The Bible states that the world is flat. Can you accept its round or are you suggesting that you can either be a Christian or a heathen 'round-worldist'.
Oh and since Adam and Eve are key to religion... then what about those people who weren't descended from them, those people that Cane was worried would smite him after he killed his brother. And those people whose daughter he married and lived with in the land of Nod.
The Bible contradicts itself constantly. You have to be able to rationally treat those contradictions. I can call myself a Christian without treating the Bible as literal truth. Can you?
Isn't prevention better than punishment? Perhaps a system that stops crimes is better than one that punishes them? 100 criminals in prison better than 100 would-be-criminals-who-didn't-commit-the-crime on the streets? No victim, no investigation/prosecution/incarceration/rehabilita tion (cough cough) costs.
On the other hand, banning violent games isn't going to stop the violence. I've got the sneaky feeling that if the German vets of World War I had access to combat and strategy games, their taste for violence and warfare would have been sated, denying the National Socialists their basic appeal to the masses "Violence and the Volk".
So tell me, who's using a computer to read or write, without using their heads? I'd also like to meet the person with the encyclopedia brain implant that uses only their head to research? Research = 'search', i.e. from outside sources.
Some people need 'crutches' and some people who don't really need them, find them very useful.
Spelling aids are a wonderful thing for the unfortunates who didn't have excellent English teachers or whose brains simply aren't wired to spell 'properly'. Good and quick writers also find them helpful as they allow efficient and quick correction of mistakes.
Search engines give incredible access to oceans of knowledge and information. Nobody can be a polymath in all fields of knowledge.
Calculators remove the tedium of mind-numbing calculation. As long as you can do basic arithmetics and algebra in your head and know what the steps to solving a more complex mathematical problem are, your calculator is not doing your job for you, it's making it easier.
'And' (sic!) looking at your grammar and spelling, I'm surprised you're bitching about current school test scores. Maybe the education in the good ol' days wasn't so good after all.
a) Pulling the plug on a wireless network - inappropriate metaphor, doubt it was a pun, in light of literary skills - see below.
b) Addressing the problem - means deal with it - I think banning wireless networks because they can be cracked is a way of addressing/dealing with the cracking problem, in the same way that changing your front door to a steel one 'addresses' the burglar-getting-through-glass-door problem.
c) Aggressive but not thorough - how can you not be more thorough in fixing a problem then by completely removing the source of the problem? Wireless suffers from warwalking / wardriving problems. Remove wireless, remove the warwalking problems.
Okay, you might not agree with me on the technical issues but I was adressing the problems that the submitter had with expressing himself. If you can't express yourself properly, then people will not listen to, consider or internalise what you're trying to tell them.
Western-free does not mean good. Autarky, which invariably means home-grown, worse and more expensive, is always, always a bad economic option. Pirating is a much better one for a developing nation.
The Judge Dredd film had Judges with guns that not only would blow up if used by someone other than the owner but would also send the shooters DNA sample with the bullet into the victim.
Then again, that film was set a little into the future.
And it was awful.
Oh and if a gun malfunctions on you, you might not have the chance to take it back to the store. Worst-case scenario - gun does not work when you're standing off with a burglar, you shout "Sh...", burglar shoots or bludgeons you, widow sues gun maker, gun maker goes out of business, employees lose jobs, wife buys condo, children go to college, you're dead.
To kill 1 in 10 is only one of the possible meanings of decimate. Dictionary.com
For example, decimate can be used to describe the 'decimation' of the Jews in Europe in WWII, despite the percentage genocide being over 90%. And the Romans aren't the only ones who needed the 'special' word, variants of decimate and decimation appear in other languages.
The Times is printed in London. It's not called the London Times. It's not called the City Times. It's just called the Times. Now the New York Times may be referred to as the Times by some Americans, more cosmopolitan Americans and world wide slashdotters recognise it as NY Times, NYTimes or The New York Times.
How is this capitalised mess 'insightful'? The police aren't asking for the power to 'make' evidence (They can make 'evidence' anyway if they want to break the law - traditional images and physical evidence can be and is tampered with). They want to use advanced filtering and enhancement techniques on digital images.
In principle these are not different to blowups, negative colour and other standard analogue photographic techniques that are already used in court in relation to photographic evidence.
If an audit trail is kept, I don't see a problem with using these techniques. Digital manipulation is a powerful tool that can be abused but as long as the source is kept pure, the manipulation can be exposed.
There is another problem with fingerprints though, the science behind fingerprinting has never really been proved. Do a google if you want to learn more.
After moving from the UK, i.e. greek/latin/french/russian/trig - good public school (US readers - means private school), I found myself with Eastern European kids doing calculus at 13. CALCULUS. Got a good education even though the only maths I use deal with probability and geometry. Seems the farther east you go from the US, the more hard-core and tougher primary and secondary schooling gets.
Peace spelt "M O G A D I S H U" and "B O S N I A".
Oh and the way the term 'liberal' is used to label political views is an insult to it's dictionary meaning. In Europe, liberal generally refers to free-market enthusiasts, people who want less government, more liberty for trade and citizens.
In the US political newspeak, it seems to mean a combination of libertine, constitutional rights fighter and big-government enthusiast.
Please define 'conservatist'. If you mean fascist racist bastiches who eat their mommas then sure, sure they're bad. Define it differently and things change.
Using blanket labels like liberal and conservative is both semantically misleading and insulting to the wide variety of political and moral stances out there.
Just forgot to mention that Asian crony economies and politics are even more exaggerated cases of money and networking giving influence. Oh and there, dictatorial party or army membership also gives power. Normal citizens have very little influence.
Not EQ - Legacy, not Japanese - Korean and I haven't heard of any driveby's. Though one guy did get beaten up in a bathroom but I think that's a healthy example way to exercise muscles that have been atrophied by hours of virtual crack. Or not.
Seems you don't know a thing about the film business you're part-time part of.
Its the actors that bring in the viewers.
The viewers bring in the money.
Thus the actors are a lot more important (in bottom-line terms) than the directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, screenwriters, though the film as such may be a team effort and may involve more work from other people than from the actors. Even if the film would look and feel the same with a different actor, its the actor (in the case of films with A-list actors) that gets the butts in the seats.
There are some directors and producers that have name value and are 'bankable' (Lucas, Spielberg) but their value is less than that of actors. 'Bankable' means that if you have Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford or De Niro (A-list) in a film, you (producer) can count on getting the money you threw at the film back. That's why the A-list actors get paid so much.
Or in slashdot friendly terms: 1) Get Tom Cruise, 2) Make film with Tom Cruise, 3) Profit.
Of course stage 2.5 which involves a bad script, bad directing and bad filming could get in the way of 3) but most film studios are pretty competent in avoiding making 'bad' films except where religion (Battlefield Earth), ego (Waterworld) or idiocy (Showgirls) overrule the clever people in studio accounting and preproduction.
If you still don't agree with me, check out the film posters. Whose name is written in the largest font? And why?
No. You get the shakes, you get a fever, you start vomiting, you want to die, you feel like you're dying. You curl up in a ball. Then you eat yogurt. And gherkins. And cry a little. And your body stops wanting and needing the substance and you go back to a normal life. Or at least as normal as it can be if you're surrounded by what you used to crave. Still if the body doesn't want it, the mind doesn't, quitting is a question of suffering through the feedback.
Psychological addiction - you can't go cold turkey. You think about it. Thinking about it makes you want it. You can't stop thinking about it. Everything you see/think relates in some weird way to your addiction. Days/weeks after stopping you still think about it and you can imagine how it would feel like to just have a little go/hit... it's your controlling mechanism, the mind that craves, you can't force or switch off the feedback.
Oh, you have to do a lot of mj to get a psychological addiction. Or so I'm told.
You mean fractured down opinionated economic, moral and technology fault lines?MS-bashers/Linux-bashers, Linus lovers/Linus haters, ecofreak/technojunkies, libertarians/communists, 'information wants to be free' swappers/ 'theft is theft' moralists and JonKatz fans/foes.
I can just imagine it, your choice of spouse is decided by the ominous by BSD/Red hat question? Or even worse, Star Trek/Lord of the Rings?
Or you meet a new neighbour and you wonder whether their game house or the computer that they're running it from is more modded?
Or that neighbour constantly comes round your house asking if you've heard of a free sofa that is also a fridge and a multimedia centre (must play OGGs) and a PDA. And is a eco friendly. And open-source. Or when they should start teaching their kids how to code, at 2, 3 or in the womb?
I also wonder how many CowboyNeal based aliases there will be on-line.
Then again, since it'll be a Windows game, I don't think 'all' the Slashdot community will take it up.
The profits might be explicitly mentioned but they're calculated by Marvel. In any way they want. Oh and participation does not cover 'licensing' for 'merchandise' or 'otherwise'.
I suspected the contract was drafted something like this when I read the headline. Its incredible that somebody who's been involved in entertainment business for decades wouldn't have known to define 'profits' in an agreement like this. Or written more detailed provisions on payment terms and conditions. And added guaranteed payments on gross income. Or added an independent review procedure. Or scratched out the proviso on licensing.
Or hired a (smart) lawyer to do it. Hmm.
Good luck Stan. Unless you find a very equitably minded judge, you're in trouble.
Follow the link: More like blue wig, red arse, sorry led.
Oh and the song is by Eiffel 65. And it's titled "Blue".
And it is extremely incredibly offensive (to my ears) techpop from Germany.
Gambling and the mob
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Big gambling is run by big listed corporations and guys called Steve and Lee, not Tony and Vitti.
There are very few mob owned casinos left. There might be some vestigal ties (through debt-collection, prostitution, etc) with the majority but the influence of organised crime (violent, inefficient) has been replaced by the influence of the organised market ('family orientated', efficient).
They mentioned the US moon landings about a decade after they occured whilst trumpeting about the landers that sent back a couple of grams of moon rock. US astronauts were bringing the stuff back by the kilogram. The Soviets were ashamed to admit that their space program had been totally eclipsed (ahem). Now, Western media had no trouble with reporting on Gagarin's flight. Which in fact some people doubt ever occured, not because the world is flat and the angels fly around at 80 km, but because there were a series of inconsistencies and occurances that raise doubts whether he was the actual pilot of the first manned flight (and not some nameless other cosmonaut who was supposedly killed in an accident).
Interesting summary of Soviet and the Nato battle plan. I would add that there was a condition to both plans being implemented, air superiority.
Which wasn't a given considering the size and quality of the opposing forces. These air forces couldn't have been knocked out preemptively or *first* (current US doctrine seems to apply a domino strategy, first air defence, then infrastructure, then battlefield components - highly effective I have to say).
Without air superiority, the battlefield aircraft would have had a quite *difficult* time.
Further, until air superiority was gained, it would have been the German grunt (albeit in a Leopard or two) who would have been trying to stop the Red Army, he would have been vulnerable to artillery. And the Mi-24s. And the T-72s. And the Specnacz running around behind Nato lines.
As far as going to war with the EU, hmm, that's a lot of (nuclear armed) territory to conquer and occupy. Unlike Isreal which you can drive through and across in an afternoon.
Insightful comment. Personally I think translation problems give the 'back to the Bible' and 'literal Bible truth' movements and any kind of Christianity based solely on the Bible of the movement...hmm, a very fragile foundation. Catholicism is based on the Bible and the Church tradition, one supplements the other. Then again, the tradition may also be flawed.
Paranoid about trademarks? The corporations can object to use of their trademarks in trade. And when they try to do the same in areas not connected with trade and the little guy stands up to them, they get slapped by the courts. Your vocabulary and freedom of speech is not being limited by trademarks.
As far as domains are concerned, are I haven't heard a case of www.[generic noun].com being adjudicated against the holder under pressure from a corporation with [generic noun] trademark (considering that you can't easily trademark a simple noun unless you're in an area of business not related to that noun, its not surprising... By way of explaination, you could probably trademark "Computer" for a restaurant but couldn't for a computer shop). Now a more original turn of phrase can be trademarked and only the trademark holder can state that it has a moral (and legal) right to an original phrase that it uses. I have no sympathy for people squatting on Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other original, non-generic phrases. But I'm open to comments and rebuttal.
Wouldn't be easy to seperate the 'conscious' parts of the cortex from the non-conscious ones that regulate the body's functioning. Its not like stripping a kernel of instructions...
As far as the Matrix is concerned, ever seen a battery farm? They make the Matrix look like a real heaven (BTW kind of nice of the machines to give us a dream world to live in and even manipulate instead of just putting everyone into a coma).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you can have it both ways. Otherwise:
The Bible states that the world is flat. Can you accept its round or are you suggesting that you can either be a Christian or a heathen 'round-worldist'.
Oh and since Adam and Eve are key to religion... then what about those people who weren't descended from them, those people that Cane was worried would smite him after he killed his brother. And those people whose daughter he married and lived with in the land of Nod.
Etc, etc, ad nauseam (see (Bible Contradictions))
The Bible contradicts itself constantly. You have to be able to rationally treat those contradictions. I can call myself a Christian without treating the Bible as literal truth. Can you?
Isn't prevention better than punishment? Perhaps a system that stops crimes is better than one that punishes them? 100 criminals in prison better than 100 would-be-criminals-who-didn't-commit-the-crime on the streets? No victim, no investigation/prosecution/incarceration/rehabilita tion (cough cough) costs.
On the other hand, banning violent games isn't going to stop the violence. I've got the sneaky feeling that if the German vets of World War I had access to combat and strategy games, their taste for violence and warfare would have been sated, denying the National Socialists their basic appeal to the masses "Violence and the Volk".
Read, write and research in your head?
So tell me, who's using a computer to read or write, without using their heads? I'd also like to meet the person with the encyclopedia brain implant that uses only their head to research? Research = 'search', i.e. from outside sources.
Some people need 'crutches' and some people who don't really need them, find them very useful.
Spelling aids are a wonderful thing for the unfortunates who didn't have excellent English teachers or whose brains simply aren't wired to spell 'properly'. Good and quick writers also find them helpful as they allow efficient and quick correction of mistakes.
Search engines give incredible access to oceans of knowledge and information. Nobody can be a polymath in all fields of knowledge.
Calculators remove the tedium of mind-numbing calculation. As long as you can do basic arithmetics and algebra in your head and know what the steps to solving a more complex mathematical problem are, your calculator is not doing your job for you, it's making it easier.
'And' (sic!) looking at your grammar and spelling, I'm surprised you're bitching about current school test scores. Maybe the education in the good ol' days wasn't so good after all.
a) Pulling the plug on a wireless network - inappropriate metaphor, doubt it was a pun, in light of literary skills - see below.
b) Addressing the problem - means deal with it - I think banning wireless networks because they can be cracked is a way of addressing/dealing with the cracking problem, in the same way that changing your front door to a steel one 'addresses' the burglar-getting-through-glass-door problem.
c) Aggressive but not thorough - how can you not be more thorough in fixing a problem then by completely removing the source of the problem? Wireless suffers from warwalking / wardriving problems. Remove wireless, remove the warwalking problems.
Okay, you might not agree with me on the technical issues but I was adressing the problems that the submitter had with expressing himself. If you can't express yourself properly, then people will not listen to, consider or internalise what you're trying to tell them.
Western-free does not mean good. Autarky, which invariably means home-grown, worse and more expensive, is always, always a bad economic option. Pirating is a much better one for a developing nation.
The Judge Dredd film had Judges with guns that not only would blow up if used by someone other than the owner but would also send the shooters DNA sample with the bullet into the victim.
Then again, that film was set a little into the future.
And it was awful.
Oh and if a gun malfunctions on you, you might not have the chance to take it back to the store. Worst-case scenario - gun does not work when you're standing off with a burglar, you shout "Sh...", burglar shoots or bludgeons you, widow sues gun maker, gun maker goes out of business, employees lose jobs, wife buys condo, children go to college, you're dead.
Ah, vocabulary provocation.
To kill 1 in 10 is only one of the possible meanings of decimate. Dictionary.com
For example, decimate can be used to describe the 'decimation' of the Jews in Europe in WWII, despite the percentage genocide being over 90%. And the Romans aren't the only ones who needed the 'special' word, variants of decimate and decimation appear in other languages.
The Times is printed in London. It's not called the London Times. It's not called the City Times. It's just called the Times. Now the New York Times may be referred to as the Times by some Americans, more cosmopolitan Americans and world wide slashdotters recognise it as NY Times, NYTimes or The New York Times.
How is this capitalised mess 'insightful'? The police aren't asking for the power to 'make' evidence (They can make 'evidence' anyway if they want to break the law - traditional images and physical evidence can be and is tampered with). They want to use advanced filtering and enhancement techniques on digital images.
In principle these are not different to blowups, negative colour and other standard analogue photographic techniques that are already used in court in relation to photographic evidence.
If an audit trail is kept, I don't see a problem with using these techniques. Digital manipulation is a powerful tool that can be abused but as long as the source is kept pure, the manipulation can be exposed.
There is another problem with fingerprints though, the science behind fingerprinting has never really been proved. Do a google if you want to learn more.
Pay them $millions a year and they'll be honest? Like CEOs?
Trig at 12?
After moving from the UK, i.e. greek/latin/french/russian/trig - good public school (US readers - means private school), I found myself with Eastern European kids doing calculus at 13. CALCULUS. Got a good education even though the only maths I use deal with probability and geometry. Seems the farther east you go from the US, the more hard-core and tougher primary and secondary schooling gets.
Peace spelt "M O G A D I S H U" and "B O S N I A".
Oh and the way the term 'liberal' is used to label political views is an insult to it's dictionary meaning. In Europe, liberal generally refers to free-market enthusiasts, people who want less government, more liberty for trade and citizens.
In the US political newspeak, it seems to mean a combination of libertine, constitutional rights fighter and big-government enthusiast.
Please define 'conservatist'. If you mean fascist racist bastiches who eat their mommas then sure, sure they're bad. Define it differently and things change.
Using blanket labels like liberal and conservative is both semantically misleading and insulting to the wide variety of political and moral stances out there.
I don't want to wear any label.
Very good point on money and networking.
Just forgot to mention that Asian crony economies and politics are even more exaggerated cases of money and networking giving influence. Oh and there, dictatorial party or army membership also gives power. Normal citizens have very little influence.
Not EQ - Legacy, not Japanese - Korean and I haven't heard of any driveby's. Though one guy did get beaten up in a bathroom but I think that's a healthy example way to exercise muscles that have been atrophied by hours of virtual crack. Or not.
Overrated?
Seems you don't know a thing about the film business you're part-time part of.
Its the actors that bring in the viewers.
The viewers bring in the money.
Thus the actors are a lot more important (in bottom-line terms) than the directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, screenwriters, though the film as such may be a team effort and may involve more work from other people than from the actors. Even if the film would look and feel the same with a different actor, its the actor (in the case of films with A-list actors) that gets the butts in the seats.
There are some directors and producers that have name value and are 'bankable' (Lucas, Spielberg) but their value is less than that of actors. 'Bankable' means that if you have Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford or De Niro (A-list) in a film, you (producer) can count on getting the money you threw at the film back. That's why the A-list actors get paid so much.
Or in slashdot friendly terms:
1) Get Tom Cruise,
2) Make film with Tom Cruise,
3) Profit.
Of course stage 2.5 which involves a bad script, bad directing and bad filming could get in the way of 3) but most film studios are pretty competent in avoiding making 'bad' films except where religion (Battlefield Earth), ego (Waterworld) or idiocy (Showgirls) overrule the clever people in studio accounting and preproduction.
If you still don't agree with me, check out the film posters. Whose name is written in the largest font? And why?
Physical addiction little harder to crack?
No. You get the shakes, you get a fever, you start vomiting, you want to die, you feel like you're dying. You curl up in a ball. Then you eat yogurt. And gherkins. And cry a little. And your body stops wanting and needing the substance and you go back to a normal life. Or at least as normal as it can be if you're surrounded by what you used to crave. Still if the body doesn't want it, the mind doesn't, quitting is a question of suffering through the feedback.
Psychological addiction - you can't go cold turkey. You think about it. Thinking about it makes you want it. You can't stop thinking about it. Everything you see/think relates in some weird way to your addiction. Days/weeks after stopping you still think about it and you can imagine how it would feel like to just have a little go/hit... it's your controlling mechanism, the mind that craves, you can't force or switch off the feedback.
Oh, you have to do a lot of mj to get a psychological addiction. Or so I'm told.
Like Slashdot?
.
You mean fractured down opinionated economic, moral and technology fault lines?MS-bashers/Linux-bashers, Linus lovers/Linus haters, ecofreak/technojunkies, libertarians/communists, 'information wants to be free' swappers/ 'theft is theft' moralists and JonKatz fans/foes
I can just imagine it, your choice of spouse is decided by the ominous by BSD/Red hat question? Or even worse, Star Trek/Lord of the Rings?
Or you meet a new neighbour and you wonder whether their game house or the computer that they're running it from is more modded?
Or that neighbour constantly comes round your house asking if you've heard of a free sofa that is also a fridge and a multimedia centre (must play OGGs) and a PDA. And is a eco friendly. And open-source. Or when they should start teaching their kids how to code, at 2, 3 or in the womb?
I also wonder how many CowboyNeal based aliases there will be on-line.
Then again, since it'll be a Windows game, I don't think 'all' the Slashdot community will take it up.
The profits might be explicitly mentioned but they're calculated by Marvel. In any way they want. Oh and participation does not cover 'licensing' for 'merchandise' or 'otherwise'.
I suspected the contract was drafted something like this when I read the headline. Its incredible that somebody who's been involved in entertainment business for decades wouldn't have known to define 'profits' in an agreement like this. Or written more detailed provisions on payment terms and conditions. And added guaranteed payments on gross income. Or added an independent review procedure. Or scratched out the proviso on licensing.
Or hired a (smart) lawyer to do it. Hmm.
Good luck Stan. Unless you find a very equitably minded judge, you're in trouble.
Follow the link: More like blue wig, red arse, sorry led.
Oh and the song is by Eiffel 65. And it's titled "Blue".
And it is extremely incredibly offensive (to my ears) techpop from Germany.
Big gambling is run by big listed corporations and guys called Steve and Lee, not Tony and Vitti.
There are very few mob owned casinos left. There might be some vestigal ties (through debt-collection, prostitution, etc) with the majority but the influence of organised crime (violent, inefficient) has been replaced by the influence of the organised market ('family orientated', efficient).
They mentioned the US moon landings about a decade after they occured whilst trumpeting about the landers that sent back a couple of grams of moon rock. US astronauts were bringing the stuff back by the kilogram. The Soviets were ashamed to admit that their space program had been totally eclipsed (ahem). Now, Western media had no trouble with reporting on Gagarin's flight. Which in fact some people doubt ever occured, not because the world is flat and the angels fly around at 80 km, but because there were a series of inconsistencies and occurances that raise doubts whether he was the actual pilot of the first manned flight (and not some nameless other cosmonaut who was supposedly killed in an accident).
Interesting summary of Soviet and the Nato battle plan. I would add that there was a condition to both plans being implemented, air superiority.
Which wasn't a given considering the size and quality of the opposing forces. These air forces couldn't have been knocked out preemptively or *first* (current US doctrine seems to apply a domino strategy, first air defence, then infrastructure, then battlefield components - highly effective I have to say).
Without air superiority, the battlefield aircraft would have had a quite *difficult* time.
Further, until air superiority was gained, it would have been the German grunt (albeit in a Leopard or two) who would have been trying to stop the Red Army, he would have been vulnerable to artillery. And the Mi-24s. And the T-72s. And the Specnacz running around behind Nato lines.
As far as going to war with the EU, hmm, that's a lot of (nuclear armed) territory to conquer and occupy. Unlike Isreal which you can drive through and across in an afternoon.
Insightful comment. Personally I think translation problems give the 'back to the Bible' and 'literal Bible truth' movements and any kind of Christianity based solely on the Bible of the movement...hmm, a very fragile foundation. Catholicism is based on the Bible and the Church tradition, one supplements the other. Then again, the tradition may also be flawed.
Paranoid about trademarks? The corporations can object to use of their trademarks in trade. And when they try to do the same in areas not connected with trade and the little guy stands up to them, they get slapped by the courts. Your vocabulary and freedom of speech is not being limited by trademarks.
As far as domains are concerned, are I haven't heard a case of www.[generic noun].com being adjudicated against the holder under pressure from a corporation with [generic noun] trademark (considering that you can't easily trademark a simple noun unless you're in an area of business not related to that noun, its not surprising... By way of explaination, you could probably trademark "Computer" for a restaurant but couldn't for a computer shop). Now a more original turn of phrase can be trademarked and only the trademark holder can state that it has a moral (and legal) right to an original phrase that it uses. I have no sympathy for people squatting on Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and other original, non-generic phrases. But I'm open to comments and rebuttal.
Wouldn't be easy to seperate the 'conscious' parts of the cortex from the non-conscious ones that regulate the body's functioning. Its not like stripping a kernel of instructions...
As far as the Matrix is concerned, ever seen a battery farm? They make the Matrix look like a real heaven (BTW kind of nice of the machines to give us a dream world to live in and even manipulate instead of just putting everyone into a coma).