But if you're a ditch-digger, the only way you can reach a point where you literally cannot do your job anymore is if you get injured, get old, or forget how to dig a ditch. It's different with blogging, or any creative job: the ability to write is not a resource you can just renew by eating food and getting a good night's sleep. It is difficult to write on demand.
Being scientifically accurate doesn't make a show good automatically, and travelling faster than light and involving suspiciously humanoid aliens doesn't make it bad. By that metric, Friends is better than either show and Futurama sucks. More important thing is to lay down your ground rules where everybody can see them and then to stick by them. Firefly is a consistent universe - if there's a problem, they solve it within the framework of that universe (or don't). Whereas with Star Trek, it seems like every problem is solved by inventing a new kind of particle which nobody has ever heard of before and nobody will ever hear of again.
I will agree that Firefly contains plenty of science. And it's certainly nearer the mark than Star Trek. But I tend to think of science fiction as fiction in which science, or scientific concepts, are the centrepiece of the story. And in Firefly, science isn't the star. The emphasis of the story is on people and their interactions. When Serenity breaks down, the story isn't why it broke and how they fix it. The story is how the crew comes to terms with their hopeless situation. This, incidentally, is what makes Firefly so appealing to the mainstream.
I guess the lesson here is that choosing a screen name which will be available everywhere and last forever is much, much harder than at first it appears. It's gotta be long and unusual so nobody else has already taken it; it can't have profanity or punctuation or spaces because many places disallow these; you can't name yourself after something which you're interested in because sooner or later you'll lost interest in it; and now, apparently, you can't insert a title in there either. How much more difficult can it get?
I didn't think there was a maximum specified length, and I've certainly seen longer URLs that 256 characters in working use. MSIE, for example, can handle URLs up to 2048 characters long. But it doesn't matter how big the file is or how long the maximum URL is. Suppose your file is four gigs. Split that up into 2097152 chunks of 2048 characters each, and reduce them all to five characters each, and you have a 10-meg file. Split that into 5120 chunks of 2048 characters and reduce them all again, and you have a 25-kilobyte file. After the next pass you're down to 63 bytes. Then you're down to five characters. Four passes, and the job is done. Takes a while to get all the info back from TinyURL, of course...
I don't think it would be protected as parody since the seal itself is not what the Onion parodies. The Onion parodies the administration and the President, but the seal it displays is real. Parody, as you suggest, would be modifying the seal in some humorous way, or (possibly) putting the real thing up, but making *it* the subject of a joke ("Ha ha, what a dumb seal").
So wait, Starship Troopers was based on a book of the same name by Robert Heinlein. The game Halo draws heavily from Starship Troopers. And if the film studios have any sense they'll be taking their storyline from the Halo books as well as the game... making this the film of the book of the game of the film of the book?
I'm not worried how long it takes Fred to do a comic, or how meticulous he is, or his dedication to his fans, or how much money he makes, or anything like that. It's the fact that he consistently fails to meet his own deadlines. He isn't doing his job properly, and if he was working for anybody but himself, he would have been fired by now.
If he can't keep up, then whatever the reason, he should ADMIT that he can't and lower his sights a bit, instead of stringing everybody along. For example, if he went to two comics per week and STUCK to that schedule... well, to be honest, I still wouldn't read the comic, because, as I said, it moves too slowly and isn't funny enough, but I would certainly have infinitely greater respect for him.
Re:Mega tokyo is a great example
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wouldn't go so far as to say Fred needs to be hit by a truck, but I would agree that Megatokyo has serious shortfalls, and I'm not talking about the comic moving too slowly, or not being funny enough anymore, which are artistic issues to which the response is "stop reading" (and I have).
The thing that makes me angry is that MT is Fred Gallagher's full-time job, but he still can't manage better than 10% filler.
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But if you're a ditch-digger, the only way you can reach a point where you literally cannot do your job anymore is if you get injured, get old, or forget how to dig a ditch. It's different with blogging, or any creative job: the ability to write is not a resource you can just renew by eating food and getting a good night's sleep. It is difficult to write on demand.
Being scientifically accurate doesn't make a show good automatically, and travelling faster than light and involving suspiciously humanoid aliens doesn't make it bad. By that metric, Friends is better than either show and Futurama sucks. More important thing is to lay down your ground rules where everybody can see them and then to stick by them. Firefly is a consistent universe - if there's a problem, they solve it within the framework of that universe (or don't). Whereas with Star Trek, it seems like every problem is solved by inventing a new kind of particle which nobody has ever heard of before and nobody will ever hear of again.
I will agree that Firefly contains plenty of science. And it's certainly nearer the mark than Star Trek. But I tend to think of science fiction as fiction in which science, or scientific concepts, are the centrepiece of the story. And in Firefly, science isn't the star. The emphasis of the story is on people and their interactions. When Serenity breaks down, the story isn't why it broke and how they fix it. The story is how the crew comes to terms with their hopeless situation. This, incidentally, is what makes Firefly so appealing to the mainstream.
You get quite a bit of packet loss like that, you know.
Are we talking about moderating a message board? Case mods? Mod chips? Quake mods? This story tells us nothing!
I guess the lesson here is that choosing a screen name which will be available everywhere and last forever is much, much harder than at first it appears. It's gotta be long and unusual so nobody else has already taken it; it can't have profanity or punctuation or spaces because many places disallow these; you can't name yourself after something which you're interested in because sooner or later you'll lost interest in it; and now, apparently, you can't insert a title in there either. How much more difficult can it get?
I don't know who you are, but you might want to pick a different username. CmdrTaco is the guy who runs this website and he'll be mighty upset.
That has to be the most elaborate Goatse troll I've ever seen. Bravo!
I didn't think there was a maximum specified length, and I've certainly seen longer URLs that 256 characters in working use. MSIE, for example, can handle URLs up to 2048 characters long. But it doesn't matter how big the file is or how long the maximum URL is. Suppose your file is four gigs. Split that up into 2097152 chunks of 2048 characters each, and reduce them all to five characters each, and you have a 10-meg file. Split that into 5120 chunks of 2048 characters and reduce them all again, and you have a 25-kilobyte file. After the next pass you're down to 63 bytes. Then you're down to five characters. Four passes, and the job is done. Takes a while to get all the info back from TinyURL, of course...
I don't think it would be protected as parody since the seal itself is not what the Onion parodies. The Onion parodies the administration and the President, but the seal it displays is real. Parody, as you suggest, would be modifying the seal in some humorous way, or (possibly) putting the real thing up, but making *it* the subject of a joke ("Ha ha, what a dumb seal").
Take the list of cluster URLs. Concatenate them into a single URL. Submit it again. Thus compressing literally ANY file to five characters.
At least, as long as the possibility space of five-character URLs isn't exhausted. It's very much first come, first served.
I'd like to see an old Penny Arcade line: "I play violent videogames and could snap any minute"
I believe you're confusing "standard" in the sense of "regular" or "average" with "standard" in the sense of "benchmark" or "target".
I always used to wonder why you never saw ad banners where it turned out you hadn't won.
Speaking for robot-kind: faster than you, meatbag.
20/15 is 133% :)
Of course not. It's educational.
Just like writing novels, then. Very, very few people make enough money from writing e.g. fiction to live off.
Don't worry, it'll all work offline. However, the toolbar download is over 500MB.
So wait, Starship Troopers was based on a book of the same name by Robert Heinlein. The game Halo draws heavily from Starship Troopers. And if the film studios have any sense they'll be taking their storyline from the Halo books as well as the game... making this the film of the book of the game of the film of the book?
Starring Al Pacino as "L"
I dunno about the microfiche idea. There's never a microfiche reader around when you need one.
As long as he stopped claiming Mon-Wed-Fri, definitely.
I'm not worried how long it takes Fred to do a comic, or how meticulous he is, or his dedication to his fans, or how much money he makes, or anything like that. It's the fact that he consistently fails to meet his own deadlines. He isn't doing his job properly, and if he was working for anybody but himself, he would have been fired by now.
If he can't keep up, then whatever the reason, he should ADMIT that he can't and lower his sights a bit, instead of stringing everybody along. For example, if he went to two comics per week and STUCK to that schedule... well, to be honest, I still wouldn't read the comic, because, as I said, it moves too slowly and isn't funny enough, but I would certainly have infinitely greater respect for him.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Fred needs to be hit by a truck, but I would agree that Megatokyo has serious shortfalls, and I'm not talking about the comic moving too slowly, or not being funny enough anymore, which are artistic issues to which the response is "stop reading" (and I have).
The thing that makes me angry is that MT is Fred Gallagher's full-time job, but he still can't manage better than 10% filler.