Big whoop. Rowling's fans aren't linking to stallman.org. You think after blowing off the Catholic church they are going to give a damn about RMS and his crusades?
Quite honestly, I don't remember the Catholic Church going after Harry Potter. It's generally been the fundamentalists, Baptists in particular. Catholicism is a very old institution, thouands of years old, and they've learned (the hard way generally) not to over-react to pop culture like Harry Potter.
Is it just me, or does this sound like it could be the next Godwin's law? Or does stating that violate the usual addendum that intentionally invoking it doesn't count?
Of course your second example treads similar water. Your ladies website would have been decidedly more private (unless she was doing it more as a hobby and left it open) so public archiving services wouldn't be showing as much.
One of the big differences I see there is that the pictures and movies on that site may have been legally distributed, name and face intact. I'll admit to being gorribly naive as to how porn sites work, but my feeling would be that by paying your $5 to access the site, you're also receiving the right to save pictures and movies for personal use. While I sincerely doubt that would give me the right to mirror the entire site, I'd think I would be able "quote" the pictures in context. Of course, one can say this of just about anything on the Internet. The beerandporn guy could find himself quoted or cited on any number of sites on the Internet. They're not mirroring his content, just saying "Charles Johnson made an endorsement for 'Hot Horsemeat and Horseradish', stating that it twiddled his bits quite satisfactorily. Personally, I thought that the pictures with the penguin looked fake." Heck, they could have direct quotes as long as they're attributed and don't constitute more than some percentage of their work, right?
That's in fact why I consider "kewl" and "cool" to be different words, with related but different meanings. I'm not sure I could explain exactly how their meanings differ, but I know it when I hear it:)
Off the top of my head (and stating point-blank that I am not really "down" with the current generation), kewl seems to be applied only as an adjective and generally applied only to something being either personally or socially appealing. It's a less... calm variant in some ways. It implies a degree of fervor or excitement in the subject. ^_^ But that's just my impression based on usage.
Yup. As in an alternate form of gnarled, which is probably a frequentive of gnar.
I'm still not a fan of the "kewl" spelling of "cool" though. Not only does it not simplify the word, but it imples an entirely different pronunciation, albeit one perhaps closer to the current argot.
Meh, I've always been of the opinion that once a word becomes part of slang, the spelling will start to conform to the phonetics more than "fixed" words. Similarly, I no longer twitch when I see transcriptions of 80's slang using words like "narly." It just helps differentiate these words from their more formal roots.
(I'm no longer an investor in them, so I don't check)
I'm curious. Did you get scared off? Need the money? Cash out at an earlier date when you thought it hit a high?
It's just that you sound like you were a fairly sensible invester who didn't believe in the hype that Amazon was going down, so it sounds distinctly odd that you dropped their stock.
How about abandoning all the terms and simply identifying yourself by your views? The whole "Ah, you oppose abortion, so you must be pro-death-penalty and a warmongerer" line drives me batty. I don't identify myself as a conservative. I don't identify myself as a liberal. I identify myself as a human. With issues. Big issues sometimes, but that's a long story and a lot of therapy...
Seriously though, if it weren't bad enough that people will try to pigeonhole others with these terms, so many people pigeonhole themselves too! "Well, I'm against the war in Iraq. That would make me a liberal. Does that really mean that I have to consider "Piss Christ" to be a work of art?" Great googly-moogly, people! Find where you stand. Stand there. Don't call names, whether it's at yourself or others.
I have faith in Bethesda to make all of these features actually work.
*wry grin* I wish I had your faith. They're very big thinkers, and they've been known for promising much more than they can deliver. The idea of having the townspeople adapt to your deeds has been present since Daggerfall. If you poke around the data files, you can actually find the database of rhyming lines that were supposed to be used when the minstrels sang your praises.
Eh, as much as I enjoy playing Morrowind, I kind of agree with the ability to get lost, and pretty literally. While they'll give you the sequence of events to follow the main quest, getting there can be quite a chore. Just like in real life, directions are very vague, "Go south from Balmora. Take the second right from where the old oak tree used to stand..." and unlike real life, you can't clarify the directions. In some ways, I almost wish for Daggerfall's system where everyone in a town knew the location of the landmarks and would give you a helpful "It's just a bit North" or "It's about 50 feet South-East of here" that you could use to triangulate on a position.
Personally, I think one think which would have allowed for a much easier game experience would be to borrow a game mechanic from Mordor and Demise. They had a seer in town. You could plug in a name of an item or monster, and they gave you vague directions as to where you might find the object or creature. Similarly, I think that it would be handy in-game to have some way of getting a charm that at least let you get warm or cold indications, maybe vague directions to a specific item or place. For that matter, if it were portable, it could even be somewhat vague. "Hello, I'm looking for a Chas Verandas. Oh. You're Charles Verndesch. My mistake."
The other thing which I think Morrowind sorely needs is some environmental reaction. When I'm 25th level and sporting the Daedric Crescent, I want people to react. Sure, once you become the Nerevarine, greetings change, but as a legendary figure I want more. Heck, when you're carrying a named artifact, you should start having bands of adventurers assaulting you to try to "liberate" it. It would be annoying if it always happened, but if it only happened in cases where you'd been flashing it around publically... maybe start out by hearing about people asking around about it so that you could get the heck out of dodge, change clothing styles, start wearing a closed-face helm. If Bethesda manages their NPC AI they're promising, we might actually see this kind of thing. I'm certainly hoping we will, at least...
The thing is, non linear games where your actions determine your standing in the game, as well as its path and outcome, are the wave of the future. Especially games with thousands of mini adventures on the side. Also, in Morrowind you interacted with practically *everything*.
Actually, that's been one of the biggest complaints against it, that there is no real hand-holding through the main quest line, that it's easy to wind up with 50 simultaneous quests and losing track of which one you're doing. *shrug* Although, to me, that's the "Final Fantasy vs. Elder Scrolls" debate. You can also see the downside of such a massive world in that every Elder Scrolls game yet has been plagued with many nagging bugs. It's one of those games you have to play with console open to keep it on track. On the other hand, the sheer extensibility was simply amazing.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
Check out TES4: Oblivion. No, Bethesda hasn't been sitting on their thumbs all this time. They just take a long time between games. I already know what my Christmas present to myself will be...
I like a lot of Baen Books's policies regarding electronic works. They offer free books, copies in DRM-free forms of the early books of many of their authors and series. With many series, if you buy a later book in the series, you receive a CD with (again DRM-free) copies of the books that came before in the series. Lastly, they've been running Webscriptions where you receive advance copies of books as they're being developed. Someone later in the thread says you're paying thrice-over for this, but that's not the case. Basically, you pay per month. In any given month, you're getting about a fourth of 8-10 different books currently in progress. Paying for four months, about the price of a twelve paperbacks, nets you 8-10 full books, and partial copies of another 24-30. Personally, it's not my cup of tea, but for those who have a wide variety of interests, and particularly for those who like ecxlusive early access, it may be worth it.
In my state, South Carolina, having a video screen (tv, dvd, etc) is illegal to have in your car if you can see it from the driver seat. Would this make talking on cellphones illegal while driving?
Only if they're wearing the glasses... at which they've got worse visibility problems than getting distracted by a movie out of the corner of their eye.
Most amusing to me was that the early versions had the chip serial numbers on the area covered with the heatsink. Removing the heatsink voided your warranty. You needed that serial number to get warranty work done on the processor.
Oh, and it would help if Intel could make decent motherboards for its own chip.
It could be my information is out of date, but I don't believe Intel has made their own motherboards for years. It's just not cost-effective. Rather, they give specifications for boards and 3rd-party manufaturers then fabtricate their own varieties. Or at least that was the way it was when I co-oped with them. *wry grin* I always wondered how much they saved after the costs of bad publicity due to bad implementations. Amazingly often, a company would ignore corrections to their motherboard diagrams and of course Intel would get blamed when the motherboards would malfunction...
What really gets to me is when it's not even based upon the actual words, but upon the "fear someone might mishear." I'm sure everyone's heard about the politician who got lambasted for using the word niggardly. Then, in a play I was in last year, someone objected to an actor who had the line, "Don't get your knickers in a knot," because she was afraid someone would mishear the word, "knickers." *sigh* And it gets to you after a while. I actually find my self balking for a second before using "black" as a personal descriptor, so many people taking offense, seeing it as labelling.
I worked at Intel as a co-op a few years ago. It seems that at one point they had "Pack Rat Days," basically, a day in the year when everyone went through their desks, took all of the old and unused papers and such, and tossed them in a provided dumpster. I asked after the tradition while I was there. They said that anti-trust suits had made them stop.
Catch is, as I understand it, all of the pagerank extensions rely on methods that essentially violate Google's usage strictures. They're turning a blink eye for now, but widespread adoption could lead to it being shut down.
*wry grin* That used to be my favorite joke to use to get kids to remember the Pythagorean Theorem. Then someone told me that I can't use that joke in a school situation because "squaw" is actually an obscene word for the Indians. Seems "squaw" approximately translates out to "cunt" in English. *sigh* There goes one of my better educational tools.
All though I still like my calculus teacher's way of getting us to remember what asymptopes were:
"You lot wouldn't know your asymptope from a hole in your graph!"
So, these two mathematicians are at lunch and the first decides to play a joke on the second. Shortly after being seated, he excuses himself and corners the waitress. He gives her a $20 tip and says that the next time she comes back, he'll ask her a question, and she's to reply, "Three X squared minus two X plus the sine of x." The mathematician gets back to his table and says, "You know, math is far too easy. I bet you twenty dollars that even our waitress can do an integral for us." The waitress arrives and the first mathematician says, "So, young lady, what's the integral of X cubed - X squared plus the cosine of X?" The waitress rolls her eyes and says, "Three X squared minus two X plus the sine of x. Plus a constant."
And for the very hardcore, like one of my friends in Dayton, the game keeps track of what objects you've collected throughout the game, so you can try to pick up one of every possible object in the game. She's only got about 20 left to go...
Slashdot Mirror
Quite honestly, I don't remember the Catholic Church going after Harry Potter. It's generally been the fundamentalists, Baptists in particular. Catholicism is a very old institution, thouands of years old, and they've learned (the hard way generally) not to over-react to pop culture like Harry Potter.
Is it just me, or does this sound like it could be the next Godwin's law? Or does stating that violate the usual addendum that intentionally invoking it doesn't count?
One of the big differences I see there is that the pictures and movies on that site may have been legally distributed, name and face intact. I'll admit to being gorribly naive as to how porn sites work, but my feeling would be that by paying your $5 to access the site, you're also receiving the right to save pictures and movies for personal use. While I sincerely doubt that would give me the right to mirror the entire site, I'd think I would be able "quote" the pictures in context. Of course, one can say this of just about anything on the Internet. The beerandporn guy could find himself quoted or cited on any number of sites on the Internet. They're not mirroring his content, just saying "Charles Johnson made an endorsement for 'Hot Horsemeat and Horseradish', stating that it twiddled his bits quite satisfactorily. Personally, I thought that the pictures with the penguin looked fake." Heck, they could have direct quotes as long as they're attributed and don't constitute more than some percentage of their work, right?
Off the top of my head (and stating point-blank that I am not really "down" with the current generation), kewl seems to be applied only as an adjective and generally applied only to something being either personally or socially appealing. It's a less... calm variant in some ways. It implies a degree of fervor or excitement in the subject. ^_^ But that's just my impression based on usage.
Yup. As in an alternate form of gnarled, which is probably a frequentive of gnar .
I'm still not a fan of the "kewl" spelling of "cool" though. Not only does it not simplify the word, but it imples an entirely different pronunciation, albeit one perhaps closer to the current argot.
Meh, I've always been of the opinion that once a word becomes part of slang, the spelling will start to conform to the phonetics more than "fixed" words. Similarly, I no longer twitch when I see transcriptions of 80's slang using words like "narly." It just helps differentiate these words from their more formal roots.
I'm curious. Did you get scared off? Need the money? Cash out at an earlier date when you thought it hit a high?
It's just that you sound like you were a fairly sensible invester who didn't believe in the hype that Amazon was going down, so it sounds distinctly odd that you dropped their stock.
Seriously though, if it weren't bad enough that people will try to pigeonhole others with these terms, so many people pigeonhole themselves too! "Well, I'm against the war in Iraq. That would make me a liberal. Does that really mean that I have to consider "Piss Christ" to be a work of art?" Great googly-moogly, people! Find where you stand. Stand there. Don't call names, whether it's at yourself or others.
I have faith in Bethesda to make all of these features actually work.
*wry grin* I wish I had your faith. They're very big thinkers, and they've been known for promising much more than they can deliver. The idea of having the townspeople adapt to your deeds has been present since Daggerfall. If you poke around the data files, you can actually find the database of rhyming lines that were supposed to be used when the minstrels sang your praises.
Personally, I think one think which would have allowed for a much easier game experience would be to borrow a game mechanic from Mordor and Demise. They had a seer in town. You could plug in a name of an item or monster, and they gave you vague directions as to where you might find the object or creature. Similarly, I think that it would be handy in-game to have some way of getting a charm that at least let you get warm or cold indications, maybe vague directions to a specific item or place. For that matter, if it were portable, it could even be somewhat vague. "Hello, I'm looking for a Chas Verandas. Oh. You're Charles Verndesch. My mistake."
The other thing which I think Morrowind sorely needs is some environmental reaction. When I'm 25th level and sporting the Daedric Crescent, I want people to react. Sure, once you become the Nerevarine, greetings change, but as a legendary figure I want more. Heck, when you're carrying a named artifact, you should start having bands of adventurers assaulting you to try to "liberate" it. It would be annoying if it always happened, but if it only happened in cases where you'd been flashing it around publically... maybe start out by hearing about people asking around about it so that you could get the heck out of dodge, change clothing styles, start wearing a closed-face helm. If Bethesda manages their NPC AI they're promising, we might actually see this kind of thing. I'm certainly hoping we will, at least...
Actually, that's been one of the biggest complaints against it, that there is no real hand-holding through the main quest line, that it's easy to wind up with 50 simultaneous quests and losing track of which one you're doing. *shrug* Although, to me, that's the "Final Fantasy vs. Elder Scrolls" debate. You can also see the downside of such a massive world in that every Elder Scrolls game yet has been plagued with many nagging bugs. It's one of those games you have to play with console open to keep it on track. On the other hand, the sheer extensibility was simply amazing.
If Morrowind were not done years ago and were done today through the Doom 3 *or* Unreal 2 Engine (either of which would imply far fewer bugs than Bethesda's own "engine"), it would eclipse all other games in popularity for 2 years. I say that because Morrowind appears to be almost the single player's equivalent of Starcraft in popularity and longevity.
Check out TES4: Oblivion. No, Bethesda hasn't been sitting on their thumbs all this time. They just take a long time between games. I already know what my Christmas present to myself will be...
I like a lot of Baen Books's policies regarding electronic works. They offer free books, copies in DRM-free forms of the early books of many of their authors and series. With many series, if you buy a later book in the series, you receive a CD with (again DRM-free) copies of the books that came before in the series. Lastly, they've been running Webscriptions where you receive advance copies of books as they're being developed. Someone later in the thread says you're paying thrice-over for this, but that's not the case. Basically, you pay per month. In any given month, you're getting about a fourth of 8-10 different books currently in progress. Paying for four months, about the price of a twelve paperbacks, nets you 8-10 full books, and partial copies of another 24-30. Personally, it's not my cup of tea, but for those who have a wide variety of interests, and particularly for those who like ecxlusive early access, it may be worth it.
Only if they're wearing the glasses... at which they've got worse visibility problems than getting distracted by a movie out of the corner of their eye.
And I thought people using cell phones while driving was a menace before...
Most amusing to me was that the early versions had the chip serial numbers on the area covered with the heatsink. Removing the heatsink voided your warranty. You needed that serial number to get warranty work done on the processor.
Oh, and it would help if Intel could make decent motherboards for its own chip.
It could be my information is out of date, but I don't believe Intel has made their own motherboards for years. It's just not cost-effective. Rather, they give specifications for boards and 3rd-party manufaturers then fabtricate their own varieties. Or at least that was the way it was when I co-oped with them. *wry grin* I always wondered how much they saved after the costs of bad publicity due to bad implementations. Amazingly often, a company would ignore corrections to their motherboard diagrams and of course Intel would get blamed when the motherboards would malfunction...
What really gets to me is when it's not even based upon the actual words, but upon the "fear someone might mishear." I'm sure everyone's heard about the politician who got lambasted for using the word niggardly. Then, in a play I was in last year, someone objected to an actor who had the line, "Don't get your knickers in a knot," because she was afraid someone would mishear the word, "knickers." *sigh* And it gets to you after a while. I actually find my self balking for a second before using "black" as a personal descriptor, so many people taking offense, seeing it as labelling.
I worked at Intel as a co-op a few years ago. It seems that at one point they had "Pack Rat Days," basically, a day in the year when everyone went through their desks, took all of the old and unused papers and such, and tossed them in a provided dumpster. I asked after the tradition while I was there. They said that anti-trust suits had made them stop.
Catch is, as I understand it, all of the pagerank extensions rely on methods that essentially violate Google's usage strictures. They're turning a blink eye for now, but widespread adoption could lead to it being shut down.
All though I still like my calculus teacher's way of getting us to remember what asymptopes were:
"You lot wouldn't know your asymptope from a hole in your graph!"
Let's do some math. Add you and me together, subtract our clothing, divide your legs, and multiply...
So, these two mathematicians are at lunch and the first decides to play a joke on the second. Shortly after being seated, he excuses himself and corners the waitress. He gives her a $20 tip and says that the next time she comes back, he'll ask her a question, and she's to reply, "Three X squared minus two X plus the sine of x." The mathematician gets back to his table and says, "You know, math is far too easy. I bet you twenty dollars that even our waitress can do an integral for us." The waitress arrives and the first mathematician says, "So, young lady, what's the integral of X cubed - X squared plus the cosine of X?" The waitress rolls her eyes and says, "Three X squared minus two X plus the sine of x. Plus a constant."
And for the very hardcore, like one of my friends in Dayton, the game keeps track of what objects you've collected throughout the game, so you can try to pick up one of every possible object in the game. She's only got about 20 left to go...
Wouldn't be the first game on the Playstation involving hunting with cameras rather than guns. Ever played Fatal Frame?
Aw... you're just blowing hot air!