Five years is ancient history? What grade are you in, son? IBM started business in 1885. THAT'S ancient history. Thinking like yous is what's wrong with business and politics today -- nobody thinks long-term.
I'm gonna say here what I said in the focus group for Episode 1, back when I was hired, more or less, to give George Lucas a true fan's feedback before his film would be sent off to post-production. What we need is more Jar Jar! He's seriously crazy! Ha ha ha! I mean... when I watch him, I'm just laughing. Great movie. Great character in a great movie!
You apparently have it backward, Mr. Troll. Perhaps if you left your bridge more often, people would treat you better, listen to your stupid ideas, and pretend to consider your twisted sense of logic.
It's give and take. Big money would rather RISK big money than take safe bets. It's easier to get a $10 million producer in Hollywood than a $1 million, because if you manage to double what they've given you, (as your loan suggests the size and expectations of your project) then they'd prefer making $10 million profit than making $1 million profit. If you're working with 10 guys in a garage hammering out a game, and you expect to sell 100,000 copies at $20 and spend $1,000,000 on wages/expenses, then your project made $1 million! Sweet! Who cares if 1 million copies have been distributed online? No one ELSE is making retail money off those, so why be greedy? Yes, if everyone paid, then you'd have $20 million, but you made twice what you needed for the project, so the project can be declared a "success" if you can swallow your stupidity.
Now, with corporations, this doesn't sit as well. They can't afford to swallow their stupidity. They have sociopathic stockholder meetings, summits, enormous payrolls, and expectations. They can afford to blow $50 million on a game just to see if they can make a franchise stick -- and it will show in most games. The current Call of Duty franchise has amazing production values. God of War III looks incredible. The problem is: these kinds of games will no longer be made for PC because corporations are selfish by design, and cannot allow people to have fun without paying -- and people will have fun without paying if it comes out on PC. Any exceptions will eventually be taken care of. For example, WoW has an enormous bankroll, and few private servers let people play for free. Expect WoW to drastically change in the next few years. In the mind of a sociopathic CEO: If something is making money, it could be making MORE money!
The article offers lots of information to begin making guesses, such as the twins data. There are also medical underpinnings to the hypothesis - if smoking can cause enough blood-related problems to cause impotency and lowered sperm count, then it also has the potential to affect the brain in a negative way. The study is being treated well -- it's not claiming any cause/effects, but it's showing researchers where they can begin testing for cause/effects.
1. What's your favorite hobby?
a. Watching TV with my family
b. Curling up with a good book
c. Twirling my moustache while laughing
2. If you were to volunteer at an orphanage, what would you feed the orphans?
a. I would feed them candy
b. I would feed them something healthy
c. I would feed them to alligators
3. Describe your romantic relationship
a. I just met a girl who has learned to trust and rely on me
b. I went home and became a family man
c. Banging a whore, you know... what's her name?
d. No relationships, but c sounds pretty good.
4. Describe your family relationship
a. My parents adored us, if only my brother would understand!
b. My parents only loved my goodie-two-shoes brother! I will show them all someday that fear is more important than love! Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!
If you want to deny global climate change, you must either deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (laughably easy to disprove you there)
Then disprove it. Run an experiment where the PROVEN greenhouse gases (such as methane) are excluded. If you want to claim it's heating up the earth, the burden of proof lies with you. Why don't you go ahead and prove yourself right?
You ignore option #3: That you cannot claim scientific validity when your predictive models are incorrect. You cannot say "Carbon levels increasing will warm up the earth. Carbon levels increased today, so if the earth warms up tomorrow, that will prove it!" as that is not even a proper prediction. You're selling me a tiger-repelling rock with that logic. (If no tigers show up tomorrow, this rock must TRULY repel tigers!)
No, global warming believers have yet to show a proper scientific HYPOTHESIS that isn't shut down by reality within a year. They cannot take a failed model, rejigger it, and say that it's now correct. They must make a proper prediction with the model, and that prediction must pass. Their charts only show the opposite of what they say (that carbon levels increase as temperature increases, not the other way around) -- and has been observed, that increasing temperatures cause CO2 to be released in greater quantities from our biosphere.
Call me a dumbass or denier all you want. I know a lack of scientific rigour when I see it. No accurate prediction, no science.
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
Believers have not followed the scientific route. They've outright contradicted it. Their models said "toads" and then there were no toads. They cannot claim "Well, climate change has made weather so unpredictable that can't even predict whether or not there will even be toadstorms!" Their models are false and they continue to extrapolate them because they are liars. They need to change their models, predict weather accurately, and start telling people what they've learned.
If speed increases your mass by compressing "time" (relatively) then time can be considered a 4th dimension.
Gravity is affected in 3 dimensions. If there was a 4th spatial dimension, the fact gravity isn't affected by it (yet IS affected by the twin paradox of relativity) then a 4th spatial dimension (that isn't time) would have a lot of explaining to do.
This doesn't disprove a 4th spatial dimension. We know that human understanding of gravity is basic and flawed, and the law of relativity may be limited in scope. It does suggest that if there is another spatial dimension, time would be the 4th dimension, and the 4th spatial dimension would have to be calculated as the 5th to fit in with ANY of our current physics.
His case is an interesting one in the Nature vs. Nurture argument. He showed that, by nature, inner city hispanic kids were just as capable at advanced studies as anyone else -- it simply required a mixture of blasting the old nurture ("You'll never be good enough to be something like an engineer, so why don't you just open a restaurant, work construction, or run a shop?") with discipline, attention, expectation, and teaching.
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
It's not a healthy thing to champion or force other people to follow. It's an embarrassment to reason. Until we KNOW what we're getting into with climate change, we can continue to focus research on it, but our EFFORTS should be focused on what we ARE damaging in full conscience. For example: come up with a better way to get fresh water to our cities, and clean it up before sending it back to the environment! We're still children with shotguns when it comes to the Earth's climate.
This is a selfish view of the war, and ignorant. It was also fought to free the oppressed from Saddam Hussein besides to just provide our own starving nation with resources (oil). Perhaps you don't have any Kurdish friends from Iraq, but I did, at the time. They had family in Baghdad when the bombs were dropping, and were saying that "My family is less scared of the bombs than they are of the bombs stopping before Saddam is out of power, for good." You know why I can say the war wasn't just fought for oil? Because France, Germany, and Russia were the major forces opposing the war. It turned out that those three countries were all buying oil from Saddam Hussein because they were turning a blind eye to the massacres he was committing. We could always buy cheap oil from Iraq -- instead, we went the very, very expensive way. Perhaps there are congressmen, generals, and presidents who simply want to satiate their lust for blood, but they only get their way when driving herds of the moral majority.
- War for revenge: Afghanistan
An aggressive state that was actively attacking our own (or at least facilitating the forces that were attacking us)? Perhaps you've been through airport detectors long enough to know that there is no such thing as a strong defense, in this case -- besides a good offense. Take the attackers off your property by forcing them to fight on theirs. The War in Afghanistan is to keep the war in Afghanistan and out of the United States. In that regard, it's worked very well for the past 9 years.
- War for money/resources: Pick your local conflict in Africa
These are fought for land, women, money (taking what you NEED) and to keep the other tribes from coming to kill YOU when You are not ready (everyone who is not like you is dead). Is self-preservation against mindless, heartless killers not morally justified? Is taking resources from an enemy to feed your starving family not noble? You can (and should) disagree with their ways, means, methods, and violence -- but try to understand them or you'll end up fueling a war yourself.
Save the people from communist enslavement, and preventing the red spread from creating a hostile hemisphere to our own. This falls quite nicely into the "Creating a more peaceful world for our grandchildren" category. Was your history class taught by Jane Fonda?
Aha! This is a trick question. You ask an objective question, pretending it might be subjective, and when someone gives a subjective answer (even if the answer would be agreed upon by 99% of the world) you will get to play devil's advocate and claim the answer is subjective. The end result: a damaged definition of "moral" and a smug slashdot poster.
If that's NOT your aim, and your question is a serious one, then I submit that it's harder to name a war that ISN'T fought for a moral cause. Whether you're providing freedom for the oppressed, resources for your starving people, or a more peaceful planet for our grandchildren -- there are few wars fought for war's sake. The morals may be egocentric, delusional, misguided, or just contrary to your own, but they are the fuel for the engine that keeps a war running.
As an exercise for your philosophical side, generalize the motives to the point that all wars are fought for a more perfect peace, and you quickly realize the unfortunate flipside: For most humans, Peace can only truly defined as a combination of "everyone who is not like me is dead" and "everyone gives me what I need before taking what they need"
Yes, wars are fought for Peace, and therefore wars are moral. It's just not the Peace that everyone else wants. That's what makes it a war, and that's what makes it immoral.
Gamestop did not design the packaging.
The packaging almost ALWAYS refers to the original purchaser or "1 time use"
Gamestop clearly marks the game as "Used"
Gamestop ALSO offers the option of returning the game, without stipulation (the clerk might ask out of interest why you returned it, but otherwise, no questions asked) -- in case you were suddenly upset because you STILL didn't understand you weren't getting the 1-time use token.
Gamestop is not the problem here. The problem is a mindless purchase, nothing done by the consumer to rectify their mindlessness, and a publisher who pulled a scam to revoke the consumer's first sale rights, and a man-in-the-middle powerful enough to be a target.
It's not going to work. Gamestop is rich enough to have lawyers that will squash this little unification of idiots. I have no love for Gamestop, but I downright hate litigous morons. This "I'll sue everyone because I'm almost too stupid to breathe!" attitude SHOULD be stomped on, even if it is stomped on by an "Evil Inc."
It's very accurate for all sorts of subjects.[citation needed] Look at the article about the Israel-Palestine conflict or articles about many [weasel words] political figures. It sucks how these things never reach an equilibrium where both sides of a debate or opposing views are presented.
Its only gotten worse as Chavez has gotten... umm... how to put it nicely... battier? Its a shame, he was a cool leader when he began; and had a number of revolutionary ideas
The same has been said about Mugabe.
I suppose it's as Buddha said: you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Slashdot Mirror
Five years is ancient history? What grade are you in, son? IBM started business in 1885. THAT'S ancient history. Thinking like yous is what's wrong with business and politics today -- nobody thinks long-term.
By 5 years, most IBM execs have been eaten by the lion.
I'm gonna say here what I said in the focus group for Episode 1, back when I was hired, more or less, to give George Lucas a true fan's feedback before his film would be sent off to post-production. What we need is more Jar Jar! He's seriously crazy! Ha ha ha! I mean... when I watch him, I'm just laughing. Great movie. Great character in a great movie!
You apparently have it backward, Mr. Troll. Perhaps if you left your bridge more often, people would treat you better, listen to your stupid ideas, and pretend to consider your twisted sense of logic.
It's give and take. Big money would rather RISK big money than take safe bets. It's easier to get a $10 million producer in Hollywood than a $1 million, because if you manage to double what they've given you, (as your loan suggests the size and expectations of your project) then they'd prefer making $10 million profit than making $1 million profit. If you're working with 10 guys in a garage hammering out a game, and you expect to sell 100,000 copies at $20 and spend $1,000,000 on wages/expenses, then your project made $1 million! Sweet! Who cares if 1 million copies have been distributed online? No one ELSE is making retail money off those, so why be greedy? Yes, if everyone paid, then you'd have $20 million, but you made twice what you needed for the project, so the project can be declared a "success" if you can swallow your stupidity.
Now, with corporations, this doesn't sit as well. They can't afford to swallow their stupidity. They have sociopathic stockholder meetings, summits, enormous payrolls, and expectations. They can afford to blow $50 million on a game just to see if they can make a franchise stick -- and it will show in most games. The current Call of Duty franchise has amazing production values. God of War III looks incredible. The problem is: these kinds of games will no longer be made for PC because corporations are selfish by design, and cannot allow people to have fun without paying -- and people will have fun without paying if it comes out on PC. Any exceptions will eventually be taken care of. For example, WoW has an enormous bankroll, and few private servers let people play for free. Expect WoW to drastically change in the next few years. In the mind of a sociopathic CEO: If something is making money, it could be making MORE money!
I know I'd feel better about job training if it felt more like killing zombies.
Sadly, job training is about CREATING zombies, not about killing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging
The article offers lots of information to begin making guesses, such as the twins data. There are also medical underpinnings to the hypothesis - if smoking can cause enough blood-related problems to cause impotency and lowered sperm count, then it also has the potential to affect the brain in a negative way. The study is being treated well -- it's not claiming any cause/effects, but it's showing researchers where they can begin testing for cause/effects.
Easier than that. Just give them a short test:
1. What's your favorite hobby?
a. Watching TV with my family
b. Curling up with a good book
c. Twirling my moustache while laughing
2. If you were to volunteer at an orphanage, what would you feed the orphans?
a. I would feed them candy
b. I would feed them something healthy
c. I would feed them to alligators
3. Describe your romantic relationship
a. I just met a girl who has learned to trust and rely on me
b. I went home and became a family man
c. Banging a whore, you know... what's her name?
d. No relationships, but c sounds pretty good.
4. Describe your family relationship
a. My parents adored us, if only my brother would understand!
b. My parents only loved my goodie-two-shoes brother! I will show them all someday that fear is more important than love! Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!
It would have predicted that Snakes on a Plane would have been the highets grossing movie ever.
If you want to deny global climate change, you must either deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (laughably easy to disprove you there)
Then disprove it. Run an experiment where the PROVEN greenhouse gases (such as methane) are excluded. If you want to claim it's heating up the earth, the burden of proof lies with you. Why don't you go ahead and prove yourself right?
You ignore option #3: That you cannot claim scientific validity when your predictive models are incorrect. You cannot say "Carbon levels increasing will warm up the earth. Carbon levels increased today, so if the earth warms up tomorrow, that will prove it!" as that is not even a proper prediction. You're selling me a tiger-repelling rock with that logic. (If no tigers show up tomorrow, this rock must TRULY repel tigers!)
No, global warming believers have yet to show a proper scientific HYPOTHESIS that isn't shut down by reality within a year. They cannot take a failed model, rejigger it, and say that it's now correct. They must make a proper prediction with the model, and that prediction must pass. Their charts only show the opposite of what they say (that carbon levels increase as temperature increases, not the other way around) -- and has been observed, that increasing temperatures cause CO2 to be released in greater quantities from our biosphere.
Call me a dumbass or denier all you want. I know a lack of scientific rigour when I see it. No accurate prediction, no science.
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
Believers have not followed the scientific route. They've outright contradicted it. Their models said "toads" and then there were no toads. They cannot claim "Well, climate change has made weather so unpredictable that can't even predict whether or not there will even be toadstorms!" Their models are false and they continue to extrapolate them because they are liars. They need to change their models, predict weather accurately, and start telling people what they've learned.
Relativity and Gravity disagree.
If speed increases your mass by compressing "time" (relatively) then time can be considered a 4th dimension.
Gravity is affected in 3 dimensions. If there was a 4th spatial dimension, the fact gravity isn't affected by it (yet IS affected by the twin paradox of relativity) then a 4th spatial dimension (that isn't time) would have a lot of explaining to do.
This doesn't disprove a 4th spatial dimension. We know that human understanding of gravity is basic and flawed, and the law of relativity may be limited in scope. It does suggest that if there is another spatial dimension, time would be the 4th dimension, and the 4th spatial dimension would have to be calculated as the 5th to fit in with ANY of our current physics.
His case is an interesting one in the Nature vs. Nurture argument. He showed that, by nature, inner city hispanic kids were just as capable at advanced studies as anyone else -- it simply required a mixture of blasting the old nurture ("You'll never be good enough to be something like an engineer, so why don't you just open a restaurant, work construction, or run a shop?") with discipline, attention, expectation, and teaching.
If I told you tomorrow that it would rain toads. Such a fierce toadstorm, you would WISH that water was coming down on you... and then tomorrow, there is nothing but sunshine -- hardly a cloud in the sky -- and I told you that my predictive model was right! It may not have been toads, but it was NOT water that was precipitated, rather sunshine! (just as I predicted) and I've got city, state, and federal governments all lobbying to force a "toad tax" and "toad insurance" upon all their citizens, every science book in the world claiming that it will rain toads on us all, and my book "Toads: The True Threat of Technology!" nets me a nobel peace prize -- would I be following the scientific method? Where did it go wrong?
Why is it so important that my model predicted an incorrect weather pattern if my model was designed to predict a weather pattern? Does "the complete opposite of what happened" count as undeniable proof in scientific predictions nowadays?
If Human-caused climate change was a 2nd grade science project, it would get an F for its results. "Predicted major hurricane season. Weakest hurricane season in decades. Perhaps my model was incorrect, but ALL the assumptions it was based on are correct! Haters gonna hate."
It's not a healthy thing to champion or force other people to follow. It's an embarrassment to reason. Until we KNOW what we're getting into with climate change, we can continue to focus research on it, but our EFFORTS should be focused on what we ARE damaging in full conscience. For example: come up with a better way to get fresh water to our cities, and clean it up before sending it back to the environment! We're still children with shotguns when it comes to the Earth's climate.
That list is considered morally wrong by SOME people under SOME belief systems
Or, as the study suggests, people with fully-functional brains.
War for oil: Iraq
This is a selfish view of the war, and ignorant. It was also fought to free the oppressed from Saddam Hussein besides to just provide our own starving nation with resources (oil). Perhaps you don't have any Kurdish friends from Iraq, but I did, at the time. They had family in Baghdad when the bombs were dropping, and were saying that "My family is less scared of the bombs than they are of the bombs stopping before Saddam is out of power, for good." You know why I can say the war wasn't just fought for oil? Because France, Germany, and Russia were the major forces opposing the war. It turned out that those three countries were all buying oil from Saddam Hussein because they were turning a blind eye to the massacres he was committing. We could always buy cheap oil from Iraq -- instead, we went the very, very expensive way. Perhaps there are congressmen, generals, and presidents who simply want to satiate their lust for blood, but they only get their way when driving herds of the moral majority.
- War for revenge: Afghanistan
An aggressive state that was actively attacking our own (or at least facilitating the forces that were attacking us)? Perhaps you've been through airport detectors long enough to know that there is no such thing as a strong defense, in this case -- besides a good offense. Take the attackers off your property by forcing them to fight on theirs. The War in Afghanistan is to keep the war in Afghanistan and out of the United States. In that regard, it's worked very well for the past 9 years.
- War for money/resources: Pick your local conflict in Africa
These are fought for land, women, money (taking what you NEED) and to keep the other tribes from coming to kill YOU when You are not ready (everyone who is not like you is dead). Is self-preservation against mindless, heartless killers not morally justified? Is taking resources from an enemy to feed your starving family not noble? You can (and should) disagree with their ways, means, methods, and violence -- but try to understand them or you'll end up fueling a war yourself.
What about Vietnam?
Save the people from communist enslavement, and preventing the red spread from creating a hostile hemisphere to our own. This falls quite nicely into the "Creating a more peaceful world for our grandchildren" category. Was your history class taught by Jane Fonda?
Can you point one out? A moral war that is.
Aha! This is a trick question. You ask an objective question, pretending it might be subjective, and when someone gives a subjective answer (even if the answer would be agreed upon by 99% of the world) you will get to play devil's advocate and claim the answer is subjective. The end result: a damaged definition of "moral" and a smug slashdot poster.
If that's NOT your aim, and your question is a serious one, then I submit that it's harder to name a war that ISN'T fought for a moral cause. Whether you're providing freedom for the oppressed, resources for your starving people, or a more peaceful planet for our grandchildren -- there are few wars fought for war's sake. The morals may be egocentric, delusional, misguided, or just contrary to your own, but they are the fuel for the engine that keeps a war running.
As an exercise for your philosophical side, generalize the motives to the point that all wars are fought for a more perfect peace, and you quickly realize the unfortunate flipside: For most humans, Peace can only truly defined as a combination of "everyone who is not like me is dead" and "everyone gives me what I need before taking what they need"
Yes, wars are fought for Peace, and therefore wars are moral. It's just not the Peace that everyone else wants. That's what makes it a war, and that's what makes it immoral.
You can't win an election with just the geeks
You can if the votes are tallied by Diebold machines.
There's a reduntard mod on the loose today. I got marked "Redundant" when I answered a question someone asked about my post.
Gamestop did not design the packaging.
The packaging almost ALWAYS refers to the original purchaser or "1 time use"
Gamestop clearly marks the game as "Used"
Gamestop ALSO offers the option of returning the game, without stipulation (the clerk might ask out of interest why you returned it, but otherwise, no questions asked) -- in case you were suddenly upset because you STILL didn't understand you weren't getting the 1-time use token.
Gamestop is not the problem here. The problem is a mindless purchase, nothing done by the consumer to rectify their mindlessness, and a publisher who pulled a scam to revoke the consumer's first sale rights, and a man-in-the-middle powerful enough to be a target.
Copying a lot of data from an infected drive onto a clean drive is typically considered a bad idea.
It's not going to work. Gamestop is rich enough to have lawyers that will squash this little unification of idiots. I have no love for Gamestop, but I downright hate litigous morons. This "I'll sue everyone because I'm almost too stupid to breathe!" attitude SHOULD be stomped on, even if it is stomped on by an "Evil Inc."
It's very accurate for all sorts of subjects.[citation needed] Look at the article about the Israel-Palestine conflict or articles about many [weasel words] political figures. It sucks how these things never reach an equilibrium where both sides of a debate or opposing views are presented.
Fixed that for you.
Its only gotten worse as Chavez has gotten... umm... how to put it nicely... battier? Its a shame, he was a cool leader when he began; and had a number of revolutionary ideas
The same has been said about Mugabe.
I suppose it's as Buddha said: you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.