I agree with your post; however,... to what end? I mean, if someone can create a binary-compatable console that plays NES games... I seriously doubt they can do it cheaper than you can buy a used NES for (about $25 last I checked).
Not to mention if existing players are given a "Stone of Change My Profession" so that they can change their character 9 times to decide which they want to be... shouldn't it allow them to change 10 times? So that they can try all 9 professions and then decide which they want to be?
Ghost questions aside, PAC-MAN is all about running around in a dark room, listening to techno, munching pills. I think that's enough to disqualify it anyway.
As has been pointed out before, the static strings that are compiled into the program are just parts of the program that are LOOKING FOR LAME. It doesn't have any part of lame in it, it's making sure that you don't use lame to encode this CD. It's part of the so-called "protection". It's looking for a whole list of files and applications that it knows about in order to prevent them from being used to extract the audio from this CD.
Harry Potter has been criticized by some of the very extreme fundamentalist, but most Christians accept it for what it is -- a great tool to get kids to read.
I was raised Southern Baptist, first in Tennessee and then in Virginia. I sometimes forget that there are many many rational christians out there who see Harry Potter just as an amusing story, or the Lord of the Rings as a paralell of the Christian story. I would be completely truthful in telling you that I have experienced first-hand many times Christians who regard anything dealing with "magic" as being straight from the Occult - I've been around the people who view the CAP report as something to actually believe.
On the upside, both Virginia and New Jersey just voted Democratic governors into office. Jerry Kilgore (republican candidate for VA gov.)'s campaign has released a memo that they consider one of the biggest reasons for their slide in popularity over the past few months to be bush's coattails - appearantly they stink on ice now.
But, if you ask me, it was more that Kilgore ran a strictly attack campaign - trying to tell everyone that they should be afraid of Tim Kaine; telling them that he opposed this, supported that, and is, quote, "Too liberal to be Governor". Kaine's adds were supportive of his own agenda and responsive to claims by Kilgore. I never once heard what Kilgore stood for, only what a horrible person his opponant was, and I would have voted for the other guy based solely on that.
Of course! As a fellow atheist, I completely agree! I know lots of mormons, and dated one for several years, as well as was in a band with one. Mormons are almost universally nice people - always willing to lend a helping hand, always very concerned about community togetherness and family time, always being model citizens. They give what little they have to the poor, they pay their taxes, they are in general an asset to society.
Doesn't change the fact that their religious beliefs are fucking nuts.
But, once you get past that, they're wonderful people. And I'm completely serious. Aside from the whacko religious rantings, society would be very much enhanced if we all acted slightly more like your average morman.
some kids might fall for it, and move further towards believing science is indistinguishable from magic - occult magic. You know, The Devil.
You, my friend, are exactly on top of this matter - you've hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Why do fundamentalist christians dislike Sci-Fi and Fantasy? Why the outcry against the Lord of the Rings, against Harry Potter, against Dungeons and Dragons?
Two reasons:
1.) Inability to tell fact from fiction. This derives directly from the fact that their core belief system - the bible - contains things that by any measure are "magic". Water into wine. Rising from the dead. Turning to a pillar of salt. Parting the red sea. Flaming swords guarding the garden of eden. Visions and prophecies and... oh my! Unfortunately, to deny these things as false is to deny their very legitimacy as a religion; while to accept them as truth is to invite the possibility that other magic exists. Normal people know there aren't elves and wizards and little boys with glasses fighting trolls in the bathrooms at school; but the Fundamentalist Christians are plagued by a nagging sense of "If Magic 'A' exists, Magic 'B' might exist", which brings me to my 2nd point:
2.) These things are a competing product. If magic exists, and only magic in this book is good magic, then everything else must be bad magic; and bad magic can only be attributed to "the Devil". Yes, Christians, there is a global satanic conspiracy - we want your kids to watch Harry Potter, because it will lead them to the Occult, it will make them curious about casting their own spells, and before you know it, they'll be levitating cars and leading hoardes of undead to disrupt your pot-luck picnics. Either that, or it's an amusing work of fiction, which tickles the imagination.
They've done such a good job throwing DnD, Harry Potter, and everything else under the bus. It's a politically correct climate that they can try to do it with science, now, too. If they can lable "evolution" as "bad magic"... think how far it will put the rest of us back.
Ah, but here... here, they're intruding on my religion. My god is the scientific method. I rely on facts, collected, verified, and reproducible. I don't deal in myths or untestable conjectures; I deal in science.
You know what I just remembered? The Dreamcast had a d-pad that was all one piece - a T-bar. I wonder if they licensed it from Nintendo, or whatever. But, that controller sucked for fighting games - not enough buttons compared to the dual shock. The trigger buttons on the underside were aweful and you were missing PPP and KKK (for breaking out of supers, etc). Plus, no select for taunts.
Heh. Somewhere I have a screen capture of a news story about a todler dying in a house fire, while his infant little brother was rescued by firemen. On the page is a banner add for an Iomega CD Burner which says "Burn, Baby! Burn".
Read beyond #1. The places where you can smoke are already restricted to allow for reasonable space between people who smoke and people who don't want to breathe smoke. So, saying "how does that give smokers the right to put poisons into other people's bodies?" is really missing the point. If you don't want smoker poisons in your body, don't go where people smoke. No one is blowing smoke in your face; that is, unless you're in a bar. Most places already make it illegal to smoke within 30 feet of a door, or only in designated areas. If you don't like smoke, visit non-smoking venues. Done. No smoke in your lungs. If you walk outside in a thunderstorm, rather than walking through the covered concourse, you're going to get wet. It's not logical to blame the clouds when you had another option, and chose the one which exposed you to undesirable circumstances.
This is the major meltdown of the no smoking bans - you sound like someone who wouldn't go to a place filled with smoke on principle - you don't want to breathe smoke. Why bother writing a law that makes it illegal for anyone to smoke there, when you weren't going there in the first place?
The only other arguement is "Well, he was smoking a cigarette and he walked by me", or "I walked past him on the way into the door". Dude. Get over it. You probably walked behind a running automobile in the parking lot; are you going to pass a law prohibiting exhaust pipes from emitting fumes within 30 feet of people?
And it isn't selfish to impose cigarette smoke on people who don't want it anywhere near them? Particularly the ones for whom even small amounts of passive smoking triggers asthma attacks.
Welcome to free market enterprise.
1.) In a free society, you should be able to be free to put anything you want into your own body. Period.
2.) If you don't like the smell of smoke, don't go where the majority of people smoke. For example, if you don't like smoke, don't go to metal shows. Those of us who don't smoke, and still like to go see GWAR once a year or so, understand the choice is ours to make: If we go to GWAR, we'll come home smelling like smoke, and need to wash our clothes (which, admittedly, is a moot point leaving a GWAR show). Don't like it? Don't go.
3.) Smoking bans in bars and resturants are bullshit. Plain and simple. If people didn't want smoke in their resturants, the free market would have a place for smoke free resturants, and people would frequent them. Oh, wait, that's exactly what happens. Same goes for bars. If people would put their money where their mouth was and say "We want a bar where no one smokes", by god, someone would build one. No one does that. Why? Because, there's no demand. But busybody people who always know what's best for you and me decided to push through a law prohibiting it, despite the fact that they wouldn't be caught dead in a dive in the middle of Richmond at 2AM anyway, so it doesn't really affect them.
With the exception of a fine Dominican cigar from time to time, I don't smoke. But, as someone else said, I'll defend your right to smoke, given that this is a free society, with free market enterprise. You wanna smoke? Go right ahead. I don't like your smoke? I'll stay the fuck away. End of story, and I'm not going to bitch about it. It falls under the same category as breasts on the Superbowl or fuck on the radio - no one is subjecting you to it. Get over it, change the channel, or stay at home and drink on your couch, you whining baby. Stop legislating your personal desires all over everyone else's freedom.
Dude, the dpad on the playstation is wonderful, because it makes the T-bar rocker four distinct buttons. People who play a lot of twitch games need that because rather than doing a "toward, quarter-circle-down, quarter-circle-toward-and-punch" move, they actually push the individual buttons, and once you get used to it (i.e. use the controller a week or two), it doesn't bother your thumb and you get to the point where you appreciate it being separate buttons.
But, again, a human interface device is a personal choice.
Re:I just had the same thought yesterday
on
XBOX 360=Dreamcast 2.0?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The article mentions that the XBOX 360 controller may be the best console controller ever. I can't see how it's possible. There are some games for which analog sticks are not the apex input device, and the D-pad on that controller looks horrible - it looks like the input on a logitech $9.99 usb controller. As long as the D-pad doesn't have at least a T-bar, instead of the circle of doom, it will never be as good as other controllers for fighting games.
Not to mention, it looks like they've been wishy-washy on what the controller for the left thumb is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be the D-pad, or the analog stick? Ugh. So instead, there's a big blank space where your thumb normally rests, and you have to stress yourself to move to either of the inputs. The buttons look too bubbly to be responsive... I dunno, it just looks like it was designed by marketing people to look slick, and then secondarily to fit the buttons on.
Sorry, but the PSX controller is the best controller ever made. To the point where I use them on my computer with an adapter to play games and emulators. Everything on the ps2 controller feels like it's in exactly the right spot. No controller compares; not the NES, SNES, dreamcast, sega, N-64, gamecube, XBOX, or any controller I've ever used on the computer. I'm not a playstation fanboy (i own a grand total of 3 playstation 2 games, and I didn't buy one of the things until 2 years after it was released), but Sony hit a homerun with that thing.
The only defense of this practice is that it would have been hard to convince the US government to pour $5 billion dollars into cell phone research in the 60's. If the only way these things get invented / discovered / improved is to fund space research, and then wait for the spin-offs... then so be it. Plus, we get the added benefit of going to space.
Belief in the good-natured core of the human being... it's a disease I share with you. I just can't let it go, I can't believe that human beings are fundamentally anything but good: I refuse to believe it.
Yeah, but how many of us have a world book encyclopedia set? There's 20 books or so in the set, and they're all chock full of 12 pt. font. My parents bought one in the early 80's, and it helped me do reports for elementry school and middle school.
When I first saw the headline - I thought, what a great idea! Print the whole thing! But I do realize it's a bit long. I wish there was some way to trim it down a bit and sell it in dead tree format. Wikipedia was extremely useful - even when I was in college: as a history major, emphasizing on classics, I used it to look up names and places that I would find in reading primary sources; it was a wonderful reference (well, it and the 1911 encyclopedia brittanica).
I appreciate your logical skepticism, but in this case... it's more like "all scientific understanding of the way our world has worked, our comprehension of paleontological history, and all the facts we've found point to this being right. It's possible that it's completely wrong, but some fundamentally basic things about our understanding of the natural world would have to be wrong."
Re:Ma Bell was worse than you think
on
Ma Bell is Back
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· Score: 1
Said startup can sell one of Verizon's lines for pennies on the dollar and if it ever breaks they just blame Verizon for it -- and then Verizon get's to fix it for them.
Been there, done that, with Infinity Computers in fredericksburg, VA. When the lines were deregulated (and verizon was forced to share), IC, which was a simple repair shop / consulting firm, started selling DSL service on the Verizon lines. Verizon charged infinity about $35 for the line, and infinity resold it for about $50 to cover the cost of bandwidth, equipment, and tech support.
It's important to re-iterate that last bit.
Verizon charged infinity for the use of the lines in the customer's homes and neighborhoods. Infinity had to provide the bandwidth, equipment (routers, mail servers, firewalls, etc, plus DSL modems for the users), and tech support.
Yes, if there was a problem with a physical line, verizon fixed it... 2 days after we submitted a problem ticket. In the mean time, we were on our own.
The, about a year and a half ago, verizon dropped their prices for residential DSL service down to... $34.99. So they were charging the end user (for bandwidth and techsupport) what they were charging infinity for just using the lines into the houses and businesses.
Needless to say, Infinity shortly thereafter stopped offering dsl service and transitioned all its customers to verizon.
I have no ill feeling toward verizon, but to cry for them because they had to open their lines up to competition is to misunderstand the true state of things.
On a sidenote: Verizon does have some technical problems that they refused to fix, which we repeatedly alerted them to - for one, their westel wireless-router-dslmodem-in-one and about half of their westel modems they give out don't play nice with Linksys routers. They'll tell you it's an issue with Linksys, and refer you to linksys's tech support, who is getting sick of telling people that there's nothing wrong with their equipment, and that something verizon is doing is messing it up. I can verify this because linksys routers were working when we were providing the service. Another is that their routing tables are not allowing a netblock that they hand out via DHCP to get back into their network - so sometimes, if your address releases and renews, and you get a different IP (168.something, I think...), you can't get to verizon.net (and all subdomains, including webmail, smtp server, news server, account portal, etc).
Well, how about more accurately, an ideal scientific law would be simply expressable and universally applicable.
The ones we have are close... F=MA is almost universal, for observable common instances of mass and acceleration. Evolution will never fit into this ideal. "Biological organisms change from generation to generation depending on a mix of random phenomina and environmental pressures" is kind of decidedly more vague than F=MA*
*in almost all cases you're likely to personally encounter
NTC reserves the right to allocate bandwidth however it deems fair, and in the best interests of the customer. The use of one or more of the following services is limited.
* Voice over IP or any other service that allows making telephone calls, local, long distance or international utilizing the Internet (telephony services.).
* KaZaA, Morpheus, Gnutella or any similar peer-to-peer application.
* Video conferencing.
* Any other "bandwidth-intensive" applications.
and
Each Internet account provides connectivity for one computer. You may not redistribute your connection to other users via a wire line, wireless, or other media. Users that redistribute connectivity will have their connection immediately terminated without refund. NTC reserves the right to contact the local University and inform them on any infringement of the honor code.
The parts that worry me are the VoIP (of course, they want you to buy their local phone service, in addition to their internet and cable), and the "one jack, one computer". I mean, that's all well and good for the average college students that make up the majority of their users, but what about my wife and I? Should I pay an extra $34.99/month for her computer to be online, when the combined total of (hers+mine) won't exceed the available bandwidth on one computer? What if I want to use my laptop wirelessly? How about hooking up my tivo to the internet so that I don't have to have it phone home for updates? I'm not going to pay $35/mo on top of the tivo service fee just to hook it up to the internet.
*sigh* I'll play nice, for now... but we'll see if it chafes me. I'm going to set up a network and distribute DHCP from my computer with no gateway... we'll see how that goes.
Also the part about reporting to the University any honor code violations... "You break our dumb rules, we'll tattle on you". What the hell, man?
The complication comes in that scientific laws are almost universally expressable as a simple equation, devoid of units and specifics. F=M*A is a law.
Evolution will *never* be a law, because it cannot be expressed in a one-liner. Biological systems are infinately more complex than anything we have quantified and reduced to a scientific law.
However, as you said in your post, "Scientific Theory" doesn't mean what the Religious ID proponants think it means. A scientific theory has been tested and, to the extent possible, all evidence we have supports its truth. Theory is as far as Evolution will ever get, and it might as well be fact.
When the school board of _________ says that they have to put a sticker in the textbooks claiming that "Evolution is just a theory and that other ideas should be considered", the word they are thinking about is "Hypothesis". Theory in the scientific world, and "I have a theory about where I left my car keys", do not have the same meaning, and therein lies the main distortion between proponants of ID and of creationism vs. evolution - most of the creationists see the word "Theory" and assume they have a foothold because of some longstanding debate in the academic world, where the reality is that no such debate is taking place - all serious scientists without an agenda agree that evolution is a fact.
XP does it out of the box, and has since the first release (I think it has since codename whistler). If you leave an XP box sitting for a while, you may hear the harddrive chugging away in the background. It's not deep defraging, not like a manual one, but it's like vaccuuming vs. rug doctor - keeping things neat.
It's my constant bitch about linux windowing systems. Obviously, there are several systems that have been coded to work with cut and paste, but the problem comes in when you install a program which hasn't correctly implemented the API, or on a system where the API is a moving target. The most common offenders in my personal experience are Mozilla and Gaim. Trying to highlight and copy text from a gaim conversation into, say, a terminal window usually ends in frustration, and sometimes i think mozilla has a mind and clipboard of its own that don't play nice with anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your post; however,
Not to mention if existing players are given a "Stone of Change My Profession" so that they can change their character 9 times to decide which they want to be... shouldn't it allow them to change 10 times? So that they can try all 9 professions and then decide which they want to be?
~W
Ghost questions aside, PAC-MAN is all about running around in a dark room, listening to techno, munching pills. I think that's enough to disqualify it anyway.
~Will
*sigh*
As has been pointed out before, the static strings that are compiled into the program are just parts of the program that are LOOKING FOR LAME. It doesn't have any part of lame in it, it's making sure that you don't use lame to encode this CD. It's part of the so-called "protection". It's looking for a whole list of files and applications that it knows about in order to prevent them from being used to extract the audio from this CD.
No LGPL violation. Move along.
Harry Potter has been criticized by some of the very extreme fundamentalist, but most Christians accept it for what it is -- a great tool to get kids to read.
I was raised Southern Baptist, first in Tennessee and then in Virginia. I sometimes forget that there are many many rational christians out there who see Harry Potter just as an amusing story, or the Lord of the Rings as a paralell of the Christian story. I would be completely truthful in telling you that I have experienced first-hand many times Christians who regard anything dealing with "magic" as being straight from the Occult - I've been around the people who view the CAP report as something to actually believe.
~Will
On the upside, both Virginia and New Jersey just voted Democratic governors into office. Jerry Kilgore (republican candidate for VA gov.)'s campaign has released a memo that they consider one of the biggest reasons for their slide in popularity over the past few months to be bush's coattails - appearantly they stink on ice now.
But, if you ask me, it was more that Kilgore ran a strictly attack campaign - trying to tell everyone that they should be afraid of Tim Kaine; telling them that he opposed this, supported that, and is, quote, "Too liberal to be Governor". Kaine's adds were supportive of his own agenda and responsive to claims by Kilgore. I never once heard what Kilgore stood for, only what a horrible person his opponant was, and I would have voted for the other guy based solely on that.
~Will
Of course! As a fellow atheist, I completely agree! I know lots of mormons, and dated one for several years, as well as was in a band with one. Mormons are almost universally nice people - always willing to lend a helping hand, always very concerned about community togetherness and family time, always being model citizens. They give what little they have to the poor, they pay their taxes, they are in general an asset to society.
Doesn't change the fact that their religious beliefs are fucking nuts.
But, once you get past that, they're wonderful people. And I'm completely serious. Aside from the whacko religious rantings, society would be very much enhanced if we all acted slightly more like your average morman.
~Wx
some kids might fall for it, and move further towards believing science is indistinguishable from magic - occult magic. You know, The Devil.
You, my friend, are exactly on top of this matter - you've hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Why do fundamentalist christians dislike Sci-Fi and Fantasy? Why the outcry against the Lord of the Rings, against Harry Potter, against Dungeons and Dragons?
Two reasons:
1.) Inability to tell fact from fiction.
This derives directly from the fact that their core belief system - the bible - contains things that by any measure are "magic". Water into wine. Rising from the dead. Turning to a pillar of salt. Parting the red sea. Flaming swords guarding the garden of eden. Visions and prophecies and
2.) These things are a competing product.
If magic exists, and only magic in this book is good magic, then everything else must be bad magic; and bad magic can only be attributed to "the Devil". Yes, Christians, there is a global satanic conspiracy - we want your kids to watch Harry Potter, because it will lead them to the Occult, it will make them curious about casting their own spells, and before you know it, they'll be levitating cars and leading hoardes of undead to disrupt your pot-luck picnics. Either that, or it's an amusing work of fiction, which tickles the imagination.
They've done such a good job throwing DnD, Harry Potter, and everything else under the bus. It's a politically correct climate that they can try to do it with science, now, too. If they can lable "evolution" as "bad magic"... think how far it will put the rest of us back.
Ah, but here... here, they're intruding on my religion. My god is the scientific method. I rely on facts, collected, verified, and reproducible. I don't deal in myths or untestable conjectures; I deal in science.
You won't tread on my religion.
~Will
You know what I just remembered? The Dreamcast had a d-pad that was all one piece - a T-bar. I wonder if they licensed it from Nintendo, or whatever. But, that controller sucked for fighting games - not enough buttons compared to the dual shock. The trigger buttons on the underside were aweful and you were missing PPP and KKK (for breaking out of supers, etc). Plus, no select for taunts.
~Will
Heh. Somewhere I have a screen capture of a news story about a todler dying in a house fire, while his infant little brother was rescued by firemen. On the page is a banner add for an Iomega CD Burner which says "Burn, Baby! Burn".
~Will
Read beyond #1. The places where you can smoke are already restricted to allow for reasonable space between people who smoke and people who don't want to breathe smoke. So, saying "how does that give smokers the right to put poisons into other people's bodies?" is really missing the point. If you don't want smoker poisons in your body, don't go where people smoke. No one is blowing smoke in your face; that is, unless you're in a bar. Most places already make it illegal to smoke within 30 feet of a door, or only in designated areas. If you don't like smoke, visit non-smoking venues. Done. No smoke in your lungs. If you walk outside in a thunderstorm, rather than walking through the covered concourse, you're going to get wet. It's not logical to blame the clouds when you had another option, and chose the one which exposed you to undesirable circumstances.
This is the major meltdown of the no smoking bans - you sound like someone who wouldn't go to a place filled with smoke on principle - you don't want to breathe smoke. Why bother writing a law that makes it illegal for anyone to smoke there, when you weren't going there in the first place?
The only other arguement is "Well, he was smoking a cigarette and he walked by me", or "I walked past him on the way into the door". Dude. Get over it. You probably walked behind a running automobile in the parking lot; are you going to pass a law prohibiting exhaust pipes from emitting fumes within 30 feet of people?
~Will
And it isn't selfish to impose cigarette smoke on people who don't want it anywhere near them? Particularly the ones for whom even small amounts of passive smoking triggers asthma attacks.
Welcome to free market enterprise.
1.) In a free society, you should be able to be free to put anything you want into your own body. Period.
2.) If you don't like the smell of smoke, don't go where the majority of people smoke. For example, if you don't like smoke, don't go to metal shows. Those of us who don't smoke, and still like to go see GWAR once a year or so, understand the choice is ours to make: If we go to GWAR, we'll come home smelling like smoke, and need to wash our clothes (which, admittedly, is a moot point leaving a GWAR show). Don't like it? Don't go.
3.) Smoking bans in bars and resturants are bullshit. Plain and simple. If people didn't want smoke in their resturants, the free market would have a place for smoke free resturants, and people would frequent them. Oh, wait, that's exactly what happens. Same goes for bars. If people would put their money where their mouth was and say "We want a bar where no one smokes", by god, someone would build one. No one does that. Why? Because, there's no demand. But busybody people who always know what's best for you and me decided to push through a law prohibiting it, despite the fact that they wouldn't be caught dead in a dive in the middle of Richmond at 2AM anyway, so it doesn't really affect them.
With the exception of a fine Dominican cigar from time to time, I don't smoke. But, as someone else said, I'll defend your right to smoke, given that this is a free society, with free market enterprise. You wanna smoke? Go right ahead. I don't like your smoke? I'll stay the fuck away. End of story, and I'm not going to bitch about it. It falls under the same category as breasts on the Superbowl or fuck on the radio - no one is subjecting you to it. Get over it, change the channel, or stay at home and drink on your couch, you whining baby. Stop legislating your personal desires all over everyone else's freedom.
~Will
Dude, the dpad on the playstation is wonderful, because it makes the T-bar rocker four distinct buttons. People who play a lot of twitch games need that because rather than doing a "toward, quarter-circle-down, quarter-circle-toward-and-punch" move, they actually push the individual buttons, and once you get used to it (i.e. use the controller a week or two), it doesn't bother your thumb and you get to the point where you appreciate it being separate buttons.
But, again, a human interface device is a personal choice.
The article mentions that the XBOX 360 controller may be the best console controller ever. I can't see how it's possible. There are some games for which analog sticks are not the apex input device, and the D-pad on that controller looks horrible - it looks like the input on a logitech $9.99 usb controller. As long as the D-pad doesn't have at least a T-bar, instead of the circle of doom, it will never be as good as other controllers for fighting games.
Not to mention, it looks like they've been wishy-washy on what the controller for the left thumb is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be the D-pad, or the analog stick? Ugh. So instead, there's a big blank space where your thumb normally rests, and you have to stress yourself to move to either of the inputs. The buttons look too bubbly to be responsive... I dunno, it just looks like it was designed by marketing people to look slick, and then secondarily to fit the buttons on.
Sorry, but the PSX controller is the best controller ever made. To the point where I use them on my computer with an adapter to play games and emulators. Everything on the ps2 controller feels like it's in exactly the right spot. No controller compares; not the NES, SNES, dreamcast, sega, N-64, gamecube, XBOX, or any controller I've ever used on the computer. I'm not a playstation fanboy (i own a grand total of 3 playstation 2 games, and I didn't buy one of the things until 2 years after it was released), but Sony hit a homerun with that thing.
~Will
The only defense of this practice is that it would have been hard to convince the US government to pour $5 billion dollars into cell phone research in the 60's. If the only way these things get invented / discovered / improved is to fund space research, and then wait for the spin-offs... then so be it. Plus, we get the added benefit of going to space.
Or something like that.
Belief in the good-natured core of the human being... it's a disease I share with you. I just can't let it go, I can't believe that human beings are fundamentally anything but good: I refuse to believe it.
Some days it's hard.
Yeah, but how many of us have a world book encyclopedia set? There's 20 books or so in the set, and they're all chock full of 12 pt. font. My parents bought one in the early 80's, and it helped me do reports for elementry school and middle school.
When I first saw the headline - I thought, what a great idea! Print the whole thing! But I do realize it's a bit long. I wish there was some way to trim it down a bit and sell it in dead tree format. Wikipedia was extremely useful - even when I was in college: as a history major, emphasizing on classics, I used it to look up names and places that I would find in reading primary sources; it was a wonderful reference (well, it and the 1911 encyclopedia brittanica).
~Will
I appreciate your logical skepticism, but in this case... it's more like "all scientific understanding of the way our world has worked, our comprehension of paleontological history, and all the facts we've found point to this being right. It's possible that it's completely wrong, but some fundamentally basic things about our understanding of the natural world would have to be wrong."
Said startup can sell one of Verizon's lines for pennies on the dollar and if it ever breaks they just blame Verizon for it -- and then Verizon get's to fix it for them.
Been there, done that, with Infinity Computers in fredericksburg, VA. When the lines were deregulated (and verizon was forced to share), IC, which was a simple repair shop / consulting firm, started selling DSL service on the Verizon lines. Verizon charged infinity about $35 for the line, and infinity resold it for about $50 to cover the cost of bandwidth, equipment, and tech support.
It's important to re-iterate that last bit.
Verizon charged infinity for the use of the lines in the customer's homes and neighborhoods. Infinity had to provide the bandwidth, equipment (routers, mail servers, firewalls, etc, plus DSL modems for the users), and tech support.
Yes, if there was a problem with a physical line, verizon fixed it... 2 days after we submitted a problem ticket. In the mean time, we were on our own.
The, about a year and a half ago, verizon dropped their prices for residential DSL service down to... $34.99. So they were charging the end user (for bandwidth and techsupport) what they were charging infinity for just using the lines into the houses and businesses.
Needless to say, Infinity shortly thereafter stopped offering dsl service and transitioned all its customers to verizon.
I have no ill feeling toward verizon, but to cry for them because they had to open their lines up to competition is to misunderstand the true state of things.
On a sidenote: Verizon does have some technical problems that they refused to fix, which we repeatedly alerted them to - for one, their westel wireless-router-dslmodem-in-one and about half of their westel modems they give out don't play nice with Linksys routers. They'll tell you it's an issue with Linksys, and refer you to linksys's tech support, who is getting sick of telling people that there's nothing wrong with their equipment, and that something verizon is doing is messing it up. I can verify this because linksys routers were working when we were providing the service. Another is that their routing tables are not allowing a netblock that they hand out via DHCP to get back into their network - so sometimes, if your address releases and renews, and you get a different IP (168.something, I think...), you can't get to verizon.net (and all subdomains, including webmail, smtp server, news server, account portal, etc).
~Will
Well, how about more accurately, an ideal scientific law would be simply expressable and universally applicable.
The ones we have are close... F=MA is almost universal, for observable common instances of mass and acceleration. Evolution will never fit into this ideal. "Biological organisms change from generation to generation depending on a mix of random phenomina and environmental pressures" is kind of decidedly more vague than F=MA*
*in almost all cases you're likely to personally encounter
It's already happening, by the way... Look at the AUP for the internet service I just signed up for:
http://www.ntc-com.com/content/?title=acceptable+
The parts that worry me are the VoIP (of course, they want you to buy their local phone service, in addition to their internet and cable), and the "one jack, one computer". I mean, that's all well and good for the average college students that make up the majority of their users, but what about my wife and I? Should I pay an extra $34.99/month for her computer to be online, when the combined total of (hers+mine) won't exceed the available bandwidth on one computer? What if I want to use my laptop wirelessly? How about hooking up my tivo to the internet so that I don't have to have it phone home for updates? I'm not going to pay $35/mo on top of the tivo service fee just to hook it up to the internet.
*sigh* I'll play nice, for now... but we'll see if it chafes me. I'm going to set up a network and distribute DHCP from my computer with no gateway... we'll see how that goes.
Also the part about reporting to the University any honor code violations... "You break our dumb rules, we'll tattle on you". What the hell, man?
~Will
The complication comes in that scientific laws are almost universally expressable as a simple equation, devoid of units and specifics. F=M*A is a law.
Evolution will *never* be a law, because it cannot be expressed in a one-liner. Biological systems are infinately more complex than anything we have quantified and reduced to a scientific law.
However, as you said in your post, "Scientific Theory" doesn't mean what the Religious ID proponants think it means. A scientific theory has been tested and, to the extent possible, all evidence we have supports its truth. Theory is as far as Evolution will ever get, and it might as well be fact.
When the school board of _________ says that they have to put a sticker in the textbooks claiming that "Evolution is just a theory and that other ideas should be considered", the word they are thinking about is "Hypothesis". Theory in the scientific world, and "I have a theory about where I left my car keys", do not have the same meaning, and therein lies the main distortion between proponants of ID and of creationism vs. evolution - most of the creationists see the word "Theory" and assume they have a foothold because of some longstanding debate in the academic world, where the reality is that no such debate is taking place - all serious scientists without an agenda agree that evolution is a fact.
Oh, COME ON. If we're talking female leads in sci-fi, no one kicks more ass than Aeryn Sun.
XP does it out of the box, and has since the first release (I think it has since codename whistler). If you leave an XP box sitting for a while, you may hear the harddrive chugging away in the background. It's not deep defraging, not like a manual one, but it's like vaccuuming vs. rug doctor - keeping things neat.
It's my constant bitch about linux windowing systems. Obviously, there are several systems that have been coded to work with cut and paste, but the problem comes in when you install a program which hasn't correctly implemented the API, or on a system where the API is a moving target. The most common offenders in my personal experience are Mozilla and Gaim. Trying to highlight and copy text from a gaim conversation into, say, a terminal window usually ends in frustration, and sometimes i think mozilla has a mind and clipboard of its own that don't play nice with anyone.