And the reason people believed them was that they made sure the plane wasn't really just hanging from a big balloon painted sky-blue. That's why you send an expert in scams along with the scientist. The scientist knows to look for bad science, the con artist knows to look for the extension cord they ran up from under the floorboards.
This particular case looks pretty tough to fake, but so do the tricks David Coperfield does. Scientists have fallen for stupid tricks before. Hell, Slashdot's covered them falling for them before.
Now the question is, would it cost more to hire the physics professor, or the magician?
Complicated shit is made out of simpler shit. It's not hard. You only have 26 letters in your post! Holy crap! There's no way you could have conveyed that much (admittedly not too good) information with only 26 letters! "Stupid" has an "I" in it. Well, clearly I must be stupid because there's no way a word could have a different meaning than the parts it's made up of. I could explain without the condecending metaphors, but other people have done it and I really don't know where I should start with you.
You mention zero-point energy. Does your understanding of that phenomenon have something to do with your belief in the existence of ether? (I just realized that was you back up a few posts) Quantum foam and shit like that is hardly the same thing as a gas for light waves to "wave" through. It's shit in space, but it's a hell of a lot more complicated kind of shit than ether was. Plus, it doesn't have anything to do with light AFAIK. As for harnessing it, I think somebody found a problem with using the Casimir effect to get any kind of serious energy. Maybe it was just that we'd have to build plates so fucking huge that the ammount of energy we'd get would be useless by the time we got the capability to build them, but I think there was a theoretical problem too. I don't remember enough details to say anything useful about it, but I'm sure I saw something like that somewhere.
Still, it's an interesting concept since from what I understand it could still be around towards the end of a heat death of the universe. Would come in awful handy until your matter starts radiating away.
You're right that he's probably pulling a PC (judging by the little female sign thing he's got on the top of his web page) but you don't need to shit your pants over it. If he wants to put female Jedi in his hypothetical metaphor, more power to him. If you're so fucking anal about default options why not bitch about the way he's clearly pandering to his audience by using a Jedi with a lightsabre when he could have just used some guy with a hammer instead?
It's two fucking letters man. Lay off. Be glad he didn't say "em" (or is it "er"?) or start going on about how Ayn Rand is God or something.
No kidding. At some point, having a full beard turned into a warning sign for just about any illegal activity under the sun. You can get away with a beard if you're over 40, so overwhelmingly UNIX-nerd looking that you couldn't possibly constitute a threat, or if you only go with a fruity little goatee. Otherwise, you're in trouble. I started shaving again a few months ago and I was amazed how trusting everybody got all of a sudden. Crazy.
Ummm... I know they tell you not to hug your infant too much for a day or two after radiation therapy, but manditory isolation from all living things for half a month? Either somebody's a leeeetle overcautious or your neighbor's got worse troubles than cancer.
What's the deal with everybody hating O'Donnel? I guess the fat chick in "A League of Their Own" was kinda annoying, but there must be something else. I only saw one episode of her little Oprah-show (had her quizzing some goatee guy about Star Wars trivia) and maybe that one wasn't a good representation, but it didn't seem that bad to me. A little goofy, but less annoying than, say, Craig Kilborn. (I was gonna say Katz, but that's not saying much) Is she really that worse than your average TV personality when I'm not paying attention?
Nike does (really!) do some serious engineering work with their track shoes. If you run 100m in 8 seconds, then Nike is actually worth something.
Their sneakers, on the other hand, are designed to look cool and have bizare, functionless gimmicks. Like plastic springs (in the heel? are you supposed to jump off your heel?) that are more likely to throw you on your face than help you jump higher, and little blobs of "jel" that screw up the cushioning effect of the foam arround them and make the shoes fall apart faster.
Still, some Nike shoes can be "faster" in the sense of providing the same support with material that weighs a few ounces less, and maybe giving you a few hundredths of a second advantage.
Oh, we have waiting lists too. Not nearly as bad (the cost means they only use them when it's necessary), so usually it's just a matter of your doctor scheduling around available machine time, but we have them. Actually, my dad waited a few weeks for a 15 minuite scan of his ankle because some researchers (not advertizers, they actually were doing medical stuff) were monopolizing the machine. They let emergency people cut in, of course, my dad just needed to see if he could take this brace thing off his foot, but by the end of the study there were a few dozen people in line for things like that.
I'm more worried about all the emoticons in the comment part of that review page. Exactly how many smoking smilies do you need? I guess it's important to differentiate between smoking cigarettes and bowling pins, but it's just a little distracting. Well, he seems to be enjoying his pin, so who am I to judge...
"Holy shit! Did you just see that! I poured this WATER into this GLASS and it FIT PERFECTLY! They must have MADE that glass for the water or something! Damn!
WAIT! All those words I just said! Wow! I sure am glad the Anglos MADE English so I could speak it! Praise the prehistoric barbarians of Scandinavia for this glorious gift to ME!"
Why is everybody assuming he's playing a robot? If he's the star I'd guess he's the detective. I haven't read the book in a decade, but what I remember was robots having moral dilemas while hiding behind dumpsters and then a detective doing all kinds of detecting and driving flying cars.
I'd expect the robots would be special effects, so they'd be, you know, robot looking. The robots aren't THAT humanoid, so far as I remember. They're wierd enough to get recognized from aways off anyway.
The detective does all kinds of cool stuff and fits Will's typecast a hell of a lot better than a robot.
...read Atlas Shrugged... or, you could just read "So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish".
"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway.
"As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks."
"Are you rich?" said another.
This made Ford laugh.
He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. "Do I look rich?" he said.
"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people..."
"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?"
"I tell them it's OK to be rich."
Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.
Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.
"You what?" he said.
The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.
"It's my big number," she said. "I have a Master's degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city."
The Supreme Court said that it's ok to sentance kids to death so long as they're over 16 (I think) in a decision, and that's the reason they gave. The dissenters (only 3, IMSMC) were a little bitchy about using the inefficiency of the legal system to dodge an actual definative judgment on the issue.
The case they wrote that for was interesting, since it was pretty weak on it's own. Some guys went joyriding and ended up chopping this guy up and throwing him in a river, and all the adults blamed somebody's younger brother who came with them after they charged them all with capital murder for bargaining purposes. They all got life, the kid gets killed. The kid's earlier appeals were complaining about the way the prosecution showed pictures of the body to the jury, which everybody admitted provided no real information and was only supposed to "demonstrate the seriousness of the crime", and how the prosecutor was running for DA and used the big conviction in the big, ghastly, chopping-people-up murder to get there.
That's what I was thinking at the beginning of DAD, with the whole getting captured thing. I thought there was going to be all kinds of Bond proving his innocence, and not being able to kill people since his 00 status got revoked or something. But, no, he just wanders around shooting people until M gives him his job back for no reason, and they start the movie over pretending the first 45 minutes didn't happen.
I'm sure M just lets a super-assasin who's supposed to be a traitor go wandering around the world under his OWN NAME, ordering her agents around and making deals with foreign inteligence agencies without even saying anything. What was the plan there?
And there's just something wrong about Bond fucking things up so many times in one movie.
Re:Whats WORSE than the invisible car
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 1
That's what I was thinking. Stranding some random Scandinavian out in the middle of a iced-over lake? He could at least come back and pick him up before he freezes to death in the Icelandic wilderness.
The Bond action-figure windsurfing the Jello-tsunami was hilarious though. That and the trees growing on the ice.
Re:Wow, two Sun articles in one day!
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 1
Do you say sol-AIR eclipse and etc? "Sun"->solar->"Solaris" I think it makes sense. But then again made-up product words don't necesarially follow rules like that. Sun could call it "SOOL-AIR-EES" if they felt like it.
Replying to myself because this is horrible. I mean, damn. I can't try out Javascript because of the way those backslashes show up before quotes. That's a perl thing, right? I find this terribly ammusing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what I thought. It's like imagining Hugh Heffner taking potshots from the roof of the mansion.
I think they might be taking a hint all the same. I have noticed a marked increase in ninja content in rap videos recently...
The nouns are all so damn long it's only right to stick some capitals in there to break things up a little.
And the reason people believed them was that they made sure the plane wasn't really just hanging from a big balloon painted sky-blue. That's why you send an expert in scams along with the scientist. The scientist knows to look for bad science, the con artist knows to look for the extension cord they ran up from under the floorboards.
This particular case looks pretty tough to fake, but so do the tricks David Coperfield does. Scientists have fallen for stupid tricks before. Hell, Slashdot's covered them falling for them before.
Now the question is, would it cost more to hire the physics professor, or the magician?
A big loud "Whaaaaaaaa?" for you.
:)
Complicated shit is made out of simpler shit. It's not hard. You only have 26 letters in your post! Holy crap! There's no way you could have conveyed that much (admittedly not too good) information with only 26 letters! "Stupid" has an "I" in it. Well, clearly I must be stupid because there's no way a word could have a different meaning than the parts it's made up of. I could explain without the condecending metaphors, but other people have done it and I really don't know where I should start with you.
You mention zero-point energy. Does your understanding of that phenomenon have something to do with your belief in the existence of ether? (I just realized that was you back up a few posts) Quantum foam and shit like that is hardly the same thing as a gas for light waves to "wave" through. It's shit in space, but it's a hell of a lot more complicated kind of shit than ether was. Plus, it doesn't have anything to do with light AFAIK. As for harnessing it, I think somebody found a problem with using the Casimir effect to get any kind of serious energy. Maybe it was just that we'd have to build plates so fucking huge that the ammount of energy we'd get would be useless by the time we got the capability to build them, but I think there was a theoretical problem too. I don't remember enough details to say anything useful about it, but I'm sure I saw something like that somewhere.
Still, it's an interesting concept since from what I understand it could still be around towards the end of a heat death of the universe. Would come in awful handy until your matter starts radiating away.
Anyway, quantam foam's sexy.
I abandoned those places for a reason, thank you very much. Get your tube out of there.
And they will say, "What the fuck was wrong
with those damn nerds?" And they will seal
it back up and abandoen it again.
Christ, man. Go take a cold shower or something.
You're right that he's probably pulling a PC (judging by the little female sign thing he's got on the top of his web page) but you don't need to shit your pants over it. If he wants to put female Jedi in his hypothetical metaphor, more power to him. If you're so fucking anal about default options why not bitch about the way he's clearly pandering to his audience by using a Jedi with a lightsabre when he could have just used some guy with a hammer instead?
It's two fucking letters man. Lay off. Be glad he didn't say "em" (or is it "er"?) or start going on about how Ayn Rand is God or something.
SciFi is like Fox without Rupert Murdoch's need for respect.
Thank God for Barry the man-whore, or we might still have MST3K instead of 6 hours of Crossing Over.
No kidding. At some point, having a full beard turned into a warning sign for just about any illegal activity under the sun. You can get away with a beard if you're over 40, so overwhelmingly UNIX-nerd looking that you couldn't possibly constitute a threat, or if you only go with a fruity little goatee. Otherwise, you're in trouble. I started shaving again a few months ago and I was amazed how trusting everybody got all of a sudden. Crazy.
Ummm... I know they tell you not to hug your infant too much for a day or two after radiation therapy, but manditory isolation from all living things for half a month? Either somebody's a leeeetle overcautious or your neighbor's got worse troubles than cancer.
Did he get his clothes back?
What's the deal with everybody hating O'Donnel? I guess the fat chick in "A League of Their Own" was kinda annoying, but there must be something else. I only saw one episode of her little Oprah-show (had her quizzing some goatee guy about Star Wars trivia) and maybe that one wasn't a good representation, but it didn't seem that bad to me. A little goofy, but less annoying than, say, Craig Kilborn. (I was gonna say Katz, but that's not saying much) Is she really that worse than your average TV personality when I'm not paying attention?
Wow, nice blind dive into philosophy there. Try rolling when you hit the logical conclusion.
Their sneakers, on the other hand, are designed to look cool and have bizare, functionless gimmicks. Like plastic springs (in the heel? are you supposed to jump off your heel?) that are more likely to throw you on your face than help you jump higher, and little blobs of "jel" that screw up the cushioning effect of the foam arround them and make the shoes fall apart faster.
Still, some Nike shoes can be "faster" in the sense of providing the same support with material that weighs a few ounces less, and maybe giving you a few hundredths of a second advantage.
Oh, we have waiting lists too. Not nearly as bad (the cost means they only use them when it's necessary), so usually it's just a matter of your doctor scheduling around available machine time, but we have them. Actually, my dad waited a few weeks for a 15 minuite scan of his ankle because some researchers (not advertizers, they actually were doing medical stuff) were monopolizing the machine. They let emergency people cut in, of course, my dad just needed to see if he could take this brace thing off his foot, but by the end of the study there were a few dozen people in line for things like that.
I'm more worried about all the emoticons in the comment part of that review page. Exactly how many smoking smilies do you need? I guess it's important to differentiate between smoking cigarettes and bowling pins, but it's just a little distracting. Well, he seems to be enjoying his pin, so who am I to judge...
"Holy shit! Did you just see that! I poured this WATER into this GLASS and it FIT PERFECTLY! They must have MADE that glass for the water or something! Damn!
WAIT! All those words I just said! Wow! I sure am glad the Anglos MADE English so I could speak it! Praise the prehistoric barbarians of Scandinavia for this glorious gift to ME!"
Welcome to Slashdot, Timmy.
I'd expect the robots would be special effects, so they'd be, you know, robot looking. The robots aren't THAT humanoid, so far as I remember. They're wierd enough to get recognized from aways off anyway.
The detective does all kinds of cool stuff and fits Will's typecast a hell of a lot better than a robot.
or, you could just read "So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish".
Pretty good summary right there, I think.
The case they wrote that for was interesting, since it was pretty weak on it's own. Some guys went joyriding and ended up chopping this guy up and throwing him in a river, and all the adults blamed somebody's younger brother who came with them after they charged them all with capital murder for bargaining purposes. They all got life, the kid gets killed. The kid's earlier appeals were complaining about the way the prosecution showed pictures of the body to the jury, which everybody admitted provided no real information and was only supposed to "demonstrate the seriousness of the crime", and how the prosecutor was running for DA and used the big conviction in the big, ghastly, chopping-people-up murder to get there.
I'm sure M just lets a super-assasin who's supposed to be a traitor go wandering around the world under his OWN NAME, ordering her agents around and making deals with foreign inteligence agencies without even saying anything. What was the plan there?
And there's just something wrong about Bond fucking things up so many times in one movie.
The Bond action-figure windsurfing the Jello-tsunami was hilarious though. That and the trees growing on the ice.
Do you say sol-AIR eclipse and etc?
"Sun"->solar->"Solaris"
I think it makes sense. But then again made-up product words don't necesarially follow rules like that. Sun could call it "SOOL-AIR-EES" if they felt like it.
Replying to myself because this is horrible. I mean, damn. I can't try out Javascript because of the way those backslashes show up before quotes. That's a perl thing, right? I find this terribly ammusing.