As Han says, "I call it luck."
To which Obi-Wan answers, "In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."
Since Episode I came out, I've thought that was a funny line, considering how lucky Obi-Wan was in his fight against Darth Maul, who should have rightly killed him.:)
"man du" is a Unix command meaning "show me the manual page for the 'du' command". 'du' is a command to show the amount of space used by files. If you pronounce it in a certain way, it sounds like "Mon dieu!" which is a generic French exclamation meaning "My god!" It's something a stereotypical Frenchman might say when he is exasperated, amazed, surprised, etc.
Of course, there's the old saying that if you have to have a joke explained to you, it ceases being funny. *sigh*
Jar-Jar is not UNIVERSALLY reviled: the Galactic Senate heartily approved of his proposal to grant Emp^H^H^HChancellor Palpatine emergency powers! Heck, even Anakin seems to like Jar-Jar, and we know what a hothead he can be. Don't you think Anakin would have dismembered Jar-Jar at the first opportunity if JJB was REALLY so reviled?
Binks: A Future For Your Children. A Future For The Republic. Vote Today.
Thanks for missing the point entirely. The point is that it was unfair competition to force competitors out of business by lowering prices so ridiculously. There's this little thing called "ethics", and the aforementioned theater manager seems to lack them. In our society, it's generally considered a bad thing to support unethical behavior.
For obvious reasons, counting the amount of money a movie makes is pointless -- a movie that makes $200 million today might have been seen by fewer people than a movie that came out 50 years ago and made $50 million, because ticket prices were so much lower then. So a better metric would be to count the number of tickets sold.
Oops! There's still a problem: There are more people and more theaters than there used to be! So simply by virtue of that fact, a movie might be seen by more people today than 50 years ago, even if the old movie is, by all other accounts, "better". Another alternative -- to count the number of people who saw movies versus the number of people who experienced other forms of entertainment -- is infeasible because counting that many people is impossible to do accurately.
Probably counting the number of tickets sold, versus the total population (taken from gubmint estimates) is probably the best metric.
Welcome to America -- this is a REPUBLIC, not a DEMOCRACY. If you don't know the difference, learn it before you start ranting about it.
Re:Getting cancelled from AOL
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
Heh, that's exactly how I got rid of my AOL account back in 1993, although it wasn't intentional. I was in some chat room (yeah, I was about 15) and used a couple of swear words. I found myself disconnected, logged back in, went to the same room, and started ranting that I'd been disconnected unfairly, what a bunch of crap! At that point, I found myself disconnected again, and couldn't log in. I was pissed off, and even sent a fax telling them that this was bogus, etc. etc. No response.
A week or so later, I discovered PrimeNet (the ISP, not the distributed computing project), and was introduced to the REAL internet. Lucky me, PrimeNet billed me for one month of service, then promptly forgot I existed, so I had a free year of Internet. Woo!
...in the "romantic" scenes. (NOTE: SPOILERS) He keeps saying all these cheesy romantic emotional things... but I actually thought it was very in-character -- it seemed like Anakin had gotten his entire sense of romance from holodramas, since he probably had had very little in the way of real social contact with girls for the past ten years. Padme put up with the clumsy come-ons because she (for whatever reason, not really well-established in the movie) was falling in love with him, but her sense of duty kept her from acknowledging it at first. Kinda sucks for Anakin that it took imminent death for Padme to get past that.:)
And can I just say that Obi-Wan is the worst Jedi ever? Episode IV, he gets killed by Vader (in what I always thought was a bit of needless martyrdom). Episode V, he acts all cryptic and unhelpful. Episode VI, he whines. Episode I, he nearly gets killed by Maul, and Episode II he nearly gets killed by Dooku. Not that I don't like him, he's just kind of incompetent.:)
And, yes, Blender-Jedi Yoda was the damn coolest thing ever. Like someone else said, it was awesome to see why Yoda is so highly regarded.
Okay, so the last ten years has seen a revolution in technology. Specifically, the ability to create, copy, and widely disseminate digital data -- be it music, movies, text, images, whatever.
One side effect of this is that it is now trivially easy for a sizable segment of the world's population (and an even larger proportion of the U.S.'s population) to violate copyright laws by (for example) purchasing music legally, making copies of that music, and disseminating it (illegally) for free to thousands of other people all over the world.
I argue that the primary purpose of law is to impose order upon a society, in a form of natural selection. Societies that lean toward laws and order are more likely to survive than societies that tend toward anarchy and chaos. Laws themselves tend to reflect the moral character of the times they are created in. Laws, like any moral system (or system of controlling behavior) are never absolute or inherent to the fabric of the universe (unless you believe that some god's laws are the "inherent morality" of the universe, but good luck getting me to believe that).
When laws conflict with reality, social stress results. There are those in society who hold the law as (almost?) sacred, and those who (in my opinion, more rightly) see the law as merely the current set of rules we must live under. (Tangent: I was dismayed to see a DEA official state that the DEA "does not want to encourage anything which might lead to a lessening of drug laws" (paraphrased) -- nevermind that the DEA, as a part of the Executive branch of our government, should not have any interest in WHAT the law is, merely in enforcing the CURRENT law, whatever it may be.)
This particular issue of stress has a particular set of industries on one side, and the bulk of the nation's citizens on the other. (I refuse to refer to people as "consumers"; it is demeaning.) Content creation industries -- music companies, film companies, publishing companies, and others who control large numbers of copyrights -- have historically based their entire business model on the idea of scarcity. They could charge money for good like music and books, because those goods could not be easily replicated by individuals. In this respect, books, music, and movies were much like any other product -- cars, power tools, furniture, or even food.
But with the dawn of the Internet and the abilities mentioned above, information like movies, music, and books can be endlessly replicated at almost zero cost by virtually any individual. Hence, the obvious conflict -- many people do not see such copying as "wrong". Why not?
The traditional view of "stealing" or "theft" involves taking an item from someone, such that the person no longer has that item. They have suffered a real, measurable loss in this instance. If I steal your car, your power tools, your furniture, or your food, you no longer have those things. Inversely, if you freely give me those things, you no longer have them to use. But information is different. Nowadays, I can freely give you a COPY of a piece of music, a book, or a movie, and still retain the original. Each of our two copies are indistinguishable -- they are identical and interchangable.
This was vaguely recognized by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution -- they understood that works (mainly books, at that time) could be bootlegged and sold illegally. They believed that a goverment-granted, and government-enforced temporary monopoly on the right to make money from the production of easily reproducible works, would help the nation, its economy, and its citizens. By giving authors that temporary monopoly, the law would encourage authors to produce more without fear that their work would be profited upon by those who had contributed nothing to it.
This was a fair idea, at the time, and indeed it is still a fair idea today. Unfortunately, the content creation industry has made great efforts toward extending the length of copyright, and if current trends continue, we can expect that no copyright will ever again expire. This obviously goes against the original intent of the copyright provisions, which was to allow authors a chance at fair compensation for their works, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a certain period. Technically, that is still true, but it is quite obvious that the content creation industry has no intention of letting it continue to be true.
Back to the issue of being able to cheaply replicate any data. The problem here is that since many people do not see copying as theft, they are inclined to believe that the law is wrong and can be ignored. There is obviously a wide variety of views on the subject; some citizens believe in sticking to the letter of the law, while others will do casual copying in certain circumstances, and yet others will massively and freely distribute copyrighted information to anyone who wants it. Even further along are commercial pirates, those who actually try to make money selling copies of copyrighted works.
The content creation industry is generally responding to this widespread "threat" by trying to purchase legislation that specifically preserves their business model. Either they do not want to embrace new technologies and figure out how to profit from them, or they are just lazy, or whatever... but the upshot is that they believe that they have a right to profit, and that it is moral to buy legislation in their favor. Some citizens and government officials believe this as well, and support such legislation, either because they REALLY believe it's wrong, or because they've been bought off by media companies.
Depending on your political views, you may or may not support the idea of direct interference in an industry by the government, for purposes of "saving" that industry. I personally believe the following: A free-market economy is generally a good thing, but if left completely unregulated, it will lead to severe abuse by the most powerful entities in the economy. Certain governmental measures are warranted, in order to prevent such abuse. Rescuing a faltering industry can be warranted, but it depends on the particular instance. If privately owned utility companies (power and water) are faltering and cannot easily be saved by the market, it is acceptable for the government to intervene -- if those companies disappear, millions of citizens may be left without water or power for extended periods of time, which is not acceptable.
However, the content creation industry is not so critical. For one thing, they do not have localized monopolies -- if I live in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), I don't have any option for who provides my water and power. I get it from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (yes, we make our own power, so no rolling blackouts for us!). If they go under and cannot provide power, then there is no way (aside from moving, which isn't feasible for hundreds of thousands of families to do at once) for me to get water and power until someone replaces the DWP. However, I can get music from numerous companies -- any of the big media conglomerates will have their music available for sale in numerous stores in the area, many of which are owned by different companies. If one (or five, or half) of the music companies goes out of business, I can still get music. Even if all music stores and companies went out of business simultaneously, I would still have all the music I had ALREADY purchased, and could listen to that while new music companies and stores were formed. (Unlike electricity, which you can't really store up in significant quantities.)
Essentially, industries which meet a certain limit of criticality are GENERALLY acceptable targets for government intervention when necessary, but of course that depends on exactly what the situation is. Trying to apply the same rules to everything, all the time, is stupid.
If the content industries can't hack it with their current business models, it will not significantly hurt anything for them to have to adapt -- even if some of them end up going out of business. It makes no sense to attempt to cripple the pace of technology and social development so that a few (relatively small) companies can survive. (By relatively small, I mean, for example, taht General Motors grosses more money in a year than all the music and film companies... COMBINED.)
Well, that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully this will inspire some creative thought in readers.:)
I didn't mind Obi-Wan beating Maul, but I had a problem with the specific mechanism. Basically, Obi-Wan flips out of the pit, catches Qui-Gon's lightsaber in mid-air, lands, and cuts Maul in half without Maul even REACTING. Maul just turns around and gets cut in half without even trying to defend himself. If anything, he should at least have swung at Obi-Wan and missed, giving Obi-Wan an opening to bisect him. (Funny that in Episode 4, Ben says, "In my experience there's no such thing as luck," when he got so incredibly lucky in that fight with Maul:) Seriously, I hope in whatever Special Edition of Episode I there is, Maul at least swings at Obi-Wan when he's flying through the air. Maybe he should cut Obi-Wan's braid off:)
I can confirm this story. I saw Trey Parker and Matt Stone at a presentation at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles, where they showed a couple episodes of South Park and then took questions from the audience for an hour. Trey (and he was visibly irritated about it) told the story about how when they did Orgazmo, they asked the MPAA what they should cut to get from an NC-17 to an R. The MPAA told them, "Sorry, we can't tell you that, you just need to guess," but when they did the South Park movie, they received itemized lists of what they would need to cut to get from NC-17 to R.
So what you're saying is, in order to see, people need to look directly at the sun? Well shit, there goes a thousand years of mom's warnings down the drain.
Thank god for those four words! This clearly exempts games like DOOM, where you are not committing any felonies (except maybe trespassing and destruction of property) -- self defense against legions of undead demons ain't a felony where I come from. Oddly, though, killing a lawyer is a felony. Damn double-standards...
So instead, you spend your time trying to instill proper moral values into that person, or trying to convince society to consider such behavior to be wrong, such that social pressure is brought on him. It's not like there's NOTHING you can do.
Of course. In the USA and most western countries, nobody is required to engage in conduct they believe is illegal, unethical, unsafe, or unpleasant -- with the exception of certain positions in the military, who are required to follow the chain of command in most circumstances.
Well, "in most circumstances" are obvious weasel words:) but, that aside... I was under the impression that it's been fairly well established that even military officers cannot be punished for disobeying orders if those orders are clearly illegal or unethical. Obviously it's clearer when the disobeyed order is illegal (like someone ordering a soldier to murder a baby), and fuzzier when the issue is an ethical conflict that is not specifically addressed by law. Can anyone elaborate on this?
One of my biggest pet peeves about computer games is how the computer stutters (or stops dead) whenever data is being accessed off the hard drive -- for example, in almost any 3D FPS, whenever you load a new level, you're treated with the sight of a status bar loading in big jumps and chunks, since the screen isn't updating while the HD is accessing. I don't have any real experience using SCSI hardware, but I was under the impression that one of the advantages of SCSI to games was that since the drive controller is asynchronous, the rest of the computer (i.e. the rendering going on in the game) doesn't stutter to a halt whenever the game accesses the drive. Is this true? Am I even on the right track? If not, wouldn't it be neat?
When will Intel start having *cool* processor code names? Like "Death Eagle" or "Killer Robot" or "Massive Rampaging Gorilla"? Sure, "Thunderbird" sounds cool, but "Death Eagle" is way cooler! I bet they could really have a marketing coup by picking better names. Or maybe just marketing them under that name to kids or something, and leaving erudite poosae names for business marketing... or something.
Just think... the Intel Death Eagle 4! They could market it as 2 million KILLERhertz! Yeah!
I would have been inclined to take your criticism if you hadn't stopped to insert a flamelike "Lame." In fact, if not for that single word, I would have changed it to "Surprised" instead of "exasperated" on your suggestion... but now, I mock you with spite! Mock! Mock!
local TV broadcaster TVNZ also made all sorts of noise about the illegality of linking to their content back in 1966 but have since come to their senses.
'Course, back then we didn't have no fancy new-fangled Pee Cees ta link with. We had ta write our "web pages" on paper, and instead of a link, we wrote down driving directions for how to find the specified document. Porn 'taint no fun when ya gotta drive 250 miles o' back country roads ta find it. I tell ya, the Interweb was different back then... we had ta use REAL superhighways instead o' this Information Superhighway.
Slashdot Mirror
Lengthy explanation:
"man du" is a Unix command meaning "show me the manual page for the 'du' command". 'du' is a command to show the amount of space used by files. If you pronounce it in a certain way, it sounds like "Mon dieu!" which is a generic French exclamation meaning "My god!" It's something a stereotypical Frenchman might say when he is exasperated, amazed, surprised, etc.
Of course, there's the old saying that if you have to have a joke explained to you, it ceases being funny. *sigh*
Jar-Jar is not UNIVERSALLY reviled: the Galactic Senate heartily approved of his proposal to grant Emp^H^H^HChancellor Palpatine emergency powers! Heck, even Anakin seems to like Jar-Jar, and we know what a hothead he can be. Don't you think Anakin would have dismembered Jar-Jar at the first opportunity if JJB was REALLY so reviled?
Binks: A Future For Your Children. A Future For The Republic. Vote Today.
Thanks for missing the point entirely. The point is that it was unfair competition to force competitors out of business by lowering prices so ridiculously. There's this little thing called "ethics", and the aforementioned theater manager seems to lack them. In our society, it's generally considered a bad thing to support unethical behavior.
"I once shot a man just to watch him die. Then I got distracted and missed it." -- Kids in the Hall
Yeah, it's off-topic. So what?
Would you mind saying what theater chain did that? I'd like to avoid patronizing them if possible.
Screw "Ender's Game", the movie... when do we get "Ender's Game", the GAME? I mean, come on, it's right there in the title!
For obvious reasons, counting the amount of money a movie makes is pointless -- a movie that makes $200 million today might have been seen by fewer people than a movie that came out 50 years ago and made $50 million, because ticket prices were so much lower then. So a better metric would be to count the number of tickets sold.
Oops! There's still a problem: There are more people and more theaters than there used to be! So simply by virtue of that fact, a movie might be seen by more people today than 50 years ago, even if the old movie is, by all other accounts, "better". Another alternative -- to count the number of people who saw movies versus the number of people who experienced other forms of entertainment -- is infeasible because counting that many people is impossible to do accurately.
Probably counting the number of tickets sold, versus the total population (taken from gubmint estimates) is probably the best metric.
Welcome to America -- this is a REPUBLIC, not a DEMOCRACY. If you don't know the difference, learn it before you start ranting about it.
Heh, that's exactly how I got rid of my AOL account back in 1993, although it wasn't intentional. I was in some chat room (yeah, I was about 15) and used a couple of swear words. I found myself disconnected, logged back in, went to the same room, and started ranting that I'd been disconnected unfairly, what a bunch of crap! At that point, I found myself disconnected again, and couldn't log in. I was pissed off, and even sent a fax telling them that this was bogus, etc. etc. No response.
A week or so later, I discovered PrimeNet (the ISP, not the distributed computing project), and was introduced to the REAL internet. Lucky me, PrimeNet billed me for one month of service, then promptly forgot I existed, so I had a free year of Internet. Woo!
...in the "romantic" scenes. (NOTE: SPOILERS) He keeps saying all these cheesy romantic emotional things... but I actually thought it was very in-character -- it seemed like Anakin had gotten his entire sense of romance from holodramas, since he probably had had very little in the way of real social contact with girls for the past ten years. Padme put up with the clumsy come-ons because she (for whatever reason, not really well-established in the movie) was falling in love with him, but her sense of duty kept her from acknowledging it at first. Kinda sucks for Anakin that it took imminent death for Padme to get past that. :)
:)
And can I just say that Obi-Wan is the worst Jedi ever? Episode IV, he gets killed by Vader (in what I always thought was a bit of needless martyrdom). Episode V, he acts all cryptic and unhelpful. Episode VI, he whines. Episode I, he nearly gets killed by Maul, and Episode II he nearly gets killed by Dooku. Not that I don't like him, he's just kind of incompetent.
And, yes, Blender-Jedi Yoda was the damn coolest thing ever. Like someone else said, it was awesome to see why Yoda is so highly regarded.
Okay, so the last ten years has seen a revolution in technology. Specifically, the ability to create, copy, and widely disseminate digital data -- be it music, movies, text, images, whatever.
:)
One side effect of this is that it is now trivially easy for a sizable segment of the world's population (and an even larger proportion of the U.S.'s population) to violate copyright laws by (for example) purchasing music legally, making copies of that music, and disseminating it (illegally) for free to thousands of other people all over the world.
I argue that the primary purpose of law is to impose order upon a society, in a form of natural selection. Societies that lean toward laws and order are more likely to survive than societies that tend toward anarchy and chaos. Laws themselves tend to reflect the moral character of the times they are created in. Laws, like any moral system (or system of controlling behavior) are never absolute or inherent to the fabric of the universe (unless you believe that some god's laws are the "inherent morality" of the universe, but good luck getting me to believe that).
When laws conflict with reality, social stress results. There are those in society who hold the law as (almost?) sacred, and those who (in my opinion, more rightly) see the law as merely the current set of rules we must live under. (Tangent: I was dismayed to see a DEA official state that the DEA "does not want to encourage anything which might lead to a lessening of drug laws" (paraphrased) -- nevermind that the DEA, as a part of the Executive branch of our government, should not have any interest in WHAT the law is, merely in enforcing the CURRENT law, whatever it may be.)
This particular issue of stress has a particular set of industries on one side, and the bulk of the nation's citizens on the other. (I refuse to refer to people as "consumers"; it is demeaning.) Content creation industries -- music companies, film companies, publishing companies, and others who control large numbers of copyrights -- have historically based their entire business model on the idea of scarcity. They could charge money for good like music and books, because those goods could not be easily replicated by individuals. In this respect, books, music, and movies were much like any other product -- cars, power tools, furniture, or even food.
But with the dawn of the Internet and the abilities mentioned above, information like movies, music, and books can be endlessly replicated at almost zero cost by virtually any individual. Hence, the obvious conflict -- many people do not see such copying as "wrong". Why not?
The traditional view of "stealing" or "theft" involves taking an item from someone, such that the person no longer has that item. They have suffered a real, measurable loss in this instance. If I steal your car, your power tools, your furniture, or your food, you no longer have those things. Inversely, if you freely give me those things, you no longer have them to use. But information is different. Nowadays, I can freely give you a COPY of a piece of music, a book, or a movie, and still retain the original. Each of our two copies are indistinguishable -- they are identical and interchangable.
This was vaguely recognized by the Founding Fathers when they wrote the Constitution -- they understood that works (mainly books, at that time) could be bootlegged and sold illegally. They believed that a goverment-granted, and government-enforced temporary monopoly on the right to make money from the production of easily reproducible works, would help the nation, its economy, and its citizens. By giving authors that temporary monopoly, the law would encourage authors to produce more without fear that their work would be profited upon by those who had contributed nothing to it.
This was a fair idea, at the time, and indeed it is still a fair idea today. Unfortunately, the content creation industry has made great efforts toward extending the length of copyright, and if current trends continue, we can expect that no copyright will ever again expire. This obviously goes against the original intent of the copyright provisions, which was to allow authors a chance at fair compensation for their works, in exchange for that work entering the public domain after a certain period. Technically, that is still true, but it is quite obvious that the content creation industry has no intention of letting it continue to be true.
Back to the issue of being able to cheaply replicate any data. The problem here is that since many people do not see copying as theft, they are inclined to believe that the law is wrong and can be ignored. There is obviously a wide variety of views on the subject; some citizens believe in sticking to the letter of the law, while others will do casual copying in certain circumstances, and yet others will massively and freely distribute copyrighted information to anyone who wants it. Even further along are commercial pirates, those who actually try to make money selling copies of copyrighted works.
The content creation industry is generally responding to this widespread "threat" by trying to purchase legislation that specifically preserves their business model. Either they do not want to embrace new technologies and figure out how to profit from them, or they are just lazy, or whatever... but the upshot is that they believe that they have a right to profit, and that it is moral to buy legislation in their favor. Some citizens and government officials believe this as well, and support such legislation, either because they REALLY believe it's wrong, or because they've been bought off by media companies.
Depending on your political views, you may or may not support the idea of direct interference in an industry by the government, for purposes of "saving" that industry. I personally believe the following: A free-market economy is generally a good thing, but if left completely unregulated, it will lead to severe abuse by the most powerful entities in the economy. Certain governmental measures are warranted, in order to prevent such abuse. Rescuing a faltering industry can be warranted, but it depends on the particular instance. If privately owned utility companies (power and water) are faltering and cannot easily be saved by the market, it is acceptable for the government to intervene -- if those companies disappear, millions of citizens may be left without water or power for extended periods of time, which is not acceptable.
However, the content creation industry is not so critical. For one thing, they do not have localized monopolies -- if I live in Westwood (a suburb of Los Angeles), I don't have any option for who provides my water and power. I get it from the City of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (yes, we make our own power, so no rolling blackouts for us!). If they go under and cannot provide power, then there is no way (aside from moving, which isn't feasible for hundreds of thousands of families to do at once) for me to get water and power until someone replaces the DWP. However, I can get music from numerous companies -- any of the big media conglomerates will have their music available for sale in numerous stores in the area, many of which are owned by different companies. If one (or five, or half) of the music companies goes out of business, I can still get music. Even if all music stores and companies went out of business simultaneously, I would still have all the music I had ALREADY purchased, and could listen to that while new music companies and stores were formed. (Unlike electricity, which you can't really store up in significant quantities.)
Essentially, industries which meet a certain limit of criticality are GENERALLY acceptable targets for government intervention when necessary, but of course that depends on exactly what the situation is. Trying to apply the same rules to everything, all the time, is stupid.
If the content industries can't hack it with their current business models, it will not significantly hurt anything for them to have to adapt -- even if some of them end up going out of business. It makes no sense to attempt to cripple the pace of technology and social development so that a few (relatively small) companies can survive. (By relatively small, I mean, for example, taht General Motors grosses more money in a year than all the music and film companies... COMBINED.)
Well, that's enough rambling for now. Hopefully this will inspire some creative thought in readers.
I didn't mind Obi-Wan beating Maul, but I had a problem with the specific mechanism. Basically, Obi-Wan flips out of the pit, catches Qui-Gon's lightsaber in mid-air, lands, and cuts Maul in half without Maul even REACTING. Maul just turns around and gets cut in half without even trying to defend himself. If anything, he should at least have swung at Obi-Wan and missed, giving Obi-Wan an opening to bisect him. (Funny that in Episode 4, Ben says, "In my experience there's no such thing as luck," when he got so incredibly lucky in that fight with Maul :) Seriously, I hope in whatever Special Edition of Episode I there is, Maul at least swings at Obi-Wan when he's flying through the air. Maybe he should cut Obi-Wan's braid off :)
I can confirm this story. I saw Trey Parker and Matt Stone at a presentation at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles, where they showed a couple episodes of South Park and then took questions from the audience for an hour. Trey (and he was visibly irritated about it) told the story about how when they did Orgazmo, they asked the MPAA what they should cut to get from an NC-17 to an R. The MPAA told them, "Sorry, we can't tell you that, you just need to guess," but when they did the South Park movie, they received itemized lists of what they would need to cut to get from NC-17 to R.
Thank god for those four words! This clearly exempts games like DOOM, where you are not committing any felonies (except maybe trespassing and destruction of property) -- self defense against legions of undead demons ain't a felony where I come from. Oddly, though, killing a lawyer is a felony. Damn double-standards...
So instead, you spend your time trying to instill proper moral values into that person, or trying to convince society to consider such behavior to be wrong, such that social pressure is brought on him. It's not like there's NOTHING you can do.
One of my biggest pet peeves about computer games is how the computer stutters (or stops dead) whenever data is being accessed off the hard drive -- for example, in almost any 3D FPS, whenever you load a new level, you're treated with the sight of a status bar loading in big jumps and chunks, since the screen isn't updating while the HD is accessing. I don't have any real experience using SCSI hardware, but I was under the impression that one of the advantages of SCSI to games was that since the drive controller is asynchronous, the rest of the computer (i.e. the rendering going on in the game) doesn't stutter to a halt whenever the game accesses the drive. Is this true? Am I even on the right track? If not, wouldn't it be neat?
When will Intel start having *cool* processor code names? Like "Death Eagle" or "Killer Robot" or "Massive Rampaging Gorilla"? Sure, "Thunderbird" sounds cool, but "Death Eagle" is way cooler! I bet they could really have a marketing coup by picking better names. Or maybe just marketing them under that name to kids or something, and leaving erudite poosae names for business marketing... or something.
Just think... the Intel Death Eagle 4! They could market it as 2 million KILLERhertz! Yeah!
Why not a banana? They already made all those celery-powered processors...
I would have been inclined to take your criticism if you hadn't stopped to insert a flamelike "Lame." In fact, if not for that single word, I would have changed it to "Surprised" instead of "exasperated" on your suggestion... but now, I mock you with spite! Mock! Mock!
'Course, back then we didn't have no fancy new-fangled Pee Cees ta link with. We had ta write our "web pages" on paper, and instead of a link, we wrote down driving directions for how to find the specified document. Porn 'taint no fun when ya gotta drive 250 miles o' back country roads ta find it. I tell ya, the Interweb was different back then... we had ta use REAL superhighways instead o' this Information Superhighway.