Please do get it straight. Why do you build the straw man if copyright violation, and attack that, when the obvious block and replacement is at the end of your rant?

With the inserted advertising of a few years ago, it is much more likely that providers would avoid that trap.

Popup, the magic word that produces an irrational knee jerk response. When can we go back to pointing out shitty journalism instead of being baited by it?

I already have a Google OS on my phone, and a Google Mail account specifically tied to just that phone. I'd rather trust Google (and the NSA) than give info to yet another third party (and the NSA).

I see no downside to trusting Google in this situation, and more downside to trusting a third party.

I thought I was alone in this until a few weeks ago I found a site called xkcdsucks, and it appears I'm not alone in thinking this.

I'm going to blow your mind right now. I mean seriously mind-fuck material. Want to know how to earn a bazillion dollars? I'll tell you. It takes work, and it won't happen overnight, but it is like printing your own money, only legally.

Take one idea that seems to have a fan base. One single thing that a large group of people agree is a good thing. Any group of people, any object of affection.

Make a web site dedicated to pointing out all of the flaws, inconsistencies, errors, fails, and general pointlessness of that thing. You don't even have to agree with yourself. Just hate something - vehemently and consistently, except for a few occasions when you pay a back-handed compliment.

And the magical part - allow comments.

People who don't agree will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong you are. Your fans will post raging apoplectic fits on how wrong your haters are. Non-participants will hit your page daily just to see their "avatars" fight, regardless of their chosen side. Through all of this, you will get PAGE VIEWS which turn into ad revenue. You will have eyeballs, and dollars.

Cafe Press will have "Joining Yet Again is retarded" coffee mugs, and "Joining Yet Again is the new Christ" napkin holders, under your control and out of your control. You will be the messiah and the anti-christ, and rich beyond your wildest dreams.

And you don't have to be honest once.

Here's another tip that will blow your already blown mind. Other people have figured this out already.

And finally, since I'm basically retirement planning for you now, doing it on Slashdot earns dollars for Dice, not for you. How did you earn two replies today? You are a spectacular idiot - a shining example of how not to think, and how not to post. The rarest of the rare, a genuine failure pile. And I stopped to help you be less failtastic, or at least encourage you to be failtastic somewhere else, like in a closet with no internet connection.

And how long has writing existed for?

That's not even remotely the question. Writing is a red herring - it is just a qualifier to the assertion that civilizations appear to have a limited shelf life. Maybe the current global civilization will exceed that, but one out of the many that have existed, is optimistic.

Every civilization [with written records] has existed for less than 5,000 years; it seems optimistic to hope that the current one will last for 10,000 more .

While everyone else hates on your for your personal taste, I merely want to point out how you failed to parse grammar.

God dammit, you retarded sack of monkey shit. If there was any possibility of bin Laden being other than dead, it would destabilize the entire US of A to the point of people actually revolting.

The amount of outrage people felt for him was enough to give up civil liberties continuously for a decade, and feel good about it. If, 20 years from now, bin Laden poked his head out from under a rock and gave an interview, or said a word, or farted, the American people would riot in the streets. The coverage of his killing (alleged, for your sake) was so complete and his death was so final that any variation from the truth would be more outrageous than failure to capture him.

There is only one thing at this time that would unite the American people to overthrow the government, and that is bin Laden being alive. Nothing threatens the life of a soccer mom - financial crises, food chain shortages, coastal real estate being lost - nothing that she would give up the SUV and life of relative luxury, other than bin Laden being alive.

Take every violation of the constitution, put it in one place, and soccer mom says "if it helps keep the terrorists away, I'm all for it." Do you know what the opposite of that is? Literally the one thing that is the complete antithesis to every justification anyone anywhere has put forth for anything done since 2001?

Keeping the terrorists not only the opposite of "away", but alive. Lying about having killed him, and having him turn up somewhere on a video with a newspaper dated today. The SINGLE thing that could turn America into a rioting cesspool of VERY angry people, and you think that somehow the government thought it would be a good idea to lie about THAT?

If he turned up somewhere, it would defeat every justification, every court decision, every individual's belief that the government is doing things for the people. Not just that they lied - that happens all the time and no one bats an eye. But they lied about the number one terrorist in the world - the one person who can scare every average person just by appearing on TV - being killed. Not by some random ass clown in a desert, but by America's most elite using America's latest technology. A fucking stealth-coptor dropped out of the sky and put an end to America's long national nightmare.

And you think not just a few people but every person on record so far would be stupid enough to lie about it? I am all for caution, and have repeatedly posted such. But this is completely, unforgivably ignorant to even mention.

I can go with you on the long thought train to thermite and faked moon landings and the grassy knoll and whatever other lunacy you want to repeat. But this is simply knee-jerk contrarianism.

"What if it were true"? What if 9/11 was an inside job? Patriot act. What if there was more than a lone gunman? Plenty. What if the moon was faked? We beat Russia. What if everything Snowden leaked was true? Assumptions confirmed.

What if bin Laden were alive? What purpose would that serve? A political boost for Obama, to give him an easy ride to a second term? We can eliminate every Republican ever, and every closeted racist as beneficiaries. Who has anything at all to gain? No one has ever justified anything by saying "It helped us get bin Laden". No secret court, spy program, political organization has ever seen benefit. There is nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Americans had forgotten about him nearly completely, and if he disappeared into the sunset few would have noticed other than Bush haters who liked to point out the shift from "number one priority" to "not a priority".

Do you still think it is even a possibility that this did not happen?

I wonder how well that would go over with them?

You know the answer to that, and that answer is why you post meaningless rhetoric from the safety of your basement. Set up an ISP, get backbone access through a peering agreement, figure out how to isolate TLA activity, and go do it. Have your door kicked in, your pets killed, and be thrown in jail for massive breaches of wire tapping and whatever other laws they can find to overwhelm your legal team. And rot in jail for forever.

You would be a martyr for the cause, if you believe in it, but you might just affect public sentiment enough to make a small dent. Everything Snowden released so far? Much more sympathy for that guy than you using the tricks of your enemy to defeat them.

Now that you have thought about it some, I'm sure you will agree that you either posted meaningless rhetoric, or a poorly considered action plan. You will go to jail and effect no change whatsoever. If that is your plan, do continue. Otherwise actually think about what you are typing, and fix it before you hit submit.

See?

No?

The largest third party got 1 percent of the last vote. How are you going to magically get the other 32 percent needed to make any difference at all? Especially when twice as many people voted libertarian as are registered libertarian. At one percent, the vote is already straining the bounds of membership.

Do a membership drive, get all third parties behind one candidate, get more than one percent of the vote committed, and maybe the smart people will vote that way.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to keep people like Palin and Romney out of office. Not because they are Republicans, but because they are dangerous to the country. Obama won 53 to 46 percent of the popular vote - unbelievably close for a team consisting of a once war veteran turned party traitor, and a vapid twat. And a black man and a doofus won by just barely 10 percent of the votes. Which was far from certain at the time.

Come back to the big boy table when you have something to show for yourself - we're fighting real battles here.

I have a rare condition, Crohn's disease, which required emergency removal of most of my colon. I therefore have little room for normal bowel evacuation storage - it sometimes presents with an unpleasant urgency.

As it was, I found myself in the Australian outback (Kiwiville, though I doubt the Aussies would claim it), and having urges that I ignored as long as possible.

Upon returning to the mainland, as soon as I saw some brush, I announced my intention to "acquaint myself with the local herbiculture". Those among my party took my meaning - and those otherwise not did not. That was my intent of course.

I shat on a bush, to make a long story short. And my options as far as bathroom tissue were concerned included:

1) A very large, and ivy-looking, leaf
2) A very large, and lethal-looking, spider
3) My pants. While not an option, I should mention that these were not an option. American pants or British pants, they were not an option. I would like to appear in public as if I had not shat myself.
4) A baby koala, who seemed to notice my excrement the way I would that of a neutron, which is to say nearly not at all.

I must confess at this point, that there now lies in Australia, a, if you will, "sanitary napkin", whose fur should be cleansed, if not thoroughly exchanged.

I hate to be a karma whore, but your employer was the one monitoring, and raising red flags.

Sucks to be all you knee-jerk reactionaries who don't bother to read, or follow up on news.

I lied. I enjoy karma whoring when my cautionary nature is right.

Jesus fucked a monkey!

Moses on a giant boat, we need to get a handle on this. We have to delete four years worth of memories. Plus however long it takes you to figure out how to delete memories. Plus however long it takes to figure out who leaked this. Get fecking started, you ass-bastards!

Oh, and the deleting of memories and independent learning need not coincide. So get something on my desk yesterday. Other than your ass gasses. We know how to create a false memory now - can we create the memory that you never invented something that you invented?

Why would monopoles have anything to do with " Valentine's Day, no less"?

Is it because 7 people were killed by what would have been a law abiding organization without prohibition? Or because we don't know if St. Valentine is a single person or multiple people?

Or because Valentinus who served a single religion - Christianity - died on the eponymous holiday?

Or because of the mythological attribution to a single person, despite not having a single person to attribute this to, or to that person's alleged habit of marrying Christian couples despite a ban on doing so?

If the last of these, and slashdotters are typically basement dwelling asexuals, then how should I interpret this, exactly? Because I do not understand what in Moses' holy boat fundamental particles have to do with humanity in any fashion.

Men are matter, women are anti-matter, and that's as deep as I get. If the woman measure in anti-mass what the man measures in mass, plus a bit, she dictates the course of the relationship. Otherwise it is the man. Similarly if there is a homosexual relationship with one having more matter than anti-matter, the dominant gender takes the course. Beyond that this makes no sense to me.

Unpaired poles are obviously deviants screwing anyone and anything that comes across them, no pun intended. Or did I misunderstand the relevance? Maybe pun was intended, did I still miss the relevance? Poles need not be paired - they should be left to their own free will. I rather respect the Poles, as a matter of fact. What am I missing?

Oh, sensationalism, shitty editorialisation, adverts, and overall shiteness. Sorry.

I have the solution to all crime. If an authorized person would shoot every American in the head, including me, there would be no crime. Does that make it a good plan? Or a legal plan?

Reductio ad absurdum is usually a very terrible idea. But we aren't dealing with the best and the brightest here, and sometimes beating people over the head to prove a point is the only way.

E.g. the male identifying mods all have small penis'.

Penises. They have small penises.

I am obviously a grammar Nazi, with a large penis - not a mod with a small penis. Or giant clitoris, for that matter.

Also, no one cares what you read - you're probably looking for the typos, logical fallacies, incomprehensible summaries, sensationalism, broken links, incomplete headlines, and overall mediocrity in order to make your average self feel above average.

Oh wait, that's me. Based on your browsing history, you're kind of a freak.

You're confusing the hardware technology with the software technology. No punch cards - we want computers that fit in your pocket. Those are the current technologies.

This was a very shitty "essay", and by that I mean loosely related thoughts vomited onto a single page. But the fundamental idea is sound, assuming there was one.

When we were resource-constrained, people were *very* inventive (not innovative) with what they made for programmers to use. They attacked a problem with zest, gusto, and some other foreign words.

The language of MatLab, for example, does very complicated math on large data sets. That's still current, right? But not widespread. APL was very arcane, but had some of the same ideas, long ago.

With C#, we have some very powerful language to do a lot of things in a few lines of code that otherwise would have taken a much longer for() loop in most other languages.

We are getting there, to the place where languages have the features we want to have. But there is still a pile of forgotten stuff that has not made it in to the latest stable tech.

If we had the new hardware, and the old ideas, code would be find-fuckingly awesome. But no, you want to go back to when things looked good but shat turtles. So have a go at your turbo button, which looks good, but doesn't really help. Underneath, we want a better algorithm and a way to access that in a language, hardware be damned.

Write a domain-specific solution in C and be happy - or write a language that implements parallelism, data access, matrix calculations, and other 5-dollar ideas, so that a programmer does not have to waste time on solved problems.

Here's what I did for you. I listened to Confused Matthew's criticism. Then I watched 2001 again. And this is what I wrote (below the dashes). This is just about what actually happens in the movie, no interpretation or analysis or meaning. The short version is - there is a LOT happening, and it happens with the imagery and not with what people traditionally expect - dialog. The set is basically another character that does a lot of the talking that normally would break the feel of realism. If you object to realism, then just stop replying and go away because that's the fundamental point of the movie, if you strip away the details and analysis.

My conclusion first so you don't get bored: , about "changing the form" as Spielberg said Kubrick was doing, in the Afterword review, Matthew said that Kubrick "changed the form so much that it isn't recognizable any more." And here is the clincher - recognizable to the countless fans of the movie, but not to Matthew and not to you. And if you are going to quote someone to support your point, you can't present it as support, then select one of those statements and object to it. He says near the end that video has to have writing, and lists viewer feedback about the meaning of the movie. And apparently anyone can put pictures with music, and it doesn't qualify as a film. I did not know that. And if someone follows some simple formulae to create something like the political commercial, it is just as good as 2001. Listen to that part of the review again and see if it really passes the smell test. It is nonsensical and full of false equivalences. And Fantasia is a silent movie, while 2001 is not.

Gattaca has a lot of dialog - there is a lot going on. I didn't see The Man From Earth. The classics of course had most everything happen in dialog - all the explanations and history and circumstance. There was no atmosphere or scene, for the most part, other than an appropriate stage so the actors don't have to say "What a nice Doctor's office you have, Doctor". The classic movies are plays with better sets.

Gattaca is much more classically styled in this way, which makes it endurable by Confused Matthew. 2001 is certainly not standard Hollywood fare - but Gattaca is very much so, which is why apparently it qualifies as a film and 2001 does not. Gattaca is therefore probably the worst example you both could have used. It's a play, set in the future. If either of you had mentioned one of the Italian verismo films I might have just accepted and moved on. It had a blockbuster cast, $36 million budget. And it's a thriller.

Now for what I prepared
dashes here - lameness accounted.

Confused Matthew is genuinely confused. He is doing a review that starts out claiming to be objective, but then the profanity and exasperation starts immediately. There is no hint of an attempt to understand the film, and he asserts "nothing is happening" when there is clearly something going on.

I'll start with the end of the review: The last 3 minutes of the last review are based on completely refusing to see that anything happened at all in the movie beyond Hal. Clarke said that anyone understanding the movie *completely* missed the point, and it wanted to raise more questions than it answered. But he concluded as if Clarke said that anyone *partly* understanding missed the point (a box full of scrabble letters is a masterpiece). And if it was supposed to raise questions, wouldn't Matthew have some actual questions? Unless he actually missed the point of the movie completely. Most people would at least ask "What the hell is that space baby?" instead of saying "Same as a turkey sandwich". This paragraph is why you should not listen to anything Confused Matthew said, at all.

The opening serves to set the stage for the rest of the movie. In a relatively short timespan, it shows two groups of apes in disagreement, one inventing tools to hunt, and then one group using those tools to kill members of the other group. The abrupt transitions delineate the groups. The difficulty of life when you are cat food, territorial disputes, invention. All in about 10 minutes. It seems slow if you don't grasp the narrative, or if you don't realize there even is one.

And it is titled the Dawn of Man, and we know that man evolved from these hairy twits, so that must be depicting the moment one group of apes became men and the other didn't. That's heavy stuff for a film that hasn't even started yet.

At the end of all that, WTF is that giant black rectangle? Now you have a reason to "turn the page" and find out what happens next. Did the rectangle spur evolution? Or just affect mental processing?

The "floating space junk" introduces the space station, without needing some contrived example for dialog. I can see it written in 45 seconds, with an additional passenger observing that the station stopped rotating - while Floyd says no, we are rotating to match it. And another air hostess to have a conversation about the grip shoes with the first one. Instead, only two people on the shuttle, one is asleep, and we feel the vastness and slowness of space. It takes longer, but the stage is set.

More importantly, it addresses the normal slew of sci-fi questions like "how do they walk when there is no gravity," "what do they eat?" "how do you go from the rotating to the non-rotating part of the ship?" There is a crapload of information there, while "nothing is happening".

Some movies, they simply say "I'm in space" in dialog and I forget where they are supposed to be shortly after. A pen weightless, grip boots, and two pilots who don't need to explain to each other what they already know make this much more realistic and set in scene than the Exposition Twins who explain what no normal folk would bother to say.

Here's where Confused Matthew thinks that the movie starts - that nothing happened at all for 22 minutes. Apparently I just imagined that there was any value to anything that I just typed. "Dialog and story points" are the criteria for a movie to be decent at all. Atmosphere and pacing have no purpose at all, and the only way you can learn something is when people talk. Let's not forget - this is a 4 part movie, not a single story straight through.

The dialog is rather routine and mundane, but hints at problems on the moon base - more "turn the page" mystery. Buried in the banality of the formal introductions and a phone call home, this is a huge plot advancement. Yet the camera hardly changes perspective. Things are moving along quickly, but it feels glacial. The formality constrains the characters from much development, but we nonetheless capture a brief bit of a foreign language, and then the Russian has a brief "hush hush" moment when prodding for more information. The characters could have been played by mannequins, but they still exude personality in their brief appearance. In fact, the whole scene could have been a minute long "mission briefing" with one character talking into a radio. Instead of a radio, it's four people with graciousness, manners, inquisitiveness, and distinct personality. The mood changes several times, and this is so much better than a minute long catch-up.

More "nothing" while some of the questions I posed earlier are answered or expounded upon.

There is a "mission briefing", but because of the Russian we have basic awareness of what's happening, and the Council does not have to go over what they should already know. It is very natural, this is the realism, and the audience still has the mystery obscured, while watching a room full of people who are discussing that very mystery. Between the lobby scene and the Council scene, and the informality on the small transport vehicle, Floyd's character is now much richer.

Character development (changing, learning, maturation) is not a primary focus here, as the depth of the mystery is revealed. We see the monolith, it's the same as what seemingly initiated the development of tools and gorillicide, the music is spooky, and it's the monolith that develops as a character. Matthew would prefer they just get right the fuck down the hill, but this is realism and people move slowly in bulky space suits in low gravity.

Through the third act, the focus is almost a character study - partly Dave, but mostly in HAL. Character development of a computer is done brilliantly through the humans' actions and dialog. Dave and Frank are eating and watching a BBC broadcast, but we can see their personalities in the interview footage. It is a genius replacement of the "talking head" exposition, since we learn a good bit about these people who are not doing much of anything.

There is only one thing that happens in the third act, which takes an hour to accomplish. Almost half of the movie for one of the four parts, so obviously the most important. Hal asks Dave about his apparent unease about the mission, and Dave asks Hal if he is updating the staff psych report. Hal says yes, and interrupts with a failed part alert. The entire third act is Hal recognizing that Dave poses a risk, and probing him for fitness to continue the mission. Create doubt, see how they handle it, and then respond to what is now a threat. Hal and Dave are playing cat and mouse and evolving knowledge of the others' position, while maintaining a facade of normalcy. Literally, it is the psych eval - metaphorically it is all the chess game. These are not flat characters - they are very subtle, and even if you don't notice them, there is a story happening. Matthew recognizes that at least.

But he is wrong about Hal being scared and panicked, and definitely being a villain. But that's not clear from just watching this movie, so I'll let him by with a warning.

The moment that Dave catches Frank, he is visibly angry and/or scared. Hal knows this will be a critical time, and terminates the remaining crew so they won't ask what happened to Dave and Frank. "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" is spoken quickly on his return, and he is visibly agitated, struggling to find a solution, and trying to pretend nothing is wrong. Anger and frustration, panic, impotence, and finally self composure and problem solving. It is not the emotional outburst people would expect, but that would be out of place. Again, it is richly subtle, but in a sterile movie these are hugely effective - especially because they are basic body language that we process on a subconscious level. We don't need Will Smith to yell "That hunk of junk is startin a piss me right the hell off". Anyone who complains that Dave is flat has no empaty.

Not only does Hal gradually become more dimensional as we learn, his adaptice strategies, to me, qualify as character development as he defends his mission. And Hal pleads for his life very humanly - by acknowledging mistakes, re-focusing on the mission, and affirming future performance, and finally saying he is afraid. And listening to Hal die is kinda sad. It takes time, but he pleads, says he is afraid, devolves, reverts to his "childhood", slows down, and the shining eye fades out.

Here's where the acid trip starts. And given the sterile subtlety of the last 2 hours, and right on the back of a dying computer and sudden revelation of the mission, it's a doozy. It is straining to hear dialog in an emotional close of your show, then the commercial blasts out at taint-yanking volume. This is the truly mesmerizing, hypnotic genius that was, and still remains, groundbreaking.

And I won't even start on the ending - best to leave that alone.