Don't think that every shuttle mission except for the Challenger incident, the columbia incident, and then this one have all been perfect. The media just usually didn't care about the little problems that popped up from time to time. You're dealing with a very complex piece of equipment, going through some of the most stressful experiences and environments around. There's been lots of problems. That's why NASA chooses very smart people to be astronauts, then trains the hell out of them.
The astronauts know it's not going to be easy. They know stuff's going to go wrong, and that they're going to have to fix it. The public (and occasionally the NASA administrators) are the ones that forget that there's always plenty of risk, and decide to occasionally make a bigger deal out of what happens than they should. The Challenger and Columbia accidents were unfortunate, no doubt. But you'd be foolish to expect that the human conquest of space would be without casualties. People still die driving to work every morning, and that gets done millions of times per day. Why should we get discouraged when a spacecraft blows up. Certainly, we should figure out what went wrong, and learn lessons from it. And we should definitely take any steps we can to protect astronauts. But a few unsuccessful missions hardly means the space program is a failure.
It's kind of weird actually. when you think about the people involved in the space program, how many of them do you think feel that space exploration should be stopped because it's too dangerous? Probably somewhere around 0%. The astronauts know the risks. The engineers know the risks.
How many politicians think it's too dangerous? I'd guess not many. They know the astronauts are volunteers. They understand that space program has scientific value, and also acts as a good inspiration for national pride. Not to mention jobs.
Now how many members of the public think it should be shut down due to the dangers? Again, I think that number would be rather small. How many people died on Columbia? Seven? How many people die every day for reasons way more pointless and interesting than space exploration? I'm thinking that the public at large supports the space program.
Yet when everyone comes together as a nation, we turn into a bunch of sissies, horribly worried that something might go wrong. I just don't understand where the fear comes from, and why it's so debilitating to the space program.
Well, let me further my previous post a little, because it left a lot out. I'll agree with some of what you said about the OT. It's not worthless, and it's certainly interesting. The word "obsolete" has more of a negative connotation than I think it should, perhaps I should've chosen better. The computer I'm typing this on is "obsolete" in that it's no longer the latest and greatest. Yet it still is very useful, and I still have some ten year old computers that can serve decent purposes. And like you said with the OT, understanding the progression of something like computer hardware can give you a much better understanding of where we are now, and what to expect in the future.
I have no problem believing that much of what is said in the OT may be true, although things like Genesis, I'm not so sure about. I guess the thing is, for me at least, it doesn't really matter whether or not that is true, because I don't see my "religion" as built off of a bunch of historical facts. Instead, it's got a foundation of what I guess could be called "truths". In some ways that's just semantics, but I'd consider truths to be less what happened in a specific sense and more about what should happen in an abstract sense.
So when I die and go up to the pearly gates, I don't think St. Peter is going to look over my life and say "well, you didn't really believe in Noah loading two of every animal in the ark, so you don't get into heaven." I hope he'd say something more like, "well you tried to respect your fellow man and treat people fairly, God will forgive you for your sins. Here's a harp, the heaven orientation tour begins in fifteen minutes." ( I also don't really expect a literal pearly gates interview, in case you're wondering)
I don't have a link, and I can't remember where it was, but not too long ago I was reading an interesting weblog where a guy was recounting a trip he took to the middle east. One of his companions, a young guy, early twenties, was raised as a christian with a very literal belief in the Bible. This included an age of the world calculated to some 6000 years or so, by tracing back all the genealogies and whatnot. Anyways, so this group is traveling around, seeing the sights, and one of the things they visit is an archeological site. And the centerpiece of the site is a 10,000 year old wall. One of the oldest remains of human construction. And so they can see this wall, and they can touch it, and all the science and intellectual progress that humanity has made tells us that this wall is 10,000 years old. And so apparently, this kid is basically shattered by what he's seeing. This wall, to him, proves that his entire religion is wrong. Everything he believes is threatened by this pile of mud bricks.
I dunno, I just can't imagine having that sort of contradiction playing itself out in my mind. I have no problem with faith, it would just be hard for me to say science is wrong, when it makes so much sense to me, and when I can see it and touch it, especially when my only evidence otherwise is that it contradicts with a book written thousands of years ago, by unknown authors with unknown agendas, translated many times by others, and interpreted in so many ways by so many different people.
But like you said, it's not critical for being a christian. I have a hard time believing that any loving God would make belief in it a requirement for salvation. It just seems to be problematic for many people because they intertwine their beliefs in "truths" with their beliefs in historical facts. More specifically historical facts from so long ago, in a time period from which not much information has survived. They have to attack any information that contradicts the historical details of the Bible, because it's so tightly integrated with the really important parts of their faith. And I find that sad for them, because if they really want to dwell on their faith, there's more worthwhile things to ponder. And I find it sad for everyone else, because science and intellectualism is being slowed down by it all.
Having not really played the Metroid Prime games, when I saw the line about not adding a third person view outside of the morph ball, I originally thought that it meant that when you went into morph ball mode, it stayed in first person.
Then I thought, that would be ridiculous, it'd probably make you sick, and you wouldn't be able to tell where you were going. And I read it again, and it made sense.
But yeah, there should be a button to press when in morph ball mode so that you can go back to first person and watch the world spin around.
Earth day is a lame counter-example, because no one forces you to celebrate it. I can go into my front and chop down my trees to celebrate earth day if I want.
Income tax is a non-religious reality, and has very little place in a debate about faith. I expected a troll post such as yours to bring up something more like murder, which is another lame counter-example, but at least has a moral implication to it.
Agreed, taking the Bible as literal is entirely problematic, for a number of reasons. First off, it was written many generations ago, when the world was a very different place. Second, a lot of it is vague and full of parables. There's no easy "literal" interpretation. Third, there's the whole lost in translation aspect, because the Bible was not written in english, and even if it was, the english language certainly evolves over time. I could go on, but we don't need any more right now.
As a christian, my interpretation is that Jesus basically told us, forget about the old testament, it's obsolete now, and here's what's important: Love God, and Love your neighbor. If you follow those two rules, the 10 commandments basically become moot, because they all fall under those two. If you do your best to follow those two, you're going to be a good person, you can plug yourself into pretty much any marginally accepting culture/society, and no one really has a right to complain.
I guess you could try and make an argument that "loving your neighbor" requires you to force your faith on them to save them, but I have a hard time buying that. If God wanted us to be forced to believe something specific, why wouldn't he just do it himself? Why didn't Jesus use his super powers to force people?
I find my faith to be comforting and relaxing. I can't imagine it any other way. I can't imagine fretting over the beliefs of people I've never even met. Like I don't already have enough to worry about.
They're extremists because they're trying to subvert the government to dictate how other people live their lives. I don't give a rats ass what you believe in, but if you think that laws should be passed to force me to believe it too, then that's extremism.
Yeah, I was generalizing a little bit with my "lazy" comment. A lot of what we pay people to do is because we don't have the time or ability to do it ourselves. I guess the point is, most people would rather spend their time consuming said content, then figuring out how to obtain it. Maybe it's not laziness as much as disinterest in the process. I didn't really mean it in a derogatory sense. If you go to work and dig up concrete all day, you're not a lazy bum just because you don't feel like spending all night fighting with Kazaa. But yeah, you get my point.
I think you could argue that something like the iTMS actually almost reverses that, because it makes the process of finding music kind of fun. It's well laid out, it's useful, and it's immediate gratification. The only one of those that you can really say about p2p in general is that it's useful.
My old roommate graduated from college (he did usually get most of his work done), and he moved back to california. Now he's working as an intern architect last I heard. No clue how many harddrives he's filled up since he left. He's a good guy though.
Actually, there are a lot like that. I'm one of them. I went to a jesuit Catholic High School, and most of the guys I graduated with, I'd consider them one of them too.
It's just that you hear the others, because they're so loud and obnoxious. One of the things that makes us sensible "believers" is the fact that we don't feel the need to tell everyone how great our beliefs are, so you just don't hear from us very often. We're too busy living our own lives to waste time talking about how other people should live theirs.
The problem is that there's still a sizable contingent of extremist christians out there, and at this moment in time, they've managed to curry some favor with the current government leaders. Any damage that they get past will be undone as soon as the pendulum swings back the other way (and it will), but it does suck in the meantime.
I'd guess that most people's beliefs are rather personal and that most of us are happy to keep it that way.
And that's why there's such a great business opportunity for downloadable content. That's why Apple is selling so many songs with their music store.
"Casual" downloading of shared content is hard, especially if you want decent quality. Convenience means a lot to people. There are lots of lazy individuals with plenty of money, and they'll happily give you a little money if you do some work for them. And figuring out a decent download counts as work.
I don't mind the music and movie studios being against file sharing. I don't even mind them suing people who share files. I just think it's kind of silly for them to be as vocal about it without offering something to compete with it. I mean, these people run giant media conglomerates. You don't get into that position without at least a decent amount of business savvy. Why are they so unable to see a big potential source of business?
But I agree with you with the hoarder mentality, and I find it sort of fascinating. A few years ago I had a roommate like that. He had every game imaginable, and no time to play them since he spent all his free time downloading more. He had every piece of graphics software I've ever heard of, and no time to really learn how to use them. He downloaded 320x240 copies of lots of crappy movies, and he watched some of them, but always secluded back in his room by himself, cause nobody else wants to watch sucky quality like that. While my other roommate and I would buy a few DVDs, and hang out in the living room with a couple other people and make it a decent social event. It was interesting to watch this kid go.
Not only that, but think about how generators tend to work. In something like hydroelectric or wind generators, you've got a consistent axis of motion, which translates well into operating a turbine. A computer mouse is moved around erratically, not providing any consistent direction. Now, there are rollers inside a mechanical mouse that would translate that into two axis, but it'd still be sporadic, and the direction of rotation would have a lot of sudden changes. I don't know how well that would translate to generating electricity. Not to mention that if you're turning some of that kinetic energy into electrical energy, you're going to be adding some resistance to movement. So the mouse is going to get harder to move.
I don't know how else you could use the movement to generate power. Capture the heat from friction when the mouse moves? I think there are other parts of the computer that provide better sources of heat for such things. If that's not efficient or economical, than integrating something similar into a mouse probably won't be. I'm not an engineer though, so these are just guesses.
So what's the problem then? The media conpanies will try and hoist this annoying DRM crap on us, we'll all get pissed off, and they'll lose us as customers. Someone else will happily step in and offer us unencumbered media to fill this huge, lucrative void.
Maybe Apple and MS will try and shove it down our throats. If it's as bad as some people are saying it will be, then consumers will respond by taking their business elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first time companies have made bad decisions and lost the market.
I thought we're supposed to hate the RIAA, and them going out of business would be a good thing for consumers and the artists too. Let them strangle themselves if they want. Musicians aren't going to stop making music, they'll just find another way to distribute it to us. Life will go on.
Yeah, because my computer desk is such a nice place for a crowd to kick back and play games. Just because you can go to some extra effort to make your computer work more like a console doesn't make it a good replacement.
Well, there's always an element that will result to that. Part of that is just the market that video games generally pander to, both intentionally and unintentionally. When I was sixteen, the chance to see some boobies, even digital ones, was probably pretty interesting to me. Heck, I still like boobies, I've just played enough games to know that the level of boobage and fun are not necessarily directly correlated.
Although slashdot's moeration and formatting systems aren't perfect, if you come back and read a thread a couple days later, the site does a halfway decent job of filtering out a lot of that crap, and you can get some decent information. But that only works if some brave people venture into the fray from the beginning, and try and bring some semblance of intelligence into the whole mess.
Seriously dude...what the hell? Are you actually being serious with this post? I'm going to assume you're joking, just so my opinion of humanity won't get any lower. But anyways, a few points to refute.
Yeah, I'd much rather play games on my phone than on my TV. Sometimes, I like to get three of my friends, and we'll all pile into my car, and they'll all look over my shoulder and watch me play Jamdat Bowling on my cell phone. It's way better than everyone having to spread out on the couch and work their own controller. Much more intimate.
And you're right. My new $1400 computer system can make prettier pictures than my five year old PS2. The controls aren't quite a nice when I'm trying to play a football game, and I can only play multiplayer with people in other buildings over the internet, but I don't want to actually be around my friends anyways.
Your watch plays games? But doesn't your phone tell you the time too? My phone replaced my watch long ago. I don't see that happening to my TV or my video game consoles any time soon.
No No NO! Don't you get it?! Nintendo needs to stop investing all their time in creating new gameplay, and instead use it creating new characters. I want nineteen separate 3rd person shooters that are different only in their artwork. I want to play lots of hallow games, each one in a completely new and under developed universe. I want so many unknown characters flying across my screen that I'll never develop any sort of emotional connection with them.
I don't know why Nintendo wasted two decades carefully creating a huge, detailed, and vibrant universe.http://www.classicgaming.com/tmk/mariopedia/...th at couldn't possibly be an asset when making games. Maybe they should hire some more marketing people, so they can get an appropriate number of young female characters with huge breasts and large anime eyes. I mean...an overweight italian plumber? Are we supposed to take this stuff seriously? How about something believable like a genetically engineered super soldier that runs around outer space and shoots stuff. Now that's a character for the ages.
Well, in general, you're right, except that the business world has been developing a sort of "winner take all" mentality, where if you're not at the top of your market, you don't matter anymore.
This matters somewhat in a business with as much publicity and marketing involved as the video game industry has. You don't just manufacture a product and put it on the store shelves, there's a huge network of websites and magazines that you have to cater to in order to reach your fans.
If all the gaming magazines are reporting that you're losing marketshare left and right, and that developers aren't going to be able to make any money writing games for your system, that could seriously affect the future sales of your console.
Simply put, Nintendo is constantly getting crapped on by the industry media, often unfairly. They've been an innovative force in the industry for a long time, they consistently make some of the highest quality games. If they get driven out of business because of hype and because they refuse to lose billions of dollars trying to build up marketshare, well, that'd be a damn shame and I'd be pissed off. Consumers wouldn't gain, we'd lose out.
I dunno, I'm surely a Nintendo Fanboy, but it's not about pride or coolness, or justifying my collection of games. I truly feel that they're the best system out there, and they're under appreciated. I don't sing their praises to people because I want Miyamoto to have more money, I think most gamers would really appreciate what the gamecube has to offer if they gave it a fair chance.
We can think of a lot of examples where an inferior choice became the default, due to a combination of lots of different things *cough*Windows*cough*. It just pains me to see it potentially happening again, and the media so eager to help make it happen.
Well, I'd say that depends. Try to think of the simple games and the more complex games as different types, neither one inherently better than the other. It's just that some of the complicated games are sucky, just like the simple ones sometimes suck. When the game market crashed (pre-NES), all the games were pretty simple, it's just that a lot weren't fun.
Sure, sometimes developers try too much and can't get it done (Black & White). But other times, it works out well, and you get a really fun game (GTA3).
But yeah, a really simple but good gameplay mechanic can turn into a timeless game. (Minesweeper).
What the hell does that mean? It's limited by having two screens? You mean it can't play games designed for three screens? I guess you're right. Nintendo is ripping us all off.
I'd only describe a vacation with a blanket term like fun or no fun if the person asking about it was someone I didn't feel like having a conversation with.
Every vacation that I've been on has had good parts, mixed in with at least a few little problems. Most of your coworkers, when they're passing you in the hall, they just want a quick answer because they've got other things to do, and they just want to hear that you had a good time. But if they're thinking of going on a similar caribbean vacation, they're going to ask you to break it down, like a game review. You can find similar reviews of packaged trips and cruises too if you feel like looking.
It's not that we can't label our games that easily, it's that we'd rather discuss them a little more thoroughly, cause we're a bunch of video game nerds. My mom can give you simple descriptions of some different games if that's what you're looking for. Mario Kart, Fun. Mario Sunshine, not fun.
But it's rare that a game is so new to us jaded gamers that a couple words is all we can use to describe it. When you've got something new like the DS, and a game that uses its unique features so fully, it becomes hard to explain to people who don't have the proper frame of reference. If it's one of those things that you have to try to understand, then you're not going to get a much better description than fun or not fun.
A couple points. First off, distributed processing is only good for somethings, because network latency can get in the way if you're shuffling a lot of data back and forth. That's why it wouldn't work well for gaming.
Second, even if you could get it working acceptably, then you run into the issue of the console no longer being a stable platform. Meaning that the developers no longer have a consistent set of hardware to optimize for. And that's half the appeal of consoles. The cell in my PS3 might be able to link up with the cell in my TV, my stereo, and my refrigerator, but no one's going to release a game targeted towards that much extra hardware, because not everyone is going to have all those extra cell enabled appliances available for use.
Multiple cores is a little easier, because they're so close together, and because the hardware designer has complete control over the interconnects. So it'll hopefully be as fast as possible, and consistent over all the systems they produce.
It makes selecting software a much bigger hassle for the end user. And/Or extra work for the developer.
This problem probably won't be as much of a factor on mobiles, for a number of reasons. Although ideally, just one WM will become the "mobile standard", and all the apps will be tailored towards it. It makes things easier for everyone. I guess unless you want to port an app that you've already got written for a different WM. But if you're going to do a decent port, you're going to be changing a lot of stuff anyways, since the interface is so different, so it's not like it isn't already a big project.
That's actually a really interesting idea for Linux to explore I think. I think Linux on the PC desktop is always going to be a "couple years away", simply because making a good desktop OS requires a lot of boring detail and busy work, and the sort of developers attracted to linux aren't usually interested in that. Especially if they're working for free. Plus there's the multiple window managers and desktop environments etc...It'll be hard for linux as a whole to keep up with big companies that can pay people to trudge through that more mundane stuff. But the mobile phone morphing into something more, that's mostly uncharted territory. Linux doesn't really have a hole to dig itself out of in relation to other OS's.
The current desktop metaphor doesn't scale down to a phone size very well. Apple realized that, and that's why the ipod interface is nothing like OSX, even though OSX is very nice. There's a whole lot of room for innovation, and there won't be the same resistance towards learning something new from consumers, because they're going to have to learn something new regardless.
I'm not sure what desktop apps people will expect on their phones. Email maybe? Web browsing perhaps. Not office software, not photo editing. The informative internet stuff is where the phone is going to be most useful, and there are quality open source equivalents for pretty much all of those. The interfaces need some reworking and major simplification to deal with mobile screen sizes and input systems, but as you said, a large part of the technical backend work is already there. Linux could really make a go at it.
Alright, well if you were talking about misgivings about safety concerns involving this specific flight, on the part of a number of engineers, that's a smaller scale and more specific problem, and one that I'm not qualified to have an opinion on.
I was thinking you were talking in a more abstract sense, in that some engineer working on a probe for jupiter might get pissed off because his funding gets cut so that another shuttle can go into LEO and not really accomplish much beyond resupplying the space station (which is a whole other can of worms).
But yeah, space flight is awesome, and even the shuttle with all its problems, it's damn impressive to watch one take off. When you get a lot of smart people together, they certainly can do amazing things.
I don't want all NASA employees convinced to fully back the shuttle program. The shuttle program is not the end-all of spacecraft. It's debatable how useful a step in space exploration it even was. It's an amazing feat of engineering, no doubt, but NASA does a lot of other stuff, stuff that gets underfunded in order to keep the shuttle going.
I'm not sure what your take is on it. Your second paragraph seems to contradict what you said in the first? Do you think NASA should fire anyone that won't toe the line in regards to the management's talking points? That doesn't sound to productive for an agency with a scientific mission.
What was interesting to me was that during the liftoff, the announcer said something to the effect of (paraphrasing) "We have launch of discovery, starting a new era of american space flight taking us to the moon, mars, and beyond!"
I found that interesting because this shuttle launch, while nice, is not any sort of real step forwards to any of those goals. It's not a big step in terms of technology or procedures. It's another replay of something that was pretty much figured out 25 years ago. It's maybe a small step in public perception of the space program, but that's it. It's a new "era" in space flight only because we're so eager to shut everything down when things go wrong.
I dunno, I'm just rambling now. I get this way when I see so much potential get drowned out in PR and politics, and the space shuttle continues to be an example of this.
I perceived this whole article as a sort of parody of conspiracy theories, not an actual attempt to rile up the fan boys. But I guess it is hard to tell, with/. being what it is. Looking at the rest of the comments though, at least some people took it as a joke.
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Don't think that every shuttle mission except for the Challenger incident, the columbia incident, and then this one have all been perfect. The media just usually didn't care about the little problems that popped up from time to time. You're dealing with a very complex piece of equipment, going through some of the most stressful experiences and environments around. There's been lots of problems. That's why NASA chooses very smart people to be astronauts, then trains the hell out of them.
The astronauts know it's not going to be easy. They know stuff's going to go wrong, and that they're going to have to fix it. The public (and occasionally the NASA administrators) are the ones that forget that there's always plenty of risk, and decide to occasionally make a bigger deal out of what happens than they should. The Challenger and Columbia accidents were unfortunate, no doubt. But you'd be foolish to expect that the human conquest of space would be without casualties. People still die driving to work every morning, and that gets done millions of times per day. Why should we get discouraged when a spacecraft blows up. Certainly, we should figure out what went wrong, and learn lessons from it. And we should definitely take any steps we can to protect astronauts. But a few unsuccessful missions hardly means the space program is a failure.
It's kind of weird actually. when you think about the people involved in the space program, how many of them do you think feel that space exploration should be stopped because it's too dangerous? Probably somewhere around 0%. The astronauts know the risks. The engineers know the risks.
How many politicians think it's too dangerous? I'd guess not many. They know the astronauts are volunteers. They understand that space program has scientific value, and also acts as a good inspiration for national pride. Not to mention jobs.
Now how many members of the public think it should be shut down due to the dangers? Again, I think that number would be rather small. How many people died on Columbia? Seven? How many people die every day for reasons way more pointless and interesting than space exploration? I'm thinking that the public at large supports the space program.
Yet when everyone comes together as a nation, we turn into a bunch of sissies, horribly worried that something might go wrong. I just don't understand where the fear comes from, and why it's so debilitating to the space program.
Well, let me further my previous post a little, because it left a lot out. I'll agree with some of what you said about the OT. It's not worthless, and it's certainly interesting. The word "obsolete" has more of a negative connotation than I think it should, perhaps I should've chosen better. The computer I'm typing this on is "obsolete" in that it's no longer the latest and greatest. Yet it still is very useful, and I still have some ten year old computers that can serve decent purposes. And like you said with the OT, understanding the progression of something like computer hardware can give you a much better understanding of where we are now, and what to expect in the future.
I have no problem believing that much of what is said in the OT may be true, although things like Genesis, I'm not so sure about. I guess the thing is, for me at least, it doesn't really matter whether or not that is true, because I don't see my "religion" as built off of a bunch of historical facts. Instead, it's got a foundation of what I guess could be called "truths". In some ways that's just semantics, but I'd consider truths to be less what happened in a specific sense and more about what should happen in an abstract sense.
So when I die and go up to the pearly gates, I don't think St. Peter is going to look over my life and say "well, you didn't really believe in Noah loading two of every animal in the ark, so you don't get into heaven." I hope he'd say something more like, "well you tried to respect your fellow man and treat people fairly, God will forgive you for your sins. Here's a harp, the heaven orientation tour begins in fifteen minutes." ( I also don't really expect a literal pearly gates interview, in case you're wondering)
I don't have a link, and I can't remember where it was, but not too long ago I was reading an interesting weblog where a guy was recounting a trip he took to the middle east. One of his companions, a young guy, early twenties, was raised as a christian with a very literal belief in the Bible. This included an age of the world calculated to some 6000 years or so, by tracing back all the genealogies and whatnot. Anyways, so this group is traveling around, seeing the sights, and one of the things they visit is an archeological site. And the centerpiece of the site is a 10,000 year old wall. One of the oldest remains of human construction. And so they can see this wall, and they can touch it, and all the science and intellectual progress that humanity has made tells us that this wall is 10,000 years old. And so apparently, this kid is basically shattered by what he's seeing. This wall, to him, proves that his entire religion is wrong. Everything he believes is threatened by this pile of mud bricks.
I dunno, I just can't imagine having that sort of contradiction playing itself out in my mind. I have no problem with faith, it would just be hard for me to say science is wrong, when it makes so much sense to me, and when I can see it and touch it, especially when my only evidence otherwise is that it contradicts with a book written thousands of years ago, by unknown authors with unknown agendas, translated many times by others, and interpreted in so many ways by so many different people.
But like you said, it's not critical for being a christian. I have a hard time believing that any loving God would make belief in it a requirement for salvation. It just seems to be problematic for many people because they intertwine their beliefs in "truths" with their beliefs in historical facts. More specifically historical facts from so long ago, in a time period from which not much information has survived. They have to attack any information that contradicts the historical details of the Bible, because it's so tightly integrated with the really important parts of their faith. And I find that sad for them, because if they really want to dwell on their faith, there's more worthwhile things to ponder. And I find it sad for everyone else, because science and intellectualism is being slowed down by it all.
Having not really played the Metroid Prime games, when I saw the line about not adding a third person view outside of the morph ball, I originally thought that it meant that when you went into morph ball mode, it stayed in first person.
Then I thought, that would be ridiculous, it'd probably make you sick, and you wouldn't be able to tell where you were going. And I read it again, and it made sense.
But yeah, there should be a button to press when in morph ball mode so that you can go back to first person and watch the world spin around.
Earth day is a lame counter-example, because no one forces you to celebrate it. I can go into my front and chop down my trees to celebrate earth day if I want.
Income tax is a non-religious reality, and has very little place in a debate about faith. I expected a troll post such as yours to bring up something more like murder, which is another lame counter-example, but at least has a moral implication to it.
Agreed, taking the Bible as literal is entirely problematic, for a number of reasons. First off, it was written many generations ago, when the world was a very different place. Second, a lot of it is vague and full of parables. There's no easy "literal" interpretation. Third, there's the whole lost in translation aspect, because the Bible was not written in english, and even if it was, the english language certainly evolves over time. I could go on, but we don't need any more right now.
As a christian, my interpretation is that Jesus basically told us, forget about the old testament, it's obsolete now, and here's what's important: Love God, and Love your neighbor. If you follow those two rules, the 10 commandments basically become moot, because they all fall under those two. If you do your best to follow those two, you're going to be a good person, you can plug yourself into pretty much any marginally accepting culture/society, and no one really has a right to complain.
I guess you could try and make an argument that "loving your neighbor" requires you to force your faith on them to save them, but I have a hard time buying that. If God wanted us to be forced to believe something specific, why wouldn't he just do it himself? Why didn't Jesus use his super powers to force people?
I find my faith to be comforting and relaxing. I can't imagine it any other way. I can't imagine fretting over the beliefs of people I've never even met. Like I don't already have enough to worry about.
They're extremists because they're trying to subvert the government to dictate how other people live their lives. I don't give a rats ass what you believe in, but if you think that laws should be passed to force me to believe it too, then that's extremism.
Yeah, I was generalizing a little bit with my "lazy" comment. A lot of what we pay people to do is because we don't have the time or ability to do it ourselves. I guess the point is, most people would rather spend their time consuming said content, then figuring out how to obtain it. Maybe it's not laziness as much as disinterest in the process. I didn't really mean it in a derogatory sense. If you go to work and dig up concrete all day, you're not a lazy bum just because you don't feel like spending all night fighting with Kazaa. But yeah, you get my point.
I think you could argue that something like the iTMS actually almost reverses that, because it makes the process of finding music kind of fun. It's well laid out, it's useful, and it's immediate gratification. The only one of those that you can really say about p2p in general is that it's useful.
My old roommate graduated from college (he did usually get most of his work done), and he moved back to california. Now he's working as an intern architect last I heard. No clue how many harddrives he's filled up since he left. He's a good guy though.
Actually, there are a lot like that. I'm one of them. I went to a jesuit Catholic High School, and most of the guys I graduated with, I'd consider them one of them too.
It's just that you hear the others, because they're so loud and obnoxious. One of the things that makes us sensible "believers" is the fact that we don't feel the need to tell everyone how great our beliefs are, so you just don't hear from us very often. We're too busy living our own lives to waste time talking about how other people should live theirs.
The problem is that there's still a sizable contingent of extremist christians out there, and at this moment in time, they've managed to curry some favor with the current government leaders. Any damage that they get past will be undone as soon as the pendulum swings back the other way (and it will), but it does suck in the meantime.
I'd guess that most people's beliefs are rather personal and that most of us are happy to keep it that way.
And that's why there's such a great business opportunity for downloadable content. That's why Apple is selling so many songs with their music store.
"Casual" downloading of shared content is hard, especially if you want decent quality. Convenience means a lot to people. There are lots of lazy individuals with plenty of money, and they'll happily give you a little money if you do some work for them. And figuring out a decent download counts as work.
I don't mind the music and movie studios being against file sharing. I don't even mind them suing people who share files. I just think it's kind of silly for them to be as vocal about it without offering something to compete with it. I mean, these people run giant media conglomerates. You don't get into that position without at least a decent amount of business savvy. Why are they so unable to see a big potential source of business?
But I agree with you with the hoarder mentality, and I find it sort of fascinating. A few years ago I had a roommate like that. He had every game imaginable, and no time to play them since he spent all his free time downloading more. He had every piece of graphics software I've ever heard of, and no time to really learn how to use them. He downloaded 320x240 copies of lots of crappy movies, and he watched some of them, but always secluded back in his room by himself, cause nobody else wants to watch sucky quality like that. While my other roommate and I would buy a few DVDs, and hang out in the living room with a couple other people and make it a decent social event. It was interesting to watch this kid go.
Not only that, but think about how generators tend to work. In something like hydroelectric or wind generators, you've got a consistent axis of motion, which translates well into operating a turbine. A computer mouse is moved around erratically, not providing any consistent direction. Now, there are rollers inside a mechanical mouse that would translate that into two axis, but it'd still be sporadic, and the direction of rotation would have a lot of sudden changes. I don't know how well that would translate to generating electricity. Not to mention that if you're turning some of that kinetic energy into electrical energy, you're going to be adding some resistance to movement. So the mouse is going to get harder to move.
I don't know how else you could use the movement to generate power. Capture the heat from friction when the mouse moves? I think there are other parts of the computer that provide better sources of heat for such things. If that's not efficient or economical, than integrating something similar into a mouse probably won't be. I'm not an engineer though, so these are just guesses.
So what's the problem then? The media conpanies will try and hoist this annoying DRM crap on us, we'll all get pissed off, and they'll lose us as customers. Someone else will happily step in and offer us unencumbered media to fill this huge, lucrative void.
Maybe Apple and MS will try and shove it down our throats. If it's as bad as some people are saying it will be, then consumers will respond by taking their business elsewhere. It wouldn't be the first time companies have made bad decisions and lost the market.
I thought we're supposed to hate the RIAA, and them going out of business would be a good thing for consumers and the artists too. Let them strangle themselves if they want. Musicians aren't going to stop making music, they'll just find another way to distribute it to us. Life will go on.
Yeah, because my computer desk is such a nice place for a crowd to kick back and play games. Just because you can go to some extra effort to make your computer work more like a console doesn't make it a good replacement.
Well, there's always an element that will result to that. Part of that is just the market that video games generally pander to, both intentionally and unintentionally. When I was sixteen, the chance to see some boobies, even digital ones, was probably pretty interesting to me. Heck, I still like boobies, I've just played enough games to know that the level of boobage and fun are not necessarily directly correlated.
Although slashdot's moeration and formatting systems aren't perfect, if you come back and read a thread a couple days later, the site does a halfway decent job of filtering out a lot of that crap, and you can get some decent information. But that only works if some brave people venture into the fray from the beginning, and try and bring some semblance of intelligence into the whole mess.
Seriously dude...what the hell? Are you actually being serious with this post? I'm going to assume you're joking, just so my opinion of humanity won't get any lower. But anyways, a few points to refute.
Yeah, I'd much rather play games on my phone than on my TV. Sometimes, I like to get three of my friends, and we'll all pile into my car, and they'll all look over my shoulder and watch me play Jamdat Bowling on my cell phone. It's way better than everyone having to spread out on the couch and work their own controller. Much more intimate.
And you're right. My new $1400 computer system can make prettier pictures than my five year old PS2. The controls aren't quite a nice when I'm trying to play a football game, and I can only play multiplayer with people in other buildings over the internet, but I don't want to actually be around my friends anyways.
Your watch plays games? But doesn't your phone tell you the time too? My phone replaced my watch long ago. I don't see that happening to my TV or my video game consoles any time soon.
No No NO! Don't you get it?! Nintendo needs to stop investing all their time in creating new gameplay, and instead use it creating new characters. I want nineteen separate 3rd person shooters that are different only in their artwork. I want to play lots of hallow games, each one in a completely new and under developed universe. I want so many unknown characters flying across my screen that I'll never develop any sort of emotional connection with them.
.http://www.classicgaming.com/tmk/mariopedia/...th at couldn't possibly be an asset when making games. Maybe they should hire some more marketing people, so they can get an appropriate number of young female characters with huge breasts and large anime eyes. I mean...an overweight italian plumber? Are we supposed to take this stuff seriously? How about something believable like a genetically engineered super soldier that runs around outer space and shoots stuff. Now that's a character for the ages.
I don't know why Nintendo wasted two decades carefully creating a huge, detailed, and vibrant universe
Well, in general, you're right, except that the business world has been developing a sort of "winner take all" mentality, where if you're not at the top of your market, you don't matter anymore.
This matters somewhat in a business with as much publicity and marketing involved as the video game industry has. You don't just manufacture a product and put it on the store shelves, there's a huge network of websites and magazines that you have to cater to in order to reach your fans.
If all the gaming magazines are reporting that you're losing marketshare left and right, and that developers aren't going to be able to make any money writing games for your system, that could seriously affect the future sales of your console.
Simply put, Nintendo is constantly getting crapped on by the industry media, often unfairly. They've been an innovative force in the industry for a long time, they consistently make some of the highest quality games. If they get driven out of business because of hype and because they refuse to lose billions of dollars trying to build up marketshare, well, that'd be a damn shame and I'd be pissed off. Consumers wouldn't gain, we'd lose out.
I dunno, I'm surely a Nintendo Fanboy, but it's not about pride or coolness, or justifying my collection of games. I truly feel that they're the best system out there, and they're under appreciated. I don't sing their praises to people because I want Miyamoto to have more money, I think most gamers would really appreciate what the gamecube has to offer if they gave it a fair chance.
We can think of a lot of examples where an inferior choice became the default, due to a combination of lots of different things *cough*Windows*cough*. It just pains me to see it potentially happening again, and the media so eager to help make it happen.
Well, I'd say that depends. Try to think of the simple games and the more complex games as different types, neither one inherently better than the other. It's just that some of the complicated games are sucky, just like the simple ones sometimes suck. When the game market crashed (pre-NES), all the games were pretty simple, it's just that a lot weren't fun.
Sure, sometimes developers try too much and can't get it done (Black & White). But other times, it works out well, and you get a really fun game (GTA3).
But yeah, a really simple but good gameplay mechanic can turn into a timeless game. (Minesweeper).
What the hell does that mean? It's limited by having two screens? You mean it can't play games designed for three screens? I guess you're right. Nintendo is ripping us all off.
I'd only describe a vacation with a blanket term like fun or no fun if the person asking about it was someone I didn't feel like having a conversation with.
Every vacation that I've been on has had good parts, mixed in with at least a few little problems. Most of your coworkers, when they're passing you in the hall, they just want a quick answer because they've got other things to do, and they just want to hear that you had a good time. But if they're thinking of going on a similar caribbean vacation, they're going to ask you to break it down, like a game review. You can find similar reviews of packaged trips and cruises too if you feel like looking.
It's not that we can't label our games that easily, it's that we'd rather discuss them a little more thoroughly, cause we're a bunch of video game nerds. My mom can give you simple descriptions of some different games if that's what you're looking for. Mario Kart, Fun. Mario Sunshine, not fun.
But it's rare that a game is so new to us jaded gamers that a couple words is all we can use to describe it. When you've got something new like the DS, and a game that uses its unique features so fully, it becomes hard to explain to people who don't have the proper frame of reference. If it's one of those things that you have to try to understand, then you're not going to get a much better description than fun or not fun.
A couple points. First off, distributed processing is only good for somethings, because network latency can get in the way if you're shuffling a lot of data back and forth. That's why it wouldn't work well for gaming.
Second, even if you could get it working acceptably, then you run into the issue of the console no longer being a stable platform. Meaning that the developers no longer have a consistent set of hardware to optimize for. And that's half the appeal of consoles. The cell in my PS3 might be able to link up with the cell in my TV, my stereo, and my refrigerator, but no one's going to release a game targeted towards that much extra hardware, because not everyone is going to have all those extra cell enabled appliances available for use.
Multiple cores is a little easier, because they're so close together, and because the hardware designer has complete control over the interconnects. So it'll hopefully be as fast as possible, and consistent over all the systems they produce.
It makes selecting software a much bigger hassle for the end user. And/Or extra work for the developer.
This problem probably won't be as much of a factor on mobiles, for a number of reasons. Although ideally, just one WM will become the "mobile standard", and all the apps will be tailored towards it. It makes things easier for everyone. I guess unless you want to port an app that you've already got written for a different WM. But if you're going to do a decent port, you're going to be changing a lot of stuff anyways, since the interface is so different, so it's not like it isn't already a big project.
That's actually a really interesting idea for Linux to explore I think. I think Linux on the PC desktop is always going to be a "couple years away", simply because making a good desktop OS requires a lot of boring detail and busy work, and the sort of developers attracted to linux aren't usually interested in that. Especially if they're working for free. Plus there's the multiple window managers and desktop environments etc...It'll be hard for linux as a whole to keep up with big companies that can pay people to trudge through that more mundane stuff. But the mobile phone morphing into something more, that's mostly uncharted territory. Linux doesn't really have a hole to dig itself out of in relation to other OS's.
The current desktop metaphor doesn't scale down to a phone size very well. Apple realized that, and that's why the ipod interface is nothing like OSX, even though OSX is very nice. There's a whole lot of room for innovation, and there won't be the same resistance towards learning something new from consumers, because they're going to have to learn something new regardless.
I'm not sure what desktop apps people will expect on their phones. Email maybe? Web browsing perhaps. Not office software, not photo editing. The informative internet stuff is where the phone is going to be most useful, and there are quality open source equivalents for pretty much all of those. The interfaces need some reworking and major simplification to deal with mobile screen sizes and input systems, but as you said, a large part of the technical backend work is already there. Linux could really make a go at it.
Alright, well if you were talking about misgivings about safety concerns involving this specific flight, on the part of a number of engineers, that's a smaller scale and more specific problem, and one that I'm not qualified to have an opinion on.
I was thinking you were talking in a more abstract sense, in that some engineer working on a probe for jupiter might get pissed off because his funding gets cut so that another shuttle can go into LEO and not really accomplish much beyond resupplying the space station (which is a whole other can of worms).
But yeah, space flight is awesome, and even the shuttle with all its problems, it's damn impressive to watch one take off. When you get a lot of smart people together, they certainly can do amazing things.
I don't want all NASA employees convinced to fully back the shuttle program. The shuttle program is not the end-all of spacecraft. It's debatable how useful a step in space exploration it even was. It's an amazing feat of engineering, no doubt, but NASA does a lot of other stuff, stuff that gets underfunded in order to keep the shuttle going.
I'm not sure what your take is on it. Your second paragraph seems to contradict what you said in the first? Do you think NASA should fire anyone that won't toe the line in regards to the management's talking points? That doesn't sound to productive for an agency with a scientific mission.
What was interesting to me was that during the liftoff, the announcer said something to the effect of (paraphrasing) "We have launch of discovery, starting a new era of american space flight taking us to the moon, mars, and beyond!"
I found that interesting because this shuttle launch, while nice, is not any sort of real step forwards to any of those goals. It's not a big step in terms of technology or procedures. It's another replay of something that was pretty much figured out 25 years ago. It's maybe a small step in public perception of the space program, but that's it. It's a new "era" in space flight only because we're so eager to shut everything down when things go wrong.
I dunno, I'm just rambling now. I get this way when I see so much potential get drowned out in PR and politics, and the space shuttle continues to be an example of this.
I perceived this whole article as a sort of parody of conspiracy theories, not an actual attempt to rile up the fan boys. But I guess it is hard to tell, with /. being what it is. Looking at the rest of the comments though, at least some people took it as a joke.