I couldn't disagree with you more. I've been a regular customer of Amazon for ten years now and I've never had problems with any of my orders. Everything's arrived in good condition and on time. When I had problems with a magazine subscription processed by a third party and talking to that third party went nowhere, I called Amazon and in less than two minutes, they agreed to refund my entire subscription. I wish everyone had customer service as good as Amazon's.
Ah, the XFL, the bastard love child of the NFL and WWE... It was mildly entertaining for about two weeks -- which come to think about it, is about how long the XFL actually lasted.
Now all we need are cameras in the players' helmets and then we can all feel like we're really part of the game. Which might not be such a good thing when you see a 300-lb lineman with a full head of steam barreling towards "you". Might make for sloppy beer management...
Sadly, I know you're serious. I was in Greece two summers ago when the fires there were making international headlines. I drove by a few mountainsides that were completely black and in some cases even still smoldering from recent fires. IIRC, a developer intentionally set at least one of the fires, which ended up getting massively out of control, in an attempt to bypass some laws that prevented development of forested land. At least the authorities got the bastard. I wonder how he feels now, knowing that his greed ended up getting people killed.
I agree with you: there's a lot of potential with the medium of comics, and it's unfortunate that so much of comics still falls into the superhero genre. I mean, imagine if 80 percent of all the movies that came out since the 1960s had been westerns. That being said, superhero comics can still be pretty good: Alan Moore's Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Moore and Neil Gaiman on Miracleman (which was unbelievably good); Frank Miller's Dark Knight and Year One, just to name a few.
As for what Hollywood has done with these comic book properties, more times than not it's been pretty bad -- the first Hulk movie, for instance, was a celluloid crime and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie really underscores your point about Hollywood adaptations sucking -- but it's gotten much, much better in recent years. We're finally starting to see some films in which they're getting the feel of the characters right. Again, just to name a few, the last two X-Men movies, Spiderman, Iron-Man, Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. All of them finally gave you an impression that the creative teams actually bothered to get some grasp of what it was that they were adapting to film.
Miracleman (Marvelman in the UK) -- that would be a semi-risky venture. Not that I'm necessarily saying that a film adaptation should be attempted because it'd probably be a spectacular failure -- and even if some brave producer were game, Miracleman is tied up in legal hell, IIRC -- but if it were done right, it'd be quite different from anything you've seen in the conventional superhero movies.
Taste and quality? Such as Road To Perdition or A History of Violence, both of which were originally comics?
Comics encompass as broad a world as other forms of fiction and literature, it's not just all superheroes and science fiction. As far as Hollywood adaptations are concerned, the problem isn't so much a lack of originality -- although there is some truth to that claim -- it's that producers are risk averse.
I'm half Turkish in fact, and what a lot of people here probably don't know is that the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest Empires in its time...
I'm half Greek so it's a good bet that my ancestors wouldn't have been singing the praises of the Ottoman Empire, but you're right, the Ottoman Empire was one of the great empires of world history and there's a wealth of culture to be found in the parts of the world that the empire once comprised.
And think about it, an 11,000 yeah old temple is very old indeed.
As the story summary says, old enough to possibly turn our ideas about the origins of civilization on their collective head. The notion that religion could have seeded civilization and the need for agriculture is rather thought-provoking. These are the sorts of discoveries that are the most fascinating, those that suggest that everything we think we know is or may be wrong. It must have been quite wondrous, for example, to have been a fairly educated person in the 1870s and hear the news that the site of ancient Troy had been discovered. All of a sudden, this place that many had regarded as existing only in fable proves to have actually existed.
I wasn't forced to study such things, but as I get older, I can feel my general curiosity pulling me toward a basic look at philosophy.
I'm not so much interested in questions like "What is reality?" -- at least not at this time -- but more practical philosophy, if you will, questions like "Are all viewpoints equally valid?"
Agreed. Eaters of the Dead, which is a retelling of Beowulf, and The Great Train Robbery were not only really good but showcased Crichton's tireless efforts at researching the culture and/or technology of the worlds in which he set his novels.
I also enjoyed Congo. The movie, however, was atrocious. Please don't let the film prevent you from reading the book.
Here's an article, originally published about 12 years ago in Discover magazine, explaining why your vote has MORE power in the electoral college system.
Of course, the real world sometimes intrudes on the theoretical. I live in a heavily Democratic state, so were I to vote Republican -- and I'm not saying that I will -- it would essentially be an exercise in futility.
There are pros and cons to the electoral college system. Yes, it does empower smaller states, but in heavily tilted states, it can also disempower the individual who swims counter to the political current.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
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· Score: 1
I completely disagree. All aspects of the voting system -- registration, actual voting, tallying -- need to be protected from tampering. Allowing false registration threatens to compromise the entire process, particularly when you consider states with no-ID laws, absentee voting, etc. Whether or not actual voting fraud takes places is not the issue; the fact that the potential for voting fraud exists is, in itself, enough that something should be done about it. After all, isn't this potential for fraud the very same principle that gets so many of us (rightly) worked up over Diebold/electronic voting?
I'm a big fan of manybooks.net. I've downloaded, well, many books from there for my Kindle, including a fair number of Jules Verne novels that you simply cannot find in dead-tree versions.
If you find that you are using the site frequently, please think about making a small donation to help keep it going. (Just for the record, I should point out that I have NO connection to manybooks.net either.)
If you have a Kindle or some other portable, you can use manybooks' mobile-friendly version: mnybks.net
That video, at least what I saw of it, was horrendous. By the time I saw the guys in the football jerseys, I had had enough. At that point I closed the page about as quickly as I could because I didn't want that video negatively affecting my reading of the book.
That was my first, and likely last, time ever going to a MySpace page. It lasted all of probably 50 seconds, quite sufficient for this lifetime.
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
No, I believe incognito mode allows the cookies but gets rid of them when you close the incognito window.
I've got my hold placed already and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it. I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon right now and I very much hope that Anathem represents a returning to form for Stephenson.
I slogged through most of Quicksilver before a busy time at work gave me the excuse I needed to put the book down. There was some particular quality to the writing in Cryptonomicon -- I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seemed to be missing from Quicksilver. For instance, there's this passage in Crypto that I absolutely loved:
[Shaftoe] gets [Glory] to the apartment, which is usually in a state of hysterical uproar even when the nation is not under military assault by the Empire of Nippon. Despite this, the appearance of Glory, shortly after the outbreak of war, borne in the arms of a United States Marine, is received by the Altamiras in much the same way as if Christ were to materialize in the center of their living room with the Virgin Mary slung over his back.
Nothing in my 500 pages of Quicksilver seemed to sparkle like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon is increasingly a house of cards.
I couldn't disagree with you more. I've been a regular customer of Amazon for ten years now and I've never had problems with any of my orders. Everything's arrived in good condition and on time. When I had problems with a magazine subscription processed by a third party and talking to that third party went nowhere, I called Amazon and in less than two minutes, they agreed to refund my entire subscription. I wish everyone had customer service as good as Amazon's.
I wish I would have skipped Vista entirely. Hell, I would have taken Win2k over Vista if I had really known how much I was going to dislike Vista.
Agreed, the old M2 system should be brought back because it seems like the idiots are taking control of the channel.
I, too, await my offtopic mod...
This is all wrong. COBOL is like Judaism... it controls most of the world's money.
The list made me smirk in amusement. This, though, made me laugh out loud. Thank you, Mr ... um ... Killer for improving my morning.
How about "oldest extant human brain"?
Ah, the XFL, the bastard love child of the NFL and WWE... It was mildly entertaining for about two weeks -- which come to think about it, is about how long the XFL actually lasted.
Now all we need are cameras in the players' helmets and then we can all feel like we're really part of the game. Which might not be such a good thing when you see a 300-lb lineman with a full head of steam barreling towards "you". Might make for sloppy beer management...
Mr. Snuffleupagus and an Adama grand-pere would indeed make quite a team.
Sadly, I know you're serious. I was in Greece two summers ago when the fires there were making international headlines. I drove by a few mountainsides that were completely black and in some cases even still smoldering from recent fires. IIRC, a developer intentionally set at least one of the fires, which ended up getting massively out of control, in an attempt to bypass some laws that prevented development of forested land. At least the authorities got the bastard. I wonder how he feels now, knowing that his greed ended up getting people killed.
I agree with you: there's a lot of potential with the medium of comics, and it's unfortunate that so much of comics still falls into the superhero genre. I mean, imagine if 80 percent of all the movies that came out since the 1960s had been westerns. That being said, superhero comics can still be pretty good: Alan Moore's Watchmen and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Moore and Neil Gaiman on Miracleman (which was unbelievably good); Frank Miller's Dark Knight and Year One, just to name a few.
As for what Hollywood has done with these comic book properties, more times than not it's been pretty bad -- the first Hulk movie, for instance, was a celluloid crime and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie really underscores your point about Hollywood adaptations sucking -- but it's gotten much, much better in recent years. We're finally starting to see some films in which they're getting the feel of the characters right. Again, just to name a few, the last two X-Men movies, Spiderman, Iron-Man, Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. All of them finally gave you an impression that the creative teams actually bothered to get some grasp of what it was that they were adapting to film.
Miracleman (Marvelman in the UK) -- that would be a semi-risky venture. Not that I'm necessarily saying that a film adaptation should be attempted because it'd probably be a spectacular failure -- and even if some brave producer were game, Miracleman is tied up in legal hell, IIRC -- but if it were done right, it'd be quite different from anything you've seen in the conventional superhero movies.
Taste and quality? Such as Road To Perdition or A History of Violence, both of which were originally comics?
Comics encompass as broad a world as other forms of fiction and literature, it's not just all superheroes and science fiction. As far as Hollywood adaptations are concerned, the problem isn't so much a lack of originality -- although there is some truth to that claim -- it's that producers are risk averse.
Close to 200 comments and no one -- no one -- has yet mentioned the Ultimate Nullifier, which could spook even the mighty Galactus?
What, don't geeks read comic books anymore?
I'm half Turkish in fact, and what a lot of people here probably don't know is that the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest Empires in its time...
I'm half Greek so it's a good bet that my ancestors wouldn't have been singing the praises of the Ottoman Empire, but you're right, the Ottoman Empire was one of the great empires of world history and there's a wealth of culture to be found in the parts of the world that the empire once comprised.
And think about it, an 11,000 yeah old temple is very old indeed.
As the story summary says, old enough to possibly turn our ideas about the origins of civilization on their collective head. The notion that religion could have seeded civilization and the need for agriculture is rather thought-provoking. These are the sorts of discoveries that are the most fascinating, those that suggest that everything we think we know is or may be wrong. It must have been quite wondrous, for example, to have been a fairly educated person in the 1870s and hear the news that the site of ancient Troy had been discovered. All of a sudden, this place that many had regarded as existing only in fable proves to have actually existed.
I wasn't forced to study such things, but as I get older, I can feel my general curiosity pulling me toward a basic look at philosophy.
I'm not so much interested in questions like "What is reality?" -- at least not at this time -- but more practical philosophy, if you will, questions like "Are all viewpoints equally valid?"
Agreed. Eaters of the Dead, which is a retelling of Beowulf, and The Great Train Robbery were not only really good but showcased Crichton's tireless efforts at researching the culture and/or technology of the worlds in which he set his novels.
I also enjoyed Congo. The movie, however, was atrocious. Please don't let the film prevent you from reading the book.
Ditto for the suburbs of DC. It's like road spam.
Here's an article, originally published about 12 years ago in Discover magazine, explaining why your vote has MORE power in the electoral college system.
Of course, the real world sometimes intrudes on the theoretical. I live in a heavily Democratic state, so were I to vote Republican -- and I'm not saying that I will -- it would essentially be an exercise in futility.
There are pros and cons to the electoral college system. Yes, it does empower smaller states, but in heavily tilted states, it can also disempower the individual who swims counter to the political current.
I'll take Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House instead.
I completely disagree. All aspects of the voting system -- registration, actual voting, tallying -- need to be protected from tampering. Allowing false registration threatens to compromise the entire process, particularly when you consider states with no-ID laws, absentee voting, etc. Whether or not actual voting fraud takes places is not the issue; the fact that the potential for voting fraud exists is, in itself, enough that something should be done about it. After all, isn't this potential for fraud the very same principle that gets so many of us (rightly) worked up over Diebold/electronic voting?
That's an interesting assembly of years there.
1453 - Constantinople falls, bringing the end of the Byzantine Empire. (Looks like that Greek grammar was printed just in time!)
1492 - Columbus and the whole ocean-blue thing; completion of the Reconquista in Spain.
1529 - Protestantism gets a shot in the arm with the Diet of something or other whose name escapes me.
1536 - Henry VIII's wild year: Catharine of Aragon dies, Anne Boleyn loses her head, Henry hooks up with Jane Seymour.
1550 - Um, never mind. Totally blanking on 1550...
I'm a big fan of manybooks.net. I've downloaded, well, many books from there for my Kindle, including a fair number of Jules Verne novels that you simply cannot find in dead-tree versions.
If you find that you are using the site frequently, please think about making a small donation to help keep it going. (Just for the record, I should point out that I have NO connection to manybooks.net either.)
If you have a Kindle or some other portable, you can use manybooks' mobile-friendly version: mnybks.net
That video, at least what I saw of it, was horrendous. By the time I saw the guys in the football jerseys, I had had enough. At that point I closed the page about as quickly as I could because I didn't want that video negatively affecting my reading of the book.
That was my first, and likely last, time ever going to a MySpace page. It lasted all of probably 50 seconds, quite sufficient for this lifetime.
No, I believe incognito mode allows the cookies but gets rid of them when you close the incognito window.
I've got my hold placed already and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it. I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon right now and I very much hope that Anathem represents a returning to form for Stephenson.
I slogged through most of Quicksilver before a busy time at work gave me the excuse I needed to put the book down. There was some particular quality to the writing in Cryptonomicon -- I can't quite put my finger on it, but it seemed to be missing from Quicksilver. For instance, there's this passage in Crypto that I absolutely loved:
Nothing in my 500 pages of Quicksilver seemed to sparkle like that.