I won't bother discussing how stupid yet another batch of useless TLDs is - much less one specifically for "adult" content (whatever THAT is).
However, it's damned obvious that the reason they don't support the.XXX TLD is because it would be condoning something that the moral majority (the guys who would like Bush to have a third term) finds reprehensible.
If you oppose pornography and adult content, you can't very well go and support having a special area for it. These people don't care about the constitution or freedom of expression or speech or allowing adults to do what they wish. They don't want this material, PERIOD. It's the same reason they oppose medical marijuana. Not because it may not have medical benefits. Not because it can't be used responsibly. Not because it's seriously harmful or will destroy the fabric of marriage between a man and a woman yadda yadda yadda. Simply because it's "not right" and you can't support such things AT ALL or your constituency will eat you alive.
It would be a lot like the Bush administration saying "prostitution is horrid and evil and wrong and.... we're going to support setting up districts in every city where it can be done legally by adults".
So I have to say, I'm stuck on this one. Yet another stupid TLD is retarded. Squeezing all adult content into one place is retarded (by the way, because one or two pages of my site might have adult content, does that mean my friends and family can't access my site AT ALL from work or a hotel or a library?). On the other hand, the reason Bush opposes it is retarded, too. In this case, both "enemies" are enemies of my enemy. Heh.
The comment that was made in the blurb/article about not being able to differentiate between a game and real life is ridiculous. It's inflammatory and biased and baseless. Nobody is making a mental disconnect between the two "places". It's just people with anger issues. Some people get seriously pissed off when someone cuts them off in traffic. They tail them until they can beat the crap out of them. Other people might let their anger get out of hand over a discussion on abortion or religion or the invasion of Iraq or a sports team or getting fouled in a basketball game. Otherwise might do so because they felt screwed over in a game that they'd invested a lot of time in.
I like Firefox. I used it forever and don't anymore, because I switched from Windows, Solaris and Linux to OSX and I don't like how Firefox currently handles on this platform.
I want Firefox to succeed and keep kicking ass.
However, counting the number of downloads is insignificant for anyone other than the guy who runs spreadfirefox. I'm more interested in what percentage of surfers use it. 80 million downloads can easily translate into 5 million users. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded it myself.
Oh well... at least that's 80 million fewer kittens.
I was assigned a task that would seem to be more or less the dream of any programmer:develop a QA management system (ISO9001 compliant, of course) for the whole company.
This completely explodified my sarcasmification detector . . .
We captured the 19 9/11 bombers on video cameras in an airport, too. They still got on an airplane and blew shit up. (They had IDs too, mind you).
See, here's the problem:
+ Cameras do not PREVENT crime. + Valid IDs, RFIDs, national ID cards and so on do not PREVENT crimes. + Police do not PREVENT crime.
+ Cameras help identify what happened or who committed a crime AFTER THE FACT. + Valid IDs help identify the criminals AFTER THE FACT. + Police help capture criminals AFTER THE FACT.
These things all aid in finding and prosecuting criminals, but they don't prevent the crimes or save victims (how many rapes in progress does a phone call to the police prevent?).
Since about the time I decided I was going to go with "Utilitarian Male" decorative motif.:)
And yes, every female that ever enters the abode threatens to (re)decorate the place.
And no, I don't let 'em.:)
And yes - I'm single. And yes - I get laid. And yes - I like being single. And yes - I like spending money on toys rather than dropping $5,000 on a decorative fucking lamp.
We're a government agency and we should be accessible to everyone. If we require MSIE, that means we require that someone have Windows, which is expensive. Not only is it an "endorsement", but it sets an entry-level for a lot of users who may not have or want to spend the money on Windows/IE.
Not to mention that a significant percentage of people don't use IE these days.
I have a couple "buffet" tables (the long brown kind with the folding legs that you see in office buildings) from OfficeMax. You can get them for about $40 each. I stuck them in my living room in front of the widescreen television - about where most people would put their sofa (I dont' have a sofa or loveseat or recliner or anything).
Then, I put my chair in front of the desk.
Then... I do my computer stuff at the desk. And I can watch TV at the same time.
As far as decor.. who cares. Are you Martha Stewart? Unless you're a millionaire, your home is never going to look like anything more than a cheap regular-people home with matching IKEA products. Go for spare. Go for sparse. Go for utilitarian.
I don't care that most people think it's weird that I have no dining table or seating of any sort (other than an office chair). I have a TV and a desk in the living room, because I like it and I can do everything I want (except sleep) in the same room.
As for drawers... just drop $40 on one of those plastic rubbermaid shelving units on rollers that you can get at Staples or OfficeMax. Put it next to yoru $40 buffet tables. Now you not only have tons of storage, but you can move it if you need to.
Why is it acceptable to check out books from the library that are nothing more than photographic "art" books filled with naked lesbians tying each other up (or hell, even Madonna's "Sex" book) but it's not acceptable to view it online?!
Anyway, take computers out of the library. have a few to replace the card catalogue, but other than that there are other places you can go for internet access and it would alleviate the whole "censorship" issue.
Savage was good, but I honestly got bored of it quickly. The command top-down mode was useless half the time because people didn't really pay attention to the guy or the guy would have no clue what he was doing.
This demo looks sweet, but it was incredibly choppy. Was it like that for everyone else? I've never had a video play like that on this box so I'm pretty sure it's the video itself...
To be frank, I would like games to be free of advertising. Can't I have just one fucking place in the entire universe where I can escape for a couple hours from the media and advertising and politics and everything else? Please, I want as little of the "real world" in here as possible.
And actually, I would prefer creative pseudo-products to real life ingame advertising. I'd rather that be a SLURM vending machine than a Coke vending machine.
I'm less interested in "character development" than I am in making sure that every ethnicity, race, socio-economic, religious and political group is properly and fairly represented in each game. Nothing detracts from my enjoyment of Tetris more than seeing more blue blocks than red. It just seems like such a horrid injustice and rips me from the enthralling gameplay.
Do you suppose that being enslaved for centuries and deprived of education, freedom, literacy and prosperity could have anything to do with it? Do you think that maybe a group of people that have only been relatively "equal" for a few decades might have a bit of catching up to do compared to those who have traditionally had an upper hand based on their race, heritage and family fortune?
The difference between black and white is about 15 IQ points and the average black american's IQ has raised by about 16 points since the late 1940s. This points entirely to a difference in opportunities and nurturing and resources rather than some idiotic idea that one race is "smarter" than another.
But look up IQ scores based on race- you'll see a trend.
Yes. The trend is that there is no inherent difference in intellect and that over time, scores are evening out as the era of segregation and slavery slips behind us in this country and parents improve their children's lot in life and, thus, their potential for opportunities.
One thing I don't want are advertisements added into a game that I've already bought. If i pay $50 for a copy of SWAT4 and then you later introduce advertising in them as part of a patch (in other words, suffer all of these bugs and glitches or get them fixed and deal with advertising in-game), I've been deceived. Perhaps I would not have bought the game in the first place, if I'd known about all the ingame ads. This is underhanded and sleazy.
Advertising in most games is done very poorly. Consider all of the Tom Cruise "WAR OF THE WORLDS" advertising in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It just looked lame and out of place. Why would a giant oil tanker in the middle east be plastered all over the bathrooms and kitchens and offices and bedrooms and break rooms with posters of a movie that was a year away from being released - or any movie at all?
Sorry, but I don't consider advertising in a videogame I've bought as being any more acceptable than having classified ads every five pages in a book I've bought or commercials in between tracks on a CD I've just bought.
Not to be that "her knees are too pointy" guy or anything, but if she's the "Amanda Congdon" girl that someone else here linked to, I don't see what the big deal is.
She's attractive, certainly. But she's kind of the typical television/women's magazine bland beauty. You know, nothing special. Face looks like every other famous "hot" chick's face. Typical hot chick body.
I like my chicks a bit more on the interesting side. I mean, look at her - she doesn't even seem to have a style unless "whatever I copied off of the latest copy of Cosmopolitan magazine" counts as a style.
But if she's like an uber-brain, that's different. I've never really found Gena Davis all that good looking, but that whole Mensa thing definitely helps.
I'd still take Morgan Webb or that faux-punk blonde chick from the same network (G4TV I think) over this rocketboom girl. Or even the hottie in the yellow outfit from Cowboy Bebop.
But at least we'll still have Fox News, MTV Real World and movie theaters. And that's all that really matters. As long as we get to keep indulging in entertainment, we'll tolerate anything - include trading all of our privacy for theoretical security.
First thing: We need to stop calling everything a "blog". If it's one person's viewpoints, it's a blog. If it's a lot of people participating together, it's a blog. If it's a listing of updated events, it's a blog. Whatever happened to things just being a website?!
Second thing: You pointed out a couple of sites out of how many hundreds of millions of personal sites? For every one valuable thriving community site that stands above the crowd and represents the rare cream, I can show you half a million live journals, a hundred thousand blogger journals and a few hundred thousand personal traditional websites.
Blogs remove the difficulty of entry, yet again. Imagine how much more crappy television would be (unthinkable, I know) if the barrier for entry was "you have to have a pulse and a camera" and any drivel you could think of putting together would automatically be accepted, produced and broadcast?!
And I don't buy it when people excuse their personal blog by saying "oh, it's just for me and my family" or "it's just for me and my friends". First - if that's true, then why is it open to the public? And regardless of that, why can't you pick up the phone and talk to your friends and family? I mean, presuming they aren't in the same city you are.
Nobody said every blog was shit. Just the enormous majority. Maybe five nines. And that just goes to prove the entire point both myself (and TBL) have offered. There is too much crap. And, worse, the crap is ENCOURAGED. After all, do you think Google or Live Journal cares if your blog has any real content? No. They just care that you're another account and that you'll link to some friends and you'll generate more eyeballs amongst yourselves.
Something about "grey goo" fits in somewhere here.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't bother discussing how stupid yet another batch of useless TLDs is - much less one specifically for "adult" content (whatever THAT is).
.XXX TLD is because it would be condoning something that the moral majority (the guys who would like Bush to have a third term) finds reprehensible.
.... we're going to support setting up districts in every city where it can be done legally by adults".
However, it's damned obvious that the reason they don't support the
If you oppose pornography and adult content, you can't very well go and support having a special area for it. These people don't care about the constitution or freedom of expression or speech or allowing adults to do what they wish. They don't want this material, PERIOD. It's the same reason they oppose medical marijuana. Not because it may not have medical benefits. Not because it can't be used responsibly. Not because it's seriously harmful or will destroy the fabric of marriage between a man and a woman yadda yadda yadda. Simply because it's "not right" and you can't support such things AT ALL or your constituency will eat you alive.
It would be a lot like the Bush administration saying "prostitution is horrid and evil and wrong and
So I have to say, I'm stuck on this one. Yet another stupid TLD is retarded. Squeezing all adult content into one place is retarded (by the way, because one or two pages of my site might have adult content, does that mean my friends and family can't access my site AT ALL from work or a hotel or a library?). On the other hand, the reason Bush opposes it is retarded, too. In this case, both "enemies" are enemies of my enemy. Heh.
Two words: COMBUSTIBLE PISS
Um... VoIP has that E911 stuff, too.
OMGWTF! Google sponsored one wi-fi hotspot in a tech-heavy city! This must mean they plan to roll out free wifi all over the country!!!!
I am failing tos ee the logic.
No.
Some of us just don't RTFA.
The comment that was made in the blurb/article about not being able to differentiate between a game and real life is ridiculous. It's inflammatory and biased and baseless. Nobody is making a mental disconnect between the two "places". It's just people with anger issues. Some people get seriously pissed off when someone cuts them off in traffic. They tail them until they can beat the crap out of them. Other people might let their anger get out of hand over a discussion on abortion or religion or the invasion of Iraq or a sports team or getting fouled in a basketball game. Otherwise might do so because they felt screwed over in a game that they'd invested a lot of time in.
I like Firefox. I used it forever and don't anymore, because I switched from Windows, Solaris and Linux to OSX and I don't like how Firefox currently handles on this platform.
I want Firefox to succeed and keep kicking ass.
However, counting the number of downloads is insignificant for anyone other than the guy who runs spreadfirefox. I'm more interested in what percentage of surfers use it. 80 million downloads can easily translate into 5 million users. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded it myself.
Oh well... at least that's 80 million fewer kittens.
I was assigned a task that would seem to be more or less the dream of any programmer:develop a QA management system (ISO9001 compliant, of course) for the whole company.
This completely explodified my sarcasmification detector . . .
We captured the 19 9/11 bombers on video cameras in an airport, too. They still got on an airplane and blew shit up. (They had IDs too, mind you).
See, here's the problem:
+ Cameras do not PREVENT crime.
+ Valid IDs, RFIDs, national ID cards and so on do not PREVENT crimes.
+ Police do not PREVENT crime.
+ Cameras help identify what happened or who committed a crime AFTER THE FACT.
+ Valid IDs help identify the criminals AFTER THE FACT.
+ Police help capture criminals AFTER THE FACT.
These things all aid in finding and prosecuting criminals, but they don't prevent the crimes or save victims (how many rapes in progress does a phone call to the police prevent?).
Since about the time I decided I was going to go with "Utilitarian Male" decorative motif. :)
:)
And yes, every female that ever enters the abode threatens to (re)decorate the place.
And no, I don't let 'em.
And yes - I'm single.
And yes - I get laid.
And yes - I like being single.
And yes - I like spending money on toys rather than dropping $5,000 on a decorative fucking lamp.
And the best argument of all:
We're a government agency and we should be accessible to everyone. If we require MSIE, that means we require that someone have Windows, which is expensive. Not only is it an "endorsement", but it sets an entry-level for a lot of users who may not have or want to spend the money on Windows/IE.
Not to mention that a significant percentage of people don't use IE these days.
I have a couple "buffet" tables (the long brown kind with the folding legs that you see in office buildings) from OfficeMax. You can get them for about $40 each. I stuck them in my living room in front of the widescreen television - about where most people would put their sofa (I dont' have a sofa or loveseat or recliner or anything).
Then, I put my chair in front of the desk.
Then... I do my computer stuff at the desk. And I can watch TV at the same time.
As far as decor.. who cares. Are you Martha Stewart? Unless you're a millionaire, your home is never going to look like anything more than a cheap regular-people home with matching IKEA products. Go for spare. Go for sparse. Go for utilitarian.
I don't care that most people think it's weird that I have no dining table or seating of any sort (other than an office chair). I have a TV and a desk in the living room, because I like it and I can do everything I want (except sleep) in the same room.
As for drawers... just drop $40 on one of those plastic rubbermaid shelving units on rollers that you can get at Staples or OfficeMax. Put it next to yoru $40 buffet tables. Now you not only have tons of storage, but you can move it if you need to.
Who cares? Either way it's only about 700% faster than my $3,300 17" Powerbook.
Dear god, x86 based OSX can't come fast enough.
Why is it acceptable to check out books from the library that are nothing more than photographic "art" books filled with naked lesbians tying each other up (or hell, even Madonna's "Sex" book) but it's not acceptable to view it online?!
Anyway, take computers out of the library. have a few to replace the card catalogue, but other than that there are other places you can go for internet access and it would alleviate the whole "censorship" issue.
Savage was good, but I honestly got bored of it quickly. The command top-down mode was useless half the time because people didn't really pay attention to the guy or the guy would have no clue what he was doing.
This demo looks sweet, but it was incredibly choppy. Was it like that for everyone else? I've never had a video play like that on this box so I'm pretty sure it's the video itself...
To be frank, I would like games to be free of advertising. Can't I have just one fucking place in the entire universe where I can escape for a couple hours from the media and advertising and politics and everything else? Please, I want as little of the "real world" in here as possible.
And actually, I would prefer creative pseudo-products to real life ingame advertising. I'd rather that be a SLURM vending machine than a Coke vending machine.
I'm less interested in "character development" than I am in making sure that every ethnicity, race, socio-economic, religious and political group is properly and fairly represented in each game. Nothing detracts from my enjoyment of Tetris more than seeing more blue blocks than red. It just seems like such a horrid injustice and rips me from the enthralling gameplay.
globally-by-regionally
What the fuck does that mean?! Is that like "way over right here"?
Or not.
Do you suppose that being enslaved for centuries and deprived of education, freedom, literacy and prosperity could have anything to do with it? Do you think that maybe a group of people that have only been relatively "equal" for a few decades might have a bit of catching up to do compared to those who have traditionally had an upper hand based on their race, heritage and family fortune?
The difference between black and white is about 15 IQ points and the average black american's IQ has raised by about 16 points since the late 1940s. This points entirely to a difference in opportunities and nurturing and resources rather than some idiotic idea that one race is "smarter" than another.
But look up IQ scores based on race- you'll see a trend.
Yes. The trend is that there is no inherent difference in intellect and that over time, scores are evening out as the era of segregation and slavery slips behind us in this country and parents improve their children's lot in life and, thus, their potential for opportunities.
One thing I don't want are advertisements added into a game that I've already bought. If i pay $50 for a copy of SWAT4 and then you later introduce advertising in them as part of a patch (in other words, suffer all of these bugs and glitches or get them fixed and deal with advertising in-game), I've been deceived. Perhaps I would not have bought the game in the first place, if I'd known about all the ingame ads. This is underhanded and sleazy.
Advertising in most games is done very poorly. Consider all of the Tom Cruise "WAR OF THE WORLDS" advertising in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It just looked lame and out of place. Why would a giant oil tanker in the middle east be plastered all over the bathrooms and kitchens and offices and bedrooms and break rooms with posters of a movie that was a year away from being released - or any movie at all?
Sorry, but I don't consider advertising in a videogame I've bought as being any more acceptable than having classified ads every five pages in a book I've bought or commercials in between tracks on a CD I've just bought.
She said STICK.
Not twig.
Not to be that "her knees are too pointy" guy or anything, but if she's the "Amanda Congdon" girl that someone else here linked to, I don't see what the big deal is.
She's attractive, certainly. But she's kind of the typical television/women's magazine bland beauty. You know, nothing special. Face looks like every other famous "hot" chick's face. Typical hot chick body.
I like my chicks a bit more on the interesting side. I mean, look at her - she doesn't even seem to have a style unless "whatever I copied off of the latest copy of Cosmopolitan magazine" counts as a style.
But if she's like an uber-brain, that's different. I've never really found Gena Davis all that good looking, but that whole Mensa thing definitely helps.
I'd still take Morgan Webb or that faux-punk blonde chick from the same network (G4TV I think) over this rocketboom girl. Or even the hottie in the yellow outfit from Cowboy Bebop.
Oh god . . . I'm so pathetic.
Don't be stupid. We will never use electric cars. We'll just change DST to all 12 months and extend it by another hour per day.
But at least we'll still have Fox News, MTV Real World and movie theaters. And that's all that really matters. As long as we get to keep indulging in entertainment, we'll tolerate anything - include trading all of our privacy for theoretical security.
First thing: We need to stop calling everything a "blog". If it's one person's viewpoints, it's a blog. If it's a lot of people participating together, it's a blog. If it's a listing of updated events, it's a blog. Whatever happened to things just being a website?!
Second thing: You pointed out a couple of sites out of how many hundreds of millions of personal sites? For every one valuable thriving community site that stands above the crowd and represents the rare cream, I can show you half a million live journals, a hundred thousand blogger journals and a few hundred thousand personal traditional websites.
Blogs remove the difficulty of entry, yet again. Imagine how much more crappy television would be (unthinkable, I know) if the barrier for entry was "you have to have a pulse and a camera" and any drivel you could think of putting together would automatically be accepted, produced and broadcast?!
And I don't buy it when people excuse their personal blog by saying "oh, it's just for me and my family" or "it's just for me and my friends". First - if that's true, then why is it open to the public? And regardless of that, why can't you pick up the phone and talk to your friends and family? I mean, presuming they aren't in the same city you are.
Nobody said every blog was shit. Just the enormous majority. Maybe five nines. And that just goes to prove the entire point both myself (and TBL) have offered. There is too much crap. And, worse, the crap is ENCOURAGED. After all, do you think Google or Live Journal cares if your blog has any real content? No. They just care that you're another account and that you'll link to some friends and you'll generate more eyeballs amongst yourselves.
Something about "grey goo" fits in somewhere here.