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Comment: Re:Thinkpads have their OWN style. (Score 1) 278

by MsGeek (#41048485) Attached to: The ThinkPad Goes Ultrabook &mdash; ThinkPad X1 Carbon Tested

Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.

Comment: Re:A few more (Score 4, Informative) 1244

by MsGeek (#39270889) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Good, Forgotten Fantasy &amp; Science Fiction Novels?

Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.

Comment: Re:most of the cast is still around (Score 1) 288

by MsGeek (#37139546) Attached to: Ridley Scott To Direct New <em>Blade Runner</em> Movie

James Hong is also still around. And I met both Hong and Joseph Turkel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007. Hong was getting a lot of love not just for Dr. Chew, but also for that immortal dude he played in "Big Trouble In Little China." But Turkel was barely visited, so we got to talk. Politics, Blade Runner, Old Hollywood, and other cool subjects. He signed an 8 x 10. I paid for it, because he was donating his share of the money to Doctors Without Borders, a truly deserving cause. He asked me "OK, what Tyrell quote do you want on it?" Since it was a picture of Tyrell with Batty before Batty sent Tyrell to his deserved demise, and since it was one of the best lines in the movie, I had him write "Revel in your time!" He appreciated the choice too. "Yeah, you never quite have enough time to do everything you want to do. We really are all replicants...not willing to accept just the years we have." It was poignant, because even though he seemed really vital and mentally active, Turkel was getting on in years.

I really am not happy with this. Although having Ridley Scott on board gives me wan hope this isn't going to totally suck, the prospect of a huge tentpole movie with a CGI retrofitted Los Angeles and everything in 3 FRIGGIN D just hurts when I think of it. I would prefer to see them completely strip it down, make it an almost indie movie which puts the action in the Los Angeles that exists RIGHT NOW, because there have been enough things added to the Downtown LA skyline that look like Blade Runner since the movie came out, and more is coming. If you don't believe me, google LA Live and The Library Tower. The Wilshire Grand Hotel is going to be torn down and replaced with a skyscraper that will have video walls.

Blade Runner was too special to remake. I hope this doesn't happen, like Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in a live-action Cowboy Bebop won't happen, or Leonardo diCaprio in a white-washed version of Akira. But if it does, Ridley Scott will probably not allow the quality level to go too far down.


by MsGeek (#36489068) Attached to: Weather Satellites Lose Funding

And this particular political party also has a vested interest in denying anthropogenic climate disruption. So they defund weather satellites. How utterly convenient!

BTW, this comment:
for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
should be fixed thusly:
for example, if there were a heavily Democratic Party-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee

The same political party in question likes to call their opposite number the DemocRAT party. They spit it out like weeks-old leftovers. They want people to associate the Democratic Party of the United States of America with Rattus rattus norvegicus. Sort of like how Radio Rwanda associated the Tutsi tribe with cockroaches.

Comment: Re:2 questions for the TSA (Score 1) 570

by Fulcrum of Evil (#36122138) Attached to: Baby's First TSA Patdown

I think you're confounding "TSA" with specific methods introduced with the TSA like body scanning and enhanced pat downs that are of dubious value.

No, I am specifically talking about those methods. You have yet to establish that there is anything to deter. You've just declared that the TSA protects us (while stealing shit).

It's an easily supportable assertion, unless you insist that I prove a negative assertion *by example*, which is of course impossible to do.

Well, we can look at the number of hijackings/attacks in the decade leading up to 9/11 (on us flights) and in the decade after. I count 1 attempt before (someone hijacked a cargo jet in 1994 so they could fly it into fedex HQ) and 2 or 3 attempts (shoe guy and underwear guy) with zero effectiveness from the TSA for the after, so we do see some attempts being made, but the TSA did nothing to detect/preent them. With that level of egg on their face, you would expect them to crow loudly about anything they actually did right, but instead, they're trying to harass train travelers. basically, they don't do shit, so why do we have them?


by Fulcrum of Evil (#36121056) Attached to: Baby's First TSA Patdown

Given that we *know* there are people out there who would like to hijack American planes, and there haven't been any attempts made, we have to assume that *some* of what TSA is doing is an effective deterrence to attempts.

No we don't, and if anything, we should be comparing them against what we did before - metal detectors, bomb sniffers. They're a whole lot more invasive and they don't do shit.

For example, metal detectors combined with the inspection of carry-on luggage are surely an effective deterrent to carrying on firearms and other weapons.

I was talking to an old timer in the TSA line; he said that in the 70s, you could bring guns on the plane - they had a locker that they'd store your gun in for you.

Bureaucratic pig-headedness is bad customer service, but it is necessary for deterrence.

Unsupported assertion. We had plenty of deterrence on 9/10/2001
