* The End *

... ?

    ^--- !!!

China is smart to do this. People are far too shut-in these days. Look how much entertainment has expanded and filtered in the niches of everyone's lives. It does not always have a positive effect on individuals (does the news even bother to cover stories of MMORPG recluses any more or is it now to be taken for granted?) and therefore nor does it always have a positive effect on populations.

Consider the effect that a film like "V for Vendetta" has had on activism itself. The iconic Guy Fawkes mask and the anonymized approach to public activism leaked directly from the film into peoples' lives, who took it seriously and decided to implement it in a fashion.

Consider the effect that video games have on what you decide to talk about with people when you're out shopping, or at work, or at school, just "hanging out", and so on. For many people, about the only people they wouldn't talk about their video games with would be their parents, who would grow weary of the subject and try to divert them to something "more productive". And that HAS to be a dwindling case, considering how many life long gamer are now parents of kids old enough to game passionately.

People fall in love with "weighted companion cubes" (despite the dead bodies inside). People spend a great deal of time meditating on whether the cake is a lie or whether there is no spoon.

When you add in a dimension of possible political opinion and conflict to an immersive game, it also adds those political opinions and conflicts to the discussion. With things in China as bad as they are right now, in many districts, it would be a bad idea to entertain people with some game depicting "the day after tomorrow" sort of mayhem that no doubt many of them wish was real today.

Because that is what they would be talking about around the water cooler, or out shopping, or while stocking the coal cellar, or while cooking, or at school. Especially the at school part, that's sort of what China's mostly concerned about. Remember it was students who were active in Tiananmen Square.

Every day, in the United States, I shake my head in shame at how many people are operating in their daily lives on a level of cinema fantasy running through their heads. It's not that they watch too many movies or that the content of the movies is wrong somehow, it's that they take what they've watched far too seriously and for whatever reason they've also adapted it to fit their self image and their perception of what their life actually is.

It's easy to defend these people as "needing heroes", and "needing to be heroes", and so on. But it's not easy to defend people who aren't aware of their surroundings and who aren't concerned with real events and real consequences in real life, no in any sense of the word "defend". And plenty of people -- who don't have self-image and self-esteem issues, or who aren't trying to take reality escapism to a whole different level -- enjoy their hero sagas and their epic struggles as things separate from real life. It's not those people that draw my concern, it's the growing number of others who get completely absorbed and proceed to live in a psychological bubble composed of entertainment imagery.

Case in point, "thug life", which is a cultural mainstream even in neighborhoods where there's no threat of actual gang activity and where there are plenty of opportunities for a better life. It's even a mainstream with little white upper class girls in grade school who obviously aren't going to cap anybody and if they wanted to count stacks they could learn accounting and investment from their millionaire parents. There's something lacking in someone's life besides monetary value and secure social networks, when they emulate being a thug ostensibly in pursuit of money and social standing, even when they have ready access to plenty of both.

It's expensive to get a rich man's money, but, it's cheap to fill a poor man's pockets.

Anonymity doesn't entail vitriol nor vice versa. I'm occasionally vitriolic and I use my actual name on forums and comment sections. I couldn't care if people are "scared away from the service" by that. I get way too many pluses, likes, and other positive responses to give a crap.

At any rate. If some web site tries to make you give a "real name" just fake it. There's nothing they can put in your way to ensure reality that you can't just get around, spoof out, or otherwise hack.

The whole thing about nasty shysters hiding behind pseudonyms is older than the world wide web. It's the darker side of anonymity. But there's no getting rid of it. If you try to get rid of the xBADxCATx13x 's in the world you're just going to be inundated with Ron Chauls III 's and Franklin Scarlet's and so on.

Good point. In other words, "try to assemble the Mac Pro by buying the individual components piecemeals and see if you can beat the cost of a factory Mac Pro."

I think OP meant, "live as slaves -- as equals, or face extinction". I think they meant to describe living in slavery as essentially making all of us (slaves) equal. I don't think the slave-owners were intended to be included in the equality.

It's not about what costs less to you
or saves you damn money, idiots.
It's about using less electricity.

So what if you calculate the lifetime
per each type of bulb, cost of each
type, cost of electricity used, etc.

It's not about the cost to you -- it was
a measure taken for the sake of
reducing power consumption.

It can be unnerving to have your snake go into hibernation. Not much information about it is readily available online, except in the form of forcing snakes into hibernation using refrigerators and that's for the sake of instigating them to breed more copiously immediately after coming out of hibernation. Our snake has been in hibernation for a month, now.

Couldn't you just create a computer generator for this audio, that uses a PRNG to intersperse pauses and other variations? You could create a much wider variety of conditions to put your parser through by controlling how much variation is in the length of each beep, pauses between beeps, pauses between letters. You could create a really bungling case or create a perfect case, and anything in between. Why not just do that?

Won't *noticeably* moisten the things they contact, you mean.

I don't need this abuse from you. Why don't you go work for the snake-oil company if they're so cutting edge that water isn't wet.

It just seems so, so stupid to me that in the search for real encryption, we have to rely on pseudo-randomness, so then the entire point of contention comes down to a matter of how much "pseudo" we're willing to accept. My theory is that as science goes deeper into math and logic, we're going to result in consecutively more "reliable" PRNG but those will always be dismissed by later science, and will always raise the point of contention. It's not worth getting worked up over, and it's certainly never worth placing so much investment in that that same and inevitable contention is going to seem dearly costly in retrospect. People are, by and large, stupid. If we want truly random results, we should utilize something like a photon interference field which is more or less considered to be completely random. Or the emission of particles from certain stable isotopes which are known to closely adhere to certain probabilities over time but are also known to be truly random. Then we would be forced to develop methods of encryption based on true randomness, which is only an impossibility as long as we continue to believe (within our limited paradigm) that it is so.

Gee. You other nerds on Slashdot, you're all so THMART.

Except when you're arguing with somebody who's actually aced a college level course in Anthropology.

"The larynx, or voice box, sits lower in the throat in humans than in chimps, one of several features that enable human speech. Human ancestors evolved a descended larynx roughly 350,000 years ago. We also possess a descended hyoid bone -- this horseshoe-shaped bone below the tongue, unique in that it is not attached to any other bones in the body, allows us to articulate words when speaking. "

http://www.livescience.com/15689-evolution-human-special-species.html [livescience.com]

btw -- FYFY (fixed you for you)

BTW, NONE of the shit you or the other guy said knocked down what I was saying about chimps -- they're not going to be human. Get over it. God, I can't get some of you geeks. Next time try somebody in your own high school.

I can't help but imagine you protested my remarks out of some desire to live out some fantasy related to your formative-years viewing of a "planet of the apes" sequel.

Gee. You other nerds on Slashdot, you're all so THMART.

Except when you're arguing with somebody who's actually aced a college level course in Anthropology.

"The larynx, or voice box, sits lower in the throat in humans than in chimps, one of several features that enable human speech. Human ancestors evolved a descended larynx roughly 350,000 years ago. We also possess a descended hyoid bone â" this horseshoe-shaped bone below the tongue, unique in that it is not attached to any other bones in the body, allows us to articulate words when speaking. "

http://www.livescience.com/15689-evolution-human-special-species.html

btw -- FYFY (fixed you for you)

BTW, NONE of the shit you or the other guy said knocked down what I was saying about chimps -- they're not going to be human. Get over it. God, I can't get some of you geeks. Next time try somebody in your own high school.

The fact that I got the wrong canister item (whipPED cream) aside -- totally moot considering thousands of other products WERE using CFC's back in the day -- the ozone holes didn't disappear. There's still an ozone hole, today, and scientists are largely puzzled about it.

What do you do, just sit in a basement and read whatever Time magazine tells you?

It could be the "fuzzy logic" they've used in "solving" the "problems":

... let's call a recess and re-convene when that statement makes sense, shall we?

Because I'm pretty sure that "shining lasers -- OR just some plain old light -- onto a cloud of WATER VAPOR" is basically where we've been since 1970. My parents were well-familiar with it enough to laugh about how pointless the technology of doing exactly that was, back in 1986.

Let me digress: my parents laughed at the attempts to "bring back 3D" (in cinema) back in the same time period. They thought it was atrocious that ANOTHER attempt was made in the 90's. They would be furious today that it's a recurring theme. My parents had no patience for social amnesia, and I guess I kind of don't, either.

I kind of hate these stupid stories we keep getting fed to us as "news". "We'll shine lashers at the water cloudsh, kidsh!" Okay, old man! You've been doing that same trick for 40 fucking years! You can quit! Snake oil has actually been regulated against by the government!

We'll get there eventually but shit like this (indulge me in quoting it one ... more ... time, it's such a precious artefact of our modern lack of common sense and how gullible 21st century humanity really has become):

'nuff said. Put me in the cryo-time-machine, wake me up when we have pills to get rid of TMAO-producing gut flora and when we reinvent the burger not to destroy the ecosphere.

There was this one time, when like, I thought this one thing was a bug, but when I got closer it was a pebble.

Did I ever tell you about this one time when I thought I seriously fucked my toe up, but I only stubbed it?

I remember once when I walked a long time, like it felt like tons of hours and miles, but it was only an hour and it was only like three miles. I dunno I guess I was tired.