We've already had one recent crap adaption of WotW... I refer you to Signs, which managed to combine the non-starter cliche of crop circles, the WotW, and the melting witch scene from the Wizard of Oz.
Did I mention ham-handed direction, predictable ending, falsely portentious middle, and Mel Gibson's worst acting job ever?
No, but when that brain surgeon or Nobel prize winner opens up the umpteenth attachment that you've warned them not to (umpteen times), when they browse the web without ant-virus software when you've installed it for them numerous times, when they ask "right button or left?" after you've explained to them that it is the left button unless you indicate otherwise 4,000 times, when they use the computer for HOURS daily but still don't know how to copy or paste text, or replace an icon on the Desktop, when they call you up every week because they don't remember their password and they've lost the piece of paper AGAIN that you wrote it down for them on, when they've purchased 500 ink cartridges for their printer but they don't know whether it is a Lexmark, an HP, or an Epson, when they don't know what version of Windows they are using, what version of what browser they are using, whether they are using Outlook Express, Eudora, or Pegasus... yes, they are inept.
No, they are more than inept, they are fucking 'tards who shouldn't own computers.
Either a masterstroke in obscure references or you made it up. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Don't be so kind. There have never been "six inch floppy disks" - though there have been three inch floppy disks.
However, consider that we still have people referring to 3.5" floppy disks as hard disks, to their monitor as their computer, and the actual tower case just as "that thing that you plug the printer into" and I'm not surprised.
The riser card is a good idea, but how do I then get the modem "outside" of the case, so to speak? Accessible to those who wish to use it, without drilling holes, etc?
Thanks in advance.
Re:Good luck finding cheap internal modems
on
Micro ATX and Linux?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not lookling for a modem which is "cheap," necessarily. But it does need to be internal, and it needs to work in Linux, and it needs to be low profile.
I can't find a controller based PCI HALF-HEIGHT modem, which is what I was hoping Slashdot would be able to help me find.
A Linmodem would be acceptable, but only if it is also half-height with an inexpensive/free driver.
Of course, the sale prices are still higher than the items were before the cards,
Bullshit. I've worked in retail for many years, and instituted customer loyalty cards myself (which is what these cards are referred to in the biz), and what you are claiming is complete crap.
and higher than the items are in areas where they don't have the cards.
Except that an increasing number of PC's don't come with floppy drives, thank goodness. I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say:
"Whatever for?"
I can never give them a good reason. If you need a floppy drive, you generally KNOW that you need one. A box of floppy disks costs approximately $5, and holds 1/60th or less the quantity of data of a single CD, which costs less and is nearly as convenient.
I sell a HUGE number of USB pen drives and people need zero coaxing. They are attractive in every category save price, but they are still affordable enough that we sell them by the case. We've sold them as door prizes to frat houses holding parties, for christ sake, and no one was puzzled as to their purpose.
Sure, if you have a piece of shite suitable for nothing but answering your e-mail, a machine of the antiquity for which a floppy drive was a necessity, then a boot floppy is a good idea. However, those machines are expiring dinosaurs whose remains we frequenlty discover in the dumpster behind my place of business (I work at a large computer retailer).
The Good Will doesn't even want them, nor any of the other charities that used to give them homes.
I, for one, look forward to the rule of the floppy-driveless uber-machines.
Select with the left button pressed, and click with the middle button in the target window to paste. No Apple-C or control-V crap, no need to press any key of any kind.
I don't like to use the mouse for anything that I don't have to; I don't know whether it is quicker or merely feels that way, but it's my working style. I favor keyboard operations over mouse almost every time.
Click to focus as a default? Ugh!
I hate the focus shifting unless I have explicitly selected it. I suspect that this is a matter of what you are used to more than any actual Ugh! factor, but I've never found a single mouse-click to change focus to be particularly inconvenient, and found focus changing without my taking explicit action to be extremely so.
I live in Moscow, Idaho, that hotbed of terrorist activity, so I am perhaps a little biased. Still, it all boils down to this:
Sami was in the United States studying. In his free time (which even students have, despite their sometimes-protestations to the contrary), he registered domains and dispersed funds for several non-profit organizations.
This made the government mad because Sami was supposed to be in the United States solely for the purpose of pursuing [his] studies. They allowed him to bring dependents into the country, so they knew that part of his time would be spent in tasks not solely concerned with pursuing his studies: being a father and being a husband do require some division of attention.
Sami got in trouble because some of the webpages for which he was the point of contact (registered in his name or otherwise) would occasionally publish material advocating terrorist acts against the United States. of course, we all know that CmdrTaco is personally responsible for everything that is published on Slashdot, so this is only fair play.
Still, I am curious. It is possible to register domains and transfer funds from one bank account to the other whilst in Saudi Arabia, right? It certainly was sneaky for near-PHD Sami to come all the way to the United States to perpetrate his evil terrorist deeds. Especially sneaky since he sent for his wife and children to be with him, just so that they would be able to suffer together if things ever went terribly wrong, which they did.
So, Sami was conspiring to help terrorists organizations, according to our government (a charge which, incidentally, very few here in redneck Moscow, Idaho actually believe). But has he been accused of being a terrorist? What is the distinction between conspiring the help terrorist organizations and being a terrorist?
Sami might be a terrorist, obviously. Likewise, George W. might have a few brain cells to rub together. I'd wager that the odds for either being true have the same statistical merit.
I am against any abridgement of free speech, but I still think that Rockstar is rather asking for it.
There are some parts of the human psyche that shouldn't be fed. Killing cops, pedestrians, and prostitutes for "fun" is pretty fucking sick, even if it might provide entertainment for those who enjoy such things.
I know, different strokes for different folks, who am I to judge the morals of others, etc., etc., whine whine whine.
Fuck that. Sometimes things ARE wrong, like genital mutilation of little girls for any reason whatsoever, religious or otherwise, or beheading women for pleasure, in a computer game or otherwise.
I don't want to live in a totalitarian state, so let Rockstar sell as many games to the morally depraved as they can. Bravo to a capitalism without responsibility or ethics.
If we enter a totalitarian world, blame it not just on the moralists, but on the companies who feel that profit is more valuable than the human soul.
Any survey which includes 50 Cent as the "best" of anything (except for, possibly, as an anal or pus scraping implement) is automatically suspect, or so I have concluded in my arbitrary, not-very-scientific opinion.
I am wary of self-publishing generally, but I have heard good things of Lightning Source.
The YA novel Eragon was published by Lightning Source, and was subsequently purchased by Knopf. Eragon was written by Christopher Paolini, who was 15 when he started the novel, and 18 when it was published. It has recently been optioned as a feature film, and is actually remarkably well-written, especially for a novel in the fantasy genre (irrespective of the author's age).
Anyway, google Christopher Paolini. He seems to speak highly of Lightning Source.
I'll be honest, I don't care how many people smoke, or how much death or suffering it causes (second-hand smoking deaths are grossly exaggerated if you read the current research about it). I've loved very few people who was actually stupid enough to start.
If you are such a fucking moron that you start smoking, then you will eventually reduce the surface population by one smoker, and my clothes won't stink as much when I go to the club. I just hope that it happens before they have children.
Think about it: a person adopts a habit that reduces his lifespan, makes his clothes stink, his breath bad, and his teeth yellow, just to be cool or tough? Are such shallow cretins really contributors to the gene pool, anyway? Youth isn't an excuse. If it was, we would all be smokers. But the non-cretinous teens never start smoking. "I like smoking" isn't an excuse either: if it were discovered tomorrow that 350,000 people a year died from eating bananas, bananas would rot on the shelves, and only the suicidal would start eating bananas.
My own children (both late teens) have never smoked, nor have any of their friends. When I expressed surprise at this recently, they both said to me, hurt: "You mean you think we would hang around with losers?"
Yielding to the temptation to smoke is a personality defect that usually means you have other, more striking defects which eliminate you from my list of potential friends, anyway. It shouts to me "I am weak" or "I am an unthinking moron" so loudly that you will never become more than a tolerated acquaintance.
Yes, this is a troll, except that I believe everything that I have typed.
For what it's worth, I don't think the law should ban smoking anywhere. It is the right of every smoker to be a stupid fuck. I just won't go to any restaurant that allows smoking, and let my dollars set their customer-smoking policy.
I've played adventure games for over 20 years, and Super Mario World has NEVER been considered an adventure game by ANY fans of the genre, despite how Moby Games might mis-classify it.
To seriously suggest otherwise is just (grossly misinformed) historical revisionism.
For adventure game purists, only text adventure were originally considered adventure games, such as the games by Level 9 and Infocom. Graphic adventures (Sierra On-Line, Scott Adams, LucasArts) were later reluctantly admitted to the adventure game category, but the squawking was considerable.
When Myst came out, the same argument started again. There were many who dismissed it just a slideshow with puzzles, sort of an adventure-game wannabe suitable only for soccer moms. The weight of public opinion and the slow death of the genre (as a popular form) contributed to its eventual acceptance.
The debate over the inclusion of these then-latter-day adventure forms was as furious as the debate over the inclusion of Star Wars as a Science Fiction film (versus a fantasy film), for those who remember those loudly contentious Real Science Fiction Geeks versus Watered Down Fantasy Interlopers days.
This is interesting? Not even in a grossly simplified, karma-whoring way.
As we make these machines bigger and better and more like ourselves,
"Bigger" has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with sentience, which is what these machines would need to possess before they could be called "like ourselves" in any meaningful sense.
Remove "bigger" from the sentence and it becomes slightly more interesting, but only if you indulge in excessive anthropomorphizing. It isn't bipedalism that makes us sentient, you know. An impreesive engineering feat, but not sentience, or even a hint thereof.
Someone mentions a standard Science Fiction trope and it is interesting? Jesus, what is Slashdot coming to...
I work for a largish ISP, and we don't get many written complaints, but when we do, they invariably fall into one of two categories:
1. The legitimate complaint where we fucked up and we will apologise profusely for having done so.
2. The complaint from the chronic whiner, who, in his mind, finds insult in something that is standard practice, and we have no intention of changing for him.
To the first category (very infrequent), we send the humble beseeching-your-forgiveness letter, and meant it.
To the second category, we send the polite-but-bland letter, because we would really prefer that they WEREN'T our customer, so we aren't going to suck their dick to keep them.
I have no way of knowing whether you fall into the former or the latter category, so don't take offence, as none was intended.
Remember, the customer who always thinks he is right is often the most obnoxious and, ultimately, the least profitable, and the provider of services or goods has to make the decision, based on prior experience, whether it is cost effective to suck that customer's dick or not.
Sometimes they make the right decision, sometimes the wrong one. Businesses which make more right decisions than wrong ones stay in business.
I read reviews to help me winnow the wheat from the chaff. I read a lot of books, and I watch a lot of films, and I'd prefer that those experiences are pleasurable. If I know in advance, before getting deep into the review, that the reviewer thinks that Alan Dean Foster and Marion Zimmer Bradley are the best-fucking-authors-in-the-world, then I will also know that, if he likes the book he is reviewing, I'll probably hate it.
I think Barry Norman and Roger Ebert are the two best film critics in the world. Why? Because they consistently recommend films that I enjoy. On the other hand, if Harry Knowles likes a film, I'll know that it sucks. Well, usually. He is such an unabashed fanboy that someties our opinions coincide.
Anyway, the point is, knowing what a reviewer thinks about other, similar films and books is a help, not a hindrance, and boosts the reviewers usefulness and credibility, if you use that inforamtion wisely.
Have to return a new camcorder? Best Buy (BBY ) Co. will dock you 15% as a "restocking fee."
I agree with most of what you have written, but I take exception here. Let me explain why...
I work at a fairly successful mom-and-pop computer retailer (the store has been in operation for 22 years). We charge no restocking fees, and are more than reasonable about refunds. Here are the consequences of our honesty and generosity:
EVERY DAY, LITERALLY, we have customers who come into the store and buy ink cartridges for printers that they don't own. They sit in front of their computer and printer for eight hours every fucking day, but they've never noticed the make or model. They buy an ink cartridge from us, rip it out of its packaging when they get it back to their home or office, and then expect a full refund or no-fault exchange when they return it to us the next day. Sadly, we almost always oblige them in the name of keeping-the-customer-happy, and it costs us hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) a year. First, the store has paid me to handle both the sale and the return, which has very little margin, so the return renders the "sale" profitless. Then, because no one will pay full-price for an obviously (and inexpertly) opened ink cartridge, we sell it for our cost (or less) to a subsequent customer, and the store also pays me for that transaction.
Or the customer who buys a cat5 cable or a wireless ethernet card on a Friday, casually asking what our return policy is. When I tell them that we like the item back within a week, unless it was defective or there was some other reason that reasonably delayed its intended return, their eyes light up. This tells me that I have just encountered one of our "borrowers," who have a LAN party to attend that weekend, and don't want to spend any money. This happens with extreme frequency, and come Monday they return the item.
Or those who are vacationing in our fair city, and brought their laptop, but forgot their power adaptor, so they buy one fron us only for the duration of their holiday.
Or those who buy five different cables (of different lengths, USB and parallel, etc) because they don't know what type their printer uses or the length they require, and it is easier to buy five and return the other four than it is to have checked or measured before they left the house.
We don't charge any re-stocking fee, and we take things back nearly 100% of the time as a general policy, but it is awfully hard to continually smile about it considering the abusers I've just described.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
Erm, no. Being amazed that Human beings [sic] can understand what R2S2 is saying is like being amazed that Tinkerbell can fly, or that no one recognized Superman when he wore glasses. All are fictions, and thus no amazement is possible.
Okay, you still find it amazing? Well, then I will share with you the amazing news that I am really an android from the year 2525, capable of translating 4500 languages simultaneously.
Humans in Western culture are not fully formed until they are well past their 20th birthday. Having children prior to that age makes you a baby raising a baby, which isn't a wise idea. Yes, that was necessary preface.
If you think that was a troll or a flame, I don't really give a shit. If you live long enough, one day you will understand. Oh, you have lived long enough, but you disagree? Well, then I'd respectfully suggest that you still have a bit more growing to do.
Anyway, on to the topic under discussion:
At 15, you arguably have the right to some privacy. However, at 11 and 12, you have no privacy rights at all. My responsibility as the parent to guide my children safely into adulthood supercedes all other considerations.
If you aren't a parent, you have no clue what being a parent is like, and that includes those with ample experience babysitting or raising their siblings. I was the oldest of nine children, and I spent hundreds of hours as their proxy Dad, but I was a baby myself, and I didn't bear the ultimate responsiblity for their welfare: this means that it did give me some level of preparation, but the real deal is still unknowable until you are actually a parent yourself.
I'm a liberal parent. I don't care that they experiment with alcohol or marijuana, masturbate, or even enjoy recreational sex as long as its done safely. However, that doesn't mean that I want some fuckstain jerking off on their webcam as he pleads with my children to watch. I don't think that anyone has ever been hurt my watching someone jerk-off - the trauma is survivable - but I don't want my children to think that such human excrement typifies our species.
Likewise, if my offspring were cruising a lot of gay-bashing or racist websites, I'd want to know. When you are 11, seeing something on the web legitimatizes it, and they need balancing input from me.
Move the computers back into public locations. Please. You don't want to be filled with regret later, not when it concerns your children.
Talk to them. Let them know that you know about such sites as rotten.com and thestileproject.com, and don't freak if you find them browsing there. But you need to know, when they are 11 or 12, what type of shit they are being exposed to.
You wouldn't send a child into a cinema that you knew was showing snuff films, and if they'd seen a snuff film, you'd certainly need to know. The same rule applies here: don't give them unmonitored access to the Internet.
As a parent, my job is to raise my children to be the best adults that they can be. Sometimes the process isn't easy.
I personally found Perdido one of the better written books that I've ever read. However, for me, the pleasure is all in the manner of telling, not in the story. Yes, I am a form over substance guy when it comes to fiction. I thrive on the ambient details. Some of my favorite authors: Gene Wolfe, John Crowley, Peter Straub (only for Shadowlands and Ghost Story; I detested Floating Dragon), Thomas Wolfe, Philip Pullman, Mary Gentle, Sheri S. Tepper, Garth Nix, and Ray Bradbury.
My list of least favorite authors is just as revealing: Christopher Stasheff, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, R.A. Salvatore, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Dean R. Koontz. These authors might be capable of concocting great stories, I don't know, because when I read their works, I feel like I am eating cold, lumpy porridge, so I ultimately push the books away.
Everyone reads for different reasons. I read to be hypnotized by textured prose. My wife reads to be engrossed in a story. Truthfully, a combination of those characteristics is my preference, but I find it seldom.
Note that I don't consider one motivation for reading to be "superior" to the other, but I do find the diversity of opinion interesting.
Terrorism is an act performed by those who are so obsessed with enforcing their worldview that they are willing to commit murder.
These people are already mentally unbalanced, so I don't think that it is too implausible that one of the nutcases might be inspired by the plot of a game.
I'm not suggesting that Sony should have modified it, but I am suggesting that, when considering the insane, the possibility of a causal connection between what for us might be diverting entertainment and for them a recipe for violence cannot be dismissed (at least not entirely).
I know that there have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions to 9/11, mostly by governments trying to misappropriate our liberties, but I did find the concerns of (some of) the Quebecois understandable, which is what I was addressing.
Slashdot Mirror
We've already had one recent crap adaption of WotW... I refer you to Signs, which managed to combine the non-starter cliche of crop circles, the WotW, and the melting witch scene from the Wizard of Oz.
Did I mention ham-handed direction, predictable ending, falsely portentious middle, and Mel Gibson's worst acting job ever?
Do we need ANOTHER crap adaption of WotW?
No, but when that brain surgeon or Nobel prize winner opens up the umpteenth attachment that you've warned them not to (umpteen times), when they browse the web without ant-virus software when you've installed it for them numerous times, when they ask "right button or left?" after you've explained to them that it is the left button unless you indicate otherwise 4,000 times, when they use the computer for HOURS daily but still don't know how to copy or paste text, or replace an icon on the Desktop, when they call you up every week because they don't remember their password and they've lost the piece of paper AGAIN that you wrote it down for them on, when they've purchased 500 ink cartridges for their printer but they don't know whether it is a Lexmark, an HP, or an Epson, when they don't know what version of Windows they are using, what version of what browser they are using, whether they are using Outlook Express, Eudora, or Pegasus... yes, they are inept.
No, they are more than inept, they are fucking 'tards who shouldn't own computers.
Either a masterstroke in obscure references or you made it up. I am giving you the benefit of the doubt.
Don't be so kind. There have never been "six inch floppy disks" - though there have been three inch floppy disks.
However, consider that we still have people referring to 3.5" floppy disks as hard disks, to their monitor as their computer, and the actual tower case just as "that thing that you plug the printer into" and I'm not surprised.
The riser card is a good idea, but how do I then get the modem "outside" of the case, so to speak? Accessible to those who wish to use it, without drilling holes, etc?
Thanks in advance.
I'm not lookling for a modem which is "cheap," necessarily. But it does need to be internal, and it needs to work in Linux, and it needs to be low profile.
I can't find a controller based PCI HALF-HEIGHT modem, which is what I was hoping Slashdot would be able to help me find.
A Linmodem would be acceptable, but only if it is also half-height with an inexpensive/free driver.
Of course, the sale prices are still higher than the items were before the cards,
Bullshit. I've worked in retail for many years, and instituted customer loyalty cards myself (which is what these cards are referred to in the biz), and what you are claiming is complete crap.
and higher than the items are in areas where they don't have the cards.
See above.
our home game machine must offer an experience that can be enjoyed by adults, children, or women
Women aren't adults in Japanese culture, or is this just a mis-translation? Or just a Freudian slip on Minagawa's part?
Except that an increasing number of PC's don't come with floppy drives, thank goodness. I haven't sold a laptop with a floppy drive in months, and when I ask cusomers whether they want a floppy drive installed in the new computer we are assembling, most say:
"Whatever for?"
I can never give them a good reason. If you need a floppy drive, you generally KNOW that you need one. A box of floppy disks costs approximately $5, and holds 1/60th or less the quantity of data of a single CD, which costs less and is nearly as convenient.
I sell a HUGE number of USB pen drives and people need zero coaxing. They are attractive in every category save price, but they are still affordable enough that we sell them by the case. We've sold them as door prizes to frat houses holding parties, for christ sake, and no one was puzzled as to their purpose.
Sure, if you have a piece of shite suitable for nothing but answering your e-mail, a machine of the antiquity for which a floppy drive was a necessity, then a boot floppy is a good idea. However, those machines are expiring dinosaurs whose remains we frequenlty discover in the dumpster behind my place of business (I work at a large computer retailer).
The Good Will doesn't even want them, nor any of the other charities that used to give them homes.
I, for one, look forward to the rule of the floppy-driveless uber-machines.
Select with the left button pressed, and click with the middle button in the target window to paste. No Apple-C or control-V crap, no need to press any key of any kind.
I don't like to use the mouse for anything that I don't have to; I don't know whether it is quicker or merely feels that way, but it's my working style. I favor keyboard operations over mouse almost every time.
Click to focus as a default? Ugh!
I hate the focus shifting unless I have explicitly selected it. I suspect that this is a matter of what you are used to more than any actual Ugh! factor, but I've never found a single mouse-click to change focus to be particularly inconvenient, and found focus changing without my taking explicit action to be extremely so.
I live in Moscow, Idaho, that hotbed of terrorist activity, so I am perhaps a little biased. Still, it all boils down to this:
Sami was in the United States studying. In his free time (which even students have, despite their sometimes-protestations to the contrary), he registered domains and dispersed funds for several non-profit organizations.
This made the government mad because Sami was supposed to be in the United States solely for the purpose of pursuing [his] studies. They allowed him to bring dependents into the country, so they knew that part of his time would be spent in tasks not solely concerned with pursuing his studies: being a father and being a husband do require some division of attention.
Sami got in trouble because some of the webpages for which he was the point of contact (registered in his name or otherwise) would occasionally publish material advocating terrorist acts against the United States. of course, we all know that CmdrTaco is personally responsible for everything that is published on Slashdot, so this is only fair play.
Still, I am curious. It is possible to register domains and transfer funds from one bank account to the other whilst in Saudi Arabia, right? It certainly was sneaky for near-PHD Sami to come all the way to the United States to perpetrate his evil terrorist deeds. Especially sneaky since he sent for his wife and children to be with him, just so that they would be able to suffer together if things ever went terribly wrong, which they did.
So, Sami was conspiring to help terrorists organizations, according to our government (a charge which, incidentally, very few here in redneck Moscow, Idaho actually believe). But has he been accused of being a terrorist? What is the distinction between conspiring the help terrorist organizations and being a terrorist?
Sami might be a terrorist, obviously. Likewise, George W. might have a few brain cells to rub together. I'd wager that the odds for either being true have the same statistical merit.
I am against any abridgement of free speech, but I still think that Rockstar is rather asking for it.
There are some parts of the human psyche that shouldn't be fed. Killing cops, pedestrians, and prostitutes for "fun" is pretty fucking sick, even if it might provide entertainment for those who enjoy such things.
I know, different strokes for different folks, who am I to judge the morals of others, etc., etc., whine whine whine.
Fuck that. Sometimes things ARE wrong, like genital mutilation of little girls for any reason whatsoever, religious or otherwise, or beheading women for pleasure, in a computer game or otherwise.
I don't want to live in a totalitarian state, so let Rockstar sell as many games to the morally depraved as they can. Bravo to a capitalism without responsibility or ethics.
If we enter a totalitarian world, blame it not just on the moralists, but on the companies who feel that profit is more valuable than the human soul.
Any survey which includes 50 Cent as the "best" of anything (except for, possibly, as an anal or pus scraping implement) is automatically suspect, or so I have concluded in my arbitrary, not-very-scientific opinion.
I am wary of self-publishing generally, but I have heard good things of Lightning Source.
The YA novel Eragon was published by Lightning Source, and was subsequently purchased by Knopf. Eragon was written by Christopher Paolini, who was 15 when he started the novel, and 18 when it was published. It has recently been optioned as a feature film, and is actually remarkably well-written, especially for a novel in the fantasy genre (irrespective of the author's age).
Anyway, google Christopher Paolini. He seems to speak highly of Lightning Source.
Off-topic rant BEGINS
I'll be honest, I don't care how many people smoke, or how much death or suffering it causes (second-hand smoking deaths are grossly exaggerated if you read the current research about it). I've loved very few people who was actually stupid enough to start.
If you are such a fucking moron that you start smoking, then you will eventually reduce the surface population by one smoker, and my clothes won't stink as much when I go to the club. I just hope that it happens before they have children.
Think about it: a person adopts a habit that reduces his lifespan, makes his clothes stink, his breath bad, and his teeth yellow, just to be cool or tough? Are such shallow cretins really contributors to the gene pool, anyway? Youth isn't an excuse. If it was, we would all be smokers. But the non-cretinous teens never start smoking. "I like smoking" isn't an excuse either: if it were discovered tomorrow that 350,000 people a year died from eating bananas, bananas would rot on the shelves, and only the suicidal would start eating bananas.
My own children (both late teens) have never smoked, nor have any of their friends. When I expressed surprise at this recently, they both said to me, hurt: "You mean you think we would hang around with losers?"
Yielding to the temptation to smoke is a personality defect that usually means you have other, more striking defects which eliminate you from my list of potential friends, anyway. It shouts to me "I am weak" or "I am an unthinking moron" so loudly that you will never become more than a tolerated acquaintance.
Yes, this is a troll, except that I believe everything that I have typed.
For what it's worth, I don't think the law should ban smoking anywhere. It is the right of every smoker to be a stupid fuck. I just won't go to any restaurant that allows smoking, and let my dollars set their customer-smoking policy.
Off-topic rant FINISHES
I've played adventure games for over 20 years, and Super Mario World has NEVER been considered an adventure game by ANY fans of the genre, despite how Moby Games might mis-classify it.
To seriously suggest otherwise is just (grossly misinformed) historical revisionism.
For adventure game purists, only text adventure were originally considered adventure games, such as the games by Level 9 and Infocom. Graphic adventures (Sierra On-Line, Scott Adams, LucasArts) were later reluctantly admitted to the adventure game category, but the squawking was considerable.
When Myst came out, the same argument started again. There were many who dismissed it just a slideshow with puzzles, sort of an adventure-game wannabe suitable only for soccer moms. The weight of public opinion and the slow death of the genre (as a popular form) contributed to its eventual acceptance.
The debate over the inclusion of these then-latter-day adventure forms was as furious as the debate over the inclusion of Star Wars as a Science Fiction film (versus a fantasy film), for those who remember those loudly contentious Real Science Fiction Geeks versus Watered Down Fantasy Interlopers days.
Sure, it sounds like a joke, but an actual match was held not too long ago
Because an "actual" match was held, it can't be a joke?
This is interesting? Not even in a grossly simplified, karma-whoring way.
As we make these machines bigger and better and more like ourselves,
"Bigger" has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with sentience, which is what these machines would need to possess before they could be called "like ourselves" in any meaningful sense.
Remove "bigger" from the sentence and it becomes slightly more interesting, but only if you indulge in excessive anthropomorphizing. It isn't bipedalism that makes us sentient, you know. An impreesive engineering feat, but not sentience, or even a hint thereof.
Someone mentions a standard Science Fiction trope and it is interesting? Jesus, what is Slashdot coming to...
I work for a largish ISP, and we don't get many written complaints, but when we do, they invariably fall into one of two categories:
1. The legitimate complaint where we fucked up and we will apologise profusely for having done so.
2. The complaint from the chronic whiner, who, in his mind, finds insult in something that is standard practice, and we have no intention of changing for him.
To the first category (very infrequent), we send the humble beseeching-your-forgiveness letter, and meant it.
To the second category, we send the polite-but-bland letter, because we would really prefer that they WEREN'T our customer, so we aren't going to suck their dick to keep them.
I have no way of knowing whether you fall into the former or the latter category, so don't take offence, as none was intended.
Remember, the customer who always thinks he is right is often the most obnoxious and, ultimately, the least profitable, and the provider of services or goods has to make the decision, based on prior experience, whether it is cost effective to suck that customer's dick or not.
Sometimes they make the right decision, sometimes the wrong one. Businesses which make more right decisions than wrong ones stay in business.
Most notably former AT&T customers can expect to wait up to a week for their number to switch.
Oh my God, a week? Oh, wait... you said up to a week, which can be anywhere from 1 - 7 days, right?
I don't know that I'd be able to live with waiting for somewhere between 1/365 and 1/52 of a year to get something as important as my number changed.
We live in a microwave world. If it doesn't hppen instantly, it takes too long.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here.
I read reviews to help me winnow the wheat from the chaff. I read a lot of books, and I watch a lot of films, and I'd prefer that those experiences are pleasurable. If I know in advance, before getting deep into the review, that the reviewer thinks that Alan Dean Foster and Marion Zimmer Bradley are the best-fucking-authors-in-the-world, then I will also know that, if he likes the book he is reviewing, I'll probably hate it.
I think Barry Norman and Roger Ebert are the two best film critics in the world. Why? Because they consistently recommend films that I enjoy. On the other hand, if Harry Knowles likes a film, I'll know that it sucks. Well, usually. He is such an unabashed fanboy that someties our opinions coincide.
Anyway, the point is, knowing what a reviewer thinks about other, similar films and books is a help, not a hindrance, and boosts the reviewers usefulness and credibility, if you use that inforamtion wisely.
Have to return a new camcorder? Best Buy (BBY ) Co. will dock you 15% as a "restocking fee."
I agree with most of what you have written, but I take exception here. Let me explain why...
I work at a fairly successful mom-and-pop computer retailer (the store has been in operation for 22 years). We charge no restocking fees, and are more than reasonable about refunds. Here are the consequences of our honesty and generosity:
EVERY DAY, LITERALLY, we have customers who come into the store and buy ink cartridges for printers that they don't own. They sit in front of their computer and printer for eight hours every fucking day, but they've never noticed the make or model. They buy an ink cartridge from us, rip it out of its packaging when they get it back to their home or office, and then expect a full refund or no-fault exchange when they return it to us the next day. Sadly, we almost always oblige them in the name of keeping-the-customer-happy, and it costs us hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) a year. First, the store has paid me to handle both the sale and the return, which has very little margin, so the return renders the "sale" profitless. Then, because no one will pay full-price for an obviously (and inexpertly) opened ink cartridge, we sell it for our cost (or less) to a subsequent customer, and the store also pays me for that transaction.
Or the customer who buys a cat5 cable or a wireless ethernet card on a Friday, casually asking what our return policy is. When I tell them that we like the item back within a week, unless it was defective or there was some other reason that reasonably delayed its intended return, their eyes light up. This tells me that I have just encountered one of our "borrowers," who have a LAN party to attend that weekend, and don't want to spend any money. This happens with extreme frequency, and come Monday they return the item.
Or those who are vacationing in our fair city, and brought their laptop, but forgot their power adaptor, so they buy one fron us only for the duration of their holiday.
Or those who buy five different cables (of different lengths, USB and parallel, etc) because they don't know what type their printer uses or the length they require, and it is easier to buy five and return the other four than it is to have checked or measured before they left the house.
We don't charge any re-stocking fee, and we take things back nearly 100% of the time as a general policy, but it is awfully hard to continually smile about it considering the abusers I've just described.
Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?
Erm, no. Being amazed that Human beings [sic] can understand what R2S2 is saying is like being amazed that Tinkerbell can fly, or that no one recognized Superman when he wore glasses. All are fictions, and thus no amazement is possible.
Okay, you still find it amazing? Well, then I will share with you the amazing news that I am really an android from the year 2525, capable of translating 4500 languages simultaneously.
Humans in Western culture are not fully formed until they are well past their 20th birthday. Having children prior to that age makes you a baby raising a baby, which isn't a wise idea. Yes, that was necessary preface.
If you think that was a troll or a flame, I don't really give a shit. If you live long enough, one day you will understand. Oh, you have lived long enough, but you disagree? Well, then I'd respectfully suggest that you still have a bit more growing to do.
Anyway, on to the topic under discussion:
At 15, you arguably have the right to some privacy. However, at 11 and 12, you have no privacy rights at all. My responsibility as the parent to guide my children safely into adulthood supercedes all other considerations.
If you aren't a parent, you have no clue what being a parent is like, and that includes those with ample experience babysitting or raising their siblings. I was the oldest of nine children, and I spent hundreds of hours as their proxy Dad, but I was a baby myself, and I didn't bear the ultimate responsiblity for their welfare: this means that it did give me some level of preparation, but the real deal is still unknowable until you are actually a parent yourself.
I'm a liberal parent. I don't care that they experiment with alcohol or marijuana, masturbate, or even enjoy recreational sex as long as its done safely. However, that doesn't mean that I want some fuckstain jerking off on their webcam as he pleads with my children to watch. I don't think that anyone has ever been hurt my watching someone jerk-off - the trauma is survivable - but I don't want my children to think that such human excrement typifies our species.
Likewise, if my offspring were cruising a lot of gay-bashing or racist websites, I'd want to know. When you are 11, seeing something on the web legitimatizes it, and they need balancing input from me.
Move the computers back into public locations. Please. You don't want to be filled with regret later, not when it concerns your children.
Talk to them. Let them know that you know about such sites as rotten.com and thestileproject.com, and don't freak if you find them browsing there. But you need to know, when they are 11 or 12, what type of shit they are being exposed to.
You wouldn't send a child into a cinema that you knew was showing snuff films, and if they'd seen a snuff film, you'd certainly need to know. The same rule applies here: don't give them unmonitored access to the Internet.
As a parent, my job is to raise my children to be the best adults that they can be. Sometimes the process isn't easy.
kid zeus,
I personally found Perdido one of the better written books that I've ever read. However, for me, the pleasure is all in the manner of telling, not in the story. Yes, I am a form over substance guy when it comes to fiction. I thrive on the ambient details. Some of my favorite authors: Gene Wolfe, John Crowley, Peter Straub (only for Shadowlands and Ghost Story; I detested Floating Dragon), Thomas Wolfe, Philip Pullman, Mary Gentle, Sheri S. Tepper, Garth Nix, and Ray Bradbury.
My list of least favorite authors is just as revealing: Christopher Stasheff, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster, R.A. Salvatore, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Dean R. Koontz. These authors might be capable of concocting great stories, I don't know, because when I read their works, I feel like I am eating cold, lumpy porridge, so I ultimately push the books away.
Everyone reads for different reasons. I read to be hypnotized by textured prose. My wife reads to be engrossed in a story. Truthfully, a combination of those characteristics is my preference, but I find it seldom.
Note that I don't consider one motivation for reading to be "superior" to the other, but I do find the diversity of opinion interesting.
Terrorism is an act performed by those who are so obsessed with enforcing their worldview that they are willing to commit murder.
These people are already mentally unbalanced, so I don't think that it is too implausible that one of the nutcases might be inspired by the plot of a game.
I'm not suggesting that Sony should have modified it, but I am suggesting that, when considering the insane, the possibility of a causal connection between what for us might be diverting entertainment and for them a recipe for violence cannot be dismissed (at least not entirely).
I know that there have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions to 9/11, mostly by governments trying to misappropriate our liberties, but I did find the concerns of (some of) the Quebecois understandable, which is what I was addressing.