...though I haven't been privy to what was found, I have been part of several interview processes where we didn't extend an offer, and the reason given was "we found something on their [social networking site/personal site/online postings] that was bad." I have to assume that it was nothing more than typical college-kid party stuff, particularly given how conservative people around most corporate environments can be.
In addition to that, she's also pretty rabidly pro-life. This is, among other things, a definite carrot toward the more religiously-oriented part of the conservative base - you know, the part that doesn't thing McCain is conservative enough (in the fundamentalist sense) for them...
That's so sad but so true. I guess the truth is I don't listen to mainstream music anymore. It's kinda something I don't want anything to do with and the greedy record companies are the reason.
I'm in a similar boat. My tastes were already leading me away from the major labels years ago, and a year or so ago I decided that my principles were demanding a complete halt to RIAA-member produced media. With the help of RIAA Radar, as well as just plain payin' attention, I've been able to make sure that anything that catches my eye isn't on the "bad" list. My main avenues for exposure are concerts and clubs, as well as just skimming bands' websites and pages on sites like MySpace and ReverbNation to find other bands connected to them.
The result? I have about 15-20 bands I try to keep up with and see when they tour through the Midwest, and pick up their CDs from the shows or order from their websites. This gives me enough new music to keep me going, and I'm typically adding another band to that list every couple of months.
There's always a little bit of a crestfallen moment when a band I really like announces on their blog that they've signed a deal with [insert major label name here], because as much as I want to keep supporting them, I don't want to contribute to feeding the beast, so to speak. I wish them the best, but since they'd end up with little/none of my money even if I were to buy their RIAA-produced CD, better it stays in my pockets than going to the major label.
Re:But Sega makes horrible games these days
on
The Evolution of Sega
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Basically, Sega churns out junk based on their (formerly) popular franchises.
While I can't claim to be a huge fan of the Sonic stuff, Sega published some great games at least during the previous console generation (post-Dreamcast). Another poster mentioned Jet Set Radio, and I'll mention Panzer Dragoon Orta and the Otogi games. For a while, they were the house publishing some of the unique and innovative stuff, rather than JustAnotherShooter and JustAnotherPlatformer.
it always amazes me how the same people that talk of the federal government in terms of utter incompetence in one sentence, the next sentence they are suggesting a multiorganizational airtight conspiracy has been meticulously arranged...
warhawks DO exist. but most everything that happens in the realm of tricky manipulation is usually due to the individual initiative of individual warhawks. not some sort of grand poobah conspiracy of warhawk cabals, or whatever.
I've made similar points on other forums when this type of discussion occurs. A lot of what people point to as conspiratorial or even deliberately planned for nefarious purposes is nothing of the sort - rather, it's simply what happens when self-serving, selfish, and opportunistic behavior is practiced by people who are in a position to influence things on a scale larger than their immediate circle of acquaintances. If it seems like there's some kind of movement in concert, it's simply that people in similar positions and with similar individual goals will often behave similarly. Large groups of powerful people, each doing things that provide immediate benefit to themselves regardless of how many other people it screws over, is not conpsiracy - it's coincidence.
These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, and if you're claiming that it should be ethically okay for Apple to break the law as long as it doesn't get caught, you're giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors who go to greater lengths to pay their employees properly because they know they're legally required to.
Something similar happens in the chemical industry, with regards to regulatory compliance - smaller companies often don't bother to hire (or don't have the resources to hire) dedicated personnel for reviewing various industrial, health, and safety regulations. The laws are complex, and are not necessarily common knowledge even amongst chemists and engineers in the applicable industries.
What often happens is that a large company will have a long, thorough, and complete MSDS that says lots of scary-sounding things because they know what the laws say they must disclose, and they know what to review and look for in their compliances. The small company's product, though, will have a very short, basic, and practically bare MSDS that doesn't say anything frightening (or even all that informative), because they didn't employ the proper resources to make sure they were in compliance with the law. That has an effect where the information disclosure is a gatekeeper to a market or region (I'm looking at you, California Proposition 65) where the large players (who have done their due diligence) are kept out because of what they have made sure they know and disclose, while the small players are often selling non-compliant goods but haven't done their homework to be able to disclose it.
Bear in mind that this is not a complaint against the regulations, as I believe they should be there. What sucks is when the large players have to obey the law (due to visibility as well as just having done the required work to know the law) while the "small fish" get away with selling stuff that anyone experienced knows can't be in compliance.
***SPOILER ALERT*** At the end of the movie, when he has finally escaped and is free of the system (as Lucas is now free and able to produce any movie he chooses from conception through to finished product) the protagonist finds him system alone, in the middle of a barren wasteland. All credit to Lucas for escaping the machine, but it sees his imagination is just as empty these days.
Rather than comment on the film ending being a metaphor for Lucas' career and ability, I just wanted to remark that I always found it quite disconcerting that, for once, the film had the bleak ending and the _book_ (Ben Bova's novelization of Lucas' screenplay) had the happily-ever-after. Was never sure which one I preferred.
>> So said instructor would purchase tickets for the atlanta >> to houston flight, and just walk off the plane in Dallas > > Some airlines are so infuriated by customers that do this > that they will refuse to ever do business with you again. > I have no idea why.
More common is that they'll simply cancel your return ticket (assuming your plan was for a round-trip). I've also had cases where, because of weather or mechanical delays, it was faster to rent a car and drive to the first-stop airport. Problem is, if you don't get on the first leg of the flight, they cancel your ticket for the second leg of your trip, and your out of luck. I'm sure there's some complicated and half-bureaucratic explanation for this, but I've never bothered to find out why.
There's always the issue of cross-contamination just from handling the singles in your wallet, since paper money is apparently rife with traces of cocaine.
It gets even more so for those who have surnames that are common given names. Making things even more complicated in trying to identify such people are those instances where they might be addressed by their middle names rather than their first names. Those are folks who are very easily lost in the noise. Yes, it's technically security through obscurity, but unless you've actually found or been given a uniquely identifying bit of information about that person, the difficulty level of "finding" them is appreciably high. (You'll note I did not posit it to be impossible.)
Add in occasions where someone has been sensible enough to have separate (and disparate) online identities for personal and professional causes and, well, they might as well not exist unless they deliberately draw attention to or identify themselves.
If you've seen it, do you think the fantasy stuff is "real" or not? If it is real, the little girl's experiences are a ray of light in a dreadful time. If it's not real (maybe she's taking some of that morphine) then her death is really quite tragic and awful, even compared to all the other events.
I think the beauty of it is in asking not whether it is real or not, but how much you want to believe it's real. How terrible it would be to contemplate the sad, brutal reality in which she lives and dies and know that all the trappings and events of the fantastic are nothing more than her escapist wishes and her denial in refusing to believe in her own death?
I don't think there's a clear answer to the question you ask because there isn't supposed to be one. To my mind, that was the point del Toro wanted to make: who are you? A believer? Or a disbeliever? I think that's one of the big take-aways here.
At one of my jobs, we hired a woman in one department who stands 6'4" tall. I couldn't decide how much of a jerk it made me that, when I first walked by her in the hall, the first thing that ran through my head was that line.:)
Thanks for the spelling correction - I wondered if I was screwing that up (on too little sleep this morning), but didn't bother to check.
Agreed that the whole campaign mechanism and media definitely marginalize anyone who doesn't fit the current duopoly; I saw more media criticism of his height (particularly as relates to his spouse) than I did of his actual policies and platform.
...perhaps I should've said "(presumptive) nominees" instead of candidates.
That would be fair and pretty accurate - those of us who supported Kucinic but still maintained any sense of reality knew he wouldn't last long, though plenty of us supported him anyways right alongside his die-hards. Bill Richardson, too, had a pretty progressive platform, but he wasn't much more viable than Kucinic in terms of general election. Now the possibility of Richardson as VP - that gets my attention, and could get me to vote for Obama. Maybe.
If a higher office candidate has a "D" or an "R" next to their name, they aren't progressive.
My preference going into this whole (ungawdly long) campaign was for Dennis Kucinic - check out his platform and I think you might see there are rare instances of someone progressive making a go of it. (One could argue that he was never a "viable" candidate, and one may well be right, but he got a lot further than I would have expected.)
After Kucinic, my horse of choice was Edwards for a somewhat-distant second. Once he bowed out, I just crossed my fingers and hoped that Obama wouldn't become a candidate I couldn't stomach. He's doing a bang-up job of running in that direction, sadly, so I guess it's time to vote Green Party yet again.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
1. Check yourself in electronically - print out your boarding pass at home. That bypasses 30 minutes, easy.
Another business frequent flyer here (about the same frequency as you cited), and I can say I did this and loved it until my name landed on the no-fly list in October of last year. I've been trying to get off the list since then, with no luck, and have to check in with a live person for every single flight! I can't even use the automated kiosks.
Arbitrary governmental action has made my work significantly more cumbersome and troublesome for no real benefit, and that has been the single largest impact I've seen.
To be fair, I don't think I said anything about medical care being an inalienable right, but was taking the premise of your analogy and illustrating what, to me, was a particularly sizable disparity. Choice is a huge differentiating factor there, though one could argue that it might well be irrelevant (which you've done quite cogently).
I think there are plenty of arguments to be made for medical care being a right insofar as it's a requirement for the support of those things which are inarguably inalienable (for the sake of clarity, we'll call those "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"). One needs access to water to live, and there are numerous organizations (governmental and otherwise) worldwide that believe that to be inalienable. It doesn't seem to me like a serious stretch of imagination to call access to food and medical care inalienable rights, as well.
Note that I did say "access" is the right, and not the care itself. How that is provided and paid for is an administrative detail, albeit a complicated one. (Understatement of the year, that one.) A system where the medical care necessary for someone to live is economically unavailable to them would seem to be barring access, and denying that right.
I'll readily concede a few points - one of which is that I don't pretend to know enough to have an answer to the healthcare dilemma that is both practical and morally just, and the other of which is that you're entirely right about government not having a good track record on addressing problems of distribution.:)
If you're a bad driver, should you not be charged more for liability insurance. If you've a genetic redisposition towards an expensive for of cancer, should you not pay more for the that?
The flaw in that particular argument, as I see it, would be that driving is a choice, while having been conceived/born is not. If you drive badly because of poor skill or simply bad behavior, that can be addressed by the choices you make (defensive driving lessons, anger management, staying off the road). What choice did you make about which egg was released, which sperm found it, and when it occurred?
Not to mention the very fundamental difference between a privilege (driving) and an inalienable right (life).
Am I the only one who got the inline Flash ad image for a Russian dating service on this/. comments page, and who found it somewhere between distasteful and darkly humorous?
But isn't it fun to see how many different aliases you can get onto the watch list?
Not for those of us who have very common names, of the type that are more frequently used to "assemble" an alias. My birth name is one of the most common in the US - not quite on the order of "John Smith," but pretty close - and this unfortunate bit has landed me on the TSA no-fly list for most of the last year, among other bits of fun.
Back on topic, I'm a chemist by profession, and I always find things like this cool as all hell. I remember the chemistry sets of yore, including some of the "antique" sets used by my father and a a few of his younger uncles, and the progression over the years of what can be done with what's available to the layman has become increasingly disappointing. What's the likelihood that any modern set would ever come with a distillation column?
Good tools and decent, interesting references must be available to help get people (especially kids!) excited about, interested in, and practicing hard sciences. I know I'm not saying anything new to lots of people around here, but dammit, I'm gonna say it anyway.
As long as the story continues from the last game's cliffhanger, I'll be happy.
Agreed - I really liked the first one, saw the cliffhanger, and found myself particularly concerned that it was going to be left out there to dry with no continuation. (In a similar previous situation, the first Drakan game, released on PC, ended with something of a cliffhanger; the semi-sequel on PlayStation2 didn't really address what happened after the first game.)
The instant an event happens anywhere in the world you have hundreds of cameras on it. This is a very, very good thing. Reporters and ground crews are no longer necessary to capture footage, you can get it de novo, unfiltered, unbiased.
I seem to recall David Brin making just such a proposition in Kiln People, where anyone who wanted to be was a freelance journalist with portable/remote cameras, network feed for commentary and statements and discussion, etc. - one had merely to search for the event and pick what feeds/sources you wanted to have, pay a real-time subscription, and there's your news.
Depends on the investor. I voted in favor of the proposals on my proxy. I'd be curious to see the distribution of votes between individual and institutional shareholders.
Ditto on similar things I've recently seen pass through investment houses like Fidelity. I saw shareholder proposals relating to abstaining from investments that benefit regimes that contribute to genocide (specifically, the Darfur-China issue), and the board statement on the proxies of course said "The board recommends voting against this proposal." Do we "play to win," and damn the cost, or do we play to the best of our ability while having a conscience? I think I know the "business" answer to this.
1) Dreamcast was legitimately ahead of its time - you can compare Tony Hawk/Dead or Alive on Dreamcast vs Playstation and see a world of difference.
2) The games were ahead of its time - many of the XBOX-generation games were largely ports of Dreamcast original games, including Metropolis Street Racer, among others.
These two points tend to indicate, to me, that you've misunderstood or misremembered the timelines involved. The Dreamcast wasn't a member of the same generation of the original Sony PSX - the Saturn was Sega's entry in that generation, while the Dreamcast was a member of the XBox/PS2/GameCube generation. In both cases, Sega got the console out into the marketplace well before anyone else (detrimentally prematurely, in the case of the Saturn). Go check out some of the old Saturn TV commercials from way back, and you'll see them mention the Playstation nearly-directly.
Incidentally, a lot of people will hold up the "easy-to-pirate" angle as the single major contributor to the Dreamcast's demise, but most of the more insightful and interesting post-mortems I've read had attributed it to a combination of the long-running hype of the as-yet-unreleased PS2 ("why buy a Sega when the PS2 will be so much better when it comes out?") and a very fumbled marketing effort on Sega's part.
Slashdot Mirror
...though I haven't been privy to what was found, I have been part of several interview processes where we didn't extend an offer, and the reason given was "we found something on their [social networking site/personal site/online postings] that was bad." I have to assume that it was nothing more than typical college-kid party stuff, particularly given how conservative people around most corporate environments can be.
In addition to that, she's also pretty rabidly pro-life. This is, among other things, a definite carrot toward the more religiously-oriented part of the conservative base - you know, the part that doesn't thing McCain is conservative enough (in the fundamentalist sense) for them...
That's so sad but so true. I guess the truth is I don't listen to mainstream music anymore. It's kinda something I don't want anything to do with and the greedy record companies are the reason.
I'm in a similar boat. My tastes were already leading me away from the major labels years ago, and a year or so ago I decided that my principles were demanding a complete halt to RIAA-member produced media. With the help of RIAA Radar, as well as just plain payin' attention, I've been able to make sure that anything that catches my eye isn't on the "bad" list. My main avenues for exposure are concerts and clubs, as well as just skimming bands' websites and pages on sites like MySpace and ReverbNation to find other bands connected to them.
The result? I have about 15-20 bands I try to keep up with and see when they tour through the Midwest, and pick up their CDs from the shows or order from their websites. This gives me enough new music to keep me going, and I'm typically adding another band to that list every couple of months.
There's always a little bit of a crestfallen moment when a band I really like announces on their blog that they've signed a deal with [insert major label name here], because as much as I want to keep supporting them, I don't want to contribute to feeding the beast, so to speak. I wish them the best, but since they'd end up with little/none of my money even if I were to buy their RIAA-produced CD, better it stays in my pockets than going to the major label.
Basically, Sega churns out junk based on their (formerly) popular franchises.
While I can't claim to be a huge fan of the Sonic stuff, Sega published some great games at least during the previous console generation (post-Dreamcast). Another poster mentioned Jet Set Radio, and I'll mention Panzer Dragoon Orta and the Otogi games. For a while, they were the house publishing some of the unique and innovative stuff, rather than JustAnotherShooter and JustAnotherPlatformer.
it always amazes me how the same people that talk of the federal government in terms of utter incompetence in one sentence, the next sentence they are suggesting a multiorganizational airtight conspiracy has been meticulously arranged...
warhawks DO exist. but most everything that happens in the realm of tricky manipulation is usually due to the individual initiative of individual warhawks. not some sort of grand poobah conspiracy of warhawk cabals, or whatever.
I've made similar points on other forums when this type of discussion occurs. A lot of what people point to as conspiratorial or even deliberately planned for nefarious purposes is nothing of the sort - rather, it's simply what happens when self-serving, selfish, and opportunistic behavior is practiced by people who are in a position to influence things on a scale larger than their immediate circle of acquaintances. If it seems like there's some kind of movement in concert, it's simply that people in similar positions and with similar individual goals will often behave similarly. Large groups of powerful people, each doing things that provide immediate benefit to themselves regardless of how many other people it screws over, is not conpsiracy - it's coincidence.
These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, and if you're claiming that it should be ethically okay for Apple to break the law as long as it doesn't get caught, you're giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors who go to greater lengths to pay their employees properly because they know they're legally required to.
Something similar happens in the chemical industry, with regards to regulatory compliance - smaller companies often don't bother to hire (or don't have the resources to hire) dedicated personnel for reviewing various industrial, health, and safety regulations. The laws are complex, and are not necessarily common knowledge even amongst chemists and engineers in the applicable industries.
What often happens is that a large company will have a long, thorough, and complete MSDS that says lots of scary-sounding things because they know what the laws say they must disclose, and they know what to review and look for in their compliances. The small company's product, though, will have a very short, basic, and practically bare MSDS that doesn't say anything frightening (or even all that informative), because they didn't employ the proper resources to make sure they were in compliance with the law. That has an effect where the information disclosure is a gatekeeper to a market or region (I'm looking at you, California Proposition 65) where the large players (who have done their due diligence) are kept out because of what they have made sure they know and disclose, while the small players are often selling non-compliant goods but haven't done their homework to be able to disclose it.
Bear in mind that this is not a complaint against the regulations, as I believe they should be there. What sucks is when the large players have to obey the law (due to visibility as well as just having done the required work to know the law) while the "small fish" get away with selling stuff that anyone experienced knows can't be in compliance.
***SPOILER ALERT***
At the end of the movie, when he has finally escaped and is free of the system (as Lucas is now free and able to produce any movie he chooses from conception through to finished product) the protagonist finds him system alone, in the middle of a barren wasteland. All credit to Lucas for escaping the machine, but it sees his imagination is just as empty these days.
Rather than comment on the film ending being a metaphor for Lucas' career and ability, I just wanted to remark that I always found it quite disconcerting that, for once, the film had the bleak ending and the _book_ (Ben Bova's novelization of Lucas' screenplay) had the happily-ever-after. Was never sure which one I preferred.
>> So said instructor would purchase tickets for the atlanta
>> to houston flight, and just walk off the plane in Dallas
>
> Some airlines are so infuriated by customers that do this
> that they will refuse to ever do business with you again.
> I have no idea why.
More common is that they'll simply cancel your return ticket (assuming your plan was for a round-trip). I've also had cases where, because of weather or mechanical delays, it was faster to rent a car and drive to the first-stop airport. Problem is, if you don't get on the first leg of the flight, they cancel your ticket for the second leg of your trip, and your out of luck. I'm sure there's some complicated and half-bureaucratic explanation for this, but I've never bothered to find out why.
There's always the issue of cross-contamination just from handling the singles in your wallet, since paper money is apparently rife with traces of cocaine.
Give your children very common names.
It gets even more so for those who have surnames that are common given names. Making things even more complicated in trying to identify such people are those instances where they might be addressed by their middle names rather than their first names. Those are folks who are very easily lost in the noise. Yes, it's technically security through obscurity, but unless you've actually found or been given a uniquely identifying bit of information about that person, the difficulty level of "finding" them is appreciably high. (You'll note I did not posit it to be impossible.)
Add in occasions where someone has been sensible enough to have separate (and disparate) online identities for personal and professional causes and, well, they might as well not exist unless they deliberately draw attention to or identify themselves.
If you've seen it, do you think the fantasy stuff is "real" or not? If it is real, the little girl's experiences are a ray of light in a dreadful time. If it's not real (maybe she's taking some of that morphine) then her death is really quite tragic and awful, even compared to all the other events.
I think the beauty of it is in asking not whether it is real or not, but how much you want to believe it's real. How terrible it would be to contemplate the sad, brutal reality in which she lives and dies and know that all the trappings and events of the fantastic are nothing more than her escapist wishes and her denial in refusing to believe in her own death?
I don't think there's a clear answer to the question you ask because there isn't supposed to be one. To my mind, that was the point del Toro wanted to make: who are you? A believer? Or a disbeliever? I think that's one of the big take-aways here.
Death by snoo snoo?
At one of my jobs, we hired a woman in one department who stands 6'4" tall. I couldn't decide how much of a jerk it made me that, when I first walked by her in the hall, the first thing that ran through my head was that line. :)
Thanks for the spelling correction - I wondered if I was screwing that up (on too little sleep this morning), but didn't bother to check.
Agreed that the whole campaign mechanism and media definitely marginalize anyone who doesn't fit the current duopoly; I saw more media criticism of his height (particularly as relates to his spouse) than I did of his actual policies and platform.
...perhaps I should've said "(presumptive) nominees" instead of candidates.
That would be fair and pretty accurate - those of us who supported Kucinic but still maintained any sense of reality knew he wouldn't last long, though plenty of us supported him anyways right alongside his die-hards. Bill Richardson, too, had a pretty progressive platform, but he wasn't much more viable than Kucinic in terms of general election. Now the possibility of Richardson as VP - that gets my attention, and could get me to vote for Obama. Maybe.
If a higher office candidate has a "D" or an "R" next to their name, they aren't progressive.
My preference going into this whole (ungawdly long) campaign was for Dennis Kucinic - check out his platform and I think you might see there are rare instances of someone progressive making a go of it. (One could argue that he was never a "viable" candidate, and one may well be right, but he got a lot further than I would have expected.)
After Kucinic, my horse of choice was Edwards for a somewhat-distant second. Once he bowed out, I just crossed my fingers and hoped that Obama wouldn't become a candidate I couldn't stomach. He's doing a bang-up job of running in that direction, sadly, so I guess it's time to vote Green Party yet again.
1. Check yourself in electronically - print out your boarding pass at home. That bypasses 30 minutes, easy.
Another business frequent flyer here (about the same frequency as you cited), and I can say I did this and loved it until my name landed on the no-fly list in October of last year. I've been trying to get off the list since then, with no luck, and have to check in with a live person for every single flight! I can't even use the automated kiosks.
Arbitrary governmental action has made my work significantly more cumbersome and troublesome for no real benefit, and that has been the single largest impact I've seen.
This strikes me as the administrative equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and sing-songing "I can't heeeeeearr yooouuuuuu!"
Medical care *cannot* be an inalienable right...
:)
To be fair, I don't think I said anything about medical care being an inalienable right, but was taking the premise of your analogy and illustrating what, to me, was a particularly sizable disparity. Choice is a huge differentiating factor there, though one could argue that it might well be irrelevant (which you've done quite cogently).
I think there are plenty of arguments to be made for medical care being a right insofar as it's a requirement for the support of those things which are inarguably inalienable (for the sake of clarity, we'll call those "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"). One needs access to water to live, and there are numerous organizations (governmental and otherwise) worldwide that believe that to be inalienable. It doesn't seem to me like a serious stretch of imagination to call access to food and medical care inalienable rights, as well.
Note that I did say "access" is the right, and not the care itself. How that is provided and paid for is an administrative detail, albeit a complicated one. (Understatement of the year, that one.) A system where the medical care necessary for someone to live is economically unavailable to them would seem to be barring access, and denying that right.
I'll readily concede a few points - one of which is that I don't pretend to know enough to have an answer to the healthcare dilemma that is both practical and morally just, and the other of which is that you're entirely right about government not having a good track record on addressing problems of distribution.
If you're a bad driver, should you not be charged more for liability insurance. If you've a genetic redisposition towards an expensive for of cancer, should you not pay more for the that?
The flaw in that particular argument, as I see it, would be that driving is a choice, while having been conceived/born is not. If you drive badly because of poor skill or simply bad behavior, that can be addressed by the choices you make (defensive driving lessons, anger management, staying off the road). What choice did you make about which egg was released, which sperm found it, and when it occurred?
Not to mention the very fundamental difference between a privilege (driving) and an inalienable right (life).
Am I the only one who got the inline Flash ad image for a Russian dating service on this
But isn't it fun to see how many different aliases you can get onto the watch list?
Not for those of us who have very common names, of the type that are more frequently used to "assemble" an alias. My birth name is one of the most common in the US - not quite on the order of "John Smith," but pretty close - and this unfortunate bit has landed me on the TSA no-fly list for most of the last year, among other bits of fun.
Back on topic, I'm a chemist by profession, and I always find things like this cool as all hell. I remember the chemistry sets of yore, including some of the "antique" sets used by my father and a a few of his younger uncles, and the progression over the years of what can be done with what's available to the layman has become increasingly disappointing. What's the likelihood that any modern set would ever come with a distillation column?
Good tools and decent, interesting references must be available to help get people (especially kids!) excited about, interested in, and practicing hard sciences. I know I'm not saying anything new to lots of people around here, but dammit, I'm gonna say it anyway.
As long as the story continues from the last game's cliffhanger, I'll be happy.
Agreed - I really liked the first one, saw the cliffhanger, and found myself particularly concerned that it was going to be left out there to dry with no continuation. (In a similar previous situation, the first Drakan game, released on PC, ended with something of a cliffhanger; the semi-sequel on PlayStation2 didn't really address what happened after the first game.)
The instant an event happens anywhere in the world you have hundreds of cameras on it. This is a very, very good thing. Reporters and ground crews are no longer necessary to capture footage, you can get it de novo, unfiltered, unbiased.
I seem to recall David Brin making just such a proposition in Kiln People, where anyone who wanted to be was a freelance journalist with portable/remote cameras, network feed for commentary and statements and discussion, etc. - one had merely to search for the event and pick what feeds/sources you wanted to have, pay a real-time subscription, and there's your news.
Depends on the investor. I voted in favor of the proposals on my proxy. I'd be curious to see the distribution of votes between individual and institutional shareholders.
Ditto on similar things I've recently seen pass through investment houses like Fidelity. I saw shareholder proposals relating to abstaining from investments that benefit regimes that contribute to genocide (specifically, the Darfur-China issue), and the board statement on the proxies of course said "The board recommends voting against this proposal." Do we "play to win," and damn the cost, or do we play to the best of our ability while having a conscience? I think I know the "business" answer to this.
1) Dreamcast was legitimately ahead of its time - you can compare Tony Hawk/Dead or Alive on Dreamcast vs Playstation and see a world of difference.
2) The games were ahead of its time - many of the XBOX-generation games were largely ports of Dreamcast original games, including Metropolis Street Racer, among others.
These two points tend to indicate, to me, that you've misunderstood or misremembered the timelines involved. The Dreamcast wasn't a member of the same generation of the original Sony PSX - the Saturn was Sega's entry in that generation, while the Dreamcast was a member of the XBox/PS2/GameCube generation. In both cases, Sega got the console out into the marketplace well before anyone else (detrimentally prematurely, in the case of the Saturn). Go check out some of the old Saturn TV commercials from way back, and you'll see them mention the Playstation nearly-directly.
Incidentally, a lot of people will hold up the "easy-to-pirate" angle as the single major contributor to the Dreamcast's demise, but most of the more insightful and interesting post-mortems I've read had attributed it to a combination of the long-running hype of the as-yet-unreleased PS2 ("why buy a Sega when the PS2 will be so much better when it comes out?") and a very fumbled marketing effort on Sega's part.