Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Why should we care if this island sinks, when we don't know why it's important? [and smokey was powerless without it]
We are told that all life would be destroyed if the island sinks, and you could say that's a decision of faith (or trust), much like Desmond pushing the button all those years (and then stopping), or Jack calling the boat (as noname points out above). But it is discouraging for them to have the "limbo" timeline, which while apparently totally fake, has a sunken island with the rest of the world humming along cheerily. Does this mean the island WAS meaningless all along, other than having some nifty supernatural puddle?
To me, Jacob was the bad guy, keeping Smokey chained to the Island for apparently no good reason.
He's also the one that turned his brother into Smokey, beat him up several times, and killed a variety of people through bringing them to the island or via his "others" who were quite merciless. Was the pool just an ego-trip that gave Jacob (and his foster mom) an excuse to be evil while telling themselves they were doing good?
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I guess what really bothers me is that this post is rated insightful and it was written by a person that did not even watch the whole series, and the most important season was missed all together. Would we think so much of a book review if the writer had picked random pages to read, and then complained when they said it seems like the books jumps around a lot.
Agreed. It's disappointing to see a trollish rant by someone who hasn't even watched the last season (the one that finished answering the mysteries...) being used by commenters as the basis to not watch a very good show.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I could be missing something more about the Whitmores/Faradays, but I don't think they were "special". Charles and Eloise were on the island when their son time traveled and they killed him, all of their effort afterward was based on that. Faraday was just smart, nothing supernatural there.
In regards to the heart of the island, we are just going off of Jacob's word which was passed down by his crazy murderous foster mother. But maybe that's the point, seeing as Jacob's duty passing to Hurley is nearly identical to the button-pressing duty that was passed down to Desmond. In both cases the duty involved having faith that the duty WAS important. Other than the rumbles when the button wasn't pressed or the cork got unplugged momentarily (a pretty good indication, really), there is no way to fully test the scenario without destroying what is being protected.
It's a Pascal's Wager type of scenario, although they didn't harp on that theme as much as they could have. To destroy all doubt of what was right or wrong, and what really needed to be done, would have been again the theme of the entire show.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
The statue is where Jacob lived, and it indicated that the island had been around and passed down through protectors since at least egyptian times. "Just a statue"?
The donkey wheel was one of several demonstrated and significant uses of the "magical energy", hardly "no big deal".
You said "it's people", but I think the people were great, their motivation and the supernatural aspect was more wishy-washy. It all came down to "it's a magical pool". That pool was used to handwave through every unexplained phenomenon on the island.
Well, Dharma did account for a bunch of answers too, and those were a more fulfilling than the ones since then in seasons 5 and 6.
Midichlorions would have been even worse than "magic pool", but the magical energy pool could have been consistent at least. It was used to wave away time travel, "consciousness" time travel, cloning bunnies, teleporting, smoke monsters, living forever, and so on. The mythology behind it was good and most mysteries were "answered", but at a certain point those answers came back to "magical answer pool".
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Great explanation. I'll add that the Man in Black thought all men were evil, and he only humored them to the extent they could help him get off the island. He explained this to Jacob in the flashback before his adoptive mother killed everyone to "protect" the island. Man in Black is basically more like his murderous adoptive mom than Jacob is, even though Jacob is the one who was passed the duty of protecting the island.
Does this make the US a "christian nation?" Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly wasn't meant to be a theocracy or an atheist nation.
Agreed. It was meant to be an atheist government, with the people able to choose to do as they wish.
For instance, no one is preventing parents from having their children pray. But the government IS preventing teachers from forcing ALL students to pray to ONE particular god.
What the current conservatives are offended by is not an ability to follow their own religion, but their inability to use big government to force their religion on others.
The idea that they'll end up having someone else's religion forced on them and their children has never occurred to them, sadly.
I was surprised when I last installed Mac OSX and it wanted to default to case-insensitive. Apple is trying to move *towards* case-insensitivity, although I have no idea why.
The fact that the past 20 years were case-sensitive is a good indication of just that: the past.
Yep, not sure how much faster this one will be able to get.
You could make the point that you should be splitting off into multiple threads (waves) for each "message board post", but I don't think they have any way to do that right now. So your original wave keeps going off on tangents and totally unrelated posts, and javascript gets slower and slower...
Might be as easy to fix as making a "Break off to new Wave" option for removing tangential responses. Or improving the folding so that collapsed sections don't slow down the rest of the wave (ie: dont get pulled into memory unless you expand them).
Ah, thanks. I assumed they had this software running on PCs that they could trivially keep up indefinitely, didn't see the details about shutting down the original Xbox's Live system entirely.
WarCraft 2: Battle.Net Edition is WarCraft 2 ported to the StarCraft engine, right down to the control changes made in StarCraft
Wow, had no idea that could be an easier approach than adding battlenet to the existing WC2 codebase!
No it doesn't. His point was that a 15 year-old game still has a working online system... and it doesn't. You had to purchase a new version of the game, released 4 years after the original (11 years ago) to get Internet play.
Right, but everyone had already bought WC2 before the bnet version was released. The number of people who actually own, let alone play WC2 over battle.net, has to be minuscule.
The fact that they're still supporting WC2's tiny bnet playerbase says a lot about their commitment.
It can't take much money to maintain that, nor to maintain Quake/Half-life master servers. Maybe it speaks more to the greedy callousness of canceling Halo 2 online play than to a heroic effort by Blizzard, Id, or Valve.
The battle.net edition of WC2 was still a minor re-release of a Very Old Game, so I think the OP's point stands.
I take it they never released an "enable battle.net play" patch for the original WC2? I supposed the original WC2 was before the time of cd-keys, which may have prevented the corporate overlords from accepting the risk of allowing "pirates" to use the online service?
As b0lt said, battle.net has been around and supported for Diablo1 much longer than it took Microsoft to shut down Halo. Blizzard, like Valve, is a company that has earned a lot of trust with gamers, and has always had the money to do The Right Thing.
Having merged with Activision may thrown a big ugly wrench into the works though.
I think at this point, it would have to be...years of successfully controlling leaks, and then a prototype for the same product line gets leaked TWICE within weeks of each other?
OR, maybe Apple was trying a new approach of letting engineers take phones off campus to usability test them under real conditions.
With a second lost phone, I assume whoever was against letting devices off campus will win the internal argument that it was a bad idea.
Can you paste me the quote in Obama's speech where he advocates state controlled media?
Or was your goal to demonstrate how easy it is for unreliable sources to lie (or strongly imply lies) with little to no risk to their (non-existent) credibility? If so, bravo!
Obama's political opponents flourish in certain media. So it's in his best interest (while being rather divorced from honesty and reality) for him to call them names and tar them as "unreliable."
There is nothing special about Obama's political opponents that makes them benefit more from unreliable sources. At least not any more than any other group. There are plenty of groups from all sides of the aisle and every extremist position that are all benefiting from spreading inaccurate information to further their causes.
It doesn't help either that most news media has become so fast-paced and sensationalist that they don't seem to do much fact-checking themselves anymore, in their race to beat the bloggers to the punch.
It would be an accurate comparison, please proceed. Of course it's several small companies (making solar panels, hybrids, etc.) and scientists versus numerous multi-national corporations, politicians, and small businesses who would be impacted by any attempts to reduce AGW. Can you post here once you add up the money on each side?
We'll also need to sum up the risk on each side. Scientists who lie take a huge risk to their individual career by being dishonest.
Oil company executives and marketing take little to no risk by spreading lies. They will easily find new jobs and move on, just like the bankers, realtors, and others responsible for the current economic crisis.
The worst risk for the company itself is it might take a reputation hit. That would require them to change their name to something random and confusing like, I don't know, how about "Altrea".
There is clearly more money on the anti-AGW side. They have a lot to gain by continuing the status quo, and they have very little risk to lying. The pro-AGW side has very little to gain by lying, and a whole lot of risk.
Those facts alone should make it quite clear which side is more likely to be honest. But please, go ahead and sum up the pro and anti AGW money and risk. It should be very enlightening.
Even worse, it lets dishonest (or stupid?) people perpetuate the Glenn Beck fallacy of criticizing Mann and AGW by pointing to Cuccinelli's blatantly political persecution as evidence that Mann and AGW are suspect.
Yeah, that was my take on it. I already bought World of Goo (and wasnt that impressed with it) and didn't care much for the Gish demo. But I still paid $20 for the bundle knowing little about the other 3 games.
I get some games to try out, and they get $20 they wouldn't otherwise have. I worry a little that they'll have statistics to say "look, cheapskates!" but I do trust that they'll think and look a little deeper, and know that these are all dollars they would never have received absent this promotional pricing.
Same thing when I bought Commander Keen off Steam and haven't actually had time to play it. I played the demo so much as a kid that they really deserve the money, no matter how much I play the discounted Steam copy.
They're talking about "psychokinetic energy", and you're worried they got the weight of a twinkie wrong? Good thing you never got to the part with the stay-puft marshmallow man!
Slashdot Mirror
Why should we care if this island sinks, when we don't know why it's important? [and smokey was powerless without it]
We are told that all life would be destroyed if the island sinks, and you could say that's a decision of faith (or trust), much like Desmond pushing the button all those years (and then stopping), or Jack calling the boat (as noname points out above). But it is discouraging for them to have the "limbo" timeline, which while apparently totally fake, has a sunken island with the rest of the world humming along cheerily. Does this mean the island WAS meaningless all along, other than having some nifty supernatural puddle?
To me, Jacob was the bad guy, keeping Smokey chained to the Island for apparently no good reason.
He's also the one that turned his brother into Smokey, beat him up several times, and killed a variety of people through bringing them to the island or via his "others" who were quite merciless. Was the pool just an ego-trip that gave Jacob (and his foster mom) an excuse to be evil while telling themselves they were doing good?
I guess what really bothers me is that this post is rated insightful and it was written by a person that did not even watch the whole series, and the most important season was missed all together. Would we think so much of a book review if the writer had picked random pages to read, and then complained when they said it seems like the books jumps around a lot.
Agreed. It's disappointing to see a trollish rant by someone who hasn't even watched the last season (the one that finished answering the mysteries...) being used by commenters as the basis to not watch a very good show.
I could be missing something more about the Whitmores/Faradays, but I don't think they were "special". Charles and Eloise were on the island when their son time traveled and they killed him, all of their effort afterward was based on that. Faraday was just smart, nothing supernatural there.
In regards to the heart of the island, we are just going off of Jacob's word which was passed down by his crazy murderous foster mother. But maybe that's the point, seeing as Jacob's duty passing to Hurley is nearly identical to the button-pressing duty that was passed down to Desmond. In both cases the duty involved having faith that the duty WAS important. Other than the rumbles when the button wasn't pressed or the cork got unplugged momentarily (a pretty good indication, really), there is no way to fully test the scenario without destroying what is being protected.
It's a Pascal's Wager type of scenario, although they didn't harp on that theme as much as they could have. To destroy all doubt of what was right or wrong, and what really needed to be done, would have been again the theme of the entire show.
The statue is where Jacob lived, and it indicated that the island had been around and passed down through protectors since at least egyptian times. "Just a statue"?
The donkey wheel was one of several demonstrated and significant uses of the "magical energy", hardly "no big deal".
You said "it's people", but I think the people were great, their motivation and the supernatural aspect was more wishy-washy. It all came down to "it's a magical pool". That pool was used to handwave through every unexplained phenomenon on the island.
Well, Dharma did account for a bunch of answers too, and those were a more fulfilling than the ones since then in seasons 5 and 6.
Midichlorions would have been even worse than "magic pool", but the magical energy pool could have been consistent at least. It was used to wave away time travel, "consciousness" time travel, cloning bunnies, teleporting, smoke monsters, living forever, and so on. The mythology behind it was good and most mysteries were "answered", but at a certain point those answers came back to "magical answer pool".
Great explanation. I'll add that the Man in Black thought all men were evil, and he only humored them to the extent they could help him get off the island. He explained this to Jacob in the flashback before his adoptive mother killed everyone to "protect" the island. Man in Black is basically more like his murderous adoptive mom than Jacob is, even though Jacob is the one who was passed the duty of protecting the island.
Does this make the US a "christian nation?" Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly wasn't meant to be a theocracy or an atheist nation.
Agreed. It was meant to be an atheist government, with the people able to choose to do as they wish.
For instance, no one is preventing parents from having their children pray. But the government IS preventing teachers from forcing ALL students to pray to ONE particular god.
What the current conservatives are offended by is not an ability to follow their own religion, but their inability to use big government to force their religion on others.
The idea that they'll end up having someone else's religion forced on them and their children has never occurred to them, sadly.
I was surprised when I last installed Mac OSX and it wanted to default to case-insensitive. Apple is trying to move *towards* case-insensitivity, although I have no idea why.
The fact that the past 20 years were case-sensitive is a good indication of just that: the past.
It's funny how you keep getting stuck on the idea that paying more for a better product = overpaying.
The issue in misdiagnosis (or lack of diagnosis) is not a doctor's lack of smarts. It's a doctor's lack of time.
Wow, "sniffing unencrypted wireless traffic", that's a bit of a misnomer don't you think?
Like how I eavesdropped on the loudspeaker at the ball game?
Google was *listening* to unencrypted publicly broadcasted traffic. That's how they find public access points.
Yep, not sure how much faster this one will be able to get.
You could make the point that you should be splitting off into multiple threads (waves) for each "message board post", but I don't think they have any way to do that right now. So your original wave keeps going off on tangents and totally unrelated posts, and javascript gets slower and slower...
Might be as easy to fix as making a "Break off to new Wave" option for removing tangential responses. Or improving the folding so that collapsed sections don't slow down the rest of the wave (ie: dont get pulled into memory unless you expand them).
If you bought Vista after a certain date, you do get it for free.
If you bought Vista before that date....well, Microsoft is a business, and businesses like money.
Ah, thanks. I assumed they had this software running on PCs that they could trivially keep up indefinitely, didn't see the details about shutting down the original Xbox's Live system entirely.
WarCraft 2: Battle.Net Edition is WarCraft 2 ported to the StarCraft engine, right down to the control changes made in StarCraft
Wow, had no idea that could be an easier approach than adding battlenet to the existing WC2 codebase!
Is that any different than saying "Halo 2 uses the same Xbox Live servers that Halo 3 / Halo Reach does"?
I don't know the BNet or Live architecture enough to know if that's really an apt comparison.
No it doesn't. His point was that a 15 year-old game still has a working online system... and it doesn't. You had to purchase a new version of the game, released 4 years after the original (11 years ago) to get Internet play.
Right, but everyone had already bought WC2 before the bnet version was released. The number of people who actually own, let alone play WC2 over battle.net, has to be minuscule.
The fact that they're still supporting WC2's tiny bnet playerbase says a lot about their commitment.
It can't take much money to maintain that, nor to maintain Quake/Half-life master servers. Maybe it speaks more to the greedy callousness of canceling Halo 2 online play than to a heroic effort by Blizzard, Id, or Valve.
The battle.net edition of WC2 was still a minor re-release of a Very Old Game, so I think the OP's point stands.
I take it they never released an "enable battle.net play" patch for the original WC2? I supposed the original WC2 was before the time of cd-keys, which may have prevented the corporate overlords from accepting the risk of allowing "pirates" to use the online service?
As b0lt said, battle.net has been around and supported for Diablo1 much longer than it took Microsoft to shut down Halo. Blizzard, like Valve, is a company that has earned a lot of trust with gamers, and has always had the money to do The Right Thing.
Having merged with Activision may thrown a big ugly wrench into the works though.
I think at this point, it would have to be...years of successfully controlling leaks, and then a prototype for the same product line gets leaked TWICE within weeks of each other?
OR, maybe Apple was trying a new approach of letting engineers take phones off campus to usability test them under real conditions.
With a second lost phone, I assume whoever was against letting devices off campus will win the internal argument that it was a bad idea.
Can you paste me the quote in Obama's speech where he advocates state controlled media?
Or was your goal to demonstrate how easy it is for unreliable sources to lie (or strongly imply lies) with little to no risk to their (non-existent) credibility? If so, bravo!
Obama's political opponents flourish in certain media. So it's in his best interest (while being rather divorced from honesty and reality) for him to call them names and tar them as "unreliable."
There is nothing special about Obama's political opponents that makes them benefit more from unreliable sources. At least not any more than any other group. There are plenty of groups from all sides of the aisle and every extremist position that are all benefiting from spreading inaccurate information to further their causes.
It doesn't help either that most news media has become so fast-paced and sensationalist that they don't seem to do much fact-checking themselves anymore, in their race to beat the bloggers to the punch.
It would be an accurate comparison, please proceed. Of course it's several small companies (making solar panels, hybrids, etc.) and scientists versus numerous multi-national corporations, politicians, and small businesses who would be impacted by any attempts to reduce AGW. Can you post here once you add up the money on each side?
We'll also need to sum up the risk on each side. Scientists who lie take a huge risk to their individual career by being dishonest.
Oil company executives and marketing take little to no risk by spreading lies. They will easily find new jobs and move on, just like the bankers, realtors, and others responsible for the current economic crisis.
The worst risk for the company itself is it might take a reputation hit. That would require them to change their name to something random and confusing like, I don't know, how about "Altrea".
There is clearly more money on the anti-AGW side. They have a lot to gain by continuing the status quo, and they have very little risk to lying. The pro-AGW side has very little to gain by lying, and a whole lot of risk.
Those facts alone should make it quite clear which side is more likely to be honest. But please, go ahead and sum up the pro and anti AGW money and risk. It should be very enlightening.
Even worse, it lets dishonest (or stupid?) people perpetuate the Glenn Beck fallacy of criticizing Mann and AGW by pointing to Cuccinelli's blatantly political persecution as evidence that Mann and AGW are suspect.
See this ridiculous post in this very thread for a great example:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1645100&cid=32140124
Yeah, that was my take on it. I already bought World of Goo (and wasnt that impressed with it) and didn't care much for the Gish demo. But I still paid $20 for the bundle knowing little about the other 3 games.
I get some games to try out, and they get $20 they wouldn't otherwise have. I worry a little that they'll have statistics to say "look, cheapskates!" but I do trust that they'll think and look a little deeper, and know that these are all dollars they would never have received absent this promotional pricing.
Same thing when I bought Commander Keen off Steam and haven't actually had time to play it. I played the demo so much as a kid that they really deserve the money, no matter how much I play the discounted Steam copy.
They're talking about "psychokinetic energy", and you're worried they got the weight of a twinkie wrong? Good thing you never got to the part with the stay-puft marshmallow man!
Likewise any of the modified Macbook tablets that have been sold for years.
It's still interesting to have PC gaming transmitted to a low-powered thin client.