Why does everything have to be in the name of SCIENCE? Or is it just because it's to do with space they automatically have to be looking for new elements or finding a lunar cure for cancer? I think playing computer games is 'cool' and I am very well aware that when I'm fragging a few people online I'm not bettering the human race.
However, your concern about pollution is a valid one and I agree that it would suck if we made the moon into a wastepaper basket and chucked random shit at it. That said, it would be kinda cool to be the first person ever to be 'buried' (not literally, unless you were Verne Troyer you'd be too heavy for the cargo weight limit) outside of Earth. Quick, get grandma's ashes!
Why go through all the bother of engineering this new grass when they can just do the following:
1) Engineer a type of Badger/Mole hybrid
2) Change the 'Eats:' variable to weeds
3) Pump up the 'Hunger' variable
4) Give it some of that cool red Terminator vision for scoping out weeds (think 'Target Identified')
5) ???
6) Profit!
A lot of the comments attached to this story are quite negative - What's the point, waste of money and so on. This is more art than a scientific experiment, pretty obvious when you RTFA and see that pretty coloured lights are being used. This would actually be quite an impressive sight, mobile phones or not. Now the whole 'sounds of the sky' thing is a bit silly, you're not going to be hearing anything really amazing, but the article doesn't mention if the phones will have their speakers disabled. If they made it a two way 'experiment' where you could 'talk to the sky' and interact with the other callers, that would be interesting to say the least.
This reminds me about the uproar over Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed modern art piece. I've been to the Tate Modern gallery in London and some pieces are breathtaking and some are, naturally, headscratchers. Of course, I'm no art expert. What pisses me off more than artists who think a single brick is art is those who kneejerk as soon as they hear the words 'Modern Art' and there are quite a lot of people like that. Now I don't know the details about Tracey Emin's bed (I know there are dirty clothes and condoms littered around, not sure if there is food and a remote control) but could it be that she is using a boring, inanimate object to represent all areas of her life - work, sleep, sex, food, entertainment etc.? Again, I'm just speculating here, I don't know exactly what the bed is like and at this point in time I can't be bothered to check (maybe a fellow Slashdotter can fill me in).
If this thing was going on near me I'd check it out to see it and might even contemplate giving it a ring. Does this make me an idiot? (pretty risky posing such a question on this place) All of us do things that appear to have no purpose or value for one reason or another. Look, I know we're all geeks, but logic and art don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Timmy (the little boy) was the murderous personality that is overlooked throughout the whole film. Remember the lame ass ending where he springs up - "Whore's don't get a second chance" and all that? Remember how we see him being responsible for most of the deaths in the 'dream' such as causing the car to crash into his 'dad'? Timmy was the personality that caused the mental patient, Rivers, to commit the original REAL murders plus strangling the REAL ambulance driver at the end of the film. So while Timmy did not actually kill anyone real because he isn't real himself, he is the killer in essence. As most of the film is based around the motel dream sequence, the audience are guessing who out of all those fictional personalities is killing everyone off. It's the kid. Any old fucker can tell that Rivers the mental patient is the one who actually kills for real because the shrinks explain it.
When trailers are engineered to produce 'false scenes'? What I mean is that two different scenes/shots are spliced together in the trailer because they coincidentally run on from eachother or work well together. For example: In the trailer for Men In Black (the first film):
Linda Fiorentino: Let me guess, this is a government conspiracy and you guys are just trying to cover it up, right? (can't remember the exact line)
Absolutely. I've even heard of a trailer for the film Identity that showed footage incriminating the little boy as the murderer. If I'd have seen that before watching the film I'd be pissed! (still thought it was a pile of horseshit Fight Club wannabe though)
4) Parents can shift even more of their responsibility towards an inanimate object.
So the list of entities responsible for bringing up a child and therefore liable when he gets fat, anti social and/or psychopathic now includes:
McDonalds
The police
School teachers
DVD Players
Not exactly what I call win-win.
All little boys want to see boobies. It's the duty of a parent to talk about this with their child, explaining that it's natural to like looking at naked flesh but that it's not the answer to everything. What's not their duty is to flip a switch on a DVD player and then sue the company when, 10 years later, poor Johnny gets confused on prom night because he is greeted with big pink round things instead of black squares that he's grown up on. My entire generation loaned eachother uncensored VHS tapes because of our childish curiosity, and my god didn't we all turn out badly? We're all going round raping girls because of that smut we watched as 10 year olds and swearing like sailors in restaurants, quick somone sue Francis Ford Coppola! This whole thing smacks of finding a problem for a solution.
Also, can someone name me a film that has 'filthy nudity and swear words' that kids would even be able to understand let alone enjoy if this was censored out?
Yeah don't be hard to hard on those record executives. Life can be tough when you can only afford 3 Ferraris this year when you wanted 4, one for each of your houses around the world.:-)
You're right, I suppose it is really simple when the instruction set is identical. I guess it's only taken a paltry 3 years for someone to be able to play Turok Evolution without sound on a PC that has twice the specs of the Xbox. Oh look, I can be a sarcastic cunt too.
People that aren't willing to spend $150 to buy the official console that runs the games properly are, in 90 percent of cases, not going to be willing to shell out $50 for the official game disks and then go home and play them with buggy graphics and/or sound. Especially when they could buy the PC equivalent for a lot of the Xbox games for less and get a proper running game with full multiplayer support etc.
'Pirating the hardware' goes hand in hand with pirating the software. An Xbox emulator won't be causing an explosion in game sales any time soon.
Most likely, this will push virtually all of the borderline Xbox purchasers (who will be buying 10+ games over the ownership duration) to say 'Fuck it, i'll download the emulator onto my PC and get the DVD-Rs cheap off my mate Bob who's into all that piracy stuff'
Just because the Xbox contains the specs (kinda) you listed above, you can't do a straight conversion onto emulation performance. When you emulate something, there is an overhead - likely to be small in the case of an Xbox due to the similar architecture but still... - so you always need more power than the original system you are trying to emulate. The Playstation has a 32 bit processor runnning at 33.87mhz and 2MB onboard RAM. Let's see you emulate the Playstation on a machine that's equivalent to that, hell I'd be impressed if you could do it on a rig with 5 times those specs.
To properly emulate the Xbox you're gonna need at least $500 worth of kit and I think even that figure is being generous.
Swimming is pretty much the only form of exercise I enjoy. I find running really boring and I notice the 'pain' much more. When I'm in the pool I can do 100 lengths at a time without taking a break and I feel more breathless as opposed to sick and stitched, but then again maybe my running technique is plain wrong. Swimming is a fantastic all body workout and is a sort of weight training and running hybrid. Breast stroke is my stroke of choice, sure it takes a lot more effort to cover the same distance as front crawl, but then again isn't that the point? Swimming breast stroke is like performing hundreds of mini horizontal chin ups (pull ups for you insensitive American clods).
The advantages of swimming include:
- Relatively inexpensive. For me the cost is a pair of swimshorts (actually I have 2), goggles plus about GBP 1.50 a session (i'm not even a member - monthly flat fee subscriptions would be far cheaper but oh well). For less than a pint of beer I can get a good block of exercise.
- All over workout as mentioned above
- You get to see mostly fit, hot chicks in skimpy, tight clothing. I'm telling you, when swimming lanes, the camel-toe opportunities make a great carrot on stick for your donkey.
Of course, swimming can be difficult for those that are particularly self conscious. Luckily I still stay trim no matter what I eat or how much exercise I do (metabolism blah blah) but wearing little more than underwear in front of all kinds of people can be daunting for some.
What I find interesting, is that this episode ever aired, as it seems to poke fun (in that subtle, Simpsonesque way) at sham cults like Scientology (if you look at the link, Scientology is listed in the references). If Nancy Cartwright is a Scientologist, how on earth did she ever agree to do the voice acting for that episode? It's like a Christian voice actor willingly working on an episode that, through humour, implys God doesn't exist and those that believe in Him are idiots.
I think to both the poster and anyone of an average or higher intelligence the pun is acknowledged, I just think he was pointing out the fact that a lot of different newspapers were using exactly the same headline. The most memorable headlines are always in a play-on-words style but there's usually a lot of variation between the different rags, from my newspaper reading experience.
Comparing live actors to voice-actors is a tricky thing. Sure, the Friends cast made a ton 'o cash per episode in contrast to the Simpsons crew, but think about the different levels of work involved.
Live actors do everything voice actors do, that is speaking into a mic, plus quite a lot more. They actually have to be presentable for the screen - make up, wardrobe, hair - doing that every time you go to the studio is gonna get annoying. Harry Shearer could turn up to work looking like a bum, go into the studio, talk, and then leave when he's performed his lines. While I have no evidence for this, I speculate that live action is gonna have a lot more takes than voice acting. I'd expect voice actors to be able to nail the correct tone of speech within only a few takes (probably a lot less now that the characters are well established and the actors well practiced). When you have a set, props, extras and six main actors in a shot, I'd expect a lot of scenes to go into double figure takes.
There's also the fact that voice actors' material can be recycled to a certain degree. I wonder how many different kinds of "D'ohs", "Eeeeexcellents" and "Eat my shortses" are on file to be used over and over. Probably not that many. I doubt that any of the trademark sayings have been recorded for many years now. Granted, each episode is not entirely made up of such material, but the point still stands.
I'm not saying that a million greenbacks per episode is necessarily well deserved, but in my opinion, voice acting should be relatively lower paid compared to live acting.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine if people could so that repeatedly to spell something...like chairface did with that laser on the Tick
As long as you're not in charge, sure!
10 kilos of matchstick heads?
Dr. Evil
"A frickin' good eBayer, they sent my "laser" to the moon in frickin' quick time. A++++++++++"
Why does everything have to be in the name of SCIENCE? Or is it just because it's to do with space they automatically have to be looking for new elements or finding a lunar cure for cancer? I think playing computer games is 'cool' and I am very well aware that when I'm fragging a few people online I'm not bettering the human race.
However, your concern about pollution is a valid one and I agree that it would suck if we made the moon into a wastepaper basket and chucked random shit at it. That said, it would be kinda cool to be the first person ever to be 'buried' (not literally, unless you were Verne Troyer you'd be too heavy for the cargo weight limit) outside of Earth. Quick, get grandma's ashes!
Why go through all the bother of engineering this new grass when they can just do the following:
1) Engineer a type of Badger/Mole hybrid
2) Change the 'Eats:' variable to weeds
3) Pump up the 'Hunger' variable
4) Give it some of that cool red Terminator vision for scoping out weeds (think 'Target Identified')
5) ???
6) Profit!
Much easier.
A lot of the comments attached to this story are quite negative - What's the point, waste of money and so on. This is more art than a scientific experiment, pretty obvious when you RTFA and see that pretty coloured lights are being used. This would actually be quite an impressive sight, mobile phones or not. Now the whole 'sounds of the sky' thing is a bit silly, you're not going to be hearing anything really amazing, but the article doesn't mention if the phones will have their speakers disabled. If they made it a two way 'experiment' where you could 'talk to the sky' and interact with the other callers, that would be interesting to say the least.
This reminds me about the uproar over Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed modern art piece. I've been to the Tate Modern gallery in London and some pieces are breathtaking and some are, naturally, headscratchers. Of course, I'm no art expert. What pisses me off more than artists who think a single brick is art is those who kneejerk as soon as they hear the words 'Modern Art' and there are quite a lot of people like that. Now I don't know the details about Tracey Emin's bed (I know there are dirty clothes and condoms littered around, not sure if there is food and a remote control) but could it be that she is using a boring, inanimate object to represent all areas of her life - work, sleep, sex, food, entertainment etc.? Again, I'm just speculating here, I don't know exactly what the bed is like and at this point in time I can't be bothered to check (maybe a fellow Slashdotter can fill me in).
If this thing was going on near me I'd check it out to see it and might even contemplate giving it a ring. Does this make me an idiot? (pretty risky posing such a question on this place) All of us do things that appear to have no purpose or value for one reason or another. Look, I know we're all geeks, but logic and art don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Timmy (the little boy) was the murderous personality that is overlooked throughout the whole film. Remember the lame ass ending where he springs up - "Whore's don't get a second chance" and all that? Remember how we see him being responsible for most of the deaths in the 'dream' such as causing the car to crash into his 'dad'? Timmy was the personality that caused the mental patient, Rivers, to commit the original REAL murders plus strangling the REAL ambulance driver at the end of the film. So while Timmy did not actually kill anyone real because he isn't real himself, he is the killer in essence. As most of the film is based around the motel dream sequence, the audience are guessing who out of all those fictional personalities is killing everyone off. It's the kid. Any old fucker can tell that Rivers the mental patient is the one who actually kills for real because the shrinks explain it.
Click here for a brief summary
Also... This 'amusing' post
When trailers are engineered to produce 'false scenes'? What I mean is that two different scenes/shots are spliced together in the trailer because they coincidentally run on from eachother or work well together. For example: In the trailer for Men In Black (the first film):
Linda Fiorentino: Let me guess, this is a government conspiracy and you guys are just trying to cover it up, right? (can't remember the exact line)
Cut to Will Smith: Psh, naw.
Two different frickin' scenes, I swear!
Absolutely. I've even heard of a trailer for the film Identity that showed footage incriminating the little boy as the murderer. If I'd have seen that before watching the film I'd be pissed! (still thought it was a pile of horseshit Fight Club wannabe though)
Yeah definately, I'm kept awake all night by the eardrum shattering cries of
'Keep your hands inside the train at all times' and
'Roollllll up, two tokens a ride, only two tokens a ride! Sit on the outside, the west side it's the best siiiide!'
Add to that the 10 year old techno music and it's a cacophony!
What about the sound of a baby crying? Even at whisper-level decibels that shit is gonna make you want to commit infanticide!
4) Parents can shift even more of their responsibility towards an inanimate object.
So the list of entities responsible for bringing up a child and therefore liable when he gets fat, anti social and/or psychopathic now includes:
McDonalds
The police
School teachers
DVD Players
Not exactly what I call win-win.
All little boys want to see boobies. It's the duty of a parent to talk about this with their child, explaining that it's natural to like looking at naked flesh but that it's not the answer to everything. What's not their duty is to flip a switch on a DVD player and then sue the company when, 10 years later, poor Johnny gets confused on prom night because he is greeted with big pink round things instead of black squares that he's grown up on. My entire generation loaned eachother uncensored VHS tapes because of our childish curiosity, and my god didn't we all turn out badly? We're all going round raping girls because of that smut we watched as 10 year olds and swearing like sailors in restaurants, quick somone sue Francis Ford Coppola! This whole thing smacks of finding a problem for a solution.
Also, can someone name me a film that has 'filthy nudity and swear words' that kids would even be able to understand let alone enjoy if this was censored out?
Yeah this thing needs some fine tuning. I just tried playing one of my Family Guy DVDs and it censored out Mr. Zucchini Head!
Yeah don't be hard to hard on those record executives. Life can be tough when you can only afford 3 Ferraris this year when you wanted 4, one for each of your houses around the world. :-)
You're right, I suppose it is really simple when the instruction set is identical. I guess it's only taken a paltry 3 years for someone to be able to play Turok Evolution without sound on a PC that has twice the specs of the Xbox. Oh look, I can be a sarcastic cunt too.
People that aren't willing to spend $150 to buy the official console that runs the games properly are, in 90 percent of cases, not going to be willing to shell out $50 for the official game disks and then go home and play them with buggy graphics and/or sound. Especially when they could buy the PC equivalent for a lot of the Xbox games for less and get a proper running game with full multiplayer support etc.
'Pirating the hardware' goes hand in hand with pirating the software. An Xbox emulator won't be causing an explosion in game sales any time soon.
Most likely, this will push virtually all of the borderline Xbox purchasers (who will be buying 10+ games over the ownership duration) to say 'Fuck it, i'll download the emulator onto my PC and get the DVD-Rs cheap off my mate Bob who's into all that piracy stuff'
Do you actually know what emulation is?
Just because the Xbox contains the specs (kinda) you listed above, you can't do a straight conversion onto emulation performance. When you emulate something, there is an overhead - likely to be small in the case of an Xbox due to the similar architecture but still... - so you always need more power than the original system you are trying to emulate. The Playstation has a 32 bit processor runnning at 33.87mhz and 2MB onboard RAM. Let's see you emulate the Playstation on a machine that's equivalent to that, hell I'd be impressed if you could do it on a rig with 5 times those specs.
To properly emulate the Xbox you're gonna need at least $500 worth of kit and I think even that figure is being generous.
It must be true though, he says it happened to his friend! Right?
Swimming is pretty much the only form of exercise I enjoy. I find running really boring and I notice the 'pain' much more. When I'm in the pool I can do 100 lengths at a time without taking a break and I feel more breathless as opposed to sick and stitched, but then again maybe my running technique is plain wrong. Swimming is a fantastic all body workout and is a sort of weight training and running hybrid. Breast stroke is my stroke of choice, sure it takes a lot more effort to cover the same distance as front crawl, but then again isn't that the point? Swimming breast stroke is like performing hundreds of mini horizontal chin ups (pull ups for you insensitive American clods).
The advantages of swimming include:
- Relatively inexpensive. For me the cost is a pair of swimshorts (actually I have 2), goggles plus about GBP 1.50 a session (i'm not even a member - monthly flat fee subscriptions would be far cheaper but oh well). For less than a pint of beer I can get a good block of exercise.
- All over workout as mentioned above
- You get to see mostly fit, hot chicks in skimpy, tight clothing. I'm telling you, when swimming lanes, the camel-toe opportunities make a great carrot on stick for your donkey.
Of course, swimming can be difficult for those that are particularly self conscious. Luckily I still stay trim no matter what I eat or how much exercise I do (metabolism blah blah) but wearing little more than underwear in front of all kinds of people can be daunting for some.
Happy splashings!
My suggestions:
Homer : Jon DiMaggio
Bart : Billy West
Grandpa : Billy West
Marge : Katey Sagal
Lisa : Lauren Tom
Everyone else : Tress Macneille
Anyone else see where I'm taking this?
...is that you?
What I find interesting, is that this episode ever aired, as it seems to poke fun (in that subtle, Simpsonesque way) at sham cults like Scientology (if you look at the link, Scientology is listed in the references). If Nancy Cartwright is a Scientologist, how on earth did she ever agree to do the voice acting for that episode? It's like a Christian voice actor willingly working on an episode that, through humour, implys God doesn't exist and those that believe in Him are idiots.
Anyone ever thought about this?
I need that new diamond encrusted cutlery set.
...
Yacht Plan!
I need that new diamond encrusted cutlery set.
Yacht Plan!
I need that new diamond encrusted cutlery set.
Yacht Plan!
(btw I did get the original reference, worthy of a +5 funny if you ask me)
I think to both the poster and anyone of an average or higher intelligence the pun is acknowledged, I just think he was pointing out the fact that a lot of different newspapers were using exactly the same headline. The most memorable headlines are always in a play-on-words style but there's usually a lot of variation between the different rags, from my newspaper reading experience.
Comparing live actors to voice-actors is a tricky thing. Sure, the Friends cast made a ton 'o cash per episode in contrast to the Simpsons crew, but think about the different levels of work involved. Live actors do everything voice actors do, that is speaking into a mic, plus quite a lot more. They actually have to be presentable for the screen - make up, wardrobe, hair - doing that every time you go to the studio is gonna get annoying. Harry Shearer could turn up to work looking like a bum, go into the studio, talk, and then leave when he's performed his lines. While I have no evidence for this, I speculate that live action is gonna have a lot more takes than voice acting. I'd expect voice actors to be able to nail the correct tone of speech within only a few takes (probably a lot less now that the characters are well established and the actors well practiced). When you have a set, props, extras and six main actors in a shot, I'd expect a lot of scenes to go into double figure takes.
There's also the fact that voice actors' material can be recycled to a certain degree. I wonder how many different kinds of "D'ohs", "Eeeeexcellents" and "Eat my shortses" are on file to be used over and over. Probably not that many. I doubt that any of the trademark sayings have been recorded for many years now. Granted, each episode is not entirely made up of such material, but the point still stands.
I'm not saying that a million greenbacks per episode is necessarily well deserved, but in my opinion, voice acting should be relatively lower paid compared to live acting.