Federal Security Service in Moscow reports that the Washington sniper is already in Moscow and currently is moving in the direction of theatrical centre on Dubrovka.
NEW! "Nord-Ost"!!! Now on video!!!
Movsaev: "I came with my family to visit my relative in Moscow. He promised to buy us tickets to Nord-Ost. He didn't, so we had to go without the tickets..."
Only at the "Nord-Ost" musical! For the first time in history a real plane with real terrorists lands on the scene! [1]
Because of some tens of bandits who took the weapons in their hands, hundreds of thousands of other Chechens will suffer, who have their weapons hidden in caches.
A few months after. A foreign journalist asks Vladimir Putin: "What happened with the hostages in Moscow?" Putin replies: "They died." [2]
It's like always in Russia. They produce a musicle, but it turns out to be a tragedy!
Today an unknown judoist moistened 45 terrorists in the toilet [3] of the theatre on Dubrovka. "I am happy that I finally got a chance to do that" he told to the journalists, after which he jumped on the tram's footboard and disappeared. [4]
The terrorists are under the lead of the infamous Chechen warlord Zahvat Nordostov. [5]
1 - It really was widely advertised that a real plane would land on the scene in the end of the musical.
2 - plays on a similar Putin's reply to the question about "Kursk". When asked what happened with the submarine, he replied "it sank".
3 - plays on the famous Putin's promise (live on TV) to moisten (Russian slang for "kill") terrorists even in the toilets. Putin is also a judoist.
4 - plays on the famous Soviet kid's poem by Marshak about a man who saved a little girl from a burning house, but then disappeared because of modesty, and now he can't even be found by the combined efforts of firefighters, police and photographers.:)
5 - untranslatable.:) "Zahvat Nordostov" means "capture of Nord-Osts" and sounds like a Chechen name (compare with "Movsar Mashadov" or something like that. This plays on an older joke about made-up names of Chechen terrorists, such as Ushat Pomoev (bucket of slops), Rekord Nadoev (record milk yields), Podryv Ustoev (undermining of moral principles), Ugon Harleev (hot-wiring Harley-Davidson bikes), or Parad Urodov (freak parade).:)
Here are some plays on the names of other nationalities: Bulgarian: Pobelka Potolkov (whitewashing of the ceilings) Polish singer: Stojka Rakova (doggystyle position) Polish boxer: Vyn'ka Meloch' (take the coins from your pockets) Azerbaijanian musician: Obrygaj-ugly (belch in the corners) Vietnamese chess player: Pen' Pnem (dumb as a stump) Greek: Slunidopolu (slobber to the floor) Japanese farmer: Nakosika Sukasena (mow some hay, bitch) Japanese geisha: Atomuli Yadalato (did I fuck the right guy?) Japanese doctor: Komuto Herovato (somone feels like shit right now) Japanese racer: Toyama Tokanava (first a hole, then a ditch)
5) The general lack of plots involving easily predictable tech, like nanotech, ubiquitous computing, and radical bioengineering of human flesh.
The only explanation that I can think of is that movie producers are too stupid and generally uninformed about the development of science and technology that they can't comprehend these ideas. There are many literary works, by Vinge and the likes that would allow some really outstanding visual effects and amazing plots (even after they are butchered by Hollywood screenwriters), but still, noone seems to be interested. The experimentation that we have seen in sci-fi movies in the past is simply no longer there. Thinking of the recent sci-fi I can only name two original (relatively) ideas - 13th Floor (and later The Matrix) and Open Your Eyes (later Vanilla Sky)... The rest is just a rehash of old plots.
There is a difference between the actions of Russian soldiers towards the enemies in Chechnya and the actions of civilians in, say, Moscow towards Chechens living there. There are many documented cases of kidnapping, murder, torture, rape and enslavement of Russian civilians by Chechens. This is not just a figment of my imagination, this is reality. Go and ask some Western journalists who've been there, preferably those who managed to leave the place as a whole and not in a coffin. Compared to that the things that Americans face in Iraq or Israelis face in Palestina are peanuts. So it is understandable that individual Russian soldiers (especially if you consider the sorry state of the Russian army) would sometimes not treat the Chechens lightly. Still, this is surely not the government policy and as far as I am aware, there is no racial profiling in the country. Heck, one of the candidates in Russian presidential elections was a Chechen!
Sorry, I was more concerned about the HTML markup and didn't pay enough attention to the wording of my post. Of course, Russians do not treat all Chechens like criminals and enemies, that's reserved for the bandits (sometimes called "rebels") only. I would even go as far as to say that the attitude towards Chechens in Russia is better than the general attitude towards Arabs was in the USA after 9/11 (although I do not have enough information to make a truly objective comparison).
Just recently a Russian officer, colonel Budanov was convicted of murder. He killed a captured female Chechen sniper. After a lengthy trial it seems that he will serve the sentence, unlike those Americans who ran over Korean girls or those who bombed Canadian soldiers (of course, I do realise it's anekdotal evidence and these cases are not representative of the general picture).
So the correct wording should be: "We treat all Chechens like humans, and some Chechens (kidnappers, murderers and terrorists) like criminals and enemies."
Yes, I haven't spent years developing so called "IP". But I have already made some useful stuff, and I am happy with others using it for free and in any way they like.
But this is not really relevant. Of course, many people would like to have extra control over their ideas and creations. But there is no reason to grant them this control. A game developer would like to dictate to others that they can't hack his games. A console manufacturer would like to dictate to others that they can't mod the consoles. A software developer would like to dictate to others how they can use the software and what other products are allowed to interact with his software. A hardware manufacturer would like to dictate to others what sorts of ink-cartriges they can use. A car manufacturer would like to follow suit with selecting what brands of oil and gas the drivers are allowed to use.
YEAH! Big news. People would like to control others, but usually they have no moral right to do it. This game developer is no exception. In a free world people should be ultimately free to do anything that doesn't directly harm other people. That includes making nude patches for games. That includes taking my photo and photoshopping it onto the goatse.cx guy. No, I would not particularly like it. Yes, you have the moral right to do it.
The disturbing feeling that I get when looking at the screenshots is not because I am uncomfortable with the basic premise of Manhunt. No, it's because the screenshots look quite dated. IMO PS2 should be killed as soon as possible, because graphics innovation is no less important than style and gameplay. I don't really look forward to playing another GTA game with the same blocky characters and generally crappy and undetailed environment. GTA3 was cool, Vice City is tolerable, but San-Angeles is going to be crap.:( Rockstar, why do you have to spoil the great gameplay with outdated visuals?!
I think there is already a game in development based on Silence of the Lambs.
BTW, do you see a problem with movies like Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, etc.? Why is it OK to make a film about killers, but not a simulator of them?
Market works by trying different things. There is currently no simulator of ballet dancers, but I can bet someone someday will eventually make one. If it's popular, another niche will soon be filled with various dancing simulators.:) You don't want to play this trash? Don't buy it. Others like it - they are free to buy and play it. Don't push you values on everyone else.
People have a perverted concept of risk. Risk is not inherently bad. Risk in game development is expected deviation in the value of future cash flows from their expected value. Rez might have been a flop, a moderately or even widely successful game. Calculate the expected sales. Ignore the unsystematic risk (risk related to this specific project that can be diversified by having a number of different games in development). Now you have an idea of what kind of profit this game will bring you. Spend on marketing accordingly. Don't just say "it's risky" - if you are working on a game, it means you expect it to be profitable. And if you expect profit, no matter what the risk is, you must spend on PR, marketing, advertisement, etc.
I can understand why a poor-quality game like RTCW: Enemy Territory (the developers decided it was not good enough, not me) would not be advertised even if it was released commercially. You don't expect any profits, development expenses are sunk cost, and you don't think marketing will help sell this crap, so you simply don't want to lose more money. But why plan from the very beginning that a risky game will have a small marketing budget, I don't know...
If someone does not want their IP being fiddled around with, he can (I don't know how to put it politely) stick this IP up his ass.:) When he released it to the public, ideologically (not legally) it becomes some sort of public domain and people can be expected to build on that. Yes, there is copyright, which is (ideologically) a short-term monopoly on commercial exploitation (a non-perfect solution to the real problem of large-scale commercial piracy), but it doesn't give the author (ideologically, again) other forms of control over his ideas and creations.
In summary, it's you, my American friend, who might really need black humour soon. After all, it's highly unlikely that the situation in Russia will become worse.:)
OK, here are a few of those that are shorter and easier to translate:
USA after September 11: Americans hang out American flags, Arabs burn American flags, Jews sew and sell American flags.
After the 9/11 Yasser Arafat expressed his condolences to president Bush and all American people. In reply president Bush promised to express his condolences to Yasser Arafat and all Arab people.
1. A group of American financiers announced a reward for the head of Bin Laden - 1 billion US dollars. 2. A group of cloning researchers urges Bin Laden to contact them for mutually beneficial cooperation.
What is the difference between Afganistan and the USA? One is a savage and barbarian terrorist state ruled by illegitimate government - a gang of bandits relying on violence, a country populated by bloodthirsty fanatics, ready to kill men, women and children everywhere in the world, to stop at no crimes against moralilty and humanity, only because they hold views on life or opinions on any issue slightly different from those that these barbarians share at the moment. Another one is a small country in Central Asia.
After the 9/11 events in New-York, Americans learned what "fear" means. After Tsereteli built on the Ground Zero a monument to the victims of the terrorist act, Americans learned what "horror" means.
Pn September 11 Ben Laden sits in his undeground shelter in Afganistan mountains. The phone calls and when Ben Laden lifts the receiver, he hears: "Ben, this is Danila. Ben, I need help!"
Frankly, I don't give a shit about negative moderation.:) Actually I enjoy it as much as positive one. On an unrelated note, what happened to people that they can't enjoy a little bit of black humour now and then?
Too bad that you probably don't speak Russian, because on the largest Russian joke site (which is, BTW, the 8th most visited site in Russia) there is a special page listing the archives of special joke issues related to events such as
Iraqi war
Columbia disaster
Nord-Ost terrorist attack in Moscow
Tragic death of Sergey Bodrov in glacier
Collision of Tu-154 and Boeing-757 over Switzerland
Closing of independed TV channel "TV-6" by president Putin
September 11 (the funniest of all, judging by the number of jokes)
and other important events
In Russia we do enjoy black humour and we find it important to laugh about the problems that we (or others) face. This is an important quality for the nation that faced as much turmoil in the past century as Russia did.
If you cannot put up with that, go get some sensitivity training or read a book on cross-cultural issues, you insensitive clod.
1) Windows OS is much more prevalent on the net than any other kind of Windows. So a content-neutral search engine should find the OS-related links first. 2) MSN actually finds some Windows OS - related pages - Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, WinXP for Tablet PC and others. The problem is that the most relevant page (Windows Family Home Page) is not listed first. 3) Information about Satyajit Ray and Jupiter is not terribly relevant to "windows" search term. Heck, on the page about Ray the word is included only once in the ALT parameter of one of the images. The page about Jupiter is marginally better because "windows" is used in the title, domain name and one link (to the "Windows Team"). How on Earth is that considered more relevant than the main Windows page is a mystery to me.
P.S. BTW, most search engines suck at general searches, like "windows", including Google. Links to WinZip, WinAmp and Adobe Acrobat probably shouldn't be included on the first page. Still, the biggest advantage of Google (in addition to "it just works" concept) is moderate amount of ads, clearly separate from search results. I've been using only Google and Yandex (A "Russian Google" - a quality and innovative search engine, also with cool minimalist page) and already forgot about the nightmare of "sponsored links"...
Search for Windows at MSN is only marginally better. The poster of the story overlooked that first 4-6 results are "Featured sites", which (as well as "sponsored") is the marketese for "advertisements". Amazon will happily sell to MSN searchers practically everything. Heck, the second result for shit offers that I "Purchase Expensive Shit" on Amazon. I shit you not.
There are other gems at the MSN, like a "featured" result, suggesting that "MSN 8 offers a better browsing experience: Try it free for 60 days." when you search for netscape or gnu.org results starting after 12th position when you search for gnu. The first result, of course, being the famous E-gnu.com African Safari Travel...
MSN (despite their claims to the contrary) is a mix between marketing crap and inferior technology. Thanks, I will pass.
Hello, indeed! I guess, if the "credit-sizedness" requirement is lifted, then the IBM PC computer, introduced in 1981, would also qualify.:) And we can go even further in history, to the mainframes and even further still...
Believe me, we (people outside UK) do and we are really grateful to people like you (no kidding). Tuning to BBC World is literally like a stream of fresh air in almost all countries. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for us to support BBC, except to occasionally buy some DVDs, but Britain gets our most sincere gratitude.
On an unrelated note, Global Business just started airing (and webcasting) the first episode of the 3-series programme about Russian business that I helped to make.:)
Not only they can go fist themselves, this also shows how BBC might be able to almost singlehandedly destroy American near-monopoly on modern videocontent. A lot of exciting things might follow (of course, they might not) - the world might switch to mostly public-funded entertainment, news, etc., China (or some other country) might do the same with software, funding a lot of software development and releasing it for free to piss off Uncle Sam. Later on Japan might release for free its designs for nanobot assemblers...
Sadly, I don't see how RIAA's monopoly on crappy music can be destroyed... It looks like there is no replacement for N'Sync and Britney Spears on the horison...
If they will not use a restrictive licence/format (and it looks promising so far), there can be an open project to redistribute the BBC content world-wide using P2P. Someone in the UK can set up gateways between the BBC-enabled UK Internet and the rest of the world, downloading materials and making them available on the P2P networks, where they can spread as much as there is demand.
Hard drives are faster, take up less space, and are very cost competative with CD's. I am unclear why CD's are popular with the tech savvy crowd. It's an inferior storage technology.
CDs have been much cheaper for most of the time. Only now have they really became cost competitive with a price of 1Gb dropping below 1$. I bought my PC one year ago with one 80Gb drive. After a few months I added another 80Gb (to store all movies I dl-ed). Then a 120Gb one. 3 drives - that's the maximum you can have in a standard case, but now I can easily upgrade all the disks to 160Gb or larger (and do the same in another year). I still do CD-RW backups (not CD-R), but only to have the files safe in case of HDD failure, not to store them for years on CDs.
Most people don't have a lot of valuable files (by valuable I mean those files that should not be lost under any circumstances) - at most a couple of gigabytes. So a couple of CD-RWs would work wonders for regular backups. If you want extra safety, keep the previous copy or two as well.
But we have to see the bright side in it. Once the infrastructure for electronic voting is in place (including also Internet-based voting), we can hope that it will be used for more direct participation of the citizens. You can't move to direct democracy until you have the infrastructure, but one you have it (and if you avoid the possibility of a dictatorship along the way), there are only good things ahead.
I think I can. From what I've learned during my stay in Japan, it seems that the Japanese attraction to technology is actually pretty normal thing. This leads me to believe that it's Americans and Europeans that are an "abomination" in this regard. Westerners do not think about the future enough and while there might be hundreds of robotics research programs in the US universities, the general public doesn't have a clue. Not so in Japan. And also, while in the US sci-fi is a prerogative of a relatively well educated minority, in Japan it's much more widespread (I am not talking here about the number of readers or book circulation numbers, but about the prevalence of certain sci-fi ideas in the national menthality).
A similar example is the issue of GM-food. The question is not why Americans are so advanced that they eat it, the real question is why Europeans are so backwards and stupid that they don't.
Being scared of progress is not a normal thing today, in the XXI century. Embracing it is normal and in general beneficial for the societies that do it.
Sorry, don't believe that. A few locations in memory are easier to change than thousands of paper ballots. Hanging chads notwithstanding...
Depends on your definition of "easy to tamper with". Apparently, it's easier to change a single paper ballot than a single electronic ballot, but once you can change one electronic ballot, you probably can just as easily change them all, which is not true for paper.
So while the expected number of tampered ballots might be similar (I am not saying it is), electronic machines are more risky. The question is whether it's compensated with cost-savings and may be somewhat lower expected number of tamperings.
I might be wrong here, but my guess is that most young males (20 years old) today play games and have no problem with understanding how to do it. And the young kids don't have a problem starting either. Give Unreal Tournament 2003 to a 5-year old and he will start blasting the bots right away.:)
The problem is with those adults who never really started playing. I started playing FPSes from Wolf3D, switched to Doom, then to Quake, then to Half-Life. I'm not at a nonplus when I see another FPS. The games evolved together with the gamers. The question is - can we make a game with Doom3 graphics technology and with Wolf3D controls and gameplay?
Does it make sense? Can you attract a 30 year old investment banker who never played games (and, like you say, is afraid to look like an idiot, even when noone is looking at him) with Pong rendered in glorious 3D, with dynamic lightning, adaptable AI and what not?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, AC, you need a Slashdot account, and preferably no longer than a 5-digit one.
Sure. It's definitely offtopic, but what can I do?
:)
:) "Zahvat Nordostov" means "capture of Nord-Osts" and sounds like a Chechen name (compare with "Movsar Mashadov" or something like that. This plays on an older joke about made-up names of Chechen terrorists, such as Ushat Pomoev (bucket of slops), Rekord Nadoev (record milk yields), Podryv Ustoev (undermining of moral principles), Ugon Harleev (hot-wiring Harley-Davidson bikes), or Parad Urodov (freak parade). :)
http://anekdot.ru/an/an0210/f021025.html
Federal Security Service in Moscow reports that the Washington sniper is already in Moscow and currently is moving in the direction of theatrical centre on Dubrovka.
NEW! "Nord-Ost"!!! Now on video!!!
Movsaev: "I came with my family to visit my relative in Moscow. He promised to buy us tickets to Nord-Ost. He didn't, so we had to go without the tickets..."
Only at the "Nord-Ost" musical! For the first time in history a real plane with real terrorists lands on the scene! [1]
Because of some tens of bandits who took the weapons in their hands, hundreds of thousands of other Chechens will suffer, who have their weapons hidden in caches.
A few months after.
A foreign journalist asks Vladimir Putin: "What happened with the hostages in Moscow?"
Putin replies: "They died." [2]
It's like always in Russia. They produce a musicle, but it turns out to be a tragedy!
Today an unknown judoist moistened 45 terrorists in the toilet [3] of the theatre on Dubrovka. "I am happy that I finally got a chance to do that" he told to the journalists, after which he jumped on the tram's footboard and disappeared. [4]
The terrorists are under the lead of the infamous Chechen warlord Zahvat Nordostov. [5]
1 - It really was widely advertised that a real plane would land on the scene in the end of the musical.
2 - plays on a similar Putin's reply to the question about "Kursk". When asked what happened with the submarine, he replied "it sank".
3 - plays on the famous Putin's promise (live on TV) to moisten (Russian slang for "kill") terrorists even in the toilets. Putin is also a judoist.
4 - plays on the famous Soviet kid's poem by Marshak about a man who saved a little girl from a burning house, but then disappeared because of modesty, and now he can't even be found by the combined efforts of firefighters, police and photographers.
5 - untranslatable.
Here are some plays on the names of other nationalities:
Bulgarian: Pobelka Potolkov (whitewashing of the ceilings)
Polish singer: Stojka Rakova (doggystyle position)
Polish boxer: Vyn'ka Meloch' (take the coins from your pockets)
Azerbaijanian musician: Obrygaj-ugly (belch in the corners)
Vietnamese chess player: Pen' Pnem (dumb as a stump)
Greek: Slunidopolu (slobber to the floor)
Japanese farmer: Nakosika Sukasena (mow some hay, bitch)
Japanese geisha: Atomuli Yadalato (did I fuck the right guy?)
Japanese doctor: Komuto Herovato (somone feels like shit right now)
Japanese racer: Toyama Tokanava (first a hole, then a ditch)
5) The general lack of plots involving easily predictable tech, like nanotech, ubiquitous computing, and radical bioengineering of human flesh.
The only explanation that I can think of is that movie producers are too stupid and generally uninformed about the development of science and technology that they can't comprehend these ideas. There are many literary works, by Vinge and the likes that would allow some really outstanding visual effects and amazing plots (even after they are butchered by Hollywood screenwriters), but still, noone seems to be interested. The experimentation that we have seen in sci-fi movies in the past is simply no longer there. Thinking of the recent sci-fi I can only name two original (relatively) ideas - 13th Floor (and later The Matrix) and Open Your Eyes (later Vanilla Sky)... The rest is just a rehash of old plots.
There is a difference between the actions of Russian soldiers towards the enemies in Chechnya and the actions of civilians in, say, Moscow towards Chechens living there. There are many documented cases of kidnapping, murder, torture, rape and enslavement of Russian civilians by Chechens. This is not just a figment of my imagination, this is reality. Go and ask some Western journalists who've been there, preferably those who managed to leave the place as a whole and not in a coffin. Compared to that the things that Americans face in Iraq or Israelis face in Palestina are peanuts. So it is understandable that individual Russian soldiers (especially if you consider the sorry state of the Russian army) would sometimes not treat the Chechens lightly. Still, this is surely not the government policy and as far as I am aware, there is no racial profiling in the country. Heck, one of the candidates in Russian presidential elections was a Chechen!
Sorry, I was more concerned about the HTML markup and didn't pay enough attention to the wording of my post. Of course, Russians do not treat all Chechens like criminals and enemies, that's reserved for the bandits (sometimes called "rebels") only. I would even go as far as to say that the attitude towards Chechens in Russia is better than the general attitude towards Arabs was in the USA after 9/11 (although I do not have enough information to make a truly objective comparison).
Just recently a Russian officer, colonel Budanov was convicted of murder. He killed a captured female Chechen sniper. After a lengthy trial it seems that he will serve the sentence, unlike those Americans who ran over Korean girls or those who bombed Canadian soldiers (of course, I do realise it's anekdotal evidence and these cases are not representative of the general picture).
So the correct wording should be: "We treat all Chechens like humans, and some Chechens (kidnappers, murderers and terrorists) like criminals and enemies."
Yes, I haven't spent years developing so called "IP". But I have already made some useful stuff, and I am happy with others using it for free and in any way they like.
But this is not really relevant. Of course, many people would like to have extra control over their ideas and creations. But there is no reason to grant them this control. A game developer would like to dictate to others that they can't hack his games. A console manufacturer would like to dictate to others that they can't mod the consoles. A software developer would like to dictate to others how they can use the software and what other products are allowed to interact with his software. A hardware manufacturer would like to dictate to others what sorts of ink-cartriges they can use. A car manufacturer would like to follow suit with selecting what brands of oil and gas the drivers are allowed to use.
YEAH! Big news. People would like to control others, but usually they have no moral right to do it. This game developer is no exception. In a free world people should be ultimately free to do anything that doesn't directly harm other people. That includes making nude patches for games. That includes taking my photo and photoshopping it onto the goatse.cx guy. No, I would not particularly like it. Yes, you have the moral right to do it.
The disturbing feeling that I get when looking at the screenshots is not because I am uncomfortable with the basic premise of Manhunt. No, it's because the screenshots look quite dated. IMO PS2 should be killed as soon as possible, because graphics innovation is no less important than style and gameplay. I don't really look forward to playing another GTA game with the same blocky characters and generally crappy and undetailed environment. GTA3 was cool, Vice City is tolerable, but San-Angeles is going to be crap. :( Rockstar, why do you have to spoil the great gameplay with outdated visuals?!
I think there is already a game in development based on Silence of the Lambs.
:) You don't want to play this trash? Don't buy it. Others like it - they are free to buy and play it. Don't push you values on everyone else.
BTW, do you see a problem with movies like Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, etc.? Why is it OK to make a film about killers, but not a simulator of them?
Market works by trying different things. There is currently no simulator of ballet dancers, but I can bet someone someday will eventually make one. If it's popular, another niche will soon be filled with various dancing simulators.
People have a perverted concept of risk. Risk is not inherently bad. Risk in game development is expected deviation in the value of future cash flows from their expected value. Rez might have been a flop, a moderately or even widely successful game. Calculate the expected sales. Ignore the unsystematic risk (risk related to this specific project that can be diversified by having a number of different games in development). Now you have an idea of what kind of profit this game will bring you. Spend on marketing accordingly. Don't just say "it's risky" - if you are working on a game, it means you expect it to be profitable. And if you expect profit, no matter what the risk is, you must spend on PR, marketing, advertisement, etc.
I can understand why a poor-quality game like RTCW: Enemy Territory (the developers decided it was not good enough, not me) would not be advertised even if it was released commercially. You don't expect any profits, development expenses are sunk cost, and you don't think marketing will help sell this crap, so you simply don't want to lose more money. But why plan from the very beginning that a risky game will have a small marketing budget, I don't know...
If someone does not want their IP being fiddled around with, he can (I don't know how to put it politely) stick this IP up his ass. :) When he released it to the public, ideologically (not legally) it becomes some sort of public domain and people can be expected to build on that. Yes, there is copyright, which is (ideologically) a short-term monopoly on commercial exploitation (a non-perfect solution to the real problem of large-scale commercial piracy), but it doesn't give the author (ideologically, again) other forms of control over his ideas and creations.
In summary, it's you, my American friend, who might really need black humour soon. After all, it's highly unlikely that the situation in Russia will become worse.
OK, here are a few of those that are shorter and easier to translate:
USA after September 11: Americans hang out American flags, Arabs burn American flags, Jews sew and sell American flags.
After the 9/11 Yasser Arafat expressed his condolences to president Bush and all American people. In reply president Bush promised to express his condolences to Yasser Arafat and all Arab people.
1. A group of American financiers announced a reward for the head of Bin Laden - 1 billion US dollars.
2. A group of cloning researchers urges Bin Laden to contact them for mutually beneficial cooperation.
What is the difference between Afganistan and the USA?
One is a savage and barbarian terrorist state ruled by illegitimate government - a gang of bandits relying on violence, a country populated by bloodthirsty fanatics, ready to kill men, women and children everywhere in the world, to stop at no crimes against moralilty and humanity, only because they hold views on life or opinions on any issue slightly different from those that these barbarians share at the moment.
Another one is a small country in Central Asia.
After the 9/11 events in New-York, Americans learned what "fear" means. After Tsereteli built on the Ground Zero a monument to the victims of the terrorist act, Americans learned what "horror" means.
And the funniest of all and completely untranslatable:
Pn September 11 Ben Laden sits in his undeground shelter in Afganistan mountains. The phone calls and when Ben Laden lifts the receiver, he hears: "Ben, this is Danila. Ben, I need help!"
Too bad that you probably don't speak Russian, because on the largest Russian joke site (which is, BTW, the 8th most visited site in Russia) there is a special page listing the archives of special joke issues related to events such as
In Russia we do enjoy black humour and we find it important to laugh about the problems that we (or others) face. This is an important quality for the nation that faced as much turmoil in the past century as Russia did.
If you cannot put up with that, go get some sensitivity training or read a book on cross-cultural issues, you insensitive clod.
Yeah, but perhaps Phoenix would be a good name for Brazilian space project.
1) Windows OS is much more prevalent on the net than any other kind of Windows. So a content-neutral search engine should find the OS-related links first.
2) MSN actually finds some Windows OS - related pages - Windows Media Player, Tablet PC, WinXP for Tablet PC and others. The problem is that the most relevant page (Windows Family Home Page) is not listed first.
3) Information about Satyajit Ray and Jupiter is not terribly relevant to "windows" search term. Heck, on the page about Ray the word is included only once in the ALT parameter of one of the images. The page about Jupiter is marginally better because "windows" is used in the title, domain name and one link (to the "Windows Team"). How on Earth is that considered more relevant than the main Windows page is a mystery to me.
P.S. BTW, most search engines suck at general searches, like "windows", including Google. Links to WinZip, WinAmp and Adobe Acrobat probably shouldn't be included on the first page. Still, the biggest advantage of Google (in addition to "it just works" concept) is moderate amount of ads, clearly separate from search results. I've been using only Google and Yandex (A "Russian Google" - a quality and innovative search engine, also with cool minimalist page) and already forgot about the nightmare of "sponsored links"...
Never attribute to malice what you can explain by stupidity.
Indian search on Windows. Only 10th result is good. First one is Windows Media Player, 2-6 are about Tablet PC with the same page for WinXP for Tablets appearing twice. There are also such wonders of relevance as Windows into the Soul of Satyajit Ray and Windows to the Universe - Jupiter.
Search for Windows at MSN is only marginally better. The poster of the story overlooked that first 4-6 results are "Featured sites", which (as well as "sponsored") is the marketese for "advertisements". Amazon will happily sell to MSN searchers practically everything. Heck, the second result for shit offers that I "Purchase Expensive Shit" on Amazon. I shit you not.
There are other gems at the MSN, like a "featured" result, suggesting that "MSN 8 offers a better browsing experience: Try it free for 60 days." when you search for netscape or gnu.org results starting after 12th position when you search for gnu. The first result, of course, being the famous E-gnu.com African Safari Travel...
MSN (despite their claims to the contrary) is a mix between marketing crap and inferior technology. Thanks, I will pass.
Hello, indeed! I guess, if the "credit-sizedness" requirement is lifted, then the IBM PC computer, introduced in 1981, would also qualify. :) And we can go even further in history, to the mainframes and even further still...
Believe me, we (people outside UK) do and we are really grateful to people like you (no kidding). Tuning to BBC World is literally like a stream of fresh air in almost all countries. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism for us to support BBC, except to occasionally buy some DVDs, but Britain gets our most sincere gratitude.
:)
On an unrelated note, Global Business just started airing (and webcasting) the first episode of the 3-series programme about Russian business that I helped to make.
Not only they can go fist themselves, this also shows how BBC might be able to almost singlehandedly destroy American near-monopoly on modern videocontent. A lot of exciting things might follow (of course, they might not) - the world might switch to mostly public-funded entertainment, news, etc., China (or some other country) might do the same with software, funding a lot of software development and releasing it for free to piss off Uncle Sam. Later on Japan might release for free its designs for nanobot assemblers...
Sadly, I don't see how RIAA's monopoly on crappy music can be destroyed... It looks like there is no replacement for N'Sync and Britney Spears on the horison...
If they will not use a restrictive licence/format (and it looks promising so far), there can be an open project to redistribute the BBC content world-wide using P2P. Someone in the UK can set up gateways between the BBC-enabled UK Internet and the rest of the world, downloading materials and making them available on the P2P networks, where they can spread as much as there is demand.
Hard drives are faster, take up less space, and are very cost competative with CD's. I am unclear why CD's are popular with the tech savvy crowd. It's an inferior storage technology.
CDs have been much cheaper for most of the time. Only now have they really became cost competitive with a price of 1Gb dropping below 1$. I bought my PC one year ago with one 80Gb drive. After a few months I added another 80Gb (to store all movies I dl-ed). Then a 120Gb one. 3 drives - that's the maximum you can have in a standard case, but now I can easily upgrade all the disks to 160Gb or larger (and do the same in another year). I still do CD-RW backups (not CD-R), but only to have the files safe in case of HDD failure, not to store them for years on CDs.
Most people don't have a lot of valuable files (by valuable I mean those files that should not be lost under any circumstances) - at most a couple of gigabytes. So a couple of CD-RWs would work wonders for regular backups. If you want extra safety, keep the previous copy or two as well.
But we have to see the bright side in it. Once the infrastructure for electronic voting is in place (including also Internet-based voting), we can hope that it will be used for more direct participation of the citizens. You can't move to direct democracy until you have the infrastructure, but one you have it (and if you avoid the possibility of a dictatorship along the way), there are only good things ahead.
I think I can. From what I've learned during my stay in Japan, it seems that the Japanese attraction to technology is actually pretty normal thing. This leads me to believe that it's Americans and Europeans that are an "abomination" in this regard. Westerners do not think about the future enough and while there might be hundreds of robotics research programs in the US universities, the general public doesn't have a clue. Not so in Japan. And also, while in the US sci-fi is a prerogative of a relatively well educated minority, in Japan it's much more widespread (I am not talking here about the number of readers or book circulation numbers, but about the prevalence of certain sci-fi ideas in the national menthality).
A similar example is the issue of GM-food. The question is not why Americans are so advanced that they eat it, the real question is why Europeans are so backwards and stupid that they don't.
Being scared of progress is not a normal thing today, in the XXI century. Embracing it is normal and in general beneficial for the societies that do it.
Sorry, don't believe that. A few locations in memory are easier to change than thousands of paper ballots. Hanging chads notwithstanding...
Depends on your definition of "easy to tamper with". Apparently, it's easier to change a single paper ballot than a single electronic ballot, but once you can change one electronic ballot, you probably can just as easily change them all, which is not true for paper.
So while the expected number of tampered ballots might be similar (I am not saying it is), electronic machines are more risky. The question is whether it's compensated with cost-savings and may be somewhat lower expected number of tamperings.
I might be wrong here, but my guess is that most young males (20 years old) today play games and have no problem with understanding how to do it. And the young kids don't have a problem starting either. Give Unreal Tournament 2003 to a 5-year old and he will start blasting the bots right away. :)
The problem is with those adults who never really started playing. I started playing FPSes from Wolf3D, switched to Doom, then to Quake, then to Half-Life. I'm not at a nonplus when I see another FPS. The games evolved together with the gamers. The question is - can we make a game with Doom3 graphics technology and with Wolf3D controls and gameplay?
Does it make sense? Can you attract a 30 year old investment banker who never played games (and, like you say, is afraid to look like an idiot, even when noone is looking at him) with Pong rendered in glorious 3D, with dynamic lightning, adaptable AI and what not?