Your argument is bizzare in its complete disconnect to reality. You do realize that your ability to get plentiful meat is itself the luxury of living in a wealthy country with lots of land, right? It's like saying, "We can't afford the luxury of commuting by bicycle! We must use SUVs, because to do otherwise is wasteful! Do you think those poor third-worlders wouldn't ride in SUVs if they could?" The fact that poor people would love to be able overutilize resources like you would does not change the fact that it is in fact the more wasteful option.
In what dimension is tofu more expensive to make than any sort of meat? Okay, I'm sure there are places where regular people don't eat it and tofu has to be specially imported for the 0.1% of the population that eats it, but please realize that in most places where it's regular food, tofu is *much* cheaper than meat. It's like how bread is cheaper than meat over here, since tofu's just processed soybean, and can be made cheaply anywhere you can grow soy. In Japan, eating more tofu than meat is itself a sign that you're poor, not a sign that you're some wierd vegan dude.
What you've said is like some Korean dude saying, "Well, why should we waste precious resources on this expensive 'saurkraut', when kim chi is much cheaper and more plentiful? Saurkraut is obviously more wasteful!" You're confusing the prices based on economies of scale and distribution at a particular location with the cost of production.
Saying, "Well, poor people should just eat meat" is a bit like the old (false)story about Marie Antounette saying "Let them eat cake".
Meat would be a good choice for feeding large numbers of poor people only in certain situations: 1) Fish and other seafood, since we don't eat plankton. 2) Lots of wild animals to hunt, though any large population will exhast is soon, and 3) Land unsuitable for agriculture, like large arid plains.
Outside of those, our best bet for feeding the masses is large-scale agriculture and low-meat diet.
Wow, this has gone completely off-topic. Sorry if I got a bit long-winded, but I've heard this "meat is poor people's food, veggies are for rich folk" type of argument before, and I couldn't stand how absurdly out of touch it was. I am not a vegan or vegetarian (in fact I've eaten more meat than tofu lately), but I don't pretend that I eat meat because I'm poor.
I prefer the seniority principle - the lower the Slashdot ID, the more right the unfounded opinion is.
One time, at CompUSA, I saw a iMac that totally had its power supply blown when I spilled my Coke on it. Them things are dangerous! It would never happen with a well-engineered computer, like my 8-year old Packard Bell.
My Slashdot ID is lower than yours, therefore this screed is truth!
I have to agree, the ability to self-build your own box not only helped the PC enthusiast, but also the industry built to support regular people.
We bought our third computer from a local mom-and-pop company that built beige boxes from standard parts, and supported them. It was nice to have a company like that locally, that one could drive over to see the guys personally instead of shipping things off to a central support center to get repairs. I'm sure it provided more employment to geeks around the country as well.
It's not something that could have been done with a company like Apple or Commodore, though they built good products.
I wish that list had included some of the first ultra-small portables like the Libretto, though. I still have trouble finding something in that form factor, it's all either small 10" notebooks or PDA-type devices now.
The Portland 2600 meet happens there, by the way. Compared to other 2600s, we might have a more adult group, though there are a few teenagers that hang around. The unofficial "third friday" meet is next friday, from 6 to 10 or so. Anyone is welcome to come by. Our regular meetings are on the first fridays, 6 to 11-ish. We do tend to be a bit late, however:)
I like Backsapce precicely because it caters to an interesting market of young adults. I see more punk/skater/goth/geek people there than any other place in Portland except maybe the square, and that's saying a lot. The good thing is, though, the age group is more in the 20's and 30's than the teens, so they're really not obnoxious or posturing a lot. They're laid-back people in general. Games and computers are kind of popular with the punk/goth crowd now because this generation of 20-somethings grew up with it, and there's a pretty big market in Portland for hip, adult game/computer places.
Backspace is right around the corner from Ground Kontrol, a video game arcade that has a full bar, and is closed to under-21s. The Backspace 'zine even had an interview with Linus Torvalds! Can you say that about most cafes? They're also open until 2am most nights, meaning you get a lot of people there who are night owls, like most of Slashdot:)
I've tried making a 'media center' for the living room with stock PC and components, and here's where I had problems:
Controls. I still had a mouse and keyboard attached to it, and while I could have gotten a wireless set, it still would have been clunky. Someone needs to make a remote with a trackpoint and a treo- or sidekick-sized keyboard, and the regular remote features. Everthing should be controllable through a remote, without a separate KB/mouse.
Interface. Sure, I had a bunch of videos on the compuer, but it was a PITA going through explorer to find and organize things. Something like iTunes for video would have helped. This was on Windows, and I have heard good things about MythTV, though. Oh, and the resolution difference between TV and PC monitors meant everything looked unreadable or ugly on the TV.
Recording Quality. The video recording from either my Hauppage card or my ATI card were really not that impressive. I could have cranked up the resolution to DVD levels, but the motion compression still kinda sucked.
Aeshetics. Okay, this is my fault, but I had a really big beige box that was really loud next to my TV. That's wat happens when you use an old P4 tower to be your 'Media PC'. If I were to do it today, I would use the lowest-power proc I could find and one of those mini ATX cases. Most of the PC market just isn't designed to be in your living room.
On a brighter note, this is what I wish I could afford: Sony Type X Living - 1.5TB HDD, wireless and wired file server, 2 video tuners, DVD-RW, TV web browsing, scheduling software, HDTV compatible... If only Sony would just dump their 'media' division and have the hardware guys take over again, we could see a really good competitor to Apple in digital integration:(
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit).
The term "objective" is a value judgement, and one that goes out the window once you decide to shoot one subject rather than another.
The question you are asking is, "How can my photo reflect the reality in front of the camera", which I think is the wrong question because it is an inherently value-based judgement and can be affected by everything from composition to lens. The question you should be asking is, "How can I get useful information out of my photo and convey it accurately to the viewer?".
I suggest you look at astronomy, or other fields where they use cameras as a data-gathering instrument rather than an artist's tool. They understand that the camera is not "objective" any more than another instrument, so what they do is document what camera, instrument, and settings were used, and convey that along with the picture. This allows them to figure out what the accuracy or tolerances of the camera are, and they accept that it is not an absolute, "objective" view, just a reading from an instrument.
This is important because false-color imagery is often used in astronomy, since telescopes often see into frequencies not visible to the human eye, such as infra-red, ultra-violet, even x-ray and gamma rays. There is no pretending that "this is what you would see if you were there", because they are often looking at things that you would not be able to see. An false-color image is like a map with elevation markings - the colors represent data, not visible light.
Look at this image, which has a 211 Meg TIFF file, or Mars rver image in false color. With those pictures, you can be sure to contact NASA and get te actual settings, time, and specs of the camera used so that you will know what kinds of inaccuracies are likely in the picutures. It's that kind of information that you would use to find tolerances for the image data so you can be sure just *how much* inaccuracy an image has. NASA doesn't pretend that they have the Eye Of God, just a very accurate instrument.
The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward.
The oppisite, actually. The best that you could do is to do whatever you need to do to make the image informative, but tell the viewer all the editing steps that were done and the settings and equipment it was taken with. I realize that newspapers don't have the space to do it with, but surely a web publication can?
This paper was so worth it, if only for inventing the term "Malicious blog". I can only imagine an army of teenage girls cracking their ex-boyfriend's computer by embedding exploits into their melodramatic poetry.
1) Have fun. 2) Allow posting comments on your stories. 3) When people abuse comments, put in moderation system to stop them. 4) Hire some random writers with axes to grind, like "Geeks are oppressed by stupid conformist society". 5) When people abuse moderation points, throw in meta-moderation system to stop them. 6) Hype yourself up, claiming you are part of some revolution in media that will bring control to the masses. 7) Sell out to some venture capitalists. 8) Abuse moderation and metamoderation system yourself when comments piss you off. 9) Cover the site in more ads than Times Square. 10) Stop putting any effort into the site whatsoever. 11) Let people pimp their own blogs in story submissions. 12) Charge money to preview stories so people can read links before hordes of visitors take sites down, a problem you caused in the first place. 13) Charge money to view the site without ads. 14)??? 15).... profit!
As you can see, the main goal of the Slashdot Method is to cause problems yourself, then charge people money to fix them. But remember, the most important step is to have fun! Hope you have as much success as they did!
I am in the market for a handheld to replace my stolen GBA:(, and I definitely agree. PSP is not even in consideration, as much as I like Wipeout. Too high a price, too few games, and a company that has a reputation for poor workmanship means no PSP for me.
I just wish Nintendo would keep backwards compatibility a bit better. Yes, each generation of handheld can play the games of the previous generation, but each also breaks multiplayer compatibility with the previous.
When you're a casual gamer like me, or more importantly among a group of casual gamers, going for a DS means not playing multiplayer with your friends:( I am not going to keep two handhelds around just so I can play with my DS friends and my GBA friends. Now I feel like I'm being torn between two gangs or something.
Why couldn't Nintendo at least keep a GBA link port on the DS? And why did they get rid of classic GB compatibility, when they already have a slot sized for it?
Nintendo's already revived the adventure format somewhat. "Trace Memory" and "Phoenix Wright" are basically modern adventure games, in that you go around looking for clues and solve mysteries, with an dialogue-driven story and inventory of clues, etc. I've been thinking about getting a DS because of games like that, actually.
And why does he say the console killed the adventure game? I remember the late 90's, the adventure game was killed in its home turf of PC gaming. From what I recall, FPSes, RTSes, and some niche games like the Sims began to dominate the whole industry. The genres that appealed mostly to geeks began to decline around that time. Realistic flight sims began their decline, PC RPGs were definitely out-competed by their console counterparts, and historical turn-based strategy is mostly gone, too. Monkey Island just couldn't compete with Quake II or Starcraft.
Oh, and the fact that adventure games are by their nature solitary, at a time when LAN and internet gaming was becoming popular, did not help.
I'm kinda frustrated by all the focus on 3D graphics nowadays, though. Only Nintendo seems to like using 2D grpahics, which I actually find more beautiful in most cases. I think we are still at the point in time where we care more about the novelty of 'realistic' 3D graphics than about whether artists actually make them look good. In the future, we might look back at our era and have a good laugh at all the bad, blocky, or badly-designed 3D models we put up with, while cartoon-style graphics look so much better.
I actually have that ad somewhere. I'm thinking of framing it and putting it on a wall, just for laughs.
But I was dissappointed these were only console video game ads, no PC ones. I can remember some damn awful ones from PC Gamer in the mid-90s.
Forgotten company/product: Picture shows shittiest, messyist room ever, with trash everywhere, leftover pizza, roaches, etc. There is no furniture, but sitting on the floor in the middle of the room is an naked, emaciated, disheveled man facing the reader, with his legs spread wide. His groin is covered up by a computer monitor, which he is staring intently at, while gripping the monitor like it's a hooker's head giving him a blowjob. The caption was something like: "Scientific studies have shown that monkeys will prefer recieving pleasure to food, water, or excercise. Are you a monkey?" I wish I could remember what the hell game that was for. Sure as hell did not make me want to get it.
Duke nukem 3D: A lineup of various very ugly people dressed as Duke Nukem, including scrawny redneck dude, several midgets, an old woman, etc. All of them making faces like a retarded child who has been told there's a monster under his bed. The caption: "Accept no substitutes." It didn't make me want to accept the real thing, either.
Tomb Raider: Every ad that tried to 'excite' us with Lara's polygonal body, ever.
Battlecruiser 3000 A.D.: Sexy woman in lingere. Speech bubble from off-screen: "Not now, honey, first I have to recharge the shields, launch missles, repair the hyperdrive...." etc.
Serf City: Crazy leprechaun-like dude in a top hat and big bulging eyes and wide grin swinging sledgehammer at reader. "Life is feudal." Indeed.
Some random online gaming service: Screenshot of Quake II, with big guys and gals with guns and camo facepaint from the game. (Badly)Photoshopped into the pic: teenager in yellow shirt and slacks, with the worst "I'm trying to look life I'm tough by roaring" face ever. I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be screaming because he's scared, angry, or having fun. Oh, and his gun was also badly photoshopped in, or maybe it was a cardboard mockup of the Quake II shotgun.
I wish I had my stack of PC Gamers here, there were way too many hilariiously bad ads back in the day.
Why bother, when they can just have him beat himself up. Or just do the traditional suicide.
"In other news today, terrorist prisoners killed themselves by slipping on a bar of soap 49 times. This obvious attempt to discredit the state shall not be rewarded with a funeral, according to officials. The body was dumped into the river following a through medical examination that showed the prisoners were clearly evil due to brain imbalances. God bless our nation."
Well, I guess it does bring the interesting issue of proliferation, since this sounds a lot easier to produce than Kevlar or similar materials. I bet it will now be easier for insurgents and terrorists to get the same level of protection as our troops.
From what I understand, this only works against projectiles going fast, so maybe we'll see something like the shields in Dune, where they duel to make the slowest thrust?:)
Disclaimer: I am only a beginning linguistics student
More importantly, people tend not to use it in actual speech, though I've heard a few people actually say "LOL", as in, "El oh el" out loud. Since most netspeak is abbreviations and acronyms used to save time, there's really no point in saying "IIRC", "AFAIK", "OMG", or "NSFW" in person.
Okay, I have heard people use "WTF?" in person, but that may be just a way of self-censoring obscenities.
Okay, that one seems to have flown over the heads of many here. Perhaps it was written by a non-native English speaker. But my interpretation is that they are saying that that is the message being sent by the companies by their actions.
is ignoring the victims and using the legal system to avoid liability. The lessons are that $4000 is not worth risking your life over, that that is what you are doing if you are foolish enough to volunteer for medical testing whatever promises you receive not withstanding, and that if you are so foolish you will be left to die by the company responsible without legal recourse should things go wrong. In other words, only an ignorant would sign up for medical testing. I predict a decline in voluntary test subjects, and a rise in the use of prisoners and other 'disposable' human subjects."
It is criticizing the company for sending that message, IMHO.
And what is so hard to believe about using prisoners as test subjects? They have already forfeited many rights, and are used for prison labor purposes.
I am trying to wrap my head around the concept of tech journalism, Hunter Thompson, and the muppets coming together... "We were somewhere around Redmond, on the edge of Microsoft campus, when the drugs began to take hold...
I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit light headed, maybe you should drive..." when all of a sudden, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge popups, all swooping and screeching about vi4gr4 all around us. "Holy Kermit!" I shouted. "What are those goddamn animals?!?!"
"What the hell are you yelling about?" My attourney, who was pouring orange juice on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process, disclaimed. No point in warning him, I thought. He'll see those bastards eventually, the poor doomed bastard.
"As your attorney, I advise you to run Firefox with the Adblock extention and put another rock of crack in your pipe. Wakka wakka wakka!!" Damn it, I thought. So that's why that rat-bastard Fozzie Bear was so calm.
My consternation was broken once again when what appeared to be a large ergonomic office chair smashed the windshield of the convertible, a red '69 Cadillac from the rental agency. The chair bounced up, over our heads, and gracefully landed, somehow, on its wheels. My following of the chair's flight through the air with my neck nearly caused me to run into the most frightening thing I have ever seen. It may have been a monkey, or an ape, or some other type of beast, but possibly it was an executive from Microsoft. Whatever it was, it was huge, thick, and with a glare and ferocious face the like of which I had never seen. With a baboon-like intensity he was shrieking, "FUCKING GONZO!!! I'LL FUCKING KILLLLLLLL THEEEEEEEEEEEMMM!!!! DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELO..." and then it began what appeared to be a seizure, uttering gibberish at the highest possible volume like an air-raid siren and foaming at the mouth.
"As your attorney, I advise you to run that bitch over and never look back - Wokka wokka wokka!!"
That's right, I thought. Listen to the bear.
May the spirits of Jim Henson and Hunter Thompson forgive me:)
Ugh... I have to respond to this utter bull, even though it's late(early?) It's funny how the "skool suks, down wit da man!" bias of Slashdot can mod up even the most ridiculous of posts.
Are you saying you grew up in the 1800s? Remembering your childhood, are you?
Saying that we should expect our 12-year olds to command navy ships and that it's a failure of society when they can't is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin.
First off, the incident you describe would have been rather unusual back then. I don't think there was an expectation that most 12-year olds would be able to perform such a task. In that era, most of them would have been farm boys who didn't command anything.
The kids of that era also would have had lunch made by... mom. The fact that kids have to have some written directive from parents to control what they eat only shows the relative freedom kids have in consumer choice, for good or bad. Kids of the 19th century would have had more parental control over their diet, not less.
You think kids would be supermen or full adults were it not for our evil educational system? Hah. Keep on dreaming.
I know how things are in Japan, and let me assure you that while there were people there who hate the U.S., and many who regard it with suspicion, the reputation of the U.S. has taken a steep decline since the Bush administration came to power, and especially since the war on Iraq. There was a brief surge of sympathy and compassion following 9/11, but the president is just too loathsome to ignore. I think it's safe to say that he is the second most disliked foreign politician, after Kim Il Jong.
Look, the fact that a bunch of people in the middle east go around burning American flags should not suprise you. What should be worrying is the fact that one of your closest allies now thinks you guys are power-mad and dangerous. I don't think either Japan or the UK will help you in your next war.
You seem to think that one either loves the U.S. unconditionally, or you hate it absolutely like those guys celebrating 9/11, and that there is no changing of opinions. The fact is, most of the world is not extreme and set in their ways like that, and your actions do have an effect on how they percieve you. Your administration has been pushing people away from liking you, so you might want to reconsider your actions.
Yes, but it's what you would expect from a terrorist group. What really shocked me are stories of teensvideoing their attacks on others and sending it to friends on mobiles. It's apparently pretty common in the UK, so it would not suprise me if it was happening in the U.S. as well.
Yes, I know teens were beating each other up before (hell, I was once or twice), but I imagine that putting it on video would make things a bit worse in terms of pride and self-esteem.
Now, I'm not the most pro-militart guy on the planet, and I opposed the war in Iraq (for any number of reasons), but I don't think your reasons are really the most well thought out, nor would I consider most soldiers to be murderers.
On the first: yeah, this suprises you? The military is mostly young men, and this is the kind of shit they pull on a regular basis. I'm not sure it would even be a misdemeanor, if it was in public and seen from a plane. If anything, the couple was commiting the offence of having sex in public.
On the second: War is about killing people, and often you do not let the enemy have the oppurtunity to hide or shoot back. What, you wanted them to get down on the ground and have a duel with those people? Talk to my grandpa about the time B-29s burned down his city, he understands that it was part of a war, and he doesn't think Americans were 'evil' for doing it. Not to say that the experience was a good thing, by any means.
As for the crew treating it as a joke, it's the normal dehumanization of the enemy that happens. Soldiers will get humor out of their situation whenever possible, and not treat it as a grave, somber duty. In that sense, films like Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now were more accurate than the ultra-serious films like Black Hawk Down. It's probobly a coping mechanism, I don't think you could do a job like that if you really felt the weight of every death you cause seriously.
Personal interactions matter a lot more to women than to most men. If they have to hang out with assholes, women will just leave, whether they like the hobby or not.
If anyone disagrees, go look at the demographics of MMORPGs vs. table-top RPGs. The last time I checked, there were more women involved in MMORPGs than in table-top, even if they hid their gender online. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that many males, especially geeks, tend to act wierdly or inappropriately around women, and so women tend to avoid those kinds of people. You can hide your gender online, but you can't do so in person. Basically, online you can be judged for your character(pun intended), and not by your body.
Also, if you've ever seen the FAQ on how to get women to join your LUG (written by a woman), it said things like 'have meetings in safe-looking neighborhoods', stuff that guys would not really think about, but which matter a lot to women. To guys, it's all about the core issue, and complaining about perhiheral issues might seem like a distraction, but to women a large part of whether they find something pleasant to do or participate in is the side issues like how interesting the other people are, or how they're treated by the others.
Like, ohmygod, you haven't heard about ZONGO yet? Lol, it's, um, this really strange, uh, THING on MYSPACE!!1!! I TOTALLY had a huuuuuge problem with it the other day!!!:) It went like, this...
I was blogging on myspace on the PC. And it was all, like, beep beep beep beep, and MySpace was, like, gone.
And I was, like.... "Uunh?" (O_O)
Zongo DEVOURED MySpace.
It was a really good myspace.:-(
And then I had to do it again, and I had to do it fast, so it wasn't as good (;_;)
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument is bizzare in its complete disconnect to reality. You do realize that your ability to get plentiful meat is itself the luxury of living in a wealthy country with lots of land, right? It's like saying, "We can't afford the luxury of commuting by bicycle! We must use SUVs, because to do otherwise is wasteful! Do you think those poor third-worlders wouldn't ride in SUVs if they could?" The fact that poor people would love to be able overutilize resources like you would does not change the fact that it is in fact the more wasteful option.
In what dimension is tofu more expensive to make than any sort of meat? Okay, I'm sure there are places where regular people don't eat it and tofu has to be specially imported for the 0.1% of the population that eats it, but please realize that in most places where it's regular food, tofu is *much* cheaper than meat. It's like how bread is cheaper than meat over here, since tofu's just processed soybean, and can be made cheaply anywhere you can grow soy. In Japan, eating more tofu than meat is itself a sign that you're poor, not a sign that you're some wierd vegan dude.
What you've said is like some Korean dude saying, "Well, why should we waste precious resources on this expensive 'saurkraut', when kim chi is much cheaper and more plentiful? Saurkraut is obviously more wasteful!" You're confusing the prices based on economies of scale and distribution at a particular location with the cost of production.
Saying, "Well, poor people should just eat meat" is a bit like the old (false)story about Marie Antounette saying "Let them eat cake".
Meat would be a good choice for feeding large numbers of poor people only in certain situations: 1) Fish and other seafood, since we don't eat plankton. 2) Lots of wild animals to hunt, though any large population will exhast is soon, and 3) Land unsuitable for agriculture, like large arid plains.
Outside of those, our best bet for feeding the masses is large-scale agriculture and low-meat diet.
Wow, this has gone completely off-topic. Sorry if I got a bit long-winded, but I've heard this "meat is poor people's food, veggies are for rich folk" type of argument before, and I couldn't stand how absurdly out of touch it was. I am not a vegan or vegetarian (in fact I've eaten more meat than tofu lately), but I don't pretend that I eat meat because I'm poor.
I prefer the seniority principle - the lower the Slashdot ID, the more right the unfounded opinion is.
One time, at CompUSA, I saw a iMac that totally had its power supply blown when I spilled my Coke on it. Them things are dangerous! It would never happen with a well-engineered computer, like my 8-year old Packard Bell.
My Slashdot ID is lower than yours, therefore this screed is truth!
I have to agree, the ability to self-build your own box not only helped the PC enthusiast, but also the industry built to support regular people.
We bought our third computer from a local mom-and-pop company that built beige boxes from standard parts, and supported them. It was nice to have a company like that locally, that one could drive over to see the guys personally instead of shipping things off to a central support center to get repairs. I'm sure it provided more employment to geeks around the country as well.
It's not something that could have been done with a company like Apple or Commodore, though they built good products.
I wish that list had included some of the first ultra-small portables like the Libretto, though. I still have trouble finding something in that form factor, it's all either small 10" notebooks or PDA-type devices now.
The Portland 2600 meet happens there, by the way. Compared to other 2600s, we might have a more adult group, though there are a few teenagers that hang around. The unofficial "third friday" meet is next friday, from 6 to 10 or so. Anyone is welcome to come by. Our regular meetings are on the first fridays, 6 to 11-ish. We do tend to be a bit late, however :)
:)
Directions here
I like Backsapce precicely because it caters to an interesting market of young adults. I see more punk/skater/goth/geek people there than any other place in Portland except maybe the square, and that's saying a lot. The good thing is, though, the age group is more in the 20's and 30's than the teens, so they're really not obnoxious or posturing a lot. They're laid-back people in general. Games and computers are kind of popular with the punk/goth crowd now because this generation of 20-somethings grew up with it, and there's a pretty big market in Portland for hip, adult game/computer places.
Backspace is right around the corner from Ground Kontrol, a video game arcade that has a full bar, and is closed to under-21s. The Backspace 'zine even had an interview with Linus Torvalds! Can you say that about most cafes? They're also open until 2am most nights, meaning you get a lot of people there who are night owls, like most of Slashdot
I've tried making a 'media center' for the living room with stock PC and components, and here's where I had problems:
:(
Controls. I still had a mouse and keyboard attached to it, and while I could have gotten a wireless set, it still would have been clunky. Someone needs to make a remote with a trackpoint and a treo- or sidekick-sized keyboard, and the regular remote features. Everthing should be controllable through a remote, without a separate KB/mouse.
Interface. Sure, I had a bunch of videos on the compuer, but it was a PITA going through explorer to find and organize things. Something like iTunes for video would have helped. This was on Windows, and I have heard good things about MythTV, though. Oh, and the resolution difference between TV and PC monitors meant everything looked unreadable or ugly on the TV.
Recording Quality. The video recording from either my Hauppage card or my ATI card were really not that impressive. I could have cranked up the resolution to DVD levels, but the motion compression still kinda sucked.
Aeshetics. Okay, this is my fault, but I had a really big beige box that was really loud next to my TV. That's wat happens when you use an old P4 tower to be your 'Media PC'. If I were to do it today, I would use the lowest-power proc I could find and one of those mini ATX cases. Most of the PC market just isn't designed to be in your living room.
On a brighter note, this is what I wish I could afford: Sony Type X Living - 1.5TB HDD, wireless and wired file server, 2 video tuners, DVD-RW, TV web browsing, scheduling software, HDTV compatible... If only Sony would just dump their 'media' division and have the hardware guys take over again, we could see a really good competitor to Apple in digital integration
The point is that the camera is only, and has always only been, a tool for realizing the vision of the photographer. It is not "objective" in any sense (and wasn't in the film days either, even film had to be "developed" and this process could vary an image quite a bit).
The term "objective" is a value judgement, and one that goes out the window once you decide to shoot one subject rather than another.
The question you are asking is, "How can my photo reflect the reality in front of the camera", which I think is the wrong question because it is an inherently value-based judgement and can be affected by everything from composition to lens. The question you should be asking is, "How can I get useful information out of my photo and convey it accurately to the viewer?".
I suggest you look at astronomy, or other fields where they use cameras as a data-gathering instrument rather than an artist's tool. They understand that the camera is not "objective" any more than another instrument, so what they do is document what camera, instrument, and settings were used, and convey that along with the picture. This allows them to figure out what the accuracy or tolerances of the camera are, and they accept that it is not an absolute, "objective" view, just a reading from an instrument.
This is important because false-color imagery is often used in astronomy, since telescopes often see into frequencies not visible to the human eye, such as infra-red, ultra-violet, even x-ray and gamma rays. There is no pretending that "this is what you would see if you were there", because they are often looking at things that you would not be able to see. An false-color image is like a map with elevation markings - the colors represent data, not visible light.
Look at this image, which has a 211 Meg TIFF file, or Mars rver image in false color. With those pictures, you can be sure to contact NASA and get te actual settings, time, and specs of the camera used so that you will know what kinds of inaccuracies are likely in the picutures. It's that kind of information that you would use to find tolerances for the image data so you can be sure just *how much* inaccuracy an image has. NASA doesn't pretend that they have the Eye Of God, just a very accurate instrument.
The logical extreme of such arguments is that the only "real" images in the digital age are taken with black-box cameras with all settings on "auto" and nothing adjusted afterward.
The oppisite, actually. The best that you could do is to do whatever you need to do to make the image informative, but tell the viewer all the editing steps that were done and the settings and equipment it was taken with. I realize that newspapers don't have the space to do it with, but surely a web publication can?
Because in the U.S., at least, 'Jap' is a racial slur, and not often used. It's on the same level as 'raghead' or 'wop'.
Is it different in the other English-speaking countries?
This paper was so worth it, if only for inventing the term "Malicious blog". I can only imagine an army of teenage girls cracking their ex-boyfriend's computer by embedding exploits into their melodramatic poetry.
Mood: h4xx0r
1) Have fun.
2) Allow posting comments on your stories.
3) When people abuse comments, put in moderation system to stop them.
4) Hire some random writers with axes to grind, like "Geeks are oppressed by stupid conformist society".
5) When people abuse moderation points, throw in meta-moderation system to stop them.
6) Hype yourself up, claiming you are part of some revolution in media that will bring control to the masses.
7) Sell out to some venture capitalists.
8) Abuse moderation and metamoderation system yourself when comments piss you off.
9) Cover the site in more ads than Times Square.
10) Stop putting any effort into the site whatsoever.
11) Let people pimp their own blogs in story submissions.
12) Charge money to preview stories so people can read links before hordes of visitors take sites down, a problem you caused in the first place.
13) Charge money to view the site without ads.
14)???
15).... profit!
As you can see, the main goal of the Slashdot Method is to cause problems yourself, then charge people money to fix them. But remember, the most important step is to have fun! Hope you have as much success as they did!
I am in the market for a handheld to replace my stolen GBA :(, and I definitely agree. PSP is not even in consideration, as much as I like Wipeout. Too high a price, too few games, and a company that has a reputation for poor workmanship means no PSP for me.
:( I am not going to keep two handhelds around just so I can play with my DS friends and my GBA friends. Now I feel like I'm being torn between two gangs or something.
I just wish Nintendo would keep backwards compatibility a bit better. Yes, each generation of handheld can play the games of the previous generation, but each also breaks multiplayer compatibility with the previous.
When you're a casual gamer like me, or more importantly among a group of casual gamers, going for a DS means not playing multiplayer with your friends
Why couldn't Nintendo at least keep a GBA link port on the DS? And why did they get rid of classic GB compatibility, when they already have a slot sized for it?
Nintendo's already revived the adventure format somewhat. "Trace Memory" and "Phoenix Wright" are basically modern adventure games, in that you go around looking for clues and solve mysteries, with an dialogue-driven story and inventory of clues, etc. I've been thinking about getting a DS because of games like that, actually.
And why does he say the console killed the adventure game? I remember the late 90's, the adventure game was killed in its home turf of PC gaming. From what I recall, FPSes, RTSes, and some niche games like the Sims began to dominate the whole industry. The genres that appealed mostly to geeks began to decline around that time. Realistic flight sims began their decline, PC RPGs were definitely out-competed by their console counterparts, and historical turn-based strategy is mostly gone, too. Monkey Island just couldn't compete with Quake II or Starcraft.
Oh, and the fact that adventure games are by their nature solitary, at a time when LAN and internet gaming was becoming popular, did not help.
I'm kinda frustrated by all the focus on 3D graphics nowadays, though. Only Nintendo seems to like using 2D grpahics, which I actually find more beautiful in most cases. I think we are still at the point in time where we care more about the novelty of 'realistic' 3D graphics than about whether artists actually make them look good. In the future, we might look back at our era and have a good laugh at all the bad, blocky, or badly-designed 3D models we put up with, while cartoon-style graphics look so much better.
I actually have that ad somewhere. I'm thinking of framing it and putting it on a wall, just for laughs.
But I was dissappointed these were only console video game ads, no PC ones. I can remember some damn awful ones from PC Gamer in the mid-90s.
Forgotten company/product: Picture shows shittiest, messyist room ever, with trash everywhere, leftover pizza, roaches, etc. There is no furniture, but sitting on the floor in the middle of the room is an naked, emaciated, disheveled man facing the reader, with his legs spread wide. His groin is covered up by a computer monitor, which he is staring intently at, while gripping the monitor like it's a hooker's head giving him a blowjob. The caption was something like: "Scientific studies have shown that monkeys will prefer recieving pleasure to food, water, or excercise. Are you a monkey?" I wish I could remember what the hell game that was for. Sure as hell did not make me want to get it.
Duke nukem 3D: A lineup of various very ugly people dressed as Duke Nukem, including scrawny redneck dude, several midgets, an old woman, etc. All of them making faces like a retarded child who has been told there's a monster under his bed. The caption: "Accept no substitutes." It didn't make me want to accept the real thing, either.
Tomb Raider: Every ad that tried to 'excite' us with Lara's polygonal body, ever.
Battlecruiser 3000 A.D.: Sexy woman in lingere. Speech bubble from off-screen: "Not now, honey, first I have to recharge the shields, launch missles, repair the hyperdrive...." etc.
Serf City: Crazy leprechaun-like dude in a top hat and big bulging eyes and wide grin swinging sledgehammer at reader. "Life is feudal." Indeed.
Some random online gaming service: Screenshot of Quake II, with big guys and gals with guns and camo facepaint from the game. (Badly)Photoshopped into the pic: teenager in yellow shirt and slacks, with the worst "I'm trying to look life I'm tough by roaring" face ever. I couldn't tell if he was supposed to be screaming because he's scared, angry, or having fun. Oh, and his gun was also badly photoshopped in, or maybe it was a cardboard mockup of the Quake II shotgun.
I wish I had my stack of PC Gamers here, there were way too many hilariiously bad ads back in the day.
Why bother, when they can just have him beat himself up. Or just do the traditional suicide.
"In other news today, terrorist prisoners killed themselves by slipping on a bar of soap 49 times. This obvious attempt to discredit the state shall not be rewarded with a funeral, according to officials. The body was dumped into the river following a through medical examination that showed the prisoners were clearly evil due to brain imbalances. God bless our nation."
Well, I guess it does bring the interesting issue of proliferation, since this sounds a lot easier to produce than Kevlar or similar materials. I bet it will now be easier for insurgents and terrorists to get the same level of protection as our troops.
:)
From what I understand, this only works against projectiles going fast, so maybe we'll see something like the shields in Dune, where they duel to make the slowest thrust?
Disclaimer: I am only a beginning linguistics student
More importantly, people tend not to use it in actual speech, though I've heard a few people actually say "LOL", as in, "El oh el" out loud. Since most netspeak is abbreviations and acronyms used to save time, there's really no point in saying "IIRC", "AFAIK", "OMG", or "NSFW" in person.
Okay, I have heard people use "WTF?" in person, but that may be just a way of self-censoring obscenities.
Okay, that one seems to have flown over the heads of many here. Perhaps it was written by a non-native English speaker. But my interpretation is that they are saying that that is the message being sent by the companies by their actions.
is ignoring the victims and using the legal system to avoid liability. The lessons are that $4000 is not worth risking your life over, that that is what you are doing if you are foolish enough to volunteer for medical testing whatever promises you receive not withstanding, and that if you are so foolish you will be left to die by the company responsible without legal recourse should things go wrong. In other words, only an ignorant would sign up for medical testing. I predict a decline in voluntary test subjects, and a rise in the use of prisoners and other 'disposable' human subjects."
It is criticizing the company for sending that message, IMHO.
And what is so hard to believe about using prisoners as test subjects? They have already forfeited many rights, and are used for prison labor purposes.
I am trying to wrap my head around the concept of tech journalism, Hunter Thompson, and the muppets coming together...
:)
"We were somewhere around Redmond, on the edge of Microsoft campus, when the drugs began to take hold...
I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit light headed, maybe you should drive..." when all of a sudden, there was a terrible roar all around us, and the sky was full of what looked like huge popups, all swooping and screeching about vi4gr4 all around us. "Holy Kermit!" I shouted. "What are those goddamn animals?!?!"
"What the hell are you yelling about?" My attourney, who was pouring orange juice on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process, disclaimed. No point in warning him, I thought. He'll see those bastards eventually, the poor doomed bastard.
"As your attorney, I advise you to run Firefox with the Adblock extention and put another rock of crack in your pipe. Wakka wakka wakka!!" Damn it, I thought. So that's why that rat-bastard Fozzie Bear was so calm.
My consternation was broken once again when what appeared to be a large ergonomic office chair smashed the windshield of the convertible, a red '69 Cadillac from the rental agency. The chair bounced up, over our heads, and gracefully landed, somehow, on its wheels. My following of the chair's flight through the air with my neck nearly caused me to run into the most frightening thing I have ever seen. It may have been a monkey, or an ape, or some other type of beast, but possibly it was an executive from Microsoft. Whatever it was, it was huge, thick, and with a glare and ferocious face the like of which I had never seen. With a baboon-like intensity he was shrieking, "FUCKING GONZO!!! I'LL FUCKING KILLLLLLLL THEEEEEEEEEEEMMM!!!! DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELO..." and then it began what appeared to be a seizure, uttering gibberish at the highest possible volume like an air-raid siren and foaming at the mouth.
"As your attorney, I advise you to run that bitch over and never look back - Wokka wokka wokka!!"
That's right, I thought. Listen to the bear.
May the spirits of Jim Henson and Hunter Thompson forgive me
Ugh... I have to respond to this utter bull, even though it's late(early?) It's funny how the "skool suks, down wit da man!" bias of Slashdot can mod up even the most ridiculous of posts.
Are you saying you grew up in the 1800s? Remembering your childhood, are you?
Saying that we should expect our 12-year olds to command navy ships and that it's a failure of society when they can't is so utterly retarded I don't know where to begin.
First off, the incident you describe would have been rather unusual back then. I don't think there was an expectation that most 12-year olds would be able to perform such a task. In that era, most of them would have been farm boys who didn't command anything.
The kids of that era also would have had lunch made by... mom. The fact that kids have to have some written directive from parents to control what they eat only shows the relative freedom kids have in consumer choice, for good or bad. Kids of the 19th century would have had more parental control over their diet, not less.
You think kids would be supermen or full adults were it not for our evil educational system? Hah. Keep on dreaming.
Note: procedure does not work on wife. Do not attempt.
*knock* "Why aren't you doing the dishes?! One knock for dishes, two for laundry!" *Krrrack*
"IBM tech support, how many I help you?"
"..my wife broke my Thinkpad over my head..."
I know how things are in Japan, and let me assure you that while there were people there who hate the U.S., and many who regard it with suspicion, the reputation of the U.S. has taken a steep decline since the Bush administration came to power, and especially since the war on Iraq. There was a brief surge of sympathy and compassion following 9/11, but the president is just too loathsome to ignore. I think it's safe to say that he is the second most disliked foreign politician, after Kim Il Jong.
Look, the fact that a bunch of people in the middle east go around burning American flags should not suprise you. What should be worrying is the fact that one of your closest allies now thinks you guys are power-mad and dangerous. I don't think either Japan or the UK will help you in your next war.
You seem to think that one either loves the U.S. unconditionally, or you hate it absolutely like those guys celebrating 9/11, and that there is no changing of opinions. The fact is, most of the world is not extreme and set in their ways like that, and your actions do have an effect on how they percieve you. Your administration has been pushing people away from liking you, so you might want to reconsider your actions.
Yes, but it's what you would expect from a terrorist group. What really shocked me are stories of teens videoing their attacks on others and sending it to friends on mobiles. It's apparently pretty common in the UK, so it would not suprise me if it was happening in the U.S. as well.
Yes, I know teens were beating each other up before (hell, I was once or twice), but I imagine that putting it on video would make things a bit worse in terms of pride and self-esteem.
Now, I'm not the most pro-militart guy on the planet, and I opposed the war in Iraq (for any number of reasons), but I don't think your reasons are really the most well thought out, nor would I consider most soldiers to be murderers.
On the first: yeah, this suprises you? The military is mostly young men, and this is the kind of shit they pull on a regular basis. I'm not sure it would even be a misdemeanor, if it was in public and seen from a plane. If anything, the couple was commiting the offence of having sex in public.
On the second: War is about killing people, and often you do not let the enemy have the oppurtunity to hide or shoot back. What, you wanted them to get down on the ground and have a duel with those people? Talk to my grandpa about the time B-29s burned down his city, he understands that it was part of a war, and he doesn't think Americans were 'evil' for doing it. Not to say that the experience was a good thing, by any means.
As for the crew treating it as a joke, it's the normal dehumanization of the enemy that happens. Soldiers will get humor out of their situation whenever possible, and not treat it as a grave, somber duty. In that sense, films like Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now were more accurate than the ultra-serious films like Black Hawk Down. It's probobly a coping mechanism, I don't think you could do a job like that if you really felt the weight of every death you cause seriously.
As long as George Clooney dies, I'm all for it. Heck, take Marky Mark too.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Mac Minis making a giant wave, and the boat... almost... makes it...
Personal interactions matter a lot more to women than to most men. If they have to hang out with assholes, women will just leave, whether they like the hobby or not.
If anyone disagrees, go look at the demographics of MMORPGs vs. table-top RPGs. The last time I checked, there were more women involved in MMORPGs than in table-top, even if they hid their gender online. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that many males, especially geeks, tend to act wierdly or inappropriately around women, and so women tend to avoid those kinds of people. You can hide your gender online, but you can't do so in person. Basically, online you can be judged for your character(pun intended), and not by your body.
Also, if you've ever seen the FAQ on how to get women to join your LUG (written by a woman), it said things like 'have meetings in safe-looking neighborhoods', stuff that guys would not really think about, but which matter a lot to women. To guys, it's all about the core issue, and complaining about perhiheral issues might seem like a distraction, but to women a large part of whether they find something pleasant to do or participate in is the side issues like how interesting the other people are, or how they're treated by the others.
Like, ohmygod, you haven't heard about ZONGO yet? Lol, it's, um, this really strange, uh, THING on MYSPACE!!1!! I TOTALLY had a huuuuuge problem with it the other day!!! :) It went like, this...
:-(
I was blogging on myspace on the PC. And it was all, like, beep beep beep beep, and MySpace was, like, gone.
And I was, like.... "Uunh?" (O_O)
Zongo DEVOURED MySpace.
It was a really good myspace.
And then I had to do it again, and I had to do it fast, so it wasn't as good (;_;)
It's kind of... a bummer.
My name is Ellen Feiss, and I MySpace...