Daughters never paid the price of their parents' misdeeds...
It's a debatable point as to whether it's a misdeed or not, but there's always the passage where Lot offered up his daughters (virgin daughters, if I recall correctly) to the rabble to persuade them to leave be the guests. Someone with a concordance or a better memory of those passages correct me or back me up?
If you're going to consider solar energy external, then you should also consider the energy in deep currents as external, because that energy differential was created by solar energy hitting the ocean.
A very good point, along with your mention of solar as a "fixed" amount source of energy. I hadn't thought of the impact of solar harvesting beyond the fact that plants obviously won't be growing in the area where the energy hasn't been completely collected - but if taken to an extreme, and not allowing environmental elements (bodies of water, expanses of ground, etc.) absorb the energy could also have climate-oriented impacts. I guess the payback vs. impact would be a great study to compare the two. My gut says solar would be lower immediate impact to the local ecology, but I'm not a climate expert by any stretch of the imagination.
This is the problem I have with these arguments. We are burning oil faster than ever before with glaciers melting at unheard of rates which can have huge consquences; yet we should sit and wait until we understand how some new idea will affect the planet?
You've attributed to me a statement I didn't make - as I didn't address our dependence on fossil fuels (nor the effects of doing such). Moving to a specific alternate energy source and reducing our usage of oil, while connected, are not the same action.
I would agree that we need to reduce our petroleum-derived fuel consumption regardless of the "when" and "what" of the alternatives. Basic conservation and lifestyle changes could have a great impact. Personally, I'm more concerned with peak oil for reasons other than fuel availability - we depend on petroleum feedstocks for manufacturing an unfathomable range of specialty chemicals and polymers. As a chemist who works in that industry, I'd like to know we have secure supplies of the raw materials to make, say nearly every type of plastic there is, rather than having burned it all up as fuel.
Good points both, if a little dichotomous. I'm not the alarmist type of tree-hugger - just one who advocates asking lots and lots of questions before taking big steps into unknown territory. As an aside, I think the islands to which you were referring are the Aleutian Islands.
placing turbines at the bottom of the ocean... say at the foot of the arctic circle where there are massive deep currents caused by cooling surface water would be an excellent idea.
This is not a bad idea, but like any other notion of harvesting energy from the kinetics of the planet, I think we ned to make sure we understand the full impact of removing that energy from the system that is the planet. Weather patterns rely on the energy inherent in air movement - and harvesting that, while seemingly innocuous, could be a badidea. Aside from the other issues that come from wind-power farms, such as scaling, etc., this is something that must be considered before we start possibly causing unanticipated effects. Bear in mind, too, the scope and scale of ecological and meteorlogical impacts. Personally, I like the notion of an external source, myself, but I'm also aware of the limitations we face in trying to use it currently.
Thanks for the response - that helps my understanding quite a bit. So here's a slightly more practical question - does VMWare (with which, again, I am wholly unfamiliar) run on x86 with Linux as the host OS? I'm sure I could find the answer if I went digging, but since this discussion would likely involve people who outright _know_ these answers, I thought I'd ask here. My goal would be to run a Windows environment with minimal performance impact. Would this likely be close enough on a machine with enough horsepower to be an adequate substitute for having a native install of the OS? Including up through some gaming?
Since I don't claim to have any experience dealing with VMWare, and only passing experience with VirtualPC (and, previously, SoftWindows) on Mac, can someone explain to me how this is different from emulation? Is it different from emulation? I've kept one x86 workstation around my home running Win98 (and dual-boot with Slackware) for a small handful of applications and a few games. The notion of making the machine Slack-only and running Windows virtually with no performance hit from emulating is attractive, but I am quite ready for my assumption to turn out flawed. Could someone with a greater clue than I've got educate me?
If only the radio industry could begin to realize that people do *NOT* like to listen to the same 7 songs over and over again throughout the day with the occasional "older" song thrown in to attempt to trick everyone.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that commercial radio treats the listeners as their market, and simply doesn't know how to properly serve that market. This is, as I'm given to understand, not the case. Listeners are not the market - they are the product. Advertisers are the market.
With that in mind, think of how you'd construct a playlist if you were running a commercial radio station. You'd want the broadest appeal in the range of target demographics for the least amount of money possible. That means the same dozen or so songs from whatever genre your station happens to represent, chosen from focus groups' studies to provide the maximum current listenership that will keep people from paying too much attention to the music but not piss them off enough to make them change the channel. That will give them the greatest volume of listeners (gathered in as cost-efficient a manner as possible) to present to advertisers, and hopefully at a higher value position than their competitors.
Understand the perspective, and you'll realize that the discussions of what people want (new stuff vs. familiarity) as listeners is irrelevant. Radio is not there for you, your friends and family, or the public. It is there to sell your "ear" time to marketers.
I swear, we have more in common with the Islamic fundamentalists we're at war with than we have differences.
Funny you should mention that, as someone has made an interesting comparison with regards to religious fundamentalism. First time I took it (few months ago, I think), I got 12 out of 20 on the quiz.
The voice acting wasn't that bad, and you were waaay too caught up in it. And it gets better as the game progresses, which you didn't apparently do.
I freely admitted that I didn't get far in - and to each their own, but when the other aspects of the game's production values were as impressive as they are, to be saddled with what I considered to be voice acting that was that bad, I simply found that I couldn't enjoy what seemed to be such a promising game. You mention the "good parts" of the game, and I was really looking forward to all that when I started, but the voice just grated on me so badly that the whole experience seemed soured from the get-go.
But complaining about the voice acting is like complaining that Mario is too kiddy to be enjoyed by adults. Rubish and besides the point.
I don't think those comparisons are quite the same at all, aside from the fact that both are posited as states rather than opinion. The only real fault I could find with what I said is that I didn't qualify it as solely my opinion ("I don't like this because to me...") rather than stating it as definitive ("Shenmue sucks because...").
I'm sure there's a great game in there, but unless the voice acting were dramatically improved from what I heard, it would have been as lost on me as if I were trying to watch a nice arthouse film someplace where I was surrounded by people talking, munching loudly, spilling drinks, etc. You could argue that's petty, but taste is all subjective, anyway.
Shenmue's voice acting and horrible script alone loses any chance it ever had at being immersive. Lines like the one I used for the title of this post combined with some of the worst recordings of people reading out loud made for a grating experience. (Seriously, people, try reading the lines a few times and putting some emotion into them instead of just taking whatever comes from reading the script the first time.)
I tried to like this game, I really did - everyone raved and raved, but less than an hour in, I simply couldn't stand it anymore. The acting was atrocious, quite possibly some of the worst application of voice talent I've ever heard in a game. I found myself comparing it to a great deal of English-dubbed anime, wishing there was an option to turn on Japanese audio with subtitles.
Of course, that assumes the Japanese voice acting was any better, and not having heard the JPN version, I simply don't know - but it seemed a safer bet.
Though I can't speak as to Safeway stores, I had an interesting discussion with someone a year or so ago who claimed to hold a fair amount of stock in Kroger. He mentioned that Kroger used whatever margins they made on selling food products just to cover operating expenses, and didn't plan on actually making any substantial profit from sales. Rather, the food and consumer products they sold were merely a way to gain a cash-flow, which was then used to generate profit through the same manner as a bank - interest and gains. Managing their cash-flow correctly (encouraging high volume of shopping, negotiating lengthy payment terms with larger suppliers) allowed them the time needed to hold money long enough for this to be viable. This same fellow claimed that in their corporate charter, Kroger was identified as a banking institution, not a retailer.
Granted, I've not verified any of this, nor do I have any proof of the veracity of his statements, but it made enough sense to me to seem plausible. At the least, it's an interesting notion, and to me it made sense to explain part of the reason for the (sometimes large) discrepancies in retail prices I'd seen at smaller grocery chains vs. larger ones like Kroger.
(Here's the part where either I get modded up for something cool-sounding, or modded down when someone with a clue proves me quite wrong.:P )
Xenogears (for PSX) wasn't much better. 100-ish hours of my life sunk into that game, and many of them were cut-scenes and dialog sequences. On more than one occasion I found myself playing for only a few minutes and then having to slog through over a half-hour of in-game engine dialog scenes. Ack!
Portable players with OGG support have been around for a while, though admittedly they were pretty thin on the ground for a bit. The Rio Karma is both a pleasure and a disappointment - good player with good features in a small package, but with one pretty drastic flaw, in that the heads on the drive tend to get stuck, and the "unofficial" suggestion for fixing it is to smack the unit with your hand (with quite a bit of force). Potentially a firmware bug in the HDD itself, but even so, very frustrating.
I've known many techs that not only didn't care about the rules of the English language, they actually regarded their ignorance of such rules as a perverse badge of honor, as if mastering the intricacies of the language was somehow beneath them.
Do a minor substitution and you'll find that situation to be an example of any chunk of humanity when faced with someone who knows something they don't.
"I dunno the first damned thing about com-pew-terrz, 'cuz that's fer nerds. I don' need ta know 'bout nothin' them fancy boxes kin do."
People are incredibly insecure creatures who regard anything they don't understand as suspicious, and anyone who understands such things makes them feel inadequate and confused, on uncertain ground and not knowing where they stand (since knowledge of the subject at hand is a power they, themselves, do not have). This makes them feel threatened, and rather than look at what is actually to blame for the threat (their own ignorance), they attack the trigger (the person whose knowledge made them face their own ignorance).
It's really no different than the "dumb" kids in grade school who threw rocks at the smart kids.
What's next? "The shock required is quite intense, so facilities doing this work will need to affix a lightning rod to their roof and wait for a storm..."?
Yes sir, I can't even get to my fridge in the morning without tripping over several feral Kangaroos that have found their way into my house.
You joke, but in Australia, qualified hunters are paid to cull herds of kangaroo to prevent overpopulation. My ex-wife's father made his living doing just that for some time. I seem to recall that some locales had to do something similar to prevent the feral cat population from going out of control.
I remembered seeing a preview for a Fantastic Four movie on a VHS many years ago, it looked terrible, and I never heard anything more of it. It apparently turns out that a movie was made in 1994 and, I guess, never actually released.
I remember seeing a poster for it for sale in some comic book shop or other, back in college, and the fella had talked about how rare it was but how it had no real value because no one seemed to want it. Said the flick was directed by Roger Corman (which is incorrect, as he only produced it), and said it was rumored to be awful, which is why it was never released.
It's sort of like a hotel mini-bar. When a naive person first comes across one, they think, "Oh, i could go for a soda. That costs about 89 cents, so i'm sure with a hotel markup, it'll be like $1.50 or $2." Then they find out the mini-bar price is $5. It's their own fault, but it's understandable since one doesn't expect such a large markup.
A lot of that confusion stems from the fact that most people have come to expext cost-plus pricing - but that doesn't maximize profits. Marketing approaches such as value-received pricing and others have become much more common, but aren't necessarily common knowledge.
Part of me wonders, too, if the price point these companies have set for their "unlimited" monthly plans gives them a hefty margin and (also important) a consistent and expected revenue amount (as opposed to the fluctuations of a service based on actual usage), and the per-message fees are so ridiculously high on purpose, to shepherd customers onto the monthly plans.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a debatable point as to whether it's a misdeed or not, but there's always the passage where Lot offered up his daughters (virgin daughters, if I recall correctly) to the rabble to persuade them to leave be the guests. Someone with a concordance or a better memory of those passages correct me or back me up?
When did Canadians start glowing? :P
A very good point, along with your mention of solar as a "fixed" amount source of energy. I hadn't thought of the impact of solar harvesting beyond the fact that plants obviously won't be growing in the area where the energy hasn't been completely collected - but if taken to an extreme, and not allowing environmental elements (bodies of water, expanses of ground, etc.) absorb the energy could also have climate-oriented impacts. I guess the payback vs. impact would be a great study to compare the two. My gut says solar would be lower immediate impact to the local ecology, but I'm not a climate expert by any stretch of the imagination.
You've attributed to me a statement I didn't make - as I didn't address our dependence on fossil fuels (nor the effects of doing such). Moving to a specific alternate energy source and reducing our usage of oil, while connected, are not the same action.
I would agree that we need to reduce our petroleum-derived fuel consumption regardless of the "when" and "what" of the alternatives. Basic conservation and lifestyle changes could have a great impact. Personally, I'm more concerned with peak oil for reasons other than fuel availability - we depend on petroleum feedstocks for manufacturing an unfathomable range of specialty chemicals and polymers. As a chemist who works in that industry, I'd like to know we have secure supplies of the raw materials to make, say nearly every type of plastic there is, rather than having burned it all up as fuel.
Good points both, if a little dichotomous. I'm not the alarmist type of tree-hugger - just one who advocates asking lots and lots of questions before taking big steps into unknown territory. As an aside, I think the islands to which you were referring are the Aleutian Islands.
This is not a bad idea, but like any other notion of harvesting energy from the kinetics of the planet, I think we ned to make sure we understand the full impact of removing that energy from the system that is the planet. Weather patterns rely on the energy inherent in air movement - and harvesting that, while seemingly innocuous, could be a bad idea. Aside from the other issues that come from wind-power farms, such as scaling, etc., this is something that must be considered before we start possibly causing unanticipated effects. Bear in mind, too, the scope and scale of ecological and meteorlogical impacts. Personally, I like the notion of an external source, myself, but I'm also aware of the limitations we face in trying to use it currently.
Thanks for the response - that helps my understanding quite a bit. So here's a slightly more practical question - does VMWare (with which, again, I am wholly unfamiliar) run on x86 with Linux as the host OS? I'm sure I could find the answer if I went digging, but since this discussion would likely involve people who outright _know_ these answers, I thought I'd ask here. My goal would be to run a Windows environment with minimal performance impact. Would this likely be close enough on a machine with enough horsepower to be an adequate substitute for having a native install of the OS? Including up through some gaming?
Since I don't claim to have any experience dealing with VMWare, and only passing experience with VirtualPC (and, previously, SoftWindows) on Mac, can someone explain to me how this is different from emulation? Is it different from emulation? I've kept one x86 workstation around my home running Win98 (and dual-boot with Slackware) for a small handful of applications and a few games. The notion of making the machine Slack-only and running Windows virtually with no performance hit from emulating is attractive, but I am quite ready for my assumption to turn out flawed. Could someone with a greater clue than I've got educate me?
If only the radio industry could begin to realize that people do *NOT* like to listen to the same 7 songs over and over again throughout the day with the occasional "older" song thrown in to attempt to trick everyone.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that commercial radio treats the listeners as their market, and simply doesn't know how to properly serve that market. This is, as I'm given to understand, not the case. Listeners are not the market - they are the product. Advertisers are the market.
With that in mind, think of how you'd construct a playlist if you were running a commercial radio station. You'd want the broadest appeal in the range of target demographics for the least amount of money possible. That means the same dozen or so songs from whatever genre your station happens to represent, chosen from focus groups' studies to provide the maximum current listenership that will keep people from paying too much attention to the music but not piss them off enough to make them change the channel. That will give them the greatest volume of listeners (gathered in as cost-efficient a manner as possible) to present to advertisers, and hopefully at a higher value position than their competitors.
Understand the perspective, and you'll realize that the discussions of what people want (new stuff vs. familiarity) as listeners is irrelevant. Radio is not there for you, your friends and family, or the public. It is there to sell your "ear" time to marketers.
Funny you should mention that, as someone has made an interesting comparison with regards to religious fundamentalism. First time I took it (few months ago, I think), I got 12 out of 20 on the quiz.
I freely admitted that I didn't get far in - and to each their own, but when the other aspects of the game's production values were as impressive as they are, to be saddled with what I considered to be voice acting that was that bad, I simply found that I couldn't enjoy what seemed to be such a promising game. You mention the "good parts" of the game, and I was really looking forward to all that when I started, but the voice just grated on me so badly that the whole experience seemed soured from the get-go.
But complaining about the voice acting is like complaining that Mario is too kiddy to be enjoyed by adults. Rubish and besides the point.
I don't think those comparisons are quite the same at all, aside from the fact that both are posited as states rather than opinion. The only real fault I could find with what I said is that I didn't qualify it as solely my opinion ("I don't like this because to me...") rather than stating it as definitive ("Shenmue sucks because...").
I'm sure there's a great game in there, but unless the voice acting were dramatically improved from what I heard, it would have been as lost on me as if I were trying to watch a nice arthouse film someplace where I was surrounded by people talking, munching loudly, spilling drinks, etc. You could argue that's petty, but taste is all subjective, anyway.
I tried to like this game, I really did - everyone raved and raved, but less than an hour in, I simply couldn't stand it anymore. The acting was atrocious, quite possibly some of the worst application of voice talent I've ever heard in a game. I found myself comparing it to a great deal of English-dubbed anime, wishing there was an option to turn on Japanese audio with subtitles.
Of course, that assumes the Japanese voice acting was any better, and not having heard the JPN version, I simply don't know - but it seemed a safer bet.
Though I can't speak as to Safeway stores, I had an interesting discussion with someone a year or so ago who claimed to hold a fair amount of stock in Kroger. He mentioned that Kroger used whatever margins they made on selling food products just to cover operating expenses, and didn't plan on actually making any substantial profit from sales. Rather, the food and consumer products they sold were merely a way to gain a cash-flow, which was then used to generate profit through the same manner as a bank - interest and gains. Managing their cash-flow correctly (encouraging high volume of shopping, negotiating lengthy payment terms with larger suppliers) allowed them the time needed to hold money long enough for this to be viable. This same fellow claimed that in their corporate charter, Kroger was identified as a banking institution, not a retailer.
Granted, I've not verified any of this, nor do I have any proof of the veracity of his statements, but it made enough sense to me to seem plausible. At the least, it's an interesting notion, and to me it made sense to explain part of the reason for the (sometimes large) discrepancies in retail prices I'd seen at smaller grocery chains vs. larger ones like Kroger.
(Here's the part where either I get modded up for something cool-sounding, or modded down when someone with a clue proves me quite wrong. :P )
Xenogears (for PSX) wasn't much better. 100-ish hours of my life sunk into that game, and many of them were cut-scenes and dialog sequences. On more than one occasion I found myself playing for only a few minutes and then having to slog through over a half-hour of in-game engine dialog scenes. Ack!
Portable players with OGG support have been around for a while, though admittedly they were pretty thin on the ground for a bit. The Rio Karma is both a pleasure and a disappointment - good player with good features in a small package, but with one pretty drastic flaw, in that the heads on the drive tend to get stuck, and the "unofficial" suggestion for fixing it is to smack the unit with your hand (with quite a bit of force). Potentially a firmware bug in the HDD itself, but even so, very frustrating.
What's the nutritional value of a Latitude? :P
ObSimpsons:
"Mmmmm... I can't wait to eat that monkey!"
Do a minor substitution and you'll find that situation to be an example of any chunk of humanity when faced with someone who knows something they don't.
"I dunno the first damned thing about com-pew-terrz, 'cuz that's fer nerds. I don' need ta know 'bout nothin' them fancy boxes kin do."
People are incredibly insecure creatures who regard anything they don't understand as suspicious, and anyone who understands such things makes them feel inadequate and confused, on uncertain ground and not knowing where they stand (since knowledge of the subject at hand is a power they, themselves, do not have). This makes them feel threatened, and rather than look at what is actually to blame for the threat (their own ignorance), they attack the trigger (the person whose knowledge made them face their own ignorance).
It's really no different than the "dumb" kids in grade school who threw rocks at the smart kids.
FRANKENDOG!
Yes sir, I can't even get to my fridge in the morning without tripping over several feral Kangaroos that have found their way into my house.
You joke, but in Australia, qualified hunters are paid to cull herds of kangaroo to prevent overpopulation. My ex-wife's father made his living doing just that for some time. I seem to recall that some locales had to do something similar to prevent the feral cat population from going out of control.
just to be a nerd for a min but i like her armored look in Kingdom Come the best.
For anyone else who didn't know (like me): clicky.
...I'd rather spend several hours listening to Donald Rumsfeld recite his favourite passages from Revelations...
Be careful - you may get your wish.
:)
I remembered seeing a preview for a Fantastic Four movie on a VHS many years ago, it looked terrible, and I never heard anything more of it. It apparently turns out that a movie was made in 1994 and, I guess, never actually released.
I remember seeing a poster for it for sale in some comic book shop or other, back in college, and the fella had talked about how rare it was but how it had no real value because no one seemed to want it. Said the flick was directed by Roger Corman (which is incorrect, as he only produced it), and said it was rumored to be awful, which is why it was never released.
A lot of that confusion stems from the fact that most people have come to expext cost-plus pricing - but that doesn't maximize profits. Marketing approaches such as value-received pricing and others have become much more common, but aren't necessarily common knowledge.
Part of me wonders, too, if the price point these companies have set for their "unlimited" monthly plans gives them a hefty margin and (also important) a consistent and expected revenue amount (as opposed to the fluctuations of a service based on actual usage), and the per-message fees are so ridiculously high on purpose, to shepherd customers onto the monthly plans.
For those who don't quite know the connection between Domino's and anti-abortion...