Well, why bother to bring terrorists all the way to the U.S. to kill Americans, which costs them time and money, when we're shipping Americans to the terrorists in Iraq, which costs us time and money?
Yes, they are. Stupid, and brainwashed.
Demonizing the enemy makes you feel good, but in the long run it's a dumb move. It may be unsavory, but you've got to understand your enemy to effectively fight him. If you think bin Laden and his group are stupid, you don't understand him. The 9-11 plot wasn't stupid- it was brilliant. Twisted, but brilliant: with a few thugs, box cutters and airline tickets you've suddenly got four cruise missiles armed with thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
Before dismissing these guys as idiots, it's worth looking at what his plan is:
"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
"This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
"All Praise is due to Allah.
"So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."
Well, George Bush may not have a long-term strategy for Iraq... but bin Laden sure as hell does. So who's the dumbass?
"Shanda" is a contraction of the words "sham" and "panda". The term's proper use is demonstrated by the following exchange:
CHINESE PEASANT #1:Look at this swell panda I got at the market in Beipao! There's no limit to what I can do with this panda! I can harness him to a cart and use him to haul my rice! Give him to the local head of the Communist Party as a bribe! Start a petting zoo- or chop him up and make panda jerky! My fortunes have changed at last!
CHINESE PEASANT #2: Much did you pay?
CHINESE PEASANT #1: Only 1000 yuan!
CHINESE PEASANT #2: Wait a minute... that's not a panda- it's a shanda!
CHINESE PEASANT #1: What? A shanda? Are you sure?
CHINESE PEASANT #2:Positive! See? It's just a sheep with a bit of black paint!
No problem, it's all in a day's work for Captain Obvious and Readily Apparent Boy. Just in case you didn't get it from the name, Readily Apparent Boy is my sidekick. Oh yes, and you should probably know that even though I'm called "Captain Obvious", I do not actually hold the rank of captain in any professional military or police force. Nor am I licensed to skipper a fishing boat or cargo vessel- the name "Captain" is purely symbolic.
Now, I've got to warn people that it hurts to rub lemon juice into paper cuts! Quick! To the ObviousMobile!
In case you missed it, that's it parked over there. It's the twelve-wheeled vehicle with a rocket engine, eighteen strobe lights, that deafening siren, and a rotating sign on top that says "This is the ObviousMobile, property of Captain Obvious" in six foot tall neon orange letters. See it? Not the Civic. It's the one next to it.
Nature also has Asymetry every where. I actually think that asymetry is the rule, look at any pair of bOObs near you, they are symetrical only for the unexperienced eye.
Please, use examples which are going to be familiar to the majority of the Slashdot audience.
In keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia, I have decided that the Wikimania conference will now be held September 17th-23rd in Ulaan Bator, Mongolia. Featured speakers will include Mikhail Gorbachev and Pamela Anderson.
Xray can work really well on fossil bone- I've gotten very nice X-rays from 75-million year old dinosaur bones, they show the bony network inside the bones (trabeculae, they're called)with as much detail as you'd get with a modern bone. However, Xray depends on density differences of the specimen, so if it's heavily impregnated with minerals you may not get much of an image.
It's also increasingly common to use CT (computed tomography, which is basically 3d Xray) on fossils. However, CT is still pretty expensive, and although it's a useful tool, and it's produced some pretty eye-candy graphics of three-dimensional spinning dinosaur heads and whatnot, it's hardly revolutionized the field or anything.
If there's an "addiction" here, it's an addiction to calling things addictions, when they aren't. This is one of those rare instances when I have to agree with the right wing- "personal responsibility" just isn't fashionable anymore. It's not my fault that I'm out of shape: I'm addicted to TV, so it's the TV's fault. It's not my fault I'm fat, I'm addicted to food. And it's not my fault I never get any work done, I'm an email junkie (complete with track marks up and down my arms where I tried to plug in the ethernet cable). Etcetera.
Just how many times do people have to see the "humans show up, large animals die out" pattern before you start seeing the connection? It happens in Australia, North and South America around 10,000 years ago, then New Zealand and Madagascar, then smaller islands like Mauritius (where the famed dodo lived) and Hawaii (home to flightless ducks and geese). Humans may not be the exclusive factor in these extinctions but it seems pretty clear they're a major part.
Basically what these guys seem to be arguing in the paper is that some large mammals hung around for ten thousand years, therefore humans didn't wipe out large mammals, it had to be climate- which doesn't seem to logically follow. Their evidence may contradict some scenarios of human-caused extinction but it hardly lets humans off the hook- some animals may have been less vulnerable and held on a bit longer in the face of human hunting/habitat destruction etc. Their evidence is interesting but they're overreaching in their conclusions, if you ask me.
So the consensus is that the robot of the future will (a) cook a mean omelette and leave the kitchen spotless afterwards, (b) be capable of really great kinky sex, and (c)be capable of infiltrating enemy territory and single-handedly taking out a column of tanks with heat-seeking missiles.
Good in the kitchen, great in the sack, strong and self-sufficient, and with teraflops of processing power... wow, sounds like my ideal woman. Naturally, there would be a model for the women as well (as a computer, it would *never* forget a birthday/anniversary!)
90% say if we receive a message from another planet we should reply.
Depends on what we get, doesn't it? Most of the messages on earth aren't worth replying to, I can only imagine what our first message will be...
Greetings Sentient Being,
I am contacting you because of a business concerning a huge sum of Iridium Crystals (valued at approximately 50 quadrillion Aldabaran Plotnicks) left to me by my late clone, Zhreenu Kraaj 173, Commandant to the Third Wing of the Xe'nil Empire's Space Fleet. Following the Third Wing's decimation and Zhreenu Kraaj 173's defeat at the hands of the dreaded Slime Mold soldiers of Aktaan Mlo, Viceroy of Aldabaran (and Kraaj 173's subsequent conversion into fungal material), these Iridium Crystals reverted to the account of the oldest Kraaj clone, namely myself.
The Xe'nil colony world on Regulus Five has now been enslaved and most of its inhabitants converted to fungal mycelium to feed the Crimson Slaath Worms of Aktaan Mlo. All Xe'nil assets have been frozen by the Aldabarians and we are no longer able to transfer them out of the solar system.
It is for this reason that I request your assistance. If you would be willing to set up an account in the Central Bank of Regulus, I could arrange for an associate in the Occupying Hierarchy to transfer the Iridium Crystals into the account via hyperspatial wire transfer. Naturally you would be entitled to 25% of the proceeds (payable either in Regulan Plotnicks or Concentrated Xe'nil Brain Cortex Extract, however you prefer), I would keep the other 75%. Of course, to set up the account you must first deposit a minimum balance of 10 trillion Aldabarian Plotnicks. Please let me know how you find my business proposition. I eagerly look forward to communicating with you further.
Seems like most of the critters that live inside the intestines are worm-shaped, not bug-shaped, so I'd think you'd want to build some sort of robotic worm or snake.
With Bush you at least know what you'll get, the only thing you knew about Kelly is that he didn't have a clue what you'd get, and neither did you.
Not Kelly. Kerry. John Kerry. I mean Jesus fucking Christ raping the Easter Bunny, it hasn't even been a year, and you're too brain-dead ignorant to know his name?
On the other hand, I guess you pretty well answered the question of how the United States could re-elect W.
Still no protection from mind readers. They know stuff.
In Philip K. Dick's _Ubik_ there's a company that sells the talents- or rather antitalents- of people who can block telepaths. The idea is that if a telepath or precog has been hired to monitor you or interfere with you, you hire the company to bring in an "inertial" who will negate the psi, and so eventually that person leaves.
A good introduction to Philip K. Dick in my opinion. It's well written and plotted (unlike a lot of his stuff) and a mind-fuck, but not the complete and total mindfuck of _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_- which is great, but starting with that one would be really starting at the deep end of the pool.
The most annoying part of FPS games, which require you to take a break from gleefully blowing the crap out of your enemies to make meticulously-timed jumps across platforms, like you've suddenly turned into Mario or something.
When they die, the guys who came up with these puzzles will go to their own personal hell. This hell will consist of a sea of molten, red-hot lava a hundred miles across which they must cross. To get to the other side, they must jump across moving platforms, elevators, and little tiny ledges. The tiniest mistake will cause them to fall into the boiling lava, and then they will have to go right back to the beginning where the last save point was. And they'll be forced to do this for all eternity.
but all those things have nothing to do with a good game. they might make a good simulation, but games are supposed to be fun, a good simulation would be as frustrating as real life.
You don't think real life makes a good video game? I have to disagree. I mean, I thought "Overweight Pimply-Faced Virgin Living in his Mom's Basement" was a blast. The graphics are wicked- you can see every little button on the remote as you're watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" reruns. And the AI is really tough- no matter how you try to get away from them, those junior high school kids track you down and beat you up and steal all your comic books.
I thought "and Rich Tong founded Ignition Partners" said Tong founded Ignorance Partners at first, that would have been interesting news.
Sounds like a great business plan to me- seems like these days, ignorance is a growth market. Hell, just selling to Slashdot alone you could make a small fortune.
They left out the address of AQ Khan, who runs a mailorder nukes biz in Pakistan.
Dude, I sent in my 4 boxtops and 8.95, and it's been 6-8 weeks already, so where's my freakin' bomb? Plus, those X-ray glasses Khan sent me totally do not help me see through women's clothing. Khan, if you're out there, I want my money back, you crook!
Seriously, this really drives home how the whole "Weapons of Mass Destruction" thing was just a bunch of bullshit. If the Bush Administration had truly wanted to do something about WMD they would have dealt with Pakistan's Nuclear Wal-Mart, put pressure on Iran, and gotten involved with North Korea- held out a few carrots and hinted at the stick of a few surgical strikes on their nuclear facilities. It's just incredible how much more dangerous this world has become under the watch of the Bush Administration, both through action and inaction. At present the occupation of Iraq has been so thorough cocked up that we're incapable of dealing with Iran or North Korea, and they know it.
I have a gas with Nethack, which, at best in an X environment has some nice little graphics to replace alphanumeric characters. I still play Super Mario World on a SNES emulator because it's still a really fun game.
yeah, but IMAGINE Nethack on a PS3 or Xbox360!
Instead of being restricted to ASCII, you could use their massive processing and graphics abilities to employ other characters- Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Linear B, Egyptian heiroglyphs, cuneiform... plus different fonts, italics, bold, all crisp and anti-aliased... imagine that instead of a puny little "@" you're now an upper-case italic omicron in Times New Roman, dealing out death as hordes of Copperplate Gothic Boldface "Ü"s and Comic Sans "Ñ"s fly at you from all directions! That would just totally ROCK!!!
Apparently the US managed to screw over the Russkies by doctoring some software and letting them steal it (from WWII onward, the Soviets engaged in industrial espionage on a massive scale); the software ran pipelines. From _At the Abyss_:
"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds... The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the operation."
You could wreak a lot of havoc on the American economy if you chose to. At present, I doubt many nations would be interested in that- it's just not in their interest. China, for instance, is making just way too much money off the U.S. economy to want to touch it. Even if we started exchanging shots over Taiwan I think they'd think hard before trying that. But what what about Al Qaeda?
"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."
Bin Laden's ultimate goal probably isn't to kill American civilians, kill American troops, or defeat us militarily. He wants to attack our economy. That was definitely a large part of what 9/11 was about, and it's a very large part of what the ongoing insurgency is about (200 billion for this invasion by the end of 2005, with no end in sight. What's really shocking is that everybody is puzzling over the Iraqi insurgency's strategy, when bin Laden explicitly lays out his strategy). And it will be a very large part of any future attacks, which could concievably move into internet attacks. Carnage is part of it, sure. But if he can't bleed you physically, he's perfectly happy to bleed your bank account. Incidentally, I had to go to Al Jazeera to find that passage- CNN, those J-school dropouts, post a heavily edited version without even mentioning that it was edited.
Dude, if you had actually read the page you linked to, you would see that James McTeigue is directing the film, not the Wachowski brothers (they're producing it).
I stand corrected. With the directors of the last two Matrix movies writing/producing AND a guy from Dark City directing it... well, hey, at least there's still the graphic novel!
...if it had a great (maybe even just good) director. But I don't know that I'd consider the Wachowski brothers exactly "great". The Matrix was OK (decent storytelling, so-so characters, great fights and special effects, and an awesome if unoriginal concept) but the sequels were abysmal in too many ways to count. You know they've screwed up when during the dramatic death scene of a primary character you're thinking, "oh for christ's sake, just go ahead and DIE of impalement already!"
The casting is at least interesting http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/fullcredits#wr iters- Hugo "Agent Smith" Weaving as V.? I dunno if I can picture that. Then again, V. is a creepy mofo and Weaving can do that well. Personally I coulda seen John Malkovich in the role. Natalie Portman- well, damn, you can't go wrong there.
You can't take Moore disavowing the movie one way or the other: he disavows all his film offspring. On the other hand, thus far they haven't exactly done him proud, either.
I feel bad for these guys and their injuries, but do people NOT know that you don't light glass tubes of gasoline on fire?
Well, not unless you're the freakin' Red Army and trying to take out a Panzer, you don't.
Too bad for the guy though. I mean, I heard he'll get prosthetic limbs and be breathing through a respirator the rest of his life. He's more machine now than man.
Actually, at that rate, Microsoft would still be able to function indefinately. (ceteris paribus, of course)
Microsoft has an average daily global sales revenue of $100 million. $5 million is about 5% of their global sales. Their profit margins far exceed 5%, therefore they could continue to pay their daily fine to the E.U. and still make a profit every day.
The other thing is they could just say, "Due to unforeseen expenses, Microsoft will be increasing the cost of all products sold in the European Union by 50 cents per day."
Hell, as long as the courts have labelled you a monopoly, you might as well act like it.
They were frightened by the attack on the WTC. They are responding by sublimating their fears into patholgogical actions.
Basically they're scared shitless over the boogey man hiding under their bed and blame him for everything bad that ever happens to them. Good, old fashioned demonism.
So basically, 9/11 happens, they get scared and wrap their house in foil. Meanwhile, George W. Bush's response to 9/11 is to invade a country with no clear link to 9/11 or al Qaeda, get 1600 troops killed along with tens of thousands of civilians, make the Islamic world hate the US even more than it used to, waste hundreds of billions of dollars, and to get us stuck battling a raging insurgency without the slightest freaking clue how to get out of the situation.
If you ask me, these people practically seem sane in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, why bother to bring terrorists all the way to the U.S. to kill Americans, which costs them time and money, when we're shipping Americans to the terrorists in Iraq, which costs us time and money?
Yes, they are. Stupid, and brainwashed.
Demonizing the enemy makes you feel good, but in the long run it's a dumb move. It may be unsavory, but you've got to understand your enemy to effectively fight him. If you think bin Laden and his group are stupid, you don't understand him. The 9-11 plot wasn't stupid- it was brilliant. Twisted, but brilliant: with a few thugs, box cutters and airline tickets you've suddenly got four cruise missiles armed with thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
Before dismissing these guys as idiots, it's worth looking at what his plan is:
"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
"This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.
"All Praise is due to Allah.
"So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."
Well, George Bush may not have a long-term strategy for Iraq... but bin Laden sure as hell does. So who's the dumbass?
CHINESE PEASANT #1:Look at this swell panda I got at the market in Beipao! There's no limit to what I can do with this panda! I can harness him to a cart and use him to haul my rice! Give him to the local head of the Communist Party as a bribe! Start a petting zoo- or chop him up and make panda jerky! My fortunes have changed at last!
CHINESE PEASANT #2: Much did you pay?
CHINESE PEASANT #1: Only 1000 yuan!
CHINESE PEASANT #2: Wait a minute... that's not a panda- it's a shanda!
CHINESE PEASANT #1: What? A shanda? Are you sure?
CHINESE PEASANT #2:Positive! See? It's just a sheep with a bit of black paint!
CHINESE PEASANT #1: Shit!
Now, I've got to warn people that it hurts to rub lemon juice into paper cuts! Quick! To the ObviousMobile!
In case you missed it, that's it parked over there. It's the twelve-wheeled vehicle with a rocket engine, eighteen strobe lights, that deafening siren, and a rotating sign on top that says "This is the ObviousMobile, property of Captain Obvious" in six foot tall neon orange letters. See it? Not the Civic. It's the one next to it.
Please, use examples which are going to be familiar to the majority of the Slashdot audience.
In keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia, I have decided that the Wikimania conference will now be held September 17th-23rd in Ulaan Bator, Mongolia. Featured speakers will include Mikhail Gorbachev and Pamela Anderson.
It's also increasingly common to use CT (computed tomography, which is basically 3d Xray) on fossils. However, CT is still pretty expensive, and although it's a useful tool, and it's produced some pretty eye-candy graphics of three-dimensional spinning dinosaur heads and whatnot, it's hardly revolutionized the field or anything.
If there's an "addiction" here, it's an addiction to calling things addictions, when they aren't. This is one of those rare instances when I have to agree with the right wing- "personal responsibility" just isn't fashionable anymore. It's not my fault that I'm out of shape: I'm addicted to TV, so it's the TV's fault. It's not my fault I'm fat, I'm addicted to food. And it's not my fault I never get any work done, I'm an email junkie (complete with track marks up and down my arms where I tried to plug in the ethernet cable). Etcetera.
Basically what these guys seem to be arguing in the paper is that some large mammals hung around for ten thousand years, therefore humans didn't wipe out large mammals, it had to be climate- which doesn't seem to logically follow. Their evidence may contradict some scenarios of human-caused extinction but it hardly lets humans off the hook- some animals may have been less vulnerable and held on a bit longer in the face of human hunting/habitat destruction etc. Their evidence is interesting but they're overreaching in their conclusions, if you ask me.
Good in the kitchen, great in the sack, strong and self-sufficient, and with teraflops of processing power... wow, sounds like my ideal woman. Naturally, there would be a model for the women as well (as a computer, it would *never* forget a birthday/anniversary!)
Depends on what we get, doesn't it? Most of the messages on earth aren't worth replying to, I can only imagine what our first message will be...
Greetings Sentient Being,
I am contacting you because of a business concerning a huge sum of Iridium Crystals (valued at approximately 50 quadrillion Aldabaran Plotnicks) left to me by my late clone, Zhreenu Kraaj 173, Commandant to the Third Wing of the Xe'nil Empire's Space Fleet. Following the Third Wing's decimation and Zhreenu Kraaj 173's defeat at the hands of the dreaded Slime Mold soldiers of Aktaan Mlo, Viceroy of Aldabaran (and Kraaj 173's subsequent conversion into fungal material), these Iridium Crystals reverted to the account of the oldest Kraaj clone, namely myself.
The Xe'nil colony world on Regulus Five has now been enslaved and most of its inhabitants converted to fungal mycelium to feed the Crimson Slaath Worms of Aktaan Mlo. All Xe'nil assets have been frozen by the Aldabarians and we are no longer able to transfer them out of the solar system.
It is for this reason that I request your assistance. If you would be willing to set up an account in the Central Bank of Regulus, I could arrange for an associate in the Occupying Hierarchy to transfer the Iridium Crystals into the account via hyperspatial wire transfer. Naturally you would be entitled to 25% of the proceeds (payable either in Regulan Plotnicks or Concentrated Xe'nil Brain Cortex Extract, however you prefer), I would keep the other 75%. Of course, to set up the account you must first deposit a minimum balance of 10 trillion Aldabarian Plotnicks. Please let me know how you find my business proposition. I eagerly look forward to communicating with you further.
sincerely,
Zhreenu Kraaj #539
Seems like most of the critters that live inside the intestines are worm-shaped, not bug-shaped, so I'd think you'd want to build some sort of robotic worm or snake.
Not Kelly. Kerry. John Kerry. I mean Jesus fucking Christ raping the Easter Bunny, it hasn't even been a year, and you're too brain-dead ignorant to know his name?
On the other hand, I guess you pretty well answered the question of how the United States could re-elect W.
In Philip K. Dick's _Ubik_ there's a company that sells the talents- or rather antitalents- of people who can block telepaths. The idea is that if a telepath or precog has been hired to monitor you or interfere with you, you hire the company to bring in an "inertial" who will negate the psi, and so eventually that person leaves.
A good introduction to Philip K. Dick in my opinion. It's well written and plotted (unlike a lot of his stuff) and a mind-fuck, but not the complete and total mindfuck of _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_- which is great, but starting with that one would be really starting at the deep end of the pool.
When they die, the guys who came up with these puzzles will go to their own personal hell. This hell will consist of a sea of molten, red-hot lava a hundred miles across which they must cross. To get to the other side, they must jump across moving platforms, elevators, and little tiny ledges. The tiniest mistake will cause them to fall into the boiling lava, and then they will have to go right back to the beginning where the last save point was. And they'll be forced to do this for all eternity.
You don't think real life makes a good video game? I have to disagree. I mean, I thought "Overweight Pimply-Faced Virgin Living in his Mom's Basement" was a blast. The graphics are wicked- you can see every little button on the remote as you're watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" reruns. And the AI is really tough- no matter how you try to get away from them, those junior high school kids track you down and beat you up and steal all your comic books.
Sounds like a great business plan to me- seems like these days, ignorance is a growth market. Hell, just selling to Slashdot alone you could make a small fortune.
Trying to stifle our free speech, are you? You NAZI!!!
Dude, I sent in my 4 boxtops and 8.95, and it's been 6-8 weeks already, so where's my freakin' bomb? Plus, those X-ray glasses Khan sent me totally do not help me see through women's clothing. Khan, if you're out there, I want my money back, you crook!
Seriously, this really drives home how the whole "Weapons of Mass Destruction" thing was just a bunch of bullshit. If the Bush Administration had truly wanted to do something about WMD they would have dealt with Pakistan's Nuclear Wal-Mart, put pressure on Iran, and gotten involved with North Korea- held out a few carrots and hinted at the stick of a few surgical strikes on their nuclear facilities. It's just incredible how much more dangerous this world has become under the watch of the Bush Administration, both through action and inaction. At present the occupation of Iraq has been so thorough cocked up that we're incapable of dealing with Iran or North Korea, and they know it.
yeah, but IMAGINE Nethack on a PS3 or Xbox360!
Instead of being restricted to ASCII, you could use their massive processing and graphics abilities to employ other characters- Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Linear B, Egyptian heiroglyphs, cuneiform... plus different fonts, italics, bold, all crisp and anti-aliased... imagine that instead of a puny little "@" you're now an upper-case italic omicron in Times New Roman, dealing out death as hordes of Copperplate Gothic Boldface "Ü"s and Comic Sans "Ñ"s fly at you from all directions! That would just totally ROCK!!!
"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds... The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the operation."
You could wreak a lot of havoc on the American economy if you chose to. At present, I doubt many nations would be interested in that- it's just not in their interest. China, for instance, is making just way too much money off the U.S. economy to want to touch it. Even if we started exchanging shots over Taiwan I think they'd think hard before trying that. But what what about Al Qaeda?
"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."
Bin Laden's ultimate goal probably isn't to kill American civilians, kill American troops, or defeat us militarily. He wants to attack our economy. That was definitely a large part of what 9/11 was about, and it's a very large part of what the ongoing insurgency is about (200 billion for this invasion by the end of 2005, with no end in sight. What's really shocking is that everybody is puzzling over the Iraqi insurgency's strategy, when bin Laden explicitly lays out his strategy). And it will be a very large part of any future attacks, which could concievably move into internet attacks. Carnage is part of it, sure. But if he can't bleed you physically, he's perfectly happy to bleed your bank account. Incidentally, I had to go to Al Jazeera to find that passage- CNN, those J-school dropouts, post a heavily edited version without even mentioning that it was edited.
I stand corrected. With the directors of the last two Matrix movies writing/producing AND a guy from Dark City directing it... well, hey, at least there's still the graphic novel!
The casting is at least interesting http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0434409/fullcredits#wr iters- Hugo "Agent Smith" Weaving as V.? I dunno if I can picture that. Then again, V. is a creepy mofo and Weaving can do that well. Personally I coulda seen John Malkovich in the role. Natalie Portman- well, damn, you can't go wrong there.
You can't take Moore disavowing the movie one way or the other: he disavows all his film offspring. On the other hand, thus far they haven't exactly done him proud, either.
Well, not unless you're the freakin' Red Army and trying to take out a Panzer, you don't.
Too bad for the guy though. I mean, I heard he'll get prosthetic limbs and be breathing through a respirator the rest of his life. He's more machine now than man.
The other thing is they could just say, "Due to unforeseen expenses, Microsoft will be increasing the cost of all products sold in the European Union by 50 cents per day."
Hell, as long as the courts have labelled you a monopoly, you might as well act like it.
So basically, 9/11 happens, they get scared and wrap their house in foil. Meanwhile, George W. Bush's response to 9/11 is to invade a country with no clear link to 9/11 or al Qaeda, get 1600 troops killed along with tens of thousands of civilians, make the Islamic world hate the US even more than it used to, waste hundreds of billions of dollars, and to get us stuck battling a raging insurgency without the slightest freaking clue how to get out of the situation.
If you ask me, these people practically seem sane in comparison.