Was this The Perfect Dunk?
Effective dunk? Check. He slammed it home with authority.
Patriotic dunk? Check. He did it in the red, white, and blue.
Mean dunk? Check. He put his hand on the head of the Australian center to vault over him, in Australia, in front of the home country crowd.
Vince Carter might have made the perfect dunk that year.
Update: Oh yes, and he did it off of a steal, too, to give him defensive credit on the play. All the better!
Having gotten not one but two Hawaii quarters with my change at the grocery store just now, I’ve now acquired one of each of the 50 state quarters.
It took ten years to get them all, but I’ve done it.
Hooray.
On top of that, Winco had honey roasted sunflower kernels. Mmm.
Google may be a name that evokes thoughts of flashy, new Internet technologies, or of a friendly relationship with the greater Internet community, but us critics have seen what they were up to all along. Just like any other industry titan, it takes what it can get, with government help when it must. What’s news, though, is that even the LA Times is taking notice:
“Google is not just a benign corporate entity. It has a variety of special interests,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, who has sparred with Google over data-privacy issues. “They’re in a great position to push their agenda through with the support of the [P]resident and the Democrats in Congress.”
….Competitors worry about Google’s close relationship with the Obama administration, said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
“The question going forward is: Will Google turn into just another business entity looking for favors in Washington, or will it manage to keep the 767 flying at 30,000 feet above the political din?” he said, a reference to the Google founders’ private plane.
Going forward? Going forward? They’ve been this way all along.
Google’s oft-quoted goal is “Don’t be evil,” but a more accurate description is “Be Democratic, except when money gets in the way.” They fool some of the people all of the time, and it’s a blast to watch. Google pretends to be this great, free software-friendly company, but at every opportunity they pull the same embrace and extend tactics that Microsoft has perfected, on more than one occasion. It’s all about lock in with them. Just like Microsoft does with Windows and Word, Google wants you tied to their services forever.
But the idea that they’ve been politically isolated before the election of Obama is silly. They’ve actually been pushing for their perverted vision of “net neutrality” from the beginning. Why do I say perverted? The original “net neutrality” push was one against a fragmentation of the Internet, where users of one ISP had a hard time reaching the services of other ISPs’ users.
Google, though, has worked to redefine the entire debate. Using their corporate dollars, Google has turned the debate into one of whether people should have to pay for what services they use, and block people from even having the option of paying for faster, more reliable Internet access. Google wants to use government to try to get casual Internet users to continue to subsidize aggressive users of Bittorrent, Google’s own YouTube, and other high-bandwidth services.
I say “continue to subsidize,” because high bandwidth users have been subsidized by casual users since the dawn of Internet in the home. Dial-up Internet only worked as a business because every user did not want to be connected all the time. The businesses were profitable because they could oversell their capacity, counting on some people to dial up only occasionally. However those who dialed up constantly paid the same rate for more service. They (we, properly, as I certainly make the most of my Internet connections, and always have) use up the allotment of others, in essence.
The same holds true today with the new DSL, Cable, and even Wireless Internet services. As demonstrated during the Obama inauguration, these services only work if most people choose not to use what they’ve paid for! That’s a great deal for the high-bandwidth users, but it’s not so great for the rest of the users, when those high-bandwidth users cause everyone else’s rates to go up because of all those episodes of South Park passing through the series of tubes.
So naturally, a lot of people who are active on the Internet have thrown themselves fervently behind Google’s “net neutrality” push. Fearing they’ll have to pay for what they use, they want Big Government to step in and keep the gravy train rolling along. Of course, this helps Google, because that gravy train has stops in GMail, Youtube, Google Documents, Picasa, Google Maps, Blogger, Google Talk with Video, and other Google services to come.
The “Net Neutrality” subsidy isn’t the only issue Google has taken up arms for even. We don’t usually think of corporations actually giving valuable donations in politics because of federal law, but California has no law prohibiting a corporation from giving to efforts for or against a ballot measure. Google has taken full advantage of that, using corporate resources to oppose Proposition 8, giving $140,000 in cash, on top of the six figures of cash donations that the Google founders individually gave to the failed (ha, ha) effort.
So, to sum up: Way to wake up to what’s already been going on, Times. Now you know why we already have no special, gushy love for Google. And now we know what we have to gear up to fight on the Internet front.
I may have called it a C, and it frustrates me to no end from time to time… but I can’t quit it.
I’m revising my grade for a pickup game: B+ for 2fort. C- for the rest. You can get by in CTF with a lot of lousy teams if you’re good enough, and careful to constantly shift classes to single-handedly adapt to the rock-paper-scissors strategic situation. You can’t specialize.
Also, the people who just run around trying to kill things and rack up points can be useful if you play off of them and fill in the role they aren’t. Again and again I’ve been the behind the scenes MVP just doing the grunt work that sets up good wins, playing this way.
It’s still frustrating when your team is really bad and the other team is pretty good, because then you just have no hope. It’s also frustrating when some guy changes to being a Sniper just after you do, so then you change to fill in the gap he left behind, and then he changes out too. Or when both teams are heavily loaded with Engineers, so even switching to Spy and trying to soften them up is worthless because your teammates don’t come in after you and take advantage.
I’m finding that the other modes are really, really hit or miss though. Just running around aimlessly can’t be played off of in the control point modes. When the other team invades or defends as a unit, you just can’t afford to be shorthanded like that. The defeats get brutal.
But yeah, I’m the battered wife of Team Fortress 2.
So I grabbed Everyday Shooter off of the Playstation Online Store at the recommendation of Ben Domenech. When my Playstation 3 was on the way I asked him for a list of things that were good to get, and that was on the list.
I don’t like it. It’s not a terrible game, no. But I find the graphics dull, the music and sound grating, and the gameplay dull. It has that classic luck element, but it also pretends to be a game you want to play all the way through level by level.
Maybe it’s not fair that for a couple months there I’d been playing a fair amount of Geometry Wars. I think that’s the much better game all around. Geometry Wars certainly has a luck element, but it plays by score, not completion of levels. That’s how it was meant to be with such classic arcade-style action.
So I congratulate Everyday Shooter on being a somewhat interesting game that manages to slow the pace and works hard to draw you in. I just prefer Geometry Wars and its, for lack of a better word, purer experience. Oh, and better graphics and sound, according to my preferences.
The doofuses over at the Gawker empire are throwing temper tantrums over Obama and his support for “warrantless wiretapping.”
Rights for foreign Islamofascists on foreign soil who like to behead Jews, oppress women, and brutally butcher Americans have long been a cause of the far left. For whatever reason, these people have been angry that President Bush oversaw the wiretapping of communications between foreign terrorists and their agents in America. “Orwell!” they shrieked in their post tags. This literally, truly was the boot stomping on our faces, forever. If you’re a terrorist, but who isn’t? I mean even President Obama pals with terrorists. Doesn’t everyone make calls to Al Qaeda every week or so?
So, one asks why they were wetting themselves for The One before they backed him in the election. Gizmodo, like many, claim to have noticed that then-Senator Obama backed President Bush on FISA and, importantly, immunity for firms who participated in… “warrantless wiretapping” programs.
The One could have taken a stand. He could have done the Mr. Smith goes to Washington filibuster of the bill, getting up to talk and not stopping until he was forced to by his colleagues. He could have gone in front of the cameras every day railing against the bill.
Instead, he voted for it.
That left the opponents of the wiretaps with a choice to make. They could have turned on him. They could have stood up for the Fourth Amendment, which they claimed was being violated. They could have stood up against the coming 1984, which they claimed was our future with such wiretapping going on. They could have gotten up and shouted Barack Obama down at every whistle stop he made.
Instead, they voted for him.
Congratuations, guys: You can whine all you want, and you can make all the claims of principle that you want, but by working to elect President Obama, you are complicit in this program now. You had every opportunity to oppose him after he sided with President Bush on FISA, but you did not. You knew what you were getting into, and you did it anyway.
I guess we’re all “Neocons” now.
How do you think Islamofascist terrorists everywhere feel that we’ve now inaugurated an Islamic apostate as our President?
Bring it on, fellas. You are failures. Not only is it certain Obama survive his entire term, but he’s going to kill a bunch of you on top of that in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. You are weak. You are utterly, totally rejected and unable to impose your will upon us. Just listen to the prayer Obama had made before he took the oath.
Islamofascism is the weak horse.
Got a Playstation 3 last week. 60GB, backward compatible, etc. etc. Won’t play my Japanese games but it should play everything else my Playstation 2 plays.
I also picked up the Orange Box. I’d heard good things about Portal and Team Fortress 2.
Well, I am through Portal. It really was everything it was set up to be. The game mechanics are great and well-executed. The setting and characters, limited as they are, are interesting and engaging. The only complaint I have about the game is that certain maneuvers seem impossible on the Playstation 3, with respect to throwing cubes and getting low-time and low-portal victories. That is minor post-victory stuff though.
Team Fortress 2 is also fairly well done in theory, but in practice I have some complaints that lead to frustration: It’s supposedly a Team game, but there are so many cues and stats that reward individual play, but don’t reward thankless team play, that random players online are not encouraged to play team roles. Right down to the inability to see what classes your team already has when you choose a class, the game encourages every man for himself, unfortunately. So in practice TF2 is only any good if you have a large stable of friends online at once to play with, I think.
Half Life 2? Forget it. I just tried it and a) I don’t know where I am, b) I don’t know what’s going on, c) I don’t know what my goal is, and d) thegame sems to be a series of scenes, each with a gimmick you have to find, hindered by the ugly setting and confusing texturing, as well as the swarms of monsters who in practice can only be killed, yes, with more gimmicks.
HL2 seems only playable in small bits, playing a bit over and over again until you find the gimmick. I’ll pass.
From New Scientist:
If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized [ed: uber tiny] squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.
Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. “Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry,” says Hogan.
We won’t rewrite New Scientist’s entire brilliant piece, but needless to say, that Hogan guy in the quote above not only thinks that a new experiment may have found that noise in our holographic signal—he predicted the experiment’s results before they happened. Hit the link to blow your pea brain for the day. Then ask yourself if we’re all just bits of information on God’s hard drive.
Anyone know where I can get Eternal Sphere cheat codes? I need to be ready for when the Executioners come.
If we’re truly going to have Big Brother watching everyone, with bleeding heart utopian programs leeching money from hard-working Americans to give it away to whoever asks, then where does that leave private charity?
When SCHIP inevitably makes medical care less affordable to more Americans, and people are hurt, while at the same time the coming tax hikes make the producers of society less well off, doesn’t the rational response to the cries of the hurt become a Dickensian “Don’t we have programs for that?”
The basic problem with socialist programs is that they are totalitarian, cutting off the natural urge to help people in one’s community and replacing it with the cold, progressive state. That scares me.