Just another nerd.
I haven’t had time in years to play a role-playing game, which is a shame because there are so many fascinating games out there. One of the few that’s caught my fancy lately is Diana: Warrior Princess.
The premise is, as author Marcus Rowland puts it,
How can you not love that concept?
Pendant Audio is a podcast site that features ongoing serialized audio dramas. Most of them are genre-related, so there are several devoted to comic book characters such as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. They’ve also got several original shows not based on trademarked properties.
I’ve mentioned before how much I absolutely love and rely on ActiveWords which combines text substitution and program launching into one incredible application for Windows.
What I also love, as a stats freak, is its extensive reporting features which are pretty thorough considering its just a text substitution/program launching application.
For example, ActiveWords knows that in the 607 days I have had my current laptop, I have entered 5,673,094 keystrokes. Of those, 148,768 were the result of ActiveWords text substitutions — or 2.62 percent of all my keystrokes. Based on my typing speed, that’s 11 hours of typing that the program has saved me.
Similarly, based on the number of ActiveWords command that I have that perform multiple steps (i.e., macro-like processes which open an application, then a file, then do complicated string search and replaces), the program has saved me 8,159 total steps — or about 13.6 hours worth of time.
So, in total, I’ve saved about a day of my life. W00t. Actually it is much more than that because I have quite a few processes that I use ActiveWords for where before I would have had to sit and think for a few moments about all of the steps I needed to take, where now I just type a short keyword and hit F8 and the program takes care of it for me.
Rogers Cadenhead got to declare victory today in his fight against the morons at MGM over the Wargames.Com domain name.
Cadenhead registered the domain years ago to sell wargames, but MGM contended that the only possible use for the Wargames.Com domain name was for the sequel to its 1983 film War Games (and WTF is MGM thinking making War Games 2?)
The funny thing is the lengths MGM went to convince the domain arbitrator that Cadenhead clearly meant the site to reference its movie. For example, in the introduction to one of his books on Java, Cadenhead wrote,
The quote “Shall we play a game?” is from the 1983 movie War Games, in which a young computer programmer portrayed by Matthew Broderick saves mankind after almost causing global thermonuclear war and the near-extinction of humankind. You’ll learn how to do that in the next book of this series, Sams Teach Yourself to Create International Incidents with Java in 24 Hours.
According to MGM, this reference (and a few other similar references) shows the extent to which Cadenhead was obsessed with the movie which led him to register the domain.
Yeah, every time I ask my wife “Shall we play a game?” what I’m really thinking is, “I wonder how I can steal MGM’s intellectual property.”
As an aside, I saw “Wargames” during its initial theatrical run during one of my rare summer visits with my father. I never saw it again until a few weeks ago — man, the movie that looks great when you’re 14 or 15 sure looks like shit when you’re approaching 40. All I can say is that Matthew Broderick is certainly not Bill Shatner.
Reuters notes that gay and lesbian NGOs have a rather difficult time being credentialed by the United Nations which usually has almost no standards at all for such determinations (based on some of the odd groups that do have NGO status).
For example, Canada’s Coalition of Gays and Lesbians of Quebec was rejected as an NGO by an 8-6 vote. The vote in this case is extremely revealing.
Voting yes to credential the group — Colombia, Israel, Peru, Romania, Britain and the United States (hmm…and here I thought the U.S. was run by a fascist theocracy?)
Voting no — Burundi, China, Egypt, Guinea, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Sudan.
Given the tenor of the United Nations, the best bet for gay and lesbian groups would probably be to adopt anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic planks. Egypt, Pakistan and Qatar may not be thrilled by a gay and lesbian group, but if that group, say, argued that Jews were behind a worldwide plot against gays and lesbians, they’d probably win immediate approval.
Source:
Canadian and Swedish gay groups frowned on at UN. Evelyn Leopold, Reuters, February 2, 2007.
The New York Times has a typical article on sex selection. What is always odd in such stories is to see the hypocrisy of groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which, as the Times notes, opposes sex selection,
Regardless of the method, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposes sex selection except in people who carry a genetic disease that primarily affects one sex. But allowing sex selection just because the parents want it, with no medical reason, may support “sexist practices,†the college said in an opinion paper published this month in its journal, Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The same people and organizations who will talk about “reproductive freedom” and a “woman’s right” when it comes to killing an embryo all of a sudden get all squishy when that “reproductive freedom” is used to bring about an outcome with which those people and groups are uncomfortable with.
The arguments against sex selection tend to rely on the very same arguments that are typically rejected when they are applied to abortion. For example, most of us think sex discrimination is wrong and so the ACOG cites sex selection as supporting “sexist practices.” Of course much the same argument is made against abortion by pro-lifers who argue that abortions contribute to a “culture of death.”
Such arguments by nominal defenders of abortion merely highlight the vacuous, empty nature of the idea of “choice.” Rather than being a serious argument, “choice” is simply a handy justification which is typically abandoned the second reproductive issues deviate from the ethics of abortion.
Source:
Girl or Boy? As Fertility Technology Advances, So Does an Ethical Debate. Denise Grady, The New York Times, February 6, 2007.