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User: chromatic

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Comments · 2,306

  1. Re:Why I despise superhero movies on Dreamworks Acquires Rights for Ghost in the Shell · · Score: 1

    And, as "PoMo Ironic" as it is, it is impossible to film a comic book movie without having to wink at your audience and acknowledge that it is, in fact, a comic book movie.

    I suppose internal consistency has never been a hallmark of the spandex-and-steroids set.

    It was also less than 30 seconds of screen time, so I'd hardly call it overdone.

    One scene in my first novel (also technically post-modern, if not because of this scene) discusses the nature of art, the quality of the craft of art, and why Star Trek sucks. Meta-commentary on the level of "Hey, I know we're making an engrossing movie here, but let's all take time out for a second to remind you that you're sitting in a theater eating overpriced popcorn with a bunch of other comic book fans in costumes. Isn't this great?" is at odds with suspension of disbelief in the same way as obvious plot holes, poor acting, and unbelievable characterizations and motivations.

    If you play it straight and pretend like nothing happened, you likely have a stodgy film.

    And yet Unbreakable actually worked as a movie.

  2. Re:Why I despise superhero movies on Dreamworks Acquires Rights for Ghost in the Shell · · Score: 1

    X-Men even poked fun at the superhero costumes.

    That's not clever writing, though. That's "Oh, look how pomo-ironic we all are! Aren't we cool?", and it's sloppy and overdone.

  3. Re:Yay New Features on First Looks at The Gimp 2.5 · · Score: 1

    I reject bug reports that read "I found a bug, fix it."

  4. Re:Open Source Terrorism? on Iron Man's New Villain — an Open Source Terrorist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a few ideological zealots, closed source drivers are as good as, or worse than, no drivers.

    Assuming those binary blobs even work on your chosen operating system and processor, or the versions thereof.

  5. Re:Who cares? on African Americans and the Video Game Industry · · Score: 1

    The only thing you can generalise about African Americans is that their skin is black.

    ... except for people born in Africa whose skin isn't black, including plenty of people from Egypt and South Africa.

  6. Re:Big Problem for MSFT on Should Microsoft Be Excluded From EU Government Sales? · · Score: 1

    In your dreams fat boy.

    Isn't Simon Pegg British?

  7. Re:Inaccurate title/summary on Google Mail Servers Enable Backscatter Spam · · Score: 1

    I thought we were done with this idiocy years ago when antivirus programs finally stopped spamming innocent third parties with incorrect notifications that they sent someone a virus.

    Years ago? I'd be happy if I thought that idiocy ended minutes ago, when I received yet another "I don't know how SMTP works, but I'm good at scanning messages for viruses, please trust me!" message.

  8. Re:In beta on Google Mail Servers Enable Backscatter Spam · · Score: 2, Informative

    Didn't anyone notice that Gmail is still in beta?

    Irrelevant. SMTP is not in beta.

  9. Re:Gmail and others blocking legit domains, so hey on Some Anti-Spam Vendors Blocking and Slowing Gmail · · Score: 1

    Thankfully forgeries are still not really the bulk of the problem.

    I'm not so sure. Every piece of spam that makes it through my filters has a forged From address.

  10. Re:Gmail and others blocking legit domains, so hey on Some Anti-Spam Vendors Blocking and Slowing Gmail · · Score: 1

    You could even give the recipient a short message saying, "xyz@abc.com sent you a message that was marked as spam. Do you know this person and want to accept messages from them in the future?"

    This isn't rocket science people.

    Your idea is better than backscatter, but how do you know xyz@abc.com really sent that message?

  11. Re:Reviewing the review on Wicked Cool PHP · · Score: 1

    ... any benchmark of PHP will support the fact that "" is undoubtedly quite a bit slower than ''.

    If that's actually true to any substantive degree (network latency is likely your biggest bottleneck when talking about HTML generated by PHP), there's something very wrong in the PHP core. The right way to parse code into some sort of AST or optree means that the parser emits a different tree for a double-quoted string with no interpolation than for a double-quoted string with interpolation. That tree should be identical to a single-quoted string with concatenation; it's the same operation. Double-quoted interpolation syntax is a programmer optimization.

  12. Re:Reviewing the review on Wicked Cool PHP · · Score: 1

    However, I think (hope) the confusion may have been in the word "interpolated", which should have been 'interpreted', 'substituted', 'replaced', or any number of other words.

    "Interpolated" is actually correct.

  13. Re:This is a problem for the Nmap book on POD Braces Itself Against Amazon · · Score: 1

    That's exactly how you work with Lightning Source. They're a division of Ingram, the massive book distributor, so there are no problems working with Amazon.com's supply chain -- unless Amazon.com makes problems.

  14. Re:Flash for PPC? on Adobe Joins Linux Foundation, Develops AIR For Linux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's silly; what makes you think Adobe supports Linux? (I mean, because all of their tech marketers and tech evangelists saying that they do.) As far as Adobe cares, the Linux kernel only runs on 32-bit x86 CPUs.

  15. Re:Amazon is just like all the rest.... on Amazon Insists Publishers Use Their On-Demand Printer · · Score: 1

    I'm not saying that there aren't good books to be found in the POD lineups -- Piers Anthony has put his entire backlist out via Xlibris...

    Those two independent clauses in the same sentence make my head hurt.

  16. Re:I don't agree, but I'm impressed on Oregon Senate Candidate Steve Novick Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    Should I mark you down as someone who's against fairness then?

    That depends. Is a higher tax rate fair for people who have greater incomes and pay more dollars taxes relative to the standard deductions? Is it fair to reward workers who take a modest risk the same as capital investors who take much larger risks? Is it fair that people make different salaries and that some investments return greater results than others? In the context of an S-corp, is it fair to make shareholders pay the same income tax rate as employees if the company takes a loss one year? (If so, what does that even mean?)

    "Fair" is rather an interesting word to use in an economic context.

  17. Re:I don't agree, but I'm impressed on Oregon Senate Candidate Steve Novick Answers Your Questions · · Score: 1

    Profits on stock sales should be at least, if not more, than taxes on an equal amount of money earned by actually WORKING.

    Shall we mark you down as someone opposed to liquidity then?

  18. Re:parents complaining? on Roleplayers Seek Removal of Nerf Gun Ban · · Score: 2, Funny

    I still haven't figured out why parents want to treat college students like they are still in middle school, and why colleges are willing to go along with it!

    If parents are paying for expensive babysitters, why not oblige them?

  19. Re:Copyright infringement? on Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot · · Score: 2

    If the software modifies, in any way, the WoW client - and he is making money off of it, then he is violating copyright laws.

    Is he distributing a modified version of the WoW client?

  20. Re:MySQL databae supremacy on IBM Invests In MySQL/Oracle Competitor · · Score: 1

    Yes, which is why they need to do such a large number of crazy voodoo tricks to scale.

    Are you seriously comparing PostgreSQL's replication and clustering support to MySQL's?

  21. Re:Not a fan on Head First JavaScript · · Score: 1

    How do the "Head First" books compare to the "Dummies" and "Tech Yourself" books?

    Head First books tend to be technically accurate.

  22. Re:Yes, but you're appealing against on Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies · · Score: 1

    The word "trivial" wasn't obviously wrong enough.

  23. Re:Yes, but you're appealing against on Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies · · Score: 1

    By giving away useful code, you are making it a trivial thing for a competitor to enter into your market.

    That seems simplistic. It's difficult for me to imagine that several Wal-Mart competitors would appear instantly if Wal-Mart released their logistics software under a free license.

  24. Re:MySQL databae supremacy on IBM Invests In MySQL/Oracle Competitor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What suggests to you that the terms "open source" and "commercial" are antonyms?

  25. Re:Link and Summary on Salasaga Fills Flash Creation Hole for Linux · · Score: 3, Informative

    Adobe are supporting [Flex] under Linux...

    If by supporting you mean "have thrown an alpha or two over the wall for 32-bit x86 processors back in December", then yes, Adobe supports Linux with Flex.