My father is a doctor and has explained this to me. As far as I remember, the brain may set the actual rate of heartbeat, but it does not control each individual heartbeat. Or perhaps the brain isn't involved at all and the rate is based on some hormonal or similar mechanisms. Nevertheless, he was quite clear on the matter that the heart is not micromanaged by the brain.
Not really, seriously. Not engaging in unfair competion is a very broad and vague statement, which ultimately commits them to not very much. Stating that they will obey applicable laws and regulations at tellst you exactly what they promise to do or not to do.
Optimally they would have both statements, but if they have to pick one, the one they picked is the best. Also from a legal point of view.
I dont get this. I myself drive an old mercedes, mostly because it's a rather stylish and fun car. And while I might not be the best of drivers, I try to be nice, not to block people and generally be helpful.
Personally I get annoyed by a whole lot of different drivers on the road and I cannot see any pattern in the makes or models of cars. Mostly it's people blocking the leftmost lane, but I've seen various types of annoying behaviour. And as I said before I can't really attributr it to any specifc make or model.
In my view you people have already made up your minde about merceds drivers in advance (or whatever make/model you "dislike"). Or its just plain different "over there". I live in denmark.
Parent is in no way insightful and does not make sense from an evolutionary point of view.
If we go along with the parents assumption that baldness makes males unattractive the evolutionary pressure would be on males to NOT go bald and the genetic sequence that increases risk for baldness would be a whole lot less common.
Everyone who does not understand why the parent is wrong should go read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. In short it explains that evolution only ever works on individuals (or actually individual genetic units, but that is less important right now) but that it never works on a species as a whole. The parent post implies that nature is doing some evolutionary selection "for the good of the species" which leads to baldness. This is absolute nonsense.
your math is wrong too, I'm afraid. The square root of 969 mm is 31 mm. That means that you would need 3.1 x 3.1 square centimeters to hold up a typical male human body. Which translates to roughly a 1.5 square inches.
I used to think somewhat along those lines about Guitar Hero until I tried it. It's just a whole lot of fun.
I have a real Guitar too. I'm not very good at it yet, but even if I was I'd consider Guitar Hero to be extreme amounts of fun. And if I were any good at it, it still wouldn't be the same without the rest of a band. And it's sort of difficult to get together with the rest of the band on a pure whim, whereas you can always just fire up guitar hero for a song or two.
Whenever the elevator applies force to haul up cargo, there must be an equal force applied on the top of the elevator, dragging it downwards to earth. The only way I can imagine to keep the whole thing from falling down would be to keep the thing up by having some sort of (rocket?) drive that pushes it upwards while it hauls cargo up. But wouldn't that be just as expensive as a regular rocket or space shuttle?
I just don't get how this would work, would somebody mind explaining?
Because even the Border Search Exception states that they must have reasonable suspicion to do so. It is my understanding that the laptop-search-bill allows them to just take your laptop "for fun" and nothing will ever come of it.
Futhermore, there is nothing that I can have on my laptop that can in any way harm you. Even if it should contain hate speech or instructions to build bombs, that's nothing that couldn't be found on the internet as well. There is absolutely zero point in searching my laptop.
If it was established that I was a known criminal or something like that, they might possibly have a reason. But I think even then there should be an immediate reason for performing the search, and not just because they had the opportunity.
This is not suddenoutbreakofcommonsense. The original bill should never have passed in the first place, and common sense would be to remove it again.
While this bill is a step in the right direction it also indirectly legitimates the original bill by not outright removing it. They have no business to search my laptop should I come to the US, not in any way, and not in a limited way either. Period.:)
I think you are correct actually, your comments on specific games I never played much notwithstanding.
I think there have always been brilliant games, and a flood of not-so-good games. Only when I was younger the not-so-good games were fun too, because I was new to the video game business. So I remember them better, and the grandparents nostalgia effect kicks in.
This would actually explain why I think older video games were actually better, while the overall quality (and its distribution) probably is moderately the same.
Are you asking me if I seriously expected a "good" game to have an immersive story, believable and interesting characters, a feeling of really being there and everything being real?
Hell yes, I was expecting the damn game to be good. Don't come to me saying that a thoroughly hyped game like crysis should be allowed to get away with shiny graphics and only so-so gameplay.
Ok, the particular word I'd go for in this case (as well as with F.E.A.R.) is repetitive. The whole world had a completely synthetic feel to it because, well it was synthetic.
Now I did enjoy assassins creed, and they had some very intriguing explanations for the game mechanics, but nevertheless it was very artificial. I did not feel like I was an assassin, but rather that I was performing an endless series of mini-games. There was no real game there.
The best part probably was during the assault on the harbour. Only - as is so damn typical in these games - the military didn't do jack shit to attack the harbor, it was only your own actions. The first two minutes were very immersive, but after that it was once again just you against the entire korean army. Not very believable, and not very immersive. And that was the BEST part of crysis, no less (to me anyway).
Are you serious? Maybe there is something wrong with me after all. Crysis was acceptable, but it sure as hell did not have much of a story. It had a bit of a background "story", after all they needed some explanation for why you run around on a island shooting koreans, but it sure as hell didn't have what I would call a real story. The story was at all times placed firmly in the background of running around and blowing stuff up. And the graphics of course.
The gameplay is ok, but after shooting the goddamn same korean guy in the jungle over and over again it gets boring after a while. They did ok by me with variations (different settings, driving a tank, inside the alien structure) but it could have been far better. And more immersive.
Crysis is an combat simulator with a certain arcade style to it. But it isn't really very engaging. All in all this is one of the few games that I would consider worth spending money on, but it sure as hell cannot compare to the best of games like the original half-life, portal, and deus-ex.
I have to respectfully disagree. While I will admit that the nostalgia effect you describe is real and affects me too, it is not the whole explanation.
Far too many games have way too bland gameplay nowadays. Anyone having played assassins creed will know what I mean, although the story was quite intriguing. F.E.A.R. also suffered from shoot-the-same-guy-a-hundred-times-in-some-hallway-syndrome. Absolutely boring rubbish, although the paranormal events made it quite intriguing at the beginning. Half-life 2 had absolutely shitty gameplay in spite of an intriguing story and good graphics. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
But I also recognize some real good titles, which almost disprove your nostalgia effect theory. Portal was absolutely stunning for example, or Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy was very interesting, and most importantly: different. They stand out from the crowd.
But too many games nowadays focus on graphics and being "epic" and whatever, and the gameplay and/or story suffer as a result. It pisses me off.
I can't at this very moment, but that is besides the point. It is not much better to indefinitely imprison "supected terrorists" than to shoot journalists. And in the end, we do not even know exactly what happened, just that he was shot. Exactly by whom and why is unclear.
And just to play devils advocate, remember how the US is abusing the media for propaganda purposes? For example, the alleged killing of babies in hospitals by iraki soldiers? How do we even know that this particular story is true?
I suppose that this story is in fact true, I am merely trying to explain these events in the context of US actions. I don't like neither countries to do what they do, but we should not let ourselves be distracted by propaganda from either side.
Seriosuly - compare what you are saying to what the US is doing. invading countries, guantanamo bay, anti-terrorism laws. etc. The US is not different, russia is simply reacting in order to stay in the game and not be controlled by the US.
Maybe what Russia is doing is wrong on some ethical level. But it sure as hell is no worse than the US, so get of your high horse.
I would like to know how you organize work at your company. Are you doing a lot of pair programming?
In our company we use SCRUM and everyone has his sets of tasks to work on during the day, not really requiring any of the other co-workers to be in the office. Of course there is the occasional question that someone else is better suited to answer, or a piece of code needs inspection or something else, but in general I do my work on my own. And there is seldom a problem for me to do it when I want to.
A small passenger plane is by its very nature, rather small. And most importantly, it is temporary. A cell phone tower will be there at all times, and it will be damn hard to overlook.
As someone who goes out hiking and has been known to take pictures of nice locations I absolutely disapprove of any non-essential structures that ruin the view. I leave it up to you what you want to consider essential.
I'm sorry, but personally I find the first one visually a lot more appealing than the latter two. I'm not exactly saying that it's pretty, but I find these bare-steel sort of towers extremely ugly and annoying.
on a completely unrelated note - how comes I have to login to slashdot every second day? Is it FF or is slashdot to blame? It annoys the heck out of me. Every time I want to comment I have to login first and then find the place to comment. ugh
And in some cases it just might be. Hardly anybody looks twice if you laugh at people "winning" darwin awards, let alone say that it was their own fault. Nobody minds if I say that some drunk driver killing himself in the car accident had no-one but himself to blame. But when it's a fat person or somebody getting AIDS because of having unprotected sex, suddenly it's a whole different matter. I call bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
My father is a doctor and has explained this to me. As far as I remember, the brain may set the actual rate of heartbeat, but it does not control each individual heartbeat. Or perhaps the brain isn't involved at all and the rate is based on some hormonal or similar mechanisms. Nevertheless, he was quite clear on the matter that the heart is not micromanaged by the brain.
You are NOT alone. I have hated these white plastic toy things they produced forever. Nobody ever agreed with me before though.
Personally I think the new look is an improvement, at the very least over the white ones, as you said.
Not really, seriously. Not engaging in unfair competion is a very broad and vague statement, which ultimately commits them to not very much. Stating that they will obey applicable laws and regulations at tellst you exactly what they promise to do or not to do.
Optimally they would have both statements, but if they have to pick one, the one they picked is the best. Also from a legal point of view.
I dont get this. I myself drive an old mercedes, mostly because it's a rather stylish and fun car. And while I might not be the best of drivers, I try to be nice, not to block people and generally be helpful.
Personally I get annoyed by a whole lot of different drivers on the road and I cannot see any pattern in the makes or models of cars. Mostly it's people blocking the leftmost lane, but I've seen various types of annoying behaviour. And as I said before I can't really attributr it to any specifc make or model.
In my view you people have already made up your minde about merceds drivers in advance (or whatever make/model you "dislike"). Or its just plain different "over there". I live in denmark.
Parent is in no way insightful and does not make sense from an evolutionary point of view.
If we go along with the parents assumption that baldness makes males unattractive the evolutionary pressure would be on males to NOT go bald and the genetic sequence that increases risk for baldness would be a whole lot less common.
Everyone who does not understand why the parent is wrong should go read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. In short it explains that evolution only ever works on individuals (or actually individual genetic units, but that is less important right now) but that it never works on a species as a whole. The parent post implies that nature is doing some evolutionary selection "for the good of the species" which leads to baldness. This is absolute nonsense.
your math is wrong too, I'm afraid. The square root of 969 mm is 31 mm. That means that you would need 3.1 x 3.1 square centimeters to hold up a typical male human body. Which translates to roughly a 1.5 square inches.
I used to think somewhat along those lines about Guitar Hero until I tried it. It's just a whole lot of fun.
:/
I have a real Guitar too. I'm not very good at it yet, but even if I was I'd consider Guitar Hero to be extreme amounts of fun. And if I were any good at it, it still wouldn't be the same without the rest of a band. And it's sort of difficult to get together with the rest of the band on a pure whim, whereas you can always just fire up guitar hero for a song or two.
I think I have been trolled
Whenever the elevator applies force to haul up cargo, there must be an equal force applied on the top of the elevator, dragging it downwards to earth. The only way I can imagine to keep the whole thing from falling down would be to keep the thing up by having some sort of (rocket?) drive that pushes it upwards while it hauls cargo up. But wouldn't that be just as expensive as a regular rocket or space shuttle?
I just don't get how this would work, would somebody mind explaining?
Because even the Border Search Exception states that they must have reasonable suspicion to do so. It is my understanding that the laptop-search-bill allows them to just take your laptop "for fun" and nothing will ever come of it.
Futhermore, there is nothing that I can have on my laptop that can in any way harm you. Even if it should contain hate speech or instructions to build bombs, that's nothing that couldn't be found on the internet as well. There is absolutely zero point in searching my laptop.
If it was established that I was a known criminal or something like that, they might possibly have a reason. But I think even then there should be an immediate reason for performing the search, and not just because they had the opportunity.
This is not suddenoutbreakofcommonsense. The original bill should never have passed in the first place, and common sense would be to remove it again.
:)
While this bill is a step in the right direction it also indirectly legitimates the original bill by not outright removing it. They have no business to search my laptop should I come to the US, not in any way, and not in a limited way either. Period.
There is also the N810 which has everything except for the phone and runs linux.
Oh yeah, it doesn't have a accelerometer either, but it has a really nice screen with a high resolution.
It's not really for everyone, and personally I'd like it to have a bit more horsepower, but otherwise it's a damn fine gadget.
I think you are correct actually, your comments on specific games I never played much notwithstanding.
I think there have always been brilliant games, and a flood of not-so-good games. Only when I was younger the not-so-good games were fun too, because I was new to the video game business. So I remember them better, and the grandparents nostalgia effect kicks in.
This would actually explain why I think older video games were actually better, while the overall quality (and its distribution) probably is moderately the same.
I have never been to 4chan and have only a vague idea of what it is. But as someone apparently disliking it, you seem to know an awful lot about it :)
Are you asking me if I seriously expected a "good" game to have an immersive story, believable and interesting characters, a feeling of really being there and everything being real?
Hell yes, I was expecting the damn game to be good. Don't come to me saying that a thoroughly hyped game like crysis should be allowed to get away with shiny graphics and only so-so gameplay.
Ok, the particular word I'd go for in this case (as well as with F.E.A.R.) is repetitive. The whole world had a completely synthetic feel to it because, well it was synthetic. Now I did enjoy assassins creed, and they had some very intriguing explanations for the game mechanics, but nevertheless it was very artificial. I did not feel like I was an assassin, but rather that I was performing an endless series of mini-games. There was no real game there.
If you say so... I found the story rather easy to ignore, it was filled with clichés, predictable and bland. The characters never developed enough for you to care about them in the slightest. To me the story was purely an excuse for the action going on, not something I could be immersed in.
The best part probably was during the assault on the harbour. Only - as is so damn typical in these games - the military didn't do jack shit to attack the harbor, it was only your own actions. The first two minutes were very immersive, but after that it was once again just you against the entire korean army. Not very believable, and not very immersive. And that was the BEST part of crysis, no less (to me anyway).
Are you serious? Maybe there is something wrong with me after all. Crysis was acceptable, but it sure as hell did not have much of a story. It had a bit of a background "story", after all they needed some explanation for why you run around on a island shooting koreans, but it sure as hell didn't have what I would call a real story. The story was at all times placed firmly in the background of running around and blowing stuff up. And the graphics of course.
The gameplay is ok, but after shooting the goddamn same korean guy in the jungle over and over again it gets boring after a while. They did ok by me with variations (different settings, driving a tank, inside the alien structure) but it could have been far better. And more immersive.
Crysis is an combat simulator with a certain arcade style to it. But it isn't really very engaging. All in all this is one of the few games that I would consider worth spending money on, but it sure as hell cannot compare to the best of games like the original half-life, portal, and deus-ex.
I have to respectfully disagree. While I will admit that the nostalgia effect you describe is real and affects me too, it is not the whole explanation.
Far too many games have way too bland gameplay nowadays. Anyone having played assassins creed will know what I mean, although the story was quite intriguing. F.E.A.R. also suffered from shoot-the-same-guy-a-hundred-times-in-some-hallway-syndrome. Absolutely boring rubbish, although the paranormal events made it quite intriguing at the beginning. Half-life 2 had absolutely shitty gameplay in spite of an intriguing story and good graphics. I could go on and on, but you get the point.
But I also recognize some real good titles, which almost disprove your nostalgia effect theory. Portal was absolutely stunning for example, or Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy was very interesting, and most importantly: different. They stand out from the crowd.
But too many games nowadays focus on graphics and being "epic" and whatever, and the gameplay and/or story suffer as a result. It pisses me off.
I can't at this very moment, but that is besides the point. It is not much better to indefinitely imprison "supected terrorists" than to shoot journalists. And in the end, we do not even know exactly what happened, just that he was shot. Exactly by whom and why is unclear.
And just to play devils advocate, remember how the US is abusing the media for propaganda purposes? For example, the alleged killing of babies in hospitals by iraki soldiers? How do we even know that this particular story is true?
I suppose that this story is in fact true, I am merely trying to explain these events in the context of US actions. I don't like neither countries to do what they do, but we should not let ourselves be distracted by propaganda from either side.
Seriosuly - compare what you are saying to what the US is doing. invading countries, guantanamo bay, anti-terrorism laws. etc. The US is not different, russia is simply reacting in order to stay in the game and not be controlled by the US.
Maybe what Russia is doing is wrong on some ethical level. But it sure as hell is no worse than the US, so get of your high horse.
I would like to know how you organize work at your company. Are you doing a lot of pair programming?
In our company we use SCRUM and everyone has his sets of tasks to work on during the day, not really requiring any of the other co-workers to be in the office. Of course there is the occasional question that someone else is better suited to answer, or a piece of code needs inspection or something else, but in general I do my work on my own. And there is seldom a problem for me to do it when I want to.
That'd be sort of cool and preferable to whatever ugly shit passes as art these days. Too bad it ain't gonna happen.
A small passenger plane is by its very nature, rather small. And most importantly, it is temporary. A cell phone tower will be there at all times, and it will be damn hard to overlook.
As someone who goes out hiking and has been known to take pictures of nice locations I absolutely disapprove of any non-essential structures that ruin the view. I leave it up to you what you want to consider essential.
I'm sorry, but personally I find the first one visually a lot more appealing than the latter two. I'm not exactly saying that it's pretty, but I find these bare-steel sort of towers extremely ugly and annoying.
on a completely unrelated note - how comes I have to login to slashdot every second day? Is it FF or is slashdot to blame? It annoys the heck out of me. Every time I want to comment I have to login first and then find the place to comment. ugh
And in some cases it just might be. Hardly anybody looks twice if you laugh at people "winning" darwin awards, let alone say that it was their own fault. Nobody minds if I say that some drunk driver killing himself in the car accident had no-one but himself to blame. But when it's a fat person or somebody getting AIDS because of having unprotected sex, suddenly it's a whole different matter. I call bullshit.