Emo Parker wasn't all that bothersome to me as it fit with the influence of Venom.
What ticked me off was his kiss with the girl on stage. Which he knew Mary Jane would witness. Before he is influenced by Venom at all. That kind of behaviour doesn't fit at all with his character development to that point. People do stupid things but that's a pretty monumental screwup in a section of his life that he'd likely be very sensitive to.
This should all be fairly obvious. Honestly when was the last time you saw a movie that had a twist or plot event that you hadn't already guessed was going to happen.
Not sure if what you said is meant in jest or not.
I have more confidence in a jury generally to come to a reasonable conclusion given what they are presented than a single Judge.
However there have been times when our justice system has failed us as a society, although it could be argued that we were failing as a society to uphold the justice system properly. The Jury nullification of civil rights laws is a prime example. Those were not truely a "jury of your peers" situations though.
That just shows that he was smart enough not to get caught committing a crime.
A judge should be able to jail someone and direct a prosecutor to file charges. Contempt of court should be a criminal charge that requires a jury conviction.
In this case the guy alledgedly committed perjury or fraud, maybe even both, but is held in contempt. If the prosecution can't prove it then he shouldn't be imprisoned.
What if you went to court and the judge demanded that you produce the secret moon rock presented to Mickey Mouse by Dirk Diggler the night of the Roswell "incident"? You obviously can't do what he asks, do you want to spend 14 years imprisoned until you do?
I wouldn't be suprised if a car's ECM and such didn't record the time of an accident by noting deployment of airbags and such. Someone else being in the car using the phone would be a good defense but it's also one that already exists in the system. If the wreck isn't too bad you can always claim that someone else was driving. And why wouldn't a prosecuting attorney know who was in a vehicle during an accident?
If you go to the TV museum in Ohio you really should take half a day and go visit COSI near downtown Columbus. I spent a lot of time at the old location when I was a kid and absolutely loved it. They moved to a new location a few years back and the wife and I went to check it out last time we were in the area. It might be a bit on the childish side as it is designed to interest children in the sciences and history. But even as an adult I found the exhibits interesting and entertaining.
Your description reminds me of a dog my family ahd when I was growing up. She was half Norwegian Elkhound and half mut. She was a very pretty dog and looked a lot like a German Sheperd in coloration and such.
Ours was much like the dogs pictured though she was mainly black with light brown and a little grey. Her tail was also not as tightly curled though I only ever saw it not raised when she was in absolute cower mode.
They didn't claim that the story line was incredibly complex or that their were was a remarkable depth and breadth of storytelling.
Diablo2 is still a fun challenging game that I've found has lots of replay value. Even with a Ladder Reset looming I'm having lots of fun trying out a build I never did before.
It's by no means a perfect game. Very limited inventory and stash space. A death penalty at the higher levels that can take a long long time to work off. Corpserunning naked to retrieve your body from a monster that already killed you once while you were fully equiped, and probably smacked you down before had time to react. The difficulty of the game can make dramatic jumps when whole packs of fast moving and or ranged monsters turn out to be completely immune to your primary attacks. No way to realocate a charactes skill or attribute points without using character editors, which only work in singleplayer mode anyways.
It'd be nice if someone could design a high quality MMO that didn't require a traditional healer at all. WoW could almost have done this but they followed the same path as EQ. They upped the difficulty on each progressive fight by making the enemies do more and more damage until you get to the point that a tank character needs focused healing to stay alive. And later other healers had to focus on healing everyone else constantly because AoE's became so prevelant.
Heck I remember a few grouping experiences in EQ simply because we couldn't find a healer. We focused on killing our target as fast as possible. Then our tank would strip off all his HP increasing gear and we would bandage him, we were exploiting how gear affected HP and how you couldn't bandage someone past half health. It wasn't a very fast group but it was better than nothing which was the only alternative.
The machine is merely a diagnostic tool. It does not by it's self reveal a lie. That'd be like accusing a gun of murder. The machine is as ever only as good as the person utilizing it.
On the subject of needing a sports car driver's license.
In my experience the sports cars I have owned have been safer and easier to drive than most sedans. Granted my experience is purely anecdotal and I've never had a powerful sports car.
I think that earning a drivers license should be a much more difficult or at least prolonged experience. Where a road test is augmented by defensive driving courses and the like. And possibly requiring retesting if you change your vehicle to one in a different category then you have previously tested.
No, it's like saying that a pilot that flies 10,000 hours in a year is probably more dangerous to ride with than one that does 100 hours a year.
It is no doubt possible that some people will cut back so extremely on their driving that their skills will completely erode. And the next time they take to the rode they will cause a huge pile up. And then the insurance companies will catch on and incorporate driving extremely few miles as a risk factor. Yes the system could be a total failure if all they did was rate people on the miles they drive. But that's not what will happen or what's being proposed. The plan is to use a persons mileage as another more direct factor in charging for their insurance.
A friend of my father's had a huge twelve passenger van that he only insured when he needed it. He'd get it insured for a few days at a time for big projects when he needed to haul stuff or take family vacations. Otherwise it sat in his barn and threatened nobody. This is essentially a micro level plan to do the same kind of thing.
It's a statistical thing. Just because you have not been in or caused any accidents where speeding was a factor does not mean that you aren't at higher risk of being in such an accident. It just means you haven't yet been in such an accident.
The insurance companies group and lump people together according to demographics and such. It isn't always fair or done scientifically. But it's done for one reason, profit. If they don't charge people enough then they can't cover their expenses. They try and find a median where they don't charge so much that they lose customers but they still want to maximize profits. If charging people like you as they do was really as undeserved as you seem to think then they'd lose customer share and start charging less, because people that fit your profile would leave for another insurance company.
You might argue though that the large companies effectively co-operate and fix the prices, to which I would suggest you see if you can't get insured through a company like USAA.
If I ever get a job again where I can carry a cell phone I'll probably get a pay as I go phone. When I had my phone I don't think I ever came within less than 200 minutes of my 500 minute allowance. If I want to talk to someone I'd much rather do it face to face or through written correspondence of some sort. The only times I can remember enjoying talking on the phone is when there were raging hormones involved.
Eh, I believe the estimated savings in pollution production were projected as a benefit of some people driving less. Those people they think would drive less because they would be more concious of their driving habits costing them more money and possibly cut back on the amount of driving they are doing. It's not that ludicrous of an idea.
We don't know how our individual insurance rates would be affected by going to this plan. It's entirely possible that many of us would end up paying less for insurance than we do now, you know living the sedintary life in our parents basement...
Seriously though if going to this plan saved me money on my insurance and I was confident that the data couldn't be used to infringe on my right to privacy I'd do it in a heart beat. The privacy implications are the only real flaw I see here.
Some posters have pointed out that some people could actually end up being more dangerous drives, through lack of practice, in a system like this one. The obvious response to that is that the insurance companies would probably catch on rather quickly and find the median values in a wide variety of brackets and charge accordingly. They already seem to be fairly adept at this except in the cases where they don't lower rates because it would cut into the more profitable parts of their business.
I have to disagree with your closing statement. Polygraph examiners with a good deal of experience have shown that they can judge when someone is lying and are very hard to fool by non-psychopaths.
Granted that skill is useless for the pursuit of justice if the person being tested is not questioned in great detail to ensure that the lies are pinpointed. That would throw out any kind of subjective question except to possibly find a direction to dig.
This method may not be a good way to do it as illustrated by the Mythbusters show. Simply thinking about other things was enough to throw off the results by clouding the detection mechanisms. This is probably actually more of a problem with the instument being too sensitive and not knowing where to focus precisely enough to filter out irrelevant activity.
Saying that we will never be able to do any of this better than we do now is a bit like saying that man will never fly.
Most people on/. probably feel that copyright should not extend long enough for Tolkien's heirs to still be expecting money from their fathers books.
And most people on/. probably also find the business practices like the infamous Hollywood Accounting techniques to be despicable and essentially outright fraud.
Personally I'd like to see them all DIAF right after producing the movie for me to watch.
The answer is to make the punishment in no way mistakable for positive attention. The cats in my house know when I am not playing and vanish in short order when they are in trouble. They'll get squirted a few times for something they aren't supposed to do. If that doesn't work they get a thurough soaking with the garden hose. I suppose if either of our cats liked being wet this wouldn't work.
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Emo Parker wasn't all that bothersome to me as it fit with the influence of Venom.
What ticked me off was his kiss with the girl on stage. Which he knew Mary Jane would witness. Before he is influenced by Venom at all. That kind of behaviour doesn't fit at all with his character development to that point. People do stupid things but that's a pretty monumental screwup in a section of his life that he'd likely be very sensitive to.
This should all be fairly obvious. Honestly when was the last time you saw a movie that had a twist or plot event that you hadn't already guessed was going to happen.
Civil what?
Maybe you were aiming for a Funny mod.
Not sure if what you said is meant in jest or not.
I have more confidence in a jury generally to come to a reasonable conclusion given what they are presented than a single Judge.
However there have been times when our justice system has failed us as a society, although it could be argued that we were failing as a society to uphold the justice system properly. The Jury nullification of civil rights laws is a prime example. Those were not truely a "jury of your peers" situations though.
That just shows that he was smart enough not to get caught committing a crime.
A judge should be able to jail someone and direct a prosecutor to file charges. Contempt of court should be a criminal charge that requires a jury conviction.
In this case the guy alledgedly committed perjury or fraud, maybe even both, but is held in contempt. If the prosecution can't prove it then he shouldn't be imprisoned.
What if you went to court and the judge demanded that you produce the secret moon rock presented to Mickey Mouse by Dirk Diggler the night of the Roswell "incident"? You obviously can't do what he asks, do you want to spend 14 years imprisoned until you do?
I wouldn't be suprised if a car's ECM and such didn't record the time of an accident by noting deployment of airbags and such. Someone else being in the car using the phone would be a good defense but it's also one that already exists in the system. If the wreck isn't too bad you can always claim that someone else was driving. And why wouldn't a prosecuting attorney know who was in a vehicle during an accident?
If you go to the TV museum in Ohio you really should take half a day and go visit COSI near downtown Columbus. I spent a lot of time at the old location when I was a kid and absolutely loved it. They moved to a new location a few years back and the wife and I went to check it out last time we were in the area. It might be a bit on the childish side as it is designed to interest children in the sciences and history. But even as an adult I found the exhibits interesting and entertaining.
Your description reminds me of a dog my family ahd when I was growing up. She was half Norwegian Elkhound and half mut. She was a very pretty dog and looked a lot like a German Sheperd in coloration and such.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_elkhound
Ours was much like the dogs pictured though she was mainly black with light brown and a little grey. Her tail was also not as tightly curled though I only ever saw it not raised when she was in absolute cower mode.
They didn't claim that the story line was incredibly complex or that their were was a remarkable depth and breadth of storytelling.
Diablo2 is still a fun challenging game that I've found has lots of replay value. Even with a Ladder Reset looming I'm having lots of fun trying out a build I never did before.
It's by no means a perfect game. Very limited inventory and stash space. A death penalty at the higher levels that can take a long long time to work off. Corpserunning naked to retrieve your body from a monster that already killed you once while you were fully equiped, and probably smacked you down before had time to react. The difficulty of the game can make dramatic jumps when whole packs of fast moving and or ranged monsters turn out to be completely immune to your primary attacks. No way to realocate a charactes skill or attribute points without using character editors, which only work in singleplayer mode anyways.
It'd be nice if someone could design a high quality MMO that didn't require a traditional healer at all. WoW could almost have done this but they followed the same path as EQ. They upped the difficulty on each progressive fight by making the enemies do more and more damage until you get to the point that a tank character needs focused healing to stay alive. And later other healers had to focus on healing everyone else constantly because AoE's became so prevelant.
Heck I remember a few grouping experiences in EQ simply because we couldn't find a healer. We focused on killing our target as fast as possible. Then our tank would strip off all his HP increasing gear and we would bandage him, we were exploiting how gear affected HP and how you couldn't bandage someone past half health. It wasn't a very fast group but it was better than nothing which was the only alternative.
The machine is merely a diagnostic tool. It does not by it's self reveal a lie. That'd be like accusing a gun of murder. The machine is as ever only as good as the person utilizing it.
On the subject of needing a sports car driver's license.
In my experience the sports cars I have owned have been safer and easier to drive than most sedans. Granted my experience is purely anecdotal and I've never had a powerful sports car.
I think that earning a drivers license should be a much more difficult or at least prolonged experience. Where a road test is augmented by defensive driving courses and the like. And possibly requiring retesting if you change your vehicle to one in a different category then you have previously tested.
No, it's like saying that a pilot that flies 10,000 hours in a year is probably more dangerous to ride with than one that does 100 hours a year.
It is no doubt possible that some people will cut back so extremely on their driving that their skills will completely erode. And the next time they take to the rode they will cause a huge pile up. And then the insurance companies will catch on and incorporate driving extremely few miles as a risk factor. Yes the system could be a total failure if all they did was rate people on the miles they drive. But that's not what will happen or what's being proposed. The plan is to use a persons mileage as another more direct factor in charging for their insurance.
A friend of my father's had a huge twelve passenger van that he only insured when he needed it. He'd get it insured for a few days at a time for big projects when he needed to haul stuff or take family vacations. Otherwise it sat in his barn and threatened nobody. This is essentially a micro level plan to do the same kind of thing.
It's a statistical thing. Just because you have not been in or caused any accidents where speeding was a factor does not mean that you aren't at higher risk of being in such an accident. It just means you haven't yet been in such an accident.
The insurance companies group and lump people together according to demographics and such. It isn't always fair or done scientifically. But it's done for one reason, profit. If they don't charge people enough then they can't cover their expenses. They try and find a median where they don't charge so much that they lose customers but they still want to maximize profits. If charging people like you as they do was really as undeserved as you seem to think then they'd lose customer share and start charging less, because people that fit your profile would leave for another insurance company.
You might argue though that the large companies effectively co-operate and fix the prices, to which I would suggest you see if you can't get insured through a company like USAA.
If I ever get a job again where I can carry a cell phone I'll probably get a pay as I go phone. When I had my phone I don't think I ever came within less than 200 minutes of my 500 minute allowance. If I want to talk to someone I'd much rather do it face to face or through written correspondence of some sort. The only times I can remember enjoying talking on the phone is when there were raging hormones involved.
Eh, I believe the estimated savings in pollution production were projected as a benefit of some people driving less. Those people they think would drive less because they would be more concious of their driving habits costing them more money and possibly cut back on the amount of driving they are doing. It's not that ludicrous of an idea.
We don't know how our individual insurance rates would be affected by going to this plan. It's entirely possible that many of us would end up paying less for insurance than we do now, you know living the sedintary life in our parents basement...
Seriously though if going to this plan saved me money on my insurance and I was confident that the data couldn't be used to infringe on my right to privacy I'd do it in a heart beat. The privacy implications are the only real flaw I see here.
Some posters have pointed out that some people could actually end up being more dangerous drives, through lack of practice, in a system like this one. The obvious response to that is that the insurance companies would probably catch on rather quickly and find the median values in a wide variety of brackets and charge accordingly. They already seem to be fairly adept at this except in the cases where they don't lower rates because it would cut into the more profitable parts of their business.
I have to disagree with your closing statement. Polygraph examiners with a good deal of experience have shown that they can judge when someone is lying and are very hard to fool by non-psychopaths.
Granted that skill is useless for the pursuit of justice if the person being tested is not questioned in great detail to ensure that the lies are pinpointed. That would throw out any kind of subjective question except to possibly find a direction to dig.
This method may not be a good way to do it as illustrated by the Mythbusters show. Simply thinking about other things was enough to throw off the results by clouding the detection mechanisms. This is probably actually more of a problem with the instument being too sensitive and not knowing where to focus precisely enough to filter out irrelevant activity.
Saying that we will never be able to do any of this better than we do now is a bit like saying that man will never fly.
I love how the parent comment is modded Insightful rather than Funny, although maybe the modding is also supposed to be a joke.
Good movie?!?!?!?!
I loved that movie! I still get a chuckle just thinking about his line after having sex with his boss.
Miranda: Ummm that was incredible. Was it good for you?
Fletcher: I've had better.
This is a fight between a bunch of chuckle heads.
Most people on /. probably feel that copyright should not extend long enough for Tolkien's heirs to still be expecting money from their fathers books.
And most people on /. probably also find the business practices like the infamous Hollywood Accounting techniques to be despicable and essentially outright fraud.
Personally I'd like to see them all DIAF right after producing the movie for me to watch.
That depends. Are the crabs wearing loafers?
To which my response is always a strong shove away. I am no cat's property or territory.
True for overly broad definitions of "we" and "us" I'd much rather BBQ the furballs in my house than let them freeload.
Cute? Maybe. Delicious? I hope to find out some day.
The answer is to make the punishment in no way mistakable for positive attention. The cats in my house know when I am not playing and vanish in short order when they are in trouble. They'll get squirted a few times for something they aren't supposed to do. If that doesn't work they get a thurough soaking with the garden hose. I suppose if either of our cats liked being wet this wouldn't work.