Agreed. Sometimes you have to stick with what works. A big pile of regolith is 100% effective against radation and the entire moon is made of the stuff. Plus, you could build most of the base by remote with *robots* before people even have to set foot there.
I like the idea of motor bikes, but I always thougth that some Segways with oversized wheels would be ideal, given that space suits have pretty limited flexilibity. Plus the things are at least doubly redundant in the commercial version: imagine one hopped-up by the guys at JPL.
The cutscenes were great, but I do miss the fast-forward feature from MGS2 when I go back and replay MGS1. Sure they disrupted the gameplay, but that's the point, isn't it? IMO, virtually nobody but John Woo can manage to allow sheer gunplay to develop characters half as well as good-old-fashioned dialogue.
I, for one, feel the storyline in MGS1 was great. I've always felt that the genius here was that it refused to take itself too seriously as it repeatedly makes fun of itself as a video game. After all, why write the next Tom-Clancy bestseller, when a more *ahem* novel approach is to write a decent story and pepper it with humor that exploits the medium of presentation. It keeps the player's expectations in check, chuckling along the whole time. Suddenly, there is a ceiling to the level of realisim provided by the whole experience; kind of a nice thing if you're pushing the PS1 around the way Konami did.
Take for example the fact that the Colonel keeps knocking down the fourth-wall to give Snake instructions on how to swim or control his movements by using the controller. They could have dropped into tutorial mode or used a narrative voice-over instead, but didn't.
Moments like this crop up all over the place: advice on saving your game, how to beat Psycho Mantis, Snakes arm hurting after the torture sequence, etc, etc. Its gets better as you move along, kind of like a runaway inside-joke if you will. That is of course you're not adverse to that kind of humor.
That having been said, I feel that MGS stands to have a great run as a comic book. The medium has a long history of laughing in spite of itself along the way, and to great effect. But to be faithful to the game, they'll have to occasionally poke fun at the fact that its all in a comic book.
Psycho Mantis: I can read your mind.. let me see.. you.. enjoy reading comic books don't you. Snake: Colonel, he's dodging everything! How do I beat this guy? Colonel: Snake, you'll have to hold him off for a while! We're reading the next issue right now to find out.
I guess Jr. here will have to take regular Myostatin injections just to keep his condition in check, else he'll wind up in a wheelchair by 35.
Re:Some metals they might find next (?)
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Please allow me contribute some missing entries, frequently found in tabletop arenas:
Unobtainium
Unobtainium is the preferred material of fantasy weaponsmiths for creating arms and armor capable of great feats otherwise impossible by any other means or craft. Many a spell is also said to be enhanced just by the mere possession of the substance. In the far-flung future, it is used in every sector of industry from composing and fueling spacecraft, anti-gravity devices, matter-teleportation machines, polymorphing robots, slashdot-effect-proof web servers, faster-than-lightspeed engines, time travel, to making the construction of 100m tall walking war machines possible.
There is even a rumor that a crash-proof version of Windows exists that requires a special CPU made of pure unobtainium.
Despite its extreme usefulness, there is no known location in the universe where the substance can be mined or produced. Furthermore, there have yet to be any published studies regarding anything about the substance itself; yet there are thousands of studies and papers regarding its many applications.
Deaminite(n. dee-em'-in-ite)
Deaminite is typically found in the construction of mundane objects that are, for reasons unexplained, immobile, impossibly heavy, or otherwise indestructible. There are many a legend involving bands of heroes, who's quest came to halt all because of unlockable and unbreakable doors composed of deaminite. Known artifacts composed of deaminite include: the impossibly heavy weapons of the gods, armor worn by 40th level death knights, Jackie Chan's head, The outer hull of the starship Enterprise, and NYC cockroaches.
Typically encounters with an object made from deaminite result in a loud booming voice, seemingly from nowhere, uttering phrases like "You cannot pick that up", "You cannot do that", "Its too heavy", "No, because I said so", and "You see a grue".
Ironically, unlike unobtaininum, Deaminite has never actually be obtained for any purpose whatsoever, so its composition and properties are completely unkown.
I dunno about using skin as a bus to power electronics, but I can see using the body as an antenna to extend the range of wireless devices. For example, the keyless car entry device on my keychain will work from farther away if I press the transmitter to my chin. Any RF geeks out there willing to explain this or elaborate on it?
Well, what I meant by "virtually the same" is that the 3d engine probably isn't going to change as much from demo-to-demo as when desktop 3d graphics were an emerging technology (see: back-in-the-day).;) You're still going to want to pull new ideas and effects out of the paradigm though, as that's kind of the point with demos. But those elaborations, from my perspective, are largely becoming more and more like filters on an already cannonical process.
To answer all the "real demos are coded on bare metal using raw assembly." and "r33l 3l33+ d3m0z @r3 13$$ Th4n 64k!!!111" flames: Demo music tracks were being composed in external editors since the Amiga. Anyone who was into the 'scene in the early 90's will remember Scream Tracker, since it allowed you to not only edit music for your own demos, but you could listen to other favorites too. There were even some kits floating around the BBS's that allowed you to 'plug in' S3M playback into your own work.
This is really just "Scream Tracker for Graphics" (or "Shockwave for Demos" for the n00bs). Makes sense to me since most 3d engines use virtually the same pipeline; this just pushes the creativity away from the bits that are the same from demo to demo.
Anyone who's ever been through a serious amount of camping and or spelunking knows that once you get mud/brush/wool/whatever into velcro, it looses all sticking power until you can manage to clean it out (not easy).
REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.
"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."
A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.
"While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes," said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. "The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this company."
"If this patent holds up in federal court, Apple will have no choice but to convert to analog," said Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs, "and I have serious doubts whether this company would be able to remain competitive selling pedal-operated computers running software off vinyl LPs."
As a result of the Microsoft patent, many other companies have begun radically revising their product lines: Database manufacturer Oracle has embarked on a crash program to develop "an abacus for the next millennium." Novell, whose communications and networking systems are also subject to Microsoft licensing fees, is working with top animal trainers on a chimpanzee-based message-transmission system. Hewlett-Packard is developing a revolutionary new steam-powered printer.
Despite the swarm of protest, Gates is standing his ground, maintaining that ones and zeroes are the undisputed property of Microsoft. Above: Gates explains the new patent to Apple Computer's board of directors.
"We will vigorously enforce our patents of these numbers, as they are legally ours," Gates said. "Among Microsoft's vast historical archives are Sanskrit cuneiform tablets from 1800 B.C. clearly showing ones and a symbol known as 'sunya,' or nothing. We also own: papyrus scrolls written by Pythagoras himself in which he explains the idea of singular notation, or 'one'; early tracts by Mohammed ibn Musa al Kwarizimi explaining the concept of al-sifr, or 'the cipher'; original mathematical manuscripts by Heisenberg, Einstein and Planck; and a signed first-edition copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness. Should the need arise, Microsoft will have no difficulty proving to the Justice Department or anyone else that we own the rights to these numbers."
Added Gates: "My salary also has lots of zeroes. I'm the richest man in the world."
According to experts, the full ramifications of Microsoft's patenting of one and zero have yet to be realized.
"Because all integers and natural numbers derive from one and zero, Microsoft may, by extension, lay claim to ownership of all mathematics and logic systems, including Euclidean geometry, pulleys and levers, gravity, and the basic Newtonian principles of motion, as well as the c
That's funny. I remember walking through the campus bookstore at Virginia Tech back in 1996, and the computers for sale were showing just that: Second Reality.
So I wonder how much Future Crew is responsible for outside of getting guys into programming graphics?
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. [...] This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems.
ComicBookGuy: Pfft.. I cannot believe that one of my bretheren speaks as if he is one of the unwashed masses. Allow me to enighten you. When not speaking Klingon, Esperanto, or Latin, the a-typical "geek" sounds much like yours truely in what may also be referred to as the "best accent ever". Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to composing my internet rant about how funds for producing Doom 3 have been syphoned off and used to buy new A/D boards for Armadillo Aerospace.
Perhaps these bacteria have evolved to simply reproduce at a higher rate, thus making death by radiation less relevant. Kind of like a brute force approach to survival I guess.
The 106 to 100 gender ratio is really more a function of the fact that X chromosome sperm are more resilient than their Y counterparts. However, there are other factors that affect that ratio such as termperature; Y sperm tend to die off much more easily when the testes get too hot.
Nature tends to stack things in favor of women outnumbering the men, for obvious reasons.;) Sadly, despite these odds, this has yet to work in favor of the average slashdot reader.
As for the dinosaurs, it is speculated that their reproductive habits may be similar to modern day (primitive) reptiles such as alligators. In that case, as the eggs are allowed to mature, a very narrow variance in the average temperature of the egg determines the sex of the offspring.
A quick google search turned up this tidbit: The temperature of the nest determines the sex of the young. The sex of an alligator is determined by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. If the nest is below 30 degrees Celsius (86 F) all are female; above 34 degrees Celsius (93 F) all are male and the temperature in between will produce both sexes.
Nature again uses this to skew the ratio toward more females since alligators use a decomposing compost heap to heat the nest while the eggs mature. Its easier for such an arrangement to get cold, hence more females.
Seems to me that if the ultimate end-product of this energy produciton method is vegetable oil, then perhaps using it to produce food grade oil might be a good first step for this technology to gain widespread adoption. Without all the hassle of using farmland to raise, spray, harvest and process corn, there's bound to be huge gains in store (instead of grains in store) for companies like Riceland Foods, Cargill Foods, and Archer Daniel Midland.
That is, should they be able to adapt quickly enough...
A little googling turned up this essay that references the aforementioned companies. It suggests that something like what we're talking about here might actually cause them some trouble:
The major problem that would force the Vegetable Oil Industry to disintegrate would be technology based. For example, genetically engineered products are becoming more popular.
IMO, although algae is a loose fit for 'genetically engineered [crops]', the impact would be profound for industry outside of fuel production.
C'mon, break the law.. we know you already are, only now we have some extra tools at our disposal to kick your ass.
Meanwhile there's 12 squad cars with radar guns hiding behind that barn on the horizon. Or in case of the RIAA, its a gang of laywers who already have the suits prepared, mad-lib style.
On a somewhat related note.. your comment reminded me of the last time I watched MTV.
I suddenly realized that it was a network 100% dedicated to commercials... after all, what else is a video except more entertaining than an add for Tampax.
Mainstream radio more or less follows suit, and it can be pretty soulless most of the time. Almost as if it's run by some winamp playlist set to 'random', and an advertising exec picking the entries.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Sometimes you have to stick with what works. A big pile of regolith is 100% effective against radation and the entire moon is made of the stuff. Plus, you could build most of the base by remote with *robots* before people even have to set foot there.
I like the idea of motor bikes, but I always thougth that some Segways with oversized wheels would be ideal, given that space suits have pretty limited flexilibity. Plus the things are at least doubly redundant in the commercial version: imagine one hopped-up by the guys at JPL.
I don't see why not.
Give 'em a call and wait for the wrecker to arrive. It may take a few decades, so please be patient.
Also keep in mind, unless your a premium member, only the first five miles of towing are free.
The cutscenes were great, but I do miss the fast-forward feature from MGS2 when I go back and replay MGS1. Sure they disrupted the gameplay, but that's the point, isn't it? IMO, virtually nobody but John Woo can manage to allow sheer gunplay to develop characters half as well as good-old-fashioned dialogue.
I, for one, feel the storyline in MGS1 was great. I've always felt that the genius here was that it refused to take itself too seriously as it repeatedly makes fun of itself as a video game. After all, why write the next Tom-Clancy bestseller, when a more *ahem* novel approach is to write a decent story and pepper it with humor that exploits the medium of presentation. It keeps the player's expectations in check, chuckling along the whole time. Suddenly, there is a ceiling to the level of realisim provided by the whole experience; kind of a nice thing if you're pushing the PS1 around the way Konami did.
Take for example the fact that the Colonel keeps knocking down the fourth-wall to give Snake instructions on how to swim or control his movements by using the controller. They could have dropped into tutorial mode or used a narrative voice-over instead, but didn't.
Moments like this crop up all over the place: advice on saving your game, how to beat Psycho Mantis, Snakes arm hurting after the torture sequence, etc, etc. Its gets better as you move along, kind of like a runaway inside-joke if you will. That is of course you're not adverse to that kind of humor.
That having been said, I feel that MGS stands to have a great run as a comic book. The medium has a long history of laughing in spite of itself along the way, and to great effect. But to be faithful to the game, they'll have to occasionally poke fun at the fact that its all in a comic book.
Psycho Mantis: I can read your mind.. let me see.. you.. enjoy reading comic books don't you.
Snake: Colonel, he's dodging everything! How do I beat this guy?
Colonel: Snake, you'll have to hold him off for a while! We're reading the next issue right now to find out.
Exactly my thought.
I guess Jr. here will have to take regular Myostatin injections just to keep his condition in check, else he'll wind up in a wheelchair by 35.
Please allow me contribute some missing entries, frequently found in tabletop arenas:
Unobtainium
Unobtainium is the preferred material of fantasy weaponsmiths for creating arms and armor capable of great feats otherwise impossible by any other means or craft. Many a spell is also said to be enhanced just by the mere possession of the substance. In the far-flung future, it is used in every sector of industry from composing and fueling spacecraft, anti-gravity devices, matter-teleportation machines, polymorphing robots, slashdot-effect-proof web servers, faster-than-lightspeed engines, time travel, to making the construction of 100m tall walking war machines possible.
There is even a rumor that a crash-proof version of Windows exists that requires a special CPU made of pure unobtainium.
Despite its extreme usefulness, there is no known location in the universe where the substance can be mined or produced. Furthermore, there have yet to be any published studies regarding anything about the substance itself; yet there are thousands of studies and papers regarding its many applications.
Deaminite (n. dee-em'-in-ite)
Deaminite is typically found in the construction of mundane objects that are, for reasons unexplained, immobile, impossibly heavy, or otherwise indestructible. There are many a legend involving bands of heroes, who's quest came to halt all because of unlockable and unbreakable doors composed of deaminite. Known artifacts composed of deaminite include: the impossibly heavy weapons of the gods, armor worn by 40th level death knights, Jackie Chan's head, The outer hull of the starship Enterprise, and NYC cockroaches.
Typically encounters with an object made from deaminite result in a loud booming voice, seemingly from nowhere, uttering phrases like "You cannot pick that up", "You cannot do that", "Its too heavy", "No, because I said so", and "You see a grue".
Ironically, unlike unobtaininum, Deaminite has never actually be obtained for any purpose whatsoever, so its composition and properties are completely unkown.
I dunno about using skin as a bus to power electronics, but I can see using the body as an antenna to extend the range of wireless devices. For example, the keyless car entry device on my keychain will work from farther away if I press the transmitter to my chin. Any RF geeks out there willing to explain this or elaborate on it?
Well, what I meant by "virtually the same" is that the 3d engine probably isn't going to change as much from demo-to-demo as when desktop 3d graphics were an emerging technology (see: back-in-the-day). ;) You're still going to want to pull new ideas and effects out of the paradigm though, as that's kind of the point with demos. But those elaborations, from my perspective, are largely becoming more and more like filters on an already cannonical process.
To answer all the "real demos are coded on bare metal using raw assembly." and "r33l 3l33+ d3m0z @r3 13$$ Th4n 64k!!!111" flames: Demo music tracks were being composed in external editors since the Amiga. Anyone who was into the 'scene in the early 90's will remember Scream Tracker, since it allowed you to not only edit music for your own demos, but you could listen to other favorites too. There were even some kits floating around the BBS's that allowed you to 'plug in' S3M playback into your own work.
This is really just "Scream Tracker for Graphics" (or "Shockwave for Demos" for the n00bs). Makes sense to me since most 3d engines use virtually the same pipeline; this just pushes the creativity away from the bits that are the same from demo to demo.
It's worse than that.
Anyone who's ever been through a serious amount of camping and or spelunking knows that once you get mud/brush/wool/whatever into velcro, it looses all sticking power until you can manage to clean it out (not easy).
Netcraft confirms, console development is dead.
I didn't have a clue what the poster was talking about (Congestion Charge)... so I asked google:
http://www.cclondon.com/whatis.shtml
Suddenly, this RFID buisness doesn't seem so bad in comparison to what Londoners are already going through.
Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes
REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.
"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."
A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.
"While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes," said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. "The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this company."
"If this patent holds up in federal court, Apple will have no choice but to convert to analog," said Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs, "and I have serious doubts whether this company would be able to remain competitive selling pedal-operated computers running software off vinyl LPs."
As a result of the Microsoft patent, many other companies have begun radically revising their product lines: Database manufacturer Oracle has embarked on a crash program to develop "an abacus for the next millennium." Novell, whose communications and networking systems are also subject to Microsoft licensing fees, is working with top animal trainers on a chimpanzee-based message-transmission system. Hewlett-Packard is developing a revolutionary new steam-powered printer.
Despite the swarm of protest, Gates is standing his ground, maintaining that ones and zeroes are the undisputed property of Microsoft.
Above: Gates explains the new patent to Apple Computer's board of directors.
"We will vigorously enforce our patents of these numbers, as they are legally ours," Gates said. "Among Microsoft's vast historical archives are Sanskrit cuneiform tablets from 1800 B.C. clearly showing ones and a symbol known as 'sunya,' or nothing. We also own: papyrus scrolls written by Pythagoras himself in which he explains the idea of singular notation, or 'one'; early tracts by Mohammed ibn Musa al Kwarizimi explaining the concept of al-sifr, or 'the cipher'; original mathematical manuscripts by Heisenberg, Einstein and Planck; and a signed first-edition copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness. Should the need arise, Microsoft will have no difficulty proving to the Justice Department or anyone else that we own the rights to these numbers."
Added Gates: "My salary also has lots of zeroes. I'm the richest man in the world."
According to experts, the full ramifications of Microsoft's patenting of one and zero have yet to be realized.
"Because all integers and natural numbers derive from one and zero, Microsoft may, by extension, lay claim to ownership of all mathematics and logic systems, including Euclidean geometry, pulleys and levers, gravity, and the basic Newtonian principles of motion, as well as the c
All apologies to the late President Reagan. This was never meant to be anything spiteful or distasteful.
That's funny. I remember walking through the campus bookstore at Virginia Tech back in 1996, and the computers for sale were showing just that: Second Reality. So I wonder how much Future Crew is responsible for outside of getting guys into programming graphics?
Stephenson sure has a way with words:
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. [...] This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
Not sure about Mozilla, but that certainly explains IE's memory problems.
ComicBookGuy: Pfft.. I cannot believe that one of my bretheren speaks as if he is one of the unwashed masses. Allow me to enighten you. When not speaking Klingon, Esperanto, or Latin, the a-typical "geek" sounds much like yours truely in what may also be referred to as the "best accent ever".
Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to composing my internet rant about how funds for producing Doom 3 have been syphoned off and used to buy new A/D boards for Armadillo Aerospace.
ack. I must've misunderstood *your* point. :(
106 to 100, that is truely strange.
Perhaps these bacteria have evolved to simply reproduce at a higher rate, thus making death by radiation less relevant. Kind of like a brute force approach to survival I guess.
You mean Bioremediation? There's already gobs of research being done in this area. :)
0 /1 2/2057227&mode=thread&tid=134&tid=191
The geobacter project does exactly that for Uranium waste. This was also mentioned back in October:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/1
Other links about bioremediation:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
USGS's site on bioremediation
"Lindows" is okay in Holland, check. ... so what *isn't* allowed in Holland again?
Not completely true, at least for people.
;) Sadly, despite these odds, this has yet to work in favor of the average slashdot reader.
The 106 to 100 gender ratio is really more a function of the fact that X chromosome sperm are more resilient than their Y counterparts. However, there are other factors that affect that ratio such as termperature; Y sperm tend to die off much more easily when the testes get too hot.
Nature tends to stack things in favor of women outnumbering the men, for obvious reasons.
As for the dinosaurs, it is speculated that their reproductive habits may be similar to modern day (primitive) reptiles such as alligators. In that case, as the eggs are allowed to mature, a very narrow variance in the average temperature of the egg determines the sex of the offspring.
A quick google search turned up this tidbit:
The temperature of the nest determines the sex of the young. The sex of an alligator is determined by the temperature at which eggs are incubated. If the nest is below 30 degrees Celsius (86 F) all are female; above 34 degrees Celsius (93 F) all are male and the temperature in between will produce both sexes.
Nature again uses this to skew the ratio toward more females since alligators use a decomposing compost heap to heat the nest while the eggs mature. Its easier for such an arrangement to get cold, hence more females.
Seems to me that if the ultimate end-product of this energy produciton method is vegetable oil, then perhaps using it to produce food grade oil might be a good first step for this technology to gain widespread adoption. Without all the hassle of using farmland to raise, spray, harvest and process corn, there's bound to be huge gains in store (instead of grains in store) for companies like Riceland Foods, Cargill Foods, and Archer Daniel Midland.
That is, should they be able to adapt quickly enough...
A little googling turned up this essay that references the aforementioned companies. It suggests that something like what we're talking about here might actually cause them some trouble:
The major problem that would force the Vegetable Oil Industry to disintegrate would be technology based. For example, genetically engineered products are becoming more popular.
IMO, although algae is a loose fit for 'genetically engineered [crops]', the impact would be profound for industry outside of fuel production.
(Microsoft looses millions in DOD revinue)
Ha-Ha.
Exactly!
C'mon, break the law.. we know you already are, only now we have some extra tools at our disposal to kick your ass.
Meanwhile there's 12 squad cars with radar guns hiding behind that barn on the horizon. Or in case of the RIAA, its a gang of laywers who already have the suits prepared, mad-lib style.
On a somewhat related note.. your comment reminded me of the last time I watched MTV.
I suddenly realized that it was a network 100% dedicated to commercials... after all, what else is a video except more entertaining than an add for Tampax.
Mainstream radio more or less follows suit, and it can be pretty soulless most of the time. Almost as if it's run by some winamp playlist set to 'random', and an advertising exec picking the entries.