Good point. Simply stated, "aviation security" has taken more lives than it has saved, by putting more people on the roads for trips of 500-1,000 miles, where they are much more likely to die than in a plane.
For what it's worth, your understanding of the USA commercial flight security process is a bit exaggerated. I have never been fingerprinted, required to fill out a form, asked for a password, etc. But it is still ridiculous and pointless. And I have been outright lied to - when traveling with a firearm in my checked bag, I was allowed to be present in a private room for the security check of the bag. They then placed a tag on it that indicated it was not to be searched again, and told me that it would be okay for me to put a lock on the bag. When I got to claim my bag at my destination, the tag had been removed and the lock had been cut off the bag. Someone working in security along the way apparently decided that he didn't have to follow the rules if he cut the tag off first.
The worst part of all this is that none of it works. This little incendiary pants-fire device made it through every security provision that was already in place. The perpetrator was already on the list of people with ties to al Qaeda, so even the database-keeping part of the security operation failed in a case where it easily could have succeeded. Long story short: The governments of the world are absolutely incompetent at aviation security. They even fail at security theater - I have yet to meet anyone who actually feels safer with everyone taking their smelly shoes off to go through security, for instance. But just try to tell them that in order to retract some of the ridiculous procedures they've put in place. Nobody in government gives a damn about the inconvenience in your life, with the exception that (in America) the left wing cares about the inconvenience of you having to get up and go to work to earn a living while the right wing cares about the inconvenience of the billionaires having to actually work for that next billion.
Obviously, we need Hollywood to get on board to help liven things up. When they have a movie that doesn't have much of a plot, they turn it into a summer blockbuster by adding two things: Gratuitous explosions and girls in bikinis. Hell, watch the bad "giant crocodile attack" B movies on the SciFi channel sometime. Even those get the occasional explosion, to the extent their budget allows, and always at least a couple of very attractive young ladies wearing as little as they can get away with on a giant crocodile-infested island.
Since bikinis are not conducive to space travel, mostly due to not being compatible with the pressure helmets (although it would certainly make for some lively experimentation as to support issues), the only alternative is explosions. NASA should just make sure that more things blow up on screen. Don't recycle rocket parts, blow them up at the apex of their suborbital flights! Don't pack waste or garbage back to Earth, blow it up in front of a camera!
Sir, I hope you can appreciate the severity of my affliction. For, you see, I have your reworded version of "Cars" stuck in my head at all times when reading Slashdot, which comes out to nearly all times in general. I actually don't remember the original lyrics because of the catchiness of your version.
Get the game disc for the data, and find the open-source game engine to play it on modern systems. Someone else posted a comment here linking to that. I've done it, and it's fun for a bit. And Quake was definitely a step up from Duke technically in many respects, especially in terms of user interface.:)
I agree that studio time has become a lot less expensive, just not down to the couple-of-amps level (but damn close, which I know to be your point). Part of that is that studio equipment is more affordable, even in the top-of-the-line market, and another part is that you can make do with one engineer instead of a team (contrast with movie production, which still requires hordes of people to do well; same with video games).
I think the main thing here is that, as a musician, I can seriously look at my savings account and decide between a new guitar and amp this year or producing a CD (because I can't write a good lyric to save my life, I am going with the new guitar and amp - built the amp last month and am holding off on the guitar only until I figure out my tax situation). A couple of decades ago, that was not a decision that would enter anyone's mind because of the different numbers of zeros on the end of each price tag. Video games are still that way - you can't look at your Christmas bonus and decide between a new computer and producing a new video game.
I don't know much about TFA's author, but I definitely got the impression from reading his damn multi-page blog post (thanks for posting another one of those to the front page, kdawson) that he didn't actually know much about the technologies he was ridiculing. Yahoo was the most obvious example - anyone who started using the web when commercializing it was a novel idea will remember finding web pages not with an indexing search engine but with Yahoo's topical hierarchy of links. It was well-organized and really did a great job as the yellow pages of the internet - in fact, if I am not much mistaken, it seems to me that Yahoo linked to data sources other than HTTP in those early days. You could turn to Webcrawler for an indexed search engine, but normally you would only do that after Yahoo's categories failed you, as relevant links were much quicker to find through a hierarchy than a full-text search. It wasn't until the web exploded in size faster than Yahoo could keep up that a text search engine was really a daily necessity, and by then the geniuses at Google were on the path to doing it right.
There are other examples in TFA of things that were not at all stupid ideas. Failures in hindsight, perhaps, but the cat-herding "even we don't know what we do" Superbowl ads were certainly more stupid at the place and time they were conceived than Steve Jobs inadvertently hitting the wrong button during a product demonstration.
Don't get too hung up on all that. Most of the people I know get confused when they celebrate their Xth birthday and I tell them that I hope their newly-begun X+1th year is as successful as the last. I literally went back and forth with one person for over an hour on her birthday this year, with her repeatedly insisting she had just turned X and not understanding why that makes the year she's in now X+1.
I've all but conceded defeat on the millennium issue. I'll never, of course, admit to having been wrong, because I wasn't; I am just tired from fighting the good fight for an entire decade and feel my efforts would be better spent correcting all the misuses of 'loose' that occur each day.
Seems like this problem would have been solved a hundred years ago...
It was, but unfortunately it was removed from Wikipedia for being original research.
Re:Still not getting it - DN3D was and is the King
on
The Nuking of Duke Nukem
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The closest was Deus Ex. Huge, gigantic game with an immersive environment that rewarded you for being cunning. But still no radio-detonated pipebombs.:)
I wouldn't call it average from a technical standpoint. Keep in mind what the average was at the time it was released. The selling point, though, was absolutely the gameplay, and you need a +6 for that. Give DN3D the only slightly more modern mouse-look and movement commands and it would still be fun to play right now.
Digital recording has come down in price a lot, but you oversimplified a bit. To do a good job with a record, it's still important to have at least two experienced sound engineers in the process. The most important is the mastering engineer, and his services are expensive but worth it because he knows things you never will about how something will sound through listeners' varying speakers, headphones, etc. And, if you can manage it, it's much more productive to have a professional in the studio to help with your recording. He'll have done all the wrong things enough times to be able to help you with microphone placement and the like. That's the difference between a professionally recorded album and a home recording job done by the band with no outside help from tracking to mastering.
However, you are right that the price has come down substantially. Producing a quality video game takes multiple developers and artists and lots of man-hours - as pointed out by TFA, a lot more than the same process did 15 years ago. If everyone can live on their day jobs or has a savings account to get them through the process, it can be done independently, but it's next to impossible to compete with someone who has the same idea and a $5 or $20 million budget to pay salaries, rent, and electricity for 3 years. With music, if your goal is to get your music into people's ears, the only advantage a major label gives you is buying radio and MTV play - if you can put up $25,000 you can produce a great-sounding, professional-quality record. More than a couple good amplifiers (figuring a good amp to cost $2,000), but not by the orders of magnitude that comparing video game production to the cost of a couple good computers turns out to be.
In short, I agree - it's apples to oranges. If radio worked the way it did 50 years ago, there would be truly no need for major record companies today. It's a shame that an LP cost so damn much to make in the 60's, because otherwise the music industry wouldn't have had to grow up around the major labels.
Only after hours and off company premises. Believe me, I've unsuccessfully lobbied for a change in this policy everywhere I've worked. Only one place allowed me to bring a stripper to work, and that was because she was a customer. Working below market with strippers all day at the office and no deadlines to get in the way of enjoying the show is a much better idea.
I only go to strip clubs for the athleticism. That's the real reason that I dislike fat strippers - it's not a shallow thing at all, I just don't enjoy the show without the athletic demonstration.
Then you are just running dynamic range compression on the TV, and you lose the dynamic range in the content you are actually watching. I'm opposed to that. Now that we're on digital broadcast TV, why can't we just have ads get a bit set so that the TV can be set to automatically mute them? Then, if advertisers want you to actually hear what they have to say, they'll have to stop being so annoying about it so you can turn that feature off. More realistically, after skimming all the comments posted here so far, I think that the most reasonable solution suggested has been an average sound level limit for commercial programming. Except for Billy Mays reruns, of course, because his voice would be pretty creepy if it were quiet.
I found a news article explaining that Mr. Watts was selected randomly for a "secondary Customs inspection" and that he was belligerent about it. I don't know what actually happened, but there's always another side to the story and, in typical Slashdot fashion, it doesn't appear anyone's considered what the other side to this one is. For instance, his being half-naked in a cell is likely because he was subdued by pepper spray, which has a tendency to get into your clothing and make you want it off of your body. I have seen one individual tear off his sweatshirt pro wrestler-style in the dead of a Montana winter night because of the pepper spray in the shirt.
It's quite likely that the US border agents went too far, but it's less likely that they beat up a Canadian celebrity just for sport.
Depends where you are. I've heard of plenty of people getting convicted for statutory rape when the girl said she was 18. And either way, it's a defense that you have to prove in court to avoid being locked up - just like here, you'd have to prove that you reasonably thought she was of legal internet age to get out of trouble for talking to her. It's just too easy for this kind of law to be abused.
As I pointed out elsewhere, kids are banned from bars but that doesn't mean you get off the hook for statutory rape just because you met her in a bar that she had sneaked into.
The Bill of Rights was largely written as a reaction to how things worked under British rule. Canadians have different (read: fewer meaningful) rights than USA citizens do largely because of how independence came about in each nation. The USA fought a long, bloody war for independence and then set up a Constitution with part of its purpose being to protect against having to do so again. On the other side of the coin, Britain basically got bored with Canada after beaver-pelt hats went out of style, and then realized what a nuisance Quebec really is and just let them be independent. Not having fought for their rights, Canadians are more or less content having none.
I didn't RTFA so I can't say if this is a case of double jeopardy or not. But Canada is a thought-crime country. For instance, it's already a criminal act in Canada to be a racist, as far as I can tell. Being tried 30 times for misspelling 'bro' as 'bra' when asking a 17-year-old if her brother was home from college for the holidays wouldn't really surprise me.
Underage minors can't legally drink alcohol where I am, but that doesn't give you a defense to statutory rape just because she was drinking a beer when you seduced her. Banning children from the internet would, if anything, just make it more common for people to get prosecuted for talking to them, since the law would act to reinforce the assumption that whoever you are talking to online is an adult.
The right group to ban from the internet is apparently Canadians.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Simply stated, "aviation security" has taken more lives than it has saved, by putting more people on the roads for trips of 500-1,000 miles, where they are much more likely to die than in a plane.
For what it's worth, your understanding of the USA commercial flight security process is a bit exaggerated. I have never been fingerprinted, required to fill out a form, asked for a password, etc. But it is still ridiculous and pointless. And I have been outright lied to - when traveling with a firearm in my checked bag, I was allowed to be present in a private room for the security check of the bag. They then placed a tag on it that indicated it was not to be searched again, and told me that it would be okay for me to put a lock on the bag. When I got to claim my bag at my destination, the tag had been removed and the lock had been cut off the bag. Someone working in security along the way apparently decided that he didn't have to follow the rules if he cut the tag off first.
The worst part of all this is that none of it works. This little incendiary pants-fire device made it through every security provision that was already in place. The perpetrator was already on the list of people with ties to al Qaeda, so even the database-keeping part of the security operation failed in a case where it easily could have succeeded. Long story short: The governments of the world are absolutely incompetent at aviation security. They even fail at security theater - I have yet to meet anyone who actually feels safer with everyone taking their smelly shoes off to go through security, for instance. But just try to tell them that in order to retract some of the ridiculous procedures they've put in place. Nobody in government gives a damn about the inconvenience in your life, with the exception that (in America) the left wing cares about the inconvenience of you having to get up and go to work to earn a living while the right wing cares about the inconvenience of the billionaires having to actually work for that next billion.
Obviously, we need Hollywood to get on board to help liven things up. When they have a movie that doesn't have much of a plot, they turn it into a summer blockbuster by adding two things: Gratuitous explosions and girls in bikinis. Hell, watch the bad "giant crocodile attack" B movies on the SciFi channel sometime. Even those get the occasional explosion, to the extent their budget allows, and always at least a couple of very attractive young ladies wearing as little as they can get away with on a giant crocodile-infested island.
Since bikinis are not conducive to space travel, mostly due to not being compatible with the pressure helmets (although it would certainly make for some lively experimentation as to support issues), the only alternative is explosions. NASA should just make sure that more things blow up on screen. Don't recycle rocket parts, blow them up at the apex of their suborbital flights! Don't pack waste or garbage back to Earth, blow it up in front of a camera!
It appears that, as always, Slashdot has the breaking news within minutes after it becomes outdated.
Hey, I have to do something with all the time I am refusing to think of the children!
Sir, I hope you can appreciate the severity of my affliction. For, you see, I have your reworded version of "Cars" stuck in my head at all times when reading Slashdot, which comes out to nearly all times in general. I actually don't remember the original lyrics because of the catchiness of your version.
Get the game disc for the data, and find the open-source game engine to play it on modern systems. Someone else posted a comment here linking to that. I've done it, and it's fun for a bit. And Quake was definitely a step up from Duke technically in many respects, especially in terms of user interface. :)
I agree that studio time has become a lot less expensive, just not down to the couple-of-amps level (but damn close, which I know to be your point). Part of that is that studio equipment is more affordable, even in the top-of-the-line market, and another part is that you can make do with one engineer instead of a team (contrast with movie production, which still requires hordes of people to do well; same with video games).
I think the main thing here is that, as a musician, I can seriously look at my savings account and decide between a new guitar and amp this year or producing a CD (because I can't write a good lyric to save my life, I am going with the new guitar and amp - built the amp last month and am holding off on the guitar only until I figure out my tax situation). A couple of decades ago, that was not a decision that would enter anyone's mind because of the different numbers of zeros on the end of each price tag. Video games are still that way - you can't look at your Christmas bonus and decide between a new computer and producing a new video game.
I don't know much about TFA's author, but I definitely got the impression from reading his damn multi-page blog post (thanks for posting another one of those to the front page, kdawson) that he didn't actually know much about the technologies he was ridiculing. Yahoo was the most obvious example - anyone who started using the web when commercializing it was a novel idea will remember finding web pages not with an indexing search engine but with Yahoo's topical hierarchy of links. It was well-organized and really did a great job as the yellow pages of the internet - in fact, if I am not much mistaken, it seems to me that Yahoo linked to data sources other than HTTP in those early days. You could turn to Webcrawler for an indexed search engine, but normally you would only do that after Yahoo's categories failed you, as relevant links were much quicker to find through a hierarchy than a full-text search. It wasn't until the web exploded in size faster than Yahoo could keep up that a text search engine was really a daily necessity, and by then the geniuses at Google were on the path to doing it right.
There are other examples in TFA of things that were not at all stupid ideas. Failures in hindsight, perhaps, but the cat-herding "even we don't know what we do" Superbowl ads were certainly more stupid at the place and time they were conceived than Steve Jobs inadvertently hitting the wrong button during a product demonstration.
Don't get too hung up on all that. Most of the people I know get confused when they celebrate their Xth birthday and I tell them that I hope their newly-begun X+1th year is as successful as the last. I literally went back and forth with one person for over an hour on her birthday this year, with her repeatedly insisting she had just turned X and not understanding why that makes the year she's in now X+1.
I've all but conceded defeat on the millennium issue. I'll never, of course, admit to having been wrong, because I wasn't; I am just tired from fighting the good fight for an entire decade and feel my efforts would be better spent correcting all the misuses of 'loose' that occur each day.
Seems like this problem would have been solved a hundred years ago...
It was, but unfortunately it was removed from Wikipedia for being original research.
The closest was Deus Ex. Huge, gigantic game with an immersive environment that rewarded you for being cunning. But still no radio-detonated pipebombs. :)
I wouldn't call it average from a technical standpoint. Keep in mind what the average was at the time it was released. The selling point, though, was absolutely the gameplay, and you need a +6 for that. Give DN3D the only slightly more modern mouse-look and movement commands and it would still be fun to play right now.
Digital recording has come down in price a lot, but you oversimplified a bit. To do a good job with a record, it's still important to have at least two experienced sound engineers in the process. The most important is the mastering engineer, and his services are expensive but worth it because he knows things you never will about how something will sound through listeners' varying speakers, headphones, etc. And, if you can manage it, it's much more productive to have a professional in the studio to help with your recording. He'll have done all the wrong things enough times to be able to help you with microphone placement and the like. That's the difference between a professionally recorded album and a home recording job done by the band with no outside help from tracking to mastering.
However, you are right that the price has come down substantially. Producing a quality video game takes multiple developers and artists and lots of man-hours - as pointed out by TFA, a lot more than the same process did 15 years ago. If everyone can live on their day jobs or has a savings account to get them through the process, it can be done independently, but it's next to impossible to compete with someone who has the same idea and a $5 or $20 million budget to pay salaries, rent, and electricity for 3 years. With music, if your goal is to get your music into people's ears, the only advantage a major label gives you is buying radio and MTV play - if you can put up $25,000 you can produce a great-sounding, professional-quality record. More than a couple good amplifiers (figuring a good amp to cost $2,000), but not by the orders of magnitude that comparing video game production to the cost of a couple good computers turns out to be.
In short, I agree - it's apples to oranges. If radio worked the way it did 50 years ago, there would be truly no need for major record companies today. It's a shame that an LP cost so damn much to make in the 60's, because otherwise the music industry wouldn't have had to grow up around the major labels.
Only after hours and off company premises. Believe me, I've unsuccessfully lobbied for a change in this policy everywhere I've worked. Only one place allowed me to bring a stripper to work, and that was because she was a customer. Working below market with strippers all day at the office and no deadlines to get in the way of enjoying the show is a much better idea.
I only go to strip clubs for the athleticism. That's the real reason that I dislike fat strippers - it's not a shallow thing at all, I just don't enjoy the show without the athletic demonstration.
The fact that she's still able to speak is a miracle of evolution.
Then you are just running dynamic range compression on the TV, and you lose the dynamic range in the content you are actually watching. I'm opposed to that. Now that we're on digital broadcast TV, why can't we just have ads get a bit set so that the TV can be set to automatically mute them? Then, if advertisers want you to actually hear what they have to say, they'll have to stop being so annoying about it so you can turn that feature off. More realistically, after skimming all the comments posted here so far, I think that the most reasonable solution suggested has been an average sound level limit for commercial programming. Except for Billy Mays reruns, of course, because his voice would be pretty creepy if it were quiet.
You are correct. That fits squarely within the parent's argument.
I found a news article explaining that Mr. Watts was selected randomly for a "secondary Customs inspection" and that he was belligerent about it. I don't know what actually happened, but there's always another side to the story and, in typical Slashdot fashion, it doesn't appear anyone's considered what the other side to this one is. For instance, his being half-naked in a cell is likely because he was subdued by pepper spray, which has a tendency to get into your clothing and make you want it off of your body. I have seen one individual tear off his sweatshirt pro wrestler-style in the dead of a Montana winter night because of the pepper spray in the shirt.
It's quite likely that the US border agents went too far, but it's less likely that they beat up a Canadian celebrity just for sport.
It does do that, but you still have to show up in court to defend yourself, which kind of sucks when you were taken advantage of.
Depends where you are. I've heard of plenty of people getting convicted for statutory rape when the girl said she was 18. And either way, it's a defense that you have to prove in court to avoid being locked up - just like here, you'd have to prove that you reasonably thought she was of legal internet age to get out of trouble for talking to her. It's just too easy for this kind of law to be abused.
As I pointed out elsewhere, kids are banned from bars but that doesn't mean you get off the hook for statutory rape just because you met her in a bar that she had sneaked into.
The Bill of Rights was largely written as a reaction to how things worked under British rule. Canadians have different (read: fewer meaningful) rights than USA citizens do largely because of how independence came about in each nation. The USA fought a long, bloody war for independence and then set up a Constitution with part of its purpose being to protect against having to do so again. On the other side of the coin, Britain basically got bored with Canada after beaver-pelt hats went out of style, and then realized what a nuisance Quebec really is and just let them be independent. Not having fought for their rights, Canadians are more or less content having none.
I didn't RTFA so I can't say if this is a case of double jeopardy or not. But Canada is a thought-crime country. For instance, it's already a criminal act in Canada to be a racist, as far as I can tell. Being tried 30 times for misspelling 'bro' as 'bra' when asking a 17-year-old if her brother was home from college for the holidays wouldn't really surprise me.
Underage minors can't legally drink alcohol where I am, but that doesn't give you a defense to statutory rape just because she was drinking a beer when you seduced her. Banning children from the internet would, if anything, just make it more common for people to get prosecuted for talking to them, since the law would act to reinforce the assumption that whoever you are talking to online is an adult.
The right group to ban from the internet is apparently Canadians.