I just hope that the seats they have in these easy cinemas are more comfortable than the seats in EastJet planes. If you've ever flow EasyJet you'll know that they have the most horribly uncomfortable seats. So much so I'll not fly them again. Also to fly easyjet you have to get both a train and a bus from central london all the way out to luton - adds a heap to the ticket price. then there is no allocated seating so you just have to scramble for a seat, with entry order based on the order you arrive at the airport and check in. they often delay and cancel flights at the very last minute because there are not enough seats filled. imagine this with cinema - you turn up but they don't start the show until the seats are 90% sold. so an 8:30 screening will almost always start at 9:30 or later. in the meantime you'll be watching ads. and sure they won't sell popcorn but bet your sweet ass there will be soft drink vending machines at £2 per can - or £2.50 for a bottle of water.
nah sorry i'm all for cheaper ticket prices - but hell, go to the prince charles cinema in soho if you want cheap prices. most films there are only £2 per screening, and you can buy tickets at the box office - no need to go out and buy a printer just so you can print out your internet issued bar code.
bollocks to that.
also, i am in bulgaria right now and paid a grand BLV5 (= approx £1.80) to see the matrix reloaded, in english with bulgarian subtitles, in a pretty decent cinema. in the UK the cinemas in leicester square charge around £10 = £12 per ticket last time i looked, and you have been able to buy them online too for years. only you don't have to print out a stupid bar code, you just turn up, stick your credit card in the slot and it spits out your tickets. incidentally this is how BAs online flight tickets work and it rocks. you buy your tickets online and just turn up to the airport, stick your card in the slot and use the touch screen to choose your seats, answer the basic security questions and it spits out your boarding passes. then you just hand over your bags at a special desk reserved for e-ticket holders and bingo you are off. takes less than 5 minutes usually.
all easycinema will do it force real cinemas to cut costs and that's a good thing for consumers. but only kids or the homeless would put up with their special brand of easyservice. on given this willl be a staff-free cinema i expect the kids and the homeless will get on just fine - trading glue and drugs for wood alcohol</opinion>
I'd like to see analagous technology applied to firearms as well. If a gun had a black box that recorded biometrics of the user, gps location and direction, time, and a small digital photo of the intended target we'd see a hell of a lot more responsible use of guns. sure it would add to the cost of a gun, but not by that much.
I say anything that you can misuse to kill someone should have such data recording abilities.
How is the GPS data getting to the car rental comnpany exactly? Are you suggesting the the car is either a) transmitting that GPS data back to avis, or b) the avis guys have a black-box fitted to the car that has been storing your entire time-and-motion log, in addition to the above mentioned black-box? somehow that strikes me as paranoid fantasy. i can assure you I have hired many dozens of cars over the last few years and sped in almost all of them at some stage, and have never been hassled by the car hire company for it. Ditto for the cops, how are they supposed to be getting this GPS data from your car? GPS on its own does not involve any transmission of your location.
having just finished the trilogy - "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman if you want the actual title - i can safely say no, none of the characters had a penguin as a daemon. Notwithstanding that oversight, they are damn fine books.
If Jesus were to appear and perform a miracle in front of me, I would abandon atheism.
I'd want to see some photo id first. and having seen many a fine illusionist in my time, I'd still reject him as a fraud. I've seen plenty of weird shit in my life, a lot of it is stuff that can easily be explained via recourse to the supernatural, but it takes more effort to consider that there may be rational, natural explanations for these things. appeals to the supernatural are just lazy.
sorry about that, I have updated the relevant javascript. it now works on ie, netscape, omniweb, safari and should probably work on other browsers that support java1.0 applets, javascript 1.2 and divs.
Several years ago I worked on an a-life project in which a population of tiny colour eating 'photobots' is let loose upon various images. After running for a few days, eating, shitting, breeding and passing their genes on down to their offspring not only could you see clear evidence of speciation on the micro scale but also the whole colony, one it hit the upper limits of the resources of the host computer, would coalesce into one or very rarely two giant blobs - meta organisms in effect. the bugs in the middle had extremely short life spans and were essentially there to be harvested by the bugs that formed the outer wall of the blob. at the very periphery there were longer-lived bugs that served to find new food for the blob. slowly but surely the blob will move around, exploiting rounding errors to consume all the colour from the image and leave black in it's place. see http://www.davesag.com/motp scroll down and click on a picture to see this for yourself.
Okay I'll bite. First up you claim "Evolution is not scientific." As I have said before it's a theory. it's a theory that makes predictions that can be tested. Those tests are designed to falsify that theory. Thus it is scientific.
Next: I don't recall bringing up the age of the earth, but since you ask, there are many ways of measuring the age of geological structures, and thus the earth.
radiometric dating. This method relies on the radioactive decay of an unstable type of atom (parent isotope) within the rock into another type of stable atom (daughter isotope). In a certain period of time, called the half-life, half of the parent isotopes will have decayed into daughter isotopes; in an additional, equivalent period of time, half of the remaining parent isotopes will have decayed, and so on. The length of the half-life, which can be measured, varies for different isotopes. By measuring the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes, the time that has elapsed since decay began can be calculated; this is equivalent to the age of the rock.
fission track dating. Certain minerals in rocks contain small amounts of uranium which decay radioactively by the splitting apart of the atomic nucleus (nuclear fission). The two fission fragments produced are highly energetic and highly charged, and they produce a linear trail of radiation damage in the surrounding crystals of the rock. This trail is known as a fission track. Fission tracks can be enlarged by chemical etching until they can be observed and measured under a microscope. The number of tracks is proportional to the time since they started to accumulate, and to the amount of uranium in the rock. The amount of uranium present can be determined by irradiating the rock with neutrons to produce a second set of fission tracks. The ratio of the original tracks to the new ones gives a measure of geological age.
amino-acid racemisation. The method relies on the fact that molecules of amino-acids, the building blocks of proteins, occur in two different forms that are mirror images of each other. These two forms are referred to as left-handed and right-handed. In living organisms, only left-handed amino acid molecules are present, but once the organism dies they slowly convert to their right handed form. Simultaneously, the right handed forms produced slowly convert back to left handed forms, until an equilibrium is reached (half left handed and half right handed), at which point the ratio remains constant. The time taken to reach equilibrium is known, so by determining the ratio of right handed to left handed forms it is possible to estimate the time elapsed since the organism died.
no please, i am all ears/eyes. I promise to pay full and serious attention to your arguments, and respond thoughtfuly. please I am keen to know how creationism better explains the unboundedness of nature, that humans and chimps share 97.5% of their dna, that we inherit traits from our parents, and other observable phenomena that to my eyes all scream of evolution, natural and sexual selection.
I personally take the position that it can be well shown that evolution is largely inconclusive.
ROTFLMAO
Evolution is one of the most established theories there is. Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed. The theory that living things evolve is just a theory, like the theory that gravity acts between two physical objects is only a theory. On the other hand the theory that an almighty creator created everything is so specious if defied reason. It's not testable, it's not falsable, it's not scientific. It's the work of cranks and crazies from thousands of years ago who had nothing else to explain what they could see. The point of science is that all theories should be debunked, and debunkable. Theories that withstand efforts to debunk them are good theories, but still only theories. Theories that make predictions when are then verified by experiment are good theories.
And this talk of 'god guided evolution' is also just a crock. I mean if your god is so amazing then why does he need to guide evolution? for sport? he's omniscient and beyond such earthly pleasures surely.
no. if you overuse mouthwash the plaque causing bacteria will evolve to eat that mouthwash. if you take antibiotics the bacteria aflicting you will evolve resistance via the very well understood mechanisms of natural selection. the list of examples that support evolutionary theories is inexhaustable. why posit the existance of a god when it's just not needed to explain things and does not add in any way to our understanding of the world.
evolution even works in software. genetic programming, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing - does god guide these?
you can even look at evolution in non-living systems. take for example the vinyl LP. faced with 'attack' by CDs and CD players, the LP and turntables, evolved from a recording medium into a musical instrument in their own right. did god have a vested interest in the survival of LPs? is god a DJ?
Your god bats for both sides. the god the poor iraqi's were busy praying to is the same god as yours. Those guys who flew planes into the WTC - same god driving their bus too.
Amino acids, planet size, PRECISE planetary evolution, distance from a sun, atmosphere, OTHER life, moons and magnetic/gravtational forces all contribute to life existing.
yep and all quite neatly explained by Lee Smolin's theory of Cosmological Natural Selection. See his book The Life of the Universe. No god needed here, nor any rampant anthopocentricism, just physics and evolution. And remember kids, evolution evolved out of blind iteration.
ooh pick me, that's an easy one. Cells 'die' when they lose internal quantum coherence and are thus unable to take advantage of the inverse zeno effect. see the excellent book Quantum Evolution for a full discussion of this, or this specific extract from the book.
How many people actually USE the "platform independence" of Java?
Well me for one. I work on my Mac, my client's staff all run various windoze, the other coders on the project use either windoze or slackware/suse linux. We host on slackware linux for staging and i am not exactly sure what the final decision will be for hosting the live site. Probably slackware linux. The point is I don't need to care. For presentations however the screen snaps all come off the Mac cos the app, a web app, looks that much better in Safari than IE or Netscape.
I am at a loss to know why anyone would code in any language that does not allow the developers to use their OS of choice, and host on their client's OS of choice. Unless you have no choice of course:-)
I first learned programming using paper cards and some PDP-11 that the school had worked out a deal to let students use as part of maths. That was in APL of all things, in 1980. Then in 1981 the Angle Park computing centre got some apple][s and some of us who were keen were allowed to go down there and learn the wonders of actually typing programs in and seeing them run on a screen. well I was hooked. Then Wizardry came out and it made a big deal about being programmed in pascal so naturally I had to learn pascal too. applesoft too of course. those were the years of hanging out in tandy stores playing text adventures and teaching myself trs-dos and assemby language, then the school bought an apple][ so no more tandy stores for me, just long nights waiting for my dad to pick me up from school - he used to work reallly really late all the time - hanging out in the 'computer room' either playing ultima/wizardry, or teaching myself 6502. i think the real reason there is such nostalgia for these machines, is that these are the machines we first really learned about computers on. and there was no-one at the school who could help you, by 1982 i knew much much more about the computers at school than any of the teachers, had my own key to the computer room, and was pissing away most of my time trying to write the mother of all text adventures. I ended up porting it to the trash-80 when my dad's office bought one near the end of 82 and still have the floppy it fit on somewhere in a box. after that, going to univerdsity and being taught pasal properly, sharing one pdp-11 with about 1000 students, learning about the halting problem, turing machines and so forth were just nowhere near as much fun. i got a mac in 84 and when the uni said i had to learn fortran and cobol I dropped out of uni as fast as i could to code 68k assember for a living. never looked back, tho these days it's java that keeps me fed.
Slashdot Mirror
nah sorry i'm all for cheaper ticket prices - but hell, go to the prince charles cinema in soho if you want cheap prices. most films there are only £2 per screening, and you can buy tickets at the box office - no need to go out and buy a printer just so you can print out your internet issued bar code.
bollocks to that.
also, i am in bulgaria right now and paid a grand BLV5 (= approx £1.80) to see the matrix reloaded, in english with bulgarian subtitles, in a pretty decent cinema. in the UK the cinemas in leicester square charge around £10 = £12 per ticket last time i looked, and you have been able to buy them online too for years. only you don't have to print out a stupid bar code, you just turn up, stick your credit card in the slot and it spits out your tickets. incidentally this is how BAs online flight tickets work and it rocks. you buy your tickets online and just turn up to the airport, stick your card in the slot and use the touch screen to choose your seats, answer the basic security questions and it spits out your boarding passes. then you just hand over your bags at a special desk reserved for e-ticket holders and bingo you are off. takes less than 5 minutes usually.
all easycinema will do it force real cinemas to cut costs and that's a good thing for consumers. but only kids or the homeless would put up with their special brand of easyservice. on given this willl be a staff-free cinema i expect the kids and the homeless will get on just fine - trading glue and drugs for wood alcohol</opinion>
That's just the tip of the Iceberg.
I can only imagine it's always sucked not to be an apple user. the apple ][ was awesome.
yes, thanks, your pedantry is noted.
I say anything that you can misuse to kill someone should have such data recording abilities.
How is the GPS data getting to the car rental comnpany exactly? Are you suggesting the the car is either a) transmitting that GPS data back to avis, or b) the avis guys have a black-box fitted to the car that has been storing your entire time-and-motion log, in addition to the above mentioned black-box? somehow that strikes me as paranoid fantasy. i can assure you I have hired many dozens of cars over the last few years and sped in almost all of them at some stage, and have never been hassled by the car hire company for it. Ditto for the cops, how are they supposed to be getting this GPS data from your car? GPS on its own does not involve any transmission of your location.
will they provide a slot to accept and recycle the expired disks? or will they just become more landfill.
having just finished the trilogy - "His Dark Materials" by Philip Pullman if you want the actual title - i can safely say no, none of the characters had a penguin as a daemon. Notwithstanding that oversight, they are damn fine books.
Shock Exclusve - Reporter tells lies - wasn't there when he did it! Pix!
a thought - by computer users do you also include computers that use computers, or do you only mean people who use computers?
"971 pages stem to stern", that's one huge fucking nut!
I'd want to see some photo id first. and having seen many a fine illusionist in my time, I'd still reject him as a fraud. I've seen plenty of weird shit in my life, a lot of it is stuff that can easily be explained via recourse to the supernatural, but it takes more effort to consider that there may be rational, natural explanations for these things. appeals to the supernatural are just lazy.
sorry about that, I have updated the relevant javascript. it now works on ie, netscape, omniweb, safari and should probably work on other browsers that support java1.0 applets, javascript 1.2 and divs.
no, this is for only 2.5% of the market as 50% of apple's market is outside the USA.
Several years ago I worked on an a-life project in which a population of tiny colour eating 'photobots' is let loose upon various images. After running for a few days, eating, shitting, breeding and passing their genes on down to their offspring not only could you see clear evidence of speciation on the micro scale but also the whole colony, one it hit the upper limits of the resources of the host computer, would coalesce into one or very rarely two giant blobs - meta organisms in effect. the bugs in the middle had extremely short life spans and were essentially there to be harvested by the bugs that formed the outer wall of the blob. at the very periphery there were longer-lived bugs that served to find new food for the blob. slowly but surely the blob will move around, exploiting rounding errors to consume all the colour from the image and leave black in it's place. see http://www.davesag.com/motp scroll down and click on a picture to see this for yourself.
Next: I don't recall bringing up the age of the earth, but since you ask, there are many ways of measuring the age of geological structures, and thus the earth.
- radiometric dating. This method relies on the radioactive decay of an unstable type of atom (parent isotope) within the rock into another type of stable atom (daughter isotope). In a certain period of time, called the half-life, half of the parent isotopes will have decayed into daughter isotopes; in an additional, equivalent period of time, half of the remaining parent isotopes will have decayed, and so on. The length of the half-life, which can be measured, varies for different isotopes. By measuring the ratio of parent to daughter isotopes, the time that has elapsed since decay began can be calculated; this is equivalent to the age of the rock.
- fission track dating. Certain minerals in rocks contain small amounts of uranium which decay radioactively by the splitting apart of the atomic nucleus (nuclear fission). The two fission fragments produced are highly energetic and highly charged, and they produce a linear trail of radiation damage in the surrounding crystals of the rock. This trail is known as a fission track. Fission tracks can be enlarged by chemical etching until they can be observed and measured under a microscope. The number of tracks is proportional to the time since they started to accumulate, and to the amount of uranium in the rock. The amount of uranium present can be determined by irradiating the rock with neutrons to produce a second set of fission tracks. The ratio of the original tracks to the new ones gives a measure of geological age.
- amino-acid racemisation. The method relies on the fact that molecules of amino-acids, the building blocks of proteins, occur in two different forms that are mirror images of each other. These two forms are referred to as left-handed and right-handed. In living organisms, only left-handed amino acid molecules are present, but once the organism dies they slowly convert to their right handed form. Simultaneously, the right handed forms produced slowly convert back to left handed forms, until an equilibrium is reached (half left handed and half right handed), at which point the ratio remains constant. The time taken to reach equilibrium is known, so by determining the ratio of right handed to left handed forms it is possible to estimate the time elapsed since the organism died.
see the Museum of Victoria's site for more detail. You may also like to check out the Age of the earth FAQ, or that bastion of all wisdom - google.A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man - jebediah springfield.
no please, i am all ears/eyes. I promise to pay full and serious attention to your arguments, and respond thoughtfuly. please I am keen to know how creationism better explains the unboundedness of nature, that humans and chimps share 97.5% of their dna, that we inherit traits from our parents, and other observable phenomena that to my eyes all scream of evolution, natural and sexual selection.
ROTFLMAO
Evolution is one of the most established theories there is. Every test designed to disprove the theory has failed. The theory that living things evolve is just a theory, like the theory that gravity acts between two physical objects is only a theory. On the other hand the theory that an almighty creator created everything is so specious if defied reason. It's not testable, it's not falsable, it's not scientific. It's the work of cranks and crazies from thousands of years ago who had nothing else to explain what they could see. The point of science is that all theories should be debunked, and debunkable. Theories that withstand efforts to debunk them are good theories, but still only theories. Theories that make predictions when are then verified by experiment are good theories.
And this talk of 'god guided evolution' is also just a crock. I mean if your god is so amazing then why does he need to guide evolution? for sport? he's omniscient and beyond such earthly pleasures surely.
no. if you overuse mouthwash the plaque causing bacteria will evolve to eat that mouthwash. if you take antibiotics the bacteria aflicting you will evolve resistance via the very well understood mechanisms of natural selection. the list of examples that support evolutionary theories is inexhaustable. why posit the existance of a god when it's just not needed to explain things and does not add in any way to our understanding of the world.
evolution even works in software. genetic programming, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing - does god guide these?
you can even look at evolution in non-living systems. take for example the vinyl LP. faced with 'attack' by CDs and CD players, the LP and turntables, evolved from a recording medium into a musical instrument in their own right. did god have a vested interest in the survival of LPs? is god a DJ?
Your god bats for both sides. the god the poor iraqi's were busy praying to is the same god as yours. Those guys who flew planes into the WTC - same god driving their bus too.
well it's a theory, it's falsable, it's science. the idea that life is some mystical force is pure voodoo.
Okay then, please set out the creationist position in terms we simple atheists can understand. please try and avoid circular arguments.
yep and all quite neatly explained by Lee Smolin's theory of Cosmological Natural Selection. See his book The Life of the Universe. No god needed here, nor any rampant anthopocentricism, just physics and evolution. And remember kids, evolution evolved out of blind iteration.
ooh pick me, that's an easy one. Cells 'die' when they lose internal quantum coherence and are thus unable to take advantage of the inverse zeno effect. see the excellent book Quantum Evolution for a full discussion of this, or this specific extract from the book.
in this particular case my sig is wrong.
Well me for one. I work on my Mac, my client's staff all run various windoze, the other coders on the project use either windoze or slackware/suse linux. We host on slackware linux for staging and i am not exactly sure what the final decision will be for hosting the live site. Probably slackware linux. The point is I don't need to care. For presentations however the screen snaps all come off the Mac cos the app, a web app, looks that much better in Safari than IE or Netscape.
I am at a loss to know why anyone would code in any language that does not allow the developers to use their OS of choice, and host on their client's OS of choice. Unless you have no choice of course :-)
I first learned programming using paper cards and some PDP-11 that the school had worked out a deal to let students use as part of maths. That was in APL of all things, in 1980. Then in 1981 the Angle Park computing centre got some apple][s and some of us who were keen were allowed to go down there and learn the wonders of actually typing programs in and seeing them run on a screen. well I was hooked. Then Wizardry came out and it made a big deal about being programmed in pascal so naturally I had to learn pascal too. applesoft too of course. those were the years of hanging out in tandy stores playing text adventures and teaching myself trs-dos and assemby language, then the school bought an apple][ so no more tandy stores for me, just long nights waiting for my dad to pick me up from school - he used to work reallly really late all the time - hanging out in the 'computer room' either playing ultima/wizardry, or teaching myself 6502. i think the real reason there is such nostalgia for these machines, is that these are the machines we first really learned about computers on. and there was no-one at the school who could help you, by 1982 i knew much much more about the computers at school than any of the teachers, had my own key to the computer room, and was pissing away most of my time trying to write the mother of all text adventures. I ended up porting it to the trash-80 when my dad's office bought one near the end of 82 and still have the floppy it fit on somewhere in a box. after that, going to univerdsity and being taught pasal properly, sharing one pdp-11 with about 1000 students, learning about the halting problem, turing machines and so forth were just nowhere near as much fun. i got a mac in 84 and when the uni said i had to learn fortran and cobol I dropped out of uni as fast as i could to code 68k assember for a living. never looked back, tho these days it's java that keeps me fed.