I think the complaint is that he is green in the game, where he should be brown.
I think I might know the "why" to the question, which is that I think they might have been worried that a small percentage of people would be using a black and white TV and brown might not be enough of a contrast.
The B&W switch on the 2600 sets a register that can be read at runtime allowing for color changes that better support black and white TVs. Howard Scott Warshaw famously had only 5 weeks to complete the entire game, so supporting that feature probably didn't make the cut.
NTSC color artifacts may be a factor too, but not sure. I know green and red aren't too happy next to each other. Making ET an actual brown shade may have gotten too close to that red-green conflict.
This is a highly questionable list, and not only because it recommends 'Freakonomics' (I suggest listening to the 'If Books could Kill' podcast about this book - their analysis is really on point).
In regards to the rest of the list - just as a single example more or less at random, re: Jordan Belfort's book:
"proven to turn anyone into a sales-closing, money-earning rock star..."
There are at least three lies in this half-sentence alone.
You know what's wild? Not ever having heard of him, I can find out who he is and how this relates to the conversation in milliseconds.
For others' benefit:
"Kurt Vonnegut explored themes of humans being observed by extraterrestrial beings in a zoo-like setting in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. ...
While this scenario involves humans being placed in a zoo by aliens, it does not specifically depict artificial intelligence (AI) as the captors. However, Vonnegut did address the impact of automation and machines on human society in his debut novel, Player Piano."
Amazing times we live in. Strange and scary, but also amazing.
This really was peak marketing idiocy. I knew people who worked at Cartoon Network at the time. Jim Samples' disconnect and subsequent resignation reverberated down the ranks and tanked a lot of careers and projects. Who would think that strapping battery operated devices to bridges with duct tape in any post-9/11 city would be a good idea?
I love when people clutch pearls and say exaggerated things to justify it. What does "battery operated" even mean lolol. Is the phrase supposed to conjure images of IEDs or what? They were battery powered LED signs
Should I report every lighted billboard I see on every block for potentially being an IED? Shall I call in every car for possibly being a car bomb? I see people on cell phones in the city constantly. Those could each be explosive devices.
Marketing departments are not required to consult with the local police department in the United States to find out if their campaigns will be an inconvenience.
> On the morning of January 31, 2007, the Boston Police Department and the Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards depicting the Mooninites, characters from the Adult Swim animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), leading to a massive panic.
Because if someone was planting IEDs, they should be prominently visible, and have lights drawing attention to it...
What IED handbook would these people be reading?
Oh wait, maybe it's the handbook that says "Make them look like they're just for entertainment, so everyone will think they're just harmless marketing gimmicks.". But if so, the handbook should specify they should make it Mickey Mouse, not some obscure TV show...
But if it’s placed on a bridge it doesn’t really matter, your target is the people above on the bridge right? If anything in that circumstance it seems like it would make it more likely to be discovered and stop your plan.
I know somebody here in my city, who worked in audio editing for Cartoon Network, and apparently what he heard was that the FBI demanded somebody fall on their sword.
The point was the FBI combined with the rather inflexible security people in Boston were probably threatening repercussions to Cartoon Network along the lines of their broadcast license
There was no information attached to them (one of the things MIT hackers always did was place clear contact information, removal instructions, etc on anything they left somewhere public.)
The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries. They could also be containers of explosives.
Some of them the character is angry, and giving the finger. Sure fits a "angry at the world" attitude of a bomb-maker.
It doesn't seem to occur to people that bombs can be designed to attract attention, and can be booby-trapped to try and kill bomb disposal teams.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to people that if you are a bomb squad or police commander, you don't have the luxury of saying "oh yeah, that thing strapped to the bridge support for an interstate, phsht, that probably isn't a bomb, that's probably just some weird vidyah game character" because if you're wrong, people die. No. You get people away from it and try to figure out what it is.
Oh, and it turned out there had been a hoax bomb left in a hospital earlier by someone who was acting deranged, and incidents in NY and DC right before all this.
Then a few years later, wouldn't you know...a few miles away, two assholes left a bunch of pressure cookers at the finish line of the marathon, killed a bunch of people and wounded dozens, murdered a campus cop, and then led police on a gunfire-filled chase through multiple towns.
I'm well aware. How is a bomb squad member supposed to know this, while looking at it stuck to the side of a bridge I-beam, wrapped in layers of black plastic? Bombs are often designed to blow up when disturbed, in hopes of injuring or killing a member of the bomb squad.
I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
> This has literally nothing to do with anything.
Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all, and that appearance (the bombs were in cooking pots) means nothing.
You're right. We should always assume the absolute worst-possible interpretation at all times and whip ourselves into a frenzy over it. Just look at the long list of IEDs with Lite-Brite-style, cartoonish characters on them. You say Mooninite, I say Neon Osama bin Laden.
> I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
I'd really love to know if you've worked EOD or if you're just a smarmy conservative condemning pranksters. Because I believe we're both truly inexperienced (ie you haven't actually done EOD) and we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
> Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all
That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. Reasonable suspicion and probable cause and all that don't operate like "we're justified in detaining you if in the future someone else commits the crime we want to accuse you of". No the police, the state, the judiciary, etc have to have proof that you've committed a crime. I mean think about what you're saying: the implication is basically most freedoms should be abridged because it's a complete certainty that in the future, someone, somewhere, will commit some tenuously related crime.
Of course I haven't done EOD. I don't need to be to know that bomb squads treat stuff like it's a bomb until proven otherwise via x-ray or a tech inspecting it, or it is disrupted by water cannon.
> we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
"common rational sense", riiiiiight. You implied bomb techs should assume (or know) that cylinders with wires coming out of them wrapped in black plastic attached to critical transportation are just batteries and could not be a pipe full of explosives.
From the Wikipedia page on the "2007 Boston Mooninite Scare":
No devices were retrieved in Los Angeles and Lieutenant Paul Vernon of the Los Angeles Police Department stated that "no one perceived them as a threat".The many Los Angeles signs were up without incident for more than two weeks prior to the Boston scare.
Police Sergeant Brian Schmautz stated that officers in Portland had not been dispatched to remove the devices, and did not plan to unless they were found on municipal property. He added, "At this point, we wouldn't even begin an investigation, because there's no reason to believe a crime has occurred." A device was placed inside 11th Ave. Liquor on Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, where it remains.
San Francisco Police Sergeant Neville Gittens said that Interference, Inc., was removing them, except for one found by art gallery owner Jamie Alexander, who reportedly "thought it was cool" and had it taken down after it ceased to function.
> Being tightly wound must be an East-coast thing.
To some degree, yes. Boston is just 4-5 hrs away from NYC, where just 6 years earlier two commercial passenger jets (from Boston) crashed into the WTC in the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. If you think police departments in Portland or LA felt the 9/11 attacks as acutely as such a nearby place as Boston, then you'd be mistaken.
(Please note that I'm not arguing that our freedom should go away because we need to be protected from terrorists. I'm just trying to show you the mindset of a law enforcement officer in Boston at the time, and that mindset was indeed to be suspicious of things that looked suspicious.)
As a Bostonian at the time, the last thing I wanted to do was whine about terrorism like some New Yorker. But I can see how in the bigger picture this pointed to an increased disconnect between the citizens and the police, with the BPD still aspiring to feel important like their big brothers in NYC.
At the time, the east coast culture felt very tech-backwards too. Tech was still everywhere, but as a counter / up-and-coming culture. There was a reason going to the west coast was liberating for so many. I think these two dynamics helped fuel the massive "WTF" dissonance of this incident, with the BPD coming off as a bunch of out of touch Keystone Cops massively overreacting and then just digging their ignorant heels in.
Calling someone irrational for being concerned a random, out of place device might be a home made bomb and then dismissing some home made bombs as having "literally nothing to do with anything" is pretty shitty.
I think the Boston Marathon bombing really is damaging to the case that the reaction was justified.
A lot is being made in this thread of a public art piece. Meanwhile, the real attack that's been cited was executed by leaving a nondescript backpack on the ground.
The other commenter raises a good point that the case being made boils down to being intentionally vague. "Random device." "Cylinders." And that really does fall apart when you describe it as "an LED sign with batteries."
It's reasonable for the bomb squad to investigate. But the likelihood that this was a threat is being grossly exaggerated.
I'll say it again: when people don't just say what the thing was (an LED sign) and instead use vague scary terms ("random out of place device") they are intentionally aiming to deceive. As well, anyone is free to click the links I've posted and judge for themselves.
Did you click on the link and see pictures of the devices? The cylindrical parts are obviously D batteries.
> the Boston Police Department stated in its defense that the ad devices shared some similarities with improvised explosive devices, with them also discovering an identifiable power source, a circuit board with exposed wiring, and electrical tape.
Ah yes. That guy has a 99.99% DNA match to Osama bin Laden. Must be a terrorist!
The only way this makes sense is if you assume any unidentified object is a bomb, which may be logical if you live in Palestine, but seems pretty unlikely in Boston.
You're suggesting the government is should treat every unidentified object as a bomb. I hope you realize how dystopian that is - anyone who creates some one-off or prototype object outside the list of legitimately creatable things will be treated as a terrorist. The Apple 1? Bomb. PiPhone? Bomb. Homemade LED name tag? Bomb. Google Glass prototype? Bomb. Mesh network air quality sensor? Bomb. Hitchhiking robot? Bomb. How do new types of things become approved and not be treated as bombs? Do I have to fill out a government form to declare that my hitchhiking robot isn't a bomb? (What if a terrorist fills out that form and declares their bomb isn't a bomb?)
> I'll never understand the reactionaries. Did they really believe that there were terrorists out there who'd build bombs and then put a Lite Bright on it?
Lots of wild stuff happening at that time. Would you believe that there was a little reported incident where someone put a bomb in their SHOE?? People were very on edge, so I can completely understand having an additional layer of paranoia about seemingly normal things being potentially dangerous.
> Was it that they were all dumb millennials who never heard of the toy?
In 2007 most millennials would have been late teens to early 20s. According to the 2015 City of Boston Workforce Report, the median age of the city workers at that time was 45.25.[1] So I’m guessing it was probably people over 30 who responded to the calls and did not call the panic off.
> When reporters interviewed cops about it, they should've started giggling, telling the cameraman to "pack it up, these cops are r***".[sic]
Again, it’s likely 18 year old Millennials weren’t reporters or police officer or firefighters, it’s probably people who had played with this sort of toy as kids and knew what it was on its face.
I think the main thing I would point out is you should consider having some grace for people at this different and distinct time in the world, and that zeitgeist.
> Was it that they were all dumb millennials who never heard of the toy?
I know it’s fashionable to dunk on millennials now but as a millennial who remembers this event we were too young to be cops and knew what ATHF and Lite Brites were.
Beyond that, millennials were between the ages of 12-25 in 2007, they weren't running the Boston bomb squad, they were the target audience of this marketing campaign.
But only to a point, correct? Otherwise we end up in the current dialogue where flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and a large percentage of religious believers feel more platformed than ever. It's far too easy for the uninformed to challenge science simply because it challenges their non-scientific beliefs.
Scientist 1: If we put a sugar cube into water whose temperature is exactly 74.7373 degrees centigrade, the water will likely turn pink. here is our evidence for this.
Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.
Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.
scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.
that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.
flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.
this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.
most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])
however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.
if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.
rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.
[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.
He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).
The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").
[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.
Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.
That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.
It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.
I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts. It's not as if you have to either censor or send your highest-status scientists to debate them, and that exhausts the finite menu. In a diverse info ecosystem someone will have their comparative advantage on engaging with cranks. The important thing about overall ecosystem health is, is it reasonable in what it amplifies?
Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).
> I don't think it helps to cancel them, probably hurts.
Who is actually being cancelled and for saying what?
This is what I find a little frustrating. There's very little censorship and when it does happen it's usually not against those that most loudly cry about censorship.
For example, did you know you can no longer use the Futurama Farnsworth quote on Facebook "we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men"? Meanwhile, I've reported and had the report rejected nutters I know literally calling for the stoning of gay people using Bible quotes. (Lev 20;13).
I was answering a comment opposing a comment opposing cancelation.
FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.
Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)
ET isn't green in the movie. Why would this be a common complaint?