They did something great in the pilot episodes and first season, but now we'll have to see yet another great show die a slow and painful death.
I wish they'd wrap up the show and stop it when they've run out of material and said what they want to say. But even the best show is doomed to drag on our screens, while the rating brings in ad money. It's so sad.
It was especially harsh and sad in Prison Break, originally an amazing 14 episode mini-series. Then in the last moment extended to a full season ("oh shit they changed the pipes, well all we did for 14 episodes now doesn't make a damn sense, does it"), and then to a second season ("don't move or I'll use my tattoo against you! i'm not afraid to!").
It's Latin: 'porne' means a whore or harlot, so pictures of harlots are called pornography.
Do you call your dog by its official Latin scientific species name? There's apparently a term in place that makes demonization of erotic photos easier.
It's similar with plenty of other conditions and events. People invent words to put a certain spin on them. There are special words for things that are a "sin" for example. A religious fellow will not tell you that being "gay" is a sin, but it's a sin since being gay means performing "sodomy". How often do we use "sodomy" in a casual conversation?
Oh right, in Fascist America we beat 'em again by suing people for links as early as 2000, in a case related to our beloved DMCA.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a beef with USA, but such remarks piss me off. The label doesn't mean a thing. Communist or Fascist or Democratic, actions speak more than words.
China's government apparently doesn't realize they are causing a problem on themselves.
Why spend all the resources to restrict people from viewing porn? So you can then spend all the resources to reduce birth rate.
Look at the other modern democratic countries: you can watch all the porn you want, and birth rate is so low that most of said countries rely on excessive immigration to keep the population numbers stable.
So I'm reading the summary: why on earth we have a made up word for this kind of material.
'Pornographic photos'
First of all, can photos not be "graphic". Any "sonic photos" you've seen recently or something? So we're left with:
'Porn photos'
Why have a made up term for this "porn". Erotic photos seems descriptive enough. Sex photos if they're more explicit. Is it because having a special term "porn" makes it sound more evil? "Pornographic" also sounds more scientific, something that could be written in a law.
Since going to jail for posting a link to "sexy photos" would be too absurd, but going to jail for "pornographic material" (OMG!) is just fine.
It doesn't seem to get mentioned a lot, but one of the secondary aims of the project is that countries should not buy very many of the units. If they are a success, it is hoped that they will start manufacturing their own.
That's interesting as an insurance (you can always make your own in case something happens with the current manifacturer).
But would you spend $300 making it on your own, or $150 buying it. Since those are targeted to poor countries, I somehow don't think they can make use of existing skills, equipment, staff, economy of scale and so on.
Even the fact that the money "stay in the country", may not offset all the additional costs introduced in the process.
And for some reason they kept poking the screens with their mischievous little fingers, as if trying to reach for something and pull it out. They just had the machines for one hour or so.
At first I thought "yugh, fingerprints".
Then "god damn it, the glass".
Then "jesus christ they'll wreck the matrix..!".
So, let the bets begin: how many days do you give em before they any of those:
1. can it work under water? 2. will it fly like a frisbee if I throw it properly? 3. how does it look on the inside?
Wouldn't it be far better to have safer browsers than to shut out (as many people or their organizations will do) 10% of the web?
I don't know. Wouldn't it be best if we had both?
It's optional whether you'll use Google's warning system, I know in a quite a lot of use cases people would rather filter 10%, hell, 20% or 30% of the web, if the remaining sites are guaranteed to be safe.
"warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu."
That's so blatantly made up right there. Flu isn't cold related, someone seems to be confusing a pedestrian cold with an actual flu.
In fact it's worse: cold weather helps kill the flu virus so it doesn't spread wide or survive for extended period of time on the outside. With higher temperatures, flu outbreaks will be worse.
The fact flu spreads in the autumn and early winter isn't directly related to a flu outbreak. The timing is, let's say, a happy coincidence. You can research more about why flu comes every year for more info.
this is where we discover AOL have been reliably backing up their ICQ server to/dev/null all these years.
There's this wormhole theory that says all data you send in/dev/null will not be lost, but actually show up on a server in an alternate universe. So no all hope is lost!
I'm from central Europe, and here everybody is using ICQ. It's gone so far that ICQ is synonymous with IM, and people exchange ICQ UINs instead of phone numbers...
Same in Eastern Europe, although Skype appears to be catching up as a replacement.
Just few days ago I was talking to friends about the new ICQ6, and the conversation went along the lines of:
ME: you gotta check the new ICQ, they dumped the silly flash voice/cam, the terrible horn and oh-oh sounds. It's a lot better.
THEM: great! so are you switching back to ICQ (note: they are all on ICQ)
ME: no, but.. I at least won't start it with disgust anymore.
And just as I gave them this compliment (it is a compliment! i hated the damn thing), now this story runs. They're out of luck, for sure.
During the problem, you can't even get the task manager to come up because the system gives everything to svchost.exe for the check. If you have the task manager up before it kicks off, you can actually see that it does in fact take the whole system for that process.
You know, I wondered why would Windows allow a process to lock up the entire OS. The process in question isn't in real-time priority, it's not even in high priority.
We have preemptive multitasking... so what on Earth. I don't remember such experiences on Ubuntu, and I'm not bashing Windows, but I'm genuinely interested why Windows sometimes has difficulties handling priorities with stuck processes.
IMO, both cremation & cemeteries are a huge waste of resources.
Cremation is useful in that it avoid infection spreading (especially, but not limited to when the man/woman died froma dangerous infection disease). It gets cremated and can be dealt with with much less resources.
But dropping the vessel from space and losing the ash in a forest isn't exactly what I imagined it should be like.
Who else thinks the whole idea is kinda retarded? I mean, in the beginning I thought the ashes of those people will be dispersed in space, which was very strong as a symbol and a ceremony, of sorts.
But carry them in space and land them (and now.. to lose them)? What the hell was the effin point of this whole thing?
To have worked for 40 years on something, to believe in it, and dedicate a life to it, to collect samples of sound, or smell, or taste from across an entire planet, then along comes a tool that makes it easy to share the results with other people, to disperse the cumulative knowledge and experience of a lifetime, only to have some bored slasher dis it off after a click and a couple seconds of listening; I'm hurt just thinking about it.
Never mind what you do, there'll be always someone to dismiss it and not like it. If the samples collected are of high quality (low noise/hiss, 2 or more channels, good frequency coverage) they can be used for far more things than supplementing google earth.
Research, audio effects, relaxation mixes etc. etc.
No matter how efficient an internal combustion engine gets, it will still emit carbon dioxide. While this technology might help an engine spew less carbon dioxide, it's still a dead end -- kind of like putting lipstick on a pig.
Put the effort into other forms of energy and we'll be a lot better off a lot more quickly.
You're participating in a logical fallacy that fails to recognize that incremental improvements could have more impact on a variable or system (ecology) and only acknowledges binary conditions (either uses fuel or doesn't at all).
Given the current infrastructure of oil stations, economics and so on, ecologically it makes much more sense to reduce the emissions from oil vehicles as much as possible, as those are in massive use right now. Concurrently to this, there are electrical vehicles sold, but since it's a new technology and there's no sufficient infrastructure, they are a minority.
Dropping everything on internal combustion r&d and throwing the money in alternative fuel sources won't speed up their adoption significantly and will result in us using the current less efficient engines for decades to come, while we're in transition.
All that matters is the bottom line. And much efficient internal combustion engine definitely help that.
If I have to kiss that pig anyway, I'd like it with lipstick, thanks.
I'm not going to call it piracy anymore. I prefer Consumer Choice Enablement.
Let's not stoop to their level. I mean, when you're caught labeling something with "Enablement", this means you're really desperate. Check it out: all the most terrible marketing driven product out there talk about "Enablement". It's basically something you talk about when you have absolutely nothing to say.
Furthermore "piracy" nowadays is something nice. It means you look like Johnny Depp, wear a lot of makeup and millions of people pay to see your antics in a cheesy pirates trilogy.
Desperately trying to come up with a better PR term for a failed corporate policy is so much like trying to be polite to people despite "the general public" always twisting polite terms into insults.
And apples are so much like Tang...
The same mental processes are in action. A term gets to mean and be associated with whatever the subject/object it notates. The word doesn't matter.
People often discover the meaning to a term "by intuition". It's hardly ingrained in their brain what it means, so they start confusing and mixing the way it SOUNDS with what it MEANS. But those are two independent properties, and the latter could be transfered onto any word with almost to transformation.
That's why we have so many different languages, but could share culture and understanding of things we need to deal with daily, never mind how we called them.
Those people will never get it. The name doesn't matter. What's so sinister about "Digital Rights Management"? It sounds pretty nice to me. The bad connotations aren't coming from the name, it's the essence of what DRM is.
People keep thinking that the order and choice of letters is all it takes to turn something bad into something great.
This has been happening also in the way people have called people with mental handicaps throughout the years, and the constant "reinvention" of the terms, to keep the names less insulting:
-----
Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "idiots" anymore. That's insulting. We'll call it people with mental retardation: retards. General public: Yea, that is a nice neutral name, no bad connotations.
One year later:
General public: My brother is a damn retard, I hate him. Socially responsible guy: That's insulting. We shouldn't call them retards anymore. We'll call them people with "slow mental development". Slow people. General public: Yea, that's neutral and nice. Cool.
One year later:
General public: My neighbour is "slow" or something. Huhuhu. Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "slow", that's insulting. Well call them "people with special education needs". Special people.
One year later:
General public: My new coworker is "special". Huhuu, get it? "Special". Hehehe.
----------
Basically you can change a name any times you want. Bad fame will come to haunt you never mind how hard you try.
Slashdot Mirror
They did something great in the pilot episodes and first season, but now we'll have to see yet another great show die a slow and painful death.
I wish they'd wrap up the show and stop it when they've run out of material and said what they want to say. But even the best show is doomed to drag on our screens, while the rating brings in ad money. It's so sad.
It was especially harsh and sad in Prison Break, originally an amazing 14 episode mini-series. Then in the last moment extended to a full season ("oh shit they changed the pipes, well all we did for 14 episodes now doesn't make a damn sense, does it"), and then to a second season ("don't move or I'll use my tattoo against you! i'm not afraid to!").
It's Latin: 'porne' means a whore or harlot, so pictures of harlots are called pornography.
Do you call your dog by its official Latin scientific species name?
There's apparently a term in place that makes demonization of erotic photos easier.
It's similar with plenty of other conditions and events. People invent words to put a certain spin on them. There are special words for things that are a "sin" for example. A religious fellow will not tell you that being "gay" is a sin, but it's a sin since being gay means performing "sodomy". How often do we use "sodomy" in a casual conversation?
Oh right, in Fascist America we beat 'em again by suing people for links as early as 2000, in a case related to our beloved DMCA.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a beef with USA, but such remarks piss me off. The label doesn't mean a thing. Communist or Fascist or Democratic, actions speak more than words.
China's government apparently doesn't realize they are causing a problem on themselves.
Why spend all the resources to restrict people from viewing porn? So you can then spend all the resources to reduce birth rate.
Look at the other modern democratic countries: you can watch all the porn you want, and birth rate is so low that most of said countries rely on excessive immigration to keep the population numbers stable.
There's gotta be a connection here somewhere...
So I'm reading the summary: why on earth we have a made up word for this kind of material.
'Pornographic photos'
First of all, can photos not be "graphic". Any "sonic photos" you've seen recently or something? So we're left with:
'Porn photos'
Why have a made up term for this "porn". Erotic photos seems descriptive enough. Sex photos if they're more explicit.
Is it because having a special term "porn" makes it sound more evil? "Pornographic" also sounds more scientific, something that could be written in a law.
Since going to jail for posting a link to "sexy photos" would be too absurd, but going to jail for "pornographic material" (OMG!) is just fine.
It doesn't seem to get mentioned a lot, but one of the secondary aims of the project is that countries should not buy very many of the units. If they are a success, it is hoped that they will start manufacturing their own.
That's interesting as an insurance (you can always make your own in case something happens with the current manifacturer).
But would you spend $300 making it on your own, or $150 buying it. Since those are targeted to poor countries, I somehow don't think they can make use of existing skills, equipment, staff, economy of scale and so on.
Even the fact that the money "stay in the country", may not offset all the additional costs introduced in the process.
I saw this institutional video someone posted here, with the kids playing with their new $150 laptops.
And for some reason they kept poking the screens with their mischievous little fingers, as if trying to reach for something and pull it out. They just had the machines for one hour or so.
At first I thought "yugh, fingerprints".
Then "god damn it, the glass".
Then "jesus christ they'll wreck the matrix..!".
So, let the bets begin: how many days do you give em before they any of those:
1. can it work under water?
2. will it fly like a frisbee if I throw it properly?
3. how does it look on the inside?
Two other companies want to be considered: Intel, with their Classmate PC, and Israeli-manufactured ITP-C.
What?? Where is India's $10 laptop?!
and moves a ton of dirt? Can I enter my dog? It's pretty damn autonomous.
:)
Ok, great! Now repeat the same, but your dog's on Mars and should receive commands from Earth
Wouldn't it be far better to have safer browsers than to shut out (as many people or their organizations will do) 10% of the web?
I don't know. Wouldn't it be best if we had both?
It's optional whether you'll use Google's warning system, I know in a quite a lot of use cases people would rather filter 10%, hell, 20% or 30% of the web, if the remaining sites are guaranteed to be safe.
"warming temperatures will mean that in 2050 there will be about 40,000 fewer deaths in Germany attributable to cold-related illnesses like the flu."
That's so blatantly made up right there. Flu isn't cold related, someone seems to be confusing a pedestrian cold with an actual flu.
In fact it's worse: cold weather helps kill the flu virus so it doesn't spread wide or survive for extended period of time on the outside. With higher temperatures, flu outbreaks will be worse.
The fact flu spreads in the autumn and early winter isn't directly related to a flu outbreak. The timing is, let's say, a happy coincidence. You can research more about why flu comes every year for more info.
this is where we discover AOL have been reliably backing up their ICQ server to /dev/null all these years.
/dev/null will not be lost, but actually show up on a server in an alternate universe. So no all hope is lost!
There's this wormhole theory that says all data you send in
Now all we need is to get to the other universe.
But beware: they might all be evil.
I'm from central Europe, and here everybody is using ICQ. It's gone so far that ICQ is synonymous with IM, and people exchange ICQ UINs instead of phone numbers...
.. I at least won't start it with disgust anymore.
Same in Eastern Europe, although Skype appears to be catching up as a replacement.
Just few days ago I was talking to friends about the new ICQ6, and the conversation went along the lines of:
ME: you gotta check the new ICQ, they dumped the silly flash voice/cam, the terrible horn and oh-oh sounds. It's a lot better.
THEM: great! so are you switching back to ICQ (note: they are all on ICQ)
ME: no, but
And just as I gave them this compliment (it is a compliment! i hated the damn thing), now this story runs. They're out of luck, for sure.
That kinda sucks for anyone years in the future who may want to study the body to see how you lived and what caused your death.
We're in the 21-st century. He doesn't need to study your body to find how you lived, he just needs to Google your name.
During the problem, you can't even get the task manager to come up because the system gives everything to svchost.exe for the check. If you have the task manager up before it kicks off, you can actually see that it does in fact take the whole system for that process.
You know, I wondered why would Windows allow a process to lock up the entire OS. The process in question isn't in real-time priority, it's not even in high priority.
We have preemptive multitasking... so what on Earth. I don't remember such experiences on Ubuntu, and I'm not bashing Windows, but I'm genuinely interested why Windows sometimes has difficulties handling priorities with stuck processes.
IMO, both cremation & cemeteries are a huge waste of resources.
Cremation is useful in that it avoid infection spreading (especially, but not limited to when the man/woman died froma dangerous infection disease). It gets cremated and can be dealt with with much less resources.
But dropping the vessel from space and losing the ash in a forest isn't exactly what I imagined it should be like.
Who else thinks the whole idea is kinda retarded? I mean, in the beginning I thought the ashes of those people will be dispersed in space, which was very strong as a symbol and a ceremony, of sorts.
.. to lose them)? What the hell was the effin point of this whole thing?
But carry them in space and land them (and now
To have worked for 40 years on something, to believe in it, and dedicate a life to it, to collect samples of sound, or smell, or taste from across an entire planet, then along comes a tool that makes it easy to share the results with other people, to disperse the cumulative knowledge and experience of a lifetime, only to have some bored slasher dis it off after a click and a couple seconds of listening; I'm hurt just thinking about it.
Never mind what you do, there'll be always someone to dismiss it and not like it. If the samples collected are of high quality (low noise/hiss, 2 or more channels, good frequency coverage) they can be used for far more things than supplementing google earth.
Research, audio effects, relaxation mixes etc. etc.
Now I can finally know what a tree sounds like when it falls and no one is around.
Sounds as if eternity was sucked into itself for infinity and back.
No matter how efficient an internal combustion engine gets, it will still emit carbon dioxide.
You also emit carbon dioxide, when you breath out. Carbon dioxide isn't a poison. Just too much of it is.
While we're at it, if you plot a graph of worst carbon dioxide polluters created by man, cars are definitely not on top.
I mean, just because technology changes doesn't mean they should kill it instead of changing with it, right?
Arghh, you don't get it, do you!! Corporations ALWAYS must do the evil thing, like in the movies, all right?
No matter how efficient an internal combustion engine gets, it will still emit carbon dioxide. While this technology might help an engine spew less carbon dioxide, it's still a dead end -- kind of like putting lipstick on a pig.
Put the effort into other forms of energy and we'll be a lot better off a lot more quickly.
You're participating in a logical fallacy that fails to recognize that incremental improvements could have more impact on a variable or system (ecology) and only acknowledges binary conditions (either uses fuel or doesn't at all).
Given the current infrastructure of oil stations, economics and so on, ecologically it makes much more sense to reduce the emissions from oil vehicles as much as possible, as those are in massive use right now. Concurrently to this, there are electrical vehicles sold, but since it's a new technology and there's no sufficient infrastructure, they are a minority.
Dropping everything on internal combustion r&d and throwing the money in alternative fuel sources won't speed up their adoption significantly and will result in us using the current less efficient engines for decades to come, while we're in transition.
All that matters is the bottom line. And much efficient internal combustion engine definitely help that.
If I have to kiss that pig anyway, I'd like it with lipstick, thanks.
I'm not going to call it piracy anymore. I prefer Consumer Choice Enablement.
Let's not stoop to their level. I mean, when you're caught labeling something with "Enablement", this means you're really desperate. Check it out: all the most terrible marketing driven product out there talk about "Enablement". It's basically something you talk about when you have absolutely nothing to say.
Furthermore "piracy" nowadays is something nice. It means you look like Johnny Depp, wear a lot of makeup and millions of people pay to see your antics in a cheesy pirates trilogy.
Desperately trying to come up with a better PR term for a failed corporate policy is so much like trying to be polite to people despite "the general public" always twisting polite terms into insults.
...
And apples are so much like Tang
The same mental processes are in action. A term gets to mean and be associated with whatever the subject/object it notates. The word doesn't matter.
People often discover the meaning to a term "by intuition". It's hardly ingrained in their brain what it means, so they start confusing and mixing the way it SOUNDS with what it MEANS. But those are two independent properties, and the latter could be transfered onto any word with almost to transformation.
That's why we have so many different languages, but could share culture and understanding of things we need to deal with daily, never mind how we called them.
Those people will never get it. The name doesn't matter. What's so sinister about "Digital Rights Management"? It sounds pretty nice to me. The bad connotations aren't coming from the name, it's the essence of what DRM is.
People keep thinking that the order and choice of letters is all it takes to turn something bad into something great.
This has been happening also in the way people have called people with mental handicaps throughout the years, and the constant "reinvention" of the terms, to keep the names less insulting:
-----
Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "idiots" anymore. That's insulting. We'll call it people with mental retardation: retards.
General public: Yea, that is a nice neutral name, no bad connotations.
One year later:
General public: My brother is a damn retard, I hate him.
Socially responsible guy: That's insulting. We shouldn't call them retards anymore. We'll call them people with "slow mental development". Slow people.
General public: Yea, that's neutral and nice. Cool.
One year later:
General public: My neighbour is "slow" or something. Huhuhu.
Socially responsible guy: We shouldn't call them "slow", that's insulting. Well call them "people with special education needs". Special people.
One year later:
General public: My new coworker is "special". Huhuu, get it? "Special". Hehehe.
----------
Basically you can change a name any times you want. Bad fame will come to haunt you never mind how hard you try.