Yeah, but we're talking the Trilogy here. Sure they have their own series and their own movies, I mean for the kids. Because they're cute and furry, but within the context of the trinity (boy am I a loser) they appear only in one movie and mostly as a sort of Deus Ex Machina, because after all, a bunch of furry midgets defeat an imperial garrison, come on, if the empire was this flimsy how did it even get off the ground, I mean, they took over Kashyyk for crying out loud, if a bunch of furry midgets, on a planet similar to the home of the wookies can defeat the empire, don't you think that the Ewok's badass older brother could do it without a contest.
As I was saying, they're not really major players through the whole of the series like 3PO and R2 were, but they (as a collective body) had a big role in RoJ.
I would like to propose a theory; The SW Law of Universal Inversion, which mirrors Murphy's law (anything that kill go wrong, will) but goes more along the lines of Douglas Adams idea of infinite improbability drives. The more likely it seems that events will occur in one direction, the less likely it is to actually happen.
This we can see in the elite storm trooper the most, the galaxies most feared army can't hit anything with their laser rifles and got mowed down by this one guy who had a laser pistol (but that was Harrison Ford so it's kind of iffy there). Also we have the whole rebellion defeating the mighty empire, yeah, with the whole fleet, oh, yeah the emperor died, but none of his generals could carry out a reasonable military campaign or battle without him? I think that Vader probably choked all of their good personnel. I guess though that this is a universal law of all things with plots, you start with an underdog and something that you need to work to get going and then you end with the underdog overcoming all sorts of odds.
Umm... Read the post right above you my misguided friend. And the responses that will inevitably flow unto you.
While I can see your point, that R2 and 3PO are pushed to the side in many places, it then becomes the question of what exactly is your meaning of a supporting character?
Is it simply a device which is contrived mainly to further the plot or to pad scenes? Is it based on overall screen time?
I'll give you 3PO as a supporting character, he just bitches, but not R2, he serves just as big a part as that Han Solo fellow, and or as Princess Leia, and a much bigger part than Chewbacca.
Ewoks only appeared in one movie, they were not really main characters of any real sort since we didn't really figure that they even had any names until droids, because all they said was Yub-yub. Come on, they didn't even get subtitles, Jabba got subtitles, Jabba is a main character. Heck, even Max Greebo (or whatever his name was) that was going after Han in A New Hope (the Mos Eisley Scene where Han shoots him with his blaster under the table) got subtitles. Ewoks are nothing man, they're just cute furry things.
Well, let's see. Radar jammers, besides being slightly spurious in my mind, really don't hurt people all that much. Sine speeders are usually aware of how fast they're going on do it on a fairly regular basis (especially if they have one of these devices). Of course if the car is going fast enough the cop can probably tell, then pull you over and ticket you, and assign you the fine or whatever for possession of such a device, and if they were especially upset with you they could probalby search the car because after all if you're jamming Police Radar you must be a terrible person running drugs or children or something.
As for IR light changer things, all right, if you're using one of these and aren't an emergency vehcile, you're just an asshole, seriously. You're causing a disruption in traffic patterns (that have been managed and regulated to high heaven by civil engineers to make sure that things work in the most efficient fashion that they can be expected to), and endangering other people at that intersection, because lord knows that even if the emergency vehicles slow down at an intersection while using one of these things, some arrogant jerk who thinks that he's the most important person on earth isn't going to do that.
I mean really, traffic is regulated so that barring some unforseen circumstnace, most people can get from point a to point b as safely and as speedily as possible. Face it, you are riding in a two ton (or more) death machine, if you hit something it will get smasehd up, ifyou hit someone they will be very hurt. People for some reason think that traffic laws are meant to inconvinience them, that they couldn't possibly be for safety or some sort of fairness in regards to traffic, no it couldn't be that the people who drafted these laws had driven upon roads and had consulted with others, experts even, and decided that there were certain ways that traffic could be conducted that would give everyone a fair shake in regards to the road, otherwise some poor schmuck would be caught at an intersection waiting for teh line of one thousand cars to pass by so he could speed quickly across the road and pray that he wouldn't die.
That first, people really don't want to read books on a computer. Secondly, how does this make Amazon any different from any book retailer. I mean, I can go into Borders and look at a book for an hour to decide if it's the right kind of book for me. I can't really see how this is any different besides the (relative) ease with which a book could be torn up and spit back out as some kind of file. That's the concern here, and frankly I don't see it as something that has the potential to rock the literary world as long as people prefer to have a real paper copy of things.
Though admitedly I do prefer works where the copyright has expired in their online form as certain publishers like to call them a classic put a nice picture on the front and sell it for $14, that's cool the author is dead and your robbing his grave, bastards. That has nothing to do with this however.
All right, so I'm going to chime in on this simply because I can.
So we have this company, they have this slogan of being "by gamers, for gamers". Then we have this press conference where Captain PR Guy says that gamers aren't the target consumer for this product.
Now, I'm just a simple caveman and your world frightens and confuses me, but isn't that just a little confused on their part. I have said a few times that this is just a fancified computer.
My problem is that these people seem schizophrenic, as if they're trying to court the gaming community but at the same time they're denying that they have anything to do with it. If we listen to what they say at one point they want everyone who's L337 Ha> I stated this when there was the bit on Newsforge, that they're running an ineffective model. They won't attract the hardcore gamers because first the price drop isn't that great, and second it hooks them onto hardware that they could have assembled for themselves with the capability to upgrade. They're not really catering to teh norms because one, it's really big, two what does it have for them, most people like games you can just sit down and play for a couple of minutes, like snood. It doens't mean anything for the casual player to have the latest and greatest availible for download if all they want is some bust-a-move shareware to click away a few hours.
My proposition is much simpler, you go for easy, you get one of those little mini computers that everyone is so in love with these days, you stuff a couple of cheap chips in there, make it look sleek, make it match the TV, make it go great with the rest of the room, you know, make it fit well on an Entertainment Center shelf, sort of unobtrusive. You hook it up, and you forget about it till you want to play it. You give them a couple of simple and fun games for free, just like it was that stupid atari ten in one thing, make it the easy freeware stuff, stuff that you can play for hours on end and all the time, like Tetris. For your subscription fee you go with higher end family friendly games, and party games and that sort of stuff. At least that's the way I see, you keep teh idea of the broadband kind of thing, but make it wiht your refular connecting, god, getting a seperate line, maybe if it could run things along the bottom of the TV like you could check stocks, e-mail and all of that fun stuff while just lounging about during a commerical, then there might be something in a dedicated connection for the masses, but not much.
Star Trek VI obviously, wherein we pretty much wiped out all of the whales, some of which eat fish. There we go, now we've managed to make even less sense then slashdot posts normally do.
So, upper class white people need special cards to be indentified? I mean I thought that being an old white dude was supposed to be like a special pass in and of itself, I mean, you have to be born into being a rich white dude, or have lots of expensive surgery? Why would these people need an ID to allow them to bypass security that they've already been bypassing?
Seriously, as others have said before the point of a security checkpoint is to check people, a lot of these radical elements use agents that have totally clean records. If a checkpoint is just letting people past because they have some stupid little card then the whole point of having the thing has just gone out the door, I mean it isn't like the checkpoint is some line rfor a ride at Disney World where you can pay an extra $200 (I have no idea how much) to get into a special fast lane thing. The security is there to prevent very bad things from happening.
I say that we label these people as terrorists, raid their corporate offices and send them off to Guantanamo, because this idea compromises national security more than any peace demonstrator or person who calls a spade a spade and a Dubya an idiot.
Yeah, one should never ask me for directions anywhere. I typically say things like, where that nice couple had those puppies that time and all sorts of other nonsense. Then again 90% of the roads in New England are extrapolated Cow Paths so the best that you can really do without pulling out your own map for reference is to just give the general gist of it. It's my understanding that the further you go out away from the east coast th emore they decided to do things like, "plan" and what not, then it just becomes highway navigations, which is boring.
I can understand not wanting to drive in Providence though, it's all these crazy little one ways strets taht seem to be at a total random, to get to any one point you have to circle a block eight times and gradually spiral inward to get there, it's crazy. Then again, it might be because whenever I'm trying to get out of Providence it's one in the morning.
I typically cruise around the SOuth Shore of MA, so I sue this thing called, a map book. It takes me like three seconds to find where a street is and the biggest problem is driving there. Unless I'm going somewhere totally crazy I avoid map programs because for me it removes some of a the magic, and I do enjoy the magic.
Well, on the scale we're looking at they're relatively gravity free (as compared to say, bullets). Nope, couldn't think of something more useful to spend money on, not like you know, feeding the hungry, vaccinations, coherent plans on vaccine distribuation in case of the rather unlikely event of a bioterrorist attack. Heck, we could you know, be building schools and housing for the poor, could be dropping money to reinforce the government in Afghanistan and to promote overall stability in the region (because I'll tell you after about eight thousand years, sticks/swords/guns haven't really seemed to do much for that), nope we have to build a laser.
I call first dibs to write my name on the moon with it. For evil...
If I recall properly the US had ruled that pop-up ad services like Gator could use their programs to put up an advertisement for another company (say like fedex when you went to UPS) when you went to a company's web-site. Here you have a search engine, whose very idea is to provide the consumer with various places to go regarding various subjects and they can't have advertisements on their own pages.
By god, because Google's Text Ads are so pervasive and they serve so much to dillute a trademark, the same principle used in the US case applies here, that a person using a certain service (say google or gator) agrees to the terms of that service (which is that they see ads, admitedly one is less obtrusive than the other but the function is the same) (though for google these terms are implicit, but then again it isn't like your getting a full screen pop up add for Linux Distros when you search for Microsoft, and what happens if someone searches for Windows?) and within that the service is allowed to deliver to you any content that does not violate either the law or the terms of service.
In my view there is no basis for this order, the text adds do not serve as a significant annoyance (not that it would matter in the first place), they do not demonstrably dillute the trademark of any company (unless of course they were overtly slanderous, Such as "Bill Gates devours the flesh of babies and sells weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, buy Linux"), and it's not outside of Google's rights to make money for their services, and for a competitor to be able to place an advertisement on a page where someone is looking for a similar product is a good place to make that money. I apologize for the incoherence.
Can you just imagine the questions that IT people would get with this kind of thing, or the havoc that I'm sure they're going to wreak.
Norm: "Can I get a virus off the network?" IT Guy: "Ummm... Sure, you have to wear these tinfoil shoes to keep the viruses from entering your body." Norm: "Can the boss read my thoughts with it?" IT Guy: "Just wear this tinfoil hat, it'll keep out their mind control rays too."
Television isn't for teh dification of the general public, or the dissemination of knowledge an dunderstanding. Television is a magic happy box for keeping people vaguely entertained/enthralled by electromagnetic waves. Let me just say however, that I don't recall the Sci-Fi channel ever pretending to be a legitimate science netork, come on folks, they have the word Fiction in their name. It's like when they had that Blair Witch program and people thought it was about a true story, you know, because their slow. I'm not even going to get started on those John Edwards shennigans, but seriously with a big enough audience and enough practice it's pretty easy to do.
Anyhow, when I was young there was all sorts of neat Science stuff like Bill Nye the science guy (I can still vaguely recall him testifying in front of some congressional commmittee for the NSF to get some more money to fund educational programs) and you had that Beakman guy (I really like Bill Nye better to tell the truth). I can't really see a whole channel dedicated to science, I can see it as part of a broader backdrop, like say, PBS, so instead of just repeating a bunch of BBC sitcoms on Thursdays and Saturdays they could show programs in the vein of Invention, and that one tha tIra Flatow had on public television way back when, and Nova and that sort of thing. Just a thought.
The Simpsons once again proved their position as a source of wonderful quotes to apply to real world events, and I don't think that I actually have to relate anything about space, and robots to get that whole thing going.
Once again I have to point out the love that both chest thumping political ideologies are expressing for one another. This is mostly in regards to Americans (which I am one, a white, middle-class suburban American so you can all shut the hell up), that our reaction to people criticizing the country is "get out". Because after all, America isn't founded on the principles of free speech and free belief.
I think that this is indicative of the current problem, that America has developed this sort of Messianic complex where they feel that you are either for America or against it. There's no way that you can really love America and think that the current administration is the devil.
Let me clear this up, I kind of admire this administration. After all, they have proved quite savvy and very adroit at manipulating facts and opinions, at using the idea of continual war to keep the domestic population distracted and in a heightened state of nationalist fervor. So the President is demonstrably not the sharpest tool in the shed, he surrounded himself with some very skilled people like Carl Rove and John Ashcroft, and that speaks a lot for the political savvy of his team.
Of course they really haven't done much for the average American (then again there are very few that do) and they have only fed off hate, bigotry, and xenophobia to enact their rather onesided policies. Plus, we all know that Iraq was about oil, why the hell are my gas prices still up there?
Back to space. I for one think that it's a great thing to dirty up our orbit, after all, if we mass our giant armies in space, they'll all die from being struck by debris moving at insane speeds and everyone down on the planet can have a relatively nice time (except for the falling bodies and such, tha tmight cause a problem). On top of that, the debris cloud will keep the aliens away from us and shield us from the terrible mind-control rays of the moon men.
[Sig]Better to die a drunken marxist then to live a conceited prick.
Yes, that's why it's free. If they just let you download the software all willy nilly then they wouldn't make any money from it, especially if they advertised that you could do such things on their site. Seriously, the watermark and the other copy protections are there to make sure that you just aren't some rinky-dink organization that's going to try and squeeze out some stuff using their software without having paid for it, of course if you really wanted to do that then you could just download Maya Unlimited of Kazaa.
But it's okay, the prevailing opinion of the United States up to the Second World War was that Jews were money grubbing second class citizens and as we can see from some posts on these forums and from certain ultra-nationalist neo-facist movements that these views haven't totally gone from our society.
The US needs to gloss over the views of Henery Ford because the US held those views (otherwise we could have helped a lot more people get out of Crazyland when they had started rounding up everyone who wasn't German and shooting them, or gassing them, or smashing them with a club), we could have done a lot, like not selling weapons to the germans. To villify Henery Ford (him being one of teh paragons of the American capitalist dream) would be to villify our whole system. This isn't to say that the man doesn't deserve to be a villain but as a tool he pales in comparison (especially at the time) to the commies or the facists. And to be fair Henery Ford is actually most famous for his refining of the process of mass production.
On an interesting note, Ford also was the first to ensure that after a little saving each one of his employees could afford to buy a model-T (it's very nice when you can afford the goods that you are making, it also inspires loyalty toward the company, and makes workers feel psychologically like they are being well compensated).
[Sig]Better to die as a drunken marxist then to live as a conceited prick.
Actually it worked for a lot of people in Edison's day, in fact even before Edison's day it worked. Big companies go out and screw the little guy in teh name of profits all the time, that's why they're big companies and everyone else is the little guy. Things only happen when people are tired enoguh of getting screwed over that they get up and demand that someone make changes, just look at the Robber Barons, no one called anything on them for a good long while, and government corruption (patronage) was only (ostensibly) celaned up by Grover Cleavland after a nutcase who had worked in his predecessor's campaign shot the guy dead because he didn't get a cushy government job (no, I don't remember the prsidetn's name it's 2:30 in the morning). Ah, well market forces help a lot too, the biggest vote in the coutnry is with the all mighty dollar and with that the proles can sink the fat pimps (becaus eyou know, a lot of the RIAA/MPAA/Computer Software crap is just whored out, in a metaphoric sense) who lord upon them.
[Sig]Better to die as a drunken marxist then live as a conceited prick.
Yeah, but that would take work and forethought. I mean, you jump into the buisness and you expect to (well, not everyone) get agented and after some demo tapes go with a record label. Sure there area a lot of bands that self promote, but a lot of the people that I've known doing that kind of thing (which is odd the number of people I've known that are in bands, as predicted on an episode of this American life, the number of people in bands to listeners will be 3:1) aren't really trying to make a good deal of cash just to have a good time of it.
Sure there are going to be people that can promote themselves and work hard at it. But people see the glitz and the glammer of the band of the minute and then forget that the band goes onto obscurity after their three minute song has stopped. I mean, jeeze, who wants to be two guys named John writing witty songs about pencil rain and robots on parade?
Let's just say that the pople who want to get fed into the machine are getting fed into the machine, and those that want to pursue art and their own amusement manage to do rather well for themselves.
I would just like to point out that this is the most appropriate use of the "in Soviet Russia" clause on the slashdot forums, probably ever. Someone give this man (however anonymous that they might be) some karma.
I don't really think that musicians can simply walk away from the RIAA or the major labels. It is from these sources that flow the biggest venues, and huge promotional machinery that can make or break an artist in a few weeks (which oddly enough seems to be their lifespan).
Film exploded in 1920 sure, but it's in a rather sorry state now (even the best movies of the year are pretty crappy) go, go and look at the local marquee.
The RIAA has had a good half century to solidify their machinery and all the bitching and whining on slashdot isn't going to do a single thing about it. As long as there are people that think that simply by being a rock star they will get to live a glamorous and rich life then the RIAA will sit pretty exploiting them with fees and loans and leaving them with a double platinum album and a metric ton of debt.
Bear in mind that right now I'm surrounded by some rather stupid people being very loud and annoying, noise pollution is the word for that. moving along...
The whole idea of entropy reminds me of a song...Everyone dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful... Which is for my intents an purposes that everything degrades and falls to peices over time and little bits with even tiny moving parts even faster, that's why solid state stuff is such a hot field (no pun intended).
Entropy is simple and very universal, hell even if you weren't using your processor it would degrade, it's like your nintendo (the like 4 bit one from the 80s), it works jujst fine, then it sits around for a while and you go back to play Mario Bros and it isn't working.
Of course people argue that if you don't touch something and don't wear it down it'll be worth more money later when everyone else has broken theirs (hence the collectible market), this is stupid, you have essentially bought something to have it sit around and do nothing, sure your processor is going to die eventually, and running a full load on it is going to do it a little faster (unless your fan dies and you burn it out it isn't going to be that much faster) but at least it's being used, that and you'll have a great excuse for buying a new one (after all you're helping find intelligent life in the universe).
Now, god is all well and good, and really he's referenced all over the place. I usually just skip over that bit, because knowing that when people are saying this they're typically referring to the Christian God whom I'm pretty sure said that he really didn't want to get invovled with all of this governance stuff and affairs of the world nonsense.
Seriously folks, if you want to talk about the man, Jesus, he was a carpenter who liked to hang out with his friends and tell stories, he was a bit of a rabble rouser sometimes but you never really see him leading vast armies and commanding hordes of men. His buddies call him Rabbi about a thousand times more than lord, think about what that means. I feel that this whole under god concept is just silly, everyone likes to claim that god is working behind their country and their ideals, it's like saying, our product has been approved by magic pixies, no one can disprove it, so everyone can claim it.
Now we have this country where there are people who don't believe in the same god, some people dont' belive in God with a capital G, some don't believe in god at all. For moment, let's just give God a rest, becuase I sure as hell didn't elect him.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but we're talking the Trilogy here. Sure they have their own series and their own movies, I mean for the kids. Because they're cute and furry, but within the context of the trinity (boy am I a loser) they appear only in one movie and mostly as a sort of Deus Ex Machina, because after all, a bunch of furry midgets defeat an imperial garrison, come on, if the empire was this flimsy how did it even get off the ground, I mean, they took over Kashyyk for crying out loud, if a bunch of furry midgets, on a planet similar to the home of the wookies can defeat the empire, don't you think that the Ewok's badass older brother could do it without a contest.
As I was saying, they're not really major players through the whole of the series like 3PO and R2 were, but they (as a collective body) had a big role in RoJ.
I would like to propose a theory; The SW Law of Universal Inversion, which mirrors Murphy's law (anything that kill go wrong, will) but goes more along the lines of Douglas Adams idea of infinite improbability drives. The more likely it seems that events will occur in one direction, the less likely it is to actually happen.
This we can see in the elite storm trooper the most, the galaxies most feared army can't hit anything with their laser rifles and got mowed down by this one guy who had a laser pistol (but that was Harrison Ford so it's kind of iffy there). Also we have the whole rebellion defeating the mighty empire, yeah, with the whole fleet, oh, yeah the emperor died, but none of his generals could carry out a reasonable military campaign or battle without him? I think that Vader probably choked all of their good personnel. I guess though that this is a universal law of all things with plots, you start with an underdog and something that you need to work to get going and then you end with the underdog overcoming all sorts of odds.
Umm... Read the post right above you my misguided friend. And the responses that will inevitably flow unto you.
While I can see your point, that R2 and 3PO are pushed to the side in many places, it then becomes the question of what exactly is your meaning of a supporting character?
Is it simply a device which is contrived mainly to further the plot or to pad scenes? Is it based on overall screen time?
I'll give you 3PO as a supporting character, he just bitches, but not R2, he serves just as big a part as that Han Solo fellow, and or as Princess Leia, and a much bigger part than Chewbacca.
Ewoks only appeared in one movie, they were not really main characters of any real sort since we didn't really figure that they even had any names until droids, because all they said was Yub-yub. Come on, they didn't even get subtitles, Jabba got subtitles, Jabba is a main character. Heck, even Max Greebo (or whatever his name was) that was going after Han in A New Hope (the Mos Eisley Scene where Han shoots him with his blaster under the table) got subtitles. Ewoks are nothing man, they're just cute furry things.
Might this have to do with the shares that Mr. Gates happens to own in Apple?
Well, let's see. Radar jammers, besides being slightly spurious in my mind, really don't hurt people all that much. Sine speeders are usually aware of how fast they're going on do it on a fairly regular basis (especially if they have one of these devices). Of course if the car is going fast enough the cop can probably tell, then pull you over and ticket you, and assign you the fine or whatever for possession of such a device, and if they were especially upset with you they could probalby search the car because after all if you're jamming Police Radar you must be a terrible person running drugs or children or something.
As for IR light changer things, all right, if you're using one of these and aren't an emergency vehcile, you're just an asshole, seriously. You're causing a disruption in traffic patterns (that have been managed and regulated to high heaven by civil engineers to make sure that things work in the most efficient fashion that they can be expected to), and endangering other people at that intersection, because lord knows that even if the emergency vehicles slow down at an intersection while using one of these things, some arrogant jerk who thinks that he's the most important person on earth isn't going to do that.
I mean really, traffic is regulated so that barring some unforseen circumstnace, most people can get from point a to point b as safely and as speedily as possible. Face it, you are riding in a two ton (or more) death machine, if you hit something it will get smasehd up, ifyou hit someone they will be very hurt. People for some reason think that traffic laws are meant to inconvinience them, that they couldn't possibly be for safety or some sort of fairness in regards to traffic, no it couldn't be that the people who drafted these laws had driven upon roads and had consulted with others, experts even, and decided that there were certain ways that traffic could be conducted that would give everyone a fair shake in regards to the road, otherwise some poor schmuck would be caught at an intersection waiting for teh line of one thousand cars to pass by so he could speed quickly across the road and pray that he wouldn't die.
That first, people really don't want to read books on a computer. Secondly, how does this make Amazon any different from any book retailer. I mean, I can go into Borders and look at a book for an hour to decide if it's the right kind of book for me. I can't really see how this is any different besides the (relative) ease with which a book could be torn up and spit back out as some kind of file. That's the concern here, and frankly I don't see it as something that has the potential to rock the literary world as long as people prefer to have a real paper copy of things.
Though admitedly I do prefer works where the copyright has expired in their online form as certain publishers like to call them a classic put a nice picture on the front and sell it for $14, that's cool the author is dead and your robbing his grave, bastards. That has nothing to do with this however.
All right, so I'm going to chime in on this simply because I can.
So we have this company, they have this slogan of being "by gamers, for gamers". Then we have this press conference where Captain PR Guy says that gamers aren't the target consumer for this product.
Now, I'm just a simple caveman and your world frightens and confuses me, but isn't that just a little confused on their part. I have said a few times that this is just a fancified computer.
My problem is that these people seem schizophrenic, as if they're trying to court the gaming community but at the same time they're denying that they have anything to do with it. If we listen to what they say at one point they want everyone who's L337 Ha>
I stated this when there was the bit on Newsforge, that they're running an ineffective model. They won't attract the hardcore gamers because first the price drop isn't that great, and second it hooks them onto hardware that they could have assembled for themselves with the capability to upgrade. They're not really catering to teh norms because one, it's really big, two what does it have for them, most people like games you can just sit down and play for a couple of minutes, like snood. It doens't mean anything for the casual player to have the latest and greatest availible for download if all they want is some bust-a-move shareware to click away a few hours.
My proposition is much simpler, you go for easy, you get one of those little mini computers that everyone is so in love with these days, you stuff a couple of cheap chips in there, make it look sleek, make it match the TV, make it go great with the rest of the room, you know, make it fit well on an Entertainment Center shelf, sort of unobtrusive. You hook it up, and you forget about it till you want to play it. You give them a couple of simple and fun games for free, just like it was that stupid atari ten in one thing, make it the easy freeware stuff, stuff that you can play for hours on end and all the time, like Tetris. For your subscription fee you go with higher end family friendly games, and party games and that sort of stuff. At least that's the way I see, you keep teh idea of the broadband kind of thing, but make it wiht your refular connecting, god, getting a seperate line, maybe if it could run things along the bottom of the TV like you could check stocks, e-mail and all of that fun stuff while just lounging about during a commerical, then there might be something in a dedicated connection for the masses, but not much.
Star Trek VI obviously, wherein we pretty much wiped out all of the whales, some of which eat fish. There we go, now we've managed to make even less sense then slashdot posts normally do.
So, upper class white people need special cards to be indentified? I mean I thought that being an old white dude was supposed to be like a special pass in and of itself, I mean, you have to be born into being a rich white dude, or have lots of expensive surgery? Why would these people need an ID to allow them to bypass security that they've already been bypassing?
Seriously, as others have said before the point of a security checkpoint is to check people, a lot of these radical elements use agents that have totally clean records. If a checkpoint is just letting people past because they have some stupid little card then the whole point of having the thing has just gone out the door, I mean it isn't like the checkpoint is some line rfor a ride at Disney World where you can pay an extra $200 (I have no idea how much) to get into a special fast lane thing. The security is there to prevent very bad things from happening.
I say that we label these people as terrorists, raid their corporate offices and send them off to Guantanamo, because this idea compromises national security more than any peace demonstrator or person who calls a spade a spade and a Dubya an idiot.
Yeah, one should never ask me for directions anywhere. I typically say things like, where that nice couple had those puppies that time and all sorts of other nonsense. Then again 90% of the roads in New England are extrapolated Cow Paths so the best that you can really do without pulling out your own map for reference is to just give the general gist of it. It's my understanding that the further you go out away from the east coast th emore they decided to do things like, "plan" and what not, then it just becomes highway navigations, which is boring.
I can understand not wanting to drive in Providence though, it's all these crazy little one ways strets taht seem to be at a total random, to get to any one point you have to circle a block eight times and gradually spiral inward to get there, it's crazy. Then again, it might be because whenever I'm trying to get out of Providence it's one in the morning.
I typically cruise around the SOuth Shore of MA, so I sue this thing called, a map book. It takes me like three seconds to find where a street is and the biggest problem is driving there. Unless I'm going somewhere totally crazy I avoid map programs because for me it removes some of a the magic, and I do enjoy the magic.
Well, on the scale we're looking at they're relatively gravity free (as compared to say, bullets). Nope, couldn't think of something more useful to spend money on, not like you know, feeding the hungry, vaccinations, coherent plans on vaccine distribuation in case of the rather unlikely event of a bioterrorist attack. Heck, we could you know, be building schools and housing for the poor, could be dropping money to reinforce the government in Afghanistan and to promote overall stability in the region (because I'll tell you after about eight thousand years, sticks/swords/guns haven't really seemed to do much for that), nope we have to build a laser.
I call first dibs to write my name on the moon with it. For evil...
If I recall properly the US had ruled that pop-up ad services like Gator could use their programs to put up an advertisement for another company (say like fedex when you went to UPS) when you went to a company's web-site. Here you have a search engine, whose very idea is to provide the consumer with various places to go regarding various subjects and they can't have advertisements on their own pages.
By god, because Google's Text Ads are so pervasive and they serve so much to dillute a trademark, the same principle used in the US case applies here, that a person using a certain service (say google or gator) agrees to the terms of that service (which is that they see ads, admitedly one is less obtrusive than the other but the function is the same) (though for google these terms are implicit, but then again it isn't like your getting a full screen pop up add for Linux Distros when you search for Microsoft, and what happens if someone searches for Windows?) and within that the service is allowed to deliver to you any content that does not violate either the law or the terms of service.
In my view there is no basis for this order, the text adds do not serve as a significant annoyance (not that it would matter in the first place), they do not demonstrably dillute the trademark of any company (unless of course they were overtly slanderous, Such as "Bill Gates devours the flesh of babies and sells weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, buy Linux"), and it's not outside of Google's rights to make money for their services, and for a competitor to be able to place an advertisement on a page where someone is looking for a similar product is a good place to make that money. I apologize for the incoherence.
Can you just imagine the questions that IT people would get with this kind of thing, or the havoc that I'm sure they're going to wreak.
Norm: "Can I get a virus off the network?"
IT Guy: "Ummm... Sure, you have to wear these tinfoil shoes to keep the viruses from entering your body."
Norm: "Can the boss read my thoughts with it?"
IT Guy: "Just wear this tinfoil hat, it'll keep out their mind control rays too."
As you can see the possibilities are endless.
Television isn't for teh dification of the general public, or the dissemination of knowledge an dunderstanding. Television is a magic happy box for keeping people vaguely entertained/enthralled by electromagnetic waves. Let me just say however, that I don't recall the Sci-Fi channel ever pretending to be a legitimate science netork, come on folks, they have the word Fiction in their name. It's like when they had that Blair Witch program and people thought it was about a true story, you know, because their slow. I'm not even going to get started on those John Edwards shennigans, but seriously with a big enough audience and enough practice it's pretty easy to do.
Anyhow, when I was young there was all sorts of neat Science stuff like Bill Nye the science guy (I can still vaguely recall him testifying in front of some congressional commmittee for the NSF to get some more money to fund educational programs) and you had that Beakman guy (I really like Bill Nye better to tell the truth). I can't really see a whole channel dedicated to science, I can see it as part of a broader backdrop, like say, PBS, so instead of just repeating a bunch of BBC sitcoms on Thursdays and Saturdays they could show programs in the vein of Invention, and that one tha tIra Flatow had on public television way back when, and Nova and that sort of thing. Just a thought.
Well to be fair, Nova is a coproduction of the BBC and WGBH, one has a lot more money...
The Simpsons once again proved their position as a source of wonderful quotes to apply to real world events, and I don't think that I actually have to relate anything about space, and robots to get that whole thing going.
Once again I have to point out the love that both chest thumping political ideologies are expressing for one another. This is mostly in regards to Americans (which I am one, a white, middle-class suburban American so you can all shut the hell up), that our reaction to people criticizing the country is "get out". Because after all, America isn't founded on the principles of free speech and free belief.
I think that this is indicative of the current problem, that America has developed this sort of Messianic complex where they feel that you are either for America or against it. There's no way that you can really love America and think that the current administration is the devil.
Let me clear this up, I kind of admire this administration. After all, they have proved quite savvy and very adroit at manipulating facts and opinions, at using the idea of continual war to keep the domestic population distracted and in a heightened state of nationalist fervor. So the President is demonstrably not the sharpest tool in the shed, he surrounded himself with some very skilled people like Carl Rove and John Ashcroft, and that speaks a lot for the political savvy of his team.
Of course they really haven't done much for the average American (then again there are very few that do) and they have only fed off hate, bigotry, and xenophobia to enact their rather onesided policies. Plus, we all know that Iraq was about oil, why the hell are my gas prices still up there?
Back to space. I for one think that it's a great thing to dirty up our orbit, after all, if we mass our giant armies in space, they'll all die from being struck by debris moving at insane speeds and everyone down on the planet can have a relatively nice time (except for the falling bodies and such, tha tmight cause a problem). On top of that, the debris cloud will keep the aliens away from us and shield us from the terrible mind-control rays of the moon men.
[Sig]Better to die a drunken marxist then to live a conceited prick.
Yes, that's why it's free. If they just let you download the software all willy nilly then they wouldn't make any money from it, especially if they advertised that you could do such things on their site. Seriously, the watermark and the other copy protections are there to make sure that you just aren't some rinky-dink organization that's going to try and squeeze out some stuff using their software without having paid for it, of course if you really wanted to do that then you could just download Maya Unlimited of Kazaa.
But it's okay, the prevailing opinion of the United States up to the Second World War was that Jews were money grubbing second class citizens and as we can see from some posts on these forums and from certain ultra-nationalist neo-facist movements that these views haven't totally gone from our society.
The US needs to gloss over the views of Henery Ford because the US held those views (otherwise we could have helped a lot more people get out of Crazyland when they had started rounding up everyone who wasn't German and shooting them, or gassing them, or smashing them with a club), we could have done a lot, like not selling weapons to the germans. To villify Henery Ford (him being one of teh paragons of the American capitalist dream) would be to villify our whole system. This isn't to say that the man doesn't deserve to be a villain but as a tool he pales in comparison (especially at the time) to the commies or the facists. And to be fair Henery Ford is actually most famous for his refining of the process of mass production.
On an interesting note, Ford also was the first to ensure that after a little saving each one of his employees could afford to buy a model-T (it's very nice when you can afford the goods that you are making, it also inspires loyalty toward the company, and makes workers feel psychologically like they are being well compensated).
[Sig]Better to die as a drunken marxist then to live as a conceited prick.
Actually it worked for a lot of people in Edison's day, in fact even before Edison's day it worked. Big companies go out and screw the little guy in teh name of profits all the time, that's why they're big companies and everyone else is the little guy. Things only happen when people are tired enoguh of getting screwed over that they get up and demand that someone make changes, just look at the Robber Barons, no one called anything on them for a good long while, and government corruption (patronage) was only (ostensibly) celaned up by Grover Cleavland after a nutcase who had worked in his predecessor's campaign shot the guy dead because he didn't get a cushy government job (no, I don't remember the prsidetn's name it's 2:30 in the morning). Ah, well market forces help a lot too, the biggest vote in the coutnry is with the all mighty dollar and with that the proles can sink the fat pimps (becaus eyou know, a lot of the RIAA/MPAA/Computer Software crap is just whored out, in a metaphoric sense) who lord upon them.
[Sig]Better to die as a drunken marxist then live as a conceited prick.
Yeah, but that would take work and forethought. I mean, you jump into the buisness and you expect to (well, not everyone) get agented and after some demo tapes go with a record label. Sure there area a lot of bands that self promote, but a lot of the people that I've known doing that kind of thing (which is odd the number of people I've known that are in bands, as predicted on an episode of this American life, the number of people in bands to listeners will be 3:1) aren't really trying to make a good deal of cash just to have a good time of it.
Sure there are going to be people that can promote themselves and work hard at it. But people see the glitz and the glammer of the band of the minute and then forget that the band goes onto obscurity after their three minute song has stopped. I mean, jeeze, who wants to be two guys named John writing witty songs about pencil rain and robots on parade?
Let's just say that the pople who want to get fed into the machine are getting fed into the machine, and those that want to pursue art and their own amusement manage to do rather well for themselves.
I would just like to point out that this is the most appropriate use of the "in Soviet Russia" clause on the slashdot forums, probably ever. Someone give this man (however anonymous that they might be) some karma.
I don't really think that musicians can simply walk away from the RIAA or the major labels. It is from these sources that flow the biggest venues, and huge promotional machinery that can make or break an artist in a few weeks (which oddly enough seems to be their lifespan).
Film exploded in 1920 sure, but it's in a rather sorry state now (even the best movies of the year are pretty crappy) go, go and look at the local marquee.
The RIAA has had a good half century to solidify their machinery and all the bitching and whining on slashdot isn't going to do a single thing about it. As long as there are people that think that simply by being a rock star they will get to live a glamorous and rich life then the RIAA will sit pretty exploiting them with fees and loans and leaving them with a double platinum album and a metric ton of debt.
Bear in mind that right now I'm surrounded by some rather stupid people being very loud and annoying, noise pollution is the word for that. moving along...
The whole idea of entropy reminds me of a song...Everyone dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful... Which is for my intents an purposes that everything degrades and falls to peices over time and little bits with even tiny moving parts even faster, that's why solid state stuff is such a hot field (no pun intended).
Entropy is simple and very universal, hell even if you weren't using your processor it would degrade, it's like your nintendo (the like 4 bit one from the 80s), it works jujst fine, then it sits around for a while and you go back to play Mario Bros and it isn't working.
Of course people argue that if you don't touch something and don't wear it down it'll be worth more money later when everyone else has broken theirs (hence the collectible market), this is stupid, you have essentially bought something to have it sit around and do nothing, sure your processor is going to die eventually, and running a full load on it is going to do it a little faster (unless your fan dies and you burn it out it isn't going to be that much faster) but at least it's being used, that and you'll have a great excuse for buying a new one (after all you're helping find intelligent life in the universe).
Now, god is all well and good, and really he's referenced all over the place. I usually just skip over that bit, because knowing that when people are saying this they're typically referring to the Christian God whom I'm pretty sure said that he really didn't want to get invovled with all of this governance stuff and affairs of the world nonsense.
Seriously folks, if you want to talk about the man, Jesus, he was a carpenter who liked to hang out with his friends and tell stories, he was a bit of a rabble rouser sometimes but you never really see him leading vast armies and commanding hordes of men. His buddies call him Rabbi about a thousand times more than lord, think about what that means. I feel that this whole under god concept is just silly, everyone likes to claim that god is working behind their country and their ideals, it's like saying, our product has been approved by magic pixies, no one can disprove it, so everyone can claim it.
Now we have this country where there are people who don't believe in the same god, some people dont' belive in God with a capital G, some don't believe in god at all. For moment, let's just give God a rest, becuase I sure as hell didn't elect him.
Peace