BTW, it seems that every time I read about students practicing extreme debauchery, and/or situations that get tragically out of control (death by alcoholic congestion or hazing, rape incidents, students gone missing in the Caribbean, etc), they lopsidedly happen with alumni from colleges in the Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, you know, the so-called red states, Bush's America. What's going on there?
This may be an unfortunate stereotype, but it's been around for a long time: At Berkeley or MIT, for example, students score dope and drink microbrews while listening to John Coltrane, or whatever as long as it's deep. This is where we get our scientists and engineers. Meanwhile, at Alabama State or Florida State, students score coke while doing budweiser beer bongs, ogle at coeds in wet t-shirts as Sammy Hagar or Eminem blares from the speakers. This is where we get our average lawyers and mid-to-upper level management.
The idea of a character having a favorite bar or diner (or in this case noodle stand) where he can always be found is a pretty well worn cliche in film noir.
You're absolutely right. In fact, there was a shady Private Eye in my hometown, about a decade ago, that could be found every night at a certain pool hall, so it's not just a film cliche, it's a real world cliche!
As for the theory itself, thinking in this manner about Dick films began for me while having a discussion a while back about how Spielberg blew the ending of Minority Report:
SPOILER ALERT!
I felt the ending was cotton candy, with John Anderton (Tom Cruise) being yanked out of his freeze, solving the crime, cleaning up the Washington justice system, getting the girl back in an idyllic cabin out in the forest as his drug habit disappears without a trace. Implausibly sweet and gooey, just like so many other Spielberg endings. Then a friend pointed pointed something out. Remember what Anderton asks just before he's put under deep freeze, and the answer he gets. - "Will I dream?" - "In here, all of your dreams come true"
And so, what happens is that the last third of the movie happens inside Anderton's mind, he's still frozen like a popsicle, which makes a lot more sense from a Philip K Dick standpoint, allows Spielberg to have his cake and eat it too, but we the audience don't get the benefit of knowing this explicitly. My respect for Spielberg went up several notches after this, and allowed me to regard the ending of War Of The Worlds in subtle ways most people would never even suspect. All is not what it seems at face value.
END OF SPOILER ALERT!
Anyway, returning to Blade Runner and the director's intent: If Deckard is a replicant, his layered behaviour (similar to Rachel's, different from Roy and his gang) plus the unicorn bit imply he has memories, therefore his bounty hunter talents must come from someone. Did the screenwriters (Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples) flesh out a full Deckard backstory? If they did, I'm hoping not much is revealed in the Special Edition or its' extra features. Some legends are perpetuated by remaining open-ended, and hey, it's more fun, as well as being a cool mental exercise. I'm afraid closure will bring an end to these endless speculative discussions about Blade Runner, and we wouln't want to deprive future generations of our little toys, now would we?
However, considering how Ridley Scott has kept mum about Alien, the Skywatcher and Zeta Reticulae, I'm pretty confident that the mysteries of Blade Runner will also remain intact.
In fact, I say Blade Runner should be one of the first assignments for High School Literature students, in essay mode: "Is Deckard human or a replicant? Elaborate". That'll get them to kick-start their interpretative skills while enjoying it. Leave Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick for later.
People, please! We're supposed to stick with Harrison Ford on this thread.
SPOILER ALERT!
In Presumed Innocent, his wife killed her. In The Fugitive, his friend Dr Nichols had his wife killed. In Regarding Henry, he knows a great blowfish place as his wife bursts into grateful tears. In Patriot Games, his wife gets the pregnancy gender results (psst...it's a boy). In Sabrina, he flies to Paris and gets himself a wife.
Jonathan Grant, London, UK: When the Alien erupted from John Hurt is it true that the other actors had not been warned and that their looks of horror were genuine or is this a movie myth?
Ridley Scott: No it is true. I figured that once you had seen it - it is a bit like telling a joke, once you have heard it, it is only half as funny when you hear it again. I thought there was absolutely no future in showing them the baby and therefore he came in literally under wraps - under Roger Dickins' wrapped wrist and was covered in a cloth. John Hurt hadn't seen it either - who was about to give birth to it. He was bent double under the table with his head back with a false chest. The chest was screwed to the table with a hole in the middle where we had to weaken the threads of his tee-shirt because I figured that when the head came through it wouldn't burst the tee-shirt.
We had all the actors around playing and we ended the scene at the moment when it would appear and they were all starting to look a bit concerned about the fact he was now thrashing on the table as if he had swallowed something.
Newshost: And they didn't know what was happening at all?
Ridley Scott: No. Well they knew something ghastly was about to happen and then there it was. I had several lines under high pressure of blood - which was actually raspberry juice - that was rigged all around the table and I had about seven cameras. I figured it would make such a mess and I only wanted to do one take so I could look at it the next day - because it would take 12 hours to clean the set up. The line broke loose and Veronica Cartwright was sprayed with this blood - she went over the back of the sofa that she was sitting on and I used the shot - I used it all. Some were in disbelief - well you saw the reaction. I said fine let's look at the rushes and that was it - I only did it once.
Aren't these new memory implanted replicants pretty new and experimental? Doesn't it seem like Deckard has been around for a while? In the end, by far the strongest argument for Deckard being a replicant is: "But wouldn't it be sooo trippy if he were!?" It just seems so ironic - a replicant who's only task is to kill other replicants.
I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe the human Deckard had been killed recently, and a replicant Deckard was created specifically for the Roy case. If I remember correctly, when we first see Deckard, he's walking in Chinatown and sits at a sidewalk stand to eat some noodles. Ask yourself this: How did the cops find him just like that (snaps fingers) in the mind-boggling maze that is LA's Chinatown? Now picture this: The replicant Deckard was activated one block away, then picked up five minutes later to take the Roy case.
However, if you read "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", you will find out that Deckard is definitely not a replicant, as he's even married and shit. Also, the novel ends in a completely different manner, something to do with a turtle. If you wanna find out what the turtle's all about, then RTFN, where N stands for Novel.
Actually, the most brilliant scientists in the Universe appear in "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" and have the biggest martian butts you've ever seen. "STAY-SHAUN!"
Actually, that was Eric Idle musing about the new strain of killer sheep that not only can hold a rifle but are also first-class shots: I don't know. I'm afraid I don't know. I'm afraid I just don't know. I'm afraid I really just don't know. I'm afraid even I really just don't know. I have to tell you I'm afraid...(drinks a glass of water) thank you, I needed that.
The Graham Chapman scientist with the ditzy blonde goes something like this: "With what sport is Wimbledon most commonly associated?" "Cricket?" "No, try again" "Cricket?" "No, try again but a different sport" "Pelote?" "No, tennis!"
Professor Eddie Jessup, portrayed by William Hurt in Ken Russell's "Altered States". For those of you who haven't seen it, Jessup is a researcher at a Boston university who obtains some extremely powerful hallucinogens from southern Mexico and does massive doses while inside a sensory deprivation tank, when seven shades of hell breaks loose, with a strong whiff of Jeckyl and an australopithecine Hyde. Plus, the guy gets some pretty decent nooky throughout the film, including one of his super-hot students, so bonus points for that.
I'm also a bit partial to Doctor/Botanist Stephen Maturin, played by Paul Bettany in "Master and Commander", who almost beat Darwin to the punch by some 20 or 30 years.
Finally, psychologist Kris Kelvin in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 epic "Solaris", is definitely up there with the greats.
The Rocket Boy story may be a myth, but I can think of a reason why the Rocket Boy story may be even more farfetched.
Consider a jet fighter designed to withstand afterburner forces and compare to any kind of car you care to consider, be it a 1967 Chevy Impala or not. If Rocket Boy weighted 175 pounds, which is more or less the average for a youngish adult US male, 8 G-Forces translates to the guy applying 1400 pounds of weight on the front seat. When a car is engineered, including front seat and seatbelt design, full-speed frontal crashes are a consideration, but not full-speed reverse crashes, and this is the kind of pressure Rocket Boy was applying to the inside of his vehicle, only stronger.
In fact, I can also picture Rocket Boy's pants jamming in the seatbelt. My guess is that as soon as the acceleration crossed a certain threshold, the car seat would snap like a recliner sofa, so that a flailing Rocket Boy would slide out of his trousers, propelling backwards waist-naked to meet his destiny, leaving behind a triumphant brown streak along the backrest, part of the backseat, car trunk and beyond into the 8th dimension.
The biggest problem with the US is people use phrases like far less functional person.
Maybe US people need more politically correct, stress management quality time. Maybe then they can heal their inner child and become fitter, happier and more productive.
How many channels that have television news sources are there in the US?
Whoops! Sorry for the typo, I changed the text a couple of times, and this one slipped right past me. I meant to say, how many news sources are there in the US?
Also in the article is the factoid that Americans consider Fox News the most trustworthy national news program overall (coming in at 11%)
How many channels that have television news sources are there in the US? I can think of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and BBC America, please correct me if I'm wrong. Let's leave out CNN Headline News, guessing that most people probably equate both channels as one and the same source. If Fox is highest at 11%, let's assume that the others average 9%, which implies a total of 65%, leaving 35% undecided, not a figure that lends credibility to any poll. However, if you split CBS into CBS Morning News, CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes, NBC into Today, Nightly News and Meet The Press, and so on with every other channel, the poll results might make a bit more sense mathwise if referring to specific news shows, as the quoted text on top specifically says program.
I've been coming over to Slashdot for a couple of years now, originally for the Physics and Astronomy posts, but now I'm hooked. As a relative newbie, I realize Slashdot is not, and has not been for quite some time, what it was in the beginning. Heck, I don't even know what it was like in the beginning, for I wasn't here then.
However, I must tell you that I love this site very much as it is now, for all the growing pains I read about from esteemed veterans such as yourself. There are minds of the very highest caliber here, from all over the world, and it is fascinating and enlightening to read and participate in the dynamic among Slashdot users on topics that include, but are not limited to, Open Source, Software and Technology. Furthermore, the moderation function, a feature that is still unique to Slashdot AFAIK, lends itself beautifully to the type of dynamic that occurs here.
I realize politics is a particularly hot potato, lending itself to heated discussion and not a small amount of silliness (myself included, of course), but the Colbert issue hit a nerve, and I was delighted to find the topic here tonight, for I would much rather discuss it in Slashdot than anywhere else. In Democratic Underground or Free Republic, to name a couple of usual suspects, discussions are nothing more than group hugs, and anyone who doesn't talk the talk gets censored and banned, which makes for some very boring and soulless reading. Slashdot, however, makes for vibrant reading, among walls graffitied by trolls and anonymous cowards lurking in the shadows, sometimes in colourful ways, sometimes in pointless and vulgar ways, but always there, and always modded -1. My god, man, I couldn't live without it, and if I couldn't live with it, there are always the filters.
So yes, Slashdot may be watered down when compared to its' salad days of 1996-2000, but it's also richer in so many other ways. You didn't think you could keep this place a secret for too long, now did you? Slashdot has grown to almost a million suscribers, yet Open Source, Software and Technology are still, and will continue to be, the heart and soul of Slashdot, with a few additional sections of course, so I hope we can raise our glasses in 2030 to toast and wax nostalgic about Slashdot's salad days of 1996-2010 and, hopefully, beyond.
One way for a system to get truly tyrannical is to go about it through phases, the increasing concentration of power proportional to the conditioning of the population to accept the freedoms they are losing as a "necessary evil" for some grand yet vague scheme of "national defense" and "imminent danger". Whatever the population loses along the way is quickly forgotten, for yet another constitutional guarantee is now being assaulted, one by one, systematically and relentlessly, with a bombardment of propaganda by media pundits in cahoots with those in power. This should all sound familiar to anyone keeping abreast of US national news. One day, you just might look around you and find out that all your rights as an individual are gone, and only a catastrophic reversal can bring things back to how they were, in a generation or two.
Surely we cannot afford to wait until things are 'truly tyrannical' to try to reverse the damage, can we? Surely we can and must detect any symptom at an early stage, oppose this nefarious process and attempt to stop it in its' tracks before the bastards have their hands around our throat, while our individual voices still mean something.
It ain't just Flash, mate, it's streaming content within a Flash frame. I'm using Download Embedded 0.4 for Firefox and all I can save to the disk is the player empty of content. Forget it.
Reality has a liberal bias, too. As for Slashdot, hey, News For Nerds? The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, duh! Now those, my friend, are two shows geared towards the inner geek in all of us, so posting about Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert in Slashdot is as apt as, say, posting about Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs.
I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen in a long while.
You know what makes it funny with an added, ultra potent edge? The fact that you're watching history as it's being made. History in a Patrick Henry "Give me liberty or give me death" crossed with "Extra Extra! Read all about it! 'Twain rips McKinley a new one'!" sort of way.
Dude, I'd like to see you try it, in front of the president and a thousand of his supporters. Try toasting your best friend at his wedding, see how long your stomach takes to untie the knots afterwards, and that's in front of a friendly crowd. Colbert was standing alone on the podium in front of a huge politically hostile audience, saying what no one has dared to say to the president's face in five long years.
The jug-eared face of a man who has sent tens of thousands of people to their death and does not accept criticism of any sort may not give you a spontaneous case of indigestion, but the presidential seal will. Colbert's intestinal fortitude is now the stuff of legend.
I think the parody factor is the whole reason Coolio is unable to take action against Weird Al for Amish Paradise
Man oh man, that's a knee-slapper if I ever heard one. Does anybody remember that Gangsta's Paradise is a straight out rip-off of Stevie Wonder's Pastime Paradise, from the 1975 album Songs In The Key Of Life? I mean, to what absurd lengths can these people go in believing their own hype and revisionist history?
The lack of originality in pseudo-musicians gunning for the Top Forty is a sight to behold. I don't mind hip-hop sampling a drum here and/or a bass there, but to use the full recycled arrangement as some sort of personal karaoke... once may be cute, twice is tiresome, three or more instances is bulls**t. But hey, if the formula works and you're gettin' paid, go for it, right?
However, the prize of hypocrisy goes to the Rolling Stones who, from one of their two hundred room estates in the english countryside, slapped a lawsuit against The Verve for Bittersweet Symphony, even as the Stones bought their estates by ripping off dozens of old-time blues artists without paying a single cent in royalties to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember... Be kind - Rewind!
- "Re...wind? Who fights the wind?"
- "The Windbreaker!"
- "Precisely. Let's go!"
In the US, High School is the time to party.
e x__scandal_at_duke
Not quite.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10464110/s
And, of course, Girls Gone Wild, Spring Break Edition and shit.
BTW, it seems that every time I read about students practicing extreme debauchery, and/or situations that get tragically out of control (death by alcoholic congestion or hazing, rape incidents, students gone missing in the Caribbean, etc), they lopsidedly happen with alumni from colleges in the Carolinas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, you know, the so-called red states, Bush's America. What's going on there?
This may be an unfortunate stereotype, but it's been around for a long time:
At Berkeley or MIT, for example, students score dope and drink microbrews while listening to John Coltrane, or whatever as long as it's deep. This is where we get our scientists and engineers.
Meanwhile, at Alabama State or Florida State, students score coke while doing budweiser beer bongs, ogle at coeds in wet t-shirts as Sammy Hagar or Eminem blares from the speakers. This is where we get our average lawyers and mid-to-upper level management.
The idea of a character having a favorite bar or diner (or in this case noodle stand) where he can always be found is a pretty well worn cliche in film noir.
You're absolutely right. In fact, there was a shady Private Eye in my hometown, about a decade ago, that could be found every night at a certain pool hall, so it's not just a film cliche, it's a real world cliche!
As for the theory itself, thinking in this manner about Dick films began for me while having a discussion a while back about how Spielberg blew the ending of Minority Report:
SPOILER ALERT!
I felt the ending was cotton candy, with John Anderton (Tom Cruise) being yanked out of his freeze, solving the crime, cleaning up the Washington justice system, getting the girl back in an idyllic cabin out in the forest as his drug habit disappears without a trace. Implausibly sweet and gooey, just like so many other Spielberg endings.
Then a friend pointed pointed something out. Remember what Anderton asks just before he's put under deep freeze, and the answer he gets.
- "Will I dream?"
- "In here, all of your dreams come true"
And so, what happens is that the last third of the movie happens inside Anderton's mind, he's still frozen like a popsicle, which makes a lot more sense from a Philip K Dick standpoint, allows Spielberg to have his cake and eat it too, but we the audience don't get the benefit of knowing this explicitly. My respect for Spielberg went up several notches after this, and allowed me to regard the ending of War Of The Worlds in subtle ways most people would never even suspect. All is not what it seems at face value.
END OF SPOILER ALERT!
Anyway, returning to Blade Runner and the director's intent: If Deckard is a replicant, his layered behaviour (similar to Rachel's, different from Roy and his gang) plus the unicorn bit imply he has memories, therefore his bounty hunter talents must come from someone. Did the screenwriters (Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples) flesh out a full Deckard backstory? If they did, I'm hoping not much is revealed in the Special Edition or its' extra features. Some legends are perpetuated by remaining open-ended, and hey, it's more fun, as well as being a cool mental exercise. I'm afraid closure will bring an end to these endless speculative discussions about Blade Runner, and we wouln't want to deprive future generations of our little toys, now would we?
However, considering how Ridley Scott has kept mum about Alien, the Skywatcher and Zeta Reticulae, I'm pretty confident that the mysteries of Blade Runner will also remain intact.
In fact, I say Blade Runner should be one of the first assignments for High School Literature students, in essay mode: "Is Deckard human or a replicant? Elaborate". That'll get them to kick-start their interpretative skills while enjoying it. Leave Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick for later.
People, please! We're supposed to stick with Harrison Ford on this thread.
SPOILER ALERT!
In Presumed Innocent, his wife killed her.
In The Fugitive, his friend Dr Nichols had his wife killed.
In Regarding Henry, he knows a great blowfish place as his wife bursts into grateful tears.
In Patriot Games, his wife gets the pregnancy gender results (psst...it's a boy).
In Sabrina, he flies to Paris and gets himself a wife.
From the provided link:
Jonathan Grant, London, UK:
When the Alien erupted from John Hurt is it true that the other actors had not been warned and that their looks of horror were genuine or is this a movie myth?
Ridley Scott:
No it is true. I figured that once you had seen it - it is a bit like telling a joke, once you have heard it, it is only half as funny when you hear it again. I thought there was absolutely no future in showing them the baby and therefore he came in literally under wraps - under Roger Dickins' wrapped wrist and was covered in a cloth. John Hurt hadn't seen it either - who was about to give birth to it. He was bent double under the table with his head back with a false chest. The chest was screwed to the table with a hole in the middle where we had to weaken the threads of his tee-shirt because I figured that when the head came through it wouldn't burst the tee-shirt.
We had all the actors around playing and we ended the scene at the moment when it would appear and they were all starting to look a bit concerned about the fact he was now thrashing on the table as if he had swallowed something.
Newshost:
And they didn't know what was happening at all?
Ridley Scott:
No. Well they knew something ghastly was about to happen and then there it was. I had several lines under high pressure of blood - which was actually raspberry juice - that was rigged all around the table and I had about seven cameras. I figured it would make such a mess and I only wanted to do one take so I could look at it the next day - because it would take 12 hours to clean the set up. The line broke loose and Veronica Cartwright was sprayed with this blood - she went over the back of the sofa that she was sitting on and I used the shot - I used it all. Some were in disbelief - well you saw the reaction. I said fine let's look at the rushes and that was it - I only did it once.
Aren't these new memory implanted replicants pretty new and experimental? Doesn't it seem like Deckard has been around for a while? In the end, by far the strongest argument for Deckard being a replicant is: "But wouldn't it be sooo trippy if he were!?" It just seems so ironic - a replicant who's only task is to kill other replicants.
I'm going out on a limb here, but maybe the human Deckard had been killed recently, and a replicant Deckard was created specifically for the Roy case. If I remember correctly, when we first see Deckard, he's walking in Chinatown and sits at a sidewalk stand to eat some noodles.
Ask yourself this: How did the cops find him just like that (snaps fingers) in the mind-boggling maze that is LA's Chinatown?
Now picture this: The replicant Deckard was activated one block away, then picked up five minutes later to take the Roy case.
However, if you read "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", you will find out that Deckard is definitely not a replicant, as he's even married and shit. Also, the novel ends in a completely different manner, something to do with a turtle. If you wanna find out what the turtle's all about, then RTFN, where N stands for Novel.
From the Cartoon World I would have to say it's a 4-way tie...
I'd include Gendô Ikari from "Neon Genesis Evangelion" to make it an even 5.
Now that's a screenwriter who did his homework.
"Hello, I'm Pris"
"Hi, I'm Larry, this is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl".
If you can make the connection, you probably watched too much television back in the mid-eighties.
Actually, the most brilliant scientists in the Universe appear in "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey" and have the biggest martian butts you've ever seen. "STAY-SHAUN!"
(exasperated tone): "Pay attention, double O seven".
Actually, that was Eric Idle musing about the new strain of killer sheep that not only can hold a rifle but are also first-class shots:
I don't know.
I'm afraid I don't know.
I'm afraid I just don't know.
I'm afraid I really just don't know.
I'm afraid even I really just don't know.
I have to tell you I'm afraid...(drinks a glass of water) thank you, I needed that.
The Graham Chapman scientist with the ditzy blonde goes something like this:
"With what sport is Wimbledon most commonly associated?"
"Cricket?"
"No, try again"
"Cricket?"
"No, try again but a different sport"
"Pelote?"
"No, tennis!"
Professor Eddie Jessup, portrayed by William Hurt in Ken Russell's "Altered States".
For those of you who haven't seen it, Jessup is a researcher at a Boston university who obtains some extremely powerful hallucinogens from southern Mexico and does massive doses while inside a sensory deprivation tank, when seven shades of hell breaks loose, with a strong whiff of Jeckyl and an australopithecine Hyde. Plus, the guy gets some pretty decent nooky throughout the film, including one of his super-hot students, so bonus points for that.
I'm also a bit partial to Doctor/Botanist Stephen Maturin, played by Paul Bettany in "Master and Commander", who almost beat Darwin to the punch by some 20 or 30 years.
Finally, psychologist Kris Kelvin in Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 epic "Solaris", is definitely up there with the greats.
The Rocket Boy story may be a myth, but I can think of a reason why the Rocket Boy story may be even more farfetched.
Consider a jet fighter designed to withstand afterburner forces and compare to any kind of car you care to consider, be it a 1967 Chevy Impala or not. If Rocket Boy weighted 175 pounds, which is more or less the average for a youngish adult US male, 8 G-Forces translates to the guy applying 1400 pounds of weight on the front seat.
When a car is engineered, including front seat and seatbelt design, full-speed frontal crashes are a consideration, but not full-speed reverse crashes, and this is the kind of pressure Rocket Boy was applying to the inside of his vehicle, only stronger.
In fact, I can also picture Rocket Boy's pants jamming in the seatbelt. My guess is that as soon as the acceleration crossed a certain threshold, the car seat would snap like a recliner sofa, so that a flailing Rocket Boy would slide out of his trousers, propelling backwards waist-naked to meet his destiny, leaving behind a triumphant brown streak along the backrest, part of the backseat, car trunk and beyond into the 8th dimension.
Maybe US people need more politically correct, stress management quality time. Maybe then they can heal their inner child and become fitter, happier and more productive.
How many channels that have television news sources are there in the US?
Whoops! Sorry for the typo, I changed the text a couple of times, and this one slipped right past me. I meant to say, how many news sources are there in the US?
Also in the article is the factoid that Americans consider Fox News the most trustworthy national news program overall (coming in at 11%)
How many channels that have television news sources are there in the US? I can think of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, MSNBC and BBC America, please correct me if I'm wrong. Let's leave out CNN Headline News, guessing that most people probably equate both channels as one and the same source. If Fox is highest at 11%, let's assume that the others average 9%, which implies a total of 65%, leaving 35% undecided, not a figure that lends credibility to any poll.
However, if you split CBS into CBS Morning News, CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes, NBC into Today, Nightly News and Meet The Press, and so on with every other channel, the poll results might make a bit more sense mathwise if referring to specific news shows, as the quoted text on top specifically says program.
An anonymous coward, to be precise.
Hello there.
I've been coming over to Slashdot for a couple of years now, originally for the Physics and Astronomy posts, but now I'm hooked. As a relative newbie, I realize Slashdot is not, and has not been for quite some time, what it was in the beginning. Heck, I don't even know what it was like in the beginning, for I wasn't here then.
However, I must tell you that I love this site very much as it is now, for all the growing pains I read about from esteemed veterans such as yourself. There are minds of the very highest caliber here, from all over the world, and it is fascinating and enlightening to read and participate in the dynamic among Slashdot users on topics that include, but are not limited to, Open Source, Software and Technology. Furthermore, the moderation function, a feature that is still unique to Slashdot AFAIK, lends itself beautifully to the type of dynamic that occurs here.
I realize politics is a particularly hot potato, lending itself to heated discussion and not a small amount of silliness (myself included, of course), but the Colbert issue hit a nerve, and I was delighted to find the topic here tonight, for I would much rather discuss it in Slashdot than anywhere else. In Democratic Underground or Free Republic, to name a couple of usual suspects, discussions are nothing more than group hugs, and anyone who doesn't talk the talk gets censored and banned, which makes for some very boring and soulless reading. Slashdot, however, makes for vibrant reading, among walls graffitied by trolls and anonymous cowards lurking in the shadows, sometimes in colourful ways, sometimes in pointless and vulgar ways, but always there, and always modded -1. My god, man, I couldn't live without it, and if I couldn't live with it, there are always the filters.
So yes, Slashdot may be watered down when compared to its' salad days of 1996-2000, but it's also richer in so many other ways. You didn't think you could keep this place a secret for too long, now did you? Slashdot has grown to almost a million suscribers, yet Open Source, Software and Technology are still, and will continue to be, the heart and soul of Slashdot, with a few additional sections of course, so I hope we can raise our glasses in 2030 to toast and wax nostalgic about Slashdot's salad days of 1996-2010 and, hopefully, beyond.
One way for a system to get truly tyrannical is to go about it through phases, the increasing concentration of power proportional to the conditioning of the population to accept the freedoms they are losing as a "necessary evil" for some grand yet vague scheme of "national defense" and "imminent danger". Whatever the population loses along the way is quickly forgotten, for yet another constitutional guarantee is now being assaulted, one by one, systematically and relentlessly, with a bombardment of propaganda by media pundits in cahoots with those in power. This should all sound familiar to anyone keeping abreast of US national news. One day, you just might look around you and find out that all your rights as an individual are gone, and only a catastrophic reversal can bring things back to how they were, in a generation or two.
Surely we cannot afford to wait until things are 'truly tyrannical' to try to reverse the damage, can we? Surely we can and must detect any symptom at an early stage, oppose this nefarious process and attempt to stop it in its' tracks before the bastards have their hands around our throat, while our individual voices still mean something.
It ain't just Flash, mate, it's streaming content within a Flash frame. I'm using Download Embedded 0.4 for Firefox and all I can save to the disk is the player empty of content. Forget it.
Slashdot has a liberal bias
Reality has a liberal bias, too. As for Slashdot, hey, News For Nerds? The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, duh! Now those, my friend, are two shows geared towards the inner geek in all of us, so posting about Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert in Slashdot is as apt as, say, posting about Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs.
I thought it was the funniest thing I'd seen in a long while.
You know what makes it funny with an added, ultra potent edge? The fact that you're watching history as it's being made. History in a Patrick Henry "Give me liberty or give me death" crossed with "Extra Extra! Read all about it! 'Twain rips McKinley a new one'!" sort of way.
But how does it take balls?
Dude, I'd like to see you try it, in front of the president and a thousand of his supporters. Try toasting your best friend at his wedding, see how long your stomach takes to untie the knots afterwards, and that's in front of a friendly crowd. Colbert was standing alone on the podium in front of a huge politically hostile audience, saying what no one has dared to say to the president's face in five long years.
The jug-eared face of a man who has sent tens of thousands of people to their death and does not accept criticism of any sort may not give you a spontaneous case of indigestion, but the presidential seal will. Colbert's intestinal fortitude is now the stuff of legend.
I think the parody factor is the whole reason Coolio is unable to take action against Weird Al for Amish Paradise
Man oh man, that's a knee-slapper if I ever heard one. Does anybody remember that Gangsta's Paradise is a straight out rip-off of Stevie Wonder's Pastime Paradise, from the 1975 album Songs In The Key Of Life? I mean, to what absurd lengths can these people go in believing their own hype and revisionist history?
The lack of originality in pseudo-musicians gunning for the Top Forty is a sight to behold. I don't mind hip-hop sampling a drum here and/or a bass there, but to use the full recycled arrangement as some sort of personal karaoke... once may be cute, twice is tiresome, three or more instances is bulls**t. But hey, if the formula works and you're gettin' paid, go for it, right?
However, the prize of hypocrisy goes to the Rolling Stones who, from one of their two hundred room estates in the english countryside, slapped a lawsuit against The Verve for Bittersweet Symphony, even as the Stones bought their estates by ripping off dozens of old-time blues artists without paying a single cent in royalties to them.