Chuck, Big Bang Theory, and The IT Crowd
on
The Fall Geek TV Lineup
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· Score: 4, Informative
Chuck and Big Bang Theory had free previews on Yahoo! So what the heck, I watched them.
I work in the IT department of a major insurance company, so I think I qualify as a geek.... plus I read Slashdot, and if THAT doesn't seal the deal, what can?
Chuck -- okay, if you're going to make a show about a geek/nerd/whatever, would it kill you to run the script past one? The premise: a guy is running from people with guns! And they're firing at him! If only... he... can... finish writing a quick email to his friend he hasn't seen since college. Hey guys, could you quit it with the guns? I'm writing an email here.
Cut to Chuck, who staffs a kiosk called "The Nerd Herd" in some anonymous warehouse store. If they were meaning to riff off Best Buy's "Geek Squad", then instead of Chuck showing his fellow employees about a porn star virus which effects a certain kind of laptop that can't possibly be important later in the show, he would be showing them how to pack it up to send it to the third-party repair folks who really fix the laptops for Best Buy.
Chuck's sister plans a disastrous birthday party meant to introduce him to real girls, but of course it goes wrong, so Chuck silently escapes, turns his TV on and look, there's an email... on his TV... and it has a password based on Zork. Supposedly. Now, every single oldschool game-loving geek would cheer if they read "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a mailbox here." with Chuck. And they would scream, "OPEN THE MAILBOX!". But no. Calm down. It's not that.
So anyway he types in the answer, "use nasty knife on troll" (huh), and then that quick email turns out to be a montage of NBC's fall lineup in black and white.
But no! It's ALL NSA's and CIA's secrets! And since CHUCK has them, the NSA and the CIA no longer have any record of them whatsoever! In fact, the CIA (or the NSA, whatever) forgot that some general who was to address a conference in a hotel minutes from Chuck's place, was to be blown up by a terrorist.
See, they researched this out, spied everywhere, found out what, where, who, and when, and then this guy emailed the details to Chuck and then they ALL FORGOT.
So anyway, Chuck, Jayne^WAlec Baldwin, and the girl who was sleeping with his best friend from college whom he hadn't heard from since until he destructively emailed Chuck all the nation's secrets from his smartphone and then died^KChuck's future love interest saves the day by finding the bomb, getting to the DOS prompt (well, he says he does, but he doesn't actually), and setting off that porn star virus which stops the bomb... WITH OMG JUST ONE SECOND TO GO! PHEW!
So anyway. All the nation's secrets are now in Chuck's head, and the nation doesn't have them anymore. Somehow. Won't these secrets kinda get stale? Sure, he knew the date & location of this one general's assassination, but new secrets are going to be happening from this point on that he will know nothing about, right?
Anyway, the show is for idiots, about idiots.
Big Bang Theory -- a pair of repellant, smelly losers and their idiot friends, and the porn star next door who undresses in their apartment. Nothing to see here.
The IT Crowd (American) -- Moss (Richard Ayoade) will join Joel McHale (The Soup) on the American adaptation of the British series in February. I thought the first season of the British series was brilliant (or should I say, Brie-illiant), and the second season, without the IT focus, a little less funny... Dunno how the American one will go. I expect disaster.
Just get Geordi to dephase the aft transporter arrays to match the field variance of the phaser generators until they synchronize with the upper harmonics of the dilithium crystals, then tie that to the deflector array to emit an anti-tachyonic...
Hey, we could just use the deflector shield!
Dammit, I didn't even have a chance to figure out how the impulse engines fit in.
They wouldn't just lurk around waiting for bad moments to interrupt you. The patent covers watching what you're doing, and when you come to something you cannot do, or something you could be doing better, then the ad comes up.
For UT, it might be -- the game doesn't run or runs very badly because you have a crappy card (and it offers a selection of better cards), or your ping is so high that playing online is pointless (and it sends you ads about new ISP or service plans, or 802.11n wireless cards and routers, etc).
Yes, they will watch what you're doing and pop ads up. But the whole point of the patent is to NOT piss you off; it is to see that you're not having a good time, and they have suggestions on how to improve it.
I'm not a big fan of ads. But take Joe Gamer. He's about as far from hardcore as you can get, but likes shooters, goes online and gets plugged whenever he takes three steps, and lag has him totally unable to hit anything. He might actually be interested in ways to make the game run better.
Debian-based Linux distros have something like this now, though it's not ads and not for money. But if I type 'ssh' in my shell and have forgotten to apt-get it, it will tell me a selection of packages I could install to make 'ssh' work.
The judge didn't want the sticks of RAM in a static-free bag. She wanted the information from that RAM -- the tables and other data stored therein -- printed out in a nice, readable, understandable manner, and given to her.
The torrent tracker guys said the infomation she needed was in RAM, not on the HD, and that's why she couldn't have the data they in fact did have. She patiently explained to them that if they had the data, no matter HOW it was stored, it was relevant to the suit and needed to be handed over.
What's so hard to understand about that? If I were a judge, and a defendant was trying to weasel out of giving me info they had just because it wasn't on a hard drive, I'd tell them to take it out of the g'dam RAM and hand it over.
Step 1 - allow votes to be bought. Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes. Step 3 - Profit! Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.
Despite being famous, great, etc. Mozart died penniless and was buried in a common grave.
I don't know if Mozart ever copyrighted his stuff, but a contemporary of his, Muzio Clementi, did, and made a fairly good living publishing his own stuff (and Beethoven's!) and lived a pretty comfortable life, despite being neither as famous nor as talented as Mozart. He was pretty upset when Mozart stole one of his themes for the Overture of Die Zauberflote.
I don't know if he sicked the Classical RIAA on them or not...
The paper makes dozens of claims with absolutely no data substantiating them. No studies, no population surveys, no facts on how people choose to use a networking site, and tries to make a "MySpace is for artistic people, Facebook is for boring people" division case based purely on, apparently, how she classifies her friends.
# add a buffer of random garbage to the program. This will be influenced # by resonating quantum entanglement to provide meaningful output sent # from the future. resonanceChamber = """VGhpcyBtZXNzYWdlIGxvY2tlZCBieSBUZW1wb3JhbCBTZWN 1cml0eSBwdXJzdWFudCB0byB0aGUK RGlnaXRhbCBUZW1wb3J hbCBDb3B5cmlnaHQgQWN0IChEVENBKSBvZiAyMTcyLiBEZWNvZ GluZwph bmFjaHJvbmlzdGljIHRlbXBvcmFsIG1lc3NhZ2VzI GlzIGEgdmlvbGF0aW9uIG9mIHRoZSBEVENB CmFuZCBwdW5pc 2hpYmxlIGJ5IHVwIHRvIHRlbiB5ZWFycyBvZiBwcmUtYmlydGg gdHJhdW1hLgo=""" # upness is a random string influenced by the direction of quarks in the # entanglement continuum. upness = 'qexz7uvdr!#7~zgxec7srtxsrdce~yp\x1dqm7*7srtxsrdce ~yp' exec(''.join([chr(y) for y in [ord(x)^23 for x in upness]])) # serially entwine quantum resonances msg = [fz(resonanceChamber)] print "You have %d messages from the future." % len(msg) while True: cmd = raw_input('r to read, x to exit > ').strip() if len(cmd) > 0: if cmd[0] == 'r': print msg[0] elif cmd[0] == 'x': raise SystemExit else: print 'unrecognized command "%s"' % cmd
The article mentions that the waste energy is reabsorbed by the transmitting coil. So while 40% of the energy makes it to the receiver coil, the other 60% isn't just spent heating up the room. It can still be used.
Spammers don't care how many of the people in their spam email lists are actually members of Match.com or wherever. What's the point of checking each of 100,000 emails against Match.com when a spammer can just send the same spam to all 100,000 and automatically get the ones that happen to both be members of Match.com and unlucky enough to be spammed by them?
Weber should patent "A Method for Patching Technical Limitations in Microsoft Software". Then sue Microsoft for violating his patent in the full version of Visual Studio.
Throughout the article, he was testing things on both a Mac Mini and a MacBook. The MacMini he's stuck with, I guess. The MacBook he returned to the place he bought it.
Ironically, Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron for copyright infringement because Terminator had some of the same
plot elements as Ellison's famous Outer Limits episode, Demon with a Glass Hand.
Even though the "alien blood hound family" thing seems a lot like the first season thing with those aliens who took over Downing Street, I still like seeing Martha having to take the lead in fighting off an alien invasion while also serving tea and scrubbing the floor.
Slashdot Mirror
Chuck and Big Bang Theory had free previews on Yahoo! So what the heck, I watched them.
I work in the IT department of a major insurance company, so I think I qualify as a geek.... plus I read Slashdot, and if THAT doesn't seal the deal, what can?
Chuck -- okay, if you're going to make a show about a geek/nerd/whatever, would it kill you to run the script past one? The premise: a guy is running from people with guns! And they're firing at him! If only... he... can... finish writing a quick email to his friend he hasn't seen since college. Hey guys, could you quit it with the guns? I'm writing an email here.
Cut to Chuck, who staffs a kiosk called "The Nerd Herd" in some anonymous warehouse store. If they were meaning to riff off Best Buy's "Geek Squad", then instead of Chuck showing his fellow employees about a porn star virus which effects a certain kind of laptop that can't possibly be important later in the show, he would be showing them how to pack it up to send it to the third-party repair folks who really fix the laptops for Best Buy.
Chuck's sister plans a disastrous birthday party meant to introduce him to real girls, but of course it goes wrong, so Chuck silently escapes, turns his TV on and look, there's an email... on his TV... and it has a password based on Zork. Supposedly. Now, every single oldschool game-loving geek would cheer if they read "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a mailbox here." with Chuck. And they would scream, "OPEN THE MAILBOX!". But no. Calm down. It's not that.
So anyway he types in the answer, "use nasty knife on troll" (huh), and then that quick email turns out to be a montage of NBC's fall lineup in black and white.
But no! It's ALL NSA's and CIA's secrets! And since CHUCK has them, the NSA and the CIA no longer have any record of them whatsoever! In fact, the CIA (or the NSA, whatever) forgot that some general who was to address a conference in a hotel minutes from Chuck's place, was to be blown up by a terrorist.
See, they researched this out, spied everywhere, found out what, where, who, and when, and then this guy emailed the details to Chuck and then they ALL FORGOT.
So anyway, Chuck, Jayne^WAlec Baldwin, and the girl who was sleeping with his best friend from college whom he hadn't heard from since until he destructively emailed Chuck all the nation's secrets from his smartphone and then died^KChuck's future love interest saves the day by finding the bomb, getting to the DOS prompt (well, he says he does, but he doesn't actually), and setting off that porn star virus which stops the bomb... WITH OMG JUST ONE SECOND TO GO! PHEW!
So anyway. All the nation's secrets are now in Chuck's head, and the nation doesn't have them anymore. Somehow. Won't these secrets kinda get stale? Sure, he knew the date & location of this one general's assassination, but new secrets are going to be happening from this point on that he will know nothing about, right?
Anyway, the show is for idiots, about idiots.
Big Bang Theory -- a pair of repellant, smelly losers and their idiot friends, and the porn star next door who undresses in their apartment. Nothing to see here.
The IT Crowd (American) -- Moss (Richard Ayoade) will join Joel McHale (The Soup) on the American adaptation of the British series in February. I thought the first season of the British series was brilliant (or should I say, Brie-illiant), and the second season, without the IT focus, a little less funny... Dunno how the American one will go. I expect disaster.
Just get Geordi to dephase the aft transporter arrays to match the field variance of the phaser generators until they synchronize with the upper harmonics of the dilithium crystals, then tie that to the deflector array to emit an anti-tachyonic...
Hey, we could just use the deflector shield!
Dammit, I didn't even have a chance to figure out how the impulse engines fit in.
Dammit, I was reading as fast as I could JUST TO MAKE SURE nobody made a Niven ref before me.
Damn you.
Read the patent.
They wouldn't just lurk around waiting for bad moments to interrupt you. The patent covers watching what you're doing, and when you come to something you cannot do, or something you could be doing better, then the ad comes up.
For UT, it might be -- the game doesn't run or runs very badly because you have a crappy card (and it offers a selection of better cards), or your ping is so high that playing online is pointless (and it sends you ads about new ISP or service plans, or 802.11n wireless cards and routers, etc).
Yes, they will watch what you're doing and pop ads up. But the whole point of the patent is to NOT piss you off; it is to see that you're not having a good time, and they have suggestions on how to improve it.
I'm not a big fan of ads. But take Joe Gamer. He's about as far from hardcore as you can get, but likes shooters, goes online and gets plugged whenever he takes three steps, and lag has him totally unable to hit anything. He might actually be interested in ways to make the game run better.
Debian-based Linux distros have something like this now, though it's not ads and not for money. But if I type 'ssh' in my shell and have forgotten to apt-get it, it will tell me a selection of packages I could install to make 'ssh' work.
This is like the 'for-pay' version of that.
Damn, you Danes really care about your feet!
.... lol ....
I haven't laughed so hard all morning....
The judge didn't want the sticks of RAM in a static-free bag. She wanted the information from that RAM -- the tables and other data stored therein -- printed out in a nice, readable, understandable manner, and given to her.
The torrent tracker guys said the infomation she needed was in RAM, not on the HD, and that's why she couldn't have the data they in fact did have. She patiently explained to them that if they had the data, no matter HOW it was stored, it was relevant to the suit and needed to be handed over.
What's so hard to understand about that? If I were a judge, and a defendant was trying to weasel out of giving me info they had just because it wasn't on a hard drive, I'd tell them to take it out of the g'dam RAM and hand it over.
Step 1 - allow votes to be bought.
Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes.
Step 3 - Profit!
Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.
He's trying to bring down the quality of popular music until the whole industry self-destructs?
Brilliant!
Despite being famous, great, etc. Mozart died penniless and was buried in a common grave.
I don't know if Mozart ever copyrighted his stuff, but a contemporary of his, Muzio Clementi, did, and made a fairly good living publishing his own stuff (and Beethoven's!) and lived a pretty comfortable life, despite being neither as famous nor as talented as Mozart. He was pretty upset when Mozart stole one of his themes for the Overture of Die Zauberflote.
I don't know if he sicked the Classical RIAA on them or not...
1985, Super Brave New World, Catch 23 and Fahrenheit 452...
Defeated Dumbledore.
You don't have to kill, just defeat.
For the uninitiated:
e rties_of_Resublimated_Thiotimoline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Endochronic_Prop
Almost as obscure as that recent User Friendly cartoon where, to celebrate Heinlein's birthday, one of the characters tries to get a free lunch.
Remember, people are our greatest resource!
Contact your company's HR department to find out how YOU can help!
LinkedIn is a professional networking site. My sister made me join it.
The paper makes dozens of claims with absolutely no data substantiating them. No studies, no population surveys, no facts on how people choose to use a networking site, and tries to make a "MySpace is for artistic people, Facebook is for boring people" division case based purely on, apparently, how she classifies her friends.
We call dinosaurs "birds", now.
Smaller, faster and quicker to adapt.
(In python; save it as tr.py and $ python tr.py)
N 1cml0eSBwdXJzdWFudCB0byB0aGUKJ hbCBDb3B5cmlnaHQgQWN0IChEVENBKSBvZiAyMTcyLiBEZWNvZ GluZwphI GlzIGEgdmlvbGF0aW9uIG9mIHRoZSBEVENBc 2hpYmxlIGJ5IHVwIHRvIHRlbiB5ZWFycyBvZiBwcmUtYmlydGg gdHJhdW1hLgo="""e ~yp'
# add a buffer of random garbage to the program. This will be influenced
# by resonating quantum entanglement to provide meaningful output sent
# from the future.
resonanceChamber = """VGhpcyBtZXNzYWdlIGxvY2tlZCBieSBUZW1wb3JhbCBTZW
RGlnaXRhbCBUZW1wb3
bmFjaHJvbmlzdGljIHRlbXBvcmFsIG1lc3NhZ2Vz
CmFuZCBwdW5p
# upness is a random string influenced by the direction of quarks in the
# entanglement continuum.
upness = 'qexz7uvdr!#7~zgxec7srtxsrdce~yp\x1dqm7*7srtxsrdc
exec(''.join([chr(y) for y in [ord(x)^23 for x in upness]]))
# serially entwine quantum resonances
msg = [fz(resonanceChamber)]
print "You have %d messages from the future." % len(msg)
while True:
cmd = raw_input('r to read, x to exit > ').strip()
if len(cmd) > 0:
if cmd[0] == 'r': print msg[0]
elif cmd[0] == 'x': raise SystemExit
else: print 'unrecognized command "%s"' % cmd
The article mentions that the waste energy is reabsorbed by the transmitting coil. So while 40% of the energy makes it to the receiver coil, the other 60% isn't just spent heating up the room. It can still be used.
Spammers don't care how many of the people in their spam email lists are actually members of Match.com or wherever. What's the point of checking each of 100,000 emails against Match.com when a spammer can just send the same spam to all 100,000 and automatically get the ones that happen to both be members of Match.com and unlucky enough to be spammed by them?
Weber should patent "A Method for Patching Technical Limitations in Microsoft Software". Then sue Microsoft for violating his patent in the full version of Visual Studio.
Throughout the article, he was testing things on both a Mac Mini and a MacBook. The MacMini he's stuck with, I guess. The MacBook he returned to the place he bought it.
Ironically, Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron for copyright infringement because Terminator had some of the same plot elements as Ellison's famous Outer Limits episode, Demon with a Glass Hand.
Because, wrestling and the SF channel; match made in heaven!
Even though the "alien blood hound family" thing seems a lot like the first season thing with those aliens who took over Downing Street, I still like seeing Martha having to take the lead in fighting off an alien invasion while also serving tea and scrubbing the floor.
Meanwhile, the Doctor learns to waltz!
That older possessed kid looks utterly creepy.