You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Then again, the majority of the people Mr. Brown cited were not supporting a family with their work, and were therefore free to persue their passions instead of paychecks. Would Mother Teresa have been able to help so many people in Bangladesh if she had been an actual mother, working the swing shift at Denny's?
First of all, it's "chord," not "cord." Cords are those things hanging off the back of your computer.
Secondly, you are wrong. Chords can be interpreted many different ways in standard notation. For example, a diminished chord with a fully diminished 7th can easily be interpreted at least 4 different ways, depending on the context. Using "b" as a shorthand for flat, "C, Eb, Gb, Bbb" could also be written "A, C, Eb, Gb", or "Eb, Gb, Bbb, Dbb", or even "F#, A, C, Eb". Which note is lowest does not always serve as an indicator, because it could be a second, third, or forth position chord.
The way it is usually interpreted is based on the overall tonality of the chords surrounding it. However, if you are talking about modern atonal music, or even older stuff from composers like Debussey where the tonal center is a little obfuscated, chord interpretations can become somewhat flexible.
The main difference between composing and programming is that when you program you are writing instructions to a math machine, using abstractions that it already knows how to process; whereas when you compose you are comunicating ideas to a feeling machine (the human mind), using abstractions that (hopefully) go beyond the bounds of what it has already experienced.
The other difference is that code lets you get by with something that is aesthetically repulsive and tedious as long as it's precise, while music lets you deviate from precision as long as it is emotionally affective.
Imagine millions of poor people suddenly deprived of free entertainment. You think they'll be taking to the streets to protest? I do.
It's nice to see an AC post something as insightful as that once in a while. It's why I still read at 0.
Taking TV away from the minimum wage slaves of America is a formula for disaster. Add to that the fact that cigarrettes not cost $7 a pack in NYC, and a lot of states are lowering legal blood-alcohol levels to 0.08 (even though most DUI-related accidents are caused by drivers who are over 0.2), and a trend is emerging: puratanism and elitism are gradually taking away all of the pleasures and distractions of the unwashed masses. If you are one of those people who likes preserving the social order, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Even Ceasar understood the need for bread and circuses. Heads of state and captains of industry today ignore it at their peril.
To me the answer is pretty obvious. Bandwidth is a limited resourse, just like real estate, so auction or homestead out all available bandwidth, and then cut the FCC to a fraction of its current size. I suppose you could give "squatters' rights" to anybody currently broadcasting (or maybe just give them the right to match the highest bid, if you are one of those "stick-it-to-da-man" anti-corporate types), and go from there.
Sure, NBC might decide to use their bandwidth to go for encrypted pay-per-view digital under this model, but as long as there's enough demand for free TV to support the advertisements-only model, somebody will provide it, even if they would need to buy some unused UHF channels to do it. (One could argue that TiVo and similar technologies may kill the ad-model within the next ten years anyway.) If nothing else, we would probably at least still have member-supported public television (which broadcasts a lot of the best shows anyway).
Under the current model, broadcasters are effectively leasing the bandwidth for free (or for the license fee, anyway), in exchange for their promise to "serve the public interest." Does anybody here really think ABC is serving the public interest? If not, why not just admit that it's a business for the sake of profit and stop making them go through the motions of running PSA's at 3:00 AM to keep the FCC happy? Sure, there was a time when TV news was regarded as a duty to the general public, but these days it's just another entertainment product, which happens to be loosely based on actual current events.
Regulating bandwidth as if it were property seems like a very simple solution to me, but then again, I'm just some libertarian crank who thinks he knows better than the FCC.
However, Jesus was not born in raised in, and did not live in, a monotheistic culture. He lived in Hellenized Judea
That's like saying an Hamish person was not raised in a Mennonite culture because there are other religions in Pennsylvania. Jesus was raised by a Jewish family, which worshipped in a Jewish temple. Furthermore, his ministry was targeted at the monothiestic culture of the Jews. Other people were welcome to follow him, but he taught from Hebrew scripture and identified himself as the One True God, which Abraham once worshipped.
This concept of God did not exist in Jesus's time, even in Judea; it is a Christian concept of God, evolved after the fact, which was adopted later by the Jews and the Muslims, but still a Christian concept nonetheless.
The concept of monothiesm was most certainly a Jewish concept. Scholars may disagree on the exact century in which Genesis and Exodus were written, but only complete crackpots claim they were written after Christ's ministry. God was known to the Jews as the "Great I Am" for hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus.
I happen to know several people like this (they all accept the premise that Man is God, and they appear, at least to me, to be sane and honest).
Yes, a person can believe that mankind is divine and not be crazy. They can also believe that they are a god and not really deviate all that far from what we consider to be sanity.
However, somebody that enters a monothiestic culture and (wrongly) believes himself to be the One True God, and insists to everybody that he be recognized as such, that guy is a complete basket-case. For Jesus to think he's Jehovah, and not be, would be as far removed from reality as I would be if I thought I was Jesus.
Do you see the distinction? You can't have an identity dysphoria of that magnitude and yet not be insane. To have such delusions is the very definition of insanity: a psychotic break from the real world.
To put it another way, "the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic", if you are talking about the single, almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent, personal creator of all the world, is one-to-one (1:1) if he is wrong.
I think I addressed everything you are saying here in the final paragraph of my post.
Specifically: Lewis's case is not as ironclad as the tone of his writing made it seem that he thought it was. I don't think it stands alone as a total vindication of Christian worship, and I can easilly see how one could draw conclusions outside of the scenario he laid out.
However, while it is not a lead-pipe "QED" solution of the matter (which all the people poking holes in his logic insist it should be to even be considered worth pondering), it is a valid model for considering the possibility of Christ's divinity.
That said, the holes in his argument are not nearly as troublesome as the axioms which must first be established before such a case can be made. To somebody who does not think it likely that we have any accurate account of what Jesus said and did, the entire exercise becomes meaningless, because his personal claim of being the One God is central to the entire case.
Not only is he not the great author Steinbeck, he's not even the sample-heavy pop musician Beck. Making a montage of clips is not brain surgery, or even novel writing or singing crappy songs to tape loops.
I don't mean to be confrontational, but you are starting to sound like those guys who were calling club DJ's "artists"(in the iPod story earlier this week) because they are good at synching BPM's and styles when playing records of other people's music.
I'm beginning to feel that words like "art", "talent" and "genius" are getting thrown around a little too much lately.
Being the funniest sci fi writer is roughly equivalent in status to being the best ballet dancer in Idaho.
I realize you were mostly just trying to be funny, but that's a shitty analog. Adams single-handedly gave birth to an entire genre: The Sci-fi comedy.
If some Idahoan (or whatever the hell you call them) was such a great dancer that ambitious young dancers all over the world were scrambling to become the next great master of "Idaho-syle ballet", then maybe it would be roughly equivelant.
I second the opinion the The Great Divorce was a masterpiece. A short book, but very interesting.
As for The Scewtape Letters, the style and format is an integral part of what makes them interesting. Take away the ironic narative and you just have a very plain story about demons trying to tempt a man into sin.
Some books are great as books and just can't be made into movies, because of their structure. "Flowers for Algrenon" was a lot like Screwtape, in that the narrative trick was critical to proper storytelling, so it can't really be made into a great film. Somebody tried with Algrenon, and the result was a very dull movie called "Charly".
Your rejection of his arguments seems to me just as likely to be colored by your perspective as his acceptance of them may have been colored by his conversion. We all tend to feel before we think.
For those unfamiliar with Mere Christianity, most of the book is an effort to map out what it is that "we" as "Christians" believe, if you cut away all the denominational cruft.
His apologetic argument (the part where he's "pushing" Christianity) ignores most traditional approaches based on Judaic prophesy an accounts of the resurrection, and instead examines the person of Jesus. It basically went like this:
From all available historical accounts, Jesus was respected as a teacher and perhaps even a prophet, even by those who were not his followers. (Both Jewish and Islamic tradition regard him as a very noteworthy ethicist, etc.) Yet, he claimed to be God. Not just "a god," which would not be all that noteworthy. He went into a Monothiestic culture and claimed to be the One-And-Only divine being.
Now, when somebody makes a remarkable claim like this, there are really only three possible conclusions you can draw:
1. He is telling the truth (usually the least likely).
2. He is lying (that "Crossing Over" dude comes to mind).
3. He actually believes it, but is wrong.
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut. Charles Manson, for example, is one such complete nut. When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
Also, a sane man who is calling himself God as an outright lie is working an extremely bold con. Looking at Christ's life also makes this a hard rap to pin on him. There's really not a lot of variety in these types of cons, and the behavior is easy to spot when you know what to look for. Not only did Jesus not behave in such a manner, but it is hard to figure out what he had to gain by preaching in relative poverty, mostly to non-religious poor folk, and allowing himself to be executed in spite of his followers' capacity to protect him.
Once you rule out the other two possibilies to your mind's satisfaction, you are left with the remarkable choice that Jesus is actually the human manifestation of God.
So, that's the gauntlet that Lewis threw down: Jesus is either Lord, lunatic, or liar. In spite of my own belief, I can see how reasonable people can draw a different conclusion than I did. I tend to agree with junkgrep that Lewis's arguements, standing on their own, don't really do much to settle the issue. One could argue "maybe it was the most successful con ever"... The more common agnostic reply is "maybe some of what we think we know about Jesus is incorrect." That would be a debate for a whole other thread though, and I'm far from the best person to argue either side.
That's funny, I though "What Dreams May Come" was a horrible movie, set in what can only be some looney Hollywood fuck's vision of Heaven: You are surrounded by fake, insubstantial beauty that melts away when you touch it, you can magically make yourself look any way you want (including any weight, any race, any gender, and any cup size... however you want to see yourself), everybody has their own enormous private house, and there is no sign of God anywhere.
Oddly enough, that description of "heaven" is remarkably close to C.S. Lewis's conception of purgatory and/or Hell in "The Great Divorce"; a place where people imprison themselves within their own materialism and self-worship.
For Everclear substitute either Finlandia or Stolichnaya, and you might be on to something.
Only yuppies, Swedes, and college girls drink Everclear. Which one are you?
On the other hand, if you live with a Swedish yuppie college girl, and mix all your drinks by raiding her liquer cabinet, allow me to raise my glass to you and say "skol!"
Roger Ebert has often commented that trailors usually sell you the movie that the marketing people wish was made, rather than the actual film. For example, the trailers for "The Royal Tennenbaums" might lead you to believe that it's a wacky comedy in the tradition of "Meet the Parents" and "There's Something About Mary", when in fact it was a ponderous dark comedy like the director's first film, "Rushmore."
I don't mind misleading trailers nearly as much as the ones that give too much away. For example, Disney's "Iron Will", a great flick about a dogsled race. The trailer showed the goddamned end of the race! I realize it was based on a true story, but it was a story that maybe 2% of moviegoers knew, and that's being generous.
Then there are the trailers which both give away the ending, and mislead you about the kind of film it is. (spoiler warning) For example, a trailer for "Cast Away" showed Tom Hanks getting home and being alienated from the world he left behind. Not only was that giving away the ending (grrr!), but it also made it look like the last 2 or 3 reels were about a rescued castaway trying to adapt back to the world, a film that might have been interesting if done well... But, as you hopefully already know if you are reading this after the spoiler warning, that's not what the film was. The whole damn movie is about whether he will survive and be rescued or not, and the part after the rescue is a 10 minute epilogue at the end of a 2 and a half out movie.
If you are comparing any trailer you have ever seen to one of the greatest novels in the history of American literature (death to any Euro snob that replies with the word "oxymoron", btw), I gotta watch the trailers that you're seeing, because we are obviously watching different ones.
You could probably make a Mad-libs style trailer template, work off it exclusively, and nobody would ever know the difference. Here, I'll get you started: "In a world where _____________,"
I remember the documentation that came with the hard drives in IBM's and Compaqs back then: "Don't attempt to move your computer across the room. The Jiggling will cause drive errors... And for God's sake, don't bump the desk your computer is sitting on, or every last scrap of data will be lost forever!!!! Do not store anything on your hard drive that you might want later, unless you also saved it elsewhere. Do not taunt the hard drive..."
Early hard drives were so famously unreliable back in the Apple ][ days that I can understand why some companies were slow to jump in.
How is reselling a new Dell or Apple different from reselling a *used* Dell or Apple.
A reseller has a relationship with the manufacturer which allows them to acquire the computers at wholesale prices. Somebody selling a used box probably bought it at full price.
I admit that I didn't research it, but I'd still be willing to bet that Apple had more than 2.7-5% market-share in the "Personal Computer" market.
20 years ago, Apple had a much bigger share of a much smaller market. These days, 5% of the computer market is enough to be considered a "playa". A lot of PC makers wish they could do 5%, especially with Apple's margins.
How boring would it be to see a DJ sitting down in front of computer, occasionally clicking something unseen on the screen?
Actually, the move to CD's made me a better performer as a DJ. Spending less time physically cueing up songs meant I could spend more time observing the people's mood, monkeying with the light show, or even going out on the floor with the crowd. Instead of thinking about what I'm going to play next, I would be thinking about what I will be playing 15 minutes from now.
I can only think that MP3's will make a mobile DJ's life even easier.
I love vinyl... but if by "sonic range" you mean dynamic range, you are wrong. CD's have a lower noise floor. Not that it matters, because pop music is almost always extremely compressed (I don't mean the data, folks, I'm talking about sound compression here), and most PA systems sound like crap.
Oh, if you meant frequency response, you would also be wrong. CD's reproduce the extreme lows much better.
The main thing that vinyl has going for it is the fact that a 44.1 sampling rate means that a signal at 11 KHz (which is high, but well in the range of human hearing) has only 4 samples representing the entire wave, so the timbre of high-pitched instruments (like trumpets and violins) can sometimes be a little off on CD's. There are a lot of overtones above the range of human hearing that we can notice the absence of if it's part of a note that we can hear. However, on a PA system in a noisy dance club, nobody will notice that difference. Our brains tend to fill in the lost sound we expect to hear remarkably well.
By the way, the "warmer" sound of vinyl is really due to equalization error. The bass on all records is tweaked way down to make cutting the grooves more practical, and a little equalizing pre-amp in your turntable pumps it back up. (That's why amplifiers have separate inputs just for phonographs.) This process tends to add a little mushiness to the bass and low mids. The vinyl "warmths" is actually a distortion of the source material. A pleasant distortion, yes... but fans of turntables began to admit this to themselves over a decade ago. It's warmer than CD because it's warmer than the source track. Digital actually got kind of a bad rap in the early days because of it... a lot of studio methods and a lot of "high end" equipment that people considered ideal were built around making records sound more realistic, which meant compensating for the quirks of vinyl sound. When playing CD's of albums recorded for vinyl, on systems tweaked for vinyl, a lot of audio critics found CD's to sound "too bright". It wasn't the fault of the media, it was just that the problems all that stuff was compensating for no longer existed, resulting in a sound that was bad in the other direction.
There is a huge difference between spinning and just bluring music together. I can do that, but to be able to actually keep a SOLID flow of music takes the ability to beat match and group themes etc. I am trying to learn how to do these, but it certainly is not easy.
First of all, beat matching is not that hard. A couple weeks of practice and any body can nail it, whether it's variable speed turntables or digital sources with knobs for simulating the same thing.
Secondly, if you don't know how to mix songs together by theme, you simply don't know your music. Go home and listen to your entire library a few times and come back when you're ready. Sheesh!
Finally, nobody ever gives a fuck about synching the beat mix except for other DJ's. A bad transition will not clear the floor... I have, in the past, deliberately done ultra-shitty, gear-grinding shifts between tempos, just to see for myself. A good DJ doesn't need to keep things at a steady 112 BPM. At all. He just needs to know how to read the crowd. Sometimes slowing speeding up or slowing down a track by about 4 BPM can really ruin the feel of the song anyway. How you work the room is way more important than how you work the wheels, even if mastering the turntable does make you feel like some kind of rave god.
DJ'ing is not a difficult task, if you know how to deal with people. Come to think of it, the human element might be why so many geeks think it's hard to do. Hmm....
I really don't care how much they screw up the anime -- it introduces it to a new audience and if they care enough they can track down the better subbed versions and hear better voice acting themselves. I got into Dragon Ball Z by watching it on the Cartoon Network, now I can't stomach that stuff for even a second, but I'm happy -- now I'm a hardcore fan -- of the original Japanese version.
Exactly. Even butchered anime can good for the genre in general if it builds the market. Look at how many Americans became anime fans in the first place by watching Robotech, which was a lazy re-edit of Macross. They know better now, but they may have never started watching had they not seen the chopped-up stuff first.
Personally, I was a "Battle of the Planets" kid. I guess that makes me an "old-skool" anime nerd.
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Then again, the majority of the people Mr. Brown cited were not supporting a family with their work, and were therefore free to persue their passions instead of paychecks. Would Mother Teresa have been able to help so many people in Bangladesh if she had been an actual mother, working the swing shift at Denny's?
Secondly, you are wrong. Chords can be interpreted many different ways in standard notation. For example, a diminished chord with a fully diminished 7th can easily be interpreted at least 4 different ways, depending on the context. Using "b" as a shorthand for flat, "C, Eb, Gb, Bbb" could also be written "A, C, Eb, Gb", or "Eb, Gb, Bbb, Dbb", or even "F#, A, C, Eb". Which note is lowest does not always serve as an indicator, because it could be a second, third, or forth position chord.
The way it is usually interpreted is based on the overall tonality of the chords surrounding it. However, if you are talking about modern atonal music, or even older stuff from composers like Debussey where the tonal center is a little obfuscated, chord interpretations can become somewhat flexible.
The main difference between composing and programming is that when you program you are writing instructions to a math machine, using abstractions that it already knows how to process; whereas when you compose you are comunicating ideas to a feeling machine (the human mind), using abstractions that (hopefully) go beyond the bounds of what it has already experienced.
The other difference is that code lets you get by with something that is aesthetically repulsive and tedious as long as it's precise, while music lets you deviate from precision as long as it is emotionally affective.
It's nice to see an AC post something as insightful as that once in a while. It's why I still read at 0.
Taking TV away from the minimum wage slaves of America is a formula for disaster. Add to that the fact that cigarrettes not cost $7 a pack in NYC, and a lot of states are lowering legal blood-alcohol levels to 0.08 (even though most DUI-related accidents are caused by drivers who are over 0.2), and a trend is emerging: puratanism and elitism are gradually taking away all of the pleasures and distractions of the unwashed masses. If you are one of those people who likes preserving the social order, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Even Ceasar understood the need for bread and circuses. Heads of state and captains of industry today ignore it at their peril.
Sure, NBC might decide to use their bandwidth to go for encrypted pay-per-view digital under this model, but as long as there's enough demand for free TV to support the advertisements-only model, somebody will provide it, even if they would need to buy some unused UHF channels to do it. (One could argue that TiVo and similar technologies may kill the ad-model within the next ten years anyway.) If nothing else, we would probably at least still have member-supported public television (which broadcasts a lot of the best shows anyway).
Under the current model, broadcasters are effectively leasing the bandwidth for free (or for the license fee, anyway), in exchange for their promise to "serve the public interest." Does anybody here really think ABC is serving the public interest? If not, why not just admit that it's a business for the sake of profit and stop making them go through the motions of running PSA's at 3:00 AM to keep the FCC happy? Sure, there was a time when TV news was regarded as a duty to the general public, but these days it's just another entertainment product, which happens to be loosely based on actual current events.
Regulating bandwidth as if it were property seems like a very simple solution to me, but then again, I'm just some libertarian crank who thinks he knows better than the FCC.
That's like saying an Hamish person was not raised in a Mennonite culture because there are other religions in Pennsylvania. Jesus was raised by a Jewish family, which worshipped in a Jewish temple. Furthermore, his ministry was targeted at the monothiestic culture of the Jews. Other people were welcome to follow him, but he taught from Hebrew scripture and identified himself as the One True God, which Abraham once worshipped.
This concept of God did not exist in Jesus's time, even in Judea; it is a Christian concept of God, evolved after the fact, which was adopted later by the Jews and the Muslims, but still a Christian concept nonetheless.
The concept of monothiesm was most certainly a Jewish concept. Scholars may disagree on the exact century in which Genesis and Exodus were written, but only complete crackpots claim they were written after Christ's ministry. God was known to the Jews as the "Great I Am" for hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus.
Yes, a person can believe that mankind is divine and not be crazy. They can also believe that they are a god and not really deviate all that far from what we consider to be sanity.
However, somebody that enters a monothiestic culture and (wrongly) believes himself to be the One True God, and insists to everybody that he be recognized as such, that guy is a complete basket-case. For Jesus to think he's Jehovah, and not be, would be as far removed from reality as I would be if I thought I was Jesus.
Do you see the distinction? You can't have an identity dysphoria of that magnitude and yet not be insane. To have such delusions is the very definition of insanity: a psychotic break from the real world.
To put it another way, "the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic", if you are talking about the single, almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent, personal creator of all the world, is one-to-one (1:1) if he is wrong.
Specifically: Lewis's case is not as ironclad as the tone of his writing made it seem that he thought it was. I don't think it stands alone as a total vindication of Christian worship, and I can easilly see how one could draw conclusions outside of the scenario he laid out.
However, while it is not a lead-pipe "QED" solution of the matter (which all the people poking holes in his logic insist it should be to even be considered worth pondering), it is a valid model for considering the possibility of Christ's divinity.
That said, the holes in his argument are not nearly as troublesome as the axioms which must first be established before such a case can be made. To somebody who does not think it likely that we have any accurate account of what Jesus said and did, the entire exercise becomes meaningless, because his personal claim of being the One God is central to the entire case.
I don't mean to be confrontational, but you are starting to sound like those guys who were calling club DJ's "artists"(in the iPod story earlier this week) because they are good at synching BPM's and styles when playing records of other people's music.
I'm beginning to feel that words like "art", "talent" and "genius" are getting thrown around a little too much lately.
I realize you were mostly just trying to be funny, but that's a shitty analog. Adams single-handedly gave birth to an entire genre: The Sci-fi comedy.
If some Idahoan (or whatever the hell you call them) was such a great dancer that ambitious young dancers all over the world were scrambling to become the next great master of "Idaho-syle ballet", then maybe it would be roughly equivelant.
Screw TV versions. There's a "Book on Tape" of John Cleese reading the letters as Screwtape. How could you possibly improve on that?
As for The Scewtape Letters, the style and format is an integral part of what makes them interesting. Take away the ironic narative and you just have a very plain story about demons trying to tempt a man into sin.
Some books are great as books and just can't be made into movies, because of their structure. "Flowers for Algrenon" was a lot like Screwtape, in that the narrative trick was critical to proper storytelling, so it can't really be made into a great film. Somebody tried with Algrenon, and the result was a very dull movie called "Charly".
For those unfamiliar with Mere Christianity, most of the book is an effort to map out what it is that "we" as "Christians" believe, if you cut away all the denominational cruft.
His apologetic argument (the part where he's "pushing" Christianity) ignores most traditional approaches based on Judaic prophesy an accounts of the resurrection, and instead examines the person of Jesus. It basically went like this:
From all available historical accounts, Jesus was respected as a teacher and perhaps even a prophet, even by those who were not his followers. (Both Jewish and Islamic tradition regard him as a very noteworthy ethicist, etc.) Yet, he claimed to be God. Not just "a god," which would not be all that noteworthy. He went into a Monothiestic culture and claimed to be the One-And-Only divine being.
Now, when somebody makes a remarkable claim like this, there are really only three possible conclusions you can draw:
1. He is telling the truth (usually the least likely).
2. He is lying (that "Crossing Over" dude comes to mind).
3. He actually believes it, but is wrong.
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut. Charles Manson, for example, is one such complete nut. When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
Also, a sane man who is calling himself God as an outright lie is working an extremely bold con. Looking at Christ's life also makes this a hard rap to pin on him. There's really not a lot of variety in these types of cons, and the behavior is easy to spot when you know what to look for. Not only did Jesus not behave in such a manner, but it is hard to figure out what he had to gain by preaching in relative poverty, mostly to non-religious poor folk, and allowing himself to be executed in spite of his followers' capacity to protect him.
Once you rule out the other two possibilies to your mind's satisfaction, you are left with the remarkable choice that Jesus is actually the human manifestation of God.
So, that's the gauntlet that Lewis threw down: Jesus is either Lord, lunatic, or liar. In spite of my own belief, I can see how reasonable people can draw a different conclusion than I did. I tend to agree with junkgrep that Lewis's arguements, standing on their own, don't really do much to settle the issue. One could argue "maybe it was the most successful con ever"... The more common agnostic reply is "maybe some of what we think we know about Jesus is incorrect." That would be a debate for a whole other thread though, and I'm far from the best person to argue either side.
Oddly enough, that description of "heaven" is remarkably close to C.S. Lewis's conception of purgatory and/or Hell in "The Great Divorce"; a place where people imprison themselves within their own materialism and self-worship.
Only yuppies, Swedes, and college girls drink Everclear. Which one are you?
On the other hand, if you live with a Swedish yuppie college girl, and mix all your drinks by raiding her liquer cabinet, allow me to raise my glass to you and say "skol!"
I don't mind misleading trailers nearly as much as the ones that give too much away. For example, Disney's "Iron Will", a great flick about a dogsled race. The trailer showed the goddamned end of the race! I realize it was based on a true story, but it was a story that maybe 2% of moviegoers knew, and that's being generous.
Then there are the trailers which both give away the ending, and mislead you about the kind of film it is. (spoiler warning) For example, a trailer for "Cast Away" showed Tom Hanks getting home and being alienated from the world he left behind. Not only was that giving away the ending (grrr!), but it also made it look like the last 2 or 3 reels were about a rescued castaway trying to adapt back to the world, a film that might have been interesting if done well... But, as you hopefully already know if you are reading this after the spoiler warning, that's not what the film was. The whole damn movie is about whether he will survive and be rescued or not, and the part after the rescue is a 10 minute epilogue at the end of a 2 and a half out movie.
You could probably make a Mad-libs style trailer template, work off it exclusively, and nobody would ever know the difference. Here, I'll get you started: "In a world where _____________,"
Early hard drives were so famously unreliable back in the Apple ][ days that I can understand why some companies were slow to jump in.
A reseller has a relationship with the manufacturer which allows them to acquire the computers at wholesale prices. Somebody selling a used box probably bought it at full price.
20 years ago, Apple had a much bigger share of a much smaller market. These days, 5% of the computer market is enough to be considered a "playa". A lot of PC makers wish they could do 5%, especially with Apple's margins.
Actually, the move to CD's made me a better performer as a DJ. Spending less time physically cueing up songs meant I could spend more time observing the people's mood, monkeying with the light show, or even going out on the floor with the crowd. Instead of thinking about what I'm going to play next, I would be thinking about what I will be playing 15 minutes from now.
I can only think that MP3's will make a mobile DJ's life even easier.
Oh, if you meant frequency response, you would also be wrong. CD's reproduce the extreme lows much better.
The main thing that vinyl has going for it is the fact that a 44.1 sampling rate means that a signal at 11 KHz (which is high, but well in the range of human hearing) has only 4 samples representing the entire wave, so the timbre of high-pitched instruments (like trumpets and violins) can sometimes be a little off on CD's. There are a lot of overtones above the range of human hearing that we can notice the absence of if it's part of a note that we can hear. However, on a PA system in a noisy dance club, nobody will notice that difference. Our brains tend to fill in the lost sound we expect to hear remarkably well.
By the way, the "warmer" sound of vinyl is really due to equalization error. The bass on all records is tweaked way down to make cutting the grooves more practical, and a little equalizing pre-amp in your turntable pumps it back up. (That's why amplifiers have separate inputs just for phonographs.) This process tends to add a little mushiness to the bass and low mids. The vinyl "warmths" is actually a distortion of the source material. A pleasant distortion, yes... but fans of turntables began to admit this to themselves over a decade ago. It's warmer than CD because it's warmer than the source track. Digital actually got kind of a bad rap in the early days because of it... a lot of studio methods and a lot of "high end" equipment that people considered ideal were built around making records sound more realistic, which meant compensating for the quirks of vinyl sound. When playing CD's of albums recorded for vinyl, on systems tweaked for vinyl, a lot of audio critics found CD's to sound "too bright". It wasn't the fault of the media, it was just that the problems all that stuff was compensating for no longer existed, resulting in a sound that was bad in the other direction.
First of all, beat matching is not that hard. A couple weeks of practice and any body can nail it, whether it's variable speed turntables or digital sources with knobs for simulating the same thing.
Secondly, if you don't know how to mix songs together by theme, you simply don't know your music. Go home and listen to your entire library a few times and come back when you're ready. Sheesh!
Finally, nobody ever gives a fuck about synching the beat mix except for other DJ's. A bad transition will not clear the floor... I have, in the past, deliberately done ultra-shitty, gear-grinding shifts between tempos, just to see for myself. A good DJ doesn't need to keep things at a steady 112 BPM. At all. He just needs to know how to read the crowd. Sometimes slowing speeding up or slowing down a track by about 4 BPM can really ruin the feel of the song anyway. How you work the room is way more important than how you work the wheels, even if mastering the turntable does make you feel like some kind of rave god.
DJ'ing is not a difficult task, if you know how to deal with people. Come to think of it, the human element might be why so many geeks think it's hard to do. Hmm....
Exactly. Even butchered anime can good for the genre in general if it builds the market. Look at how many Americans became anime fans in the first place by watching Robotech, which was a lazy re-edit of Macross. They know better now, but they may have never started watching had they not seen the chopped-up stuff first.
Personally, I was a "Battle of the Planets" kid. I guess that makes me an "old-skool" anime nerd.
Yes, they are not.
There are lots of H1B holders from East Asia, Central America, and even (gasp) Europe.
I personally have meet more Russian H1B techies than Indian ones in the places I have worked.
If you are going to play the Race Card, check to see if the Fact Card trumps it first.
(BTW: I am totally in favor of allowing H1B workers, and I'm saying that as a programmer who is out of work at the moment.)
You have chosen to live in the United States, a beligerantly capitalist nation, for over 15 years...
You believe that workers, including foreign workers, ought to continue to work for what they are willing to accept, based on supply and demand...
You point out that laws can have devistating effects in spite of the best of intentions.
I agree with most of your points, but I'm not sure that Karl Marx would. You sound like a free-market capitalist to me.