Damn, I've been trying to think of something to do with this 2.5GB Bigfoot when it finally gives up the ghost and I think that fits the ticket. Of course, I dunno when that might actually be, given that in its seven years of service it has outlasted three other hard drives and countless other pieces and parts.
Heh, Quicktime is the main reason why I can't bring myself to try iTunes yet. Quicktime is easily one of the worst apps that I have ever had the misfortune of installing, from the crappy interface to the fact that its the only video app I've ever used that doesn't keep the power save settings from killing the monitor while a movie is playing. Not quite as bad as Realplayer or whatever lame new name they're using now, but close. I'll wait for a while for the initial hype to die down a bit and then check out some reviews.
Good point. These sort of questions may be silly to us, but there are still a lot of older people out there who didn't even hear of the Internet until they were in their 40s. Many of them got that typical dismissive mentality that I'm sure many members of every generation get when a revolutionary new development is brought about that they weren't raised around; my mom is like that. Which is always confusing to me since she and her older Luddite kin also bitch that we don't communicate often enough, yet if they had Internet access we could do so all of the time without the ridiculous long distance bills.
That's why I feel that in the case of the Internet, it has such amazing utility for finding information and facilitating communication that I think it suffers much less from that problem. My dad spent the past 20 years working on high-tech shit, so he obviously didn't have an issue, but my mother-in-law is about as technically oriented as the Amish and even she uses the Internet all of the time, once she gave it a chance.
Campaigns to convince people to use the Internet and studies by bored academecians looking to justify more grant money are all pointless. I'm sure that this same nonsense took place when the telephone first started to become popular. The Internet is such mind-blowing advance in human communication that access isn't going to do anything but improve. So sit back, get a good laugh from all of the hand waving, and then go read some news, IM an old friend, and search around for a great price on that new camera, because you can.
As a ham, I have experimented with Mandrake & Red Hat
Those would be the wrong distros to use anyhow.:) Hams should use Debian since dselect (or aptitude or whatever you choose to use for your package browsing) has a ham radio category which means that you can browse through the software listing, choose what you want to try out, and it gets installed to your computer automatically, along with any dependencies that it might have. Great selection of free software that requires even less effort to install than apps in Windows. Might want to check it out if you are still considering giving Linux a chance.
Its all about keeping ahead of death until the situation can be improved. Medical science is flying and crazy new shit comes out every other month. Sure, there's not a whole lot that can be done to allow a 90 year old to look and feel 30. Yet. But there may be, so in the meantime I'll take any innovation, such as an exoskeleton that will help keep me from busting my head open, as a means of keeping just a step or two ahead of death in the hopes that I can delay long enough to get a real improvement that'll score me a few more quality years. Alive, I can still fight for a better future. Dead, I can only decompose.
And yes, I will get cryogenically frozen if the opportunity should be available when I die. The narrow odds for survival offered by cryogenics are still far better than the impossibility of survival guaranteed by decomposition, cremation, or taxidermy.
That is not only an interesting story, but also some interesting analysis by the submitter, in a tin-foil hat sort of way. I certainly have no problem with generating further methods of receiving potentially lifesaving organs short of attempting to hasten the demise of a donor, but I do realize that there are some out there who have strict moral or religious beliefs who are concerned about being forced to be involved in such a program.
This program is awesome because it provides a little more incentive for those who are on the fence while allowing those who absolutely refuse to donate to still be able to take organs when needed through existing resources. No it may not be exactly fair, but it does stand to reason that those who help continue to make such a great feature of modern medicine as donor organs available for future generations should also have some advantage when receiving organs.
You can't have it both way, at least until we figure out a way to grow organs separate from a full human since cloning's going to be a big legal pain-in-the-ass for years to come. Such is the nature of compromise. Now quit trying to screw the sick from having ready access to lifesaving organs by keeping the supply low.
Since it usually only takes around 5-10 minutes plus travel time, I see time being an even more lame excuse in this case than the fatties who claim that they don't have time for exercise.
Unfortunately, this isn't a case of being denied liberty for a few months during ops overseas. The government doesn't seem to have a period of expiration planned for these samples, so even though I have been a civilian for over six years, they still have my DNA on file. Goody, I now rank the same as a convicted criminal, since civilians who never bothered to serve aren't required to have samples on file.
If I had any delusions about my DNA sample helping to bring about liberty, justice, and all of those other silly idealistic concepts, I'd be thrilled to have it on file. But at this point, its nothing but a potential liability as god forbid I scratch my head and leave a few hairs someplace where someone gets killed soon after I leave. Yeah, we lose some of our rights when we serve, but we supposedly become regular old U.S. citizens when we leave, instead of parolees.
Yeah, if this sort of nonsense legislation actually made it into our laws, then I would tell my daughter exactly that. Its just too damned easy to download music not to bring that minor detail to her attention and I much prefer for her not to be bankrupted, imprisoned, and carrying a felony record for the rest of her life over something so fucking stupid. Those who are unable to adapt to technological change still have massive enough warchests to lease our legal system with an option to buy, so I won't waste time instilling pointless morality about real theft if the penalty is actually far less. Free market my ass; the market spoke, but the corporations didn't want to listen, so they told the market to get fucked through the multiple gunpoints of the U.S. government.
Oops, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to send several hundred thousand troops across this here ocean to run upon your shores all willy-nilly with guns a-blazin. I dunno what happened really. Guess that's the last time I mix beer with papaya juice. Well, hope you get all of the holes in your country filled, but I've got to go to my vacation home and get me a weekend of R&R.
Heh, don't count on that as long as our lawmakers are composed of the dust-pissing generation. Even though most of them are so rich that they can hire people to carry them around on cushions, these old bastards will never do anything to risk their continued ability to endanger the rest of us out on the road. But at least they are not out there playing violent video games.
Holy shit, crazy people like violent video games?!? Well that does it; we need to ban crazy people immediately before these violent video games become too popular!
Heh. Every FPS has a persistant world. The first time you play this map, play Axis, then next time play Allies. The map itself hasn't changed a bit, just whoever gets the initial advantage, Just like areas in MMOGs. No need to level up when you already have all of the skills you need to operate everything in the game. Planetside sounds like months and months of work to get to the point where you are playing a futuristic Battlefield 1942.
Having said that, I'd actually love to check Planetside out, but I don't spend $50 on anything sight unseen anymore. I suppose I could take out an ad in the paper: Wanted - 7 day trial key for Planetside. $50 may not mean much to you, but that's either another memory chip for my camera or two blowjobs and a 40oz.;)
Getting back to the topic, I think more of an FPS angle would have been far better suited to Star Wars Galaxies, as players seems to be predominantly seeking an action game from it. I know developers of massively multis tend to avoid anything leading to "twitch" play as they don't want to alienate their less skilled customers, but given the massive success of the FPS genre, particularly online, I'd say that concern is a bit overblown.
This insistence on attempting to pigeonhole crap that someone throws onto celluloid, canvas, hard disk, etc. is such bullshit. There's no such thing as art as a separate entity from everything else that people create. Art is strictly a matter of opinion, and since everyone's opinion differs, there can be no definition. Video game renders are as good as anything that some sweaty old man smeared squished plant matter all over.
This is just more of the same ignorant elitist shit that keeps that stupid art vs. pornography debate alive and kicking, frivolously pissing away time in our courts. If you create something and someone else likes it, then good on you. If they don't, throw that crap away and try again. Its bad enough that we've gotten so fucking stupid as to require the government to tell us what we find acceptable and what we don't; we sure as hell don't need these jackasses wasting anyone's time by trying to elevate their chicken scratches to a higher level of being through some arbitrary decision to promote it to the mystical realm of ART (cue angelic choir).
Actually, religion isn't frowned upon, its accepted as a tenet of human society. That's why religious institutions get granted tax exemptions and whatnot. The fuss in the US with religion is equal treatment for all beliefs, or lack thereof. Hence the careful phrasing "no law respecting an establishment of religion" restricting the Congress from favoring (formally) any particular religion. As far as protection in the workplace, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, religion is a protected status along with sex, race, color, or origin.
Interesting aside concerning age discrimination: it exists, but it only applies to people 40 and over, in accordance with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Technically you can be fired for being too young or old as long as you are not over 40, although I'd imagine that most employers are incredibly paranoid from our litigation-happy atmosphere to test those waters. In addition, age discrimination is waiverable by contract or does not apply in certain job fields where public safety is involved.
Excellent observation. My only hope is that lawmakers don't regularly peruse Slashdot else they would be more likely to ignore a reasonable display of alarm to that which could truly be threatening to liberties just by having simple shit like this being derided as the devil's chariot.
The "slippery slope" is a ridiculous argument, as all law is based upon consideration of an act and just how far we are willing to tolerate it. Contact with another person, OK, contact with their neck, OK, contriction of that neck, fucking wrong. Let's outlaw contact. Sane law requires the recognition of the circumstances under which something can be used, and abused.
In this case, it is basic data on the most recent five seconds of a vehicle just prior to an incident that causes the discharge of the airbag. The only sensitive information I can possibly see this as revealing is just how much of an asshole the driver was just prior to smashing something. Wait until the technology is incremented to a point where it presents a discernable threat to doing anything but that and then flip the fuck out. Don't jump the gun and get lawmakers even more jaded than they already are.
Funny, royalty always seemed to be composed of uninitiated, self-righteous brats who were given that opportunity simply by falling out of the right uterus. We here in the grand old U.S. of A. make it a choice as well. I'd call that a step up for civilization.;)
I took the tour one Sunday since they were offering free lunch and I was bored. Pretty tight setup. The VR lab was cool and they had some very sweet computer labs. Some dude who used to work for id gave the intro to the computer animation program, which made me realize was a dork I was for recognizing his name. At least it wasn't until halfway through his spiel and I soon forgot it, so I don't feel too bad. But they had all sorts of machines there, including a room full of SGI workstations for the animation classes.
The video and audio editing hardware they have... holy shit. They have got some serious hardware on that end. If you've ever considered video or audio editing, you really need to drag your ass down here to Orlando and play with those toys. The mobile stage setup was fairly sweet; a few semis that unload a big outdoor tented stage setup.
All in all, it looked like you really got your money's worth, which is good because it does cost a pretty penny, hence my attending a public university instead. But if your parents don't know what the fuck to do with all of that money sitting around, have them send you down here. Just don't forget the AC, because the weather sucks.
It means that he's not one of the pinheads driving like an asshole, stealing the house plants by my front door, taking up two spaces in a crowded parking lot, or lobbying the government to enforce their particular morality on me at gunpoint. As far as I'm concerned, he's damn near royalty.;)
I treasure irreverence, even when taken to extremes, because among the outrage there lies those wonderful kernels of curiosity that the otherwise closed-minded might not have otherwise had the mental fortitude to face without having the issue thrown in their faces. The conclusion that they come to following such consideration isn't so important as how they came to that conclusion. I would much prefer it to yet another generation who maintain their most basic beliefs only because someone such as their mommies and daddies told them that was how things were and that was that.
To use that example of movies that support terrorism (a bit broad lumping together all terrorists as being the same animal, as I don't see Islamic Jihad finding too much common ground with the IRA, so feel free to interpret "terrorism" as a particular group for clarity), I think that it would be refreshing to truly get to know and understand the perspective of those who would commit such heinous acts. We find it far too easy to have certain groups of people declared as "evil" and then read about them being summarily executed in foreign lands.
Admittedly, the predominant attitude of "kill them all, now" would probably continue to dominate and perhaps even be accentuated after a better understanding is reached, but at least these death sentences would be delivered from a more informed perspective than that of blind fear. We might even be able to develop solutions that get at the root of the problem rather than simply treating the symptoms.
As for the usefulness of speech, that is a stripe of a totally different color but one that is fairly self-regulating, since those who won't find it useful, such as those of us not in the turnip trade to reference your example, simply won't bother with it. Of course, that does make me wonder why these zealots are so deathly afraid of materials that make their people think, since they would likely walk away bored or find it to be highly comedic if they were so confident in their beliefs. But then I don't proclaim to understand the incredibly xenophobic world of those sort of religions, so I may simply be missing something incredibly obvious to those of you who do.
Be sure to bring a badass PC to keep yourself occupied with games and to communicate with the rest of the planet. And to do class assignments as well, I suppose, although you'll find ways around that crap soon enough as it just gets in the way of having fun.
As for in class, you'll need a tazer to keep yourself awake during those excruciatingly long and boring lecture classes held in stadiums refurbished with that wonderful seating pilfered from gnome villages with attached swinging testicular restraint devices that you can also write on if the tip of your pen is narrow enough and you can keep you hand steady. Be sure to grab one of the seats with the restraint on the left side if you are right-handed; the southpaws will love you for it.
Seriously, though, don't sweat it so much. Just have a decent PC and make sure you have your own printer, because having to run to the school lab just to print your shit out sucks. And turn off that goddamned cellphone in class else I or one of my collegues shove it up your ass. Enjoy college!
And, as history tells us, imperialism just doesn't work very well.
Well, to be fair, history tells us that democracy doesn't work very well, either.;) Seriously though, I, too, have grown tired of the fear-mongering that has become the status quo. Yeah, we got slapped on September 11, 2001. Wanna know something? Its going to happen again at some point in the future. Every nation on the planet has to deal with this sort of thing, and the US has had it far better than most, since for us it is always isolated attacks with no further risk of escalation; i.e. an invasion of conquest or occupation. The United States could drop all pretenses of maintaining civil liberties and shift to a completely totalitarian regime and successful attacks on US soil and on US assets overseas would still occasionally occur.
Welcome to the real world, sorry if some of you find it to be far more hostile than the Cosby Show had prepared you for it to be. Go crack a few history books and you might begin to realize that a) humanity is violent, and b) the US has had it easy. I understand that Americans are more prone to be, for the lack of a better word, cowardly, since most Americans have never even been in a fist fight, nevertheless have had to deal with any real turmoil, but the cowardous has gotten out of hand. If you are still so frightened that you can't live accepting that you are far, far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than you are to even see a terrorist attack in person, then move your ass out to the sticks and set up shop, because I don't foresee terrorists mounting an attack on Red Lodge, Montana. In the meantime, can we get back to building a nation for the world, and its own citizens, to envy rather than despise?
Most corporate drones just aren't intelligent or creative enough to understand that much going on at one time, so they can only choose a single aspect to focus on. You have seen the advertisements and TV shows that they create, right?:)
Just settle out of court at $97+ billion and then declare bankruptcy. Total cost to the student: about $300 for the paralegal and paperwork. Seems like a better deal than about anything that he'd actually be able to get in a courtroom against the RIAA goon squad and he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of his life about how he once accrued $97 billion in debt.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I've been trying to think of something to do with this 2.5GB Bigfoot when it finally gives up the ghost and I think that fits the ticket. Of course, I dunno when that might actually be, given that in its seven years of service it has outlasted three other hard drives and countless other pieces and parts.
Heh, Quicktime is the main reason why I can't bring myself to try iTunes yet. Quicktime is easily one of the worst apps that I have ever had the misfortune of installing, from the crappy interface to the fact that its the only video app I've ever used that doesn't keep the power save settings from killing the monitor while a movie is playing. Not quite as bad as Realplayer or whatever lame new name they're using now, but close. I'll wait for a while for the initial hype to die down a bit and then check out some reviews.
Good point. These sort of questions may be silly to us, but there are still a lot of older people out there who didn't even hear of the Internet until they were in their 40s. Many of them got that typical dismissive mentality that I'm sure many members of every generation get when a revolutionary new development is brought about that they weren't raised around; my mom is like that. Which is always confusing to me since she and her older Luddite kin also bitch that we don't communicate often enough, yet if they had Internet access we could do so all of the time without the ridiculous long distance bills.
That's why I feel that in the case of the Internet, it has such amazing utility for finding information and facilitating communication that I think it suffers much less from that problem. My dad spent the past 20 years working on high-tech shit, so he obviously didn't have an issue, but my mother-in-law is about as technically oriented as the Amish and even she uses the Internet all of the time, once she gave it a chance.
Campaigns to convince people to use the Internet and studies by bored academecians looking to justify more grant money are all pointless. I'm sure that this same nonsense took place when the telephone first started to become popular. The Internet is such mind-blowing advance in human communication that access isn't going to do anything but improve. So sit back, get a good laugh from all of the hand waving, and then go read some news, IM an old friend, and search around for a great price on that new camera, because you can.
As a ham, I have experimented with Mandrake & Red Hat
:) Hams should use Debian since dselect (or aptitude or whatever you choose to use for your package browsing) has a ham radio category which means that you can browse through the software listing, choose what you want to try out, and it gets installed to your computer automatically, along with any dependencies that it might have. Great selection of free software that requires even less effort to install than apps in Windows. Might want to check it out if you are still considering giving Linux a chance.
Those would be the wrong distros to use anyhow.
Its all about keeping ahead of death until the situation can be improved. Medical science is flying and crazy new shit comes out every other month. Sure, there's not a whole lot that can be done to allow a 90 year old to look and feel 30. Yet. But there may be, so in the meantime I'll take any innovation, such as an exoskeleton that will help keep me from busting my head open, as a means of keeping just a step or two ahead of death in the hopes that I can delay long enough to get a real improvement that'll score me a few more quality years. Alive, I can still fight for a better future. Dead, I can only decompose.
And yes, I will get cryogenically frozen if the opportunity should be available when I die. The narrow odds for survival offered by cryogenics are still far better than the impossibility of survival guaranteed by decomposition, cremation, or taxidermy.
That is not only an interesting story, but also some interesting analysis by the submitter, in a tin-foil hat sort of way. I certainly have no problem with generating further methods of receiving potentially lifesaving organs short of attempting to hasten the demise of a donor, but I do realize that there are some out there who have strict moral or religious beliefs who are concerned about being forced to be involved in such a program.
This program is awesome because it provides a little more incentive for those who are on the fence while allowing those who absolutely refuse to donate to still be able to take organs when needed through existing resources. No it may not be exactly fair, but it does stand to reason that those who help continue to make such a great feature of modern medicine as donor organs available for future generations should also have some advantage when receiving organs.
You can't have it both way, at least until we figure out a way to grow organs separate from a full human since cloning's going to be a big legal pain-in-the-ass for years to come. Such is the nature of compromise. Now quit trying to screw the sick from having ready access to lifesaving organs by keeping the supply low.
Since it usually only takes around 5-10 minutes plus travel time, I see time being an even more lame excuse in this case than the fatties who claim that they don't have time for exercise.
Thank you, my friend. I could not locate that info previously, so I am greatly appreciative for the link.
Unfortunately, this isn't a case of being denied liberty for a few months during ops overseas. The government doesn't seem to have a period of expiration planned for these samples, so even though I have been a civilian for over six years, they still have my DNA on file. Goody, I now rank the same as a convicted criminal, since civilians who never bothered to serve aren't required to have samples on file.
If I had any delusions about my DNA sample helping to bring about liberty, justice, and all of those other silly idealistic concepts, I'd be thrilled to have it on file. But at this point, its nothing but a potential liability as god forbid I scratch my head and leave a few hairs someplace where someone gets killed soon after I leave. Yeah, we lose some of our rights when we serve, but we supposedly become regular old U.S. citizens when we leave, instead of parolees.
Yeah, if this sort of nonsense legislation actually made it into our laws, then I would tell my daughter exactly that. Its just too damned easy to download music not to bring that minor detail to her attention and I much prefer for her not to be bankrupted, imprisoned, and carrying a felony record for the rest of her life over something so fucking stupid. Those who are unable to adapt to technological change still have massive enough warchests to lease our legal system with an option to buy, so I won't waste time instilling pointless morality about real theft if the penalty is actually far less. Free market my ass; the market spoke, but the corporations didn't want to listen, so they told the market to get fucked through the multiple gunpoints of the U.S. government.
Oops, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean to send several hundred thousand troops across this here ocean to run upon your shores all willy-nilly with guns a-blazin. I dunno what happened really. Guess that's the last time I mix beer with papaya juice. Well, hope you get all of the holes in your country filled, but I've got to go to my vacation home and get me a weekend of R&R.
Heh, don't count on that as long as our lawmakers are composed of the dust-pissing generation. Even though most of them are so rich that they can hire people to carry them around on cushions, these old bastards will never do anything to risk their continued ability to endanger the rest of us out on the road. But at least they are not out there playing violent video games.
Holy shit, crazy people like violent video games?!? Well that does it; we need to ban crazy people immediately before these violent video games become too popular!
Heh. Every FPS has a persistant world. The first time you play this map, play Axis, then next time play Allies. The map itself hasn't changed a bit, just whoever gets the initial advantage, Just like areas in MMOGs. No need to level up when you already have all of the skills you need to operate everything in the game. Planetside sounds like months and months of work to get to the point where you are playing a futuristic Battlefield 1942.
;)
Having said that, I'd actually love to check Planetside out, but I don't spend $50 on anything sight unseen anymore. I suppose I could take out an ad in the paper: Wanted - 7 day trial key for Planetside. $50 may not mean much to you, but that's either another memory chip for my camera or two blowjobs and a 40oz.
Getting back to the topic, I think more of an FPS angle would have been far better suited to Star Wars Galaxies, as players seems to be predominantly seeking an action game from it. I know developers of massively multis tend to avoid anything leading to "twitch" play as they don't want to alienate their less skilled customers, but given the massive success of the FPS genre, particularly online, I'd say that concern is a bit overblown.
This insistence on attempting to pigeonhole crap that someone throws onto celluloid, canvas, hard disk, etc. is such bullshit. There's no such thing as art as a separate entity from everything else that people create. Art is strictly a matter of opinion, and since everyone's opinion differs, there can be no definition. Video game renders are as good as anything that some sweaty old man smeared squished plant matter all over.
This is just more of the same ignorant elitist shit that keeps that stupid art vs. pornography debate alive and kicking, frivolously pissing away time in our courts. If you create something and someone else likes it, then good on you. If they don't, throw that crap away and try again. Its bad enough that we've gotten so fucking stupid as to require the government to tell us what we find acceptable and what we don't; we sure as hell don't need these jackasses wasting anyone's time by trying to elevate their chicken scratches to a higher level of being through some arbitrary decision to promote it to the mystical realm of ART (cue angelic choir).
Actually, religion isn't frowned upon, its accepted as a tenet of human society. That's why religious institutions get granted tax exemptions and whatnot. The fuss in the US with religion is equal treatment for all beliefs, or lack thereof. Hence the careful phrasing "no law respecting an establishment of religion" restricting the Congress from favoring (formally) any particular religion. As far as protection in the workplace, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, religion is a protected status along with sex, race, color, or origin.
Interesting aside concerning age discrimination: it exists, but it only applies to people 40 and over, in accordance with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Technically you can be fired for being too young or old as long as you are not over 40, although I'd imagine that most employers are incredibly paranoid from our litigation-happy atmosphere to test those waters. In addition, age discrimination is waiverable by contract or does not apply in certain job fields where public safety is involved.
Excellent observation. My only hope is that lawmakers don't regularly peruse Slashdot else they would be more likely to ignore a reasonable display of alarm to that which could truly be threatening to liberties just by having simple shit like this being derided as the devil's chariot.
The "slippery slope" is a ridiculous argument, as all law is based upon consideration of an act and just how far we are willing to tolerate it. Contact with another person, OK, contact with their neck, OK, contriction of that neck, fucking wrong. Let's outlaw contact. Sane law requires the recognition of the circumstances under which something can be used, and abused.
In this case, it is basic data on the most recent five seconds of a vehicle just prior to an incident that causes the discharge of the airbag. The only sensitive information I can possibly see this as revealing is just how much of an asshole the driver was just prior to smashing something. Wait until the technology is incremented to a point where it presents a discernable threat to doing anything but that and then flip the fuck out. Don't jump the gun and get lawmakers even more jaded than they already are.
Funny, royalty always seemed to be composed of uninitiated, self-righteous brats who were given that opportunity simply by falling out of the right uterus. We here in the grand old U.S. of A. make it a choice as well. I'd call that a step up for civilization. ;)
I took the tour one Sunday since they were offering free lunch and I was bored. Pretty tight setup. The VR lab was cool and they had some very sweet computer labs. Some dude who used to work for id gave the intro to the computer animation program, which made me realize was a dork I was for recognizing his name. At least it wasn't until halfway through his spiel and I soon forgot it, so I don't feel too bad. But they had all sorts of machines there, including a room full of SGI workstations for the animation classes.
The video and audio editing hardware they have... holy shit. They have got some serious hardware on that end. If you've ever considered video or audio editing, you really need to drag your ass down here to Orlando and play with those toys. The mobile stage setup was fairly sweet; a few semis that unload a big outdoor tented stage setup.
All in all, it looked like you really got your money's worth, which is good because it does cost a pretty penny, hence my attending a public university instead. But if your parents don't know what the fuck to do with all of that money sitting around, have them send you down here. Just don't forget the AC, because the weather sucks.
It means that he's not one of the pinheads driving like an asshole, stealing the house plants by my front door, taking up two spaces in a crowded parking lot, or lobbying the government to enforce their particular morality on me at gunpoint. As far as I'm concerned, he's damn near royalty. ;)
I treasure irreverence, even when taken to extremes, because among the outrage there lies those wonderful kernels of curiosity that the otherwise closed-minded might not have otherwise had the mental fortitude to face without having the issue thrown in their faces. The conclusion that they come to following such consideration isn't so important as how they came to that conclusion. I would much prefer it to yet another generation who maintain their most basic beliefs only because someone such as their mommies and daddies told them that was how things were and that was that.
To use that example of movies that support terrorism (a bit broad lumping together all terrorists as being the same animal, as I don't see Islamic Jihad finding too much common ground with the IRA, so feel free to interpret "terrorism" as a particular group for clarity), I think that it would be refreshing to truly get to know and understand the perspective of those who would commit such heinous acts. We find it far too easy to have certain groups of people declared as "evil" and then read about them being summarily executed in foreign lands.
Admittedly, the predominant attitude of "kill them all, now" would probably continue to dominate and perhaps even be accentuated after a better understanding is reached, but at least these death sentences would be delivered from a more informed perspective than that of blind fear. We might even be able to develop solutions that get at the root of the problem rather than simply treating the symptoms.
As for the usefulness of speech, that is a stripe of a totally different color but one that is fairly self-regulating, since those who won't find it useful, such as those of us not in the turnip trade to reference your example, simply won't bother with it. Of course, that does make me wonder why these zealots are so deathly afraid of materials that make their people think, since they would likely walk away bored or find it to be highly comedic if they were so confident in their beliefs. But then I don't proclaim to understand the incredibly xenophobic world of those sort of religions, so I may simply be missing something incredibly obvious to those of you who do.
Be sure to bring a badass PC to keep yourself occupied with games and to communicate with the rest of the planet. And to do class assignments as well, I suppose, although you'll find ways around that crap soon enough as it just gets in the way of having fun.
As for in class, you'll need a tazer to keep yourself awake during those excruciatingly long and boring lecture classes held in stadiums refurbished with that wonderful seating pilfered from gnome villages with attached swinging testicular restraint devices that you can also write on if the tip of your pen is narrow enough and you can keep you hand steady. Be sure to grab one of the seats with the restraint on the left side if you are right-handed; the southpaws will love you for it.
Seriously, though, don't sweat it so much. Just have a decent PC and make sure you have your own printer, because having to run to the school lab just to print your shit out sucks. And turn off that goddamned cellphone in class else I or one of my collegues shove it up your ass. Enjoy college!
And, as history tells us, imperialism just doesn't work very well.
;) Seriously though, I, too, have grown tired of the fear-mongering that has become the status quo. Yeah, we got slapped on September 11, 2001. Wanna know something? Its going to happen again at some point in the future. Every nation on the planet has to deal with this sort of thing, and the US has had it far better than most, since for us it is always isolated attacks with no further risk of escalation; i.e. an invasion of conquest or occupation. The United States could drop all pretenses of maintaining civil liberties and shift to a completely totalitarian regime and successful attacks on US soil and on US assets overseas would still occasionally occur.
Well, to be fair, history tells us that democracy doesn't work very well, either.
Welcome to the real world, sorry if some of you find it to be far more hostile than the Cosby Show had prepared you for it to be. Go crack a few history books and you might begin to realize that a) humanity is violent, and b) the US has had it easy. I understand that Americans are more prone to be, for the lack of a better word, cowardly, since most Americans have never even been in a fist fight, nevertheless have had to deal with any real turmoil, but the cowardous has gotten out of hand. If you are still so frightened that you can't live accepting that you are far, far more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than you are to even see a terrorist attack in person, then move your ass out to the sticks and set up shop, because I don't foresee terrorists mounting an attack on Red Lodge, Montana. In the meantime, can we get back to building a nation for the world, and its own citizens, to envy rather than despise?
Most corporate drones just aren't intelligent or creative enough to understand that much going on at one time, so they can only choose a single aspect to focus on. You have seen the advertisements and TV shows that they create, right? :)
Just settle out of court at $97+ billion and then declare bankruptcy. Total cost to the student: about $300 for the paralegal and paperwork. Seems like a better deal than about anything that he'd actually be able to get in a courtroom against the RIAA goon squad and he'll have a great story to tell for the rest of his life about how he once accrued $97 billion in debt. ;)