Some people's beliefs do not include a requirement to go to Church every week.
In the United States, many "Evangelicals" (not a name for a denomination, but rather a collection of protestant believers with a set of beliefs similar to Southern Baptists) attend Bible study groups on a semi-regular basis, but seldom bother with Sunday morning services. They take their faith seriously, but they see their religious as a deeply personal thing, rather than a collection of weekly rites or an organizing force of their social lives.
I believe I'm the King of San Francisco. Does that make it true?
No, but we can narrow the truth down to a few possibilities:
1. You believe you are the King of San Francisco when you are not. This would make you a complete nut.
2. You don't really believe you are the King of San Francisco, but said so anyway. This would make you a liar, or at the very least, you were only kidding.
3. You actually are the King of San Francisco.
Jesus claimed to be God. If he's not God, then he was completely insane for saying so, unless he was deliberately lying about something as important as messianic prophesy to an oppressed people, making him one of the scummiest liars in history.
So, which is it? Lord, Lunatic, or Liar?
(Disclaimer: While C.S. Lewis made a lot of hay in his time with this argument, there is one area of wiggle-room for the agnostic which he left out, which is the idea that Jesus never made such a claim, and the written record which says so, the Bible, is incorrect for one reason or another. Like Knuth, I believe in God, but I've long since abandoned the idea that my belief could ever be justified by pure logic to the satisfaction of an objective non-believer.)
Please don't forget we're all boycotting the evil media companies.
Speak for yourself, loser. Personally, I try to go to films twice if the media company who makes it is evil, simply to off-set the impact of your boycott.
Back on topic:
Wallace and Grommit never did much for me, but "Chicken Run" was such a hilarious movie that I'm willing to give it another chance when the new film comes out.
I'm not even going to try to produce a come-back from that one. That was hilarious.:)
(FWIW: Got to act 3 more often than not in those days, but seldom reach act 2 anymore when I try to play it on those game-in-the-joystick TV consoles these days. I guess my reflexes are abandoning me in my old age.)
If you buy it at the beginning of the life cycle, you have a longer time before it's obsolete
On the other hand, if you buy in the middle or near the end of a life cycle, you are likely to get a "Rev 2" or "Rev 3" version of the product. Some of us think it's worth buying something which "should have" enjoyed a price reduction by now, because we can get something which we know will be fairly solid.
Ordering on opening day gets you that sexy new tech when it's all shiny and new, but it also means that there are probably a few glitches which won't be discovered until the early adopters like you get a chance to use and abuse them for a few months.
This is the case with nearly all new electronics these days, not just Apple.
I made an exception when I ordered a new Mac mini on announcement day, but in most cases my rule is, "the sadder but wiser girl for me."
This is mainly because one of the first things Jobs did when he took over the company was shorten the inventory chain to make sure that there were precious few macs sitting on Apple-owned shelves.
When a new model is about to be released, they simply stop manufacturing the old one, and in a matter of days the old one is completely out of stock.
There have even been several occastions when Apple has run out of a specific model of laptop a week or two before its replacement was introduced.
Having vast stockpiles of inventory lying around is one of the things which was killing their profits back in the Dark Ages between Jobs regimes.
Not only was there no serial port and no SCSI port, but there were no PCI slots in the iMac.
This meant that USB was pretty much the only way to add hardware of any sort to an iMac.
This did far more to create a market for USB devices than improved Windows drivers on the PC side.
Prior to the arrival of the iMac, most peripheral makers tended to ask "why go with USB when we can make a PCI card, serial device, or PS/2 device which can be used by a much broader base of PC owners?"
You might try to remind me of that, but it's incorrect. I still have a Toshiba Infinia with USB ports that predates the earliest iMacs.
Yes you did, but you had almost nothing to plug into it.
When the iMac came out, the USB port was the only serial port of any kind. There was no RS-232, no RS-485, no ADB, no nothing. Just two USB ports. The keyboard had a two-port USB hub built into it as well.
This created an instant demand of USB devices. Suddenly companies like Belkin decided that making USB devices was worth the trouble, because there was a whole market of tens of thousands of new computers which could use no other hardware format.
Good communication is two-way. You whine about making yourself clear, but nowhere mention actually listening. You seem to be the all too common type of whiner with no other skills. All talk.
Sorry, what was that? My attention was on somebody more important.
Another perspective
on
Got Game
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Speaking as somebody who has played a wide assortment of computer games since the days of the Atari 2600 and Vic20, I would just like to point out that this has got to be the dumbest goddamned book to have come out in the last ten years.
Do you want to know what's useful in the workforce? Communication skills.
Learn to make yourself clear, in both written and spoken interactions with others, and stop praying that your high score on Ms. Pac Man will someday look good on your resume, because it won't.
People would complain less often if the phones were better at being phones before all the engineering effort went into adding silly toys to them.
My current phone is from Motorola. It folds into a small enough size to fit in a front jeans pocket (an important requirement), and pretty good battery life (another)... but has a lot of features I didn't care about (a crappy camera, a color screen, web browsing, text messaging, etc. etc. etc.)
The color screen wallpaper did default to a lovely photo of T-Moble spokesmodel Katherine Zeta Jones, so I guess that's a plus.
But here's the thing: It sounds like crap. Also, if I were to drop it from any higher than about 5 feet, I'm pretty sure it would shatter into a stunning array of little multi-colored pieces.
I would gladly trade all of the funky features, even the picture of Ms. Jones, for a phone of the same size which could withstand falling out of a car window on the highway and produce a signal which sounds at least as good as what you get from a quality land-line phone.
You articulated my point even better than I did. Were it in my power to shave a few mod points off my original post and put them on yours, I would. Well done.
1. Do you do activity X to an excess (with whatever definition of excess applies to that activity)?
That can not be established until a definition of excess is agreed upon. To many people, going out drinking once a week and having two beers is excessive. To many others, having a glass of wine with dinner beginning at age 7, and "having a few" a couple times a week with friends as an adult, is quite moderate.
2. Could you stop doing activity X if you wanted to?
That question can not be answered if the subject does not want to stop.
3. Has doing activity X prevented you from fulfilling major obligations, such as job, family, etc.
People fail to fulfill major obligations for many reasons, and that doesn't make them addictions.
Have you ever heard the term "hunting widow"? It's commonly used here in the midwest to refer to women who are married to men who spend the vast majority of the hunting season out in duck blinds and deer stands, completely neglecting their marital obligations. Are these hard-core hunters addicts, or merely choosing to do something they enjoy over something they "should" be doing?
The problem with many of these definitions of "addiction" is that they were created by people who are in the business of selling addiction treatment. They have a vested interest in defining it as broadly as possible, because that gives them the largest possible customer base.
the research did not indicate that one to two drinks a day was a healthy practice, but that the people who did drink like that were healthier than those that didn't
If it rationalizes my booze-hound ways, I'm taking the correlation to show causality.:)
If the drinking itself is not the main factor, then one could postulate that "being a puritanical busibody who cares about how much other people drink" might result in a shorter and less healthy life.
It so happens that my father is a licensed phsychologist. He once told me that he spends the vast majority of his clinical time takeing people off anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs which were prescribed by general practitioners.
The vast majority of the people on Vallium, Paxil, Prozac, or Ritilan are people who probably should not be on anything, and in many cases these drugs are a hinderance to ideal mental health.
Unfortunately, you don't need to be a specially trained phsychiatrist to prescribe this stuff, and any medical doctor who perceives you as "depressed" or exibiting a behavior where he recently read that drug X "has had some success at treating the problem" during his 7-minute visit which included a physical can load you up on all kinds of Happy Pills.
This is where I have a problem with all the puritanical crap out there.
According to medical research, one or two pints of beer (or glasses of red wine) per night is a healthy practice, reducing the chances of heart disease and alzeimer's while reducing stress.
According to AA, two or three pints a night means you are an alcoholic.
There's an overlap here, which means either 1) One side or the other is full of crap, or 2) Mild alcoholism is good for you.
In either case, I enjoy beer or wine with my dinner on a regular basis, and if that makes me a drunkard then so be it.
Lots of people spend 20-30 hours or more a week watching TV, and most of society considers this to be perfectly normal.
During softball season, I spend close to 10 hours a week either playing games or practicing fastpitch softball, and I'm considered a very "casual" player in my league. Some people spend more time playing softball than they spend at their jobs.
In High School, I knew a guy who spent almost every evening and every weekend hacking and wardialing for hours on end. These days, he's gainfully employed in the IT field.
"Does something a lot" != "Addicted"
The only thing which makes a person who spends 30 hours a week playing a game different from most people is that their chosen form of recreation happens to be a fringe activity. They are not hurting anybody, so I say leave them the hell alone.
Furthermore, can we get past this stupid habbit of calling every apparant obsessive/compulsive behavior an "addiction?" It's not as if these people are going to go through withdrawl symptoms if they are deprived of their gaming "fix" for a couple weeks.
The problem with that system is that you end up with strong fighters who are almost always complete idiots, clever wizards who can't lift their familiars of the ground without a system of pullies, and rogues who either build around a charisma of 18 (for deception skills) or 6 (because they don't care about what others think of them.)
The whole idea of rolling multiple dice was to generate a "bell curve" distribution, so any ability over 15 was considered rare and exceptional. Over time, ability generation systems have become considerably more "munchkin friendly."
Pork doesn't keep very well in hot Israeli climates. Also, salting meat (to remove blood) helps preserve it.
Furthermore, pigs spread disease. The flu, for example, usually evolves in bird populations, but usually can't be transmitted from birds to humans. It can, however, be passed from birds to pigs, and then a pig with a flu virus can pass it to humans.
So, if there were no pig farming, we probably would not need to bother with flu shots every year.
(For the record: I'm not Jewish, just interested in the history of Hebrew law. It is one of the half-dozen-or-so oldest sets of laws we have on record, after all.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can do a lot of cool things with English, if you spend long enough trying.
This may come as somewhat of a shock to you, but I'm almost positive that Jesus was not speaking English.
Some people's beliefs do not include a requirement to go to Church every week.
In the United States, many "Evangelicals" (not a name for a denomination, but rather a collection of protestant believers with a set of beliefs similar to Southern Baptists) attend Bible study groups on a semi-regular basis, but seldom bother with Sunday morning services. They take their faith seriously, but they see their religious as a deeply personal thing, rather than a collection of weekly rites or an organizing force of their social lives.
The current President is an example of such folk.
Your option 4 is pretty much the same missed option which I cited, that Jesus did not make the claim he is recorded to have made.
I believe I'm the King of San Francisco. Does that make it true?
No, but we can narrow the truth down to a few possibilities:
1. You believe you are the King of San Francisco when you are not. This would make you a complete nut.
2. You don't really believe you are the King of San Francisco, but said so anyway. This would make you a liar, or at the very least, you were only kidding.
3. You actually are the King of San Francisco.
Jesus claimed to be God. If he's not God, then he was completely insane for saying so, unless he was deliberately lying about something as important as messianic prophesy to an oppressed people, making him one of the scummiest liars in history.
So, which is it? Lord, Lunatic, or Liar?
(Disclaimer: While C.S. Lewis made a lot of hay in his time with this argument, there is one area of wiggle-room for the agnostic which he left out, which is the idea that Jesus never made such a claim, and the written record which says so, the Bible, is incorrect for one reason or another. Like Knuth, I believe in God, but I've long since abandoned the idea that my belief could ever be justified by pure logic to the satisfaction of an objective non-believer.)
Please don't forget we're all boycotting the evil media companies.
Speak for yourself, loser. Personally, I try to go to films twice if the media company who makes it is evil, simply to off-set the impact of your boycott.
Back on topic:
Wallace and Grommit never did much for me, but "Chicken Run" was such a hilarious movie that I'm willing to give it another chance when the new film comes out.
Come to think of it, "The Cluetrain Manifesto" was less than 10 years ago. That's gotta be in the running as well.
I'm not even going to try to produce a come-back from that one. That was hilarious. :)
(FWIW: Got to act 3 more often than not in those days, but seldom reach act 2 anymore when I try to play it on those game-in-the-joystick TV consoles these days. I guess my reflexes are abandoning me in my old age.)
(Or, as the bumper sticker says: "After the rapture, can I have your car?")
I'm pretty religious myself, but I gotta say that this is the funniest bumper sticker I've heard of in a long time.
Certainly a lot more amusing then those crawling "Darwin" fish you see everywhere.
If you buy it at the beginning of the life cycle, you have a longer time before it's obsolete
On the other hand, if you buy in the middle or near the end of a life cycle, you are likely to get a "Rev 2" or "Rev 3" version of the product. Some of us think it's worth buying something which "should have" enjoyed a price reduction by now, because we can get something which we know will be fairly solid.
Ordering on opening day gets you that sexy new tech when it's all shiny and new, but it also means that there are probably a few glitches which won't be discovered until the early adopters like you get a chance to use and abuse them for a few months.
This is the case with nearly all new electronics these days, not just Apple.
I made an exception when I ordered a new Mac mini on announcement day, but in most cases my rule is, "the sadder but wiser girl for me."
This is mainly because one of the first things Jobs did when he took over the company was shorten the inventory chain to make sure that there were precious few macs sitting on Apple-owned shelves.
When a new model is about to be released, they simply stop manufacturing the old one, and in a matter of days the old one is completely out of stock.
There have even been several occastions when Apple has run out of a specific model of laptop a week or two before its replacement was introduced.
Having vast stockpiles of inventory lying around is one of the things which was killing their profits back in the Dark Ages between Jobs regimes.
Not only was there no serial port and no SCSI port, but there were no PCI slots in the iMac.
This meant that USB was pretty much the only way to add hardware of any sort to an iMac.
This did far more to create a market for USB devices than improved Windows drivers on the PC side.
Prior to the arrival of the iMac, most peripheral makers tended to ask "why go with USB when we can make a PCI card, serial device, or PS/2 device which can be used by a much broader base of PC owners?"
You might try to remind me of that, but it's incorrect. I still have a Toshiba Infinia with USB ports that predates the earliest iMacs.
Yes you did, but you had almost nothing to plug into it.
When the iMac came out, the USB port was the only serial port of any kind. There was no RS-232, no RS-485, no ADB, no nothing. Just two USB ports. The keyboard had a two-port USB hub built into it as well.
This created an instant demand of USB devices. Suddenly companies like Belkin decided that making USB devices was worth the trouble, because there was a whole market of tens of thousands of new computers which could use no other hardware format.
Good communication is two-way. You whine about making yourself clear, but nowhere mention actually listening. You seem to be the all too common type of whiner with no other skills. All talk.
Sorry, what was that? My attention was on somebody more important.
Speaking as somebody who has played a wide assortment of computer games since the days of the Atari 2600 and Vic20, I would just like to point out that this has got to be the dumbest goddamned book to have come out in the last ten years.
Do you want to know what's useful in the workforce? Communication skills.
Learn to make yourself clear, in both written and spoken interactions with others, and stop praying that your high score on Ms. Pac Man will someday look good on your resume, because it won't.
People would complain less often if the phones were better at being phones before all the engineering effort went into adding silly toys to them.
My current phone is from Motorola. It folds into a small enough size to fit in a front jeans pocket (an important requirement), and pretty good battery life (another)... but has a lot of features I didn't care about (a crappy camera, a color screen, web browsing, text messaging, etc. etc. etc.)
The color screen wallpaper did default to a lovely photo of T-Moble spokesmodel Katherine Zeta Jones, so I guess that's a plus.
But here's the thing: It sounds like crap. Also, if I were to drop it from any higher than about 5 feet, I'm pretty sure it would shatter into a stunning array of little multi-colored pieces.
I would gladly trade all of the funky features, even the picture of Ms. Jones, for a phone of the same size which could withstand falling out of a car window on the highway and produce a signal which sounds at least as good as what you get from a quality land-line phone.
Makes you wonder if we'll have 120 and 200GB drives in our cell phones in 2015 :worry:
You worry about that?
Luddite.
By 2015, I want a cell phone with a 200GB HD installed sub-dermally in my jaw!
And where's my damn flying car!?!?!?
You articulated my point even better than I did. Were it in my power to shave a few mod points off my original post and put them on yours, I would. Well done.
1. Do you do activity X to an excess (with whatever definition of excess applies to that activity)?
That can not be established until a definition of excess is agreed upon. To many people, going out drinking once a week and having two beers is excessive. To many others, having a glass of wine with dinner beginning at age 7, and "having a few" a couple times a week with friends as an adult, is quite moderate.
2. Could you stop doing activity X if you wanted to?
That question can not be answered if the subject does not want to stop.
3. Has doing activity X prevented you from fulfilling major obligations, such as job, family, etc.
People fail to fulfill major obligations for many reasons, and that doesn't make them addictions.
Have you ever heard the term "hunting widow"? It's commonly used here in the midwest to refer to women who are married to men who spend the vast majority of the hunting season out in duck blinds and deer stands, completely neglecting their marital obligations. Are these hard-core hunters addicts, or merely choosing to do something they enjoy over something they "should" be doing?
The problem with many of these definitions of "addiction" is that they were created by people who are in the business of selling addiction treatment. They have a vested interest in defining it as broadly as possible, because that gives them the largest possible customer base.
the research did not indicate that one to two drinks a day was a healthy practice, but that the people who did drink like that were healthier than those that didn't
:)
If it rationalizes my booze-hound ways, I'm taking the correlation to show causality.
If the drinking itself is not the main factor, then one could postulate that "being a puritanical busibody who cares about how much other people drink" might result in a shorter and less healthy life.
Either way, hooray for our side.
It so happens that my father is a licensed phsychologist. He once told me that he spends the vast majority of his clinical time takeing people off anti-depressants and other mind-altering drugs which were prescribed by general practitioners.
The vast majority of the people on Vallium, Paxil, Prozac, or Ritilan are people who probably should not be on anything, and in many cases these drugs are a hinderance to ideal mental health.
Unfortunately, you don't need to be a specially trained phsychiatrist to prescribe this stuff, and any medical doctor who perceives you as "depressed" or exibiting a behavior where he recently read that drug X "has had some success at treating the problem" during his 7-minute visit which included a physical can load you up on all kinds of Happy Pills.
This is where I have a problem with all the puritanical crap out there.
According to medical research, one or two pints of beer (or glasses of red wine) per night is a healthy practice, reducing the chances of heart disease and alzeimer's while reducing stress.
According to AA, two or three pints a night means you are an alcoholic.
There's an overlap here, which means either 1) One side or the other is full of crap, or 2) Mild alcoholism is good for you.
In either case, I enjoy beer or wine with my dinner on a regular basis, and if that makes me a drunkard then so be it.
Lots of people spend 20-30 hours or more a week watching TV, and most of society considers this to be perfectly normal.
During softball season, I spend close to 10 hours a week either playing games or practicing fastpitch softball, and I'm considered a very "casual" player in my league. Some people spend more time playing softball than they spend at their jobs.
In High School, I knew a guy who spent almost every evening and every weekend hacking and wardialing for hours on end. These days, he's gainfully employed in the IT field.
"Does something a lot" != "Addicted"
The only thing which makes a person who spends 30 hours a week playing a game different from most people is that their chosen form of recreation happens to be a fringe activity. They are not hurting anybody, so I say leave them the hell alone.
Furthermore, can we get past this stupid habbit of calling every apparant obsessive/compulsive behavior an "addiction?" It's not as if these people are going to go through withdrawl symptoms if they are deprived of their gaming "fix" for a couple weeks.
The problem with that system is that you end up with strong fighters who are almost always complete idiots, clever wizards who can't lift their familiars of the ground without a system of pullies, and rogues who either build around a charisma of 18 (for deception skills) or 6 (because they don't care about what others think of them.)
The whole idea of rolling multiple dice was to generate a "bell curve" distribution, so any ability over 15 was considered rare and exceptional. Over time, ability generation systems have become considerably more "munchkin friendly."
Part of it has to do with lack of refrigeration.
Pork doesn't keep very well in hot Israeli climates. Also, salting meat (to remove blood) helps preserve it.
Furthermore, pigs spread disease. The flu, for example, usually evolves in bird populations, but usually can't be transmitted from birds to humans. It can, however, be passed from birds to pigs, and then a pig with a flu virus can pass it to humans.
So, if there were no pig farming, we probably would not need to bother with flu shots every year.
(For the record: I'm not Jewish, just interested in the history of Hebrew law. It is one of the half-dozen-or-so oldest sets of laws we have on record, after all.)
I know it makes more sense to see 50 cent in a game shootin someone rather than britney spears :) I say bring it on!
I dunno... A "Britney Spears vs. Lindsay Lohan" mod for some kind of FPS deathmatch would be kind of fun to see. Maybe even worth paying for.
-Britney has gibbed herself. "Oops... I did it again."
-Lindsay has taken the lead
-2 frags left
Then again, I was a big fan of "Dead or Alive: eXtreme Beach Volleyball" so take that for whatever you think it's worth.