wow you got close to guessing right, but what's the matter? somebody told you the same thing about your haircut? do you like wearing sweaters too? hahaha
A soft, friendly image? I don't think so. Bill Gates looks are that of an old and unfit nerd with a stupid haircut from the 60's. Definitely not the image you want to associate with something like an mp3 player or videogame machine.
Moreover (and this may be just me), but his demeanor is kind of offensive. It gives off a slight impression that he thinks nothing of the people around him and would just as well screw them for whatever. Or maybe he just sounds like a liar or hypocrite anyways.
I don't say that as a Linux fanboy or anti-MS troll, but Bill Gates and similar corporate figures seem to always have that kind of "aura" about them.
According to the novel 1984, one of the ultimate goals of a dictatorship is devising a way to read people's minds. In the novel, this translates to entire scientific research sections dedicated to such projects, as well as the constant use of psychological techniques (illustrated in the book) for the surveillance and interrogation of the general populace.
This is not surprising. It derives from becoming paranoid and losing trust on your fellow human beings: "what if someone is secretly thinking of killing us? we ought to have a way to tell!". I hope no one ever gains such understanding, as it would be a serious threat to freedom.
What's with you people and your obsession with "believing" and "being right"? the only information we had was that from the news. We were not in the case at all.
In what way does having "believed" in the current outcome validate you? all of us have been just guessing, that's all. It means nothing whether you "were right" or not.
Because knowledge is power. Therefore, information about me can be used to gain power over me. Privacy keeps others from having such information.
There are other reasons I guess, but that's the most important one when relating the concept of personal privacy to institutions such as government agencies, corporations, etc. It has nothing to do with shame or morality, it's all about power and control.
I live in Japan and have been thinking on getting one of these cool UMPCs. I have been considering a Kohjinsha and the eee, but unfortunately they have serious drawbacks.
The eee is shipped here only with Windows XP, which increases the price enough to no longer be attractive.
On the other hand, the kohjinsha UMPCs are damn sleek pieces of hardware, double as tablets and have a very cool mouse-replacement similar to the Thinkpads (this and the touch screen being the best things of this machine). Unfortunately, the Windows XP model only has 512mb of ram and the mouse-replacement thingy is not as cool as the one in the Vista model, which has the 1gb and Intel A110. But come on, Vista? even if I can replace it on my own with XP, I feel kind of dirty paying for that costly Vista license.
That's the problem with you people. Always trying to aggrandize stuff out of proportion.
Listen here, 9/11 was an act of international terrorism, and should have been dealt with as such. What's with this "war on terror" non-sense? you are all just reacting as it's one of your damn movies or something.
Lies and follies are always paid for (even if it's not you who is being made to pay the cost) and the sooner you realize that phrases like "great nation", "achievement of humanity" and "noble intentions" mean nothing at best and complete hipocrisy most of the time, the better.
Interesting explanation. That doesn't change the fact that you should have updated that name a long, long time ago. You are not the only ones on this continent and I assure it is a fact that it's jarring for everyone else in this continent to hear you talk so loudly about america this and america that, as if the whole place belonged to you.
It's not our fault you can't even come up with a name for your country and try to take over the continent's
And yes, it is insulting for the rest of us because, if we didn't know that you lack the creativity to come up with a nice-sounding name for your country (let alone any sort of real culture) we would assume that you are either pretending to be the only ones who matter in this continent or that you are trying to speak for everyone else.
Think how it sounds for the other countries in America when you speak of "american interests" or "american values".
The Silent Hill movie does resemble the visual style of the game but does not respect its story, instead presenting us with something else entirely. Unfortunately, they gave that job to the american who wrote Armageddon, so surprise surprise, yet another christian-influenced sin/punishment theme ending with a bloodfest. They just didn't get it at all.
It was often that I heard from co-workers in past jobs how nice would be to land a job at Microsoft.They always talked about the excellent pay, the stock options, the safe employment, how big and powerful the company was, etc.
But not once did I hear them talk about what great software they could make there or how interesting the projects would be. It was always about pay, position, job security.
I get the impression that people dont go to work to Microsoft to make great things. Regardless of the product quality, I'm sure they got their fat paychecks already. No need to pity them at all.
I'm of the same opinion as the gpp and did watch the entire series and the movie (I was sorta bored).
My theory is that most fans just really like Whedon's characters, cliches and style of dialogue. If you don't know what that is, you can see it repeated exactly in Angel, Buffy and Alien:Resurrection. Examples: no one can say anything straight, it's all got to be "witty". Martial arts are for some reason the greatest power in the universe. Every character is "bad" but would do all sorts of heroics to save a kitten (while cursing reluctantly of course... because they are bad!!), etc.
Basically, there's nothing particularly wrong with Firefly. It just lacks any sort of brilliance. The series ends up coalescing into a bland, insipid whole.
Yes, but I wasn't referring to that kind of thing. Perhaps I wasn't specific enough, but to get a sense of the kind of things I was referring to please re-read the example I wrote.
I don't think any one jokes about things such as the suffering or loss of a loved one, having one's own dreams crushed, etc. And I'm pretty sure that the people who really cared about these killed people (if any) won't be coping with the incident by making cheap jokes or clever remarks.
Nope, unlike what tv may have taught you, people rarely, if ever, joke about something anything that affects and hurts them.
Let's see you cracking a joke about the robot at the funeral if it was *your* son in the casket.
Now, I don't see anything bad about us making jokes in this forum, since we aren't personally involved in the matter at all and can only feel sorry in an "abstract" kind of way (as in, accidents and human loss are sad but oh well I can't feel sad for *every* bad thing that happens in this world right?), and this won't be read by the affected people. But let's not go around pretending that we are "dealing" or "coping" with anything here. That's just hipocrisy.
Imagine you are in the dark ages and you are summoned for not having paid tithe to the local church.
The church complains that not only they are entitled to it by divine right, but also that it's not fair you benefit from the innumerable and priceless services they provide to the community (such as hunting for heretics) without contributing what they ask for.
Knowing that the penalty may range from outrageous fines to beheading even (and especially) when confessing, what would you say when asked whether you did in fact pay your tithe?
Your post reeks of the typical, ignorant, i-know-better "if they really X then they would Y".
You are equating emotions to personhood. You're wrong. Emotions can be stronger than you and your judgement, and lead you through a path of destruction.
I have experienced depression. It's overwhelming, and it suffocates any initiative or effort that may originate in you. It disrupts your thoughts, and you simply can't think clearly anymore. You start forgetting things, absently obsessing over others. You may try to overcome it, but unless the root of the sadness and loneliness isn't erradicated, they will win after a few hours or days.
And in this world, you have to fight tooth and nail for your happy ending. If you can't even get up the bed, who is going to do it for you? no one is coming to help you, and you better comprehend that well. You have to get up, even if it means drugging yourself up. Of course, that doesn't mean there is balance and more importantly, one must not mistake the stimulation for well-being, because time is short, and it's running out.
According to our history as a species, we have no trouble being cruel or sacrificing others when our interests, however essential or triffling, are on the line. You really think we were going to treat animals any better?
I work as a programmer and use a linux server at work. I like a lot the idea of an open system where I can modify whatever, make scripts to control the behavior of the system, etc. So I try it at home and here's what happens:
Mandriva 2006 worked on a friend's laptop so I try to install it at home. Works fine for a few hours until, for some still unknown reason, the headphones suddenly emit ear-jarring static at the maximum possible volume no matter what I'm doing or what settings I use. I try reinstalling. The problem repeats.
A few months later Mandriva 2007 comes out and I give it a try. Installation finishes and on first boot-up the system freezes on the "setting hardware clock" step. Ridiculous. I try reinstalling, same problem. Try again, this time updating from Mandriva 2006. It works, but random stuff is broken. I trash it.
But it's fine since there's this great new distro called Ubuntu that everyone's praising, right? I can't stand gnome so I download kubuntu and proceed to install. I live in Japan so I tell the installer to set the system language as Japanese. First thing I try is surfing the web, but the text is all monospaced and is hard to read. I try messing with firefox and the system settings, no good.
Ok moving on, I need wine for my japanese word processor, so I go to the system admin menu and click on the wine icon. Tells me it will install it for me. Repository linking and such and such stuff. Result? "it appears you don' have wine installed on your system". I try installing it from the package manager gui and the command line. It doesn't even know it exists.
Well, let's look some videos. I open them with MPlayer but an error message window pops-up intermittently non-stop telling me "cannot find PCM audio controller" eventhough the audio is fine. Ok, let's try finding help on the net. Only one forum post describing the same problem and the answer is, he knows how to fix it, but he won't bother because it's in the the man page. One hour later of messing with the program's config files the error message is no longer plastered all over my screen. Fine. Hey, how do I display this file's subtitles? not supported?
Well, let's try Xine. Um, why is it that when I press the scan forward/backward key it moves like 2 minutes? I just want it to skip 5 seconds! shouldn't that be the default behavior? I dig into the config files. One hour later I find the key, but it will only give me 7 seconds. Fine. I'm content watching anime until weird artifices appear. Whole parts are covered in random green pixels.
I try moving files around with the file system gui, konqueror. I can't move it because I'm not root. That would be fine, except there's nowhere I can give a su command to this thing. While doing whatever, I get random application crashes, a window with a kde gear with a bomb inside appears.
I incorrectly shutdown the system and reiserfs won't start until it's rebuilt the tree or something. 2 hours later it's done. It once ruined one of my directory trees. NTFS wouldn't even bother me with any of this.
Linux is slow to boot-up. Maybe Linux is fast but X is damn slow and clunky. When windows xp is done, Linux is just starting X, or finishing mounting the file systems.
System display on kubuntu irritates my vision. I install the nvidia driver, set the refresh level correctly and yet I can't look at the thing for 15 minutes without starting to feel bothered. Mandriva was fine.
Conclusion: Linux works well running things that have had a lot of work and testing in them, like apache and websphere, but in the desktop it's a mismash of poorly coded apps with an even more poorly integrated system beneath. Oh, and it wont't work with my tv card.
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wow you got close to guessing right, but what's the matter? somebody told you the same thing about your haircut? do you like wearing sweaters too? hahaha
A soft, friendly image? I don't think so. Bill Gates looks are that of an old and unfit nerd with a stupid haircut from the 60's. Definitely not the image you want to associate with something like an mp3 player or videogame machine.
Moreover (and this may be just me), but his demeanor is kind of offensive. It gives off a slight impression that he thinks nothing of the people around him and would just as well screw them for whatever. Or maybe he just sounds like a liar or hypocrite anyways.
I don't say that as a Linux fanboy or anti-MS troll, but Bill Gates and similar corporate figures seem to always have that kind of "aura" about them.
I once saw Batman do it
Didn't he prove himself to be the culprit by revealing the location of the corpse? There's no reasonable doubt here, it's certain he did it?
Don't forget their "every business is the same thing" and "we know better than the people who do the actual work" mentality.
According to the novel 1984, one of the ultimate goals of a dictatorship is devising a way to read people's minds. In the novel, this translates to entire scientific research sections dedicated to such projects, as well as the constant use of psychological techniques (illustrated in the book) for the surveillance and interrogation of the general populace.
This is not surprising. It derives from becoming paranoid and losing trust on your fellow human beings: "what if someone is secretly thinking of killing us? we ought to have a way to tell!". I hope no one ever gains such understanding, as it would be a serious threat to freedom.
What's with you people and your obsession with "believing" and "being right"? the only information we had was that from the news. We were not in the case at all.
In what way does having "believed" in the current outcome validate you? all of us have been just guessing, that's all. It means nothing whether you "were right" or not.
Because knowledge is power. Therefore, information about me can be used to gain power over me. Privacy keeps others from having such information.
There are other reasons I guess, but that's the most important one when relating the concept of personal privacy to institutions such as government agencies, corporations, etc. It has nothing to do with shame or morality, it's all about power and control.
This is just a comment on the name of the distro, but I think it's terrible.
First of all, what's up with "new sense"? it sounds like a buzzword. It doesn't convey it's supposed meaning at all. It's just noise.
Second, the shape of the word is all wrong. It looks like some boring and unintelligible java or c variable.
Third, it's hard/unnatural to pronounce.
Frankly, that name sounds like something some programmer who hasn't come out of his basement for weeks would come up with.
Merits of the distro notwithstanding, which I think is a great idea and a worthy cause.
I live in Japan and have been thinking on getting one of these cool UMPCs. I have been considering a Kohjinsha and the eee, but unfortunately they have serious drawbacks.
The eee is shipped here only with Windows XP, which increases the price enough to no longer be attractive.
On the other hand, the kohjinsha UMPCs are damn sleek pieces of hardware, double as tablets and have a very cool mouse-replacement similar to the Thinkpads (this and the touch screen being the best things of this machine). Unfortunately, the Windows XP model only has 512mb of ram and the mouse-replacement thingy is not as cool as the one in the Vista model, which has the 1gb and Intel A110. But come on, Vista? even if I can replace it on my own with XP, I feel kind of dirty paying for that costly Vista license.
That's the problem with you people. Always trying to aggrandize stuff out of proportion.
Listen here, 9/11 was an act of international terrorism, and should have been dealt with as such. What's with this "war on terror" non-sense? you are all just reacting as it's one of your damn movies or something.
Lies and follies are always paid for (even if it's not you who is being made to pay the cost) and the sooner you realize that phrases like "great nation", "achievement of humanity" and "noble intentions" mean nothing at best and complete hipocrisy most of the time, the better.
Interesting explanation. That doesn't change the fact that you should have updated that name a long, long time ago. You are not the only ones on this continent and I assure it is a fact that it's jarring for everyone else in this continent to hear you talk so loudly about america this and america that, as if the whole place belonged to you.
It's not our fault you can't even come up with a name for your country and try to take over the continent's
And yes, it is insulting for the rest of us because, if we didn't know that you lack the creativity to come up with a nice-sounding name for your country (let alone any sort of real culture) we would assume that you are either pretending to be the only ones who matter in this continent or that you are trying to speak for everyone else.
Think how it sounds for the other countries in America when you speak of "american interests" or "american values".
The Silent Hill movie does resemble the visual style of the game but does not respect its story, instead presenting us with something else entirely. Unfortunately, they gave that job to the american who wrote Armageddon, so surprise surprise, yet another christian-influenced sin/punishment theme ending with a bloodfest. They just didn't get it at all.
It was often that I heard from co-workers in past jobs how nice would be to land a job at Microsoft.They always talked about the excellent pay, the stock options, the safe employment, how big and powerful the company was, etc.
But not once did I hear them talk about what great software they could make there or how interesting the projects would be. It was always about pay, position, job security.
I get the impression that people dont go to work to Microsoft to make great things. Regardless of the product quality, I'm sure they got their fat paychecks already. No need to pity them at all.
excellent techno soundtrack
I'm of the same opinion as the gpp and did watch the entire series and the movie (I was sorta bored).
My theory is that most fans just really like Whedon's characters, cliches and style of dialogue. If you don't know what that is, you can see it repeated exactly in Angel, Buffy and Alien:Resurrection. Examples: no one can say anything straight, it's all got to be "witty". Martial arts are for some reason the greatest power in the universe. Every character is "bad" but would do all sorts of heroics to save a kitten (while cursing reluctantly of course... because they are bad!!), etc.
Basically, there's nothing particularly wrong with Firefly. It just lacks any sort of brilliance. The series ends up coalescing into a bland, insipid whole.
Yes, but I wasn't referring to that kind of thing. Perhaps I wasn't specific enough, but to get a sense of the kind of things I was referring to please re-read the example I wrote.
I don't think any one jokes about things such as the suffering or loss of a loved one, having one's own dreams crushed, etc. And I'm pretty sure that the people who really cared about these killed people (if any) won't be coping with the incident by making cheap jokes or clever remarks.
Nope, unlike what tv may have taught you, people rarely, if ever, joke about something anything that affects and hurts them.
Let's see you cracking a joke about the robot at the funeral if it was *your* son in the casket.
Now, I don't see anything bad about us making jokes in this forum, since we aren't personally involved in the matter at all and can only feel sorry in an "abstract" kind of way (as in, accidents and human loss are sad but oh well I can't feel sad for *every* bad thing that happens in this world right?), and this won't be read by the affected people. But let's not go around pretending that we are "dealing" or "coping" with anything here. That's just hipocrisy.
Imagine you are in the dark ages and you are summoned for not having paid tithe to the local church.
The church complains that not only they are entitled to it by divine right, but also that it's not fair you benefit from the innumerable and priceless services they provide to the community (such as hunting for heretics) without contributing what they ask for.
Knowing that the penalty may range from outrageous fines to beheading even (and especially) when confessing, what would you say when asked whether you did in fact pay your tithe?
Now replace "dark ages" with "ip dark ages".
In response to such outrageous abuses many propose "no-buying-cds" days and other utterly useless measures.
But what would really hurt their pride and lessen their damage would be for the community to set a fund and help this person with her legal fees.
This would really show that the people won't tolerate someone's life being ruined to set an "example" and instill fear in everyone else.
(note: I'm not an American citizen, somebody please set it up instead)
Your post reeks of the typical, ignorant, i-know-better "if they really X then they would Y".
You are equating emotions to personhood. You're wrong. Emotions can be stronger than you and your judgement, and lead you through a path of destruction.
I have experienced depression. It's overwhelming, and it suffocates any initiative or effort that may originate in you. It disrupts your thoughts, and you simply can't think clearly anymore. You start forgetting things, absently obsessing over others. You may try to overcome it, but unless the root of the sadness and loneliness isn't erradicated, they will win after a few hours or days.
And in this world, you have to fight tooth and nail for your happy ending. If you can't even get up the bed, who is going to do it for you? no one is coming to help you, and you better comprehend that well. You have to get up, even if it means drugging yourself up. Of course, that doesn't mean there is balance and more importantly, one must not mistake the stimulation for well-being, because time is short, and it's running out.
According to our history as a species, we have no trouble being cruel or sacrificing others when our interests, however essential or triffling, are on the line. You really think we were going to treat animals any better?
I work as a programmer and use a linux server at work. I like a lot the idea of an open system where I can modify whatever, make scripts to control the behavior of the system, etc. So I try it at home and here's what happens:
Mandriva 2006 worked on a friend's laptop so I try to install it at home. Works fine for a few hours until, for some still unknown reason, the headphones suddenly emit ear-jarring static at the maximum possible volume no matter what I'm doing or what settings I use. I try reinstalling. The problem repeats.
A few months later Mandriva 2007 comes out and I give it a try. Installation finishes and on first boot-up the system freezes on the "setting hardware clock" step. Ridiculous. I try reinstalling, same problem. Try again, this time updating from Mandriva 2006. It works, but random stuff is broken. I trash it.
But it's fine since there's this great new distro called Ubuntu that everyone's praising, right? I can't stand gnome so I download kubuntu and proceed to install. I live in Japan so I tell the installer to set the system language as Japanese. First thing I try is surfing the web, but the text is all monospaced and is hard to read. I try messing with firefox and the system settings, no good.
Ok moving on, I need wine for my japanese word processor, so I go to the system admin menu and click on the wine icon. Tells me it will install it for me. Repository linking and such and such stuff. Result? "it appears you don' have wine installed on your system". I try installing it from the package manager gui and the command line. It doesn't even know it exists.
Well, let's look some videos. I open them with MPlayer but an error message window pops-up intermittently non-stop telling me "cannot find PCM audio controller" eventhough the audio is fine. Ok, let's try finding help on the net. Only one forum post describing the same problem and the answer is, he knows how to fix it, but he won't bother because it's in the the man page. One hour later of messing with the program's config files the error message is no longer plastered all over my screen. Fine. Hey, how do I display this file's subtitles? not supported?
Well, let's try Xine. Um, why is it that when I press the scan forward/backward key it moves like 2 minutes? I just want it to skip 5 seconds! shouldn't that be the default behavior? I dig into the config files. One hour later I find the key, but it will only give me 7 seconds. Fine. I'm content watching anime until weird artifices appear. Whole parts are covered in random green pixels.
I try moving files around with the file system gui, konqueror. I can't move it because I'm not root. That would be fine, except there's nowhere I can give a su command to this thing. While doing whatever, I get random application crashes, a window with a kde gear with a bomb inside appears.
I incorrectly shutdown the system and reiserfs won't start until it's rebuilt the tree or something. 2 hours later it's done. It once ruined one of my directory trees. NTFS wouldn't even bother me with any of this.
Linux is slow to boot-up. Maybe Linux is fast but X is damn slow and clunky. When windows xp is done, Linux is just starting X, or finishing mounting the file systems.
System display on kubuntu irritates my vision. I install the nvidia driver, set the refresh level correctly and yet I can't look at the thing for 15 minutes without starting to feel bothered. Mandriva was fine.
Conclusion: Linux works well running things that have had a lot of work and testing in them, like apache and websphere, but in the desktop it's a mismash of poorly coded apps with an even more poorly integrated system beneath. Oh, and it wont't work with my tv card.
I dare this guy to play Final Fantasy VI and Silent Hill 2 and tell me that games cannot be art.
Old people. It's almost as if their perspective of the world freezes at 40 or something. I wonder if this will happen to me too.