This is going to replace the "glass half empty/glass half full" thing.
I'm from the country that spawned The Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party, and voted the latter into the European Parliament!
...not from that country that screwed The Pirate Bay over in a corrupt trial with a biased judge and started to indirectly censor them by taking down arbitrary ISPs...
It is your belief that nobody would buy books from Amazon if they could get free digital books from a user-friendly file sharing website? And as a result, people would stop writing books?
That must be why iTunes Music Store is such a failure, and why Amazon has had to abandon their film sections because of The Pirate Bay. And as a result, people have stopped making music and films.
As much as I am against the right to bear arms in principle, and I thank God we have gun control laws in this country (Sweden) it's hard not to realize that in the US, the situation is completely different. The reason there are fewer gunshot deaths here is not only that we have gun control, it's that we've had gun control since forever. The US, on the other hand, has been a nation of guns for so long that there's no way you could possibly do anything about it now. You simply could not impose gun control on America now, because there are so very many people and so very many guns, outlawing them now would have no effect.
I think the problem can't be fixed by laws, it has to come from the people. Every person who simply doesn't get a gun, is a person who is less likely to accidentally shoot himself, or snap one day and take it to his school to kill everyone, or have his kids find it and hurt themselves. If everyone would just realize that and stop being so obsessed with guns, maybe one day the problem would have reduced to a level where it could be tackled.
But it'll never happen because they are so obsessed with guns. It seems people don't even realize that it is a problem. Instead of blaming the guns, they blame poor security or the nutjob who did it. Guess what, we have extremely poor security here in Sweden. We don't have metal detectors at my university, or even some sort of card required to enter the buildings, any madman with five rifles under his overcoat could walk right into the school at any time and shoot everyone!! But that's never happened. And we have nutjobs here, too! One of the most widely reported Swedish nutjobs recently was a guy who snapped and drove a car at 60 miles per hour through a pedestrian precinct full of people. How many people died again? Oh, 2. If he'd had a gun instead of a car? Not 2.
I have never killed a robot by aiming at the brain. That's zombies, you ignorant clod.
Robots are defeated by aiming at the bright, red (sometimes yellow) light that is hidden by thick armor which is unpenetrable by any weapon in the world, but which opens for long amounts of time every once in a while so you can fire at it.
"For the past 70 years, we used to be wrong only 20% of the time, but now we've discovered a new exciting method which allows us to be wrong 42% of the time!"
Obviously, the most important Halloween event today was my releasing a silly vampire game! It's slightly NetHack-inspired and Yipe!-inspired, except you get to eat placentas and suck blood. Yeah.
"Yes, I'm pretty sure when the elections get 'cancelled indefinitely' we'll be all primed for revolution. Provided we're not all distracted by the new consoles first."
Me, I'm pretty sure that only years ago, people were pretty sure that when that whole 'habeo-whatever who cares anyway' was put out of practice, we'll all be primed for revolution.
I look forward to finding out what will be the predicted revolution-trigger after it turns out that official dictatorship isn't.
The funniset thing in that article was the sentence "So if you ever lose your mind and want a copy of E.T., or maybe five million, grab a shovel and drive out to the desert. They're free."
It's funny because you can't actually do it - Wikipedia: "Starting on September 27, 1983, a layer of concrete was poured on top of the crushed materials".
Crushed, buried, sealed in concrete. Now that is one bad video game.
Bungie - check.
Great backstory - check.
Peter Jackson - check.
WETA - check.
Promising director - check.
Good scriptwriter - check.
Infinite budget - check.
Too good to be true - check.
How could anything this promising NOT end up the biggest anticlimax of all time?
Here's an example of how liberal they aren't: two of the posters in their election campaign are "let's make it easier for cops to wiretap people" and "let's force immigrants to learn Swedish before they can become citizens". Oh they're way liberal all right. (Pun!)
This may come as a surprise to many, but there are old people out there right now as we speak! In fact, there is quite a large number of 'em - for some reason, there was a huge Old People Boom recently, an unexplainable echo of the Baby Boom 40-60 years ago...
Except I liked it. But it sucked though. Although it said lots of good things. And it was also terrible. And the guy who wrote it had some great points. But it was all a bunch of crap and a waste of time to read. It was good though.
We had something similar to this in a school I went to. As mentioned before, in Sweden the schools are supposed to provide tax-paid lunches for the kids (and for the free marketeers out there, I'm happy to report that two out of the three schools I've gone to have served excellent, restaurant quality lunches). But the third school didn't have any kitchen or dining hall, so in order to provide our lunches without having to build stuff, they gave us these fancy cards that were recharged with virtual money every month, and they were accepted in most of the restaurants near the school. The only restrictions were that you could only buy food and you could only use a fixed amount of virtual money per day.
This worked just fine, and was really great in many ways. Among other things, because we were only allowed to use 55:- per day (less than $8), even the somewhat fancy restaurants who wanted our business quickly added 55:- lunches to their menus, which would have costed more otherwise.
Every year, parents of new kids would complain and try to get the school to add more restrictions, such as banning soda and orange juice and narrowing the definition of "food" used by certain places that allowed us to buy cookies. It never happened, and after eating one cookie a day (I saved cookie money by eating at the cheap place) for the three years I went to the school, I still didn't have a heart attack, get fat, or have my teeth rot and fall out.
So now that I think about it, maybe this is a bad idea after all, since its purpose is to restrict and ours was the total opposite. Never mind, then.
"Lookout! Water ahead!"
Or maybe they could build huge devices in the oceans, and they could give useful information to people on boats, such as "Don't anchor on this wire!", "Don't drive across the device!!", "Duck crossing!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is going to replace the "glass half empty/glass half full" thing.
...not from that country that screwed The Pirate Bay over in a corrupt trial with a biased judge and started to indirectly censor them by taking down arbitrary ISPs...
I'm from the country that spawned The Pirate Bay and the Pirate Party, and voted the latter into the European Parliament!
Finally I can have BSOD all over my face. I also look forward to having this on my tombstone: "I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST DEAD PIXEL!"
It is your belief that nobody would buy books from Amazon if they could get free digital books from a user-friendly file sharing website? And as a result, people would stop writing books? That must be why iTunes Music Store is such a failure, and why Amazon has had to abandon their film sections because of The Pirate Bay. And as a result, people have stopped making music and films.
As much as I am against the right to bear arms in principle, and I thank God we have gun control laws in this country (Sweden) it's hard not to realize that in the US, the situation is completely different. The reason there are fewer gunshot deaths here is not only that we have gun control, it's that we've had gun control since forever. The US, on the other hand, has been a nation of guns for so long that there's no way you could possibly do anything about it now. You simply could not impose gun control on America now, because there are so very many people and so very many guns, outlawing them now would have no effect.
I think the problem can't be fixed by laws, it has to come from the people. Every person who simply doesn't get a gun, is a person who is less likely to accidentally shoot himself, or snap one day and take it to his school to kill everyone, or have his kids find it and hurt themselves. If everyone would just realize that and stop being so obsessed with guns, maybe one day the problem would have reduced to a level where it could be tackled.
But it'll never happen because they are so obsessed with guns. It seems people don't even realize that it is a problem. Instead of blaming the guns, they blame poor security or the nutjob who did it. Guess what, we have extremely poor security here in Sweden. We don't have metal detectors at my university, or even some sort of card required to enter the buildings, any madman with five rifles under his overcoat could walk right into the school at any time and shoot everyone!! But that's never happened. And we have nutjobs here, too! One of the most widely reported Swedish nutjobs recently was a guy who snapped and drove a car at 60 miles per hour through a pedestrian precinct full of people. How many people died again? Oh, 2. If he'd had a gun instead of a car? Not 2.
Cool.
How did they think it up then?
They're not predicting the Second Coming of the Woz?
"How many roads must a man walk down?"
Let's play global WMD war.
So, the MPAA's got a DA against an SMB for ripping DVDs against the DMCA, eh? WTF mate?
Obscenity lies in the eye of the beholder.
I have never killed a robot by aiming at the brain. That's zombies, you ignorant clod.
Robots are defeated by aiming at the bright, red (sometimes yellow) light that is hidden by thick armor which is unpenetrable by any weapon in the world, but which opens for long amounts of time every once in a while so you can fire at it.
"For the past 70 years, we used to be wrong only 20% of the time, but now we've discovered a new exciting method which allows us to be wrong 42% of the time!"
Obviously, the most important Halloween event today was my releasing a silly vampire game! It's slightly NetHack-inspired and Yipe!-inspired, except you get to eat placentas and suck blood. Yeah.
Tess the Vampire! (There is 1 naughty word on that link.)
"Yes, I'm pretty sure when the elections get 'cancelled indefinitely' we'll be all primed for revolution. Provided we're not all distracted by the new consoles first."
Me, I'm pretty sure that only years ago, people were pretty sure that when that whole 'habeo-whatever who cares anyway' was put out of practice, we'll all be primed for revolution.
I look forward to finding out what will be the predicted revolution-trigger after it turns out that official dictatorship isn't.
The funniset thing in that article was the sentence "So if you ever lose your mind and want a copy of E.T., or maybe five million, grab a shovel and drive out to the desert. They're free."
It's funny because you can't actually do it - Wikipedia: "Starting on September 27, 1983, a layer of concrete was poured on top of the crushed materials".
Crushed, buried, sealed in concrete. Now that is one bad video game.
Seriously:
Bungie - check.
Great backstory - check.
Peter Jackson - check.
WETA - check.
Promising director - check.
Good scriptwriter - check.
Infinite budget - check.
Too good to be true - check.
How could anything this promising NOT end up the biggest anticlimax of all time?
Here's an example of how liberal they aren't: two of the posters in their election campaign are "let's make it easier for cops to wiretap people" and "let's force immigrants to learn Swedish before they can become citizens". Oh they're way liberal all right. (Pun!)
If we resorted to genetic engineering of humans to make everyone perpetually happy, I'd say that'd be quite depressing.
This may come as a surprise to many, but there are old people out there right now as we speak! In fact, there is quite a large number of 'em - for some reason, there was a huge Old People Boom recently, an unexplainable echo of the Baby Boom 40-60 years ago...
However, it's apparently free of charge for Swedish residents - until the upcoming elections. A very interesting way of fishing for votes =)
Except I liked it. But it sucked though. Although it said lots of good things. And it was also terrible. And the guy who wrote it had some great points. But it was all a bunch of crap and a waste of time to read. It was good though.
We had something similar to this in a school I went to. As mentioned before, in Sweden the schools are supposed to provide tax-paid lunches for the kids (and for the free marketeers out there, I'm happy to report that two out of the three schools I've gone to have served excellent, restaurant quality lunches). But the third school didn't have any kitchen or dining hall, so in order to provide our lunches without having to build stuff, they gave us these fancy cards that were recharged with virtual money every month, and they were accepted in most of the restaurants near the school. The only restrictions were that you could only buy food and you could only use a fixed amount of virtual money per day.
This worked just fine, and was really great in many ways. Among other things, because we were only allowed to use 55:- per day (less than $8), even the somewhat fancy restaurants who wanted our business quickly added 55:- lunches to their menus, which would have costed more otherwise.
Every year, parents of new kids would complain and try to get the school to add more restrictions, such as banning soda and orange juice and narrowing the definition of "food" used by certain places that allowed us to buy cookies. It never happened, and after eating one cookie a day (I saved cookie money by eating at the cheap place) for the three years I went to the school, I still didn't have a heart attack, get fat, or have my teeth rot and fall out.
So now that I think about it, maybe this is a bad idea after all, since its purpose is to restrict and ours was the total opposite. Never mind, then.
"Lookout! Water ahead!" Or maybe they could build huge devices in the oceans, and they could give useful information to people on boats, such as "Don't anchor on this wire!", "Don't drive across the device!!", "Duck crossing!!!"