The USS Quad Damage

Apparently Warner Bros is up in arm about an Indian film with a character called Hari Putter and have taken court action against the producers of the film.

Hari Putter however has no magical powers and there is no magic alternate world in the movie.

Meanwhile there is a 1986 film called Troll which has a boy character called Harry Potter whom actually discovers he has magical powers and enters an alternate magical world to fight monsters.

Perhaps Warner Bros would like to sue the producers of that film for coming up with the character over a decade before that anoying female british writer plagiarized it.

If you look at the world’s flags, there are some pretty awesome ones out there. Due to the heavy contrast and bold colours, flags can be the most striking depiction of a country.

Australia’s nation colours, everyone in Australia agrees, are shithouse. Green and gold were never really meant to be put together, and yet we’ve got to sneak them into our olympic uniforms. See if you can spot them in this year’s olympics. owever, I really like them. We’ve built such a sporting name of ourselves with those colours, they mean something now, and they didn’t before. They feel like our culture, our heritage, like our gaudy high school uniforms. The more I look at those colours the more they look like home.

However, when confronted with the flags of all the nations, Australia’s flag… didn’t really seem like it represented our nation like the others. Look at Nepal’s flag. This flag was the one which pretty much made me feel a little bit bad about ours. Not only is it the only non-rectangular flag in the world, you could actually begin to see Nepal behind this flag. It’s got that punch which makes people think twice.

When reading the Wikipedia entry for the Flag of Australia I realised I wasn’t the only one who thought that our flag looked a little un-representative. The whole British emblem on the top left alongside the 800 other countries with almost the exact same flag makes it feel like “well, Britain’s the important part”.

Take a look for a moment at the Australian Aboriginal Flag, but try and forget all the Aboriginal context that’s associated with it. Imagine the person you respect most has come up with this flag idea and it looks like that flag. OKOK, not quite like that flag, with the Red and Yellow bits matching the colour scheme of the Vietnam flag. Well.. maybe brighter yellow, but you get the idea. It’s dark and the Sun’s just coming up, and the earth is red. Is that not more like home, in your heart?

The PETA or the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals usually use either famour celebrities or naked women to attract attention to what ever rediculous message they are trying to peddle to the public.

Now however they have found a new tactic. Claim to want to do something so stupidly outrageous it gets news coverage.

Such as wanting to advertise on the USA/Mexico border wall warning mexicans against the perils of eating meat.

Or saying they want to buy a Sea World, release all the animals and replace them with virtual reality exibits.

Perhaps they could buy old naval sub marines to sink fishing or whaling ships on the high seas.

Or buy the Statue of Liberty and convert it into a giant I’d rather go naked than wear fur advertisement.

Why stop there. Why not claim they want to buy the moon, build a moon base and send the worlds animals there so that they may be safe from humans.

I mean it’s not like they are actually going to do it and the more rediculous the better the media story. Thus some journo will report on it because it is apparently news worthy.

We were playing Cod4 yesterday, and there was a player on the other team named "Elmo". This wasn’t strange in itself. Lots of people have unexpected avatars in a game. Elmo was very good, consistently being on the top of the team’s leaderboard. The only surprise there is that he wasn’t clearly part of some clan (Clan {SeS} perhaps?). At the end of the game he said something not immediately shocking, but it was something which grew to bother me:

Elmo: The only person who did well was Elmo.

Initially, that sounds like hubris. Initially, I thought he was joking—pretending to be someone else praising Elmo’s skill. It took a few seconds to realise that he was speaking about himself in the third person. Still hubris, but now as some sort of monarch. It took a little while to register who the avatar was in real life.

Elmo is a character from Sesame Street who talks about himself in the third person. Elmo, the player, was in effect pretending to be Elmo from sesame street. It was like some sort of twisted role playing. He clearly wasn’t a serious role player, because the very idea of Elmo (effectively a cartoon character) in a serious, war setting, is preposterous. In addition, he ripped off a character from a TV show rather than creating his own. However, he clearly saw more to it than just a name, and felt the need to adopt the persona of Elmo. In effect, he was pretending to be Elmo the player, rather than Elmo the character in the game.

So, my question is, why aren’t there any female models in COD4?

What ever happened to the almost nightly reporting of record petrol and oil prices?

Earlier today I read this article called Pregnant? Forget about a new job and saw that you could leave a comment.

So I did.

I asked if it was safe to assume that the person in the story, Simone Giblin, was applying for full time jobs. Given that she made a point of saying that if she was hired by someone she would be very grateful and would want to return to work part time after she’s had her baby.

Nice of her huh?

Except ofcourse makes the whole story not about some pregnant person being turned down from jobs because she’s pregnant but instead a story about someone wanting part time work and being turned down from full time positions.

Anyway I reread the article and noticed that there is now no option to comment on the story.

A little while ago, "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness – Episode 1" (hereafter RSPD) was released. Considering the game comes from those who write a webcomic about games, not to mention, folks who are regularly critical of… regular games… the game was hotly anticipated, and many were keen to have their own say about it.

I played RSPD shortly after it came out, and wrote down some impressions. Here they are, now that everyone already knows what the game is like:

The very first thing that hits you about the game is that Tycho and Gabe were somehow involved in it’s creation (I am the best reviewer evar). You really notice everything from the game mechanics, art style, and writing are in a style that they display on their webcomic and in their "news". Every object you interact with is individually narrated. Every trash-can, each pointless door, every retarded cat has paragraphs written about how it’s not really important, and how that it doesn’t impact your life. Unfortunately, these trashcans occasionally contain items which you find useful, so you have to interact with them all. Seriously, after like the fifth time, it’s no longer funny. After the twentieth, it’s infuriating hearing about the life story of a trashcan. I understand that they were trying to be ironic, but it started to remind me less of Tycho and more of Jane Austen.

There were far too many garbage cans and crates. Garbage cans and crates are well known "cut-and-paste" level elements, so I can see that they’re being ironic here as well, but it stil makes the game seem dull and repetetive, even though each of them look slightly different, and have slightly different narration. The whole thing seems as though a whole cavalcade of art  and text vomited onto the screen.

The game itself is practically final fantasy, with a little bit of quick-time events. It’s not a bad game, but it tries too hard to not try too hard…

However I didn’t hear anything about him looting the guild bank.

Seriously the whole thing reminds me of how WoW raiding guilds handle people leaving especially when your a decent player.

I think I was telling Sunny with a U ages ago about it. Here’s a perfect if real world example of what happens.

Sonny Bill could face criminal charges: Gallop

Watch the linked movie if you can.

Link

I can’t say anything without being angry, so I’ll just post the link.

I’ve begun to see more and more TV screens in cars such as 4WDs. Invariably, they’re playing cartoons for the kiddies in the rear seats to watch. There’s only one problem. I sometimes start watching them as well. On the road, they’re the brightest thing visible, and they’re right in the line of sight. Also, I’m curious as to what they’re subjecting their kids to (usually spongebob squarepants). I’ve actually gotten so drawn in once that these bright lights came on and I was like "WTF"

The car was braking.

NSW urged to learn from WYD transport success. It’s down the bottom.

So the average wage of a worker in Australia is something like 50k a year, obviously higher in the CBD. World Youth Day lasted about a weak. However the CBD was deserted thanks to traffic fears. Thus if 239,200 people at 50k a year took the week off then there’s been no net benefit to the economy? Funny how thats also around the same amount of pilgrims (200k) whom attended WYD.

Homer Simpson: Okay, boy. This is where all the hard work, sacrifice, and painful scaldings pay off.
Employee: Four pounds of grease… that comes to… sixty-three cents.
Homer Simpson: Woo-hoo!
Bart Simpson: Dad, all that bacon cost twenty-seven dollars.
Homer Simpson: Yeah, but your mom paid for that!
Bart Simpson: But doesn’t she get her money from you?
Homer Simpson: And I get my money from grease! What’s the problem?

Police hoons caught ignoring speed limits

Summerised offduty police staff and officers were caught by fixed speed cameras doing upto 20km/h over the posted speed limits in Queensland.

Which follows the suspended licence of a NSW minister for sub 15km/h above the posted speed limits.

Seriously when those that make the laws and those that enforce the laws don’t deem the laws worthy of being enforced then maybe just maybe they aren’t there for safety but instead exist as a tax.

I liked His and Her Circumstances because it was very terse. The voice overs were done very quickly, and the story was kept concise. The whole time, the punch lines came hard and fast, and so did the emotions. For someone with very little patience, Kare Kano was a great anime.

I would say that it aspires to an infernokrusher aesthetic. I like the idea behind infernokrusher, because it’s: * Short tempered – Everything is kept concise and minimalist * Lossy – Due to the sudden flaming destruction of the subject matter, it is required that many things are left up to the reader, or implied. * Attention-grabbing – The main point here is to keep the key points of something in one’s head. Poignant explosions trigger memories.

I believe this is ideal for documents in a workplace. When places end up with way too much documentation which no one follows, and no one can use their own judgement and decision making skills when following processes, infernokrusher is an ideal aesthetic for these documents to have: * Get to the Point – Because no one really cares, and the people who you need to convince are antithetic to your point. * Imply a lot – Expect that your document is skimmed. Make your most important points in the most effective locations. * Trigger memories with explosions – Make people remember things in your document.

No one seems to agree. Workplaces seem to have this soul-sucking boredom entrenched in their fabric. Ironically, they are doomed to a ball of flame.

Violent video games often bear the brunt of the blame when some loon goes out to kill a bunch of people. Luckily, while some of these loons play video games, none of them are associated with gaming. They’re not avid or pro gamers, they’re not game designers, and they’re not game programmers. People from many walks of life sometimes commit murder, whether it’s doctors, or CEOs, or economists. However, unlike these other professions, I think that if someone "in the gaming industry" or "well known in gaming circles" killed someone else, gaming in it’s entirety would be in a lot of trouble.

There was a kind of joke "test", which asked you to find if someone was a Programmer or a serial killer. I thought it was fairly funny, because maybe that’s how we present ourselves to the outside world. If an economist was a serial killer, people would say "I’m so shocked that an economist would do this"; if a programmer was a serial killer, people would say "I always knew those guys were a little off-kilter." I figured we’d never get to a situation where a well known programmer would kill someone. Then Hans Reiser happened. I’ve mentioned reiserfs a few times before, and I’ve always spoken fondly of it. Even though it didn’t take off, I still admire the idea. It’s really quite bad that the dude’s gonna have "murderer" next to his name. The wikipedia entry already has more about the murder and trial than about reiserfs.

Quite sad.

I’ve uploaded "fwoosh" on vimeo, which has fairly decent video quality. I’ve got the links on the sidebar. For now, anything I upload to vimeo will appear there. If we make more videos, we can make a "channel" so only the team choko videos will be on this site. We should also consider restarting the team choko productions site. I’ll upload some of the other videos (like Waldorf’s) when I can blur out certain details (like Harpy’s license and my car’s registration plate). Unfortunately, due to the people involved in, say, thief and the bundanoon vid. We should consider remaking thief, and maybe make some more stuff.

I appear to have lost planet ninja…

I saw some statistic which claimed that 74% of pedestrians being hit by vehicles were the fault of the pedestrian. Even if the percent was 0.0001% I’m stumped as to who pays when a pedestrian is at fault in a car accident.

I did some googling and nothing. I do remember seeing something about the NRMA or some similar australian insurance company suing children for damages caused in car accidents that were their fault. However it was in the context of an article condeming the insurer as a money grubbing organisation.

I would assume if some pedestrian steps out infront of you then they’d have to pay or it would be built into your insurance premium as an accident that wasn’t your fault. Thus no no-claim penalty.

Or am I looking at this all wrong and every single car accident where a pedestrian is hit by a motorvechicle is a fault of the driver under the law?

Opera 9.5 was released around the same time as FF3, and sports a bunch of new features. It beats firefox in rendering speed as well as accuracy (Acid3), and does it in a smaller memory footprint. This is nice, and I want that, but I’m not getting Opera 9.5. Opera has always struck me as a scary browser. The features it has are more powerful than other browsers, but require more memory and "rote learning". FF will ask you to "Remember password" if you enter one on a site, but Opera has a "Magic Wand" which AFAIK you have to trigger yourself. The mere fact that it’s called a "magic wand" makes it ominous. I see Opera as I see the ‘vi’ editor. Terse and powerful, but confusing. I like FF for it’s minimalism, extensibility, and usability.

You may not agree with me, but the point is fairly simple: Opera doesn’t float my boat. Firefox does. However, here’s the problem: Opera is written by talented engineers in a capitalist economy. They used to charge for it, but no longer do so (I wonder how they make money, now). Mozilla, OTOH, are a non-profit which is written by (equally talented) engineers who are out to enrich people’s lives. I can donate to the Mozilla foundation, but I don’t think that most FF developers would see that money, since FF is not really about the money. If I paid for Opera, some software engineers presumably would see the money.

I’m an OSS kind of guy. I’m practically a free software kind of guy. The thing that stops me from taking the final step is the Opera factor. I want talented software engineers to benefit from my cash as I benefit from their software. However, how can I do that in a reasonable way? Also, simply by being an awesome free alternative, isn’t FF depriving these software engineers of money? I mean, on the one hand they’re enriching society, but on the other they’re hurting other software engineers, people who they should have a strong empathy with.

I guess I’m arguing that a BSD style license is better than a GPL style license, because with the former, you’re benefitting other software engineers as well as everyone else. By contrast, with the latter you’re only benefitting the users. However, is it really that simple? Should Mozilla be doing things to actively (for lack of a better term) "invite" Opera to integrate itself within firefox itself? Shouldn’t Opera be working with the ‘zilla guys to give a little, and then use that for their own browser? This way, the commercial browsers will always have a competitive advantage over the open source ones, but the open source ones are guaranteed to be able to catch up. Having commercial software "working together" with free software helps everyone. The free software benefits, because more code plops into it. The commercial software benefits, because so much re-use is available, and there’s a sort of "guarantee" that the commercial software will be one step ahead of the free stuff. Is this not the right thing to do?

An interesting read at smh.com.au called For Earth, a carbon price is priceless.

Summerised the idea is that we need a carbon tax to push investment into energy generation that doesn’t emit CO2 as the current fuel alternatives, coal to fuel, tar sands oil extraction, oil shale extraction, all produce alot more carbon dioxide than normal crude from the ground. All of these have fairly low break even points compared to the current price of oil.

After reading it I remembered back to the 1970’s oil crisis’s and how one of the factors screwing up supply back then was artificial scarcity when I think the United States government decreed that already proven oil was to be sold at the pre crisis price and newly found oil was to tbe sold at the market rate. In effect creating an incentive to find more oil. The problem was that those with proven reserves simply stopped selling oil creating an artificial scarcity.

Anyway the idea popped into my head that perhaps one of the factors contributing to record oil prices is that markets are factoring in a future carbon tax. Which would mean that it is beyond OPECs power to lower oil prices. Infact it is beyond any oil producer to lower oil prices because at some point in the future oil pumped from the ground is going to be one hell of alot more expensive thanks to a carbon tax. Or to put it another way the only way oil prices are going down is if world governments decide that there are worse things people can be doing than emitting carbon dioxide and get over this whole carbon dioxide hysteria and tackle some real, present day, quantifiable problems.

Some family in Scotland registered the domain name Narnia.mobi as a gift to their son to use as his email address.

The article proceeds as a normal David vs Goliath battle of some rich corporation vs your poor average person. Obviously they should be able to keep the domain and the people running CS Lewis’s company are evil, evil people.

Hmm. Maybe not. See .mobi is supposed to be specifically used for delivering web pages to mobile internet devices. Infact 100% of the pages published on .mobi domains MUST be tailored for mobile devices. It’s basically the .com .org .net .mil .gov .whatever else of mobile phone devices. The family however is not intending to use it as such and it really should be turned over to the CS Lewis company, perhaps with the family being paid the cost of registration and maintinance of the domain. Atleast at a common sense abstracted public relations media level as the original article intended. Whether or not this is the case under the law is however a whole other story.

My dad’s a lunatic. He told me about this water powered car created by a company named Genepax. I assumed he found this "information" on the webnet, and proceeded to make fun of him. He does this kind of thing a lot.

If you googled genepax you’d find not their website, but a bunch of actual news sources, including engaget and gizmodo, as well as SMH and a bunch of television news sources. Everyone seems to believe this is real.

Let me try that again… Everyone believes that if you put water into a fuel cell which outputs.. water.. the water is somehow generating electricity. There’s only really two buzzwords thrown in between "water goes in" and "Fuel cell". The only thing curiously missing is the apparently miraculous ability of the fuel cell to generate water as it’s output. What gives newspapers the right to just regurgitate a fucking white paper without checking their sources? Exactly how many physicists… or even high school students were consulted about this? My dad’s a fucking retard as is, he doesn’t need a bunch of reputable sources somehow vindicating his beliefs.