Terminally Incoherent

Apparently Bloomberg is advocating creation of nationwide DNA database for US workers. Few years ago, saying something as insane as this would be a political suicide. DNA national databases existed only in scary futuristic dystopian visions such as Gattaca.

But hey, we live in 2006 now. Scary dystopian visions are here now. And if you think I’m exaggerating think about it for a second. Even if they this database is used for ID only, and no one can actually examine your genetic code today, you never know what is going to happen in the next 10 years. How many civil liberties were lost because of the Patriot Act? Do you remember a time when wiretapping domestic calls would be a big deal?

You never know what may change in the future. The sole existence of such a database may be a temptations future politicians will not be able to resist. Inch by inch the privacy and anti discrimination guards around it will be taken away using clever legislation.

And then, 20-30 years from now, you grandson will not be able to find any well paying job for the rest of his life, because he might be genetically predisposed to some rare disease. Yes, it is a slippery slope argument - but a very real one. We seen things like this happening in the last few years. If we let the government abuse our liberties then it can only get worse with time.

I officially entered the world of MMOG’s. My brother bought me Guild Wars for my birthday so I have been playing this for the last few days. So far I’m not addicted yet. Unlike WOW and similar games, GW does not have a monthly subscription fee so I can play it as often, as I want.

You see, I’m a casual gamer. I mainly play on weekends, or when I can find couple of hours to kill during the evenings. I just can’t justify subscribing to a regular MMO to myself. With GW on the other hand, I do not waste money when I’m not playing. So I think this is a perfect game for me.

First impression of the game is positive. Although I wish there were more options of customizing your character. You can set your height, and then pick from 6-8 class specific faces and hairstyles, and hair/skin colors. That’s about it. So everyone in the game ends up looking the same. On the other hand, this is not a really new game so I guess I can’t complain that much Perhaps I should have started off with GW: Factions. But oh well…

The game promises that there is no camping or grinding, and it is in fact true. All the adventuring areas are instanced, so the only place you get to interact with other players are towns. So gold miners can grind in the instanced areas all by their lonesome, without bothering anyone else. Unfortunately it also means that you can’t just meet people “on the road”. If you decide to wander around the world, you are on by your own.

I have mixed feelings about that aspect of the game. On one hand, it kinda sucks that the social areas are confined to towns. On the other hand, it allows the game to appear more realistic. For example if you wander around outside the town you will see villagers walking around on the local roads, or hanging out in the fields instead of hordes of players chasing down the newbie level monsters to get to level 2 quickly.

So far I only finished few beginner level quests and so I haven’t had a chance to play around with more advanced features of the game. So no formal review for now.

Internet memes are taking over! I still can’t believe that X3 referenced that trippy I’m the Juggernaught Bitch cartoon voiceover. The audience went absolutely nuts when he said that. It was priceless. The movie was worth watching just for that quite itself.

I would complain that Juggernaught is not technically a mutant (his powers are mystical in origin) but I’m going to give it a rest. Apparently in the Ultimate X-Men continuity, he is a mutant so I guess I can’t really complain that much. The last two movies clearly established that the mainstream X-Men canon is not going to be strictly followed on the big screen.

The Sentinel scene though, was such a teaser. Highly disappointing. Overall though, the movie was decent.

Update Sat, May 27 2006, 06:19 PM

Thanks to Zewrestler for posting the link to the bonus clip that was shown after the credits in the comments! Like most people I did not stay for the credits so I missed it.

If you are a slashdot reader, you probably know that the site sends out silly Futurama quotes with it’s headers. They are contained in custom fields like X-Fry, X-Bender, X-Leela and etc… Here is an example of a typical slashdot HTML header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 16:35:56 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_perl/1.29
SLASH_LOG_DATA: shtml
X-Powered-By: Slash 2.005000113
X-Bender: We're both expressible as the sum of two cubes!

No, I did not discover this myself and no, it’s not new. Google for it, and see how many hits you get. I just figured that I share the script I use to snurch the quote from that header. I have my Kmail set up so that it uses this to append a random quote at the end of each of may emails:

lynx -mime_header http://slashdot.org/ | head -n6 | tail -1 | cut -f2 -d-

I have also seen this done using sed regexps, and perl but eh… This is easier.

For the windows folk who do not speak unix, here is an English translation: grab the 6th line of the slashdot HTML header, and display everything after the first ‘-’ (the one that appears in X-Bender and etc..)

I saw the Lost season finale today. It is probably important to mention that this is the first episode of this show I have ever seen. So here is a question for all the Lost junkies out there - how long did you guys wait to find out what the hell is the purpose of that countdown timer? Cause for me it was like 30 minutes

I think that I will be peer pressured into watching it regularly when it comes back with a new season, now that I actually revealed some interest in the show. So the question is, should I try to watch the last two seasons to catch up? Is it worth catching up, now that I’m throughly spoiled by watching season finale?