Just in case Disney needs any inspiration on how to make Starwars worse, there was a discussion-thread on alternatehistory.com about how Star wars Episode 1 could have been made worse - http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=236784. Some of the suggestions are truly inspired. One of them being introducing some subtle racism and making Jar-Jar Binks a stereotypical black person who only talks in Jive. Also by not hiring John Williams to do the score, we'd end up with Jar-Jar's leitmotif being some early 20th century Jazz.
There's a theory that ancient literature from about 3000 years ago points to humans having a different way of perceiving the world than they do today (Bicameral Mind). This is described in the following Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29 ).
>"For example, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware."
While 2684 years isn't quite as old as 3000 years, there might be a chance that part of this 'previous state of conciousness' may be preserved.
As you know, Mercury is an anomalously heavy planet for such a small object. One widely accepted theory is that sometime in the distant past, Mercury was much bigger and suffered from a collision that ripped away most of Mercury (the abundance of craters means that it must have happened a very long time ago).
Recently, we have discovered planetary systems orbiting around other stars. One thing that a lot of these systems feature is a large Jupiter-like gas planet orbiting close to the star. In fact, our solar system is beginning to look anomalous in not having a masive gas-giant close to the sun. I have a theory that Mercury was once a gas-giant that suffered a high-speed collision with a large object. The force of the collision was such that the entire atmosphere of Mercury was ejected into space. The 'spider' in the picture looks like it could have been a meterorite impact that punctured Mercury's crust, but somehow, I doubt it was created by an impact with enough force to rip away a gas-giant-sized atmosphere.
>But what story is too big for a Simpsons episode? Given the unreality of the series, what premise could carry a movie that shouldn't simply be an episode?
Here's a possible plot. In nearly all movies, there's usually some sort of love interest. So what happens in Springfield is that there is all of a sudden a mass outbreak of Cooties. Everyone in the film falls in love with someone - with the exception of Bart who is perpetually going through his "girls are icky" phase. Either there could be simple two-way relationships (like Willie and the female-version of Willie from Shelbyville, or Maggie and Baby-Gerald can make peace and fall in love), or there could be triangles (eg. Millhouse -> Lisa -> Nelson), and there culd be a few 'suprises' (eg. Smithers pairs off with whichever one of the Bouvier-sisters is a lesbian). Marge and Homer are going through a period of marital difficulties, but are in the end overcome by the cooties, and the film ends just as they are about to 'snuggle'. One thing we're sure to see is an absolutely cute quote from a very heart-broken Ralph Wiggum that somehow sums up in a nutshell what love is all about and will be quoteed for years to come.
Other things to look out for include:
The opening-sequence music gets expanded into a theatrical masterpiece (duh!).
Bart's lines on the chalkboard at the start could be "my phone number does not begin with 555".
The film uses the entire set of known Simpsons cliches. Right after the closing credits, the screen goes black. You can hear Comic-Book guy saying "Excuse me, I think you'll find that there is one cliche that has not made it into this film". Then, Homer will reply with "DOH!!!", and Comic-Book guy will say "Thankyou".
If you're doing the cut-and-paste thing, you can even enter the letters out of order. Just make sure you use the mouse to position the cursor and not the arrow-keys.
>And, the interface is a javascript keyboard on the login page for input of letters and numbers. HTTPS too. AFAIK, they wouldn't be able to use a mouse-logger, eh?
You'd have to make sure the keyboard is a non-standard layout, so Querty, Dvorak, Alphabetical-order are all out.
But in order to log into your e-mail account, you would need to supply your password.
One way to get round this is to type the first few letters of the password, switch to an other app, type some gibberish, and then switch back to your web-browser / telnet-session (doing more switching if you're feeling insecure). If this is one of those hardware devices that sit between the PC and the keyboard, it cannot know what belongs where, but there might be some software out there that can detect app-switching and record kepresses on a per-app basis.
If we harnesed the energy of the Earth's centre, we'd risk cooling the Earth to such a degree that the core would solidify, and this would cause the magnetic field to shut down and we'd be bombarded by solar radiation. On the plus side, a cooler core would put an end to all those pesky earthquakes and volcanoes.
Apparently, the Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so if ever they drilled down to the core, it would heat up the planet. While the upper-mantle is nowhere near as hot as the core, is there some risk that the air at the bottom of the hole will be heated by convection, and then rise up forcing more cold air downwasds? The solid crust not only prevents such convection events, but is also a poor thermal conductor. If this does happen, could this contribute significantly to Global Warming, or worse?
> Also let us not forget the promotional song from Buckner and Garcia - "Pac Man Fever" that hit the airwaves briefly.
Aphex Twin, in the guise of Power Pill, recorded Pac-Man. Although this was recorded many years after the B&G "Pac Man Fever", the Aphex Twin version sounds more Pac-Man like than the B&G version (the style of the music integrates better with the pacman sounds).
AE.
The probe cannot move anywhere once it has landed. Even assuming it's instruments survived the impact, and that the probe is oriented in such a way that the camera etc. is fully manoeuverable, it was calculated that there would be two or so hours between surface-impact and the end of the orbiter-probe line of sight. Two hours is plenty of time for a stationary probe to execute a pre-programmed photo-shoot and transmit the data back to Casini. Even if the probe landed in a liquid-hydrocarbon river and gradually flowed along the river, two hours should be enough to gather all kinds of data. Apart from lightning, storms or tectonic activity, there's not much else that can happen in two hours.
>Exxon getting sued for those excess 30,000-50,000 deaths per year due to anthropogenic global warming.
That's about 10 times as many people who died in the WTC on 11 September. When that happened, Al-Qaeda instantly became public enemy no. 1. But the oil-companies and car-manufacturers are getting away scot-free.
>On the example of the tobacco company lawsuits, I doubt such action would succeed
I thought that some Tobacco companies recently had to pay a fortune in a recent lawsuit?
Maybe a lawsuit on the polluting comapnies is what is needed if world governments aren't willing to take drastic action to curb pollution.
Unfortunately, the increased temperature will cuase the 3 big rivers of Northern Russia to increase their output into the Arctic Sea. This (along with the melting ice-caps) will decrease the salinity of the sea-water in the place where the Gulf-stream changes direction. This may have the effect of halting the gulf-stream altogether and cause colder weather for Britain.
People don't always code websites correctly to standards - I WANT the ALT text to popup, for me personally.
There is a FireFox extension called
"Popup ALT Attributes" that does just that. However, I would recommend that you do not get into the habit of relying on it too much, as it won't discorage webmasters from abusing the ALT tag.
What you should be doing instead is contacting the webmasters of the offending websites and tell them to use the TITLE tag for popup titles, and the ALT tag for text that replaces an image when the image cannot be viewed.
I think that.cc domains should be used for websites for specific areas, organisations and governmental thingamajigs in a country, or a town, etc. eg. www.londontransport.co.uk, www.whitehouse.gov.us, www.uva.ac.nl, etc. TLDs should be used for things that are not bounded to a country eg. multi-national companies, organisations, networks, etc. Individuals who want their own internet-address can chose if they want to be associated with a country, or be part of the global network. There are cases for ambiguity where it is debatable if an organisation really is multi-national, but in those cases, making the wrong decision on whether or not to get a.cc TLD does not matter. What I'm against is.cc TLDs being abused for something that's not country related just so they can create interestingly-named websites, eg. the.tv domain of Tuvavlu is being used for TV stations. Even greater abuses are countries like Columbia selling a uk.co domain for when the.co.uk domain is already taken.
Incidentally, the reason why the.us domain is hardly used in the USA is because when the Internet was first set up, it wasn't envisioned that it would expand outside the USA, so universities, etc, ended up with the edu TLD whereas in all other contries, they end up with their.cc TLD, so because the USA invented the Internet first, they like to flaunt this fact by shying away from using the.us TLD. A similar thing happened with postage stamps. These were invented in the UK, and nowardays, the UK is the only country that does not mention the country's name on the stamp.
Another test he could do is to report all the bugs he discovered that he can recreate on demand to the team that writes the browsers, and see which team comes up with a fixed version the fastest.
This reminds me of a story I heard about the Kletz virus. If you remember, this virus scanned the address-books of infected machines, and sent forged e-mails on behalf of various people in the address books to other people in the address-books. I've heard stories of people being scared when all of a sudden an e-mail from a friend who'se been dead for a year appears.
Slashdot Mirror
Just in case Disney needs any inspiration on how to make Starwars worse, there was a discussion-thread on alternatehistory.com about how Star wars Episode 1 could have been made worse - http://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=236784. Some of the suggestions are truly inspired. One of them being introducing some subtle racism and making Jar-Jar Binks a stereotypical black person who only talks in Jive. Also by not hiring John Williams to do the score, we'd end up with Jar-Jar's leitmotif being some early 20th century Jazz.
...can be summed up in this video-clip by Fascinating Aïda.
There's a theory that ancient literature from about 3000 years ago points to humans having a different way of perceiving the world than they do today (Bicameral Mind). This is described in the following Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29 ).
>"For example, in the Iliad and sections of the Old Testament no mention is made of any kind of cognitive processes such as introspection, and there is no apparent indication that the writers were self-aware."
While 2684 years isn't quite as old as 3000 years, there might be a chance that part of this 'previous state of conciousness' may be preserved.
As you know, Mercury is an anomalously heavy planet for such a small object. One widely accepted theory is that sometime in the distant past, Mercury was much bigger and suffered from a collision that ripped away most of Mercury (the abundance of craters means that it must have happened a very long time ago). Recently, we have discovered planetary systems orbiting around other stars. One thing that a lot of these systems feature is a large Jupiter-like gas planet orbiting close to the star. In fact, our solar system is beginning to look anomalous in not having a masive gas-giant close to the sun. I have a theory that Mercury was once a gas-giant that suffered a high-speed collision with a large object. The force of the collision was such that the entire atmosphere of Mercury was ejected into space. The 'spider' in the picture looks like it could have been a meterorite impact that punctured Mercury's crust, but somehow, I doubt it was created by an impact with enough force to rip away a gas-giant-sized atmosphere.
When training managment consultants, an often used excersize is to discuss switching to the DVORAK keyboard to illustrate the difficulties of change. See this part of the Wikipedia article on Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.
Here's a possible plot. In nearly all movies, there's usually some sort of love interest. So what happens in Springfield is that there is all of a sudden a mass outbreak of Cooties. Everyone in the film falls in love with someone - with the exception of Bart who is perpetually going through his "girls are icky" phase. Either there could be simple two-way relationships (like Willie and the female-version of Willie from Shelbyville, or Maggie and Baby-Gerald can make peace and fall in love), or there could be triangles (eg. Millhouse -> Lisa -> Nelson), and there culd be a few 'suprises' (eg. Smithers pairs off with whichever one of the Bouvier-sisters is a lesbian). Marge and Homer are going through a period of marital difficulties, but are in the end overcome by the cooties, and the film ends just as they are about to 'snuggle'. One thing we're sure to see is an absolutely cute quote from a very heart-broken Ralph Wiggum that somehow sums up in a nutshell what love is all about and will be quoteed for years to come.
Other things to look out for include:
If you're doing the cut-and-paste thing, you can even enter the letters out of order. Just make sure you use the mouse to position the cursor and not the arrow-keys.
You'd have to make sure the keyboard is a non-standard layout, so Querty, Dvorak, Alphabetical-order are all out.
But in order to log into your e-mail account, you would need to supply your password. One way to get round this is to type the first few letters of the password, switch to an other app, type some gibberish, and then switch back to your web-browser / telnet-session (doing more switching if you're feeling insecure). If this is one of those hardware devices that sit between the PC and the keyboard, it cannot know what belongs where, but there might be some software out there that can detect app-switching and record kepresses on a per-app basis.
If we harnesed the energy of the Earth's centre, we'd risk cooling the Earth to such a degree that the core would solidify, and this would cause the magnetic field to shut down and we'd be bombarded by solar radiation. On the plus side, a cooler core would put an end to all those pesky earthquakes and volcanoes.
Apparently, the Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so if ever they drilled down to the core, it would heat up the planet. While the upper-mantle is nowhere near as hot as the core, is there some risk that the air at the bottom of the hole will be heated by convection, and then rise up forcing more cold air downwasds? The solid crust not only prevents such convection events, but is also a poor thermal conductor. If this does happen, could this contribute significantly to Global Warming, or worse?
Aphex Twin, in the guise of Power Pill, recorded Pac-Man. Although this was recorded many years after the B&G "Pac Man Fever", the Aphex Twin version sounds more Pac-Man like than the B&G version (the style of the music integrates better with the pacman sounds). AE.
The probe cannot move anywhere once it has landed. Even assuming it's instruments survived the impact, and that the probe is oriented in such a way that the camera etc. is fully manoeuverable, it was calculated that there would be two or so hours between surface-impact and the end of the orbiter-probe line of sight. Two hours is plenty of time for a stationary probe to execute a pre-programmed photo-shoot and transmit the data back to Casini. Even if the probe landed in a liquid-hydrocarbon river and gradually flowed along the river, two hours should be enough to gather all kinds of data. Apart from lightning, storms or tectonic activity, there's not much else that can happen in two hours.
That's about 10 times as many people who died in the WTC on 11 September. When that happened, Al-Qaeda instantly became public enemy no. 1. But the oil-companies and car-manufacturers are getting away scot-free.
>On the example of the tobacco company lawsuits, I doubt such action would succeed
I thought that some Tobacco companies recently had to pay a fortune in a recent lawsuit?
Maybe a lawsuit on the polluting comapnies is what is needed if world governments aren't willing to take drastic action to curb pollution.
Unfortunately, the increased temperature will cuase the 3 big rivers of Northern Russia to increase their output into the Arctic Sea. This (along with the melting ice-caps) will decrease the salinity of the sea-water in the place where the Gulf-stream changes direction. This may have the effect of halting the gulf-stream altogether and cause colder weather for Britain.
Slightly offtopic, but this will serve the needs of those of us reading this thread for a fix of C-related humour. The Infrequently asked questions in C (C-IAQ).
There is a FireFox extension called "Popup ALT Attributes" that does just that. However, I would recommend that you do not get into the habit of relying on it too much, as it won't discorage webmasters from abusing the ALT tag.
What you should be doing instead is contacting the webmasters of the offending websites and tell them to use the TITLE tag for popup titles, and the ALT tag for text that replaces an image when the image cannot be viewed.
Incidentally, the reason why the .us domain is hardly used in the USA is because when the Internet was first set up, it wasn't envisioned that it would expand outside the USA, so universities, etc, ended up with the edu TLD whereas in all other contries, they end up with their .cc TLD, so because the USA invented the Internet first, they like to flaunt this fact by shying away from using the .us TLD. A similar thing happened with postage stamps. These were invented in the UK, and nowardays, the UK is the only country that does not mention the country's name on the stamp.
http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/
A Windows-based clone of Chaos called Chaos-Funk can be downloaded here.
At least we've learned something. Before Cassini, all we knew about Titan was "Orange".
Another test he could do is to report all the bugs he discovered that he can recreate on demand to the team that writes the browsers, and see which team comes up with a fixed version the fastest.
This reminds me of a story I heard about the Kletz virus. If you remember, this virus scanned the address-books of infected machines, and sent forged e-mails on behalf of various people in the address books to other people in the address-books. I've heard stories of people being scared when all of a sudden an e-mail from a friend who'se been dead for a year appears.
Aaaaaargh!
Must not cut and paste from makefiles.
Don't forget -march=pentium2