in the USA. Sick of it, ready for a lifetime boycott. Don't like product placements and other assorted corporate propaganda in my fiction. Girlfriend and kid agree. Just not enjoyable anymore. Went from being a banal but vaguely amusing experience to a manifestly unpleasant one. Never again. Hope the international film making community has the good sense not to follow their lead into obscurity and oblivion.
Trust isn't a warm and fuzzy feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. Trust is a choice.
Trust is making the "I know they can screw me, and I know I haven't relieved myself of dependence on them, and I know I am vulnerable should they prove irresponsible or malicious, but I'm going to run with it."
For someone in your position to be making statements like "I don't trust the government" is moronic.
You go out and systematically replace the government in your life, and put yourself in a position where you are needing nothing and taking nothing and using nothing that they provide you, you pay the overwhelming dues necessary to make that happen. That's when you get to talk about how you don't trust the government.
Until then, you're just a punk with a big mouth living in a dream world.
Dude, it's a shortage of people. It's caused by decades of birth control and a philosophy that you should wait till you're 30 before you start a family. It's in every field of endeavor. It has nothing to do with education, or loyalty, or any of that shite. It has to do with demographics, and it's going to keep getting worse, most likely for the rest of your life.
Exactly. They didn't have any resources that are out of reach of any student, and students are poor as dirt. It's not like it's hard to get into a university and use their resources...
If you want to give it teeth, you're not going to do it using the currency of your enemy to bribe your enemies politicians. You need infrastructure under your own control, and an economy of your own. Then you need to establish yourself as a more authoritative government than the one you wish to replace.
If you do that, the strength of your enemy becomes your own strength.
If you don't, you're just a protester, demanding arbitrary concessions instead of giving an empowering system that they will voluntarily help you maintain.
"As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power.
I'm confused. Didn't Yahoo get their ass handed to them by a search engine that was created in a garage, whose creators only saw significant investment after that was concluded?
This already exists. There are Islamic courts around the world, and the faithful bring their grievances to them rather than to the local authorities. There was a big scandal in Ottawa, Canada about 8 years ago because the sentences of the Islamic court were illegal to enforce in Canada... not sure, but I believe they convicted someone of kidnapping for locking up his sister at the Mullahs decree. Don't know how that panned out, but at any rate, there are a number of "shadow governments" already going on.
Man, I am so happy to see my idea stolen. I've been ranting to anyone who would listen about how much we need this for a long time now. Going to dig into this and bring it to the attention of The Atlantica Party leader. They haven't dreamed this far, but it's consistent with their ideology, and I so want to live this way...
This just in: The US and its allies, having established the capacity to censor the entire middle east during the recent destruction of undersea cables, is now sowing misinformation across the internet coupled to a malware payload. Billions of emails sent in this fashion will create enough noise to render all information that doesn't come through official highly suspect.
If you lie you will go to hell and burn for an eternity!!!!
How about, "If you lie, you will have to maintain multiple subjective realities within your mind to avoid being caught, and you will still get caught anyways. Extended along the timespan of a lifetime, you will become a creature without an identity of your own, spawning new partial identities for yourself constantly in response to external stimulus, unable to say with any degree of confidence who you are or what you believe. You will be powerless to hold your form when you meet a man with integrity. When you enter this subjective state of being, you will already be in Hell, and you will stay there for the remainder of your life."
Stop taking things so literally. This is no different from high school science, where they explain reality to you one year, and you take it on faith that they're not lying to you, then the next year, they explain how things that were presented as conclusive facts last year are actually a good deal more complex than was presented to you, and the things they taught you last year were really an oversimplified fairy tale to get you headed in the right direction.
You're missing something. Most of those people didn't know how to read. They had to remember. That means oral tradition. That means personification and mnemonic devices. That is the reason for all this personification, it's a means of expressing knowledge and wisdom (or bullshit and foolishness, as the case may be) in a fashion that is consumable to the people. Science, with its insistence on going to Latin of all things for its terminology, could learn something from this.
I already understand what spirituality is, and how it relates to religion.
The "spirit" is the subjective experience of reality. The warnings and recommendations of most world religions relating to the spirit are about giving advice on how to increase the quality of the subjective experience through conscious modification of an individuals perspective.
That's the point of faith. Faith is about modifying the self. Religious rituals are about modifying the self, along with a great deal of modern fluffy new age.
I use the terms of the Magician and the Priest when I'm thinking about it.
The Magician uses Faith to modify himself, knowingly, to achieve a goal. He knows that he's chosen his belief as a tool to transform himself, and its effectiveness isn't reliant on objective reality. Therefore, he can use "nonsense" to strengthen himself in consciously chosen ways, and choose to stop believing in the nonsense if he thinks it's wise. If you meet him, he might give you some advice on how you can do the same for yourself, or he might not.
The Priest uses rituals and Faith to modify others, without their conscious knowledge, to achieve control. He knows he's using these rituals and whatnot to transform his parish, but they do not know that, they believe that he's discussing objective reality, when he isn't. The Priest is evil. He goes beyond the evil of killing a man, and usurps his very identity with trickery.
Priests lead a lot of angry people to wholesale reject religion because they see what the Priest is trying to do to them. I did when I was 6 or 7, and I thought of it in those exact terms, that this person was trying to take away my right to chose who I am and destroy me.
But when you get a little more sophisticated, you can see how you can use the psychological tools of religions upon yourself and then abandon or change them later.
We need these tools, and these ideas, but we need them to serve us and not oppress us.
Meh... getting too metaphysical. Time to go back to writing unit tests...
Re:An opinionated an biased review
on
Google Lively Review
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
This is a gimmicky marketing toy, not a tool. As a gimmicky toy, the most practical use for it is websites intended for a younger audience. I spent half the day yesterday looking at how this could be exploited for that purpose. The fact that there is porn on there already means that there is no way we're going to be able to trust this enough to put it to use. Shame.
Incidentally, did anyone figure out how to get it working with Facebook accounts instead of Google accounts?
You are the one that isn't thinking critically. All these religions say in their texts that God is the Universe and the Universe is God. Jesus was always going on about how God was everyone, and under every rock, and in the sky, etc. Allah isn't permitted to be depicted as a person because people are meant to remember that Allah isn't a person. And on, and on, and on.
Thing about it is, religion has a lot to tell us about man and his societies that isn't really scientifically verifiable. You can't do an experiment where you take a few human cultures, give them rules to live by, let them sit in the dish for 5 generations, then see what the results are. You'll be dead before there is any data.
Take a look at Evolutionary Psychology. They try to break it all down, from the smallest granularity, the individual, right on up to cultural systems. If you're going to try to find predictive patterns in cultural systems and agree on rules for a society that elevates certain values (personal freedom perhaps?) without destroying itself in x number of generations, you need to look at the religious/cultural values of history, study their interactions both external and internal, and attempt to make deductions.
As our world fills up and mankind grows increasingly powerful, these are going to become increasingly important questions to answer if we don't want our cultural systems to knock us back down a notch. And there is ample room for contributions to the discussion from both the scientific and religious communities, if they can ever stop bickering about terminology.
Why can't people recognize that "God" is a metaphorical reference to the universe which science is dedicated to studying?
When a scientist brings forth an equation that describes the manner in which mutation and natural selection come together to create higher order life out of lower order life, which was created out of chemical soup, they are "contemplating the nature of God".
It's such a stupid thing to fight about. If you took a perspective where you were using scientific tools to examine God in which we all live, and you subjected your conclusions to rigorous processes with peer examination, and you created a model based on verifiable facts that described the "Personality" of God, it wouldn't be any different from modern science.
The equations of a scientist are an abstract representation of the Personality of God, and the stories of religion are personified representations of the equations of a scientist. Everyone is talking about the same damned thing, and arguing about which metaphor they like the best.
It's like watching two parents fighting over whether their daughter is a beautiful little flower or a cute little button. The religious communities and the scientific communities are just as bad as each other in this regard.
What I'm arguing is that the only significant things that have changed is that you can rely on your users having a high speed connection and a computer powerful enough to run JavaScript applications in a browser without choking and dying. Nothing particularly significant or innovative has changed on the software side, it's just stepwise refinement of hardware allowing the tools to be used for things that were obvious to any developer worth their salt back in 2000.
If you want something that will actually get them thinking about science, but fluffy enough for pre-teens, I'd recommend A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Does a great job of introducing the concepts of multidimensional space to kids.
Heh... if you want something that is "sexy" in the same vein, The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker sure blew my mind when I was a kid. Having seen the latest Futurama movie, I'm betting Matt Groening was a fan as well...
Web 2.0 is all the things you could do with popups and IFrames across an intranet, except now we use XMLHttpRequests, and you don't have to worry about the secretaries with the PII 350 getting pissy as their machine chokes to death on Javascript.
That's such a delusion. People you talk to online are not anything like what you think of them. You're not interacting with a person, you're interacting with your own imagination, seeded with a few select facts or fictions from someone else.
If you really do feel connected to people you meet online, then you're actually not connected to anyone, and you're creating imaginary friends, like someone in a sensory deprivation chamber having lucid dreams.
Be who you want on the web pages you visit
7/08/2008 02:02:00 PM
Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager
Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we've been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text "[[hug]]".
I think the guys at Google need to stop eating at the office...
You're wrong. It is your nations authoritarian regime that will fall.
I don't know how your twisted mind transforms "Democracy, with votes contingent on a demonstrated connection to future generations of society" into "Authoritarian fantasy", but I do know that before too much longer, unless the means by which we allocate resources changes, your going to watch your peers (and possibly yourself) get into health care and look after childless elderly. They will do this because they're desperate to get at the resources those childless elderly hold. And they, and you, will see your parents die without care because there are insufficient hands. And everything will fall apart because there aren't enough hands.
I've got no desire to be an administrator of authority. Been there, done that, find it a very annoying position to be placed in, quite frankly. But when people like you are wringing your hands and wondering how everything went so very wrong, I'm going to have seen the writing on the wall and have been thinking about how to get our collective asses out of the fire for 20 years. You're going to be ready to listen to ANYONE who has a clue when that happens.
Hopefully, things will only be so brutal as they must be, and we will move on with people surviving, being held accountable for their own shit and living and cooperating in relative freedom. That's what I want to see.
If it doesn't happen, things will get religious nutjob brutal, Hitler brutal, Pol Pot brutal, flush with joy at the arbitrary wielding of power brutal, and accepted by the populace because for all the horrible things they do out of psychosis, they were willing to do the necessary things that others didn't have the stomach to even acknowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Raging nihilism, intense, disturbing images, anarchy, mutilation, and you call foul if Batman drinks sprite? That's the line? I'm flabbergasted. By all means, I'm sure there's a million better things to do than to see a movie, go run in a park or something... but product placement? Really? Wow.
That's the line. I call foul if Batman drinks Sprite. Game over.
Maybe you should pick and choose the filmmakers you support instead of just generalizing that Hollywood = bad There are still quite a few US filmmakers who hold the integrity of their vision above that of the studio's greed for profit.
I don't believe that to be true, and I won't waste my money hoping not to be forced to suffer through it any further. I don't really care if people think I'm trolling or not. I'm still not giving those fuckers any money. Only reason I'm posting this at all is so those who might be tempted to follow this product placement money train will know that there are some real people out there who will reject their offering with prejudice should they make that choice.
Why not just leave your money at the theatre, then you don't have to sit thru it.
Won't be watching Hollywood movies anymore, or any other films or shows produced in the USA. Sick of it, ready for a lifetime boycott. Don't like product placements and other assorted corporate propaganda in my fiction. Girlfriend and kid agree. Just not enjoyable anymore. Went from being a banal but vaguely amusing experience to a manifestly unpleasant one. Never again. Hope the international film making community has the good sense not to follow their lead into obscurity and oblivion.
Trust isn't a warm and fuzzy feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. Trust is a choice.
Trust is making the "I know they can screw me, and I know I haven't relieved myself of dependence on them, and I know I am vulnerable should they prove irresponsible or malicious, but I'm going to run with it."
For someone in your position to be making statements like "I don't trust the government" is moronic.
You go out and systematically replace the government in your life, and put yourself in a position where you are needing nothing and taking nothing and using nothing that they provide you, you pay the overwhelming dues necessary to make that happen. That's when you get to talk about how you don't trust the government.
Until then, you're just a punk with a big mouth living in a dream world.
Dude, it's a shortage of people. It's caused by decades of birth control and a philosophy that you should wait till you're 30 before you start a family. It's in every field of endeavor. It has nothing to do with education, or loyalty, or any of that shite. It has to do with demographics, and it's going to keep getting worse, most likely for the rest of your life.
Hey... we need half a dozen Intarweb Tube Engineers here in the office. Short supply these days.. got a resume?
Not me... I'm an Internet Application Developer. Web Developer is so 1990s...
Exactly. They didn't have any resources that are out of reach of any student, and students are poor as dirt. It's not like it's hard to get into a university and use their resources...
If you want to give it teeth, you're not going to do it using the currency of your enemy to bribe your enemies politicians. You need infrastructure under your own control, and an economy of your own. Then you need to establish yourself as a more authoritative government than the one you wish to replace.
If you do that, the strength of your enemy becomes your own strength.
If you don't, you're just a protester, demanding arbitrary concessions instead of giving an empowering system that they will voluntarily help you maintain.
"As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power.
I'm confused. Didn't Yahoo get their ass handed to them by a search engine that was created in a garage, whose creators only saw significant investment after that was concluded?
This already exists. There are Islamic courts around the world, and the faithful bring their grievances to them rather than to the local authorities. There was a big scandal in Ottawa, Canada about 8 years ago because the sentences of the Islamic court were illegal to enforce in Canada... not sure, but I believe they convicted someone of kidnapping for locking up his sister at the Mullahs decree. Don't know how that panned out, but at any rate, there are a number of "shadow governments" already going on.
Man, I am so happy to see my idea stolen. I've been ranting to anyone who would listen about how much we need this for a long time now. Going to dig into this and bring it to the attention of The Atlantica Party leader. They haven't dreamed this far, but it's consistent with their ideology, and I so want to live this way...
This just in: The US and its allies, having established the capacity to censor the entire middle east during the recent destruction of undersea cables, is now sowing misinformation across the internet coupled to a malware payload. Billions of emails sent in this fashion will create enough noise to render all information that doesn't come through official highly suspect.
If you lie you will go to hell and burn for an eternity!!!!
How about, "If you lie, you will have to maintain multiple subjective realities within your mind to avoid being caught, and you will still get caught anyways. Extended along the timespan of a lifetime, you will become a creature without an identity of your own, spawning new partial identities for yourself constantly in response to external stimulus, unable to say with any degree of confidence who you are or what you believe. You will be powerless to hold your form when you meet a man with integrity. When you enter this subjective state of being, you will already be in Hell, and you will stay there for the remainder of your life."
Stop taking things so literally. This is no different from high school science, where they explain reality to you one year, and you take it on faith that they're not lying to you, then the next year, they explain how things that were presented as conclusive facts last year are actually a good deal more complex than was presented to you, and the things they taught you last year were really an oversimplified fairy tale to get you headed in the right direction.
You're missing something. Most of those people didn't know how to read. They had to remember. That means oral tradition. That means personification and mnemonic devices. That is the reason for all this personification, it's a means of expressing knowledge and wisdom (or bullshit and foolishness, as the case may be) in a fashion that is consumable to the people. Science, with its insistence on going to Latin of all things for its terminology, could learn something from this.
I already understand what spirituality is, and how it relates to religion.
The "spirit" is the subjective experience of reality. The warnings and recommendations of most world religions relating to the spirit are about giving advice on how to increase the quality of the subjective experience through conscious modification of an individuals perspective.
That's the point of faith. Faith is about modifying the self. Religious rituals are about modifying the self, along with a great deal of modern fluffy new age.
I use the terms of the Magician and the Priest when I'm thinking about it.
The Magician uses Faith to modify himself, knowingly, to achieve a goal. He knows that he's chosen his belief as a tool to transform himself, and its effectiveness isn't reliant on objective reality. Therefore, he can use "nonsense" to strengthen himself in consciously chosen ways, and choose to stop believing in the nonsense if he thinks it's wise. If you meet him, he might give you some advice on how you can do the same for yourself, or he might not.
The Priest uses rituals and Faith to modify others, without their conscious knowledge, to achieve control. He knows he's using these rituals and whatnot to transform his parish, but they do not know that, they believe that he's discussing objective reality, when he isn't. The Priest is evil. He goes beyond the evil of killing a man, and usurps his very identity with trickery.
Priests lead a lot of angry people to wholesale reject religion because they see what the Priest is trying to do to them. I did when I was 6 or 7, and I thought of it in those exact terms, that this person was trying to take away my right to chose who I am and destroy me.
But when you get a little more sophisticated, you can see how you can use the psychological tools of religions upon yourself and then abandon or change them later.
We need these tools, and these ideas, but we need them to serve us and not oppress us.
Meh... getting too metaphysical. Time to go back to writing unit tests...
This is a gimmicky marketing toy, not a tool. As a gimmicky toy, the most practical use for it is websites intended for a younger audience. I spent half the day yesterday looking at how this could be exploited for that purpose. The fact that there is porn on there already means that there is no way we're going to be able to trust this enough to put it to use. Shame.
Incidentally, did anyone figure out how to get it working with Facebook accounts instead of Google accounts?
You are the one that isn't thinking critically. All these religions say in their texts that God is the Universe and the Universe is God. Jesus was always going on about how God was everyone, and under every rock, and in the sky, etc. Allah isn't permitted to be depicted as a person because people are meant to remember that Allah isn't a person. And on, and on, and on.
Thing about it is, religion has a lot to tell us about man and his societies that isn't really scientifically verifiable. You can't do an experiment where you take a few human cultures, give them rules to live by, let them sit in the dish for 5 generations, then see what the results are. You'll be dead before there is any data.
Take a look at Evolutionary Psychology. They try to break it all down, from the smallest granularity, the individual, right on up to cultural systems. If you're going to try to find predictive patterns in cultural systems and agree on rules for a society that elevates certain values (personal freedom perhaps?) without destroying itself in x number of generations, you need to look at the religious/cultural values of history, study their interactions both external and internal, and attempt to make deductions.
As our world fills up and mankind grows increasingly powerful, these are going to become increasingly important questions to answer if we don't want our cultural systems to knock us back down a notch. And there is ample room for contributions to the discussion from both the scientific and religious communities, if they can ever stop bickering about terminology.
Why can't people recognize that "God" is a metaphorical reference to the universe which science is dedicated to studying?
When a scientist brings forth an equation that describes the manner in which mutation and natural selection come together to create higher order life out of lower order life, which was created out of chemical soup, they are "contemplating the nature of God".
It's such a stupid thing to fight about. If you took a perspective where you were using scientific tools to examine God in which we all live, and you subjected your conclusions to rigorous processes with peer examination, and you created a model based on verifiable facts that described the "Personality" of God, it wouldn't be any different from modern science.
The equations of a scientist are an abstract representation of the Personality of God, and the stories of religion are personified representations of the equations of a scientist. Everyone is talking about the same damned thing, and arguing about which metaphor they like the best.
It's like watching two parents fighting over whether their daughter is a beautiful little flower or a cute little button. The religious communities and the scientific communities are just as bad as each other in this regard.
What I'm arguing is that the only significant things that have changed is that you can rely on your users having a high speed connection and a computer powerful enough to run JavaScript applications in a browser without choking and dying. Nothing particularly significant or innovative has changed on the software side, it's just stepwise refinement of hardware allowing the tools to be used for things that were obvious to any developer worth their salt back in 2000.
If you want something that will actually get them thinking about science, but fluffy enough for pre-teens, I'd recommend A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Does a great job of introducing the concepts of multidimensional space to kids.
Heh... if you want something that is "sexy" in the same vein, The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker sure blew my mind when I was a kid. Having seen the latest Futurama movie, I'm betting Matt Groening was a fan as well...
Web 2.0 is all the things you could do with popups and IFrames across an intranet, except now we use XMLHttpRequests, and you don't have to worry about the secretaries with the PII 350 getting pissy as their machine chokes to death on Javascript.
Not really that exciting.
That's such a delusion. People you talk to online are not anything like what you think of them. You're not interacting with a person, you're interacting with your own imagination, seeded with a few select facts or fictions from someone else.
If you really do feel connected to people you meet online, then you're actually not connected to anyone, and you're creating imaginary friends, like someone in a sensory deprivation chamber having lucid dreams.
Yeah, whatever... Did you read this guy?
Be who you want on the web pages you visit 7/08/2008 02:02:00 PM Posted by Niniane Wang, Engineering Manager
Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we've been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text "[[hug]]".
I think the guys at Google need to stop eating at the office...
You're wrong. It is your nations authoritarian regime that will fall.
I don't know how your twisted mind transforms "Democracy, with votes contingent on a demonstrated connection to future generations of society" into "Authoritarian fantasy", but I do know that before too much longer, unless the means by which we allocate resources changes, your going to watch your peers (and possibly yourself) get into health care and look after childless elderly. They will do this because they're desperate to get at the resources those childless elderly hold. And they, and you, will see your parents die without care because there are insufficient hands. And everything will fall apart because there aren't enough hands.
I've got no desire to be an administrator of authority. Been there, done that, find it a very annoying position to be placed in, quite frankly. But when people like you are wringing your hands and wondering how everything went so very wrong, I'm going to have seen the writing on the wall and have been thinking about how to get our collective asses out of the fire for 20 years. You're going to be ready to listen to ANYONE who has a clue when that happens.
Hopefully, things will only be so brutal as they must be, and we will move on with people surviving, being held accountable for their own shit and living and cooperating in relative freedom. That's what I want to see.
If it doesn't happen, things will get religious nutjob brutal, Hitler brutal, Pol Pot brutal, flush with joy at the arbitrary wielding of power brutal, and accepted by the populace because for all the horrible things they do out of psychosis, they were willing to do the necessary things that others didn't have the stomach to even acknowledge.