When my 10 year old penniless cousin downloads a song, she has caused no one any financial harm. If she stole a CD, though, she'd be taking a physical object that someone else could've otherwise bought--this is wrong, this is stealing, this ALWAYS causes tangible, financial loss, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge the fundemental difference between these two scenarios is a direct participant in RIAA's massive FUD campaign.
I'm not saying that piracy isn't a potential problem (and perhaps it does need to be addressed somehow, though personally I know of no one who downloads music but never buys it--my cousin and I included), but it's NOT theft any more than checking out a book at the library or fast-forwarding through commercials with your VCR (or Tivo) is theft.
They've already named a chess-playing computer after the computer from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love Adams references as much as the next geek, but I think that once is enough.
Oh trust me, it's for real. And yes, they do use it. And let me tell you, this article worries me. On a day like today, a script kiddy could inflict some really serious chaos.
Replace the Escalades with minivans... yes, harder to stop, yes more kinetic energy (to address some of the other replies), but your line of sight is much farther, it's easier for other people to see you, you roll right over smaller obstacles. Yeah, you stand a greater chance of rolling over, but you also stand a greater chance of SURVIVING that rollover (actually, my dad rolled his van just a few months ago...)
I probably should have done a little more research before making my assertions, but oh well. Mod me down if you must...
There are a few assertions, though that still I feel comfortable making. The car from the article is very small, and most non-petroleum vehicles are very small, very light vehicles. Decreased weight can only get you so far (unless you're going to decrease the speed limit too), and I'll take a solid sedan over a compact car any day of the week... especially if that car is going to be made out of nonmetal composites. If you're flying down the interstate at 70 (...or 80, or 90), wouldn't you want a few hundred pounds of steel between you and whatever you happen to hit?
But yeah, at the end of the day I'd have to say that SUVs are stupid, and I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. I merely meant to say that we shouldn't focus on creating incredibly small, incredibly fast, incredibly flimsy cars and then claim it's the bigger cars' fault when they get annihilated.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not defending Hummers' and SUVs' impact on the environment (not to mention our dependence on Middle East oil) but it drives me nuts when people say that the fuel efficient cars get eaten alive by the SUVs and Hummers and trucks--therefore we should outlaw all of the bigger cars.
If we just take into account safety, we would be far better off banning all of the smaller cars. Smaller cars vs. smaller cars are somewhat safer, but bigger cars vs. bigger cars (and bigger cars vs. trees, telephole poles, etc.) are MUCH safer. Rollovers are an exception, but not all big vehicles have the tendency to roll over.
And just exactly why do you think that their astroturfing campaign would be anything more than a source of great amusement for us? There are no good no philosophical or moral (and probably no legal) reasons for anyone to take SCO seriously, and anyone here who tries will either be modded funny or flamebait, depending on how thick they layer on the bullshit.
In the end, SCO realize that BS only works on real grass.
Do you own a Tivo or a VCR? Ever fastforward through commercials? Thief! You're depriving those poor advertisers of their hard-earned dollars!
Just because something is illegal (or unlawful, as is the case in CIVIL matters like these) does not make it wrong, and while there is definitely good reason to ensure that musicians continue to receive compensation, this issue is NOT as cut and dry as the Morality Police would have us belief. Taken to the extreme, beliefs like yours would outlaw all libraries because they take away money from authors and publishers.
That this sort of system is an absolute necessity for any nation that has embraced the concept of progress. There's only ONE way to stay the same, but there's an infinite number of ways we can change. If 25% of the American people are apathetic enough to think things need to stay the same, they can still manage to beat out the other 75% of the country if no one else agrees on a solution.
And we shouldn't HAVE to agree; we shouldn't have to unanimously agree on the solution in order to agree that there should BE a solution. But in a single-elimination voting system such as ours, we have no choice. We rally around the candidate closest to our view, lest we give the election to the man who is not even in the same zipcode as our beliefs.
Saying that we should vote for Nader (or whoever) anyway just so he can get federal funding for his next attempt is absolutely ludicrous. Conventional voting is fundementally flawed, fundementally biased AGAINST PROGRESS and unless people start to realize this and write their congressmen en mass, things will never change. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will lay down their collective power without a long, hard fight.
In a system without runoff voting, yes it most certainly is. How do you expect people to rally around a worthy third candidate (out of the hundreds out there) when there is such a compelling motivation to vote "NOTKerry" or "NOTBush"? Maybe when they truly are identical someone else can challenege them, but right now there are just too many people willing to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Properly, we should use C.E. and B.C.E. because 1. The majority of people on this planet do not consider Jesus Christ to be their lord and 2. It's rather doubtful as to whether he was actually born in the year 1 A.D. in the first place.
But let's be realistic, people never pay attention to pedantic nitpicks like these.
Didn't see it at all, in fact, as I was too busy screaming at Firefox for crashing every other second. Was replying to the parent, who said simply "Brog." In actuality, the L is probably the least severe problem with translating "Blog" into Japanese, and yours fits nicely.
Dutch is funny as hell. I defy you to visit the Netherlands and keep a straight face when you see a gondola captain cussing out someone who just cut him off. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the culture--it's just an utterly foreign sound that your ears must get used to before you can get over the humor. I don't find Japanese funny at all anymore, simply because I've watched so much subbed anime...
Spanish is funny because it is (or seems to be, anyway) so much faster than English. Japanese is funny (I guess) because it's so gutteral. Swedish and Dutch are so funny because of the wildly fluctuating pitches. German (and to a lesser extent, Russian) is funny because it sounds so hard and militaristic. With the exception of this last one, NONE of these things has anything to do with the country itself and all of these reactions will disappear if one spends enough time around that language. Maybe this reactions are silly or even offensive, but they're not half as offensive as someone who calls them racist.
With the exception of -n, no Japanese syllable ends in a consonant (though the vowels are sometimes silent depending on emphasis.) They might be able to handle the L (I've heard several Japanese people--eh, well, *anime characters* use the English L perfectly), but I'm pretty sure that the BR consonant blend doesn't exist. So yes, the resulting phonetic translation would be pretty much unintelligible.
Since when is making fun of a foreign language racism? "Oh look, we English-speaking people have sloppy, drawn out vowels!" Is that actually insulting to you?
On a related note, can't Political Correctness just fucking die already?
My second thought goes something like this: what, was A Clockwork Orange just not scary enough for these people? For God's sake, let's have clinical trials first, then prisoner/probation trials before we even CONSIDER giving this shit to millions of children and teenagers.
/rant on
Actually, no, scratch that. Let's just not ever consider giving mind-altering substances to (relatively) heathly human beings, period. I was addicted to speed (a pseudo-amphetamine better known as Ritalin) for four years of my life (11-15), yet I still managed to ditch the habit over the strenuous objections of my parents and doctors. I suffered from extreme bouts of depression (I'd like to say that I don't anymore, but that's not entirely true...), I only grew a few more inches (my dad is 6'2", I'm 5'7"), I had incontrolable fits of rage for the first month of withdraw, and for what, a few A's? Give me a fucking break. It's been around since the 1950's; haven't they bothered to do serious long-term studies on this shit? No adult I know has anything positive to say about it...
The problem is, people keep saying that things like drug addiction or ADHD are diseases and the side affects are just that--mere inconsequential inconviences one must endure while one is taking The Cure. These drugs work because they mimic certain hormones or neurotransmitters. Is it such a stretch to say that any substance that nullifies these drugs might also affect the chemically similar neurotransmitters?
The simple truth is, there IS NO CURE for the human mind. There never will be; we're just too fucking complex. Like the submitter said, what happens when an immunized kid suffers a horrible accident and winds up living with chronic pain, "immune" to any effective treatment? What happens to all of the people who actually do function better under the influence of certain recreational pharmaceuticals? I knew a lot of people who would probably either kill themselves or go berserk or quit their jobs and go homeless if they couldn't smoke/drink/smoke pot. (I worked at McDonald's btw, so when I say a lot of people, I mean a LOT of people.)
Yeah, it's sad, but taking away their reprieve is NOT the answer. There are deep-seated sociological problems underlying drug use, and bullshit projects like these only highlights just how ignorant those in power are.
Just think about it for a moment before you mod me into oblivion. The article mentions acocaine-specific vaccination, but if they are working on chemicals that target all kinds of euphoric, psychological addiction, wouldn't religion (or perhaps chronic TV-watchers) be the first to go?
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying, I really am. At first, it sounds fairly reasonable and interesting and stuff.
Unfortunately, I cannot get past the implication that you are one of the many that believe that the universe/human race is only five thousand years old. For me, the discussion stops right there. If you are prepared to throw away all of geology, archeology, paleontology, quantum physics, astronomy, etc. in favor of questionable conclusions drawn from a heavily edited and (mis?)translated book written by unknown authors, then there's nothing left for me to say.
After the travesty that was Nemesis (yet another insipid movie centered almost entirely on Picard, and then they have the gall to kill off Data?), I think one can safely say that the rules no longer apply.
Yeah, Insurrection may have sucked (and First Contact kicked ass), but Generations was an order of magnitude better than Nemesis. At this point, the odd=sucks, even=kicks ass rule applies only to the 6 original movies.
But the difference is, if open source does it the resulting product is free to the world. No one is taking our money, no one can decide not to release the source code, etc.
What Microsoft is doing is bad not because it puts people out of business, but because it puts people out of business for the sake of increasing their own pocketbook and strengthening their stranglehold on the market.
To put it another way, if linux puts people out of business, it does so while it increases user freedoms and decreases user costs (and both of these things could potentially lead to greater economic growth in the long run.)
Progress will always put people out of business--it's unavoidable. But monopolies can easily break the laws of capitalism, and so I believe that what Microsoft is doing can no longer be called "progress"...
I generally view the last two Hitchhiker books not so much as novels, but as a protest from Adams. He never liked writing (other than the Liff books), and he always hated being pigeonholed as the writer of the Hitchhiker series. Furthermore, he himself recognized the flaws in the last two books and blamed them, at least partially, on a turbulent personal life.
They're not great books (though you can find great fragments of writing within them--even Mostly Harmless had some killer dialog and a few cutesy ideas), but I think it's a little unfair of you to call them proof of Adams' "limitations as a writer." I especially don't agree with your comments about the third Hitchhiker book...
I think many people don't give Life, the Universe, and Everything a fair chance. Yes, it is slower, but only in the sense that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is slower than a typical American sitcom. In this book, Adams found the whimsicalness that was, IMHO, lost in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Even as the plot is drawn tightly into focus (and yes, it actually has a compelling central plot, unlike the first two books), he manages to give us such wonderful bits as the encounter with Agrajag, the secret of flying, Prak, Belgium, etc. By contrast, all that Restaurant... gave us was "the B Ark", the (distorted?) Ultimate Question, and a lot of (relatively) uninteresting Zaphod scenes.
I've also gotta say that the first Dirk Gently book was very tightly written and quite clever, and I really don't see how anyone could call it "incoherent" ("less funny", perhaps, but you can't weave a compelling mystery when you're cracking a joke every other paragraph.) The themes were dark, interesting, and completely unpredictable, the perspective shifts were very atmospheric and well-timed, and the characters were very distinct and believable. The sequel fell on its face somewhat (the plot was much less interesting and the focus shifted around far too much), though it was a little funnier than Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Finally, anyone who fails to mention Last Chance to See is doing the late Mr. Adams a great disservice. If you still don't understand it when some people (like me) call DNA one of the greatest writers of all time, read this book. Its "plot" is, um, fairly uninteresting (just a bunch of rich westerners traveling around looking at endangered species), yet it remains one of the most hilariously stylish nonfiction books I have ever read. His narrative style is extraordinarily powerful--funny and fiendishly clever to the extreme, yet with all kinds of beautiful insights lying just beneath the surface. The events that take place are not really very interesting, but on the whole I'd have to say that it's a very good book simply because the prose itself is so engaging.
And that, I think, is the best thing I can say about the work of Douglas Noel Adams. His material might have been hit-and-miss, but his style never faltered for a moment.
God damn you slashdot! I don't care about yahoo's upgrade. All I want to do is check my fucking email--but I can't because (presumably) yahoo's email service is being slashdotted.
yeah, but I can count the number of popup's I've experienced using Mozilla (for 2ish years now) on one hand. I'm assuming that other IE alternatives (Safari, Opera, Konquoror, etc.) are just as effective against popups, so for the time being I think it's safe to say that popups=IE, and I think it's damnably stupid to use IE to surf porn sites.
Why the hell would anyone use IE to surf porn sites? Nevermind the fact that Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox surf faster (in my experience, anway) and has popup blocking enabled by default--porn sites (especially ones that have tons of popups) are some of the most malicious websites out there. Not to mention the fact that Firefox has a few nifty spider extentions that can automatically save all of the images for you...
Irrelevant. While I have read that babies born to older mothers stand a greater chance of developing various disorders, they aren't actually born suffering from premature old age or any such thing. If age was inhereted, life couldn't exist, period.
Slashdot Mirror
When my 10 year old penniless cousin downloads a song, she has caused no one any financial harm. If she stole a CD, though, she'd be taking a physical object that someone else could've otherwise bought--this is wrong, this is stealing, this ALWAYS causes tangible, financial loss, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge the fundemental difference between these two scenarios is a direct participant in RIAA's massive FUD campaign.
I'm not saying that piracy isn't a potential problem (and perhaps it does need to be addressed somehow, though personally I know of no one who downloads music but never buys it--my cousin and I included), but it's NOT theft any more than checking out a book at the library or fast-forwarding through commercials with your VCR (or Tivo) is theft.
They've already named a chess-playing computer after the computer from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I love Adams references as much as the next geek, but I think that once is enough.
Oh trust me, it's for real. And yes, they do use it. And let me tell you, this article worries me. On a day like today, a script kiddy could inflict some really serious chaos.
Taylor B. Palm Bay, FL
Replace the Escalades with minivans... yes, harder to stop, yes more kinetic energy (to address some of the other replies), but your line of sight is much farther, it's easier for other people to see you, you roll right over smaller obstacles. Yeah, you stand a greater chance of rolling over, but you also stand a greater chance of SURVIVING that rollover (actually, my dad rolled his van just a few months ago...)
I probably should have done a little more research before making my assertions, but oh well. Mod me down if you must...
There are a few assertions, though that still I feel comfortable making. The car from the article is very small, and most non-petroleum vehicles are very small, very light vehicles. Decreased weight can only get you so far (unless you're going to decrease the speed limit too), and I'll take a solid sedan over a compact car any day of the week... especially if that car is going to be made out of nonmetal composites. If you're flying down the interstate at 70 (...or 80, or 90), wouldn't you want a few hundred pounds of steel between you and whatever you happen to hit?
But yeah, at the end of the day I'd have to say that SUVs are stupid, and I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. I merely meant to say that we shouldn't focus on creating incredibly small, incredibly fast, incredibly flimsy cars and then claim it's the bigger cars' fault when they get annihilated.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not defending Hummers' and SUVs' impact on the environment (not to mention our dependence on Middle East oil) but it drives me nuts when people say that the fuel efficient cars get eaten alive by the SUVs and Hummers and trucks--therefore we should outlaw all of the bigger cars.
If we just take into account safety, we would be far better off banning all of the smaller cars. Smaller cars vs. smaller cars are somewhat safer, but bigger cars vs. bigger cars (and bigger cars vs. trees, telephole poles, etc.) are MUCH safer. Rollovers are an exception, but not all big vehicles have the tendency to roll over.
And just exactly why do you think that their astroturfing campaign would be anything more than a source of great amusement for us? There are no good no philosophical or moral (and probably no legal) reasons for anyone to take SCO seriously, and anyone here who tries will either be modded funny or flamebait, depending on how thick they layer on the bullshit.
In the end, SCO realize that BS only works on real grass.
Breaking the law is both an extremely effective and moral way of changing unjust laws.
Do you own a Tivo or a VCR? Ever fastforward through commercials? Thief! You're depriving those poor advertisers of their hard-earned dollars!
Just because something is illegal (or unlawful, as is the case in CIVIL matters like these) does not make it wrong, and while there is definitely good reason to ensure that musicians continue to receive compensation, this issue is NOT as cut and dry as the Morality Police would have us belief. Taken to the extreme, beliefs like yours would outlaw all libraries because they take away money from authors and publishers.
That this sort of system is an absolute necessity for any nation that has embraced the concept of progress. There's only ONE way to stay the same, but there's an infinite number of ways we can change. If 25% of the American people are apathetic enough to think things need to stay the same, they can still manage to beat out the other 75% of the country if no one else agrees on a solution.
And we shouldn't HAVE to agree; we shouldn't have to unanimously agree on the solution in order to agree that there should BE a solution. But in a single-elimination voting system such as ours, we have no choice. We rally around the candidate closest to our view, lest we give the election to the man who is not even in the same zipcode as our beliefs.
Saying that we should vote for Nader (or whoever) anyway just so he can get federal funding for his next attempt is absolutely ludicrous. Conventional voting is fundementally flawed, fundementally biased AGAINST PROGRESS and unless people start to realize this and write their congressmen en mass, things will never change. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will lay down their collective power without a long, hard fight.
In a system without runoff voting, yes it most certainly is. How do you expect people to rally around a worthy third candidate (out of the hundreds out there) when there is such a compelling motivation to vote "NOTKerry" or "NOTBush"? Maybe when they truly are identical someone else can challenege them, but right now there are just too many people willing to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Properly, we should use C.E. and B.C.E. because 1. The majority of people on this planet do not consider Jesus Christ to be their lord and 2. It's rather doubtful as to whether he was actually born in the year 1 A.D. in the first place.
But let's be realistic, people never pay attention to pedantic nitpicks like these.
Didn't see it at all, in fact, as I was too busy screaming at Firefox for crashing every other second. Was replying to the parent, who said simply "Brog." In actuality, the L is probably the least severe problem with translating "Blog" into Japanese, and yours fits nicely.
Dutch is funny as hell. I defy you to visit the Netherlands and keep a straight face when you see a gondola captain cussing out someone who just cut him off. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the culture--it's just an utterly foreign sound that your ears must get used to before you can get over the humor. I don't find Japanese funny at all anymore, simply because I've watched so much subbed anime...
Spanish is funny because it is (or seems to be, anyway) so much faster than English. Japanese is funny (I guess) because it's so gutteral. Swedish and Dutch are so funny because of the wildly fluctuating pitches. German (and to a lesser extent, Russian) is funny because it sounds so hard and militaristic. With the exception of this last one, NONE of these things has anything to do with the country itself and all of these reactions will disappear if one spends enough time around that language. Maybe this reactions are silly or even offensive, but they're not half as offensive as someone who calls them racist.
Disclaimer: IANAJM (Japaense Major)
With the exception of -n, no Japanese syllable ends in a consonant (though the vowels are sometimes silent depending on emphasis.) They might be able to handle the L (I've heard several Japanese people--eh, well, *anime characters* use the English L perfectly), but I'm pretty sure that the BR consonant blend doesn't exist. So yes, the resulting phonetic translation would be pretty much unintelligible.
Since when is making fun of a foreign language racism? "Oh look, we English-speaking people have sloppy, drawn out vowels!" Is that actually insulting to you?
On a related note, can't Political Correctness just fucking die already?
My second thought goes something like this: what, was A Clockwork Orange just not scary enough for these people? For God's sake, let's have clinical trials first, then prisoner/probation trials before we even CONSIDER giving this shit to millions of children and teenagers.
/rant on
/rant off
Actually, no, scratch that. Let's just not ever consider giving mind-altering substances to (relatively) heathly human beings, period. I was addicted to speed (a pseudo-amphetamine better known as Ritalin) for four years of my life (11-15), yet I still managed to ditch the habit over the strenuous objections of my parents and doctors. I suffered from extreme bouts of depression (I'd like to say that I don't anymore, but that's not entirely true...), I only grew a few more inches (my dad is 6'2", I'm 5'7"), I had incontrolable fits of rage for the first month of withdraw, and for what, a few A's? Give me a fucking break. It's been around since the 1950's; haven't they bothered to do serious long-term studies on this shit? No adult I know has anything positive to say about it... The problem is, people keep saying that things like drug addiction or ADHD are diseases and the side affects are just that--mere inconsequential inconviences one must endure while one is taking The Cure. These drugs work because they mimic certain hormones or neurotransmitters. Is it such a stretch to say that any substance that nullifies these drugs might also affect the chemically similar neurotransmitters?
The simple truth is, there IS NO CURE for the human mind. There never will be; we're just too fucking complex. Like the submitter said, what happens when an immunized kid suffers a horrible accident and winds up living with chronic pain, "immune" to any effective treatment? What happens to all of the people who actually do function better under the influence of certain recreational pharmaceuticals? I knew a lot of people who would probably either kill themselves or go berserk or quit their jobs and go homeless if they couldn't smoke/drink/smoke pot. (I worked at McDonald's btw, so when I say a lot of people, I mean a LOT of people.)
Yeah, it's sad, but taking away their reprieve is NOT the answer. There are deep-seated sociological problems underlying drug use, and bullshit projects like these only highlights just how ignorant those in power are.
...will it work on religion?
Just think about it for a moment before you mod me into oblivion. The article mentions acocaine-specific vaccination, but if they are working on chemicals that target all kinds of euphoric, psychological addiction, wouldn't religion (or perhaps chronic TV-watchers) be the first to go?
I'm trying to figure out what you're saying, I really am. At first, it sounds fairly reasonable and interesting and stuff.
Unfortunately, I cannot get past the implication that you are one of the many that believe that the universe/human race is only five thousand years old. For me, the discussion stops right there. If you are prepared to throw away all of geology, archeology, paleontology, quantum physics, astronomy, etc. in favor of questionable conclusions drawn from a heavily edited and (mis?)translated book written by unknown authors, then there's nothing left for me to say.
After the travesty that was Nemesis (yet another insipid movie centered almost entirely on Picard, and then they have the gall to kill off Data?), I think one can safely say that the rules no longer apply.
Yeah, Insurrection may have sucked (and First Contact kicked ass), but Generations was an order of magnitude better than Nemesis. At this point, the odd=sucks, even=kicks ass rule applies only to the 6 original movies.
But the difference is, if open source does it the resulting product is free to the world. No one is taking our money, no one can decide not to release the source code, etc.
What Microsoft is doing is bad not because it puts people out of business, but because it puts people out of business for the sake of increasing their own pocketbook and strengthening their stranglehold on the market.
To put it another way, if linux puts people out of business, it does so while it increases user freedoms and decreases user costs (and both of these things could potentially lead to greater economic growth in the long run.)
Progress will always put people out of business--it's unavoidable. But monopolies can easily break the laws of capitalism, and so I believe that what Microsoft is doing can no longer be called "progress"...
I generally view the last two Hitchhiker books not so much as novels, but as a protest from Adams. He never liked writing (other than the Liff books), and he always hated being pigeonholed as the writer of the Hitchhiker series. Furthermore, he himself recognized the flaws in the last two books and blamed them, at least partially, on a turbulent personal life.
They're not great books (though you can find great fragments of writing within them--even Mostly Harmless had some killer dialog and a few cutesy ideas), but I think it's a little unfair of you to call them proof of Adams' "limitations as a writer." I especially don't agree with your comments about the third Hitchhiker book...
I think many people don't give Life, the Universe, and Everything a fair chance. Yes, it is slower, but only in the sense that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is slower than a typical American sitcom. In this book, Adams found the whimsicalness that was, IMHO, lost in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Even as the plot is drawn tightly into focus (and yes, it actually has a compelling central plot, unlike the first two books), he manages to give us such wonderful bits as the encounter with Agrajag, the secret of flying, Prak, Belgium, etc. By contrast, all that Restaurant... gave us was "the B Ark", the (distorted?) Ultimate Question, and a lot of (relatively) uninteresting Zaphod scenes. I've also gotta say that the first Dirk Gently book was very tightly written and quite clever, and I really don't see how anyone could call it "incoherent" ("less funny", perhaps, but you can't weave a compelling mystery when you're cracking a joke every other paragraph.) The themes were dark, interesting, and completely unpredictable, the perspective shifts were very atmospheric and well-timed, and the characters were very distinct and believable. The sequel fell on its face somewhat (the plot was much less interesting and the focus shifted around far too much), though it was a little funnier than Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
Finally, anyone who fails to mention Last Chance to See is doing the late Mr. Adams a great disservice. If you still don't understand it when some people (like me) call DNA one of the greatest writers of all time, read this book. Its "plot" is, um, fairly uninteresting (just a bunch of rich westerners traveling around looking at endangered species), yet it remains one of the most hilariously stylish nonfiction books I have ever read. His narrative style is extraordinarily powerful--funny and fiendishly clever to the extreme, yet with all kinds of beautiful insights lying just beneath the surface. The events that take place are not really very interesting, but on the whole I'd have to say that it's a very good book simply because the prose itself is so engaging.
And that, I think, is the best thing I can say about the work of Douglas Noel Adams. His material might have been hit-and-miss, but his style never faltered for a moment.
God damn you slashdot! I don't care about yahoo's upgrade. All I want to do is check my fucking email--but I can't because (presumably) yahoo's email service is being slashdotted.
Or am I the only one out here being affected?
yeah, but I can count the number of popup's I've experienced using Mozilla (for 2ish years now) on one hand. I'm assuming that other IE alternatives (Safari, Opera, Konquoror, etc.) are just as effective against popups, so for the time being I think it's safe to say that popups=IE, and I think it's damnably stupid to use IE to surf porn sites.
Why the hell would anyone use IE to surf porn sites? Nevermind the fact that Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox surf faster (in my experience, anway) and has popup blocking enabled by default--porn sites (especially ones that have tons of popups) are some of the most malicious websites out there. Not to mention the fact that Firefox has a few nifty spider extentions that can automatically save all of the images for you...
Irrelevant. While I have read that babies born to older mothers stand a greater chance of developing various disorders, they aren't actually born suffering from premature old age or any such thing. If age was inhereted, life couldn't exist, period.