I saw the movie first, then read the comic, and spent dozens of pages wondering why the comic book stuff existed at all, except as filler for the original release (I assume it was released as a series and they needed to hit X frames/pages per edition) and for some graphical variety for the artist. I couldn't have been happier they decided to take that out of the movie.
I generally cringe from taking the advice of someone with heavy-handed opinions who would call a genre I enjoy "unwatchable dogshit" but your inclusion of Mystery Men up there with The Watchmen means we agree on a couple of points. I may check out Special, though with a little trepidation.
Well, for most people finding electricity once a week isn't a hardship. And for most of us, books don't fit any better inside our pockets than an e-reader would, and space and weight is a huge factor: when traveling you can take 50 books with you for the same price as the first one, and it's still smaller and lighter than anything but a very thin paperback.
As for screens hurting your eyes, are you talking about the e-ink screens, too, or just the LCD ones like on iPads and iPhones? Because while the latter (which put out a glow) are hard on my eyes, I detect almost no difference between e-ink and paper screens (yeah, the contrast is a little worse, but it's nothing compared to a computer monitor.)
You also overlooked another critical factor: instantaneous delivery.
I'm thinking of writing a crazy book, and shopping it to one of these neo-con publishers, all to get me some early retirement on the backs of the ideological loons. I'm not sure yet if I should invent a new angle, or tie together multiple existing memes in a new way.
I think about doing this now and then, but I can never come up with ideas that have the right combination of loony, spite, paranoia, and catchy to really get people frothing. If you have extra ideas that you're just discarding, let me know. I'd gladly give proper credit for a nice seed of pure crazy.
One of the nice bonuses to doing something like this, when you're tired of making up lies or the money runs out, you can always do something to tarnish your reputation and further discredit and embarrass all the people loony enough to follow you. Of course we know some people will continue to believe despite the evidence, but possibly it lets you do a tiny bit of good by setting up some crazies for a fall.
Assuming you don't mind being that mercenary about your approach. Which may be the real reason I haven't done it yet.
Of course it does. But my example was based on actual calculations of the distances and speeds involved that were appropriate for the time. In this case, an average trip speed of 55 mph (which assumes speeding to make up for the stops) or an average trip speed of 50 mph (assuming no speeding and relatively infrequent stops). Speed limits were 55 at the time, so 5 mph was very nearly a 2-hour time difference.
The point where Google manually verifies the blocks before incorporating that into search results for anyone but the blocking user, I think.
They'll probably only ever check the top X% of most-blocked offenders to get the really bad ones, and they'll probably have a means of whitelisting genuinely useful sites so that they don't have to repeatedly check the same sites. With those things in place, it wouldn't be difficult to blacklist the largest and most egregious of the useless sites fairly quickly, without causing any real damage to useful sites.
Yep, this and #5 are the real abuses that I assumed the article was talking about. Sites that have page after page after page of no content whatsoever, but each page tuned to a keyword and set up to be a receptacle for either your own input or pretend data that just redirects to another search. If I'm searching for reviews, what are the odds that what I'm really searching for is a place to put my own review? Ummm.... zero? The internet is full of enough places for us to spill our own blathering words. Nobody, ever, needs to search to find a place because they're desperate to talk and haven't figured out how.
Don't feel too bad. Took me four years of being a PC tech before I complained out loud about that lousy site, and someone mentioned I should just scroll down.
If it makes you feel any better, my brother and I have read the same book at the same time, because we didn't want to have to wait for the other one to finish. I have friends who have done the same thing. So even two people reading at once isn't really a violation of what's possible with physical books. Assuming the two of you are willing to be crammed in a small space together while reading, and synchronize your page turns.
Maybe not in your place of employment, but your absolute negatives are not world-wide rules. In a small design firm, back in the day, as the HTML guy I regularly had conversations with designers about what was and wasn't possible to do with a web site. They learned from me, I learned from them, and the 10th site we put together went many times more smoothly than the first site we tried. It's entirely possible.
Along the games theme, I wrote mine on the back of a puzzle. Yes, this meant I had to put the puzzle together at work on my own, after hours, to write the message, and then scramble it and help my then-girlfriend put it together a second time. The writing on the back was driving her crazy with curiosity the entire time.
My dad was trying some "be safe" talk on me once when I was driving from Ohio to Florida, a trek of over 1000 miles. I'd already done some analysis at different speeds, to guess how long the trip would take. All he got out was, "Be safe. Remember, five miles an hour is.." before I interrupted with "a two-hour difference!"
He gave me a funny look and I reassured him that I'd drive safely despite the time savings.
Yep, I'm often running a handful of years behind the new releases. Bought and played Starcraft in ~2004, I think, when it was $20 for the boxed set, for example, and Age of Empires (I & II together) for $10 a few years ago. Now I do also buy a few new titles here and there, but picking up the cheap old ones that I never got around to is very economical, and then if I get bored or sidetracked and don't play it much, I don't feel like I've lost out.
I wonder what he'd think of my game? It's completely free! There is a donation model, of course, but it's optional. And people have continued to find value in it for years.
I don't know why you don't have a million mod points. I'd missed all of that background from Woz and hand been wondering about just that stuff. You answered all my unasked questions and then some, and thoroughly explained that particular issue. Thanks.
Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. If my code doesn't work, I KNOW it's not my computer, it's me. Then I go fix it. Or if I can't fix it, I take a break until I'm ready to come back. It's never once entered my mind to consider *threatening* a computer for doing what I told it to.
I repeat: when I complained that the question they just asked me was meaningless as a method of identity verification they agreed and offered me, at that point an unverified individual, to lock the account down with a password. Good job.
Well, if you were posing as someone else, you wouldn't have bothered to complain about security. So there's a good chance you're the real customer.
That's only true if there's been enough time for light to stream in from every point in the sky, and there has not. That's why the currently observable universe is smaller than the whole universe. Redshift from receding galaxies also moves the light out of the visible spectrum. And of course there's gas and dusk which would occlude some of that light.
There's never been any real issue with the universe being bigger than the observable universe. It's like standing in a fog, and asking if it's possible to have objects that are outside your range of vision (the observable universe). The answer is yes, easily.
As for other universes, that's not something that would be observable. Many scientists would say it's possible they exist, but they'd also say if you can observe it, it's by definition inside this universe. There's no possible concept of "distance between" universes. The universe is everything. There may be another everything out there, but it's completely disconnected by both space and time from this particular instance of everything.
We are merely at the center of what we can see of the universe. Which makes sense. Imagine you're in a dense fog. You're going to have a bubble around you that's basically spherical in shape, inside which you can see things and outside which you can't see anything but fog. No matter where you go, you're always going to be at the exact center of that bubble. It doesn't actually put you at the center of anything meaningful, it's just an artifact of how your rage of vision works.
You're confusing what we can see with where we are physically located in the grand scheme of things.
If you're in a dense fog, and can only see 30 feet in any direction, that bubble of visibility is the known universe. It doesn't signify anything about the size of the fog or where you are located in it. Any person, standing anywhere in that patch of fog, is still only going to be able to see 30 feet in any given direction, and they will always be at the center of what they can see.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw the movie first, then read the comic, and spent dozens of pages wondering why the comic book stuff existed at all, except as filler for the original release (I assume it was released as a series and they needed to hit X frames/pages per edition) and for some graphical variety for the artist. I couldn't have been happier they decided to take that out of the movie.
I generally cringe from taking the advice of someone with heavy-handed opinions who would call a genre I enjoy "unwatchable dogshit" but your inclusion of Mystery Men up there with The Watchmen means we agree on a couple of points. I may check out Special, though with a little trepidation.
As for screens hurting your eyes, are you talking about the e-ink screens, too, or just the LCD ones like on iPads and iPhones? Because while the latter (which put out a glow) are hard on my eyes, I detect almost no difference between e-ink and paper screens (yeah, the contrast is a little worse, but it's nothing compared to a computer monitor.)
You also overlooked another critical factor: instantaneous delivery.
I'm thinking of writing a crazy book, and shopping it to one of these neo-con publishers, all to get me some early retirement on the backs of the ideological loons. I'm not sure yet if I should invent a new angle, or tie together multiple existing memes in a new way.
I think about doing this now and then, but I can never come up with ideas that have the right combination of loony, spite, paranoia, and catchy to really get people frothing. If you have extra ideas that you're just discarding, let me know. I'd gladly give proper credit for a nice seed of pure crazy.
One of the nice bonuses to doing something like this, when you're tired of making up lies or the money runs out, you can always do something to tarnish your reputation and further discredit and embarrass all the people loony enough to follow you. Of course we know some people will continue to believe despite the evidence, but possibly it lets you do a tiny bit of good by setting up some crazies for a fall.
Assuming you don't mind being that mercenary about your approach. Which may be the real reason I haven't done it yet.
Of course it does. But my example was based on actual calculations of the distances and speeds involved that were appropriate for the time. In this case, an average trip speed of 55 mph (which assumes speeding to make up for the stops) or an average trip speed of 50 mph (assuming no speeding and relatively infrequent stops). Speed limits were 55 at the time, so 5 mph was very nearly a 2-hour time difference.
They'll probably only ever check the top X% of most-blocked offenders to get the really bad ones, and they'll probably have a means of whitelisting genuinely useful sites so that they don't have to repeatedly check the same sites. With those things in place, it wouldn't be difficult to blacklist the largest and most egregious of the useless sites fairly quickly, without causing any real damage to useful sites.
Yep, this and #5 are the real abuses that I assumed the article was talking about. Sites that have page after page after page of no content whatsoever, but each page tuned to a keyword and set up to be a receptacle for either your own input or pretend data that just redirects to another search. If I'm searching for reviews, what are the odds that what I'm really searching for is a place to put my own review? Ummm.... zero? The internet is full of enough places for us to spill our own blathering words. Nobody, ever, needs to search to find a place because they're desperate to talk and haven't figured out how.
Don't feel too bad. Took me four years of being a PC tech before I complained out loud about that lousy site, and someone mentioned I should just scroll down.
If it makes you feel any better, my brother and I have read the same book at the same time, because we didn't want to have to wait for the other one to finish. I have friends who have done the same thing. So even two people reading at once isn't really a violation of what's possible with physical books. Assuming the two of you are willing to be crammed in a small space together while reading, and synchronize your page turns.
Maybe not in your place of employment, but your absolute negatives are not world-wide rules. In a small design firm, back in the day, as the HTML guy I regularly had conversations with designers about what was and wasn't possible to do with a web site. They learned from me, I learned from them, and the 10th site we put together went many times more smoothly than the first site we tried. It's entirely possible.
Along the games theme, I wrote mine on the back of a puzzle. Yes, this meant I had to put the puzzle together at work on my own, after hours, to write the message, and then scramble it and help my then-girlfriend put it together a second time. The writing on the back was driving her crazy with curiosity the entire time.
He gave me a funny look and I reassured him that I'd drive safely despite the time savings.
Yep, I'm often running a handful of years behind the new releases. Bought and played Starcraft in ~2004, I think, when it was $20 for the boxed set, for example, and Age of Empires (I & II together) for $10 a few years ago. Now I do also buy a few new titles here and there, but picking up the cheap old ones that I never got around to is very economical, and then if I get bored or sidetracked and don't play it much, I don't feel like I've lost out.
Since it's on topic and free, guess it's okay to plug. A web-based superhero RPG. http://www.twilightheroes.com./
Twilight stands for sunset, as it has for half a millennium, and not for the vampire fad of the past few years.
I don't know why you don't have a million mod points. I'd missed all of that background from Woz and hand been wondering about just that stuff. You answered all my unasked questions and then some, and thoroughly explained that particular issue. Thanks.
Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. If my code doesn't work, I KNOW it's not my computer, it's me. Then I go fix it. Or if I can't fix it, I take a break until I'm ready to come back. It's never once entered my mind to consider *threatening* a computer for doing what I told it to.
I repeat: when I complained that the question they just asked me was meaningless as a method of identity verification they agreed and offered me, at that point an unverified individual, to lock the account down with a password. Good job.
Well, if you were posing as someone else, you wouldn't have bothered to complain about security. So there's a good chance you're the real customer.
Just out of curiosity, how much time did you have to spend paying off and renewing those loans to make $5 - $10/month?
That's only true if there's been enough time for light to stream in from every point in the sky, and there has not. That's why the currently observable universe is smaller than the whole universe. Redshift from receding galaxies also moves the light out of the visible spectrum. And of course there's gas and dusk which would occlude some of that light.
There's never been any real issue with the universe being bigger than the observable universe. It's like standing in a fog, and asking if it's possible to have objects that are outside your range of vision (the observable universe). The answer is yes, easily. As for other universes, that's not something that would be observable. Many scientists would say it's possible they exist, but they'd also say if you can observe it, it's by definition inside this universe. There's no possible concept of "distance between" universes. The universe is everything. There may be another everything out there, but it's completely disconnected by both space and time from this particular instance of everything.
We are merely at the center of what we can see of the universe. Which makes sense. Imagine you're in a dense fog. You're going to have a bubble around you that's basically spherical in shape, inside which you can see things and outside which you can't see anything but fog. No matter where you go, you're always going to be at the exact center of that bubble. It doesn't actually put you at the center of anything meaningful, it's just an artifact of how your rage of vision works.
If you're in a dense fog, and can only see 30 feet in any direction, that bubble of visibility is the known universe. It doesn't signify anything about the size of the fog or where you are located in it. Any person, standing anywhere in that patch of fog, is still only going to be able to see 30 feet in any given direction, and they will always be at the center of what they can see.
Excellent answers. I'd give you mod points if I had 'em.
Not for the first 5 minutes of driving or ~15 minutes of idling.
...?
Insert comment about warming up the car inside the garage
Those aren't stars. Read up on your Vonnegut. Particularly 'Breakfast of Champions.'