I am so tired of movies asking us to fret over who will best who in a physical fight. Oh no, the hero is danger, they bravely charge in, they take a fall, they fight back, etc, etc, etc. Sure, it pushes our primitivist buttons, but if you realize this is what is going on and step outside of it, these scenes are very boring!..
Give me some reflection on attachment and loss, time as thief, things can never be the same, hope and the loss of it and finding balance once again, or _some_ higher level theme. I really don't care who can deliver the death blow in the nick of time- ESPECIALLY when it's still essentially like the old cowboys and indians- the heros seldom die or die slowly, while the bad guys die instantaneous deaths left and right.
All in all, I enjoyed the trilogy, but I'd happily trade half to three quarters of the fight scenes for more of the content from the orginal novels.
PS - It was interesting to see how they decided the make the Southerons (sp?) light skinned, side stepping the book's woefully dated african-as-devil take.:)
I saw a show just l like this in London.. a two man re-enactment of all of Shakespeare's plays done very rapidly. This was very funny. I wonder who started this genre? Maybe bards used to sing the Illiad super fast to entertain each other?
anethema above makes a good point. don't rush out and buy a track ball for carpal.. I had/have it and bought a track ball thinking it would help.. in fact it made the pain rather worse. for me, more vigourous movements involved in rebuilding an old house actually seem to have cured the pain.. not sure I understand why, but thought I'd share a data point
kraftwerk was more influential in the long run
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So the Beatles created a few new subgenres of rock? So what... How about a band that helped spawn the next phase, post-rock evolution of music- Kraftwerk.
Here comes another solution looking for a problem!
Let's all go back to ARCnet and Netware. It was fast enough, and guaranteed full employment for networking techs!
Appletalk rocked too, but was far too easy to configure. How many people made 6 figures installing Appletalk?
The shows are even available while they are being broadcast!
how to bypass the meter-get a temporary disconnect
on
Solving a Wiring Mess?
·
· Score: 1
Get a temporary disconnect for limb cutting and then wire a new hidden box before the meter.
I've never done this, I always wonder if the power company would notice the difference and start tracking it down.. but there is no practical reason why you could not.
Hell, I hear half of Rio is wired up this way..
-virto
Here's a tip if you wish to do this yourself- call the electrical company and ask them for a 'temporary disconnect' for limb cutting, moving your tall artwork in place, or some such.
I did this for my 1923 bungalow. When I bought it the house supply wire was a set of tin 20 gauge wires dating from sometime from the 20s or 30s! As you can imagine, that setup was more dangerous than anything I might do!
Once you are cut off, you can do whatever you need to do.. I reccomend scrapping it all and starting from scratch as I did- so you know that you have it right. In my case, I only had 110 to deal with, so it was a bit simpler.
If you read a wiring manual very carefully, follow it obsessively, and triple check your work, I think you should be fine.
By the way, this is a great time to wire your house to work better with X10 - use nothing smaller than 12 gauge wire (this is a good idea for fire safety anyway) and centralise the wiring towards the center of the house if you can- right next to where you tie in your x10 transmitters. Also, don't string together outlets and switches in series like the pros do- run a seperate line for each.. this also will help keep you out of trouble.
This sort of wiring also gives you the choice of putting relays on each lighting circuit for computer control.
In my case, I did not have a standard weatherhead (where the power lines hook up) so I wired one up inside the attic where the power company could not see it and then mounted it on the house later.:)
Oh yeah, make damn sure the breaker is turned off when power is reconnected and spend a few hours watching for problems when you do reconnect it..
Also make sure you are not at home when they reconnect the wiring, and lock your breaker box down fully if it is outside. That way, they can't do any pesky checks... it worked for me!
Cursive is hard to read anyway. Why should we have more than one form of written language?
I guess I represent the category this story mentions. I am 27, grew up using QWERTY more than any pen, and never learned cursive in school. I also did not learn times tables since I had a calculator by thw way. Additionally, I can't walk very far without getting tired because of cars.
If you could just give up channels 5 and 6, FM broadcast range could be doubled. Currently it is 88-108 MHz. TV channel 5 alone uses 76-82 and channel 6 uses 82-88.
There would be minimal pain because there are far more broadcast stations than are actually being used, even in large markets like LA. On the other hand, there are not nearly enough radio stations to meet demand. Everyone wins, except for some cost to broadcasters on channels 5 and 6. Hell, here in Houston, the third largest US city, those stations are totally unusued along with 4,7,9,10, and 12 in VHF alone.
FM receivers would then be required to carry the new frequencies just as TVs were required by law to carry UHF.
That watch looks very cool from my point of view. I wonder if a good looking watch from your perspective is one that is associated with being rich?
I'd rather have a hottie who thinks a USB watch is cool:)
so you're saying it's great if you're rich
on
Creating Car Free Cities
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Well that's cool, but what if you can't afford doormen, deliveries, handymen, restaurants (most of the time), cabs, etc ?
I live in Houston, which is alot like Atlanta, but with much better roads. Yes, there are lots of crappy things about a motopia. There are also things that are good and bad, depending on your point of view. For example, it allow the middle class to seperate themselves fully from the lower classes, leaving most (until recently almost all) inner city neighbourhoods in Houston 99% lower class.
I do prefer cities like London with their well developed public transport and a decent population. New York is a very different story, because it has such a massive underclass. You have to ride that train with a bunch of scum and watch your back when you get off. Then, you are much more vulnerable on foot to attack, rape, and murder. No thanks.
What is the actual annual minimal cost for a car? If you can teach yourself how to fix basic problems, and buy a used for $1000 that you can probably keep going for about 2 years, that's $500/year. Insurance at a cut rate place runs _up to_ $60 if you answer the questions correctly (no tickets, no accidents, whatever the truth). That's $720 a year. Then, a liberal estimate of gas costs for a full fledged commute acorss Houston is something like $100 a month, for $1200 per year. Add in $200 a year for parts. What is the total? $3,200 per year, $260 per month.
I was unable to find a yearly total for NY, but a one year pass on London Transport, which includes tube and buses, would run you between $1000 and $2250 depending on what zones you need.
you never know where breakthroughs will happen
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
History has shown you really never know where the next breakthrough or pre-breakthrough will come from. It is consquently nearly imposible to do a long term cost benefit analysis of one experimental program over another.
Galvani was a strange man trying to put electricty through frogs legs, but the battery he created made fundamental differences for the development of electronics.
Was it worth all the money the government gave to Douglas Englebart to come up with something as useless to the world of the 1960's as the mouse?
I was just reading the other day how NASA scientists were the first to identify hydroplaning and have consequently changed the way that tires and braking systems are built. The examples could go on and on. You really never know what application this sort of stuff will find. The best thing you can do is to give the gearheads money and and keep them screwing around! At any rate it is a hell of a better deal than buying another dozen Apache helicopters for the right wing militias of Columbia or some other crap. Ignorant people just complain about NASA because that's the government spending they see on TV.
Setting people up to do science in microgravity could revolutionize our society one day when some crazed aging hippy's experiment yields the secret to making incredibly strong fibers.. or who knows what?
Left wing activism has been flowering in Houston and Dallas in recent years and has been kicking hard at the ruling elite in Austin for many years. Many of the children of folks who moved here for their corporate jobs are starting to see through the sham I'm afraid.
Houston is perhaps the most conservative city out of the top 4 metro regions (NY, LA, Chicago, and Houston).. and yet we have cool lefty things like an open access micro cinema (the aurora picture show), a full power FM pacifica station (KPFT) which a genuine open door policy where anyone can just walk in and start producing radio, fully non profit art centers like Super Happy Fund Land, a dozen vegetarian/vegan restaurants, all out activists groups like the Houston Peace and Justice Center, Houston Animal Rights Team, Food Not Bombs, the Green Party etc, etc...
Also there's a bunch of incredibly cool people who work for NASA. So let's not be so quick to put down a state as all one way. California may be the land of fruits and nuts, but it also contains Orange county and Ronald Reagan.
whats with the americans attitude
on
Junkyard Wars Tour
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I can deal with the filming in a desert look.. incidentally the newer british shows are also filmed at the same spot outside LA..
What I get tired of is the macho attitude of many of the american teams. In contrast to the usual british sense that 'it's all in good fun' most of the US teams are overly competitive and pushy.
They get genuinely pissed off when they can't find something and especially when they lose, which takes all the fun out of it. The Miami gearheads are a case in point, though I guess they come from a particularly macho segment of US society.
Then there's the US team leader who thinks that a mixture of shouting 'let's go, let's go, let's go' and then berating his team members passes for leadership. Sheesh.
Not every team is like that of course, the High Flyers being a recent notable exception. Plus, they had the former governor of North Dakota.
I forget quite where, but I read an interview with one of the producers who said they also remove stuff from the yard that would make the challenge too easy.
Despite seeding the yard, if you watch the show you'll notice the teams still often face the dilemma of being unable to find the stuff they need/want which sometimes results in the failure of their machines.
I used to feel this way until I knocked around the world a little bit and saw the way the other 2/3s live.
Unfortunately, we're better off to educate the spawn a little bit than to have to live in the same city with the spawn's ill raised spawn's spawn and their 17 cousins. You can't keep moving to the suburbs forever. Then you just end up with something nasty, like the city of Houston, TX:)
I do magazine design work, which involves mostly working at home but then visiting client's offices. The imac is surprisingly well adapted to this lifestyle.
LCD is right out, because the colors are too inaccurate, especially when you have 2-4 people looking at the screen at once from different angles..
Anything bigger than 15" would be tough to carry in one hand while you carry everything else in the other one. Anyway, don't be so snooty. Plenty of people who use their computers all the time are perfectly satisfied with 15".. or even 13" *gasp* monitors!
You could save the audio using a program that redirects the audio signal internally like Total Recorder.. or output the flash full screen to another computer and record into MPG.. a bit kludgy, but it would work:)
Art is often hard to fully understand, because unless assumptions are made it becomes excessively wordy, something like scholarship when it is done right.
In fact, it would be almost impossible to totally understand the meanings of an artwork without being the person who created it. The associations, implications, and assumptions behind an act of expression are a product of that person's mind at the moment of creation.
The further you are culturally from the creator the less the art will speak to you.
However there is a loophole, which is all too often exploited.. If you leave your expression vague enough, people will use their natural tendency to assume that all people are more like themselves than they really are, and will fill in the blanks the way they see fit. If the viewer is inclined to see you positively, they'll fill in the blanks with positives, and, presto! you're art is suddenly deeply meaningful. Yay!
Straightforward expression has a much harder time getting across because if it's inherent complexity, but it ultimately explains the world much better.
It took me a long time to realize the game of the anti-activist squad. There is a certain cost in time and possible bad publicity (the latter turning into internal pressure on the person responsible inside the organization) for 'taking out' an activist.
So, the goal is to find those who are organisers, who get other people to attend and generally make things happen- but who do not have the economic or political resources to defend themselves effectively.
This is ultimately the danger of modern surveillance. In the past taking people out has been risky because you might get the 'wrong' guy. I have personally seen cops plant crack on a protest organiser who turned out to be a very bad choice for them. He was straight edge, studying to be a catholic priest, and his dad was CEO of a major bank. Oops.
Without a doubt, video motion detection is going to be huge. Programs like Homewatcher, GOTCHA, and many others (I'm too lazy to set up links) can sense motion very accurately, take timestamped images, upload them to a webserver, send them via faz and email, call your phone, run external programs, etc, etc.
If you live in a dangerous neighbourhood like me(and if economic downturns persist, perhaps you soon will) they are hugely useful. Couples with cheap cameras and cheap low power hard drives, systems like this could make crime very dangerous for the potential thief if they were extremely widespread.
A big motivator for some folks buying laptops and other big ticket items for their small-medium size business is that the purchase price is a tax deduction (and reduces cash on hand at the end of the year), but the rebate is totally off the books.
So that $5000 projector yields not just $1200 in rebates, but a tax free $1200! That makes it equivalent to something like a taxed $1600 worth of income or so.
Slashdot Mirror
I am so tired of movies asking us to fret over who will best who in a physical fight. Oh no, the hero is danger, they bravely charge in, they take a fall, they fight back, etc, etc, etc. Sure, it pushes our primitivist buttons, but if you realize this is what is going on and step outside of it, these scenes are very boring!..
:)
Give me some reflection on attachment and loss, time as thief, things can never be the same, hope and the loss of it and finding balance once again, or _some_ higher level theme. I really don't care who can deliver the death blow in the nick of time- ESPECIALLY when it's still essentially like the old cowboys and indians- the heros seldom die or die slowly, while the bad guys die instantaneous deaths left and right.
All in all, I enjoyed the trilogy, but I'd happily trade half to three quarters of the fight scenes for more of the content from the orginal novels.
PS - It was interesting to see how they decided the make the Southerons (sp?) light skinned, side stepping the book's woefully dated african-as-devil take.
I saw a show just l like this in London.. a two man re-enactment of all of Shakespeare's plays done very rapidly. This was very funny. I wonder who started this genre? Maybe bards used to sing the Illiad super fast to entertain each other?
This guy has a detailed tutorial on how to do this with an old powerbook duo
:) :)
I'm just waiting until I get mine from ebay!
Plus this gives you a good reason to still run localtalk..
anethema above makes a good point. don't rush out and buy a track ball for carpal.. I had/have it and bought a track ball thinking it would help.. in fact it made the pain rather worse. for me, more vigourous movements involved in rebuilding an old house actually seem to have cured the pain.. not sure I understand why, but thought I'd share a data point
So the Beatles created a few new subgenres of rock? So what... How about a band that helped spawn the next phase, post-rock evolution of music- Kraftwerk.
Here comes another solution looking for a problem! Let's all go back to ARCnet and Netware. It was fast enough, and guaranteed full employment for networking techs! Appletalk rocked too, but was far too easy to configure. How many people made 6 figures installing Appletalk?
The leftist Pacifica station here in Houston, KPFT has already done something like this. Since it went up about 6 weeks ago, www.kpftarchive.org"> has been serving all of the local, voluneer produced public affairs shows (about 10-12 hours worth a day) online for stream or download.
The shows are even available while they are being broadcast!
Get a temporary disconnect for limb cutting and then wire a new hidden box before the meter.
I've never done this, I always wonder if the power company would notice the difference and start tracking it down.. but there is no practical reason why you could not.
Hell, I hear half of Rio is wired up this way.. -virto
Here's a tip if you wish to do this yourself- call the electrical company and ask them for a 'temporary disconnect' for limb cutting, moving your tall artwork in place, or some such.
:)
I did this for my 1923 bungalow. When I bought it the house supply wire was a set of tin 20 gauge wires dating from sometime from the 20s or 30s! As you can imagine, that setup was more dangerous than anything I might do!
Once you are cut off, you can do whatever you need to do.. I reccomend scrapping it all and starting from scratch as I did- so you know that you have it right. In my case, I only had 110 to deal with, so it was a bit simpler.
If you read a wiring manual very carefully, follow it obsessively, and triple check your work, I think you should be fine.
By the way, this is a great time to wire your house to work better with X10 - use nothing smaller than 12 gauge wire (this is a good idea for fire safety anyway) and centralise the wiring towards the center of the house if you can- right next to where you tie in your x10 transmitters. Also, don't string together outlets and switches in series like the pros do- run a seperate line for each.. this also will help keep you out of trouble.
This sort of wiring also gives you the choice of putting relays on each lighting circuit for computer control.
In my case, I did not have a standard weatherhead (where the power lines hook up) so I wired one up inside the attic where the power company could not see it and then mounted it on the house later.
Oh yeah, make damn sure the breaker is turned off when power is reconnected and spend a few hours watching for problems when you do reconnect it..
Also make sure you are not at home when they reconnect the wiring, and lock your breaker box down fully if it is outside. That way, they can't do any pesky checks... it worked for me!
Good luck and be careful!
Cursive is hard to read anyway. Why should we have more than one form of written language?
I guess I represent the category this story mentions. I am 27, grew up using QWERTY more than any pen, and never learned cursive in school. I also did not learn times tables since I had a calculator by thw way. Additionally, I can't walk very far without getting tired because of cars.
If you could just give up channels 5 and 6, FM broadcast range could be doubled. Currently it is 88-108 MHz. TV channel 5 alone uses 76-82 and channel 6 uses 82-88.
There would be minimal pain because there are far more broadcast stations than are actually being used, even in large markets like LA. On the other hand, there are not nearly enough radio stations to meet demand. Everyone wins, except for some cost to broadcasters on channels 5 and 6. Hell, here in Houston, the third largest US city, those stations are totally unusued along with 4,7,9,10, and 12 in VHF alone.
FM receivers would then be required to carry the new frequencies just as TVs were required by law to carry UHF.
check out the TV broadcast frequencies if you are interested.
However, sometimes slackers whip out some stuff that you would never have seen coming, which turn out to be incredibly valuable..
That watch looks very cool from my point of view. I wonder if a good looking watch from your perspective is one that is associated with being rich?
:)
I'd rather have a hottie who thinks a USB watch is cool
Well that's cool, but what if you can't afford doormen, deliveries, handymen, restaurants (most of the time), cabs, etc ?
s -tickets-may2003.pdf
I live in Houston, which is alot like Atlanta, but with much better roads. Yes, there are lots of crappy things about a motopia. There are also things that are good and bad, depending on your point of view. For example, it allow the middle class to seperate themselves fully from the lower classes, leaving most (until recently almost all) inner city neighbourhoods in Houston 99% lower class.
I do prefer cities like London with their well developed public transport and a decent population. New York is a very different story, because it has such a massive underclass. You have to ride that train with a bunch of scum and watch your back when you get off. Then, you are much more vulnerable on foot to attack, rape, and murder. No thanks.
What is the actual annual minimal cost for a car? If you can teach yourself how to fix basic problems, and buy a used for $1000 that you can probably keep going for about 2 years, that's $500/year. Insurance at a cut rate place runs _up to_ $60 if you answer the questions correctly (no tickets, no accidents, whatever the truth). That's $720 a year. Then, a liberal estimate of gas costs for a full fledged commute acorss Houston is something like $100 a month, for $1200 per year. Add in $200 a year for parts. What is the total? $3,200 per year, $260 per month.
I was unable to find a yearly total for NY, but a one year pass on London Transport, which includes tube and buses, would run you between $1000 and $2250 depending on what zones you need.
http://www.londontransport.co.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/fare
History has shown you really never know where the next breakthrough or pre-breakthrough will come from. It is consquently nearly imposible to do a long term cost benefit analysis of one experimental program over another.
Galvani was a strange man trying to put electricty through frogs legs, but the battery he created made fundamental differences for the development of electronics.
Was it worth all the money the government gave to Douglas Englebart to come up with something as useless to the world of the 1960's as the mouse?
I was just reading the other day how NASA scientists were the first to identify hydroplaning and have consequently changed the way that tires and braking systems are built. The examples could go on and on. You really never know what application this sort of stuff will find. The best thing you can do is to give the gearheads money and and keep them screwing around! At any rate it is a hell of a better deal than buying another dozen Apache helicopters for the right wing militias of Columbia or some other crap. Ignorant people just complain about NASA because that's the government spending they see on TV.
Setting people up to do science in microgravity could revolutionize our society one day when some crazed aging hippy's experiment yields the secret to making incredibly strong fibers.. or who knows what?
Left wing activism has been flowering in Houston and Dallas in recent years and has been kicking hard at the ruling elite in Austin for many years. Many of the children of folks who moved here for their corporate jobs are starting to see through the sham I'm afraid.
Houston is perhaps the most conservative city out of the top 4 metro regions (NY, LA, Chicago, and Houston).. and yet we have cool lefty things like an open access micro cinema (the aurora picture show), a full power FM pacifica station (KPFT) which a genuine open door policy where anyone can just walk in and start producing radio, fully non profit art centers like Super Happy Fund Land, a dozen vegetarian/vegan restaurants, all out activists groups like the Houston Peace and Justice Center, Houston Animal Rights Team, Food Not Bombs, the Green Party etc, etc...
Also there's a bunch of incredibly cool people who work for NASA. So let's not be so quick to put down a state as all one way. California may be the land of fruits and nuts, but it also contains Orange county and Ronald Reagan.
I can deal with the filming in a desert look.. incidentally the newer british shows are also filmed at the same spot outside LA..
What I get tired of is the macho attitude of many of the american teams. In contrast to the usual british sense that 'it's all in good fun' most of the US teams are overly competitive and pushy.
They get genuinely pissed off when they can't find something and especially when they lose, which takes all the fun out of it. The Miami gearheads are a case in point, though I guess they come from a particularly macho segment of US society.
Then there's the US team leader who thinks that a mixture of shouting 'let's go, let's go, let's go' and then berating his team members passes for leadership. Sheesh.
Not every team is like that of course, the High Flyers being a recent notable exception. Plus, they had the former governor of North Dakota.
I forget quite where, but I read an interview with one of the producers who said they also remove stuff from the yard that would make the challenge too easy.
Despite seeding the yard, if you watch the show you'll notice the teams still often face the dilemma of being unable to find the stuff they need/want which sometimes results in the failure of their machines.
I used to feel this way until I knocked around the world a little bit and saw the way the other 2/3s live.
:)
Unfortunately, we're better off to educate the spawn a little bit than to have to live in the same city with the spawn's ill raised spawn's spawn and their 17 cousins. You can't keep moving to the suburbs forever. Then you just end up with something nasty, like the city of Houston, TX
I do magazine design work, which involves mostly working at home but then visiting client's offices. The imac is surprisingly well adapted to this lifestyle. LCD is right out, because the colors are too inaccurate, especially when you have 2-4 people looking at the screen at once from different angles.. Anything bigger than 15" would be tough to carry in one hand while you carry everything else in the other one. Anyway, don't be so snooty. Plenty of people who use their computers all the time are perfectly satisfied with 15".. or even 13" *gasp* monitors!
You could save the audio using a program that redirects the audio signal internally like Total Recorder.. or output the flash full screen to another computer and record into MPG.. a bit kludgy, but it would work :)
Art is often hard to fully understand, because unless assumptions are made it becomes excessively wordy, something like scholarship when it is done right.
In fact, it would be almost impossible to totally understand the meanings of an artwork without being the person who created it. The associations, implications, and assumptions behind an act of expression are a product of that person's mind at the moment of creation.
The further you are culturally from the creator the less the art will speak to you. However there is a loophole, which is all too often exploited.. If you leave your expression vague enough, people will use their natural tendency to assume that all people are more like themselves than they really are, and will fill in the blanks the way they see fit. If the viewer is inclined to see you positively, they'll fill in the blanks with positives, and, presto! you're art is suddenly deeply meaningful. Yay!
Straightforward expression has a much harder time getting across because if it's inherent complexity, but it ultimately explains the world much better.
It took me a long time to realize the game of the anti-activist squad. There is a certain cost in time and possible bad publicity (the latter turning into internal pressure on the person responsible inside the organization) for 'taking out' an activist.
So, the goal is to find those who are organisers, who get other people to attend and generally make things happen- but who do not have the economic or political resources to defend themselves effectively.
This is ultimately the danger of modern surveillance. In the past taking people out has been risky because you might get the 'wrong' guy. I have personally seen cops plant crack on a protest organiser who turned out to be a very bad choice for them. He was straight edge, studying to be a catholic priest, and his dad was CEO of a major bank. Oops.
Without a doubt, video motion detection is going to be huge. Programs like Homewatcher, GOTCHA, and many others (I'm too lazy to set up links) can sense motion very accurately, take timestamped images, upload them to a webserver, send them via faz and email, call your phone, run external programs, etc, etc. If you live in a dangerous neighbourhood like me(and if economic downturns persist, perhaps you soon will) they are hugely useful. Couples with cheap cameras and cheap low power hard drives, systems like this could make crime very dangerous for the potential thief if they were extremely widespread.
A big motivator for some folks buying laptops and other big ticket items for their small-medium size business is that the purchase price is a tax deduction (and reduces cash on hand at the end of the year), but the rebate is totally off the books.
So that $5000 projector yields not just $1200 in rebates, but a tax free $1200! That makes it equivalent to something like a taxed $1600 worth of income or so.