a baron wasteland of terrible purely "Hollywood" style sci-fi films
Are you suggesting a Captain Planet villain is behind it all?
The name "Baron Wasteland", while fitting the theme, violates one of the main rules of the show - it gives the pun to the bad guy rather than Captain Planet. What they'd do was have a bad guy with an unfeasible first name like "Marquess Wasteland" and then just as the end-of-episode fight ends, Captain Planet would say, "Guess you've been demoted to a Baron, Wasteland!"
Seriously though, very funny. I noticed the typo but completely missed the implications of the title "Baron Wasteland". All my nonexistent "+1, Funny" are belong to you.
Answer me honestly -- after a couple decades of internet usage, what is your attention span like?
Personally? Same as it always was. I can focus on things long-term, but I can get distracted by the pretty lights and colors of a TV set, often during certain long conversations with a member of the opposite sex.
So, uh, typical male attention span, then.
And I am definitely an Internet addict. While my backup plan is always a good book, if I'm off it for long enough I do get a bit twitchy.
When is the last time you read a long, hard, book?
Let's see.... The Ciardi translation of the Divine Comedy. I reached Canto 12 of Purgatorio this morning.
Before that? Not a classic by any means, but I read Daniel Abraham's "A Betrayal in Winter" in all of about two sittings.
While I'm sure some people are instant-gratification-needing Twitter-using oh-my-god-where-were-you-20-seconds-ago infoholics, that's not everyone. And I'm not convinced that those aren't the same people who, a generation back, called all their friends and acquaintances on a regular basis. Hell, I've known people who called me literally once a day to find out what's new.
The world changes, but people stay the same. Some always drank too much, or got addicted to the plants out in the desert, or obsessed about a person who didn't know they existed, or masturbated waaay too much. Just because it's easier to get booze, drugs, info on celebrities, and porn than it was even 10 years ago doesn't mean that those things have transformed otherwise normal people into assorted freaks, and it's gonna take some pretty overwhelming evidence to convince me that the biochemistry of the Internet-using population is different than the biochemistry of a population without Internet access.
Which would be a good thing. Why wait thousands of years for humans to evolve (if at all - it's not the super intelligent scientists and other successful people who have the most kids, quite the contrary)
You assume genetics is the only determinant of intelligence.
if you could make the jump right now, with much more impact?
For the same reason you don't hand an oxyacetylene torch (or administrator access to a company network) to a five-year-old and ask why he should wait until he's an adult to start learning marketable skills. We still don't know enough about genetics to start testing for more than a handful of things, and definitely don't know enough to start tweaking things in a living, thinking human being. Trying it now is just driving nails with a wrecking ball.
My main concern is actually protecting against robbery rather than armed defense of my property. What we actually bought is reasonably secure; people won't be able to just walk into our property.
You bought Mordor? Dude, doesn't work. Last owner had a valuable gold ring vandalized by two short guys with body hair issues and their freak friend.
Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while.
What!? You LINKED to a page on TV Tropes? You've doomed half of Slashdot! That site is a black hole that sucks you in and spits you out countless hours later. And I have proof! Just click on that link and you'll see.
Off all things, linking TV Tropes, these crazy people.
Speaking of software patents, didn't Microsoft just _get_ one for saving a word processing document as an XML file?
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others).
Judging by the average patent article on Slashdot? No. I'm reasonably sure at this point I could get a patent for the absorption of oxygen into a heme-based solution, and then sue someone for breathing.
So, blipverts have been tried (episode "Blipverts"), we've got the first attempts at the two-way sampler here ("Blipverts", "Rakers"), the distributed denial of service attack ("The Blanks") has become de rigeur, terrorism becoming a ratings commodity like anything else ("War"), people carry most of their money on small devices that just need to be popped into a machine to facilitate transfer of funds (entire series), and (a bit of a stretch) we sort of have court proceedings starring celebrity judges as afternoon TV ("Academy").
Nope. But send a few juicy targets off to the state pen and the rest will learn to keep their heads down. If a country makes a fairly minor crime a hanging offense, that first guy swinging from the gallows is a great message to any possible second. Laws aren't just punishments, they're also deterrents.
Which kinda clashes with that Jesus guy's attitude, as i understand the Bible.
Well, then, obviously you're not understanding it right and are going to Hell forever unless you convert to the true Christian church, the church of St. Rambo of the Hardened Bunker. We regularly go out and throw rocks through the windows of heathens, and their willingness to use weapons against us (either directly or by summoning armed police officers) proves to us that they are the evil ones!
Sexual display, learning tool or form of social glue? Art still refuses to be pinned down
WTF? How about a way of expression??
I've yet to see someone who tries to interpret art who goes for the obvious.
It's also worth noting that that's about the only time I've seen the words "sexual" and "glue" used together without it being a funny ER story.
Mods: I'm 100% serious. Putting aside any personal feelings of disgust, how many of you agree? You all know it's true.
The mods clearly agree. It's official - the longest unbroken string of +4 and +5 informative/insightfuls I have ever seen is a paean to nose picking. C'mon guys! We're never gonna shed the basement-dwelling nerd image at this rate, and the only girls who will look at us will be ones who pick THEIR noses!
It is absolutely breathtaking to me that people think the above behavior is somehow "normal".
Depending on how the user uses the computer, it can be. Me? I don't need that. I do keep a backup image in case, and update it every so often, but I have yet to need it.
On the other hand, in the PC shop where I work, we have this one customer.... He was bringing his PC in so often (literally monthly) due to the mass of spyware and viruses on it that we made a fresh image of the OS and burned it onto disk, then when he came in he could opt for the full-price diagnostic and install or go for the cut-rate reimage. He managed to stay away for two months once when the tech taped a note to the PC that basically said "If it's free, it's a virus. Don't click on it!" But then he saw these smileys that he just had to use in his e-mails....
10 PRINT "What?"
20 PRINT "I don't understand"
30 PRINT "Where's the tea?"
40 GOTO 10
And then there's the Canadian version:
10 PRINT "Yes sir, Inspector Fenwick."
20 PRINT "Hello, Nell."
30 PRINT "For it's Tommy this and Tommy that and 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of his country!' when the guns begin to shoot."
40 GOTO 10
(Disclaimer: This post will make absolutely no sense unless you've seen the "Mechanical Dudley" episode of Dudley Do-Right.)
Absolutely. Don't want a kid hearing anything objectionable! In the interests of reaching this wonderful, Utopian, and completely achievable goal, I suggest we also ban children from all other sources of possible profanity, such as:
using the Internet,
playing video games,
watching TV,
going outside,
being around strangers,
being around their parents and other relatives, and
being around all other children, those vile little deviants.
Don't you mean, er, "artical"? I suppose it smacks of me being a spelling nazi, but it makes a site's already too-good-to-be-true claims sound even less valid when the first thing I see on the main page is "Featured Artical", and then realize the same typo is made in equally large text partway down the page.
It's like when someone insists they're an expert on computers and then says that they bought a Jesus (as in "Hay-Soos") EeePC.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we need to coin a new word for defamation on "electronic" media.
Please, no. Given the typical attempts to "Internetize" words, we'll either end up with eSlander or iBel.
Seriously, mods, please check to see if stuff like this is real by checking out sources before modding posts up.
Check sources, require citations? What do you think this is, Wikipedia?
Are you suggesting a Captain Planet villain is behind it all?
The name "Baron Wasteland", while fitting the theme, violates one of the main rules of the show - it gives the pun to the bad guy rather than Captain Planet. What they'd do was have a bad guy with an unfeasible first name like "Marquess Wasteland" and then just as the end-of-episode fight ends, Captain Planet would say, "Guess you've been demoted to a Baron, Wasteland!"
Seriously though, very funny. I noticed the typo but completely missed the implications of the title "Baron Wasteland". All my nonexistent "+1, Funny" are belong to you.
Answer me honestly -- after a couple decades of internet usage, what is your attention span like?
Personally? Same as it always was. I can focus on things long-term, but I can get distracted by the pretty lights and colors of a TV set, often during certain long conversations with a member of the opposite sex.
So, uh, typical male attention span, then.
And I am definitely an Internet addict. While my backup plan is always a good book, if I'm off it for long enough I do get a bit twitchy.
When is the last time you read a long, hard, book?
Let's see.... The Ciardi translation of the Divine Comedy. I reached Canto 12 of Purgatorio this morning.
Before that? Not a classic by any means, but I read Daniel Abraham's "A Betrayal in Winter" in all of about two sittings.
While I'm sure some people are instant-gratification-needing Twitter-using oh-my-god-where-were-you-20-seconds-ago infoholics, that's not everyone. And I'm not convinced that those aren't the same people who, a generation back, called all their friends and acquaintances on a regular basis. Hell, I've known people who called me literally once a day to find out what's new.
The world changes, but people stay the same. Some always drank too much, or got addicted to the plants out in the desert, or obsessed about a person who didn't know they existed, or masturbated waaay too much. Just because it's easier to get booze, drugs, info on celebrities, and porn than it was even 10 years ago doesn't mean that those things have transformed otherwise normal people into assorted freaks, and it's gonna take some pretty overwhelming evidence to convince me that the biochemistry of the Internet-using population is different than the biochemistry of a population without Internet access.
Which would be a good thing. Why wait thousands of years for humans to evolve (if at all - it's not the super intelligent scientists and other successful people who have the most kids, quite the contrary)
You assume genetics is the only determinant of intelligence.
if you could make the jump right now, with much more impact?
For the same reason you don't hand an oxyacetylene torch (or administrator access to a company network) to a five-year-old and ask why he should wait until he's an adult to start learning marketable skills. We still don't know enough about genetics to start testing for more than a handful of things, and definitely don't know enough to start tweaking things in a living, thinking human being. Trying it now is just driving nails with a wrecking ball.
My main concern is actually protecting against robbery rather than armed defense of my property. What we actually bought is reasonably secure; people won't be able to just walk into our property.
You bought Mordor? Dude, doesn't work. Last owner had a valuable gold ring vandalized by two short guys with body hair issues and their freak friend.
You should know that I take it personally when people talk about my mother like that ;)
YOUR mother? I thought he was talking about MY mother!
Tv Tropes is the most fun Wiki I've found in a while.
What!? You LINKED to a page on TV Tropes? You've doomed half of Slashdot! That site is a black hole that sucks you in and spits you out countless hours later. And I have proof! Just click on that link and you'll see.
Off all things, linking TV Tropes, these crazy people.
reconstructed the warped the Unicorn tapestries circa 2003.
Patently Yours, Kilgore Trout
We've been leafrolled!
This will be great for pictures that are old, though not for ones that have been damaged by mold.
The patent office isn't competent to evaluate this kind of patent (which makes me wonder if they're competent about any others).
Judging by the average patent article on Slashdot? No. I'm reasonably sure at this point I could get a patent for the absorption of oxygen into a heme-based solution, and then sue someone for breathing.
If we have sunk to new depths, it is by having giants stand upon our shoulders
I thought it was from standing in the footprints of giants.
If a giant tries to stand on your shoulders, you'll probably find yourself in the footprint fairly fast, albeit not standing.
Looks like Max Headroom was once again ahead of its time. Bring on the Blipverts.
It's already been attempted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
So, blipverts have been tried (episode "Blipverts"), we've got the first attempts at the two-way sampler here ("Blipverts", "Rakers"), the distributed denial of service attack ("The Blanks") has become de rigeur, terrorism becoming a ratings commodity like anything else ("War"), people carry most of their money on small devices that just need to be popped into a machine to facilitate transfer of funds (entire series), and (a bit of a stretch) we sort of have court proceedings starring celebrity judges as afternoon TV ("Academy").
That's all I can remember offhand.
You think you can jail 3/4 of a country?
Nope. But send a few juicy targets off to the state pen and the rest will learn to keep their heads down. If a country makes a fairly minor crime a hanging offense, that first guy swinging from the gallows is a great message to any possible second. Laws aren't just punishments, they're also deterrents.
> the other side is evil
Which kinda clashes with that Jesus guy's attitude, as i understand the Bible.
Well, then, obviously you're not understanding it right and are going to Hell forever unless you convert to the true Christian church, the church of St. Rambo of the Hardened Bunker. We regularly go out and throw rocks through the windows of heathens, and their willingness to use weapons against us (either directly or by summoning armed police officers) proves to us that they are the evil ones!
But thank you for that insightful observation that the mods are judging the ideas, not their personal feelings on the ideas. Makes me feel better.
Maybe I was just observing that they're as disgusting as everyone else.;)
Sexual display, learning tool or form of social glue? Art still refuses to be pinned down
WTF? How about a way of expression??
I've yet to see someone who tries to interpret art who goes for the obvious. It's also worth noting that that's about the only time I've seen the words "sexual" and "glue" used together without it being a funny ER story.
Mods: I'm 100% serious. Putting aside any personal feelings of disgust, how many of you agree? You all know it's true.
The mods clearly agree. It's official - the longest unbroken string of +4 and +5 informative/insightfuls I have ever seen is a paean to nose picking. C'mon guys! We're never gonna shed the basement-dwelling nerd image at this rate, and the only girls who will look at us will be ones who pick THEIR noses!
(And with that, now it's disgusting again.)
It is absolutely breathtaking to me that people think the above behavior is somehow "normal".
Depending on how the user uses the computer, it can be. Me? I don't need that. I do keep a backup image in case, and update it every so often, but I have yet to need it.
On the other hand, in the PC shop where I work, we have this one customer.... He was bringing his PC in so often (literally monthly) due to the mass of spyware and viruses on it that we made a fresh image of the OS and burned it onto disk, then when he came in he could opt for the full-price diagnostic and install or go for the cut-rate reimage. He managed to stay away for two months once when the tech taped a note to the PC that basically said "If it's free, it's a virus. Don't click on it!" But then he saw these smileys that he just had to use in his e-mails....
10 PRINT "What?" 20 PRINT "I don't understand" 30 PRINT "Where's the tea?" 40 GOTO 10
And then there's the Canadian version:
10 PRINT "Yes sir, Inspector Fenwick."
20 PRINT "Hello, Nell."
30 PRINT "For it's Tommy this and Tommy that and 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of his country!' when the guns begin to shoot."
40 GOTO 10
(Disclaimer: This post will make absolutely no sense unless you've seen the "Mechanical Dudley" episode of Dudley Do-Right.)
So you are saying that this plea from the InventGeek site didn't make you want to donate:
But we alwase can use some help funding new projects for you all. So please donate!
Is the new project a good spellchecker? I'll donate to that.:)
some people still think about the children.
Absolutely. Don't want a kid hearing anything objectionable! In the interests of reaching this wonderful, Utopian, and completely achievable goal, I suggest we also ban children from all other sources of possible profanity, such as:
using the Internet,
playing video games,
watching TV,
going outside,
being around strangers,
being around their parents and other relatives, and
being around all other children, those vile little deviants.
Eeep! /me dons tinfoil hat. /me realizes tinfoil is matter
D'oh!
I don't know if I should fear or welcome the day conspiracy theorists spontaneously all decide that tinfoil is out to get them.
So, does peeling duct tape emit gamma bursts?
Do you really honestly want to know the answer to that question?
HULK WANT ANSWER! WHEN HULK PEEL TAPE, HULK GET STRONGER!
Since no one reads the article
Don't you mean, er, "artical"? I suppose it smacks of me being a spelling nazi, but it makes a site's already too-good-to-be-true claims sound even less valid when the first thing I see on the main page is "Featured Artical", and then realize the same typo is made in equally large text partway down the page.
It's like when someone insists they're an expert on computers and then says that they bought a Jesus (as in "Hay-Soos") EeePC.