100% agree. Especially about the cinema thing - I have never in the past two years had anybody had their phone ring when I saw a movie. I have however had a bucnh of teenagers yell because they were brainless.
That's a good link but not very many photos, unfortunately. Not considering the tragedy itself, there is something eerily beautiful about abandoned, overgrown cities. I found it rather interesting how bad the condition of part of the city is (for example the stairs of the cultural ministry or whatever it was, totally falling apart). I mean, it hasn't even been fifteen years now and yet parts of this place really look like wilderness.
Well I don't think cloning is all that different from other ways of artificial reproduction/fertilization. It's just a lot more complicated, and right now results a very, very high risk of defomities/defects in the newly created offspring. Since the known risks are so high, it should not be used on humans, or on any kind of larger scale on animals.
Ah, but maybe that is exactly what's happening. It'd certainly explain a lot of shit that's been happening on our planet.;-)
Seriously though, there is probably not much to argue about. If nothing else, we ourselves have set the precedent that it is okay for a "higher" lifeform to experiment with a "lower" lifeform so we couldn't really complain. Of course we probably wouldn't even understand that we're being experimented with.
Maybe it's human arrogance, but I would say that we proved to be the "highest" life form on earth simply by conquering the world and setting up a technological civilization. We don't really have any other standard to measure such things by, so it's really a question for theologists and philosphers. And I'd really, really like the religious nuts to shut the hell up about pretty much any issue that concerns the real world.
No offense to any self-proclaimed religious or other kind of nut intended.
Well, call the fact that we value humans over other creatures 'specism' if you want. No creature deserves unnecessary cruel treatment; I am not going to go into philosophy over the issue. Common opinion though is that animals are pets or food at best, and vermin at worst. My personal "standard" is being self aware and having a certain level of intelligence. And yes I think it'd be quite okay to do this type of thing with human cells or small lumps thereof (just as I consider abortion okay within a certain time period). However, the cloned baby will - if we use the as yet cloned animals as an example - probably be born and live a while and then develop deformities, cancer, whatever you call it (I am system operator and not doctor, Jim). That is the cruel part.
I do not mind the procedure itself, I strongly object that it is being attempted on humans while it is showing such obvious problems in animals. That's the part that makes it look like the concentration camp medical experiments of the Nazis.
Once it actually works I do not see cloning as being that much different from any other kind of reproduction. It remains the question whether this is particularily healthy for the gene pool, but that is an entirely different matter.
I think there is no real legal loophole, cloning just isn't covered by most countries' laws because it's too new. Wouldn't call that a loophole. Still, this is hardly established procedure and has many known risks, so it really is human experimentation. Very nazi-esque.
And you are right, extremist groups of any cause are pretty much alike. No matter whether they're political, christian, jewish, cultish, or islamic.
Let's assume this is just PR by a cult sect. But still, it is worrying - that here we have people who are willing to perform what amounts to human experimentation *despite* the defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing this to a human being is in my eyes not any better than the medical experiments conducted by the Nazis.
We need to regulate this type of research and deal with rogue 'scientists' and 'doctors' who are willing to do such acts. Please note that I think an outright ban on human cloning is not a good idea, there is too much promise in the technology - just, we need to be very, very careful what we're doing with it.
I think you got the chicken-and-egg problem solved the wrong way. Remember the 60s to 80s? Post-nuclear apocalypse was all the rage, from Wasteland to Mad Max. Why? Because real life threatened the entire world with sudden thermonuclear destruction, and people used movies, books, and games to cope with the issue.
Then we hit the 80s and 90s and cyberpunk and dystopia are all the rage. Economic downturn, return to facist political systems, apathy, culture shock, corruption. Have you considered that this is what is really bothering people, scaring them, and they use the computer games to vent these fears, to deal with them in some way?
Well I guess there is a point to be seen in the "real" end, and I liked the end as it is... it just seemed too easy. Vash had a lot more problems in the episodes leading up to the end... the end then seemed to be like a five minute deal. I'd really expected something much more dramatic, much meaner, much more saddening etc.
Trigun is one of my favorite Anime shows, ever. So the end is a little anticlimatic, okay. But the build-up is awesome, the characters are great, and it has a wonderful mix between action, serious drama, and comedy/slapstick. Everybody should check this show out. But do not stop watching, the first few episodes are really pretty silly (in a good way in my eyes), the story unfolds later.
Advertisements for bake sales and carl marx.sig's are not for company email. If nothing else, it shows a grand lack of professional attitude.
As for the specific bake sale example: Send it to employees you know (say your department) and people might not care or even welcome the info. But if it's sent to all 30000 employees, then yes, it is spam, and in my eyes grounds for immediate termination of contract with such an employee.
Yes and no. For one thing, Bioware promised a client (on the CD, no less), so they have to deliver. And yes I am sure it's an investment in the future. However, I think there is one more reason why NWN gets ported to Linux while a hundred thousand other games don't. Bioware is, as far as companies go, very smart. They know their market. And I am sure they know that a sizeable share of Linux geeks are long-time RPG fanatics. Probably much more so than users of any other OS. What's more, Linux users tend to have a goodly amount of technology available. Specifically, this includes Servers that can - and will - be used to host games of NWN. And last but not least, many Linux users will know programming, making them the ideal module builders (NWN's scripting language is basically C as far as I have seen it).
So, by supporting Linux, Bioware probably hopes to increase the infrastructure and the community produced content available to the game by an unporoportionally large chunk. Yes, there are many, many solo players out there, but still the free add-ons are one big seller for NWN.
I added an entry to my weblog about them. Got 351 hits on that entry, and I am just a lowly unknown person. There was a lot of demand for info from ignorant and scared users. Interestingly, almost all of these hits were during a relatively short period of time, so I guess that the ad campaign mostly stopped (or there may be better-ranked sites explaining the problem).
Asking me questions is fine, unless I had a long day. Then I usually just tell people to ask me another day and that's fine by them. However, some people still expect me to fix everybody and their kid sister's systems. I used to cave easily to such requests, it being good karma and all. I mean it never hurts to have people owe you a favor, right?
Yeah, right. That is only as good as the people honoring it. Ask them something in return, and "uhm I am so busy right now". This gets even worse when they start telling you lies in order to have you come back for more help. Fake friends are always a very annoying thing, and it seems that tech talent attracts a lot of fake friends.
I only fix family's computer problems now, and maybe some very close friends. Everybody else will not get an offer of help from me anymore, and if they ask, i will give general advice at most. If they want my help, they better pay me - either in cold, hard cash or in some other way.
I mean, just because your aunt likes knitting, she isn't expected to make pullovers and socks for every dummy who comes along, right? So why should tech talent be any different?
The problem is that most people (a) take this free tech support for granted ("hey it's fun for you, after all"); (b) they only come to you for tech support and never for other stuff and (c) they never, ever return the kindness.
Yes, some people are not like that but the vast majority of the mundane world has a serious attitude problem called egoism.
Not in my book. I find this thing really great, the only problem being the seemingly low power supply. Here in Germany, Mercedes started to sell a card called a "smart" which is basically a tiny, light, cheap, two seat car. (Probably avilable internationally too, I am not an expert on cars.) First, everybody made jokes about them, but guess what - they sell! Why? They get people around, they are cheaper than normal cars, they need relatively little gas, and above all they are small and can park where normal cars do not have space.
Enter the segway. Yes, it's not for long distance travel and yet it's not for people who want to lug around a lot of stuff. But for those short-distance trips, it's perfect. Especially in the US - When I was in southern Maine, we would drive everywhere, even if it was just 5 minutes away, simply because there were no real sidewalks (and way too much car traffic for my poor safety-loving European mind).;-)
Also don't forget that a lot of people (especially the elderly) cannot walk well anymore, and while they still do not need a wheelchair, they are really not very mobile. Maybe a segway would be the perfect solution for them.
I do not see it replacing the car, mostly because you cannot transport anything with them that doesn't fit a backpack; but it might well take some load off of the roads and reduce some parking problems.
Okay sorry not to nit-pick but where are spy planes and atomic bomb programs "space fakes"? Those are military ones; NASA is a civilian program. Now I am not doubting that especially in the early days, when the lines were more blurred, there were some fakes, but to compare Gagarin bailing out with a fake moon landing? That is a really different sort of magnitude.
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100% agree. Especially about the cinema thing - I have never in the past two years had anybody had their phone ring when I saw a movie. I have however had a bucnh of teenagers yell because they were brainless.
That's a good link but not very many photos, unfortunately. Not considering the tragedy itself, there is something eerily beautiful about abandoned, overgrown cities. I found it rather interesting how bad the condition of part of the city is (for example the stairs of the cultural ministry or whatever it was, totally falling apart). I mean, it hasn't even been fifteen years now and yet parts of this place really look like wilderness.
I feel old now.
Well I don't think cloning is all that different from other ways of artificial reproduction/fertilization. It's just a lot more complicated, and right now results a very, very high risk of defomities/defects in the newly created offspring. Since the known risks are so high, it should not be used on humans, or on any kind of larger scale on animals.
Ah, but maybe that is exactly what's happening. It'd certainly explain a lot of shit that's been happening on our planet. ;-)
Seriously though, there is probably not much to argue about. If nothing else, we ourselves have set the precedent that it is okay for a "higher" lifeform to experiment with a "lower" lifeform so we couldn't really complain. Of course we probably wouldn't even understand that we're being experimented with.
Maybe it's human arrogance, but I would say that we proved to be the "highest" life form on earth simply by conquering the world and setting up a technological civilization. We don't really have any other standard to measure such things by, so it's really a question for theologists and philosphers. And I'd really, really like the religious nuts to shut the hell up about pretty much any issue that concerns the real world.
No offense to any self-proclaimed religious or other kind of nut intended.
Well, call the fact that we value humans over other creatures 'specism' if you want. No creature deserves unnecessary cruel treatment; I am not going to go into philosophy over the issue. Common opinion though is that animals are pets or food at best, and vermin at worst. My personal "standard" is being self aware and having a certain level of intelligence. And yes I think it'd be quite okay to do this type of thing with human cells or small lumps thereof (just as I consider abortion okay within a certain time period). However, the cloned baby will - if we use the as yet cloned animals as an example - probably be born and live a while and then develop deformities, cancer, whatever you call it (I am system operator and not doctor, Jim). That is the cruel part.
I do not mind the procedure itself, I strongly object that it is being attempted on humans while it is showing such obvious problems in animals. That's the part that makes it look like the concentration camp medical experiments of the Nazis.
Once it actually works I do not see cloning as being that much different from any other kind of reproduction. It remains the question whether this is particularily healthy for the gene pool, but that is an entirely different matter.
I think there is no real legal loophole, cloning just isn't covered by most countries' laws because it's too new. Wouldn't call that a loophole. Still, this is hardly established procedure and has many known risks, so it really is human experimentation. Very nazi-esque.
And you are right, extremist groups of any cause are pretty much alike. No matter whether they're political, christian, jewish, cultish, or islamic.
Let's assume this is just PR by a cult sect. But still, it is worrying - that here we have people who are willing to perform what amounts to human experimentation *despite* the defects shown in many of the cloned animals. Doing this to a human being is in my eyes not any better than the medical experiments conducted by the Nazis.
We need to regulate this type of research and deal with rogue 'scientists' and 'doctors' who are willing to do such acts. Please note that I think an outright ban on human cloning is not a good idea, there is too much promise in the technology - just, we need to be very, very careful what we're doing with it.
Maybe that's why we cut back the space programme...they're afraid the hoax will be uncovered ;-)
I think you got the chicken-and-egg problem solved the wrong way. Remember the 60s to 80s? Post-nuclear apocalypse was all the rage, from Wasteland to Mad Max. Why? Because real life threatened the entire world with sudden thermonuclear destruction, and people used movies, books, and games to cope with the issue.
Then we hit the 80s and 90s and cyberpunk and dystopia are all the rage. Economic downturn, return to facist political systems, apathy, culture shock, corruption. Have you considered that this is what is really bothering people, scaring them, and they use the computer games to vent these fears, to deal with them in some way?
Well I guess there is a point to be seen in the "real" end, and I liked the end as it is... it just seemed too easy. Vash had a lot more problems in the episodes leading up to the end... the end then seemed to be like a five minute deal. I'd really expected something much more dramatic, much meaner, much more saddening etc.
As I said, anticlimatic... not necessarily bad.
Trigun is one of my favorite Anime shows, ever. So the end is a little anticlimatic, okay. But the build-up is awesome, the characters are great, and it has a wonderful mix between action, serious drama, and comedy/slapstick. Everybody should check this show out. But do not stop watching, the first few episodes are really pretty silly (in a good way in my eyes), the story unfolds later.
Advertisements for bake sales and carl marx .sig's are not for company email. If nothing else, it shows a grand lack of professional attitude.
As for the specific bake sale example: Send it to employees you know (say your department) and people might not care or even welcome the info. But if it's sent to all 30000 employees, then yes, it is spam, and in my eyes grounds for immediate termination of contract with such an employee.
Yes and no. For one thing, Bioware promised a client (on the CD, no less), so they have to deliver. And yes I am sure it's an investment in the future. However, I think there is one more reason why NWN gets ported to Linux while a hundred thousand other games don't. Bioware is, as far as companies go, very smart. They know their market. And I am sure they know that a sizeable share of Linux geeks are long-time RPG fanatics. Probably much more so than users of any other OS. What's more, Linux users tend to have a goodly amount of technology available. Specifically, this includes Servers that can - and will - be used to host games of NWN. And last but not least, many Linux users will know programming, making them the ideal module builders (NWN's scripting language is basically C as far as I have seen it).
So, by supporting Linux, Bioware probably hopes to increase the infrastructure and the community produced content available to the game by an unporoportionally large chunk. Yes, there are many, many solo players out there, but still the free add-ons are one big seller for NWN.
I second your hopes here.
I added an entry to my weblog about them. Got 351 hits on that entry, and I am just a lowly unknown person. There was a lot of demand for info from ignorant and scared users. Interestingly, almost all of these hits were during a relatively short period of time, so I guess that the ad campaign mostly stopped (or there may be better-ranked sites explaining the problem).
Asking me questions is fine, unless I had a long day. Then I usually just tell people to ask me another day and that's fine by them. However, some people still expect me to fix everybody and their kid sister's systems. I used to cave easily to such requests, it being good karma and all. I mean it never hurts to have people owe you a favor, right?
Yeah, right. That is only as good as the people honoring it. Ask them something in return, and "uhm I am so busy right now". This gets even worse when they start telling you lies in order to have you come back for more help. Fake friends are always a very annoying thing, and it seems that tech talent attracts a lot of fake friends.
I only fix family's computer problems now, and maybe some very close friends. Everybody else will not get an offer of help from me anymore, and if they ask, i will give general advice at most. If they want my help, they better pay me - either in cold, hard cash or in some other way.
I mean, just because your aunt likes knitting, she isn't expected to make pullovers and socks for every dummy who comes along, right? So why should tech talent be any different?
The problem is that most people (a) take this free tech support for granted ("hey it's fun for you, after all"); (b) they only come to you for tech support and never for other stuff and (c) they never, ever return the kindness.
Yes, some people are not like that but the vast majority of the mundane world has a serious attitude problem called egoism.
Not in my book. I find this thing really great, the only problem being the seemingly low power supply. Here in Germany, Mercedes started to sell a card called a "smart" which is basically a tiny, light, cheap, two seat car. (Probably avilable internationally too, I am not an expert on cars.) First, everybody made jokes about them, but guess what - they sell! Why? They get people around, they are cheaper than normal cars, they need relatively little gas, and above all they are small and can park where normal cars do not have space.
;-)
Enter the segway. Yes, it's not for long distance travel and yet it's not for people who want to lug around a lot of stuff. But for those short-distance trips, it's perfect. Especially in the US - When I was in southern Maine, we would drive everywhere, even if it was just 5 minutes away, simply because there were no real sidewalks (and way too much car traffic for my poor safety-loving European mind).
Also don't forget that a lot of people (especially the elderly) cannot walk well anymore, and while they still do not need a wheelchair, they are really not very mobile. Maybe a segway would be the perfect solution for them.
I do not see it replacing the car, mostly because you cannot transport anything with them that doesn't fit a backpack; but it might well take some load off of the roads and reduce some parking problems.
There is no Class B. It's called a /16.
In fact, that is exactly what will happen, as copyright gets extended every couple of years.
I assume that the success itself is worth far more.
Well on the other hand the guiness book of records does check the records.
Question is, of course, whether he really carries all that junk, all the time.
...because of this whole war they are waging on their customers.
Do you?
Okay sorry not to nit-pick but where are spy planes and atomic bomb programs "space fakes"? Those are military ones; NASA is a civilian program. Now I am not doubting that especially in the early days, when the lines were more blurred, there were some fakes, but to compare Gagarin bailing out with a fake moon landing? That is a really different sort of magnitude.
Whoever wants the leaked beta will get it anyway. At least this way, slashdot can overload their servers. ;-)