It's not thin at all. I'll bet it confused a lot of people just like it confused me. Right after they dodge the car, I started trying to figure out why Doc Ock would have done that. Did he know Peter was Spidey? Was he trying to prove it to everyone by making him dodge the car?
The bigger issue is that the scene was apparently done that way because it made for such great trailers. They dumbed down part of the film to get more of us in the theaters, at the expense of overall movie quality. That's what sucks.
Since the dawn of sporting events, sports have been designed around the viewer, not the player.
That's ridiculous. All sports (except for pitiful commercial mutant creations like arena football) were originally played for the fun of the players. It took nearly forty years of widespread amateur play before the first pro baseball league was formed. I think that's all that's lacking here: time. As computer gamers grow up and games become more accepted (and spectator-friendly), it'll happen. Not that I consider it a good thing.
Others have pointed out how it will stop terrorists, though it hardly matters. We only worry about these piddly little terrorists nowadays because no one can match us (insert US-centric disclaimer) militarily. No one can match us militarily because we have a huge, skilled fighting force with crazy shit like damned-near-invincible tanks, stealth bombers with GPS-guided bombs, and MOTHERFUCKING RAILGUNS that would make Carmack do a doubletake.
The Cold War was when we were just barely winning the arms race. We're way ahead now. Let's keep it that way.
I think PayPal, with its current policies, is not geared to serve virtual trading. There needs to be a service that can verify virtual delivery of virtual goods. However that in itself is a problem because game developers are generally against the real life trading of their virtual goods that they technically still own.
Which brings us to the heart of the issue. These are essentially black-market goods (not that I give a damn, just saying). If you buy a gun out of the trunk of some guy's car in a dark alley, do you expect legal recourse to be available to you when you discover that the firing chamber is rusted out? No. When you get some bad crack and your heart stops, do you sue your dealer? No.
Wait, if you're an American, how have you caught that hideous "Cheers," signature bug?
And while I'm on the subject, do you people think I care what your first names are? Are you not aware that I turned off signatures in order to avoid extraneous crap like that?
Poets have been selling their works for a long time. Granted, not many have gotten wealthy off of their passion, but maybe that's because it's not worth a whole lot. I suspect that a lot of people are like me and appreciate art, but have slightly less need and desire for it than, say, a good sandwich. So it kind of sucks that you and others have decided that I need to help support the NEA. Because, you know, I'd really rather fund new brake pads for my car than the creation of a picture of the christ in a jar of piss, or whatever else is coming out of the NEA nowadays.
Just to be totally clear, none of the above contained any sarcasm whatsoever.
Okay, I just have to post again after re-reading your post.
And if our society is going to support the idea that we can keep producing more people despite the fact that there are less resources available for them, we need to find a way to keep everyone happy and feeling productive, without overburdening the government or creating a negative social status (welfare).
Poppycock. I could give a damn if someone feels bad because he recognizes the fact that he's useless. And the problem with welfare isn't that applies a "negative social status" (as well it should!) but that it rewards people for producing children when obviously there were insufficient resources for the parents. (You pointed out both this population/resource issue and the welfare cause in the very same sentence, yet failed to connect them... strange.)
Put simply, the government needs to be able to support people who want to be artists, writers, musicians, hobbyists, explorers, naturalists, scientists, inventors, or any other interest that involves individual dedication and creativity.
Artists, writers, musicians, and maybe hobbyists (Hobbyists? WTF? Who isn't a hobbyist?) might benefit those around them in some metaphysical sense, but not in any practical one. They certainly don't deserve public subsidies. Are you aware that artists can sell their works? If the artist can make a living that way, then he will, and capitalism worked. If he can't, he'll find a job that pays, and capitalism worked. In no case is it necessary to resort to communism.
Until recently, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities in the UK were completely free for citizens to attend.
Hundreds of thousands? Wow. Look, you don't have to go to Oxford. There are many great universities (at least in the US) in the low tens of thousands, start to finish. Many even lower, depending on what you're planning to do when you get out. A small price to pay. The years you invest gaining the education are worth more. As uses of public money go, however, I would have to say that subsidized education is certainly not the worst.
With your last point, that interplanetary boondoggles are still more worthwhile than wars on terror, I must wholeheartedly agree.
What utter insanity! Allow me to break this down for you from two points of view.
From society's point of view, it's a bad idea to reward people for wasteful, unproductive behavior. By this, I mean behavior that doesn't meet (directly or indirectly) a country's basic needs like feeding people, helping people stay alive, keeping out invaders, etc. Poetry is nice and all, but it's just a pastime. Rewards (no matter how small) should go to those that earn them by doing the difficult, dangerous, unpleasant things that just need doing.
From my point of view, you can piss right off. How dare you suggest that society take some of my money and give it to some lazy bastard!
EVERY rifle needs to be cleaned in order to remain functional.
You'd be surprised what they're doing with small arms these days...
http://www.hk-usa.com/pages/military-le/rifles-c ar bines/xm8.html
"Unlike the current M4/M16 direct gas system with gas tube, the XM8 gas system does not introduce propellant gases and the associated carbon fouling back into the weapon's receiver during firing. This greatly increases the reliability of the XM8 while at same time reducing operator cleaning time by as much as 70%. This system also allows the weapon to fire more than 15,000 rounds without lubrication or cleaning in even the worst operational environments. A cold hammer forged barrel will guarantee a minimum of 20,000 rounds service life and ultimate operator safety in the event of an obstructed bore occurrence."
That's... an "interesting" point of view. You can't be a great swimmer; you're either an Olympic swimmer or you suck. You can't be smart; you're either a NASA rocket scientist or an idiot.
If you'll pardon my asking such a pointed question, what happened to you to make you such a jerk?
Anonymous poster, I hope you find this reply amongst all the cruft. I suspect that there are a lot of people here who are not proud of what they've accomplished with their gifts.
Your description matches me almost perfectly (don't care for photography much), except for the timeframe. After 9 years of repeatedly trying and dropping out of college, I almost have my baccalaureate. So allow me to try and condense all the experience I've come by the hard way in that period of time.
Your skills and talents ALONE will only get you so far. Success in college, as well as the rest of adult life, requires an enormous amount of self-discipline. You probably have not had to develop much of that. When you first encounter a class you can't slack your way through, you will probably fail it. It's ok; don't give up. Analyze what you did wrong (don't ignore the simple things), adjust your plan of attack, and go into the next semester with everything you've got.
Study. Almost everything you learn in school will come in handy later on, despite popular myth to the contrary. I mean everything, from history to foreign languages to math to public speaking. Trust me on this one and just learn it all to the best of your ability.
Good friends make all the difference. Surround yourself with positive, determined students, and it will help you be one too. Look for people who will encourage and support you, not people who will tempt you into beer, pot, and videogames (well, only in moderation). If you see the people around you going downhill academically, try to help them, but don't let them drag you down too. Your family probably can give you support, too; don't be afraid to ask (or to even admit to yourself that you need it, for that matter).
You probably think you have enough humility, but you do not. Many of the most important skills in life are ones that you thought you could skip out on (without admitting it to yourself). Get ready to go back and learn them. Social skills, disciplined study habits, goal-setting, car maintenance, housework. You will be shocked at the people around you who move away from their parents and don't know how to clean up after themselves, or turn into hermits because they don't have their respective moms telling them to go outside and make friends. These things are life's small potatoes. You were not meant to fail in life because you can't remember to do your homework, but you will never get a chance to try and defeat life's big problems until you take the time to master these small ones.
You might be thinking that this all sounds like pretty general advice, not really tailored your situation, and you would be fairly right. Despite being bright, you have to deal with life's small potatoes too. Just don't forget you're special. Ignore the naysayers here, because this is so important: above all else, NEVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE SPECIAL. You were meant to succeed in life, though exactly what that means to you, I could not guess. That's up to you.
Why would you want to spend $350+ on a calculator that can also function as a PDA, when you can get a great PDA for as much and install calculator software onto it?
Thank you. I've been sitting here trying to figure out how you could use the atmosphere for lift while accelerating to orbital velocity without massive drag. Funny how hundreds of people can read and discuss a concept without noticing that it is fundamentally impossible.
Look what you've done, troll. A million nerds come out screaming, "It was made of rocket fuel!" like it's news of the second coming.
Guys, about twice a week you tell me how it wasn't the hydrogen that made the Hindenburg explode. The funny thing is, you learned this by way of an old Slashdot post that I ALSO READ. We all know about the aluminum whatever-oxide rocket fuel blimp. So go home.
Except that Cisco has no real incentive to find bugs in their code, whereas a cracker does. Motivation makes a huge difference. And why would Cisco need to do strict audits on their code? Nobody outside the company will ever see it. Right?
Um, no, you got it backwards. Crackers have no real motivation -- you couldn't even brag if you brought down the internet for a day (well, unless you LIKE jail). Cisco has a multi-billion dollar business built on the security of their products.
How does that change anything? So you just query a guy's chip repeatedly to get the next 100 or so numbers, then you can go make 100 transactions. The bank computer sees continuity of the sequence as if it were the real chip the whole time. Try again.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, "murder" would be what the guy with the hammer almost did.
Let me be the judge of that.
As of 2004, anyone who hosts a large file on the internet without also seeding that file via BitTorrent is a FUCKING MORON.
It just boggles the mind.
It's not thin at all. I'll bet it confused a lot of people just like it confused me. Right after they dodge the car, I started trying to figure out why Doc Ock would have done that. Did he know Peter was Spidey? Was he trying to prove it to everyone by making him dodge the car?
The bigger issue is that the scene was apparently done that way because it made for such great trailers. They dumbed down part of the film to get more of us in the theaters, at the expense of overall movie quality. That's what sucks.
Why, when you put it that way, it's so obvious. Thank God I'm not buff!
Since the dawn of sporting events, sports have been designed around the viewer, not the player.
That's ridiculous. All sports (except for pitiful commercial mutant creations like arena football) were originally played for the fun of the players. It took nearly forty years of widespread amateur play before the first pro baseball league was formed. I think that's all that's lacking here: time. As computer gamers grow up and games become more accepted (and spectator-friendly), it'll happen. Not that I consider it a good thing.
Or better yet, some sort of rental service, or Rent-A-Goat, if you will. Ooh ooh patent patent!
The one thing that disappoints me is that they're letting quake 4 be developed on the doom 3 engine. :-(
I'm sorry, is Doom 3 not advanced enough to suit your standards?
Others have pointed out how it will stop terrorists, though it hardly matters. We only worry about these piddly little terrorists nowadays because no one can match us (insert US-centric disclaimer) militarily. No one can match us militarily because we have a huge, skilled fighting force with crazy shit like damned-near-invincible tanks, stealth bombers with GPS-guided bombs, and MOTHERFUCKING RAILGUNS that would make Carmack do a doubletake.
The Cold War was when we were just barely winning the arms race. We're way ahead now. Let's keep it that way.
Don't believe the hype on things like the F-22 and railguns until they've been tested in true battle.
Today's pet peeve: "it begs THE question"
I think PayPal, with its current policies, is not geared to serve virtual trading. There needs to be a service that can verify virtual delivery of virtual goods. However that in itself is a problem because game developers are generally against the real life trading of their virtual goods that they technically still own.
Which brings us to the heart of the issue. These are essentially black-market goods (not that I give a damn, just saying). If you buy a gun out of the trunk of some guy's car in a dark alley, do you expect legal recourse to be available to you when you discover that the firing chamber is rusted out? No. When you get some bad crack and your heart stops, do you sue your dealer? No.
That's called life.
Wait, if you're an American, how have you caught that hideous "Cheers," signature bug?
And while I'm on the subject, do you people think I care what your first names are? Are you not aware that I turned off signatures in order to avoid extraneous crap like that?
Poets have been selling their works for a long time. Granted, not many have gotten wealthy off of their passion, but maybe that's because it's not worth a whole lot. I suspect that a lot of people are like me and appreciate art, but have slightly less need and desire for it than, say, a good sandwich. So it kind of sucks that you and others have decided that I need to help support the NEA. Because, you know, I'd really rather fund new brake pads for my car than the creation of a picture of the christ in a jar of piss, or whatever else is coming out of the NEA nowadays.
Just to be totally clear, none of the above contained any sarcasm whatsoever.
Okay, I just have to post again after re-reading your post.
And if our society is going to support the idea that we can keep producing more people despite the fact that there are less resources available for them, we need to find a way to keep everyone happy and feeling productive, without overburdening the government or creating a negative social status (welfare).
Poppycock. I could give a damn if someone feels bad because he recognizes the fact that he's useless. And the problem with welfare isn't that applies a "negative social status" (as well it should!) but that it rewards people for producing children when obviously there were insufficient resources for the parents. (You pointed out both this population/resource issue and the welfare cause in the very same sentence, yet failed to connect them... strange.)
Put simply, the government needs to be able to support people who want to be artists, writers, musicians, hobbyists, explorers, naturalists, scientists, inventors, or any other interest that involves individual dedication and creativity.
Artists, writers, musicians, and maybe hobbyists (Hobbyists? WTF? Who isn't a hobbyist?) might benefit those around them in some metaphysical sense, but not in any practical one. They certainly don't deserve public subsidies. Are you aware that artists can sell their works? If the artist can make a living that way, then he will, and capitalism worked. If he can't, he'll find a job that pays, and capitalism worked. In no case is it necessary to resort to communism.
Until recently, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities in the UK were completely free for citizens to attend.
Hundreds of thousands? Wow. Look, you don't have to go to Oxford. There are many great universities (at least in the US) in the low tens of thousands, start to finish. Many even lower, depending on what you're planning to do when you get out. A small price to pay. The years you invest gaining the education are worth more. As uses of public money go, however, I would have to say that subsidized education is certainly not the worst.
With your last point, that interplanetary boondoggles are still more worthwhile than wars on terror, I must wholeheartedly agree.
What utter insanity! Allow me to break this down for you from two points of view.
From society's point of view, it's a bad idea to reward people for wasteful, unproductive behavior. By this, I mean behavior that doesn't meet (directly or indirectly) a country's basic needs like feeding people, helping people stay alive, keeping out invaders, etc. Poetry is nice and all, but it's just a pastime. Rewards (no matter how small) should go to those that earn them by doing the difficult, dangerous, unpleasant things that just need doing.
From my point of view, you can piss right off. How dare you suggest that society take some of my money and give it to some lazy bastard!
EVERY rifle needs to be cleaned in order to remain functional.
c ar bines/xm8.html
You'd be surprised what they're doing with small arms these days...
http://www.hk-usa.com/pages/military-le/rifles-
"Unlike the current M4/M16 direct gas system with gas tube, the XM8 gas system does not introduce propellant gases and the associated carbon fouling back into the weapon's receiver during firing. This greatly increases the reliability of the XM8 while at same time reducing operator cleaning time by as much as 70%. This system also allows the weapon to fire more than 15,000 rounds without lubrication or cleaning in even the worst operational environments. A cold hammer forged barrel will guarantee a minimum of 20,000 rounds service life and ultimate operator safety in the event of an obstructed bore occurrence."
Little news flash for you: what Microsoft says and what Microsoft does are not necessarily the same thing.
That's... an "interesting" point of view. You can't be a great swimmer; you're either an Olympic swimmer or you suck. You can't be smart; you're either a NASA rocket scientist or an idiot.
If you'll pardon my asking such a pointed question, what happened to you to make you such a jerk?
Anonymous poster, I hope you find this reply amongst all the cruft. I suspect that there are a lot of people here who are not proud of what they've accomplished with their gifts.
Your description matches me almost perfectly (don't care for photography much), except for the timeframe. After 9 years of repeatedly trying and dropping out of college, I almost have my baccalaureate. So allow me to try and condense all the experience I've come by the hard way in that period of time.
Your skills and talents ALONE will only get you so far. Success in college, as well as the rest of adult life, requires an enormous amount of self-discipline. You probably have not had to develop much of that. When you first encounter a class you can't slack your way through, you will probably fail it. It's ok; don't give up. Analyze what you did wrong (don't ignore the simple things), adjust your plan of attack, and go into the next semester with everything you've got.
Study. Almost everything you learn in school will come in handy later on, despite popular myth to the contrary. I mean everything, from history to foreign languages to math to public speaking. Trust me on this one and just learn it all to the best of your ability.
Good friends make all the difference. Surround yourself with positive, determined students, and it will help you be one too. Look for people who will encourage and support you, not people who will tempt you into beer, pot, and videogames (well, only in moderation). If you see the people around you going downhill academically, try to help them, but don't let them drag you down too. Your family probably can give you support, too; don't be afraid to ask (or to even admit to yourself that you need it, for that matter).
You probably think you have enough humility, but you do not. Many of the most important skills in life are ones that you thought you could skip out on (without admitting it to yourself). Get ready to go back and learn them. Social skills, disciplined study habits, goal-setting, car maintenance, housework. You will be shocked at the people around you who move away from their parents and don't know how to clean up after themselves, or turn into hermits because they don't have their respective moms telling them to go outside and make friends. These things are life's small potatoes. You were not meant to fail in life because you can't remember to do your homework, but you will never get a chance to try and defeat life's big problems until you take the time to master these small ones.
You might be thinking that this all sounds like pretty general advice, not really tailored your situation, and you would be fairly right. Despite being bright, you have to deal with life's small potatoes too. Just don't forget you're special. Ignore the naysayers here, because this is so important: above all else, NEVER FORGET THAT YOU ARE SPECIAL. You were meant to succeed in life, though exactly what that means to you, I could not guess. That's up to you.
Why would you want to spend $350+ on a calculator that can also function as a PDA, when you can get a great PDA for as much and install calculator software onto it?
Thank you. I've been sitting here trying to figure out how you could use the atmosphere for lift while accelerating to orbital velocity without massive drag. Funny how hundreds of people can read and discuss a concept without noticing that it is fundamentally impossible.
Look what you've done, troll. A million nerds come out screaming, "It was made of rocket fuel!" like it's news of the second coming.
Guys, about twice a week you tell me how it wasn't the hydrogen that made the Hindenburg explode. The funny thing is, you learned this by way of an old Slashdot post that I ALSO READ. We all know about the aluminum whatever-oxide rocket fuel blimp. So go home.
Actually, it's been well-established for some time that Dagobah had a strong dark-force aura, which allowed Yoda to hide undetected.
Same with Tattooine, hence Obi Wan Kenobi's presence there.
Dweeb.
Except that Cisco has no real incentive to find bugs in their code, whereas a cracker does. Motivation makes a huge difference. And why would Cisco need to do strict audits on their code? Nobody outside the company will ever see it. Right?
Um, no, you got it backwards. Crackers have no real motivation -- you couldn't even brag if you brought down the internet for a day (well, unless you LIKE jail). Cisco has a multi-billion dollar business built on the security of their products.
How does that change anything? So you just query a guy's chip repeatedly to get the next 100 or so numbers, then you can go make 100 transactions. The bank computer sees continuity of the sequence as if it were the real chip the whole time. Try again.