I have one. The total cost of insurance, legal fees, and payouts amounts to 0.5% of the total cost of healthcare. I've seen different numbers in different places, as low as 0.16% in one estimation. All of them have been a fraction of a single percent.
I think that FF games have always had a dumbed down combat system for the most part. They dress it up with occasional differences, but certain common threads of "fake strategy" seem to show up in all of them, and usually in just enough quantity to ruin what might have been an otherwise fun game. Mainly I'm talking about things like the idiotic legacy of featuring 20 different status debuff spells that all do roughly the same thing (prevent your party from getting hurt or attacked for a few turns) and for which almost every boss in the game is vulnerable to exactly one of them. So the "strategy" becomes trying each debuff in order until you figure out which is "the one" and then the fight becomes easy. Factor in irritatingly placed save points that require you to die and replay the same 20 minutes of game over a few times while you figure this out and presto: "fake strategy" that's convincing enough to fool players into thinking that they are "getting better at the game" or that they had to "think of a better strategy" to beat the boss. The difference between the good and bad FF games usually boils down to where and how ham handedly they force these sorts of mechanics in and also, as I mentioned in a previous post, how douchey their characters are (in some cases astonishingly douchey). Completely obtuse item combination systems that feature complex recipes with absolutely no way to learn these combinations or even hints about them in game don't help either, not to mention the infamous Zodiac Spear treasure chest bullshit from FFXII. This is definitely a trend that's gotten worse since the older games, which is odd because the internet is so ubiquitous now that "making games to sell strategy guides" doesn't work anymore.
No kidding. I heard so many people talk about how awesome FFIX was but I couldn't stand to play it for more than a couple hours. The main protagonist was just such a petty asshole that I just got annoyed and quit playing. The newer games have actually ruined the older games for me too since they showed me that those games were only good because technological limitations prevented Square for making the characters as douchey as they wanted them to be.
Brett Buck is posting on Slashdot because he's getting threatened behind the scenes by a global shadow organization of ex-KGB who have kidnapped members of his family pending his cooperation with their Slashdot forum agenda.
Making grandiose claims without the slightest hint of factual basis or evidence is FUN!
You can understand the outcomes without the math. You can NOT understand the "why" without the math. I'll leave it as an at home exercise whether those people you know actually understand general relativity, or just know the implications of it.
If you want to talk about action, I've read in quite a few climate and/or food and agriculture sources that the very best thing an individual can do right now to prevent global warming is to simply not eat beef anymore. Fuel efficient cars help a little. Running your AC less, etc. etc. etc. all help a little bit. But if the CO2 to methane conversion which occurs as cows digest grass were to be greatly reduced, that would help a whole lot. Not to mention the amount of energy that is consumed growing food for cows in the first place.
Tablets may never take off as a computer replacement, but when they get cheap enough with stylus inputs common enough they'd make a great paper replacement. Instead of a computer that you can do much less with, it will be composition notebook or a newspaper that you can do a lot more with. For students, engineers, artists, scientists, etc. paper does a lot of things that computers don't. Tablets + stylus can do most of the things that paper can do plus a lot of what a computer can do. MS had people salivating over the Courier for exactly that reason. They canned it anyway and that's why Apple is printing money while Microsoft just keeps printing office documents.
This is the sort of thing that doesn't make sense to people who don't work in science. Look up the "Inerrancy of empirical observation". Basically our observations and measurements are always "correct" in that they are always telling us exactly what they are telling us. Our interpretation and analysis of those observations is where the "wrongness" can get introduced. A miscalibrated instrument isn't "wrong" (though even scientists will use that vernacular) it's just making a different observation than we think it is. It's correct and we are misinterpreting what it's number tells us about the world. Thus the analysis of data is usually the most important part of any scientific endeavor and the only way to analyze data perfectly is to already fully understand the phenomena, which is the entire point of analyzing the data in the first place. If we could just take some data and apply the most appropriate analysis a priori, than science wouldn't take nearly so long to proceed. When exploring something new, for which there is little precedent in data analysis, you sort of have to scrape by with theoretical guidance based on science of related phenomena that is better understood and keep adjusting your analysis in an iterative process over long periods of data acquisition. It's messy and it takes a long time and it requires lots of players all working together and essentially arguing with each other about the best way to do things.
Pro AGW types aren't quick to dimiss critques of methedology, simply criques of this global iterative process. They dismiss the suggestion that the iterative adjustment and refinement of analysis is cheating. It's not, it's how science it done and has been done for hundreds of years to produce all the successful science we know and love. If you question the methodology of an AGW study, you'll get a fair response about why that methodology was chosen and if your suggestion or critique holds water you will have contributed to the discussion. If you question the very idea that methodology ought to evolve and shift with new data and better understanding of the underlying phenomena, then you get the response you'd expect to get at suggesting that doing normal science is "cheating" when it suggests AGW, but not in any other field.
Another good example of this issue is in evolution science, where arguments amongst experts about the particular details of phenomena underlying evolution were taken by creationists as evidence that nobody could agree because nobody knew what they were talking about. "Even biologists can't agree on evolution! Why should it be in science text books!?" This has always been a red herring. This is how science is done and it's one of the primary reasons why science works. Not only is it not a fault, it's one of the greatest strengths of the whole system.
I read your other comments and I see your sarcasm now. I thought the idea of a sarcasm punctuation was dumb when I saw it, but Slashdot gives the idea some serious legs.
1. Considering CO2's IR absorbance is extremely easy to test and the information is vital to the accuracy of medical equipment used all over the world, I'm guessing that you read this somewhere and never fact checked it. Provide some primary sources.
2. Humans produce 100 times as much CO2 per year as volcanic eruptions do. Volcanic eruptions have been shown over and over to usually result in net cooling of the climate from sulfer dioxide emissions. http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
It's ironic because I consider ignorance to include reading shit off a blog and not looking for primary sources or fact checking, which coincidentally seems to be exactly what you did.
My problem with FOSS software in general is too many mediocre choices. I go looking for some specialized software or utility and I find 10+ different applications that all solve the problem in a different way, covering a different subset of all the elements of the problem, and are all decidedly mediocre in their execution. As someone who doesn't actually contribute to OSS I could easily be missing something about this (although since most users don't make software, my misconceptions will likely be those of the normal user too) but I would much rather see the open source community gravitate more and work together to make fewer better applications. Instead everybody makes their own movie player until we have 30 video players that are all crappy and never make it past version 0.6b. And for Linux we get these different environments that use different technology to generate different UIs and include different options etc. If choice is the goal, why can't we have one environment that lets you chose the UI that you want? If the environments are cross compatible, then why do we need so many? I can understand the idea of choice in terms of interface, but why so much choice in terms of the underlying technology?
The Mac example is extremely pertinent. Not only do they offer a limited number of options, but it's EXTREMELY clear what each option is supposed to be for. Cost vs. performance vs. portability. The choices are built by one company and thus they aren't afraid to specialize these options. In Linux, all the options are made by different groups who each want their option to do everything and be THE option. So it's NEVER clear what each choice is good or not good for and it's because the wild west development structure means that every option is built to be good at everything and none of them ever actually achieve that. As a longtime windows user who's tried a handful of different linux distros and desktop environments, I can tell you that the ONLY decision that is clear in terms of what you get and what you give up is picking a "lightweight" environment or a "full featured, desktop class" environment. That was the only choice that was ever clear to me. KDE vs. Gnome? No idea and I don't have the time to mess around with it. There's the "just use Ubuntu and forget about the rest" group, but the rest of the community spends all their hot air talking about how Shuttleworth is undermining the broader OSS community. But those people don't really try to compete with Ubuntu. They don't throw their collective weight behind a unified competitor with more respect for the community. I can see the appeal of an organically organized and intrinsically motivated community of software developers, but as a smart and technical (but non-software developer) user I can tell you that the in-fighting, needless competition instead cooperation, and the vast wasteland of largely irrelevant distros used by people who need to feel different or validate the idea of choice by chosing something obscure is really off putting.
That was indeed the point of the sustainable farming comparison (the article was poorly written and not at all any kind of in depth analysis or discussion so I'm not surprised people are missing things). The point of sustainable farming is that you produce less than you could in order to maintain the sustainability of your farm in the long term. You could over plant, over fertilize, clear cut forests, aggressively catch every fish you can possibly get and you'll make more money this month or this year and then the ecosystem will collapse and you won't make money anymore. The point being that aggressively taking EVERY dollar that micro transactions could possibly make you in a month will probably make you more money that month. But next month people will be annoyed at how you have destabilized the game or ruined the fun or whatever and stop playing. Short term gain vs. long term sustainability.
Where the WoW model falls down is for infrequent players. I don't want to pay $13 a month every month when I might not play the game at all in a given month. Or I might play a little bit, or a lot. All you can eat buffets are nice because we all know about how much we want to eat in a single meal. Paying 20 times more at the buffet restaurant for all you can eat in a month is a much less helpful proposition for most people.
They sort of have AC. They have air intakes in the front that direct the air to adjustable vents "inside". But yes I wasn't counting the Goldwing because I don't consider it a motorcycle. It's basically a vehicle for people too stupid or too stubborn to realize that they ought to just buy a convertible instead.
If you've never ridden a motorcycle, then you really don't appreciate how distracted you are while driving a car. No phone calls, texting, talking to a passenger, no radio to adjust, no AC to adjust, no seat position to adjust. Nothing. Nothing but the road and traffic. It literally amazed me every time I rode just how different it was from the car environment.
I always found this Palin-ism particularly asinine. Not only because of the above but because Alaska is a good 3 or 4 THOUSAND miles from Moscow. It's next door to Russia's snowy barren asshole. Even if being close to Russia's seat of power meant anything, Alaska isn't!
Don't even bother with the Sony TVs. They do make some nice TVs, but so do Samsung and Sharp (Aquos anyway, their budget sets don't hold the same value proposition) for quite a bit less money. I can't think of a single line of Sony products that doesn't butt up against better and cheaper competition. They are just coasting and selling the name to people old enough to have bought their first nice TV 20+ years ago when Sony actually gave a crap.
Android Movie Market =! Netflix. Netflix works on rooted and unrooted android and iphone devices. Therefore saying it runs on rooted iphones is a meaningless argument. Android Movie Market is also not Netflix, so discussing netflix at all is pretty much irrelevant to a discussion about the movie market. Calling someone an idiot for making a doubly irrelevant argument sounds like a fair assessment to me.
But then I wouldn't consider you an audiophile. Perhaps it's my own personal definition of the word. In my opinion you are an audio enthusiast, or someone who appreciates music and audio for it's own sake. I consider an audiophile to be somebody who appreciates expensive things because they are expensive. I'm talking about people who shell out for anti-vibration cable supports, $1,500 cables that fail a double blind listening test to coat hangers or plain unshielded copper wire. Point is you can appreciate your sound quality enough to spend good money on it, or you can appreciate the idea that spending big money on snake oil makes you feel superior to regular people. The term audiophile is so abused by the latter that I consider it an insult to people like you and me in the former group. Just look over the internet at audio equipment review sites and magazines, you'll find more often than not that those with audiophile in their name are full of shit and those without it are more likely to be objective about sound and passionate about quality in a realistic way.
That's the whole point! Pretty much any similarly priced "brand name shit" is better than Bose. Audiophiles are people with more money than sense. But you don't have to be an audio snob to see that you can buy some serious gear with the $400 you spent on Bose equipment which sounds no better than $100 gear. The point is that Bose IS expensive gear, you just aren't getting any quality for it. You don't have to drop 10k to beat Bose in quality, pretty much anything costing more than $100 will do that. If you think suggesting people skip Bose and spend the SAME amount on dramatically better gear makes one a stupid over-fed audiophile, then you deserve your shitty speakers.
Exactly. I cringe at Best Buy listening to sales people push monster cables, Dr. Dre Beats headphones, Bose speakers, apple branded versions of non proprietary equipment (like audio extension cables or AC to USB adapters), and pretty much anything made by Sony since 1995.
While the bumper sticker Bose trashing you've been hearing here is pretty much accurate, if you read serious reviews you'll find that the universal gripe with Bose isn't really their sound but their value. They don't sound bad so much as they sound just as good as equipment costing a third as much money, and they sound considerably worse than almost anything else you could buy at the same inflated price. So you're suggestion that they sound damn good at a mid range price seems like you haven't done much comparison listening. You basically hit a bullseye on Bose greatest weakness as a product and called it a strength. Spend 5 minutes with Google "best speakers for $X" where X is what you spent on those over priced Bose speakers and you'll find a giant pile of simultaneously better and cheaper equipment. Take the $350 you spent on pretty much anything Bose and get some Audioengine A5's instead.
I definitely agree. And I also happen to really love video games. But the main reason why they are fun, and why players assume the most honorable version of themselves is because there are no consequences. Doctors need a lot of education and get paid a lot of money. But they don't need more education than a lot of other professions who get paid much less. Doctors aren't being compensated only for the education they endured to achieve the capable status in that profession. They are also being compensated for the consequences of their job. People die or get injured if you aren't good at being a doctor. People go to jail or pay huge fines if you aren't good at being a lawyer. Nobody really suffers much if a research professor writes a crap paper. Consequences are an intrinsic part of productivity. Games are only fun because you don't actually die when your game avatar does. You really can't inject real world productivity into games without also injecting real world consequence. The two are linked inextricably. Even if I don't die when my avatar dies, let's just say my company looses $500 every time my avatar dies. Sorry, but that game isn't fun anymore.
Actually they did learn something. The section of brain next to the spatial reasoning piece never formed in Einstein's brain. This allowed his spatial reasoning section to fill the empty space and be twice as large as a normal person's. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dubious of genetic engineering of humans. Knowing beforehand that a piece of brain was simply not going to form would be the sort of thing someone would try to "fix".
Slashdot Mirror
I have one. The total cost of insurance, legal fees, and payouts amounts to 0.5% of the total cost of healthcare. I've seen different numbers in different places, as low as 0.16% in one estimation. All of them have been a fraction of a single percent.
I think that FF games have always had a dumbed down combat system for the most part. They dress it up with occasional differences, but certain common threads of "fake strategy" seem to show up in all of them, and usually in just enough quantity to ruin what might have been an otherwise fun game. Mainly I'm talking about things like the idiotic legacy of featuring 20 different status debuff spells that all do roughly the same thing (prevent your party from getting hurt or attacked for a few turns) and for which almost every boss in the game is vulnerable to exactly one of them. So the "strategy" becomes trying each debuff in order until you figure out which is "the one" and then the fight becomes easy. Factor in irritatingly placed save points that require you to die and replay the same 20 minutes of game over a few times while you figure this out and presto: "fake strategy" that's convincing enough to fool players into thinking that they are "getting better at the game" or that they had to "think of a better strategy" to beat the boss. The difference between the good and bad FF games usually boils down to where and how ham handedly they force these sorts of mechanics in and also, as I mentioned in a previous post, how douchey their characters are (in some cases astonishingly douchey). Completely obtuse item combination systems that feature complex recipes with absolutely no way to learn these combinations or even hints about them in game don't help either, not to mention the infamous Zodiac Spear treasure chest bullshit from FFXII. This is definitely a trend that's gotten worse since the older games, which is odd because the internet is so ubiquitous now that "making games to sell strategy guides" doesn't work anymore.
No kidding. I heard so many people talk about how awesome FFIX was but I couldn't stand to play it for more than a couple hours. The main protagonist was just such a petty asshole that I just got annoyed and quit playing. The newer games have actually ruined the older games for me too since they showed me that those games were only good because technological limitations prevented Square for making the characters as douchey as they wanted them to be.
Brett Buck is posting on Slashdot because he's getting threatened behind the scenes by a global shadow organization of ex-KGB who have kidnapped members of his family pending his cooperation with their Slashdot forum agenda.
Making grandiose claims without the slightest hint of factual basis or evidence is FUN!
You can understand the outcomes without the math. You can NOT understand the "why" without the math. I'll leave it as an at home exercise whether those people you know actually understand general relativity, or just know the implications of it.
If you want to talk about action, I've read in quite a few climate and/or food and agriculture sources that the very best thing an individual can do right now to prevent global warming is to simply not eat beef anymore. Fuel efficient cars help a little. Running your AC less, etc. etc. etc. all help a little bit. But if the CO2 to methane conversion which occurs as cows digest grass were to be greatly reduced, that would help a whole lot. Not to mention the amount of energy that is consumed growing food for cows in the first place.
Tablets may never take off as a computer replacement, but when they get cheap enough with stylus inputs common enough they'd make a great paper replacement. Instead of a computer that you can do much less with, it will be composition notebook or a newspaper that you can do a lot more with. For students, engineers, artists, scientists, etc. paper does a lot of things that computers don't. Tablets + stylus can do most of the things that paper can do plus a lot of what a computer can do. MS had people salivating over the Courier for exactly that reason. They canned it anyway and that's why Apple is printing money while Microsoft just keeps printing office documents.
This is the sort of thing that doesn't make sense to people who don't work in science. Look up the "Inerrancy of empirical observation". Basically our observations and measurements are always "correct" in that they are always telling us exactly what they are telling us. Our interpretation and analysis of those observations is where the "wrongness" can get introduced. A miscalibrated instrument isn't "wrong" (though even scientists will use that vernacular) it's just making a different observation than we think it is. It's correct and we are misinterpreting what it's number tells us about the world. Thus the analysis of data is usually the most important part of any scientific endeavor and the only way to analyze data perfectly is to already fully understand the phenomena, which is the entire point of analyzing the data in the first place. If we could just take some data and apply the most appropriate analysis a priori, than science wouldn't take nearly so long to proceed. When exploring something new, for which there is little precedent in data analysis, you sort of have to scrape by with theoretical guidance based on science of related phenomena that is better understood and keep adjusting your analysis in an iterative process over long periods of data acquisition. It's messy and it takes a long time and it requires lots of players all working together and essentially arguing with each other about the best way to do things.
Pro AGW types aren't quick to dimiss critques of methedology, simply criques of this global iterative process. They dismiss the suggestion that the iterative adjustment and refinement of analysis is cheating. It's not, it's how science it done and has been done for hundreds of years to produce all the successful science we know and love. If you question the methodology of an AGW study, you'll get a fair response about why that methodology was chosen and if your suggestion or critique holds water you will have contributed to the discussion. If you question the very idea that methodology ought to evolve and shift with new data and better understanding of the underlying phenomena, then you get the response you'd expect to get at suggesting that doing normal science is "cheating" when it suggests AGW, but not in any other field.
Another good example of this issue is in evolution science, where arguments amongst experts about the particular details of phenomena underlying evolution were taken by creationists as evidence that nobody could agree because nobody knew what they were talking about. "Even biologists can't agree on evolution! Why should it be in science text books!?" This has always been a red herring. This is how science is done and it's one of the primary reasons why science works. Not only is it not a fault, it's one of the greatest strengths of the whole system.
I read your other comments and I see your sarcasm now. I thought the idea of a sarcasm punctuation was dumb when I saw it, but Slashdot gives the idea some serious legs.
1. Considering CO2's IR absorbance is extremely easy to test and the information is vital to the accuracy of medical equipment used all over the world, I'm guessing that you read this somewhere and never fact checked it. Provide some primary sources.
2. Humans produce 100 times as much CO2 per year as volcanic eruptions do. Volcanic eruptions have been shown over and over to usually result in net cooling of the climate from sulfer dioxide emissions.
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/climate.php
It's ironic because I consider ignorance to include reading shit off a blog and not looking for primary sources or fact checking, which coincidentally seems to be exactly what you did.
My problem with FOSS software in general is too many mediocre choices. I go looking for some specialized software or utility and I find 10+ different applications that all solve the problem in a different way, covering a different subset of all the elements of the problem, and are all decidedly mediocre in their execution. As someone who doesn't actually contribute to OSS I could easily be missing something about this (although since most users don't make software, my misconceptions will likely be those of the normal user too) but I would much rather see the open source community gravitate more and work together to make fewer better applications. Instead everybody makes their own movie player until we have 30 video players that are all crappy and never make it past version 0.6b. And for Linux we get these different environments that use different technology to generate different UIs and include different options etc. If choice is the goal, why can't we have one environment that lets you chose the UI that you want? If the environments are cross compatible, then why do we need so many? I can understand the idea of choice in terms of interface, but why so much choice in terms of the underlying technology?
The Mac example is extremely pertinent. Not only do they offer a limited number of options, but it's EXTREMELY clear what each option is supposed to be for. Cost vs. performance vs. portability. The choices are built by one company and thus they aren't afraid to specialize these options. In Linux, all the options are made by different groups who each want their option to do everything and be THE option. So it's NEVER clear what each choice is good or not good for and it's because the wild west development structure means that every option is built to be good at everything and none of them ever actually achieve that. As a longtime windows user who's tried a handful of different linux distros and desktop environments, I can tell you that the ONLY decision that is clear in terms of what you get and what you give up is picking a "lightweight" environment or a "full featured, desktop class" environment. That was the only choice that was ever clear to me. KDE vs. Gnome? No idea and I don't have the time to mess around with it. There's the "just use Ubuntu and forget about the rest" group, but the rest of the community spends all their hot air talking about how Shuttleworth is undermining the broader OSS community. But those people don't really try to compete with Ubuntu. They don't throw their collective weight behind a unified competitor with more respect for the community. I can see the appeal of an organically organized and intrinsically motivated community of software developers, but as a smart and technical (but non-software developer) user I can tell you that the in-fighting, needless competition instead cooperation, and the vast wasteland of largely irrelevant distros used by people who need to feel different or validate the idea of choice by chosing something obscure is really off putting.
That was indeed the point of the sustainable farming comparison (the article was poorly written and not at all any kind of in depth analysis or discussion so I'm not surprised people are missing things). The point of sustainable farming is that you produce less than you could in order to maintain the sustainability of your farm in the long term. You could over plant, over fertilize, clear cut forests, aggressively catch every fish you can possibly get and you'll make more money this month or this year and then the ecosystem will collapse and you won't make money anymore. The point being that aggressively taking EVERY dollar that micro transactions could possibly make you in a month will probably make you more money that month. But next month people will be annoyed at how you have destabilized the game or ruined the fun or whatever and stop playing. Short term gain vs. long term sustainability.
Where the WoW model falls down is for infrequent players. I don't want to pay $13 a month every month when I might not play the game at all in a given month. Or I might play a little bit, or a lot. All you can eat buffets are nice because we all know about how much we want to eat in a single meal. Paying 20 times more at the buffet restaurant for all you can eat in a month is a much less helpful proposition for most people.
They sort of have AC. They have air intakes in the front that direct the air to adjustable vents "inside". But yes I wasn't counting the Goldwing because I don't consider it a motorcycle. It's basically a vehicle for people too stupid or too stubborn to realize that they ought to just buy a convertible instead.
If you've never ridden a motorcycle, then you really don't appreciate how distracted you are while driving a car. No phone calls, texting, talking to a passenger, no radio to adjust, no AC to adjust, no seat position to adjust. Nothing. Nothing but the road and traffic. It literally amazed me every time I rode just how different it was from the car environment.
I always found this Palin-ism particularly asinine. Not only because of the above but because Alaska is a good 3 or 4 THOUSAND miles from Moscow. It's next door to Russia's snowy barren asshole. Even if being close to Russia's seat of power meant anything, Alaska isn't!
"And as the great Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means that anything can happen at any time for no reason."
-Prof. Farnsworth
Don't even bother with the Sony TVs. They do make some nice TVs, but so do Samsung and Sharp (Aquos anyway, their budget sets don't hold the same value proposition) for quite a bit less money. I can't think of a single line of Sony products that doesn't butt up against better and cheaper competition. They are just coasting and selling the name to people old enough to have bought their first nice TV 20+ years ago when Sony actually gave a crap.
Android Movie Market =! Netflix. Netflix works on rooted and unrooted android and iphone devices. Therefore saying it runs on rooted iphones is a meaningless argument. Android Movie Market is also not Netflix, so discussing netflix at all is pretty much irrelevant to a discussion about the movie market. Calling someone an idiot for making a doubly irrelevant argument sounds like a fair assessment to me.
But then I wouldn't consider you an audiophile. Perhaps it's my own personal definition of the word. In my opinion you are an audio enthusiast, or someone who appreciates music and audio for it's own sake. I consider an audiophile to be somebody who appreciates expensive things because they are expensive. I'm talking about people who shell out for anti-vibration cable supports, $1,500 cables that fail a double blind listening test to coat hangers or plain unshielded copper wire. Point is you can appreciate your sound quality enough to spend good money on it, or you can appreciate the idea that spending big money on snake oil makes you feel superior to regular people. The term audiophile is so abused by the latter that I consider it an insult to people like you and me in the former group. Just look over the internet at audio equipment review sites and magazines, you'll find more often than not that those with audiophile in their name are full of shit and those without it are more likely to be objective about sound and passionate about quality in a realistic way.
That's the whole point! Pretty much any similarly priced "brand name shit" is better than Bose. Audiophiles are people with more money than sense. But you don't have to be an audio snob to see that you can buy some serious gear with the $400 you spent on Bose equipment which sounds no better than $100 gear. The point is that Bose IS expensive gear, you just aren't getting any quality for it. You don't have to drop 10k to beat Bose in quality, pretty much anything costing more than $100 will do that. If you think suggesting people skip Bose and spend the SAME amount on dramatically better gear makes one a stupid over-fed audiophile, then you deserve your shitty speakers.
Exactly. I cringe at Best Buy listening to sales people push monster cables, Dr. Dre Beats headphones, Bose speakers, apple branded versions of non proprietary equipment (like audio extension cables or AC to USB adapters), and pretty much anything made by Sony since 1995.
While the bumper sticker Bose trashing you've been hearing here is pretty much accurate, if you read serious reviews you'll find that the universal gripe with Bose isn't really their sound but their value. They don't sound bad so much as they sound just as good as equipment costing a third as much money, and they sound considerably worse than almost anything else you could buy at the same inflated price. So you're suggestion that they sound damn good at a mid range price seems like you haven't done much comparison listening. You basically hit a bullseye on Bose greatest weakness as a product and called it a strength. Spend 5 minutes with Google "best speakers for $X" where X is what you spent on those over priced Bose speakers and you'll find a giant pile of simultaneously better and cheaper equipment. Take the $350 you spent on pretty much anything Bose and get some Audioengine A5's instead.
I definitely agree. And I also happen to really love video games. But the main reason why they are fun, and why players assume the most honorable version of themselves is because there are no consequences. Doctors need a lot of education and get paid a lot of money. But they don't need more education than a lot of other professions who get paid much less. Doctors aren't being compensated only for the education they endured to achieve the capable status in that profession. They are also being compensated for the consequences of their job. People die or get injured if you aren't good at being a doctor. People go to jail or pay huge fines if you aren't good at being a lawyer. Nobody really suffers much if a research professor writes a crap paper. Consequences are an intrinsic part of productivity. Games are only fun because you don't actually die when your game avatar does. You really can't inject real world productivity into games without also injecting real world consequence. The two are linked inextricably. Even if I don't die when my avatar dies, let's just say my company looses $500 every time my avatar dies. Sorry, but that game isn't fun anymore.
Actually they did learn something. The section of brain next to the spatial reasoning piece never formed in Einstein's brain. This allowed his spatial reasoning section to fill the empty space and be twice as large as a normal person's. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me dubious of genetic engineering of humans. Knowing beforehand that a piece of brain was simply not going to form would be the sort of thing someone would try to "fix".