That's why I don't own any Star Trek seasons. The Babylon 5 seasons hit my upper limit for rebuying tv shows (I already paid to watch them on cable) at ~$85.
Maybe you should try before you are so sure to dismiss. I was raised on a sugarless diet and am thankful for it.
As an aside, it served as a practical demonstration of skeptical thinking. Cereal boxes would have big advertisements and large font descriptions on the fronts of their boxes about how "healthy" they all were. We were taught to look at the nutritional information and learned how easily and prevalently advertisements lie.
You pay $110 dollars for one season of a show? Are you insane? Even if it was on DVD, with all the glorious extra DVD goodness, no show is worth $110 dollars!
I'd pay $20 bucks to be able to download a season of a television show I like with no DVD extras or anything. So where can I buy?
That means you have to make room for album art, booklet and the actual physical media
Or, taking an example from the purchase you just made, you could sell the cd. You generally make all of your money back. It's exactly like getting music for free!
you have to rip it yourself including all the problems some copy-protected CDs throw in your way
Like that's hard. Seriously. Have you ever not been able to rip a cd?
But much as I loathe the XBox and much as I prefer a more cerebral, more demanding gaming experience....
A little excessive there aren't you? Or have you only looked at highlight clips of games available for the XBox?
You are implying that the XBox doesn't currently deliver a more cerebral, more demanding game experience than Halo. That isn't the sum of the system, there are a ton of great games out there.
Halo is to FPS games what Final Fantasy 7 was to RPGs. A accessable, big success that provides the first taste of a gaming genre to the masses. Just because FF7 was on the Playstation didn't mean that all of its RPGs (or all of its games) were poorly written and shallow. The same holds true for the XBox.
If I can learn to love the XBox (raised on Infocom, Atari, Origin, Nintendo, Apogee, iD, and Lucasarts), anyone can. I didn't play it at all until late last year and have been quite impressive with what I've found. More and more my GC gathers dust (except for Resident Evil 4). My desktop hasn't been a game platform since Myst IV.
Plug for an awesome game: Play Psychonauts. Tim Schafer is the best creative genius in gaming today. If you haven't, play Grim Fandango on the PC (or ScummVM...someday?).
Watch the Clone Wars cartoons for the best lightsaber duels and battle scenes. General Grevious vs. Obi-Wan one-on-one? Bah, gimme Grevious taking out a dozen Jedi at once. Or the awesome battle between elite battle droids in the high speed train station. Or Mace Windu taking out a capital attack ship (and thousands of battle droids) single handedly. Just watch his force-fu.
Your impression is correct, but needs to be tempered. HK is not an independent state nor it is a part of China...entirely. It is a strange amalgamation of both. Essentially the Chinese government wants the money, but don't want to change their government too quickly. From the twentieth century they have more than a few examples of how quickly things can go bad when swift government changes are enacted by even well intentioned people.
If you want to see the future government of China look more to HK and less to Beijing. While HK will integrate back into China, China will resemble it more than it will resemble China. Note also the new talks between Taiwan (or at least the GuoMinDang) and the CCP, very encouraging.
My further research into the *current* state of HK does indicate that it is still more autonomous than I thought. Servers located in HK may well be effectively ignored by the mainland government.
(with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers)
Hong Kong is part of China now. But s/Hong\ Kong/foreign/ and you'd have it.
Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censorship?
Stubborn remnants of the CCP old guard.
Who are the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the gentry class who used to be in power until the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Perhaps because there is such a cohesive span of recorded history in China, cyclic patterns are readily apparent.
If you want to talk serious censorship, the CCP is nothing. Check out the Chinese Dynasties, where power was held by a scholarly ruling class who wrote documents in a written language that was---by design---impossible for a "normal" citizen to read! Not because they couldn't understand the characters (although most were illiterate), but they could not understand the references. One or two characters could refer to pages of nuance from one of hundreds of Confucian texts that the scholars had memorized.
Corporations will buy this data and purchase very precise profiles of each of us, enabling them to efficiently shake even more money from our wallets using all sorts of psychological enticements that will be very hard to defend against.
What, like Jedi mind tricks? Good gravy man, show some willpower! Or is the lure of Shiny Thing, now with 200% more For You goodness too powerful?
Hell, if they are able to accurately model tons of consumers: awesome. Then they might give us what we want rather than try and push-sell a bunch of crap. If they offer me something I want, great for them and me. If I can afford it, then I'll buy it and we both win.
Oh no, corporations are tracking me, because I'm so important they must be doing some super voodoo-ninja-marketing attack. We are all already aggregated data points in dozens of corporate databases. If they are going to try and sell stuff, they might as well use accurate info.
Did the customer tracking of Minority Report scare you?
Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3?
Yes. Read the arstechnia article about OS X's new desktop rendering system. Then think about how much information is stored on the video card for that to work. Then think about how the current effects are just scratching the surface.
My 128 meg card can handle it now for most things, but when I turn on a whole bunch of real-time effects it does get bogged down because it is forced to swap with system memory.
On the other hand, such 'gods' are mocked in the Psalms and various narrative books (such as Judges and the Samuel-Kings-Chronicles block) as being idols, false, made of wood, clay, gold, etc.
Sometimes yes (Isaiah 37:19); but certainly not always. Yes, the worship of other Gods is denounced, but not their existence. The Christian God is continually praised as the God of gods, more powerful than all others.
Daniel 11:36
"The king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place.
1 Kings 2:23
Meanwhile, the officials of the king of Aram advised him, "Their gods are gods of the hills. That is why they were too strong for us. But if we fight them on the plains, surely we will be stronger than they.
2 Chronicles 28:23
He offered sacrifices to the gods of Damascus, who had defeated him; for he thought, "Since the gods of the kings of Aram have helped them, I will sacrifice to them so they will help me." But they were his downfall and the downfall of all Israel.
Psalm 86:8
Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord; no deeds can compare with yours.
Psalm 95:3
For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.
Psalm 96:4
For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods.
Psalm 97:9
For you, O LORD, are the Most High over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.
Psalm 135:5
I know that the LORD is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods.
Jeremiah 44:8
Why provoke me to anger with what your hands have made, burning incense to other gods in Egypt, where you have come to live? You will destroy yourselves and make yourselves an object of cursing and reproach among all the nations on earth.
But of course you implied Christianity, or at least good ol' Church going folk. The problem is, they are pretty unfamiliar with the foundations of their "faith" as well. True Christians wouldn't want to legislate morality because it puts the government in God's place; but all too often we have christians who cry out for this very thing.
I'm not disagreeing with your argument, your points are valid and important. Just trying to clarify that dispite what most think, when you sit down and read the Bible it describes a very different religion than what most christian people practice.
Paganism, worshipping idols, even the acceptance of the concept of multiple gods is really not something even more mainstream non-church going concerned parents would want for their kids.
Spoken like someone not familiar with the details of the Christian faith. Christianity does not deny the existence of other Gods, just the worship of them.
Frex:
Genesis 11:5-7
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
Exodus 18:11
11 Now I know that the LORD is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly."
After reading your review I thought you'd be interested to know that In Safari 2.0 the RSS feeds can be integreated with bookmarks. Just drag the feeds to a bookmarks directory and they are auto-updated with notification.
I have not understood why GWB's henchman are cutting these little ones
FUD. As poor a President that GW is, laying Voyager on his Resolute Desk isn't fair. NASA is trying to use the Voyager program as leverage to reduce their proposed budget cuts.
Essentially GW's budget includes a NASA funding cut. NASA says that if the budget goes through as it is, then it will be forced to cut funding to maintaining Voyager and other fun science projects.
As I see it, their hope is that those in Washington will balk at potentially losing a famous project from their generation.
I would be willing to bet that current day NASA engineers could not send up a spacecraft using the same technology the old engineers had.
And I would be willing to bet that those old engineers couldn't do it using current technology. It's not a question of advancement or loss, it's what you are used to using.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I don't own any Star Trek seasons. The Babylon 5 seasons hit my upper limit for rebuying tv shows (I already paid to watch them on cable) at ~$85.
Wow, way to get excessive. I guess by your .sig you'd be a man. :-)
Maybe you should try before you are so sure to dismiss. I was raised on a sugarless diet and am thankful for it.
As an aside, it served as a practical demonstration of skeptical thinking. Cereal boxes would have big advertisements and large font descriptions on the fronts of their boxes about how "healthy" they all were. We were taught to look at the nutritional information and learned how easily and prevalently advertisements lie.
You pay $110 dollars for one season of a show? Are you insane? Even if it was on DVD, with all the glorious extra DVD goodness, no show is worth $110 dollars!
I'd pay $20 bucks to be able to download a season of a television show I like with no DVD extras or anything. So where can I buy?
That means you have to make room for album art, booklet and the actual physical media
Or, taking an example from the purchase you just made, you could sell the cd. You generally make all of your money back. It's exactly like getting music for free!
you have to rip it yourself including all the problems some copy-protected CDs throw in your way
Like that's hard. Seriously. Have you ever not been able to rip a cd?
That the best Star Wars movie wasn't directed (or scripted) by Lucas. He laid out the story, others did the details. Best thing for him really.
Right, and that's a handy resource. But Safari doesn't only install widgets from that webpage...which is what a whitelist would be.
But much as I loathe the XBox and much as I prefer a more cerebral, more demanding gaming experience....
A little excessive there aren't you? Or have you only looked at highlight clips of games available for the XBox?
You are implying that the XBox doesn't currently deliver a more cerebral, more demanding game experience than Halo. That isn't the sum of the system, there are a ton of great games out there.
Halo is to FPS games what Final Fantasy 7 was to RPGs. A accessable, big success that provides the first taste of a gaming genre to the masses. Just because FF7 was on the Playstation didn't mean that all of its RPGs (or all of its games) were poorly written and shallow. The same holds true for the XBox.
If I can learn to love the XBox (raised on Infocom, Atari, Origin, Nintendo, Apogee, iD, and Lucasarts), anyone can. I didn't play it at all until late last year and have been quite impressive with what I've found. More and more my GC gathers dust (except for Resident Evil 4). My desktop hasn't been a game platform since Myst IV.
Plug for an awesome game: Play Psychonauts. Tim Schafer is the best creative genius in gaming today. If you haven't, play Grim Fandango on the PC (or ScummVM...someday?).
Your joke is one line too long.
Watch the Clone Wars cartoons for the best lightsaber duels and battle scenes. General Grevious vs. Obi-Wan one-on-one? Bah, gimme Grevious taking out a dozen Jedi at once. Or the awesome battle between elite battle droids in the high speed train station. Or Mace Windu taking out a capital attack ship (and thousands of battle droids) single handedly. Just watch his force-fu.
Awesome.
True. In another reply I noted that I was incorrect. HK is still essentially autonomous, and still only technically part of mainland China.
That shows the trouble of going outside of ones expertise.
Your impression is correct, but needs to be tempered. HK is not an independent state nor it is a part of China...entirely. It is a strange amalgamation of both. Essentially the Chinese government wants the money, but don't want to change their government too quickly. From the twentieth century they have more than a few examples of how quickly things can go bad when swift government changes are enacted by even well intentioned people.
If you want to see the future government of China look more to HK and less to Beijing. While HK will integrate back into China, China will resemble it more than it will resemble China. Note also the new talks between Taiwan (or at least the GuoMinDang) and the CCP, very encouraging.
My further research into the *current* state of HK does indicate that it is still more autonomous than I thought. Servers located in HK may well be effectively ignored by the mainland government.
(with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers)
Hong Kong is part of China now. But s/Hong\ Kong/foreign/ and you'd have it.
Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censorship?
Stubborn remnants of the CCP old guard.
Who are the grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the gentry class who used to be in power until the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Perhaps because there is such a cohesive span of recorded history in China, cyclic patterns are readily apparent.
If you want to talk serious censorship, the CCP is nothing. Check out the Chinese Dynasties, where power was held by a scholarly ruling class who wrote documents in a written language that was---by design---impossible for a "normal" citizen to read! Not because they couldn't understand the characters (although most were illiterate), but they could not understand the references. One or two characters could refer to pages of nuance from one of hundreds of Confucian texts that the scholars had memorized.
Yeah, it's Startropics Syndrome all over again. Beyond Good and Evil was a fantastic game.
One out now that is in danger of slipping through the cracks is Psychonauts, check it out.
Thinkgeek isn't the only store that sells them.
Corporations will buy this data and purchase very precise profiles of each of us, enabling them to efficiently shake even more money from our wallets using all sorts of psychological enticements that will be very hard to defend against.
What, like Jedi mind tricks? Good gravy man, show some willpower! Or is the lure of Shiny Thing, now with 200% more For You goodness too powerful?
Hell, if they are able to accurately model tons of consumers: awesome. Then they might give us what we want rather than try and push-sell a bunch of crap. If they offer me something I want, great for them and me. If I can afford it, then I'll buy it and we both win.
Oh no, corporations are tracking me, because I'm so important they must be doing some super voodoo-ninja-marketing attack. We are all already aggregated data points in dozens of corporate databases. If they are going to try and sell stuff, they might as well use accurate info.
Did the customer tracking of Minority Report scare you?
Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3?
Yes. Read the arstechnia article about OS X's new desktop rendering system. Then think about how much information is stored on the video card for that to work. Then think about how the current effects are just scratching the surface.
My 128 meg card can handle it now for most things, but when I turn on a whole bunch of real-time effects it does get bogged down because it is forced to swap with system memory.
On the other hand, such 'gods' are mocked in the Psalms and various narrative books (such as Judges and the Samuel-Kings-Chronicles block) as being idols, false, made of wood, clay, gold, etc.
Sometimes yes (Isaiah 37:19); but certainly not always. Yes, the worship of other Gods is denounced, but not their existence. The Christian God is continually praised as the God of gods, more powerful than all others.
Daniel 11:36
"The king will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things against the God of gods. He will be successful until the time of wrath is completed, for what has been determined must take place.
1 Kings 2:23
Meanwhile, the officials of the king of Aram advised him, "Their gods are gods of the hills. That is why they were too strong for us. But if we fight them on the plains, surely we will be stronger than they.
2 Chronicles 28:23
He offered sacrifices to the gods of Damascus, who had defeated him; for he thought, "Since the gods of the kings of Aram have helped them, I will sacrifice to them so they will help me." But they were his downfall and the downfall of all Israel.
Psalm 86:8
Among the gods there is none like you, O Lord; no deeds can compare with yours.
Psalm 95:3
For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods.
Psalm 96:4
For great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods.
Psalm 97:9
For you, O LORD, are the Most High over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.
Psalm 135:5
I know that the LORD is great, that our Lord is greater than all gods.
Jeremiah 44:8
Why provoke me to anger with what your hands have made, burning incense to other gods in Egypt, where you have come to live? You will destroy yourselves and make yourselves an object of cursing and reproach among all the nations on earth.
But of course you implied Christianity, or at least good ol' Church going folk. The problem is, they are pretty unfamiliar with the foundations of their "faith" as well. True Christians wouldn't want to legislate morality because it puts the government in God's place; but all too often we have christians who cry out for this very thing.
I'm not disagreeing with your argument, your points are valid and important. Just trying to clarify that dispite what most think, when you sit down and read the Bible it describes a very different religion than what most christian people practice.
The prize (as originally intended) is supposed to provide funding for dreamers to begin their exciting new research.
Paganism, worshipping idols, even the acceptance of the concept of multiple gods is really not something even more mainstream non-church going concerned parents would want for their kids.
Spoken like someone not familiar with the details of the Christian faith. Christianity does not deny the existence of other Gods, just the worship of them.
Frex:
Genesis 11:5-7
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
Exodus 18:11
11 Now I know that the LORD is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly."
And the big, Exodus 20:3
3 "You shall have no other gods before me.
After reading your review I thought you'd be interested to know that In Safari 2.0 the RSS feeds can be integreated with bookmarks. Just drag the feeds to a bookmarks directory and they are auto-updated with notification.
I have not understood why GWB's henchman are cutting these little ones
FUD. As poor a President that GW is, laying Voyager on his Resolute Desk isn't fair. NASA is trying to use the Voyager program as leverage to reduce their proposed budget cuts.
Essentially GW's budget includes a NASA funding cut. NASA says that if the budget goes through as it is, then it will be forced to cut funding to maintaining Voyager and other fun science projects.
As I see it, their hope is that those in Washington will balk at potentially losing a famous project from their generation.
Tigons are cooler, plus they have an awesome video game studio named after them.
I would be willing to bet that current day NASA engineers could not send up a spacecraft using the same technology the old engineers had.
And I would be willing to bet that those old engineers couldn't do it using current technology. It's not a question of advancement or loss, it's what you are used to using.