The article is full of bad examples, and misses many much better ones. It's also chock full of bad grammar and incorrect word usage. Just awful. I've read high school papers that put this to shame.
If the author doesn't speak English as his/her primary language then I'll cut them some slack, but I've read Slashdot comments that were better written than this!
Wait. Are you seriously claiming that the intention of "the scientific community"- their purpose- is not to better understand the universe, but rather to find an excuse to be immoral and unaccountable? Is the patent absurdity of your claim not obvious to you?
A few things to bear in mind. A) Scientists are a contentious lot, and getting them to all secretly conspire for the sole purpose of moral unaccountability is fodder for very, very bad fiction. B) Many scientists are religious. Even some evolutionary biologists. C) If you look at crime statistics the correlation between religiosity and ethics is inverse. Atheists are far less likely to be criminals than religious people are.
Your statement speaks more to the woeful state of science education in the US than to the correctness of either particular stance.
I was originally going to challenge your statement and ask you to provide some facts to back it up, but the more I think about it the more I agree with you. Evolution is science, and science isn't always simple and intuitive. It's harder to convey in a single sentence (although "Evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." works nicely), and requires a bit of thought on the part of the listener/reader to fully grasp.
Creationism is the easy way out. "God made everything pretty much as it is, and God has always existed." Very simple to convey. Very easy to grasp. Very much completely at odds with all of the evidence if one is willing to study, investigate, and think, as opposed to just accepting whatever Kent Hovind and his ilk spew because it sounds good.
The mapping from sociology to evolution is obviously a poor one, but it serves to illustrate a point: Academic study may self-select people who agree with ideas in that field, because people who do not agree with these ideas are unlikely to enter the field.
Very interesting point and, ironically, spoken like a sociologist.;-)
I also find the dock very irritating; on a small screen, the fixed menu and dock make a wide screen even shorter
Out of curiosity, were you leaving it at the bottom of the screen? If so then I completely see where you're coming from, but there's a very easy solution- move the Dock to the left edge of the screen.
I love OS X and am actually pretty fond of the Dock, but for the life of me I can't figure out why Apple uses such a horrible default configuration. Out of the box your complaints are dead on- it uses up too much screen real estate in a terrible location. When I sit down at a new machine, the first things I do are move the Dock to the left side, make it smaller, and add shortcuts to the Applications and Utilities folders to it. It requires just a bit of window adjustment the first time you launch an app after making the changes, but afterward the app remembers your preferred window configuration.
My primary machine is a 12" PowerBook, so I'm all about conserving space. I also frequently plug it it into a large external monitor, and have it configured to have the menu bar appear on the external monitor, which solves the "where is my menu?" problem for me. YMMV.
By that logic, my Cybrex360 system is positively crushing the competition! By not expending any resources developing it my R&D costs are orders of magnitude below those of the Wii, PS3, or 360. By not selling it I've dropped my manufacturing costs to a level that the other guys can't touch!
Heck! I haven't even released any product at all and I've already broken even! Anything I make off of it now is pure profit!
I'm in a similar situation. My first non-used Mac was one of the orginal 12" PowerBooks, purchased less than a month after the 12" line came out, and it created in me a love that borders on unnatural. I'd used a 15" TiBook extensively, but this was a completely different thing, and I realized that I'll never use a laptop larger than 12" as my primary machine again. I'm completely hooked on the size.
Despite its modest performance it was my constant companion until the day I found out that Apple was abandoning the 12" form factor in their transition to Intel processors. At that point I ordered a new 12" PB will all the specs (memory, CPU, hard drive) maxed out, cloned my old machine over to the new one, and continued. (I've since upgraded the hard drive further myself.) I expected to have to wait a long time before another acceptably small Mac laptop would be available, so I got the top of the line to carry me through.
I want a faster Mac. I want more memory, higher LCD resolution, a backlit keyboard, and the ability to run Parallels or Boot Camp. I'd be willing to pay an absurd amount for these features (are you hearing me, Steve?), but I absolutely will not take a size trade-off. Not even a marginal one. 13" MacBook? Nope. Too big. I'll stick with my G4, thanks.
I hope that this rumor is true, because Apple has gotten me hooked on the ultra-portability of this form factor and no additional bells and whistles are going to convince me to "upgrade" to a larger machine.
Didn't you hear? US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has decided that since Asimov's three laws aren't explicitly spelled out in the Constitution we have no right to protection under them.
Native people? Aren't we all native to somewhere? I currently live in the same country in which I was born, but I don't feel that gives me any particular insight into how folks should live their lives.
and from people from the Far East.
Sir, are you implying that the people in the "Far East" are pacifists who do not engage in war? If so, I strongly suggest that you put down the Yellow Bamboo videos and learn some history. Southeast Asia has some of the richest and most fascinating (and bloodiest) military history in the world. If I were Chinese I would honestly be offended by your remark.
I see the point you're trying to make, and clearly resolving a conflict equitably by non-violent means is preferable to waging war. It's been said that war is the failure of diplomacy, and there's some truth to that. However, the unfortunate fact is that the pursuit of a life of "peace of mind & give joy" doesn't scale up to international relations. Any nation that values non-violence over its own defense *will* be crushed. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." -- John Stuart Mill
I have to disagree with you on one point, but only ever so slightly. IMHO, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is not only the best of the series, but the finest example of the fighting game genre as a whole. It was innovative, graphically pleasing, and had a surprisingly interesting plot (well, for a beat-em-up, anyway). Even games that have come after it have been disappointing to me.
Okay, maybe it's just because I've got the hots for Frost...;-)
To each his own of course, but in my experience I have to differ with you. The GC controller is acceptable (I'm hooked on Metroid Prime right now, having never even glanced at the GC's library prior to getting a Wii), but the Virtual Console games I'm finding that the classic controller is well worth the $. I have small-ish hands, and it fits perfectly and has a familiar button layout (I'm still adjusting to the GC controller). Additionally, for some VC games like R-Type III the classic controller is required.
I guess I'm lucky in that in my area the CC is almost as plentiful as the GC controller. Of course, finding the Wiimote is like looking for a unicorn. It goes without saying that I'm envious of your success in finding controllers.:-)
That's a neat idea, but in the absence of definitive data I'm going with the more conservative estimate. I've got a classic controller, and in the games I've played with it it simply replicates buttons that are already on the wiimote/nunchuk. However, I suppose that if a game could be played with one player on the wiimote and another on the nunchuk then in that case you'd be right.
So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.
Funny you should mention this. I'm a big Dreamcast fan and recently the very happy owner of a Wii, and for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on the two systems remind me of each other.
The white case and Japanese UI aesthetic are obvious factors, but I think it goes beyond that. Neither system has the most powerful processor, but both are overflowing with creative engineering that goes beyond mere novelty, both are ideally suited to party play (IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers, and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8), both are IMHO the most fun consoles of their generation.
I fondly remember having absurd amounts of fun playing Bomberman with 4 players on the DC. It naturally follows that the first Virtual Console game I pulled down for the Wii was Bomberman '93.
I've never understood why the Dreamcast wasn't a runaway success, and the whole sad saga was like living in Bizzaro world where the better system is forgotten by the world. At the risk of sounding 'woo-woo', the Wii feels like the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, and seeing the more innovative system finally getting the popularity it deserves this time around takes a lot of the bitterness off of the DC's ignominious end.
If they ever come out with Chu Chu Rocket for the Wii then all will truly be right with the world.:-)
There's nothing magical about clinical death, and as long as you are preserved well enough that your original synaptic structures can be extrapolated then reviving you, while a difficult technical challenge, is certainly within the laws of physics. Electron micrographs indicate that under good circumstances current cryosuspension techniques preserve synaptic structures quite well.
Cryonics is certainly not a guaranteed thing (unlike your fate with burial or cremation), but the "once you're dead you're dead" argument doesn't actually have much technical merit outside of the framework of current technology.
While the cost of maintaining patients in cryostatis is minimal, at some point it becomes more cost effective to revive them than to leave them as is in perpetuity.
Aside from that, there'll be a significant publicity value associated with the first few revivals. After it becomes clear that people *can* be revived, the idea of just leaving the rest in stasis becomes ethically questionable.
I'm wearing a DMS of sorts right now. It's a bracelet that contains post-mortem instructions to chill my body to 10 C, do CPR, push an anticoagulant, and the 800# of the cryonics company with which I'm signed up.
Of course, the most important single word on the bracelet is "REWARD".:-)
I've also made sure that my wife (who is in the process of signing up) and my friends (some of whom are also signed up) are on board with this, and willing to go to bat for me if the coroner decides to get uppity.
It thrills me more than it probably should just to see that question posted, 22 or so years after the movie came out, and see so many people quickly respond. BB has been in my top 10 all-time favorite movies since I saw it in the theater as a kid, and I'm delighted to see that it still has a strong following.
BTiLC is a fantastic movie and shares much of the same charm that makes BB special, but as others have mentioned the claim that Big Trouble was intended to be the sequel is incorrect.
Incidentally, if you can still find the Ernie Cline script for the sequel anywhere it's definitely worth a read. I was lucky enough to download a copy many years ago before it got pulled from his site, and it would make for a damn fine movie.
Additionally, the watermelons are engineered to be nutritionally complete.
Now, if you want the other reason why it was there, watch the DVD with the commentary track. There was a lot of conflict going on over the movie, and they threw it in to see if the studio was even bothering to watch the dailies anymore. It turned out that they weren't.:-)
I have a "Happy Music" playlist on my iPod that I listen to once or twice a week. That song is on it, which means that I probably haven't gone more than 4 days without hearing it in about 2 years. All of Michael Boddicker's music is fantastic and well ahead of its time, but the opening and closing themes are really something special.
I just got my Wii last night, and was up until almost 2:30 this morning playing around with it. I didn't go to bed until I'd played Wii Sports, updated the software, downloaded/played Bomberman '93, and checked out every feature the Wii had to offer.
I woke up bleary-eyed this morning, stumbled through the living room, and saw the light. Being the kind of geek who actually reads manuals, I knew what it was and fired the machine right back up to see what was new. I played with the Weather Forecast Channel, then since the remote was already in my had did a few rounds of boxing and tennis before starting to get ready for work.
I didn't get to work until 11:30, and have spent most of the day reading Wii stuff online. I am *not* productive today!
Slashdot Mirror
The article is full of bad examples, and misses many much better ones. It's also chock full of bad grammar and incorrect word usage. Just awful. I've read high school papers that put this to shame.
If the author doesn't speak English as his/her primary language then I'll cut them some slack, but I've read Slashdot comments that were better written than this!
Wait. Are you seriously claiming that the intention of "the scientific community"- their purpose- is not to better understand the universe, but rather to find an excuse to be immoral and unaccountable? Is the patent absurdity of your claim not obvious to you?
A few things to bear in mind. A) Scientists are a contentious lot, and getting them to all secretly conspire for the sole purpose of moral unaccountability is fodder for very, very bad fiction. B) Many scientists are religious. Even some evolutionary biologists. C) If you look at crime statistics the correlation between religiosity and ethics is inverse. Atheists are far less likely to be criminals than religious people are.
Your statement speaks more to the woeful state of science education in the US than to the correctness of either particular stance.
I was originally going to challenge your statement and ask you to provide some facts to back it up, but the more I think about it the more I agree with you. Evolution is science, and science isn't always simple and intuitive. It's harder to convey in a single sentence (although "Evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." works nicely), and requires a bit of thought on the part of the listener/reader to fully grasp.
Creationism is the easy way out. "God made everything pretty much as it is, and God has always existed." Very simple to convey. Very easy to grasp. Very much completely at odds with all of the evidence if one is willing to study, investigate, and think, as opposed to just accepting whatever Kent Hovind and his ilk spew because it sounds good.
The mapping from sociology to evolution is obviously a poor one, but it serves to illustrate a point: Academic study may self-select people who agree with ideas in that field, because people who do not agree with these ideas are unlikely to enter the field.
;-)
Very interesting point and, ironically, spoken like a sociologist.
I also find the dock very irritating; on a small screen, the fixed menu and dock make a wide screen even shorter
Out of curiosity, were you leaving it at the bottom of the screen? If so then I completely see where you're coming from, but there's a very easy solution- move the Dock to the left edge of the screen.
I love OS X and am actually pretty fond of the Dock, but for the life of me I can't figure out why Apple uses such a horrible default configuration. Out of the box your complaints are dead on- it uses up too much screen real estate in a terrible location. When I sit down at a new machine, the first things I do are move the Dock to the left side, make it smaller, and add shortcuts to the Applications and Utilities folders to it. It requires just a bit of window adjustment the first time you launch an app after making the changes, but afterward the app remembers your preferred window configuration.
My primary machine is a 12" PowerBook, so I'm all about conserving space. I also frequently plug it it into a large external monitor, and have it configured to have the menu bar appear on the external monitor, which solves the "where is my menu?" problem for me. YMMV.
Cheers!
By that logic, my Cybrex360 system is positively crushing the competition! By not expending any resources developing it my R&D costs are orders of magnitude below those of the Wii, PS3, or 360. By not selling it I've dropped my manufacturing costs to a level that the other guys can't touch!
Heck! I haven't even released any product at all and I've already broken even! Anything I make off of it now is pure profit!
Worth looking into! Thanks for the tip!
I'm in a similar situation. My first non-used Mac was one of the orginal 12" PowerBooks, purchased less than a month after the 12" line came out, and it created in me a love that borders on unnatural. I'd used a 15" TiBook extensively, but this was a completely different thing, and I realized that I'll never use a laptop larger than 12" as my primary machine again. I'm completely hooked on the size.
Despite its modest performance it was my constant companion until the day I found out that Apple was abandoning the 12" form factor in their transition to Intel processors. At that point I ordered a new 12" PB will all the specs (memory, CPU, hard drive) maxed out, cloned my old machine over to the new one, and continued. (I've since upgraded the hard drive further myself.) I expected to have to wait a long time before another acceptably small Mac laptop would be available, so I got the top of the line to carry me through.
I want a faster Mac. I want more memory, higher LCD resolution, a backlit keyboard, and the ability to run Parallels or Boot Camp. I'd be willing to pay an absurd amount for these features (are you hearing me, Steve?), but I absolutely will not take a size trade-off. Not even a marginal one. 13" MacBook? Nope. Too big. I'll stick with my G4, thanks.
I hope that this rumor is true, because Apple has gotten me hooked on the ultra-portability of this form factor and no additional bells and whistles are going to convince me to "upgrade" to a larger machine.
A successful ME boot *would* be cause for celebration... if it ever actually happened. ;-)
So that I'm not accused of exaggerating, my definition of "successful" in this case would include no error messages to click through during boot.
Didn't you hear? US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has decided that since Asimov's three laws aren't explicitly spelled out in the Constitution we have no right to protection under them.
Why not learn more from native people
Native people? Aren't we all native to somewhere? I currently live in the same country in which I was born, but I don't feel that gives me any particular insight into how folks should live their lives.
and from people from the Far East.
Sir, are you implying that the people in the "Far East" are pacifists who do not engage in war? If so, I strongly suggest that you put down the Yellow Bamboo videos and learn some history. Southeast Asia has some of the richest and most fascinating (and bloodiest) military history in the world. If I were Chinese I would honestly be offended by your remark.
I see the point you're trying to make, and clearly resolving a conflict equitably by non-violent means is preferable to waging war. It's been said that war is the failure of diplomacy, and there's some truth to that. However, the unfortunate fact is that the pursuit of a life of "peace of mind & give joy" doesn't scale up to international relations. Any nation that values non-violence over its own defense *will* be crushed. I wish it weren't so, but it is.
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-- John Stuart Mill
I have to disagree with you on one point, but only ever so slightly. IMHO, Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance is not only the best of the series, but the finest example of the fighting game genre as a whole. It was innovative, graphically pleasing, and had a surprisingly interesting plot (well, for a beat-em-up, anyway). Even games that have come after it have been disappointing to me.
;-)
Okay, maybe it's just because I've got the hots for Frost...
To each his own of course, but in my experience I have to differ with you. The GC controller is acceptable (I'm hooked on Metroid Prime right now, having never even glanced at the GC's library prior to getting a Wii), but the Virtual Console games I'm finding that the classic controller is well worth the $. I have small-ish hands, and it fits perfectly and has a familiar button layout (I'm still adjusting to the GC controller). Additionally, for some VC games like R-Type III the classic controller is required.
:-)
I guess I'm lucky in that in my area the CC is almost as plentiful as the GC controller. Of course, finding the Wiimote is like looking for a unicorn. It goes without saying that I'm envious of your success in finding controllers.
Amateur. I own it on VHS and DVD! And have watched it within the last 3 months! (Just please don't tell my wife!)
;-)
Crash & burn!
That's a neat idea, but in the absence of definitive data I'm going with the more conservative estimate. I've got a classic controller, and in the games I've played with it it simply replicates buttons that are already on the wiimote/nunchuk. However, I suppose that if a game could be played with one player on the wiimote and another on the nunchuk then in that case you'd be right.
So far the only thing that looks like it has a chance of displacing it is the Wii.
:-)
Funny you should mention this. I'm a big Dreamcast fan and recently the very happy owner of a Wii, and for reasons that I can't quite put my finger on the two systems remind me of each other.
The white case and Japanese UI aesthetic are obvious factors, but I think it goes beyond that. Neither system has the most powerful processor, but both are overflowing with creative engineering that goes beyond mere novelty, both are ideally suited to party play (IIRC the DC was the only system of its generation that easily supported 4 controllers, and for virtual console games the Wii could in theory support up to 8), both are IMHO the most fun consoles of their generation.
I fondly remember having absurd amounts of fun playing Bomberman with 4 players on the DC. It naturally follows that the first Virtual Console game I pulled down for the Wii was Bomberman '93.
I've never understood why the Dreamcast wasn't a runaway success, and the whole sad saga was like living in Bizzaro world where the better system is forgotten by the world. At the risk of sounding 'woo-woo', the Wii feels like the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, and seeing the more innovative system finally getting the popularity it deserves this time around takes a lot of the bitterness off of the DC's ignominious end.
If they ever come out with Chu Chu Rocket for the Wii then all will truly be right with the world.
That sounds just like my boss! Great! I'll feel right at home in the dehumanized, humans-are-merely-physical-resources future! :-)
There's nothing magical about clinical death, and as long as you are preserved well enough that your original synaptic structures can be extrapolated then reviving you, while a difficult technical challenge, is certainly within the laws of physics. Electron micrographs indicate that under good circumstances current cryosuspension techniques preserve synaptic structures quite well.
Cryonics is certainly not a guaranteed thing (unlike your fate with burial or cremation), but the "once you're dead you're dead" argument doesn't actually have much technical merit outside of the framework of current technology.
While the cost of maintaining patients in cryostatis is minimal, at some point it becomes more cost effective to revive them than to leave them as is in perpetuity.
Aside from that, there'll be a significant publicity value associated with the first few revivals. After it becomes clear that people *can* be revived, the idea of just leaving the rest in stasis becomes ethically questionable.
I'm wearing a DMS of sorts right now. It's a bracelet that contains post-mortem instructions to chill my body to 10 C, do CPR, push an anticoagulant, and the 800# of the cryonics company with which I'm signed up.
:-)
Of course, the most important single word on the bracelet is "REWARD".
I've also made sure that my wife (who is in the process of signing up) and my friends (some of whom are also signed up) are on board with this, and willing to go to bat for me if the coroner decides to get uppity.
It thrills me more than it probably should just to see that question posted, 22 or so years after the movie came out, and see so many people quickly respond. BB has been in my top 10 all-time favorite movies since I saw it in the theater as a kid, and I'm delighted to see that it still has a strong following.
BTiLC is a fantastic movie and shares much of the same charm that makes BB special, but as others have mentioned the claim that Big Trouble was intended to be the sequel is incorrect.
Incidentally, if you can still find the Ernie Cline script for the sequel anywhere it's definitely worth a read. I was lucky enough to download a copy many years ago before it got pulled from his site, and it would make for a damn fine movie.
Additionally, the watermelons are engineered to be nutritionally complete.
:-)
Now, if you want the other reason why it was there, watch the DVD with the commentary track. There was a lot of conflict going on over the movie, and they threw it in to see if the studio was even bothering to watch the dailies anymore. It turned out that they weren't.
I have a "Happy Music" playlist on my iPod that I listen to once or twice a week. That song is on it, which means that I probably haven't gone more than 4 days without hearing it in about 2 years. All of Michael Boddicker's music is fantastic and well ahead of its time, but the opening and closing themes are really something special.
I just got my Wii last night, and was up until almost 2:30 this morning playing around with it. I didn't go to bed until I'd played Wii Sports, updated the software, downloaded/played Bomberman '93, and checked out every feature the Wii had to offer.
I woke up bleary-eyed this morning, stumbled through the living room, and saw the light. Being the kind of geek who actually reads manuals, I knew what it was and fired the machine right back up to see what was new. I played with the Weather Forecast Channel, then since the remote was already in my had did a few rounds of boxing and tennis before starting to get ready for work.
I didn't get to work until 11:30, and have spent most of the day reading Wii stuff online. I am *not* productive today!