The time needed for our solar system to develop life was more than a third of the age of the universe so far....We're probably just the first advanced civilization in our galaxy.
I don't think I buy this. Considering the amount of time life existed on Earth before human civilization came to power, it seems like we should be on the slow side. Think of the hundreds of millions of years of dinosaurs before mammals even got a chance. Seems like on other planets one of the earlier life forms would have had just as good a chance of developing intelligence sooner. Maybe we'll eventually find that a certain number of extinction events are required for intelligence to evolve, but in the meantime I would guess we're late bloomers rather than early.
I am apparently one of those poor saps who can either make eye contact, or watch where my hand is going, but not both. Generally I figure it's better to make eye contact and flub the handshake a little than stare at the person's hand. So I sometimes (maybe 20% of the time) end up either too short (just fingers) or too far (kind of jamming the webbing together awkwardly). I try to adjust if possible, but sometimes the other person already has you in their grip, and it's just better to go with it.
I've always hoped it wasn't just me, and that at least half of the blame for mis-coordinating the hand position lies with the other person, but maybe it's just me.
At least one thing I do know is I've got the pressure in a moderate middle ground . I've had enough that are too hard or too soft (one gal I met recently took soft to an extreme by extending her hand and then not moving her fingers at all -- it wasn't a soft squeeze, it was literally nonexistent) to know what the right pressure feels like.
I was hoping maybe this study would venture into some of the silly complicated extra convolutions people put in their handshakes. Mostly seems to be a phenomenon of younger guys trying to be hip, who have some ridiculous five-part ritual. Grab, slap, wiggle, fist, waggle some finger, whatever it is. I watch people around me going through the whole procedure like they know what the other person is about to do, but I've always felt sort of colorblind or tone deaf as far as those gestures go. Can anyone explain to me how the hell I'm supposed to know it's "grab, smash elbow, bump chest, slap back twice" this time, and next time it'll be "grab hand, clasp forearm, do the hokey pokey"?
That mostly sounds like arguments against that specific "local" designer, rather than *all* local designers. I'm many years removed from working at a design firm (as a web programmer), but we certainly understood meeting deadlines, delivering necessary files, and that other stuff. Of course that place geared for top performance and charged accordingly, and mostly worked with gigantic corporations who could afford us. I've still got to think there's a middle ground where you still get adequate performance for moderate price.
Yeah, I would have actually appreciated a little more guidance when I was younger. I was moderately good at most subjects, and simply didn't know how to figure out what sort of jobs I might enjoy--which is definitely sometimes a bit removed from the subjects you can choose to study. Even at a college that encouraged diversity in education, I couldn't sample all the subjects, and again those aren't necessarily like the jobs you'll do later. I picked physics because it sounded challenging (and it was, but I didn't really like the work), and have mostly been in computers (both web programming and tech support) ever since, though I've done some freelance work in copy editing, marketing, and graphic design, among other things.
I've considered a lot of other careers over the years: accounting, journalism, running a brewpub, all kinds of things. Part of the problem is I've never known if I'd like or hate the jobs. Of course an aptitude test might not tell me that, but it might at least tell me if something was going to be a real struggle.
So far what I've found I like best in the world is creating computer games, like the one in my sig, though right now it's basically just a hobby for evenings and weekends. Part of the appeal is I'm programmer, artist, writer, strategist, community leader, mathematician, playtester, marketer, and accountant, all rolled into one. Other than the marketing position, I kind of enjoy doing a little bit of each every month, though I think I also enjoy that I don't have to do any of them all month long.
Wow, Ultraviolet Sun? It sounds like a science fiction story from the 50's.
It'd be about beings that live not on a planet, but on a small, cool star that, in comparison to the ultraviolet sun, might as well be solid ground. The UV sun is their star, because it's so much brighter and hotter than their own world.
Completely nonsensical, of course, and also copyright by Shampoo, 2010.
genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on.
Of course they are, but so is everything else.
No kidding. Back in junior high, bored out of my mind, I played a "game" where I pressed '1 + 1 =' on my calculator and then kept pressing = to continue adding 1 to the total. Pretty sure I got to at least 100,000 at one point... and I was excited about it because it was a nice, round number!
Not only that, but I'd remember where I left off, so that when the calculator shut off I could plug in the right number to start it up again in the next class. And, later on, when I got tired of the big numbers, I started over again so I could go through the "fun" small numbers again, celebrating when I got to my address, or my zip code, or my birthday, and other such things.
Yeah, I also got really excited the other day when my car hit 190,000 miles. Actually, I got excited at 189,999, and then got really ticked off when I forgot to check it again until miles down the road when all those zeroes had passed. Clearly I have a brain that's very susceptible to RPG-type hacks.
The depressing thing about this is I've spent evenings and weekends over the last four years working on a low-res browser-based RPG, which of course has all the classic collect/level/grind aspects, but on top of that I've layered witty text, quests, puzzles, jokes, and other quality entertainment to justify the fact that the game basically plays on a kind of human addiction... and I'm struggling to keep the servers going.
The only thing I don't do is provide sleazy incentives for players to spam their friends. They have to do their clicking all on their own, though they can certainly still invite friends to compete.
Apparently I should have just stopped three and a half years ago, put in a single cow, and started paying people to spam their friends, and I'd be a hell of a lot more successful. Who knew? Excuse me while I go smash a few things until I feel better...
I see where you're coming from, but with a few small shifts in perspective (for me at least) a reader seemed to make sense.
1. I've picked up about 30 books already for my Nook, and I haven't paid a dime. Some old classics, a bunch from the Baen library (science fiction and fantasy; may not be your thing), but that brings me down to $5/book already, and it hasn't even been a month. (No, I haven't read them all yet.)
2. Many libraries have a method for you to borrow e-books, which is more of them for free. Mine requires me to visit the library once in person to sign up for the program, so I haven't done it yet, but then I can download books at home any time I want. With a small-town library that has horrible hours and requires a 40-minute round-trip drive, this is a real convenience.
3. I love having a bookshelf stocked with books, too. I'm still buying regular books. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. But I also have an entire shelf full of "stuff I've read and don't want anymore but haven't gotten rid of yet." I'm happy with my top several hundred favorites, for the most part.
4. The DRM is a bit of a tough question, and the landscape is likely to have changed a lot by the time the device breaks and it's time to get a new one, so your guess is as good as mine for what will happen. But all of the e-books I've got now (all the free ones) came DRM-free, and are also stored on my computer for backup. If e-pub format loses out, and it's looking like an eventual winner right now, I'm sure there'll be a converter. If Amazon loses out, they're so big they'll HAVE to offer an alternative format to download.
5. Not sure I buy your argument that buying online is wasteful. I'd argue that 30 minutes going to the library or having a book shipped to you is far more wasteful than a quick download. Sure, it may build a little character to wait for things now and then, but if you're going to buy a book why not get it right away and just start reading? I guess you meant the reader itself was the wasteful part?
6. Don't even joke about the inconvenience of moving books. I realize I'm unusual here, but I've moved something like 30 times in my life, and the boxes of books were by far the heaviest and most painful part of the experience many times over. I eventually just started keeping my least favorite books in boxes so I didn't have to unpack them from year to year. At one point I just gave away about five boxes of books because I couldn't sell them and didn't want to move them any more (and couldn't fit them into the small apartment when I married my wife and we had to merge all our worldly possessions). Having an electronic copy would mean I'd still have all those books around, which would be really nice.
I've run into occasions where a site doesn't just choke on special characters, it just strips them out of your submitted password and doesn't tell you. It may be fixed now, but PHPBB had problems with the @ sign. I created a new bulletin board, put in "sample@password" as the admin password, and then couldn't log in. Can't even remember now how I found the error, but I know I did a full reinstall at least once before realizing that I could log in with "samplepassword" because the @ had been stripped out of the initial submission (without telling me) but wasn't being stripped out of the later attempts to log in. Talk about obnoxious!
I suspect you're joking, but I was pretty embarrassed to find that one of my "mid-level" passwords was used as an example in a different slashdot discussion a few months back. The poster was working with a key pattern that matched one I'd picked. Even though it's unlikely someone would try that pattern against one of my accounts, I figured it was obvious enough to make it into a dictionary and I shouldn't use it anymore.
Some people aren't happy unless you apologize exactly the way they want you to apologize. Generally this should involve a lot of groveling, moaning, and hand-wringing. Perhaps ritual suicide. Based on a few dozen sample explicit explanations earlier in the posts, no two people agree on exactly what is the appropriate magic way to apologize to make it all better, and thus no matter what Apple did, everyone would still be unhappy.
And this is for a group of people who, mostly, didn't even appear to own an iPhone or be affected by the problem. They still want blood anyway, for some reason.
Have you ever touched a TV antenna? What did that do to the signal?
In my case it generally made the picture clearer as I tried to position the antenna. Then I'd let go to sit down, and the picture would go all wonky again because the reception properties had changed. Can't tell you how many episodes of the Simpsons I watched while standing in front of the TV, because that was the only way I could get a picture on my old TV way out at the edge of town.
Another angle: this lets them capture half of a sale from used games, rather than nothing. If I pick up a used copy from GameStop, I've still got to pay regular price for the second half of the game. I'm 100% sure they're drooling all over that scenario, too.
Well, there's one potential benefit--if I'm not sure about a game, I tend to skip it. Being able to pay half price for half of it before deciding if I wanted to shell out the rest for the other half has a small appeal to it. I might try out more games that way, and if it's a horrible game at least I'm only burned for half of the purchase cost. Assuming the pricing and playability actually worked out that way.... not that I'm optimistic about that.
You buy a code, and that code unlocks your game, forever and ever, the transaction is finished.
Well, unless you need to reinstall and can't find the code years later. For some reason I could hold on to the installers, but I could never manage to keep track of the documentation. Particularly when it's sold separately, it can be hard to keep track of that information. I remember getting locked out of Lemmings in college after needing to reinstall the OS. It's frustrating to own software but not be able to play it. Same with my old Forgotten Realms games, though in that case I could sometimes fudge it by just guessing E a lot, since it seemed to appear frequently on the code wheel.
The thing is, it's *useful* to have a word that means "degrades quickly through biological means" whereas we've got very little use for a word meaning "degrades eventually through biological means if you don't mind waiting a few lifetimes, more or less".
Same thing with "organic" for that matter. It may not be perfectly logical by your standards, but it's plenty useful for getting specific information across.
For now, yes. In a decade, when every new device has this setup, it'll be one of those things that we can simply forget about. It will be inconceivable to the next generation that we ever even had to bother paying attention to which end was which. That kind of convenience, where an annoyance can simply disappear, has a certain brilliance to it.
Counter anecdote: I studied something I thought would make me employable, and it took a miserable senior year to realize just how much I hated the prospect of working in the field. So I had to teach myself new skills anyway, which I did by spending a summer pursuing something I really liked and teaching myself the skills to have an entry-level job in the field by the end of the summer. You might argue that learning what you don't like is a valuable lesson (and it is), but it's not worth four years of missing out on things you do like just because you think you're being smart about being employed. I wish I'd taken a lot more enjoyable classes, and a lot fewer of the ones that in retrospect feel like drudgery.
Sure, if you're taking something that seems particularly unlikely to lead to employment, it's worth branching out and picking up at least the basics in something else. Two semesters of C++ taken for fun in college have been moderately helpful in giving me a foundation for some of the programming I've done since then (some for fun; some for profit). Of course I think anyone who doesn't use college as a chance to branch out is missing one of the best benefits of college, but some folks are more single-minded than I am. I have personally found being "well rounded" to make me both a better person and better employee. Being the technical guy who can also write well and knows a little about art has given me more opportunities than I would have had being the technical guy who was just the technical guy.
Yeah, I had a similar reaction to God of War. After I fell off the same plank and drowned about 8 times in a row, I turned off the game and haven't touched it since. Simply not fun.
It's unfortunate that the real-world mechanics of death are no fun to play...
Hm. Now it would be quite intriguing if the mechanics of death WERE fun. Obviously it'd require a premise with something to make it interesting -- an afterlife and reincarnation and possibly a multitude of worlds, for instance. Dying isn't dying, so much as transitioning to the next world, where you do things there. Perhaps you'd split your time between the afterlife and this world, dying and being reborn in order to work on a project inextricably linked between the two planes. Maybe you'd have to go out of your way to die at the right time and place, or with the right kind of karma, to set up your next transition so you end up where you'd like (land in the right circle of hell, say, or be reborn into the right village, or with access to the right people and resources).
It sounds kind of weird, but I think it's something I could see myself playing. It's also something I could see not going over well with parents ("this game teaches kids it's okay to die!") Guess you could also try a variation where you're a robot, and your electronic brain keeps being transplanted into different kind of machinery depending on where and how your current body is deactivated. That might be a little more sanitized.
Still, I can only imagine the player's shock and delight the first time their character dies, and they think they're going to have to start over, only to realize that the afterlife is actually the next level! But of course they only have a limited time to finish what they want before they're reincarnated and sucked back into some new spot in the mortal world.
I just dropped off two old ones at Best Buy, who recycled them for me. I DID have to pay ($10 per monitor) but in exchange they gave me two $10 gift certificates. So basically they'll recycle a monitor for free as long as you're willing to spend $10 in their store.
Considering my next best option was a local recycle center that would charge me $25 per monitor and give me nothing back (except a sense of civic pride?), it seemed like a no-brainer to me.
I had a debate with a girl once who insisted that the Visa cards with your picture on them represented the mark of the beast because "VISA" was Roman Numerals for 666. In the heat of the argument I didn't get past the VI being 6, and it was only days later that I realized S isn't even a Roman numeral, and their system would require six letters to add up to 666 anyway -- one for each 5's place and one for each of the 1's.
Another time had a crazy man in Indianapolis hand me a flyer explaining that the year, 1992, was when armageddon was going to come because 1992 was 666 times 3. That time I was smart enough to do the math and realize no, it's 1998. So I laughed at him and threw away his ranting flyer... until 1998, of course, when the world actually did come to an end. Wait, what?
People are people, and will have different reactions. Doubt anybody would be happy being hit in the face or robbed. Buddhists do tend to have a very strong belief in trying to avoid doing harm to others and finding peace and love with the world around them, and as a doctrine it's much more prevalent as a core precept when talking to Buddhists about Buddhism than it is when talking to Christians about Christianity.
Slashdot Mirror
The time needed for our solar system to develop life was more than a third of the age of the universe so far....We're probably just the first advanced civilization in our galaxy.
I don't think I buy this. Considering the amount of time life existed on Earth before human civilization came to power, it seems like we should be on the slow side. Think of the hundreds of millions of years of dinosaurs before mammals even got a chance. Seems like on other planets one of the earlier life forms would have had just as good a chance of developing intelligence sooner. Maybe we'll eventually find that a certain number of extinction events are required for intelligence to evolve, but in the meantime I would guess we're late bloomers rather than early.
I've always hoped it wasn't just me, and that at least half of the blame for mis-coordinating the hand position lies with the other person, but maybe it's just me.
At least one thing I do know is I've got the pressure in a moderate middle ground . I've had enough that are too hard or too soft (one gal I met recently took soft to an extreme by extending her hand and then not moving her fingers at all -- it wasn't a soft squeeze, it was literally nonexistent) to know what the right pressure feels like.
I was hoping maybe this study would venture into some of the silly complicated extra convolutions people put in their handshakes. Mostly seems to be a phenomenon of younger guys trying to be hip, who have some ridiculous five-part ritual. Grab, slap, wiggle, fist, waggle some finger, whatever it is. I watch people around me going through the whole procedure like they know what the other person is about to do, but I've always felt sort of colorblind or tone deaf as far as those gestures go. Can anyone explain to me how the hell I'm supposed to know it's "grab, smash elbow, bump chest, slap back twice" this time, and next time it'll be "grab hand, clasp forearm, do the hokey pokey"?
That mostly sounds like arguments against that specific "local" designer, rather than *all* local designers. I'm many years removed from working at a design firm (as a web programmer), but we certainly understood meeting deadlines, delivering necessary files, and that other stuff. Of course that place geared for top performance and charged accordingly, and mostly worked with gigantic corporations who could afford us. I've still got to think there's a middle ground where you still get adequate performance for moderate price.
I've considered a lot of other careers over the years: accounting, journalism, running a brewpub, all kinds of things. Part of the problem is I've never known if I'd like or hate the jobs. Of course an aptitude test might not tell me that, but it might at least tell me if something was going to be a real struggle.
So far what I've found I like best in the world is creating computer games, like the one in my sig, though right now it's basically just a hobby for evenings and weekends. Part of the appeal is I'm programmer, artist, writer, strategist, community leader, mathematician, playtester, marketer, and accountant, all rolled into one. Other than the marketing position, I kind of enjoy doing a little bit of each every month, though I think I also enjoy that I don't have to do any of them all month long.
Wow, Ultraviolet Sun? It sounds like a science fiction story from the 50's.
It'd be about beings that live not on a planet, but on a small, cool star that, in comparison to the ultraviolet sun, might as well be solid ground. The UV sun is their star, because it's so much brighter and hotter than their own world.
Completely nonsensical, of course, and also copyright by Shampoo, 2010.
genre of games is largely just 'brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money,' which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on.
Of course they are, but so is everything else.
No kidding. Back in junior high, bored out of my mind, I played a "game" where I pressed '1 + 1 =' on my calculator and then kept pressing = to continue adding 1 to the total. Pretty sure I got to at least 100,000 at one point ... and I was excited about it because it was a nice, round number!
Not only that, but I'd remember where I left off, so that when the calculator shut off I could plug in the right number to start it up again in the next class. And, later on, when I got tired of the big numbers, I started over again so I could go through the "fun" small numbers again, celebrating when I got to my address, or my zip code, or my birthday, and other such things.
Yeah, I also got really excited the other day when my car hit 190,000 miles. Actually, I got excited at 189,999, and then got really ticked off when I forgot to check it again until miles down the road when all those zeroes had passed. Clearly I have a brain that's very susceptible to RPG-type hacks.
The only thing I don't do is provide sleazy incentives for players to spam their friends. They have to do their clicking all on their own, though they can certainly still invite friends to compete.
Apparently I should have just stopped three and a half years ago, put in a single cow, and started paying people to spam their friends, and I'd be a hell of a lot more successful. Who knew? Excuse me while I go smash a few things until I feel better ...
For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C
Which you can derive from noting the Sun's yellow color (approximately 570–590 nm) and applying Planck's Law or Wein's Displacement Law in reverse.
So, uh, according to these laws, what color is 40,000 degrees Celsius? Your linked chart didn't seem to go that high.
A lack of money, mostly.
1. I've picked up about 30 books already for my Nook, and I haven't paid a dime. Some old classics, a bunch from the Baen library (science fiction and fantasy; may not be your thing), but that brings me down to $5/book already, and it hasn't even been a month. (No, I haven't read them all yet.)
2. Many libraries have a method for you to borrow e-books, which is more of them for free. Mine requires me to visit the library once in person to sign up for the program, so I haven't done it yet, but then I can download books at home any time I want. With a small-town library that has horrible hours and requires a 40-minute round-trip drive, this is a real convenience.
3. I love having a bookshelf stocked with books, too. I'm still buying regular books. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. But I also have an entire shelf full of "stuff I've read and don't want anymore but haven't gotten rid of yet." I'm happy with my top several hundred favorites, for the most part.
4. The DRM is a bit of a tough question, and the landscape is likely to have changed a lot by the time the device breaks and it's time to get a new one, so your guess is as good as mine for what will happen. But all of the e-books I've got now (all the free ones) came DRM-free, and are also stored on my computer for backup. If e-pub format loses out, and it's looking like an eventual winner right now, I'm sure there'll be a converter. If Amazon loses out, they're so big they'll HAVE to offer an alternative format to download. 5. Not sure I buy your argument that buying online is wasteful. I'd argue that 30 minutes going to the library or having a book shipped to you is far more wasteful than a quick download. Sure, it may build a little character to wait for things now and then, but if you're going to buy a book why not get it right away and just start reading? I guess you meant the reader itself was the wasteful part?
6. Don't even joke about the inconvenience of moving books. I realize I'm unusual here, but I've moved something like 30 times in my life, and the boxes of books were by far the heaviest and most painful part of the experience many times over. I eventually just started keeping my least favorite books in boxes so I didn't have to unpack them from year to year. At one point I just gave away about five boxes of books because I couldn't sell them and didn't want to move them any more (and couldn't fit them into the small apartment when I married my wife and we had to merge all our worldly possessions). Having an electronic copy would mean I'd still have all those books around, which would be really nice.
I've run into occasions where a site doesn't just choke on special characters, it just strips them out of your submitted password and doesn't tell you. It may be fixed now, but PHPBB had problems with the @ sign. I created a new bulletin board, put in "sample@password" as the admin password, and then couldn't log in. Can't even remember now how I found the error, but I know I did a full reinstall at least once before realizing that I could log in with "samplepassword" because the @ had been stripped out of the initial submission (without telling me) but wasn't being stripped out of the later attempts to log in. Talk about obnoxious!
I suspect you're joking, but I was pretty embarrassed to find that one of my "mid-level" passwords was used as an example in a different slashdot discussion a few months back. The poster was working with a key pattern that matched one I'd picked. Even though it's unlikely someone would try that pattern against one of my accounts, I figured it was obvious enough to make it into a dictionary and I shouldn't use it anymore.
And this is for a group of people who, mostly, didn't even appear to own an iPhone or be affected by the problem. They still want blood anyway, for some reason.
Have you ever touched a TV antenna? What did that do to the signal?
In my case it generally made the picture clearer as I tried to position the antenna. Then I'd let go to sit down, and the picture would go all wonky again because the reception properties had changed. Can't tell you how many episodes of the Simpsons I watched while standing in front of the TV, because that was the only way I could get a picture on my old TV way out at the edge of town.
Another angle: this lets them capture half of a sale from used games, rather than nothing. If I pick up a used copy from GameStop, I've still got to pay regular price for the second half of the game. I'm 100% sure they're drooling all over that scenario, too.
Well, there's one potential benefit--if I'm not sure about a game, I tend to skip it. Being able to pay half price for half of it before deciding if I wanted to shell out the rest for the other half has a small appeal to it. I might try out more games that way, and if it's a horrible game at least I'm only burned for half of the purchase cost. Assuming the pricing and playability actually worked out that way .... not that I'm optimistic about that.
You buy a code, and that code unlocks your game, forever and ever, the transaction is finished.
Well, unless you need to reinstall and can't find the code years later. For some reason I could hold on to the installers, but I could never manage to keep track of the documentation. Particularly when it's sold separately, it can be hard to keep track of that information. I remember getting locked out of Lemmings in college after needing to reinstall the OS. It's frustrating to own software but not be able to play it. Same with my old Forgotten Realms games, though in that case I could sometimes fudge it by just guessing E a lot, since it seemed to appear frequently on the code wheel.
The thing is, it's *useful* to have a word that means "degrades quickly through biological means" whereas we've got very little use for a word meaning "degrades eventually through biological means if you don't mind waiting a few lifetimes, more or less".
Same thing with "organic" for that matter. It may not be perfectly logical by your standards, but it's plenty useful for getting specific information across.
For now, yes. In a decade, when every new device has this setup, it'll be one of those things that we can simply forget about. It will be inconceivable to the next generation that we ever even had to bother paying attention to which end was which. That kind of convenience, where an annoyance can simply disappear, has a certain brilliance to it.
Sure, if you're taking something that seems particularly unlikely to lead to employment, it's worth branching out and picking up at least the basics in something else. Two semesters of C++ taken for fun in college have been moderately helpful in giving me a foundation for some of the programming I've done since then (some for fun; some for profit). Of course I think anyone who doesn't use college as a chance to branch out is missing one of the best benefits of college, but some folks are more single-minded than I am. I have personally found being "well rounded" to make me both a better person and better employee. Being the technical guy who can also write well and knows a little about art has given me more opportunities than I would have had being the technical guy who was just the technical guy.
Yeah, I had a similar reaction to God of War. After I fell off the same plank and drowned about 8 times in a row, I turned off the game and haven't touched it since. Simply not fun.
It's unfortunate that the real-world mechanics of death are no fun to play...
Hm. Now it would be quite intriguing if the mechanics of death WERE fun. Obviously it'd require a premise with something to make it interesting -- an afterlife and reincarnation and possibly a multitude of worlds, for instance. Dying isn't dying, so much as transitioning to the next world, where you do things there. Perhaps you'd split your time between the afterlife and this world, dying and being reborn in order to work on a project inextricably linked between the two planes. Maybe you'd have to go out of your way to die at the right time and place, or with the right kind of karma, to set up your next transition so you end up where you'd like (land in the right circle of hell, say, or be reborn into the right village, or with access to the right people and resources).
It sounds kind of weird, but I think it's something I could see myself playing. It's also something I could see not going over well with parents ("this game teaches kids it's okay to die!") Guess you could also try a variation where you're a robot, and your electronic brain keeps being transplanted into different kind of machinery depending on where and how your current body is deactivated. That might be a little more sanitized.
Still, I can only imagine the player's shock and delight the first time their character dies, and they think they're going to have to start over, only to realize that the afterlife is actually the next level! But of course they only have a limited time to finish what they want before they're reincarnated and sucked back into some new spot in the mortal world.
I just dropped off two old ones at Best Buy, who recycled them for me. I DID have to pay ($10 per monitor) but in exchange they gave me two $10 gift certificates. So basically they'll recycle a monitor for free as long as you're willing to spend $10 in their store.
Considering my next best option was a local recycle center that would charge me $25 per monitor and give me nothing back (except a sense of civic pride?), it seemed like a no-brainer to me.
I had a debate with a girl once who insisted that the Visa cards with your picture on them represented the mark of the beast because "VISA" was Roman Numerals for 666. In the heat of the argument I didn't get past the VI being 6, and it was only days later that I realized S isn't even a Roman numeral, and their system would require six letters to add up to 666 anyway -- one for each 5's place and one for each of the 1's.
... until 1998, of course, when the world actually did come to an end. Wait, what?
Another time had a crazy man in Indianapolis hand me a flyer explaining that the year, 1992, was when armageddon was going to come because 1992 was 666 times 3. That time I was smart enough to do the math and realize no, it's 1998. So I laughed at him and threw away his ranting flyer
People are people, and will have different reactions. Doubt anybody would be happy being hit in the face or robbed. Buddhists do tend to have a very strong belief in trying to avoid doing harm to others and finding peace and love with the world around them, and as a doctrine it's much more prevalent as a core precept when talking to Buddhists about Buddhism than it is when talking to Christians about Christianity.