Think again. I'm seriously, very seriously, not buying the SE DVDs, or the prequel DVDs, until I can buy the original trilogy on DVD. It's at the top of my DVDs-to-buy list, see? I may buy the others just to "fill out the library," but what's the point if I don't have the originals? Sure there are positive things about the SEs, but there's no way I could enjoy them - it would just be a nagging reminder that I can't watch the real movies.
I don't know if I'll go to the trouble of buying a LD player and making my own DVDs, but I may do so one of these days when I run out of other projects (yeah, right). I suppose the deadline is whenever my VHS copies wear out and I haven't obtained a digital copy yet.
So, in other words, you're underestimating how disgusted people are about this. When I walk by the SEs, I won't feel the urge to buy them - I'll feel the urge to buy them, walk outside, remove the shrink-wrap, and then return them to the store and complain that it's the wrong version. Maybe I'll hassle them to try and order the version I want. Maybe I won't do any of the above, but I'll certainly think about it as I pass by the display...
Are you kidding? Don't just buy them anyway. I'm not buying any of this crap until the originals are released on DVD. No SE's, no prequels, no star wars legos, nothing. Maybe I'll borrow the SE DVD's from someone so I can rip 'em and try to do some repairs, but there's no way I'm going to buy them.
Maybe, just maybe, I will buy the special editions after I buy the originals (yes, they will be released eventually, after Lucas is dead and/or the copyrights expire and/or the robots take over) - just for completeness' sake. Probably not, though, after all of this stupidity.
Plus, the barrow is what explains the ability of Merry's sword to wound the Witch King. No ordinary sword could have done that, but the barrow blades that the hobbits were carrying were forged by the people of the north to fight the Witch Lord of Angmar, who later becomes the leader of the Black Riders.
I guess the sword that Aragorn gave him must have also had some sort of magical properties, but it wasn't explained.
At any rate, this is a pretty minor nit-pick. My major beef with the movies was the cheesification of the dialog and the totally unnecessary additions to the plot (especially when the movies were already pressed for time).
Exactly. These companies are just giving themselves a really bad name. I was entertaining a project recently that involved a wireless camera. Hmm, where do I get a wireless camera? I did a google search, and of course X10 showed up prominently in the results - so I moved on to the other links to see what was available. I didn't even bother looking at their site, because a big red flag came up as soon as I saw their name.
Hold on a sec - you still need to buy a new player to play HD-DVD. The backwards compatibility just means you don't need your old player anymore.
I would agree that HD-DVD seems to make more sense than BR-DVD, though.
The DVD+R/DVD+RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW mess is just ridiculous. I'm still waiting for the dust to settle before I buy a DVD burner. I guess the best thing to do is to buy whatever is the official standard - why encourage Sony/HP/Dell to ignore standards and create a big pain in the ass for consumers?
In the short term, Jupiter has some rather interesting moons to explore.
In the long term, who knows? Gas mining operation?
The point is, by undertaking immense challenges like sending humans to Jupiter, we learn a lot. I think that learning is important to the advancement of civilization, although some may differ.
Or perhaps the two of you could design and build a Millennium Falcon from standard Lego parts? Not only would it be more satisfying to complete, but it could potentially be a lot cooler than the pre-defined set. Some parts of the ship (the cockpit, for example) would be difficult to design, but that's the fun of playing with Legos!
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say - that in the worst case scenario we're screwed anyway, so we might as well have no fear.
Maybe I'm an optimist, but I would like to think that any sufficiently advanced intelligence will have learned to be peaceful. Even if the opposite is true, though, it wouldn't do us any good to hide. If a civilization is 100k years ahead of us, we're pretty much at their mercy - might as well act friendly and hope for the best!
He's lying if he says he has a Voodoo 2 in his 486 - unless his 486 has a PCI bus.
DOOM 2 runs great on my Pentium 66 with VESA local bus graphics. Yeah, it's a hot machine, but I might have to add more RAM for DOOM 3, as I hear it's a real memory hog compared to the second one.:(
Hmm. I'm confused. You are calling the theory of evolution "ridiculous," but at the same time you put "Theory" in bold. If it's ridiculous, then why are you accepting it as a theory (i.e. the best and strongest explanation that anyone has ever been able to come up with)?
If you have a better explanation that's not a total waste of time, then please share it with the world.
...or better yet, simply reprogram generic hardware using software.
I'm not an EE, but wouldn't it be possible to build a motherboard where all (most?) of the chips were FPGAs or something? What would be the performance issues? Seems like it might be a more realistic plan than actually fabricating chips.
Maybe it doesn't bother you, but I feel weird using "they" where it doesn't fit. I just use "he," in the way that the English language has worked for centuries. "He" or "his" can be gender neutral, as in:
"If anyone wants to look at the code, he can just grab it out of CM."
It's obvious that "he" refers to any person, male or female. "He or she" is just unnecessarily clunky. The "he" in the sentence is just a placeholder, an example. It implies that if "he" can get the code, then "she" can also.
That's an interesting observation, but I don't think it works very well. I think when you talk about average intelligence, *most* people are going to be pretty close to the average.
If you average the numbers in the set [1,5,3,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,7,9] you get 5. It is not true that half of the values are below average, nor is it true that half are above average.
I think most people are of average intelligence. I also think that most people are actually pretty smart - or at least they have the potential to be. The biggest problem we have is that people don't have much knowledge, and they really don't want to. Nobody looks past the end of their nose.
The average person isn't stupid, but simply isn't open to thinking about things. I think it's analagous to the fact that most people have the potential to be in good physical shape, but they're fat because they don't exercise. People don't exercise their brains!
I think the point is that spammers would move their operations to other countries if email originating in the US was taxed.
The whole email tax idea is pointless anyway. If one particular protocol (or set of protocols) is taxed, then everyone will use something else. Probably something with a technological spam prevention solution.
> Suppose people work around it by creating VPNs > and just tunnel their email to members of the > VPN by encrypted means.
Tax evasion is illegal.
It's not tax evasion, it's tax avoidance. If you tax email, I'll stop using email. Why should I pay a tax to send bits in one format when I can send them in another format without paying said tax?
Note that I didn't say "tax free," because I already pay taxes for the bits that I send. I pay taxes monthly when I pay my ISP bill.
Now if you're talking about an additional tax on *all* bits transmitted, then it's no longer an email tax, it's a communication tax.
> What about instant messages? efax? VoIP?
A different set of taxes.
It's pointless to have different taxes on different protocols, because it's all just information. If HTTP is the cheapest tax, then I'll send *everything* using HTTP.
From what I can gather about Silbo it's based on relative frequency. You don't have to have perfect pitch to speak/process it, you just have to be able to generate and identify changes in pitch.
You can communicate anything with beeps and whistles - the trick is doing it efficiently. Heck, you could whistle morse code if you wanted to.
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Where else would I put it? Cult Classics?
I don't know if I'll go to the trouble of buying a LD player and making my own DVDs, but I may do so one of these days when I run out of other projects (yeah, right). I suppose the deadline is whenever my VHS copies wear out and I haven't obtained a digital copy yet.
So, in other words, you're underestimating how disgusted people are about this. When I walk by the SEs, I won't feel the urge to buy them - I'll feel the urge to buy them, walk outside, remove the shrink-wrap, and then return them to the store and complain that it's the wrong version. Maybe I'll hassle them to try and order the version I want. Maybe I won't do any of the above, but I'll certainly think about it as I pass by the display...
Dum de dum...
[checks watch]
La la la...
[twiddles thumbs]
*Yawn* - still waiting...
Maybe, just maybe, I will buy the special editions after I buy the originals (yes, they will be released eventually, after Lucas is dead and/or the copyrights expire and/or the robots take over) - just for completeness' sake. Probably not, though, after all of this stupidity.
I guess the sword that Aragorn gave him must have also had some sort of magical properties, but it wasn't explained.
At any rate, this is a pretty minor nit-pick. My major beef with the movies was the cheesification of the dialog and the totally unnecessary additions to the plot (especially when the movies were already pressed for time).
I would agree that HD-DVD seems to make more sense than BR-DVD, though.
The DVD+R/DVD+RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW mess is just ridiculous. I'm still waiting for the dust to settle before I buy a DVD burner. I guess the best thing to do is to buy whatever is the official standard - why encourage Sony/HP/Dell to ignore standards and create a big pain in the ass for consumers?
Sure, building a moon base is expensive up front, and may eclipse some other important projects, but the benefits are enormous.
In the long term, who knows? Gas mining operation?
The point is, by undertaking immense challenges like sending humans to Jupiter, we learn a lot. I think that learning is important to the advancement of civilization, although some may differ.
Maybe I'm an optimist, but I would like to think that any sufficiently advanced intelligence will have learned to be peaceful. Even if the opposite is true, though, it wouldn't do us any good to hide. If a civilization is 100k years ahead of us, we're pretty much at their mercy - might as well act friendly and hope for the best!
If they're going to wipe us out, they're going to wipe us out. Hiding for a few millennia won't help us much.
Not that it's at all practical to solve someone's psychological problems on an atomic scale.
Two peanuts were walking down the road. And one was assaulted... peanut.
DOOM 2 runs great on my Pentium 66 with VESA local bus graphics. Yeah, it's a hot machine, but I might have to add more RAM for DOOM 3, as I hear it's a real memory hog compared to the second one. :(
If you have a better explanation that's not a total waste of time, then please share it with the world.
No? I didn't think so.
I'm not an EE, but wouldn't it be possible to build a motherboard where all (most?) of the chips were FPGAs or something? What would be the performance issues? Seems like it might be a more realistic plan than actually fabricating chips.
"If I was an English professor and somebody misspelled 'hear,' I wouldn't flunk him but I'd at least mark him down."
;)
Of course, the types who mix the two up are the least likely to actually ask how to use the words correctly.
"If anyone wants to look at the code, he can just grab it out of CM."
It's obvious that "he" refers to any person, male or female. "He or she" is just unnecessarily clunky. The "he" in the sentence is just a placeholder, an example. It implies that if "he" can get the code, then "she" can also.
That's an interesting observation, but I don't think it works very well. I think when you talk about average intelligence, *most* people are going to be pretty close to the average.
If you average the numbers in the set [1,5,3,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5,7,9] you get 5. It is not true that half of the values are below average, nor is it true that half are above average.
I think most people are of average intelligence. I also think that most people are actually pretty smart - or at least they have the potential to be. The biggest problem we have is that people don't have much knowledge, and they really don't want to. Nobody looks past the end of their nose.
The average person isn't stupid, but simply isn't open to thinking about things. I think it's analagous to the fact that most people have the potential to be in good physical shape, but they're fat because they don't exercise. People don't exercise their brains!
I think the point is that spammers would move their operations to other countries if email originating in the US was taxed.
The whole email tax idea is pointless anyway. If one particular protocol (or set of protocols) is taxed, then everyone will use something else. Probably something with a technological spam prevention solution.
It's not tax evasion, it's tax avoidance. If you tax email, I'll stop using email. Why should I pay a tax to send bits in one format when I can send them in another format without paying said tax?
Note that I didn't say "tax free," because I already pay taxes for the bits that I send. I pay taxes monthly when I pay my ISP bill.
Now if you're talking about an additional tax on *all* bits transmitted, then it's no longer an email tax, it's a communication tax.
It's pointless to have different taxes on different protocols, because it's all just information. If HTTP is the cheapest tax, then I'll send *everything* using HTTP.
From what I can gather about Silbo it's based on relative frequency. You don't have to have perfect pitch to speak/process it, you just have to be able to generate and identify changes in pitch.
You can communicate anything with beeps and whistles - the trick is doing it efficiently. Heck, you could whistle morse code if you wanted to.