This became popular when the first big MMO (Ultima Online) came onto the scene. In an intro movie of UO, you have some kind of evil wizard casting a spell to destroy the universe/take over the world (I don't remember exactly, it's been a while). Eventually the world gets.. encapsulated by some magic crystal ball that he had. Then came along the mysterious avatar to battle this villan, which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.
turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original. So now all the broken shards of the crystal ball contain a variant of the original world, which brings the avatar to start a new quest: how to bring the shards back together. (it looks like the devs at UO never got to this part:-P)
I'm assuming based on the screenshots, it's a little windows app that begins the debian install process. Functionally the Debian ISO it would be analagous to a 'windows upgrade' CD.
Trust is a very hard thing to earn amongst geeks. Ok this is way offtopic, but anyways.. I believe a lot of it comes from our social environment - we get beat up in schools as a kid, growing up the local bully would trick us into doing something foolish at our own expense and their entertainment (from our innate desire to 'fit in', so to speak), even so far getting trolled by our own kind in various outlets (getting PKed from people you considered 'friends,' or being goatse.cx'd), or being victims of various exploitations (at work, at love, etc). Growing up in that kind of environment, at times when I see a genuine gesture of grace, I can't believe it for a minute, and my head is spinning thinking of all the possibilities and reasons of why someone would do such a thing, likely at my expense nonetheless. Maybe it's just the nature of geeks to think ahead, *shrug* I don't know.
But in any case, it will come as second nature to us to be distrustful. Sometimes that manifests prematurely - perhaps the sales of the iphone are worse than expected and Jobs is trying to boost sales in order to look good in front of the other cellphone carriers - I could be thinking. Or perhaps: sales really did go well early on, but they noticed a sharp drop after the first month because they priced themselves out of the sweetspot (coupled with the whole ATT bundling push fiasco). A PR maneuver like this could bring forth a few more customers, maybe. Or maybe this was planned from the start, and luckily their supplier had better than expected yields for hardware parts and Apple took that to their advantage in order to get a jump on more marketshare against the other cellphone manufacturers (at the same time looking good towards consumers and not looking like total price-gouging capitalists which any true-blue american company in the business of cellphones is so well known for). Who the hell knows? Perhaps the cellphone carriers looking to take advantage of apple forced apple to price their units high (perhaps with aid from other manufacturers that had stake at the carriers, like clique'y capitalism), so Apple played the game according to the rules set upon them - untill the time was right for them to turn around, give the carriers the finger and set the rules how Apple wants to play them. (too much tinfoil hat?)
Anyways, it's a refreshing change of pace, and a nice gesture for Apple to go forth and do all that. For the rest of us that know how Apple rolls, we've all be patiently waiting for the price to go down (and more carriers to be supported) - or we've been waiting for the ipod touch instead. Or we're waiting for revision B down the road when something wacky happens with the iphone 6 months from now.
Hmmm... I'm trying to decipher this. Is English not your first language? Are you saying there's something with my anatomy? Are you saying someone should copulate with me until I cease to function?
either that or untill you run out of money
or maybe he's visibly upset and had to shout some expletives because you broke his asshole, or something..
I may be paging to my swap file multiple times each minute. It might prove hard to level that activity out across the drive as a whole.
perhaps this was a tongue-in-cheek comment... but anyways perhaps this warrants a response for people that may not understand.
ok, so Rule #1: NEVER USE THE FLASH DRIVE FOR PAGING. Use the hard disk drive instead. I can't for the life of me figure out a reasonable answer to completely removing the HDD. Those things are so cheap for so much data density, engineers have taken development of them to an art form. Seriously, paging should be regulated to the 'unreliable' storage medium - that being the HDD of course. What are you afraid of? that moving parts of the HDD are going to fail so consistently - how much abuse are you actually putting your laptop through in the first place?? After all, the only reason why we do paging at all is because we just don't have enough ram. Those things are so close to being disposable memory, and SO much cheaper then flash drives.
IMO I would only use flash drives for only two conditions: critical data that is able to withstand physical abuse of storage medium, and read-data only. So, for the average computer user, that would mostly mean:
operating system
applications
large documents you aren't likely to move around - like your MP3 collection, for example
documents you've created yourself - photoshop files for designers, Word docs/spreadsheets for the business types, code for developers, things like that.
that way you reduce the number of writes being done on the drive. Got a bigger HD? You can use it to store your temporary crap: movies you downloaded over BT, your copy of the latest game so you can NOCD it, your porn collection (unless it's VERY important, I suppose..). paging on a flash drive is waste of money - why spend so much on reliable flash ram (more reliable than HDD anyway) so you can use it to PAGE?? That's the equivalent of a chip maker deciding that it's a good idea to make a CPU that contains 512Mb of L1 cache. Or, car analogy time: driving on the highway on first gear.
Eventually we'll start seeing smaller drives in laptops that will do nothing but page. Just wait it out and let's see where this goes.
Remember folks, the cost of memory from most expensive to least expensive goes something like this: L1 cache <- L2 cache <- RAM <- HDD. Where does a flash drive fit in? Somewhere between RAM and HDD. Flash isn't the end-all-be-all to memory. We just use flash ram and HDD because we don't have enough ram (and battery life). Which we use because we don't have enough CPU cache (and battery life).
If you want to see a *really* screwed up, inflationary economy, look at the economies of the original WoW servers; that economy does not have any market balance forces to eat up the supply of goods (the way to fix that would be to have NPC controlled auction offerings to help keep prices in check, or for NPC vendors to change their prices based on rate of exchange). Simply stated, there is no current mechanism in that game to check the economy because there is no mechanism to absorb the ever-increasing amount of cash in the game.
there was a discussion on a mud dev mailing list regarding how inflation is dealt in WoW. Most sharp inflation occurs when gold farmers constantly bring in a steady stream of gold (and people buying it in the thousands). What WoW does is find the source of the gold income, and does a massive banhammer strike, removing thousands of accounts at once, and billions of gold along with it. I've seen this first hand, when playing the week before and after the massive ban - auction prices for a particular item would be roughly 5000gp range, and one week plummeted down to 1500gp range (which is still a goshdarn large amount of money for an item). Outside of the gold farming banning, to combat regular inflation, blizzard uses and controls the flow of money drains, modifying auction fees to go up and down, and with armor repair costs.
IMO I beleive WoW does a pretty good job controlling inflation. If you REALLY want to talk about a messed up economy, EQ is where it's at.:-P
I know this was meant to be funny, but I'll respond because I'm a dork
IF = Ironforge, the dwarven capital
SW = Stormwind, the human capital
"to hearth" is slang for "to use a hearthstone" (not the bottom of a fireplace) - an item everybody has that is used to teleport from wherever they are in the world to wherever they decide to call home. Most people bind themselves to one of the two capitals.
It *does* give the consumer a less restricted product, but at the cost of making said consumer liable if the "wrong person" ever get hold of those watermarked tunes.
Maybe then people will start treating their digital data with a little more responsibility. When this does occur, people will be less willing to share their files with one another. And if it eventually does escalate to epidemic proportions, let's say someone wrote a little invasive worm that read your files and dumped all your songs into some repository, won't it be more likely that they will go after the source/repository? I'm not about to shed big soppy tears for the poor individual who kept their computer unsecure with hundreds of dollars of music that they purchased legally.
Every over-caffienated insomniac computer nerd should know that MTV runs videos between roughly 5AM and 8AM on weekdays, just as surely as we all know that Comedy Central goes to infomercials at 4AM and Comcast cable internet connections go down momentarily for maintenance at 3AM between Sunday and Monday.
I don't know what's more tragic: the fact that I know that, or the fact that we know that.
Seriously, how do they expect to blend in with nerds, we can smell non-nerds a mile away.
Seriously, the total absence of unshowered nerd BO should be the first clear sign, it feel like a black hole to anybody with a nose. It would have been more fun if all the participants were blindfolded, just head toward the least offending smell! That would have really shocked the reporter, "I don't know how they did it, they were blindfolded, it's like these hackers have magic hacker powers." Hackers on steroids, indeed. (I'm joking, fellas)
Where is BLOODNINJA when you need him?? That would be thoroughly entertaining. Too bad DATELINE would never air that. Where do these underage cybersex channel chats take place anyways? I wonder why nobody's found them and ratted them out.
That sounds a bit odd. How was the thumb resting on the trackball? Were you controlling the trackball with the tip of your thumb? In resting position, I usually have my thumb sit right against the underside of my knuckle, extending outward - as if I am about to give a handshake.
The big trackballs don't seem to do it for me. By far my most favorite trackball is the basic Logitech Trackman. I've been using it for several years, switching over and trying different trackballs, but I always go back to this one. Your hand is resting comfortably, the ball is perfectly positioned and I have yet to run into a situation where my thumb would be tired - dunno, maybe it's the gamer in me.
As for precision, it's pretty good. I do game with it, some counterstrike, but mostly WoW pvp. What I do find to be a hinderance in sheer gaming performance, however is in certain games where you need fast jerky movement over small areas (an RTS, like starcraft, or when you need to move quickly and click on raid members to heal in WoW), nothing beats a mouse - well, maybe a tablet?
As for work stuff, I've never really had it hinder me when drawing out some artwork using vector graphics. One thing to get used to is clicking and dragging, mostly because users are most comfortable using the weight of their palm to control the mouse while dragging, the way the trackball is designed it doesn't let you do that. So if you're click/dragging something along, sometimes you can accidentally release the button while moving your thumb. Doesn't happen often, but it can occur, mostly in places where you are using a trackball on a nonsolid surface, like the arm of a sofa or on your knee or something. I've had much worse luck trying to click-drag with larger trackballs, but I don't have large fingers. YMMV.
My initial reasoning for getting it was because I didn't have enough desk space.:-P Because of the small amount of real estate, I usually bring it along with my laptop, to coffeeshops, on my bed, or in front of the tv. I hate those laptop trackpads.
I disagree. Most of the time it's just trolling behavior. No big deal. It just happens we notice the event is magnified because of sheer number. Just think of it as MMO trolling.
A significant number of these events are spontaneous, and the majority of them do not pan out. But when they do, hilarity does occur.
The issue is that there will always be that one or two people that takes it to the next step. Outside of the insults and name-calling, you'll always have one idiot thinks it's gonna be really funny when they try to attempt so and so stunt, but is oblivious to the fact that it's against the law. This is what brings in the police. Or Fox News.
/b/, for most of the time is an inversive self-trolling community. So they keep to themselves. But if/when something causes them to mobilize, they will. Like waking up the beast, it really does take a lot to offend Anonymous, and a good number of items that are offensive of Anonymous would be offensive against society. (like inaccurate news reporting and racial hate sites) But it doesn't happen too often, which is why everybody gets bored and starts pulling off pranks to keep busy.
Was this in Baltimore? Otakon (anime convention) was taking place this past weekend. I know a number of people at the convention went to the midnight book release
The "early adopters" went HD in 2001. HD is mass-market in 2007: ilo 32" Widescreen LCD HDTV w/ Built-in Digital ATSC/NTSC Tuner $500
Resolution 1366 x 768
Except people actively shopping for HD are mostly looking for units that support 1920 × 1080, not 1280 × 720. Probably the reason why these units are getting cheaper and cheaper is because nobody is really buying them..? Anyways what's the deal with that weird resolution setting? 1366x768?
Methinks GP was going for a knee-jerk reaction by spinning a "big-bad-corporation-takes-rights-away-from-contri butors-again" stance, rather than looking at Rockstar simply trying to cover their own ass.
Yeah I've been contemplating getting a standalone player, but the biggest factor for me getting a ps3 was because I needed to fulfill my gamer quota(I actaully did not buy a single console from the last generation, and this is actaully my first playstation, I'm behind for sure). Plus it was kind of a impulse buy - had some extra cash, purchased me a Wii, and walked into a local gameshop and they had one 60G PS3 left, so I said to myself - why the hell not? The misses was not too happy however:-P
I really wish there were more games out for the PS3, but in truth I've just been too busy lately with RL that I haven't had a chance to sit down a play some games, or I've just been too exhausted from work that all I wanted to do was just sit down and zone out and watch some pretty pictures for about an hour.
It's very likely that I'll be picking up the high profile games, such as GTA4 and the new Metal Gear game, but to be honest I'm most excited about the new Contra game coming out for the DS for my commute - largely due to the homage to old school gaming. Maybe I'm hitting a geek midlife crisis, at least I can tell the misses that it's cheaper than getting a shiny red sports car...
But a few years later you could buy a fully-spec'd multi-region DVD player for $50. Plus DVDs are already being phased out in favour of a new technology, making your investment overpriced and shortlived. And yet here you are about to do the same thing all over again. It seems you just don't learn.
Huh?
Are you saying he should wait a few more years for blu-ray players to lower their costs to around 50 dollars, at a point where BRDVD are going to be phased out in favour of a new technology?
Would it be deemed unreasonable that he could have bought the $1000 dvd player over ten years ago?
I bought a ps3 back in January, mostly for Blu-ray. If you get a chance, try and get the Planet Earth documentary - absolutely stunning. I also bought a dvd copy of Planet Earth for my coworker, and while it still looks good - it's true: you really can't go back once you go HD.
I'm sure the console is nice too:-) In all seriousness, my friends have been coming over, downloading demos like Gran Tourismo and Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and they do indeed look very pretty, I just haven't been interested in playing anything lately.
But as a Blu-ray player, I picked up a bluetooth remote and some movies. I was good to go.
I saw the movie, and the only plausible explanation that it would have been rated R is because of the usage of the word 'shit.' A lot of the actors end up saying that a good number of times, including one soldier saying (not verbatim, just off the top of my head)
"Man oh man, if you can see this shit.."
"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" - someone being chased by a Decepticon
"Oh..shit" - when one of the transformers dies - mostly for humor effect
There is no nudity, but there are some body shots that emphasize the female figure - which may give have upped the ante for a stronger rating due to sexual content. Possibly.
Some of the violence would would have definately changed the movie rating to R if they were humans instead of robots. For example, there is a beheading, and then there is the scene where Megatron takes Jazz and... kills him - this is where the audience goes "OOOH!" No human blood gore however. Only one human gets impaled, most humans that die are 'behind the curtain' so to speak.. You get the idea.
The movie is indeed kinda campy. Deliberate cliches here and there ("More that meets the eye" and some quotes directly from the original cartoon movie). The 'transformer' sound inserted discreetly (done well, imo), and the oblig. cheesy love story thing going on. It is on the violent side, but imo not any more violent or containing sexual content than WWE Wrestling. So if your kids can stomach WWE, they will probably like this movie. Everybody that I saw it with (who grew up with Transformers) loved it.
Slashdot Mirror
This became popular when the first big MMO (Ultima Online) came onto the scene. In an intro movie of UO, you have some kind of evil wizard casting a spell to destroy the universe/take over the world (I don't remember exactly, it's been a while). Eventually the world gets.. encapsulated by some magic crystal ball that he had. Then came along the mysterious avatar to battle this villan, which during the course of the fight, the crystal ball falls over and shatters.
turns out that the destruction of the crystal ball did not destroy the world/universe/whatever, but instead ended up creating 'reflections' of the world identical to the original. So now all the broken shards of the crystal ball contain a variant of the original world, which brings the avatar to start a new quest: how to bring the shards back together. (it looks like the devs at UO never got to this part :-P)
yeah, but it really really sucks when you get PK'd in NASDAQ. Nothing you earn is nodrop/soulbound
I'm assuming based on the screenshots, it's a little windows app that begins the debian install process. Functionally the Debian ISO it would be analagous to a 'windows upgrade' CD.
But that's my guess
Trust is a very hard thing to earn amongst geeks. Ok this is way offtopic, but anyways.. I believe a lot of it comes from our social environment - we get beat up in schools as a kid, growing up the local bully would trick us into doing something foolish at our own expense and their entertainment (from our innate desire to 'fit in', so to speak), even so far getting trolled by our own kind in various outlets (getting PKed from people you considered 'friends,' or being goatse.cx'd), or being victims of various exploitations (at work, at love, etc). Growing up in that kind of environment, at times when I see a genuine gesture of grace, I can't believe it for a minute, and my head is spinning thinking of all the possibilities and reasons of why someone would do such a thing, likely at my expense nonetheless. Maybe it's just the nature of geeks to think ahead, *shrug* I don't know.
But in any case, it will come as second nature to us to be distrustful. Sometimes that manifests prematurely - perhaps the sales of the iphone are worse than expected and Jobs is trying to boost sales in order to look good in front of the other cellphone carriers - I could be thinking. Or perhaps: sales really did go well early on, but they noticed a sharp drop after the first month because they priced themselves out of the sweetspot (coupled with the whole ATT bundling push fiasco). A PR maneuver like this could bring forth a few more customers, maybe. Or maybe this was planned from the start, and luckily their supplier had better than expected yields for hardware parts and Apple took that to their advantage in order to get a jump on more marketshare against the other cellphone manufacturers (at the same time looking good towards consumers and not looking like total price-gouging capitalists which any true-blue american company in the business of cellphones is so well known for). Who the hell knows? Perhaps the cellphone carriers looking to take advantage of apple forced apple to price their units high (perhaps with aid from other manufacturers that had stake at the carriers, like clique'y capitalism), so Apple played the game according to the rules set upon them - untill the time was right for them to turn around, give the carriers the finger and set the rules how Apple wants to play them. (too much tinfoil hat?)
Anyways, it's a refreshing change of pace, and a nice gesture for Apple to go forth and do all that. For the rest of us that know how Apple rolls, we've all be patiently waiting for the price to go down (and more carriers to be supported) - or we've been waiting for the ipod touch instead. Or we're waiting for revision B down the road when something wacky happens with the iphone 6 months from now.
Hmmm... I'm trying to decipher this. Is English not your first language? Are you saying there's something with my anatomy? Are you saying someone should copulate with me until I cease to function?
either that or untill you run out of money
or maybe he's visibly upset and had to shout some expletives because you broke his asshole, or something..
*grumble* after reading that I didn't think it was that twee..
..to me it felt a little more.. foghorn-leghorn
I may be paging to my swap file multiple times each minute. It might prove hard to level that activity out across the drive as a whole.
perhaps this was a tongue-in-cheek comment... but anyways perhaps this warrants a response for people that may not understand.
ok, so Rule #1: NEVER USE THE FLASH DRIVE FOR PAGING. Use the hard disk drive instead. I can't for the life of me figure out a reasonable answer to completely removing the HDD. Those things are so cheap for so much data density, engineers have taken development of them to an art form. Seriously, paging should be regulated to the 'unreliable' storage medium - that being the HDD of course. What are you afraid of? that moving parts of the HDD are going to fail so consistently - how much abuse are you actually putting your laptop through in the first place?? After all, the only reason why we do paging at all is because we just don't have enough ram. Those things are so close to being disposable memory, and SO much cheaper then flash drives.
IMO I would only use flash drives for only two conditions: critical data that is able to withstand physical abuse of storage medium, and read-data only. So, for the average computer user, that would mostly mean:
that way you reduce the number of writes being done on the drive. Got a bigger HD? You can use it to store your temporary crap: movies you downloaded over BT, your copy of the latest game so you can NOCD it, your porn collection (unless it's VERY important, I suppose..). paging on a flash drive is waste of money - why spend so much on reliable flash ram (more reliable than HDD anyway) so you can use it to PAGE?? That's the equivalent of a chip maker deciding that it's a good idea to make a CPU that contains 512Mb of L1 cache. Or, car analogy time: driving on the highway on first gear.
Eventually we'll start seeing smaller drives in laptops that will do nothing but page. Just wait it out and let's see where this goes.
Remember folks, the cost of memory from most expensive to least expensive goes something like this: L1 cache <- L2 cache <- RAM <- HDD. Where does a flash drive fit in? Somewhere between RAM and HDD. Flash isn't the end-all-be-all to memory. We just use flash ram and HDD because we don't have enough ram (and battery life). Which we use because we don't have enough CPU cache (and battery life).
If you want to see a *really* screwed up, inflationary economy, look at the economies of the original WoW servers; that economy does not have any market balance forces to eat up the supply of goods (the way to fix that would be to have NPC controlled auction offerings to help keep prices in check, or for NPC vendors to change their prices based on rate of exchange). Simply stated, there is no current mechanism in that game to check the economy because there is no mechanism to absorb the ever-increasing amount of cash in the game.
there was a discussion on a mud dev mailing list regarding how inflation is dealt in WoW. Most sharp inflation occurs when gold farmers constantly bring in a steady stream of gold (and people buying it in the thousands). What WoW does is find the source of the gold income, and does a massive banhammer strike, removing thousands of accounts at once, and billions of gold along with it. I've seen this first hand, when playing the week before and after the massive ban - auction prices for a particular item would be roughly 5000gp range, and one week plummeted down to 1500gp range (which is still a goshdarn large amount of money for an item). Outside of the gold farming banning, to combat regular inflation, blizzard uses and controls the flow of money drains, modifying auction fees to go up and down, and with armor repair costs.
IMO I beleive WoW does a pretty good job controlling inflation. If you REALLY want to talk about a messed up economy, EQ is where it's at. :-P
I know this was meant to be funny, but I'll respond because I'm a dork
IF = Ironforge, the dwarven capital
SW = Stormwind, the human capital
"to hearth" is slang for "to use a hearthstone" (not the bottom of a fireplace) - an item everybody has that is used to teleport from wherever they are in the world to wherever they decide to call home. Most people bind themselves to one of the two capitals.
It *does* give the consumer a less restricted product, but at the cost of making said consumer liable if the "wrong person" ever get hold of those watermarked tunes.
Maybe then people will start treating their digital data with a little more responsibility. When this does occur, people will be less willing to share their files with one another. And if it eventually does escalate to epidemic proportions, let's say someone wrote a little invasive worm that read your files and dumped all your songs into some repository, won't it be more likely that they will go after the source/repository? I'm not about to shed big soppy tears for the poor individual who kept their computer unsecure with hundreds of dollars of music that they purchased legally.
Every over-caffienated insomniac computer nerd should know that MTV runs videos between roughly 5AM and 8AM on weekdays, just as surely as we all know that Comedy Central goes to infomercials at 4AM and Comcast cable internet connections go down momentarily for maintenance at 3AM between Sunday and Monday.
I don't know what's more tragic: the fact that I know that, or the fact that we know that.
Seriously, how do they expect to blend in with nerds, we can smell non-nerds a mile away.
Seriously, the total absence of unshowered nerd BO should be the first clear sign, it feel like a black hole to anybody with a nose. It would have been more fun if all the participants were blindfolded, just head toward the least offending smell! That would have really shocked the reporter, "I don't know how they did it, they were blindfolded, it's like these hackers have magic hacker powers." Hackers on steroids, indeed. (I'm joking, fellas)
Where is BLOODNINJA when you need him?? That would be thoroughly entertaining. Too bad DATELINE would never air that. Where do these underage cybersex channel chats take place anyways? I wonder why nobody's found them and ratted them out.
The only thing they are missing to complete awesomeness is to make them ninja robots. With nunchucks. We could call these machines SWORDCHUCKS.
Who needs an "Army of one" when you can have an "Army of one third"??
That sounds a bit odd. How was the thumb resting on the trackball? Were you controlling the trackball with the tip of your thumb? In resting position, I usually have my thumb sit right against the underside of my knuckle, extending outward - as if I am about to give a handshake.
The big trackballs don't seem to do it for me. By far my most favorite trackball is the basic Logitech Trackman. I've been using it for several years, switching over and trying different trackballs, but I always go back to this one. Your hand is resting comfortably, the ball is perfectly positioned and I have yet to run into a situation where my thumb would be tired - dunno, maybe it's the gamer in me.
As for precision, it's pretty good. I do game with it, some counterstrike, but mostly WoW pvp. What I do find to be a hinderance in sheer gaming performance, however is in certain games where you need fast jerky movement over small areas (an RTS, like starcraft, or when you need to move quickly and click on raid members to heal in WoW), nothing beats a mouse - well, maybe a tablet?
As for work stuff, I've never really had it hinder me when drawing out some artwork using vector graphics. One thing to get used to is clicking and dragging, mostly because users are most comfortable using the weight of their palm to control the mouse while dragging, the way the trackball is designed it doesn't let you do that. So if you're click/dragging something along, sometimes you can accidentally release the button while moving your thumb. Doesn't happen often, but it can occur, mostly in places where you are using a trackball on a nonsolid surface, like the arm of a sofa or on your knee or something. I've had much worse luck trying to click-drag with larger trackballs, but I don't have large fingers. YMMV.
My initial reasoning for getting it was because I didn't have enough desk space. :-P Because of the small amount of real estate, I usually bring it along with my laptop, to coffeeshops, on my bed, or in front of the tv. I hate those laptop trackpads.
I disagree. Most of the time it's just trolling behavior. No big deal. It just happens we notice the event is magnified because of sheer number. Just think of it as MMO trolling.
A significant number of these events are spontaneous, and the majority of them do not pan out. But when they do, hilarity does occur.
The issue is that there will always be that one or two people that takes it to the next step. Outside of the insults and name-calling, you'll always have one idiot thinks it's gonna be really funny when they try to attempt so and so stunt, but is oblivious to the fact that it's against the law. This is what brings in the police. Or Fox News.
/b/, for most of the time is an inversive self-trolling community. So they keep to themselves. But if/when something causes them to mobilize, they will. Like waking up the beast, it really does take a lot to offend Anonymous, and a good number of items that are offensive of Anonymous would be offensive against society. (like inaccurate news reporting and racial hate sites) But it doesn't happen too often, which is why everybody gets bored and starts pulling off pranks to keep busy.
Why are things of entertainment always considered 'uncivilized?' Video games, sports, movies, music. What is considered 'civil' entertainment? MMO's?
Was this in Baltimore? Otakon (anime convention) was taking place this past weekend. I know a number of people at the convention went to the midnight book release
The "early adopters" went HD in 2001. HD is mass-market in 2007: ilo 32" Widescreen LCD HDTV w/ Built-in Digital ATSC/NTSC Tuner $500
Resolution 1366 x 768
Except people actively shopping for HD are mostly looking for units that support 1920 × 1080, not 1280 × 720. Probably the reason why these units are getting cheaper and cheaper is because nobody is really buying them..? Anyways what's the deal with that weird resolution setting? 1366x768?
Methinks GP was going for a knee-jerk reaction by spinning a "big-bad-corporation-takes-rights-away-from-contri butors-again" stance, rather than looking at Rockstar simply trying to cover their own ass.
Yeah I've been contemplating getting a standalone player, but the biggest factor for me getting a ps3 was because I needed to fulfill my gamer quota(I actaully did not buy a single console from the last generation, and this is actaully my first playstation, I'm behind for sure). Plus it was kind of a impulse buy - had some extra cash, purchased me a Wii, and walked into a local gameshop and they had one 60G PS3 left, so I said to myself - why the hell not? The misses was not too happy however :-P
I really wish there were more games out for the PS3, but in truth I've just been too busy lately with RL that I haven't had a chance to sit down a play some games, or I've just been too exhausted from work that all I wanted to do was just sit down and zone out and watch some pretty pictures for about an hour.
It's very likely that I'll be picking up the high profile games, such as GTA4 and the new Metal Gear game, but to be honest I'm most excited about the new Contra game coming out for the DS for my commute - largely due to the homage to old school gaming. Maybe I'm hitting a geek midlife crisis, at least I can tell the misses that it's cheaper than getting a shiny red sports car...
Huh?
Are you saying he should wait a few more years for blu-ray players to lower their costs to around 50 dollars, at a point where BRDVD are going to be phased out in favour of a new technology?
Would it be deemed unreasonable that he could have bought the $1000 dvd player over ten years ago?
I bought a ps3 back in January, mostly for Blu-ray. If you get a chance, try and get the Planet Earth documentary - absolutely stunning. I also bought a dvd copy of Planet Earth for my coworker, and while it still looks good - it's true: you really can't go back once you go HD.
I'm sure the console is nice too :-) In all seriousness, my friends have been coming over, downloading demos like Gran Tourismo and Ninja Gaiden Sigma, and they do indeed look very pretty, I just haven't been interested in playing anything lately.
But as a Blu-ray player, I picked up a bluetooth remote and some movies. I was good to go.
I saw the movie, and the only plausible explanation that it would have been rated R is because of the usage of the word 'shit.' A lot of the actors end up saying that a good number of times, including one soldier saying (not verbatim, just off the top of my head)
"Man oh man, if you can see this shit.."
"Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" - someone being chased by a Decepticon
"Oh..shit" - when one of the transformers dies - mostly for humor effect
There is no nudity, but there are some body shots that emphasize the female figure - which may give have upped the ante for a stronger rating due to sexual content. Possibly.
Some of the violence would would have definately changed the movie rating to R if they were humans instead of robots. For example, there is a beheading, and then there is the scene where Megatron takes Jazz and... kills him - this is where the audience goes "OOOH!" No human blood gore however. Only one human gets impaled, most humans that die are 'behind the curtain' so to speak.. You get the idea.
The movie is indeed kinda campy. Deliberate cliches here and there ("More that meets the eye" and some quotes directly from the original cartoon movie). The 'transformer' sound inserted discreetly (done well, imo), and the oblig. cheesy love story thing going on. It is on the violent side, but imo not any more violent or containing sexual content than WWE Wrestling. So if your kids can stomach WWE, they will probably like this movie. Everybody that I saw it with (who grew up with Transformers) loved it.