I don't believe the ending was that we aren't supposed to know, but that it doesn't matter. At this point, his dream IS his reality, much the same as the people who were dreaming when they went to find the sedative guy.
Well.. the "RPG" games that I've played on Facebook involve repeatedly clicking the same button to "complete quests" to gain exp to level so that you open up a new button that you can click repeatedly to complete quests to gain exp to level. As far as I can tell, there was no maximum level and the storyline was simply "You steal a car." "You steal a car." "You have failed to steal a car." which then evolved to "You rob a bank." "You rob a bank." "You have failed to rob a bank."
Then if you look at Farmville, you buy a cow then wait some time, click on it and it gives you more cows, then repeat. Ok, so I haven't actually played Farmville, but I've seen people do it, and I'm fairly certain that's the mechanic at play.
The point is, all these games do is give you trivial rewards for giving them clicks/money. The rewards don't mean anything, except to your brain which is sucked into getting some sort of thrill by receiving these random rewards.
To paraphrase Stephen Tobolowsky quoting someone else: Genius is coming up with an idea that everything else thinks they could have thought of.
If they are the first to propose this sort of idea, then they should be given the patent for it. If not, then they shouldn't get the patent. To me it shouldn't matter if someone, after the fact, says "Oh, I could have thought of that."
Honestly, I have no doubt this was intentional. Ever since I can remember thinking about it, I've always known that that riff was from "Kookaburra." It just made sense to me that a song about Australia would include a riff from one of the most iconic songs in Australian history.
I still think it's a bit ludicrous that they were only sued 20+ years after the song became a mega-hit, by a company that had absolutely no part in the creation of the original tune.
How? Religion is created by people. Every person who translates a Bible has a say in what that Bible reads. Every person that gives a sermon has a say in what his followers believe. Sure, there's a founder, and his beliefs are all good and great, but every person who's preached a religion throughout the years has shaped that religion. When you get people who invade a foreign country to purge the heathens, that reflects on the religion as a whole. Same when you get people who boycott soldiers' funerals, who call for forceful conversions, who intentionally alter that religions fundamental beliefs in order to keep a population ignorant and subservient.
I, for one, do not believe that the New Testament speaks only Christ's words and teachings, especially considering that considerable portions were written hundreds of years after his death. Also consider that the Church picked and chose which books to include in the New Testament. How do we know that some people didn't just get it wrong and some of the missing books were the right ones? When humans are involved, things tend to be screwed up more often than not.
This isn't even considering that Jesus, like Luther centuries later, wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new religion, rather he was attempting to modify the existing Hebrew religion. That itself puts a serious dent in your own theory the difference between founders and followers/descendants. And there aren't many people who would say that the Hebrews were necessarily a completely peaceful people. From the massacre of the worshipers of the golden calf to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there was plenty of violence to go around.
Normally I would also be one to throw up the correlation != causation flag, but in this case, I'm leaning towards actually believing that there is a causal effect. I know that when I play video online games, the swearing rubs off on me and I curse like crazy for the next day or two (or, when I still played WoW, the next year and a half). I know that after I played Burnout or Need for Speed, I was harder on the accelerator and more likely to change lanes instead of slow down when approaching a car in front of me.
Of course, this is one person's anecdotal evidence, but when it corroborates the findings of a study, I find it hard to dismiss. This would be relatively easy to actually experiment on, though. Just take a random sample of teenagers who can drive, give them a random task to perform for an hour, including, but not limited to, playing racing games, then put them in the driver's seat on a controlled course. If the ones that played racing games complete the course faster or more recklessly than the ones who played other types of games, then you can demonstrate causation, if not, then you can't.
If this was a private school, I'd have no problem with it. Private schools can do what private schools want. This is a public school, and they are requiring students & their parents to pay out extra money for laptops. And it's not just any laptops, but they must be MacBooks.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for teaching kids about technology. But requiring them all to have MacBooks, even if they already have their own non-Apple laptops, is absurd. What can they teach about technology at large, using a MacBook, that they cannot teach using Windows? Furthermore, it is likely that when these kids graduate high school and go to college, they will find Windows machines far more readily accessible than Macs. After college, most of these students will find that prospective employers won't even give them the choice to work on a Mac.
I could possibly get on board with the school requiring laptops, but requiring them to buy (or lease or borrow) new machines, and not giving them the choice of which OS they can use, to me, crosses the line.
PS - How long until the first pics of some kid popping Mike & Ike's surface on the net?
The question is.. is this really progress? Minimalism is helped draw a lot of people to Google, taking that away gives one more reason to at least check out the competitors.
Bing is my primary search engine and I'm a huge fan of its background images, but there was something about Google's execution of the background image that just irked me. Whether it was the white Google lettering, the full screen image rather than just partial screen, or merely the fact that they were copying Microsoft, it seemed... off.
I guess my point is that the background images being bad for Google doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad for search engines, but just that this particular execution wasn't good.
There are actually a lot of big names on this list. From Michael Bloomberg to Rahm Emanuel to the CEO's of many highly recognizable institutions, people will care.
How about if you forget to put an "Employee's Only" sign on the back room to your storefront? I think that analogy is more appropriate. Is it illegal for me to walk through that door?
It's not so much that they are controlling your thoughts, necessarily, but they have the capacity to do so. If they wanted to start shaping search results to give favorable views of one idea and unfavorable views of another, it would take some work to find out. Through that, they could subtly shape any debate that they wished, and they could do it so subtly that nobody would notice.
Concerning the general election, you're correct. However, Obama did have to overcome a quite significant deficit to defeat Hillary, helped in no small part by the significant fund raising that he achieved.
Besides, with the creation of synthetic genomes recently, wouldn't scientists just create a human or animal genome to splice with the other? If they were doing this they'd only be looking for a small section of a particular species genome to splice with a humans, so synthesizing it wouldn't be too difficult*. At that point, they are only inserting synthetic genes and, while they are violating the spirit of the law, I seriously doubt they would be violating the letter.
My next question is what happens when they find that they can use pig DNA or whale DNA to combat heart disease or AIDS? Are they going to repeal the law for life saving purposes or are they going to run scared and continue to suppress life-saving sciences because their concept of reality is distorted.
That is quite possibly the worst definition of theft I have ever heard. If I sell apples by the highway, and you come up and put a cart right next to mine, are you stealing from me? You are, after all, depriving me of future revenue by taking sales that would have otherwise been mine.
I'm not exactly sure where the doctrine lies, but I believe that the Catholic church believes something along those lines. The information I'm using comes from a pamphlet from 5-10 years ago, but basically it states this: If evolution is real, it is merely the process through which god created men and animals. This same pamphlet also stated that aliens may or may not exist, but if they do, then they were created by the same God that created humanity. The pamphlet argued that science is a tool given to man by God to be used to better ourselves and, outside of certain ethical issues, nothing about it is inherently at odds with the Catholic religion.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe the ending was that we aren't supposed to know, but that it doesn't matter. At this point, his dream IS his reality, much the same as the people who were dreaming when they went to find the sedative guy.
Indeed. After cutting nearly everyone else to keep fares low, they now just pray that nothing breaks.
Well.. the "RPG" games that I've played on Facebook involve repeatedly clicking the same button to "complete quests" to gain exp to level so that you open up a new button that you can click repeatedly to complete quests to gain exp to level. As far as I can tell, there was no maximum level and the storyline was simply "You steal a car." "You steal a car." "You have failed to steal a car." which then evolved to "You rob a bank." "You rob a bank." "You have failed to rob a bank."
Then if you look at Farmville, you buy a cow then wait some time, click on it and it gives you more cows, then repeat. Ok, so I haven't actually played Farmville, but I've seen people do it, and I'm fairly certain that's the mechanic at play.
The point is, all these games do is give you trivial rewards for giving them clicks/money. The rewards don't mean anything, except to your brain which is sucked into getting some sort of thrill by receiving these random rewards.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/12/
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Operant_conditioning
Man.. "troopergate?" Really? Stop it. Please.
"Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
To paraphrase Stephen Tobolowsky quoting someone else: Genius is coming up with an idea that everything else thinks they could have thought of.
If they are the first to propose this sort of idea, then they should be given the patent for it. If not, then they shouldn't get the patent. To me it shouldn't matter if someone, after the fact, says "Oh, I could have thought of that."
Will Hunting? Is that you?
Damn. Mismod. Should have been +1 Funny :-/
Honestly, I have no doubt this was intentional. Ever since I can remember thinking about it, I've always known that that riff was from "Kookaburra." It just made sense to me that a song about Australia would include a riff from one of the most iconic songs in Australian history.
I still think it's a bit ludicrous that they were only sued 20+ years after the song became a mega-hit, by a company that had absolutely no part in the creation of the original tune.
How? Religion is created by people. Every person who translates a Bible has a say in what that Bible reads. Every person that gives a sermon has a say in what his followers believe. Sure, there's a founder, and his beliefs are all good and great, but every person who's preached a religion throughout the years has shaped that religion. When you get people who invade a foreign country to purge the heathens, that reflects on the religion as a whole. Same when you get people who boycott soldiers' funerals, who call for forceful conversions, who intentionally alter that religions fundamental beliefs in order to keep a population ignorant and subservient.
I, for one, do not believe that the New Testament speaks only Christ's words and teachings, especially considering that considerable portions were written hundreds of years after his death. Also consider that the Church picked and chose which books to include in the New Testament. How do we know that some people didn't just get it wrong and some of the missing books were the right ones? When humans are involved, things tend to be screwed up more often than not.
This isn't even considering that Jesus, like Luther centuries later, wasn't necessarily seeking to create a new religion, rather he was attempting to modify the existing Hebrew religion. That itself puts a serious dent in your own theory the difference between founders and followers/descendants. And there aren't many people who would say that the Hebrews were necessarily a completely peaceful people. From the massacre of the worshipers of the golden calf to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, there was plenty of violence to go around.
And I was getting a Dell.
What happens when the trolls start just reverse-modding people en masse?
Normally I would also be one to throw up the correlation != causation flag, but in this case, I'm leaning towards actually believing that there is a causal effect. I know that when I play video online games, the swearing rubs off on me and I curse like crazy for the next day or two (or, when I still played WoW, the next year and a half). I know that after I played Burnout or Need for Speed, I was harder on the accelerator and more likely to change lanes instead of slow down when approaching a car in front of me.
Of course, this is one person's anecdotal evidence, but when it corroborates the findings of a study, I find it hard to dismiss. This would be relatively easy to actually experiment on, though. Just take a random sample of teenagers who can drive, give them a random task to perform for an hour, including, but not limited to, playing racing games, then put them in the driver's seat on a controlled course. If the ones that played racing games complete the course faster or more recklessly than the ones who played other types of games, then you can demonstrate causation, if not, then you can't.
If this was a private school, I'd have no problem with it. Private schools can do what private schools want. This is a public school, and they are requiring students & their parents to pay out extra money for laptops. And it's not just any laptops, but they must be MacBooks.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for teaching kids about technology. But requiring them all to have MacBooks, even if they already have their own non-Apple laptops, is absurd. What can they teach about technology at large, using a MacBook, that they cannot teach using Windows? Furthermore, it is likely that when these kids graduate high school and go to college, they will find Windows machines far more readily accessible than Macs. After college, most of these students will find that prospective employers won't even give them the choice to work on a Mac.
I could possibly get on board with the school requiring laptops, but requiring them to buy (or lease or borrow) new machines, and not giving them the choice of which OS they can use, to me, crosses the line.
PS - How long until the first pics of some kid popping Mike & Ike's surface on the net?
The question is.. is this really progress? Minimalism is helped draw a lot of people to Google, taking that away gives one more reason to at least check out the competitors.
Bing is my primary search engine and I'm a huge fan of its background images, but there was something about Google's execution of the background image that just irked me. Whether it was the white Google lettering, the full screen image rather than just partial screen, or merely the fact that they were copying Microsoft, it seemed... off.
I guess my point is that the background images being bad for Google doesn't necessarily mean that they're bad for search engines, but just that this particular execution wasn't good.
Yes I can.
There are actually a lot of big names on this list. From Michael Bloomberg to Rahm Emanuel to the CEO's of many highly recognizable institutions, people will care.
How about if you forget to put an "Employee's Only" sign on the back room to your storefront? I think that analogy is more appropriate. Is it illegal for me to walk through that door?
It's not so much that they are controlling your thoughts, necessarily, but they have the capacity to do so. If they wanted to start shaping search results to give favorable views of one idea and unfavorable views of another, it would take some work to find out. Through that, they could subtly shape any debate that they wished, and they could do it so subtly that nobody would notice.
Concerning the general election, you're correct. However, Obama did have to overcome a quite significant deficit to defeat Hillary, helped in no small part by the significant fund raising that he achieved.
Besides, with the creation of synthetic genomes recently, wouldn't scientists just create a human or animal genome to splice with the other? If they were doing this they'd only be looking for a small section of a particular species genome to splice with a humans, so synthesizing it wouldn't be too difficult*. At that point, they are only inserting synthetic genes and, while they are violating the spirit of the law, I seriously doubt they would be violating the letter.
My next question is what happens when they find that they can use pig DNA or whale DNA to combat heart disease or AIDS? Are they going to repeal the law for life saving purposes or are they going to run scared and continue to suppress life-saving sciences because their concept of reality is distorted.
*Obviously, difficult is a relative term.
That is quite possibly the worst definition of theft I have ever heard. If I sell apples by the highway, and you come up and put a cart right next to mine, are you stealing from me? You are, after all, depriving me of future revenue by taking sales that would have otherwise been mine.
You just made me cry a little.
I'm not exactly sure where the doctrine lies, but I believe that the Catholic church believes something along those lines. The information I'm using comes from a pamphlet from 5-10 years ago, but basically it states this: If evolution is real, it is merely the process through which god created men and animals. This same pamphlet also stated that aliens may or may not exist, but if they do, then they were created by the same God that created humanity. The pamphlet argued that science is a tool given to man by God to be used to better ourselves and, outside of certain ethical issues, nothing about it is inherently at odds with the Catholic religion.