The fact that you find pig tasty is also proof that eating dogs is a reasonable responce to certain conditions. Once humans decide to eat something, they learn to like it. The smell of dog revolts you and is tasty to others. The smell of pig revolts me.
I think the thing with dogs is more emotional than anything else. I never smelled cooked dog, so I don't know if it would revolt me or not (probably not, to be honest, I like meat -- a lot).
Jim Rome probably said it best one day: "I'm not going to eat the guy who brings me my slippers. I'm not going to eat the guy that protects my family". And that's really what it comes down to. Dogs have been bred to be "man's best friend" and be a useful part of the family. Pigs have been bred to be eaten, although some have pigs as pets, but then, people turn just about anything into pets.
Pigs are domesticated animals created by humans. They've been bred for thousands of years to provide garbage disposal.
IANAPF (IANA pig farmer), and I could be wrong, but I don't think your typical food pig has been modified by humans all that far from your typical wild pig. Not like wolves -> dogs.
I tend to doubt that pigs were bred for "garbage disposal", unless you mean that they are efficient at eating scrap-waste and making themselves into food. Personally, I look at pigs as a vital source of bacon and pork ribs (*smack* *smack*).:)
Speaking of not eating pork: can you tell me why people in the Western culture don't eat dog meat? Would you call that superstition too?
Actually, there is a logical reason: It's because dogs are a domesticated animal, created by humans. Same for cats. They've been bred for thousands of years to provide companionship, emotional attachment, and last but not least, partnership in work. Therefore they don't tend to be seen as animals for food.
It's only in very poor countries where meat is scarce and companion animals are a luxury that you tend to get dog meat as food. Even then, many cultures won't eat them if they are working breeds and provide a useful service.
Case in point, new building sites are inspected and all kinds of crazy nonsense is done to select sites, but quite surprisingly they knew not to build on formations that us westerners commonly build on that just happen to leak radon gas.
I don't know; if you have enough rules, you're certainly going to coincidently eliminate some source of problem. That's like having a rule that "it's bad luck to walk under a ladder", and then crediting good luck when paint never falls on your head. Or a rule that a broken mirror creates bad luck, and then crediting the gods when you never get cut by broken glass.
If they happen to have a rule that building on scaly ground allows evil spirits to rise up and haunt you doesn't mean that they knew radon gas might also leak out of scaly ground (or whatever).
When I was growing up (born in '64), superstition was still pretty widespread in mainstream society, such as rabbit's feet, black cat's crossing your path, "bread and butter", salt over the shoulder, knock on wood, etc. There were people who really took these things seriously: in fact, you might remember a twilight zone episode where some guy speaking about superstition matter-of-factly noted that many people believed in rabbit's feet (and then some guy piped up with "darn right" or something like that).
It occurred to me that these sort of things are almost totally dead, most likely caused by the homogenization of society caused by television and mass media.
Even astrology seems to have taken some big hits. I'm sure there are still some nutcases that follow it, but nothing like it once was.
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously. My wife has a friend (who's Asian) whose mother actually made her not buy a particular condo she was looking at because some Feng Shui witch doctor didn't like it. I've even heard some stories about dot-com idiots in the Silicon Valley who felt the need to blow big $$$ on Feng Shui analyses of their office spaces.
Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.
[of course, I'm leaving out religion from this discussion of superstition, but that's another subject entirely.:)]
300 baud connections even a 14-year-old could outtype
300 baud (in those days) was about 30 chars/second. Unless you're pressing keys at random, there's no way any human can keep up with that. It only seemed slow because of the latency of echoing your characters back to you.:)
I've just spent EIGHT FUCKING HOURS trying to get this piece of shit laptop to dial up fucking Earthlink. "wvdial" JUST FUCKING DOESN'T WORK.
Is there ANYONE on earth who thinks Linux is ready for the average person???
It takes 5 seconds to set this up under Windows.
Sorry, mod me down as off-topic, but I felt I had to get this off my chest. It's 4:38pm as I type this, and I have someone leaving on a plane for a demo tomorrow at 7am. "Yeah, just gotta set up the modem and you'll be all set! Well, no, I haven't done that before under Linux, but it's menu driven nowadays. How hard can it be?"
Yes, I've tried a) multiple modems, b) multiple ISPs (for GODS sake), multiple FUCKING everything.
Excuse me while I try and figure how to set up an old-school chat script.
Man, there is SO MUCH TRUTH to "Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing".
Damn straight. Here's an idea: Why don't you ask your FRIEND what he would like you to send to "subvert" his daughter.
What an asshole. With friends like that, who needs stalkers. Why do I have the feeling that this "friend" is hoping the daughter will gratefully fulfill some sick fantasy of his.
but quite frankly I would be much happier as a pioneer on the surface of Mars than I am right now, headed toward an exciting career in the soul-sucking field of white-collar paper-pushing.
That's great, and someday we WILL colonize other places for just that reason. But there is a BIG difference between old-world exploration and space exploration. The big thing is that an old-world colony could be self-sufficient once you got the colonists to the new land. With enough hard work and natural resources, you could build your colony from the land.
But a Mars landing is different. To make a self sufficient colony is insanely difficult and expensive, and quite frankly might be beyond our technology right now. That means you have to have supplies continually coming from Earth. Big $$$$$.
Isn't a shot at answering the eternal question "are we alone?" reason enough to go to Mars?
If that's what you want, then you should definitely NOT be in favor of manned trips. Like I said in another post, we can send 100 unmanned probes for the cost of a single manned probe.
Trust me, I want to go into space. Badly. But I realize that the only way it's going to happen is for space to pay for itself by establishing an industrial infrastructure first in orbit, then in the asteroid belts, then possibly on the moon (although there might not be much there worth having), and then -- someday -- Mars might be cheap enough when our technology reaches the right level.
It sucks, but I think that's the reality of how it has to happen.
Lewis and Clark weren't sent across the continental United States for Gold or any other reason. They were sent to pave the way for others. To see what was there and find what might be of value, scientifically, economically or otherwise.
Dude, you're contradicting yourself in the same sentence. They didn't send them out just for the hell of it, they sent them out to see what might be (as you say) "of value". The US government was extremely interested in expanding the size of US territory. Of course, they were also interested in finding new trading routes to East Europe.
Or something like that. Sure, economics drove the exploration of the New World. But the sheer thrill of exploration is also a factor. We didn't climb Mount Everest after running a detailed cost/benefit analysis.
I agree that a certain amount of exploration is done for the sake of research and learning. I think that's why we went to the moon in the first place. The USSR certainly gave us some motivation, but more than that, we wanted to do something that hadn't been done before.
Of course, in the long run, any colony would have to be able to sustain itself. But what would it hurt if we splurged just this once?
But see, that's the problem: space has been done before. There was a lot more mystery surrounding the moon shot. The was truly something that had never been done before. But going to Mars is just more of the same. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that we can do it; it's just a question of spending the money. In other words, we've already done the splurging -- on the moon. If we're going to spend money like that, we can do 100 unmanned probes for the cost of 1 manned probe.
It's too hard, we complain, it's too dangerous, we might fail. We can't afford the risk, we have to wait until we can make it safe. We have to wait, and wait and wait.
That's NOT why we're not going. We're not going because going there is TOTALLY WORTHLESS.
People really need to clue in to why people made voyages in the past. They didn't make the voyage for the hell of it, or just to see if they could, they did it for selfish reasons: 1) Find Gold, 2) Escape oppression, 3) Escape crowding and find virgin land, 4) Gold.
There currently is just economic reason to go to Mars. If you want to men in space and you want men in space to stay, then stop whining about how the government should dump money when there is almost no return on the investment except "Gee! Wow! We made it! Whoop-de-doo!"
If we are ever to stay in space, space has to pay for itself through industrialization.
The reason we don't go to Mars is exactly the opposite reason you cite: We don't go because we already know we can do it with enough money. With the moon mission, that really was new.
When I was in high school it was like a dictatorship you have NO rights what so ever.
I should add that I actually agree with the philosophy of running a tight ship and not allowing the "inmates to run the asylum". I take a very dim view of class disruption (which is why I made the caveat that we didn't know the whole story). However, there is so much "death of common sense" in school districts where they completely turn off their brains when interpreting the rules. Things like suspensions when a six year old makes a pretend gun out of paper and things like that. Stories like that make me want to strangle the school administrators.
Anyway, that's why my kids are going to private school.:)
Technically, this type of law doesn't have to be supported on moral grounds. If the law simply states that each person has equal rights, then sexual assault can be made illegal without morality coming into it. The person committing the assault is taking away the rights of the victim...
That's somewhat "libertarian 101" philosophy (along the lines of "I can do anything I want as long as it doesn't interfere with your right to do anything you want"). The problem with that whole line of reasoning is defining exactly what "taking away my rights" really means. Where things get slippery is in "preventative" laws, such as gun laws or drug laws. Those laws are designed to prevent me from breaking the law, even though I may not actually use those products to take away someone elses rights (such as driving while drugged, or shooting someone).
The story I always bring up about this philosophy being taken too far was that I got into an argument with a Libertarian one time who insisted that it was his right to shoot at people. His right to shoot at people stopped when he actually hit someone, but up until that point, no one should be able to stop him.
Obviously, the guy was an idiot, but it illustrates the danger of the line of thinking.
Of course, this is different from the question of "where life begins". If we define a human being as starting at conception, then they have civil rights as an independent person, and thus get the rights due any other child. This backs up your point that you don't really need morality to answer the legal question, you only need to define the rights of fetus.
The principal wanted to suspend her for a week - the parents (who rushed to the school when they heard about this) managed to talk them down to a day.
The parents allowed the student to get suspended for a day? That's just ludicrous. If it was an honest accident (and there may be more to the story than we see here, like using it to make a big disruption in the class), then there should be zero punishment.
If it was me, I would have said something like, "Tell you what. How about NO punishment, or I sue the school for not having the proper blocking software to prevent my daughter getting exposed to porn.":)
They had been attempting to create an early-stage human embryo, with the aim of harvesting stem cells for the use to treat patients with disorders such as Parkinson's and heart disease.
In other news, the Third Reich announced today that they have been doing some "secret" experiments on Jews with the goal of treating patients with many noble-sounding disorders.
I'm really becoming that cynical, but I just can't reconcile religion and politics, or see it as having any place in a political scheme.
That's why you're confused. It's not a religious issue, and EITHER SIDE bringing religion into it is wrong.
The only issue is whether life begins at conception. If it does, then experiments on a living, unique, human entity is wrong. If it doesn't, then it's not morally wrong.
And by the way...
but more from some kind of right wing perogative to tell me what I can morally do.
Society tells you what you can and can't do every day, yes, even morally. Get used to it. For example, society considers it illegal AND immoral to sexually assault someone. But gee, who are they to tell YOU what to do, right?
Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign.
And in other news, Burger King is "aggressively lobbying" me to switch to eating Whoppers instead of Big Macs. What is the story here?
So what, Microsoft shouldn't even be allowed to market its product? It's somehow evil for them to try and make the case for their products being superior?
Dude, I think you need to look a little closer. Those facial features aren't textures, they are polygons. Note the shadows from the facial features on the face itself. Look at the detail of the hands. In the words of Carmack at his Japan presentation, "in previous engines, we were lucky to have 3 polygons for a nose".:)
I like to give a plug for this book every now and then: Why Michael Couldn't Hit: And Other Tales of the Neurology of Sports. Even if you don't care at all about sports, this book is a fascinating read. It describes how the brain and neurology is linked with being a world-class athlete. What I found especially interesting is that the author makes a good case that there are small windows during growing up where you must play a particular sport in order to be world-class at it. If you miss the window, you miss your chance. After that, your brain does not have plasticity to devote a specialized part of itself to the sport. He also makes the case that being a world-class musician has similar windows.
I would imagine that there are similar cases to be made about being world-class at a particular mental sport such as chess.
Personally, I would like to see space exploration start happening, and continue happening. Let's be honest: The moon missions, while probably the most significant and arguably the most complex engineering feat in human history, basically was "Wow! We made it! Now what??".
Instead of throwing all this government money into the sh**hold where we know it will probably never come out, let's give tax incentives to get private companies into space. First company to mine an asteroid gets a 20 year tax moritorium! Same deal for space-based factories!
The key is that space has to pay for itself. If we depend on the government to put men into space, then men in space depends on the whims of budgets and politicians. The only way to get there and stay there is to have an economic incentive to stay there.
You're saying that I shouldn't participate in political discussion unless I know how "the world should be run."
No, I said what I meant: Just because you might be good at a particular subject, doesn't mean you can apply the same reasonings to another subject.
[i said] If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. [you said] In short, you're telling me to shut the fuck up because I disagree with you. Now, which one of us is "intrinsically anti-freedom?"
I meant "should" in the sense that we would all be better off if you stayed away until you learned more about reality, not in the sense that you should be "forbidden" to voice your opinion. Feel free. But that doesn't make you less wrong and misguided.
However, unlike you or M. Le Pen, I realize that there is nothing intrinsically dangerous about studying and sharing the teachings of Marx, or even forming political associations based upon Marxist ideology.
Here is where you went off the deep end and began manufacturing things based not on what I actually said, but on your own biases.
Uh, no. Freedom feeds the people, fascism starves the people. As I said recently, the world is hungry not because of unequal distribution of wealth, it's because of unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because something happens to be legal doesn't mean that I can't find it morally or politically objectionable.
The problem here is that wiretapping is 100% moral and ethical -- in the context of law enforcement and a court order.
Anyone who thinks wiretaps are always bad are not living in any sort of real world.
The fact that you find pig tasty is also proof that eating dogs is a reasonable responce to certain conditions. Once humans decide to eat something, they learn to like it. The smell of dog revolts you and is tasty to others. The smell of pig revolts me.
I think the thing with dogs is more emotional than anything else. I never smelled cooked dog, so I don't know if it would revolt me or not (probably not, to be honest, I like meat -- a lot).
Jim Rome probably said it best one day: "I'm not going to eat the guy who brings me my slippers. I'm not going to eat the guy that protects my family". And that's really what it comes down to. Dogs have been bred to be "man's best friend" and be a useful part of the family. Pigs have been bred to be eaten, although some have pigs as pets, but then, people turn just about anything into pets.
Pigs are domesticated animals created by humans. They've been bred for thousands of years to provide garbage disposal.
IANAPF (IANA pig farmer), and I could be wrong, but I don't think your typical food pig has been modified by humans all that far from your typical wild pig. Not like wolves -> dogs.
I tend to doubt that pigs were bred for "garbage disposal", unless you mean that they are efficient at eating scrap-waste and making themselves into food. Personally, I look at pigs as a vital source of bacon and pork ribs (*smack* *smack*). :)
Speaking of not eating pork: can you tell me why people in the Western culture don't eat dog meat? Would you call that superstition too?
Actually, there is a logical reason: It's because dogs are a domesticated animal, created by humans. Same for cats. They've been bred for thousands of years to provide companionship, emotional attachment, and last but not least, partnership in work. Therefore they don't tend to be seen as animals for food.
It's only in very poor countries where meat is scarce and companion animals are a luxury that you tend to get dog meat as food. Even then, many cultures won't eat them if they are working breeds and provide a useful service.
Case in point, new building sites are inspected and all kinds of crazy nonsense is done to select sites, but quite surprisingly they knew not to build on formations that us westerners commonly build on that just happen to leak radon gas.
I don't know; if you have enough rules, you're certainly going to coincidently eliminate some source of problem. That's like having a rule that "it's bad luck to walk under a ladder", and then crediting good luck when paint never falls on your head. Or a rule that a broken mirror creates bad luck, and then crediting the gods when you never get cut by broken glass.
If they happen to have a rule that building on scaly ground allows evil spirits to rise up and haunt you doesn't mean that they knew radon gas might also leak out of scaly ground (or whatever).
Something I've been thinking about lately...
When I was growing up (born in '64), superstition was still pretty widespread in mainstream society, such as rabbit's feet, black cat's crossing your path, "bread and butter", salt over the shoulder, knock on wood, etc. There were people who really took these things seriously: in fact, you might remember a twilight zone episode where some guy speaking about superstition matter-of-factly noted that many people believed in rabbit's feet (and then some guy piped up with "darn right" or something like that).
It occurred to me that these sort of things are almost totally dead, most likely caused by the homogenization of society caused by television and mass media.
Even astrology seems to have taken some big hits. I'm sure there are still some nutcases that follow it, but nothing like it once was.
One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously. My wife has a friend (who's Asian) whose mother actually made her not buy a particular condo she was looking at because some Feng Shui witch doctor didn't like it. I've even heard some stories about dot-com idiots in the Silicon Valley who felt the need to blow big $$$ on Feng Shui analyses of their office spaces.
Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.
[of course, I'm leaving out religion from this discussion of superstition, but that's another subject entirely. :)]
I'm with you, except for...
300 baud connections even a 14-year-old could outtype
300 baud (in those days) was about 30 chars/second. Unless you're pressing keys at random, there's no way any human can keep up with that. It only seemed slow because of the latency of echoing your characters back to you. :)
I've just spent EIGHT FUCKING HOURS trying to get this piece of shit laptop to dial up fucking Earthlink. "wvdial" JUST FUCKING DOESN'T WORK.
Is there ANYONE on earth who thinks Linux is ready for the average person???
It takes 5 seconds to set this up under Windows.
Sorry, mod me down as off-topic, but I felt I had to get this off my chest. It's 4:38pm as I type this, and I have someone leaving on a plane for a demo tomorrow at 7am. "Yeah, just gotta set up the modem and you'll be all set! Well, no, I haven't done that before under Linux, but it's menu driven nowadays. How hard can it be?"
Yes, I've tried a) multiple modems, b) multiple ISPs (for GODS sake), multiple FUCKING everything.
Excuse me while I try and figure how to set up an old-school chat script.
Man, there is SO MUCH TRUTH to "Linux is free only if your time is worth nothing".
Damn straight. Here's an idea: Why don't you ask your FRIEND what he would like you to send to "subvert" his daughter.
What an asshole. With friends like that, who needs stalkers. Why do I have the feeling that this "friend" is hoping the daughter will gratefully fulfill some sick fantasy of his.
but quite frankly I would be much happier as a pioneer on the surface of Mars than I am right now, headed toward an exciting career in the soul-sucking field of white-collar paper-pushing.
That's great, and someday we WILL colonize other places for just that reason. But there is a BIG difference between old-world exploration and space exploration. The big thing is that an old-world colony could be self-sufficient once you got the colonists to the new land. With enough hard work and natural resources, you could build your colony from the land.
But a Mars landing is different. To make a self sufficient colony is insanely difficult and expensive, and quite frankly might be beyond our technology right now. That means you have to have supplies continually coming from Earth. Big $$$$$.
Isn't a shot at answering the eternal question "are we alone?" reason enough to go to Mars?
If that's what you want, then you should definitely NOT be in favor of manned trips. Like I said in another post, we can send 100 unmanned probes for the cost of a single manned probe.
Trust me, I want to go into space. Badly. But I realize that the only way it's going to happen is for space to pay for itself by establishing an industrial infrastructure first in orbit, then in the asteroid belts, then possibly on the moon (although there might not be much there worth having), and then -- someday -- Mars might be cheap enough when our technology reaches the right level.
It sucks, but I think that's the reality of how it has to happen.
Lewis and Clark weren't sent across the continental United States for Gold or any other reason. They were sent to pave the way for others. To see what was there and find what might be of value, scientifically, economically or otherwise.
Dude, you're contradicting yourself in the same sentence. They didn't send them out just for the hell of it, they sent them out to see what might be (as you say) "of value". The US government was extremely interested in expanding the size of US territory. Of course, they were also interested in finding new trading routes to East Europe.
Or something like that. Sure, economics drove the exploration of the New World. But the sheer thrill of exploration is also a factor. We didn't climb Mount Everest after running a detailed cost/benefit analysis.
I agree that a certain amount of exploration is done for the sake of research and learning. I think that's why we went to the moon in the first place. The USSR certainly gave us some motivation, but more than that, we wanted to do something that hadn't been done before.
Of course, in the long run, any colony would have to be able to sustain itself. But what would it hurt if we splurged just this once?
But see, that's the problem: space has been done before. There was a lot more mystery surrounding the moon shot. The was truly something that had never been done before. But going to Mars is just more of the same. There's no doubt in anyone's mind that we can do it; it's just a question of spending the money. In other words, we've already done the splurging -- on the moon. If we're going to spend money like that, we can do 100 unmanned probes for the cost of 1 manned probe.
It's too hard, we complain, it's too dangerous, we might fail. We can't afford the risk, we have to wait until we can make it safe. We have to wait, and wait and wait.
That's NOT why we're not going. We're not going because going there is TOTALLY WORTHLESS.
People really need to clue in to why people made voyages in the past. They didn't make the voyage for the hell of it, or just to see if they could, they did it for selfish reasons: 1) Find Gold, 2) Escape oppression, 3) Escape crowding and find virgin land, 4) Gold.
There currently is just economic reason to go to Mars. If you want to men in space and you want men in space to stay, then stop whining about how the government should dump money when there is almost no return on the investment except "Gee! Wow! We made it! Whoop-de-doo!"
If we are ever to stay in space, space has to pay for itself through industrialization.
The reason we don't go to Mars is exactly the opposite reason you cite: We don't go because we already know we can do it with enough money. With the moon mission, that really was new.
When I was in high school it was like a dictatorship you have NO rights what so ever.
I should add that I actually agree with the philosophy of running a tight ship and not allowing the "inmates to run the asylum". I take a very dim view of class disruption (which is why I made the caveat that we didn't know the whole story). However, there is so much "death of common sense" in school districts where they completely turn off their brains when interpreting the rules. Things like suspensions when a six year old makes a pretend gun out of paper and things like that. Stories like that make me want to strangle the school administrators.
Anyway, that's why my kids are going to private school. :)
Technically, this type of law doesn't have to be supported on moral grounds. If the law simply states that each person has equal rights, then sexual assault can be made illegal without morality coming into it. The person committing the assault is taking away the rights of the victim...
That's somewhat "libertarian 101" philosophy (along the lines of "I can do anything I want as long as it doesn't interfere with your right to do anything you want"). The problem with that whole line of reasoning is defining exactly what "taking away my rights" really means. Where things get slippery is in "preventative" laws, such as gun laws or drug laws. Those laws are designed to prevent me from breaking the law, even though I may not actually use those products to take away someone elses rights (such as driving while drugged, or shooting someone).
The story I always bring up about this philosophy being taken too far was that I got into an argument with a Libertarian one time who insisted that it was his right to shoot at people. His right to shoot at people stopped when he actually hit someone, but up until that point, no one should be able to stop him.
Obviously, the guy was an idiot, but it illustrates the danger of the line of thinking.
Of course, this is different from the question of "where life begins". If we define a human being as starting at conception, then they have civil rights as an independent person, and thus get the rights due any other child. This backs up your point that you don't really need morality to answer the legal question, you only need to define the rights of fetus.
The principal wanted to suspend her for a week - the parents (who rushed to the school when they heard about this) managed to talk them down to a day.
The parents allowed the student to get suspended for a day? That's just ludicrous. If it was an honest accident (and there may be more to the story than we see here, like using it to make a big disruption in the class), then there should be zero punishment.
If it was me, I would have said something like, "Tell you what. How about NO punishment, or I sue the school for not having the proper blocking software to prevent my daughter getting exposed to porn." :)
They had been attempting to create an early-stage human embryo, with the aim of harvesting stem cells for the use to treat patients with disorders such as Parkinson's and heart disease.
In other news, the Third Reich announced today that they have been doing some "secret" experiments on Jews with the goal of treating patients with many noble-sounding disorders.
But hey, the ends justify the means, right?
I'm really becoming that cynical, but I just can't reconcile religion and politics, or see it as having any place in a political scheme.
That's why you're confused. It's not a religious issue, and EITHER SIDE bringing religion into it is wrong.
The only issue is whether life begins at conception. If it does, then experiments on a living, unique, human entity is wrong. If it doesn't, then it's not morally wrong.
And by the way...
but more from some kind of right wing perogative to tell me what I can morally do.
Society tells you what you can and can't do every day, yes, even morally. Get used to it. For example, society considers it illegal AND immoral to sexually assault someone. But gee, who are they to tell YOU what to do, right?
Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign.
And in other news, Burger King is "aggressively lobbying" me to switch to eating Whoppers instead of Big Macs. What is the story here?
So what, Microsoft shouldn't even be allowed to market its product? It's somehow evil for them to try and make the case for their products being superior?
This article is just idiotic and inflammatory.
Dude, I think you need to look a little closer. Those facial features aren't textures, they are polygons. Note the shadows from the facial features on the face itself. Look at the detail of the hands. In the words of Carmack at his Japan presentation, "in previous engines, we were lucky to have 3 polygons for a nose". :)
I like to give a plug for this book every now and then: Why Michael Couldn't Hit: And Other Tales of the Neurology of Sports. Even if you don't care at all about sports, this book is a fascinating read. It describes how the brain and neurology is linked with being a world-class athlete. What I found especially interesting is that the author makes a good case that there are small windows during growing up where you must play a particular sport in order to be world-class at it. If you miss the window, you miss your chance. After that, your brain does not have plasticity to devote a specialized part of itself to the sport. He also makes the case that being a world-class musician has similar windows.
I would imagine that there are similar cases to be made about being world-class at a particular mental sport such as chess.
Highly recommended.
I bet they'd make a great conversation piece. Not that I'd ever buy one. That would make me one of the plunder-ers.
Just because something is old, doesn't make it valuable or rare. Should I feel guilty if I buy some 2000-year-old Roman coin for $10?
The world is not running out of cuneiform tablets of some merchant's accounting records.
Personally, I would like to see space exploration start happening, and continue happening. Let's be honest: The moon missions, while probably the most significant and arguably the most complex engineering feat in human history, basically was "Wow! We made it! Now what??".
Instead of throwing all this government money into the sh**hold where we know it will probably never come out, let's give tax incentives to get private companies into space. First company to mine an asteroid gets a 20 year tax moritorium! Same deal for space-based factories!
The key is that space has to pay for itself. If we depend on the government to put men into space, then men in space depends on the whims of budgets and politicians. The only way to get there and stay there is to have an economic incentive to stay there.
You're saying that I shouldn't participate in political discussion unless I know how "the world should be run."
No, I said what I meant: Just because you might be good at a particular subject, doesn't mean you can apply the same reasonings to another subject.
[i said] If you are a socialist, then you have no clue about how the world should be run, and should just stay away. [you said] In short, you're telling me to shut the fuck up because I disagree with you. Now, which one of us is "intrinsically anti-freedom?"
I meant "should" in the sense that we would all be better off if you stayed away until you learned more about reality, not in the sense that you should be "forbidden" to voice your opinion. Feel free. But that doesn't make you less wrong and misguided.
However, unlike you or M. Le Pen, I realize that there is nothing intrinsically dangerous about studying and sharing the teachings of Marx, or even forming political associations based upon Marxist ideology.
Here is where you went off the deep end and began manufacturing things based not on what I actually said, but on your own biases.
Uh, no. Freedom feeds the people, fascism starves the people. As I said recently, the world is hungry not because of unequal distribution of wealth, it's because of unequal distribution of capitalism and freedom.