When I watch Jeopardy!, I childishly yell out "Triple Stumper!" whenever I know the correct response and all three of the contestants either get it wrong or don't respond, and I'll sometimes do a little dance.
And if that happens during Final Jeopardy, I yell out "Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper!" and I'll break into an extended, elaborate dance, not unlike a wide receiver dancing in the endzone after a touchdown. I get maybe one of those every three months. The evening when I performed that dance while watching Jeopardy! with my girlfriend and her parents is particularly memorable.
Then there was a friend of mine who got a "Ultimate Mega Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper," where he correctly guessed the response before the clue was even given, knowing only the category, and all three contestants got it wrong. As I recall, his head exploded. That was quite a day.
Al Gore's gonna be suing over his invention of the Internet
This might be a bit off-topic, but my curiousity is piqued.
Where exactly can I find a reliable source that quotes Al Gore as having said that he invented the internet?
I mean, I read that, in 1999, he stated in an interview, "'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet," by which he meant securing funding for it, but nowhere have I found, outside of message board posts, that Al Gore actually claimed to have invented the internet itself.
I read that he told a House committee about the internet in 1989, remarking, "I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network will create an environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses." Geez, what a crackpot!
Wonderful! With this new cross-continental wireless connection, those poor, hapless widows of deposed and assassinated heads of the Nigerian government and industry can all the more easily appeal for help in moving their vast sums of wealth into foreign bank accounts!
I have experimented with free PHP to-do list software, but haven't found it easy enough to continue with.
What I use for my own to-do list is Apple's iCal, which has the ability, thanks to my $99-a-year Mac.com account, to put my list on the web and every Mac I use.
I must say, there is nothing quite so satisfying as checking the tiny "done" box next to an item on my to-do list. Sometimes I'm tempted to put trivial items on it like "take off shoes" or "read Slashdot" just so I'll have the opportunity to check off a done item.
Ralph Nader called Washington DC a "corporate-occupied terrority," and I think we need little proof beyond this bill to bolster his claim.
Giant corporations walk into a congressman's office, just flat-out order him to introduce a bill that their lawyers wrote that suspends the Constitution so that they can make a little bit more money, and the congressman goes right along with it, apparently without a moment's hesitation.
As far as enforcing this law, I cannot imagine in a million years that any standard of fairness would even be considered in its application. As Drummond states in Inherit the Wind, "I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches -- its upholders as well as its defiers."
When people who innocently use technology like TiVo and VCRs and CD burners start getting randomly sued and arrested by RIAA and MPAA members, I can only hope that the public outcry is strong enough to reverse the trend. But I fear that the opposite will happen, that we'll all be huddled under our bedclothes, shivering in fear that the giant corporations will come after us next. Terrified that armed corporate goon squads, deputized under the banner of protecting copyright, will break our doors down, confiscate our computers and home entertainment systems, and lead us off in handcuffs, we'll do anything to protect ourselves from them, even if it means testifying against a neighbor, friend, or family member. Boy, do I hope that I'm just being paranoid.
Last year I gave my supervisor a sealed, labeled envelope containing the various usernames and passwords I use, and the various ways that I change them from time to time, just in case something happens to me.
When I first gave it to her, she immediately ripped it open, not fully comprehending what it was. I had to snatch it out of her hands, exclaiming, "I'm not dead yet!" I sealed it into another envelope and she put it in her drawer, where it has remained untouched to this day (I assume).
The headline about "Smart Bullets" reminds me of a Tom Toles book entitled At least our bombs are getting smarter, a cartoon preview of the 1990s. The cover art is humorous... a daft (and probably tragically typical) American student can't figure out how to spell "budget," while the man-sized smart bomb sitting at the desk behind him is working out some kind of complex mathematical equation. In the corner of the cartoon, as in all Toles cartoons, there's a tiny punch-line. In this case, someone, probably the teacher, assures the smart bomb that "There'll always be a job for a chap like you." Dear God, it's more true today than it was fourteen years ago.
As far as smart bullets go, it sounds like the little spider transmitters Spider-Man uses to track the henchmen of his enemies, whom he inevitably follows right back to the bad guy's lair just in time to get clobbered by $villain. I wonder if there's an average number of years between the time a technology is introduced in comic books and the time it becomes a reality. Looks to me like it hovers around thirty.
Your ad hominem raises an important point. There're two ways to be useful to te species. One is to produce more lives. The other is to make others' lives somehow better so others can produce more lives. I choose the latter.
Leave my hominems outta this, buddy... my hominems got nothin' ta do with it.
Of course, the obligatory standard defense goes something like it's about as useful as E=mc^2. Terribly useless for the average Joe, terribly useful for some upcoming unknown technological application, or a math/science discovery that depends on this proof that paves the way for said application.
Everybody, sing along, loud enough so that Howard can hear you all the way over in the Erie County Holding Center!
Nah nah... nah nah nah nah... hey hey hey... good-BYE!
When I read that Howard Carmack told Earthlink, "Nothing is in my name, so you'll never catch me," all I could think was, you arrogant, silly man. These are government agents and corporate attorneys that you're up against. You're an overweight criminal in his mid-30s who lives in a shack in Buffalo. I think they're gonna catch you, and right quick.
Sure enough, they did. In addition to his prison time, Carmack has a multi-million-dollar judgment against him from Earthlink for his misuse of their network.
What I think is hilarious about that Day After Tomorrow movie is how the studio advertises it as "from the director of Independence Day." That's not a big recommendation in my book. That's like a breakfast cereal manufacturer advertising a new product as "brought to you by the makers of pus, earwax, boogers, chewed bubblegum and cat vomit! Yum!"
I think it's a mistake to advertise that a movie was directed by a guy who directed a really awful previous movie! On that basis alone, I am absolutely not ever going to allow any of this movie to come into view of my eyes, other than what I've already suffered through by seeing the ludicrous trailer about a billion times.
I heard that they were already doing it... the rendering software gets back-door installed alongside Gator or Kazaa. It's mentioned in the part of the EULA that's written backwards in Pig-Esperanto.
I bet there's not a single software-related patent that's been issued in the last ten years that couldn't be overturned by prior art. Stuff that seems cutting edge now was being mulled over twenty years ago, sometimes thirty or forty years ago.
At the risk of being off-topic but kind of still on-topic, have you all seen where PanIP's lovely "Automated Sales" patent got overturned recently? Unless PanIP can convince the USPTO to overturn its decision, it looks like there will be no more lawsuits against e-commerce companies coming from PanIP, unless they think they can stand on just their automated transactions patent, and that one under review, too.
There's a link to the story at the old website of the PanIP Group Defense Fund, at youmaybenext.com.
Well, the USMC uses suits like this that are powered by sound. Tiny receivers built into a Marine's helmet transmit sound energy into a belt-mounted unit to the rear. Guttural, high-pitched sounds generate the most energy, so when you see a sergeant right up in a private's face screaming, he's actually just recharging the private's batteries. No, really!
If you're put to death for refusing to wear it, how could there be anyone disallowed from commerce for not having it?
It'll be like not filing a tax return. You could get away with it for a little while, but eventually the authorities catch up with you and demand that you get the ID device. Then, if you actively refuse to submit to its installation, they just kill you.
But it occurred to me a little while ago that maybe there won't be a device or even a visible mark at all. Maybe it will be your fingerprints and your retinal pattern that becomes the Mark of the Beast once they've been added to the global database. So that covers the hand and forehead part of the prophesy, kind of.
So at some point, every legitimate shopkeeper will have to have customers and salespeople submit to a combination fingerprint and retina scan before a transaction can take place, and no cash will change hands. The debit and credit will take place electronically. No signature will even be required.
That ought to scare the believers, oh yeah. Whoever refuses to be added to the database will be imprisoned in some countries, put to death in others. The death sentence might be carried out as an actual execution, or might be done more covertly, disguised perhaps as a denial of medical care to anyone not in the system.
One time, years ago, I was collecting money at the door of a bar for a friend's band, and this kind of dirty hippie dude came up and wanted to come in. The doorman of the bar demanded to see ID before letting him in, since it was a 21-and-over venue. The hippie dude got really peeved, since he didn't have any ID at all, and was denied admittance, and as he walked away, he angrily exclaimed, "Sorry, I don't carry the Mark of the Beast."
If I wasn't busy working, I'd have run after the guy and demanded to know how he could possibly equate a driver's license, which one carries in one's pocket and uses to simply prove identity, age, and automobile driving privileges, with the Mark of the Beast from the Bible. I wanted to ask him, "Hey, if you went into that little grocery store across the street and tried to buy a pack of gum, would you have to show ID? No? Then how is an ID card the Mark of the Beast when you can buy most things without showing it?" Then he probably would've stabbed me or something. Good thing I had to stay in the bar and collect money.
Still, people like that hippie dude ought to at least read the Bible before declaring that its prophesies are being fulfilled.
And the ID card will be grafted onto the right hand or forehead of the bearer, and will contain a 666-character identification number. Persons without ID cards will be disallowed from engaging in commerce of any kind, and those actively refusing to wear the ID card will be summarily put to death.
When questioned about the potential reactions from devout Christians, government officials replied, "Revelations of what, now?"
Slashdot Mirror
When I watch Jeopardy!, I childishly yell out "Triple Stumper!" whenever I know the correct response and all three of the contestants either get it wrong or don't respond, and I'll sometimes do a little dance.
And if that happens during Final Jeopardy, I yell out "Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper!" and I'll break into an extended, elaborate dance, not unlike a wide receiver dancing in the endzone after a touchdown. I get maybe one of those every three months. The evening when I performed that dance while watching Jeopardy! with my girlfriend and her parents is particularly memorable.
Then there was a friend of mine who got a "Ultimate Mega Final Jeopardy Triple Stumper," where he correctly guessed the response before the clue was even given, knowing only the category, and all three contestants got it wrong. As I recall, his head exploded. That was quite a day.
Al Gore's gonna be suing over his invention of the Internet
This might be a bit off-topic, but my curiousity is piqued.
Where exactly can I find a reliable source that quotes Al Gore as having said that he invented the internet?
I mean, I read that, in 1999, he stated in an interview, "'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet," by which he meant securing funding for it, but nowhere have I found, outside of message board posts, that Al Gore actually claimed to have invented the internet itself.
I read that he told a House committee about the internet in 1989, remarking, "I genuinely believe that the creation of this nationwide network will create an environment where work stations are common in homes and even small businesses." Geez, what a crackpot!
Wonderful! With this new cross-continental wireless connection, those poor, hapless widows of deposed and assassinated heads of the Nigerian government and industry can all the more easily appeal for help in moving their vast sums of wealth into foreign bank accounts!
Yeah, I'd go with Betty, but I'd be thinkin' of Wilma.
Don't forget the Wave Motion Gun!
It's our only hope against Desslok and the Gamalons!
Sing it with me now... "We're off to outer space..."
I have experimented with free PHP to-do list software, but haven't found it easy enough to continue with.
What I use for my own to-do list is Apple's iCal, which has the ability, thanks to my $99-a-year Mac.com account, to put my list on the web and every Mac I use.
I must say, there is nothing quite so satisfying as checking the tiny "done" box next to an item on my to-do list. Sometimes I'm tempted to put trivial items on it like "take off shoes" or "read Slashdot" just so I'll have the opportunity to check off a done item.
Ralph Nader called Washington DC a "corporate-occupied terrority," and I think we need little proof beyond this bill to bolster his claim.
Giant corporations walk into a congressman's office, just flat-out order him to introduce a bill that their lawyers wrote that suspends the Constitution so that they can make a little bit more money, and the congressman goes right along with it, apparently without a moment's hesitation.
As far as enforcing this law, I cannot imagine in a million years that any standard of fairness would even be considered in its application. As Drummond states in Inherit the Wind, "I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches -- its upholders as well as its defiers."
When people who innocently use technology like TiVo and VCRs and CD burners start getting randomly sued and arrested by RIAA and MPAA members, I can only hope that the public outcry is strong enough to reverse the trend. But I fear that the opposite will happen, that we'll all be huddled under our bedclothes, shivering in fear that the giant corporations will come after us next. Terrified that armed corporate goon squads, deputized under the banner of protecting copyright, will break our doors down, confiscate our computers and home entertainment systems, and lead us off in handcuffs, we'll do anything to protect ourselves from them, even if it means testifying against a neighbor, friend, or family member. Boy, do I hope that I'm just being paranoid.
When listening to background radition, we here in Western New York can only hear the cryptic cosmic phrase, MY TEE TAH KOH MY TEE TAH KOH.
Last year I gave my supervisor a sealed, labeled envelope containing the various usernames and passwords I use, and the various ways that I change them from time to time, just in case something happens to me.
When I first gave it to her, she immediately ripped it open, not fully comprehending what it was. I had to snatch it out of her hands, exclaiming, "I'm not dead yet!" I sealed it into another envelope and she put it in her drawer, where it has remained untouched to this day (I assume).
The headline about "Smart Bullets" reminds me of a Tom Toles book entitled At least our bombs are getting smarter, a cartoon preview of the 1990s. The cover art is humorous... a daft (and probably tragically typical) American student can't figure out how to spell "budget," while the man-sized smart bomb sitting at the desk behind him is working out some kind of complex mathematical equation. In the corner of the cartoon, as in all Toles cartoons, there's a tiny punch-line. In this case, someone, probably the teacher, assures the smart bomb that "There'll always be a job for a chap like you." Dear God, it's more true today than it was fourteen years ago.
As far as smart bullets go, it sounds like the little spider transmitters Spider-Man uses to track the henchmen of his enemies, whom he inevitably follows right back to the bad guy's lair just in time to get clobbered by $villain. I wonder if there's an average number of years between the time a technology is introduced in comic books and the time it becomes a reality. Looks to me like it hovers around thirty.
I followed the instructions and my B-52 model looks like Fred Schneider. I was hoping for Kate Pierson. Dang.
Your ad hominem raises an important point. There're two ways to be useful to te species. One is to produce more lives. The other is to make others' lives somehow better so others can produce more lives. I choose the latter.
Leave my hominems outta this, buddy... my hominems got nothin' ta do with it.
Of course, the obligatory standard defense goes something like it's about as useful as E=mc^2. Terribly useless for the average Joe, terribly useful for some upcoming unknown technological application, or a math/science discovery that depends on this proof that paves the way for said application.
And he's single ladies!
This stuff is so fascinating that I'm just sure I'll be the life of the party when I start talking about it!
"You know, mathematicians theorize that there's an infinite number of prime twins, and... hey, where are you going?"
He's nerdy, he's overweight, but he's not a white guy.
Everybody, sing along, loud enough so that Howard can hear you all the way over in the Erie County Holding Center!
Nah nah... nah nah nah nah... hey hey hey... good-BYE!
When I read that Howard Carmack told Earthlink, "Nothing is in my name, so you'll never catch me," all I could think was, you arrogant, silly man. These are government agents and corporate attorneys that you're up against. You're an overweight criminal in his mid-30s who lives in a shack in Buffalo. I think they're gonna catch you, and right quick.
Sure enough, they did. In addition to his prison time, Carmack has a multi-million-dollar judgment against him from Earthlink for his misuse of their network.
Have fun in prison, Howard!
What I think is hilarious about that Day After Tomorrow movie is how the studio advertises it as "from the director of Independence Day." That's not a big recommendation in my book. That's like a breakfast cereal manufacturer advertising a new product as "brought to you by the makers of pus, earwax, boogers, chewed bubblegum and cat vomit! Yum!"
I think it's a mistake to advertise that a movie was directed by a guy who directed a really awful previous movie! On that basis alone, I am absolutely not ever going to allow any of this movie to come into view of my eyes, other than what I've already suffered through by seeing the ludicrous trailer about a billion times.
Oh, great. I just hope when they photograph my house the lawn is mowed and the hedges are trimmed.
Still, this would be a great way to find out who has lawn gnomes, plastic flamingos, and those fat-lady-bending-over things in their gardens.
I heard that they were already doing it... the rendering software gets back-door installed alongside Gator or Kazaa. It's mentioned in the part of the EULA that's written backwards in Pig-Esperanto.
I bet there's not a single software-related patent that's been issued in the last ten years that couldn't be overturned by prior art. Stuff that seems cutting edge now was being mulled over twenty years ago, sometimes thirty or forty years ago.
At the risk of being off-topic but kind of still on-topic, have you all seen where PanIP's lovely "Automated Sales" patent got overturned recently? Unless PanIP can convince the USPTO to overturn its decision, it looks like there will be no more lawsuits against e-commerce companies coming from PanIP, unless they think they can stand on just their automated transactions patent, and that one under review, too.
There's a link to the story at the old website of the PanIP Group Defense Fund, at youmaybenext.com.
Well, the USMC uses suits like this that are powered by sound. Tiny receivers built into a Marine's helmet transmit sound energy into a belt-mounted unit to the rear. Guttural, high-pitched sounds generate the most energy, so when you see a sergeant right up in a private's face screaming, he's actually just recharging the private's batteries. No, really!
You can tell the reviewer has spent a lot more time playing videogames than learning how to punctuate and spell.
Proofreading: The Anti-Suck
If you're put to death for refusing to wear it, how could there be anyone disallowed from commerce for not having it?
It'll be like not filing a tax return. You could get away with it for a little while, but eventually the authorities catch up with you and demand that you get the ID device. Then, if you actively refuse to submit to its installation, they just kill you.
But it occurred to me a little while ago that maybe there won't be a device or even a visible mark at all. Maybe it will be your fingerprints and your retinal pattern that becomes the Mark of the Beast once they've been added to the global database. So that covers the hand and forehead part of the prophesy, kind of.
So at some point, every legitimate shopkeeper will have to have customers and salespeople submit to a combination fingerprint and retina scan before a transaction can take place, and no cash will change hands. The debit and credit will take place electronically. No signature will even be required.
That ought to scare the believers, oh yeah. Whoever refuses to be added to the database will be imprisoned in some countries, put to death in others. The death sentence might be carried out as an actual execution, or might be done more covertly, disguised perhaps as a denial of medical care to anyone not in the system.
its "Revelation" (not plural)
Damn, I should've looked it up.
One time, years ago, I was collecting money at the door of a bar for a friend's band, and this kind of dirty hippie dude came up and wanted to come in. The doorman of the bar demanded to see ID before letting him in, since it was a 21-and-over venue. The hippie dude got really peeved, since he didn't have any ID at all, and was denied admittance, and as he walked away, he angrily exclaimed, "Sorry, I don't carry the Mark of the Beast."
If I wasn't busy working, I'd have run after the guy and demanded to know how he could possibly equate a driver's license, which one carries in one's pocket and uses to simply prove identity, age, and automobile driving privileges, with the Mark of the Beast from the Bible. I wanted to ask him, "Hey, if you went into that little grocery store across the street and tried to buy a pack of gum, would you have to show ID? No? Then how is an ID card the Mark of the Beast when you can buy most things without showing it?" Then he probably would've stabbed me or something. Good thing I had to stay in the bar and collect money.
Still, people like that hippie dude ought to at least read the Bible before declaring that its prophesies are being fulfilled.
And the ID card will be grafted onto the right hand or forehead of the bearer, and will contain a 666-character identification number. Persons without ID cards will be disallowed from engaging in commerce of any kind, and those actively refusing to wear the ID card will be summarily put to death.
When questioned about the potential reactions from devout Christians, government officials replied, "Revelations of what, now?"