Having noted that 52% of all humans are female, I make that assumption when gender is not otherwise indicated.
Interesting. (And, to note, I certainly don't take offense at being called "she".)
FWIW, you're conciously being grammatically incorrect. The gender-neutral term in English for a creature is "he", for no other reason than it's shorter and more men have been active in shaping the language.
("human" and "man" should have their definitions reversed, so that "human" and "woman" would both be the genders of man. Not that it would happen...)
You can disagree whether or not your god is real, but I don't, and there's no other way to express our disagreement on that fundamental position.
So... you're an atheist who agrees that God exists? (You said that you don't disagree--or I'm just poking fun at grammar.)
"Imaginary" is, in addition to being offensive, incorrect. Big Bird is imaginary--no adult thinks that he really exists as more than a character, and actor, and a costume. But the "ether" isn't imaginary--it just wasn't there.
Call religion "false" all you want. Call it "fictious" or "incorrect" or "erroneous." But don't call it "fiction" or "imaginary", because the vast majorty of those that taught for followed a religion throught the millenia believed it to be true, and using the other words implies otherwise.
What's "good" about creating a spirit which will lead a person into doing wrong things to another person?
In cronological order:
It adds to existance.
It gives the spirit a chance to turn against its nature.
It gives the first person a chance to face temptation.
It shows the first person their weaknesses
It gives the second person something to struggle against.
It shows other people the limits of humanity.
By extension, Satan does what God made Satan to do, so Satan is right, but evil.
Lucifer does not do what God made him to do. In fact, he does just about the opposite. And the other various spirits are similarly created--born innocent, even if with wicked tendencies, and then having chosen to be what they are.
You'll never get anywhere arguing right/evil in mythology. All we have are stories that were told and re-told by churches and churchmen that wanted to reinforce faith, and so there are reconciliations aplently.
In the temporal world, no one creates a spirit, anyway. Got another?
But that's just an exploration of the limits of the paradox of Christian morality.
For more than fifteen centuries, the smartest and most intelligent people in the world had occasion to bend their mind to stretching the simple morality at the base of the gospel story into a very broad base of morality. Calling it "limited" is, well, showing about as much standing as a guy shilling a perpetual motion machine.
As for arguing that morality is more than a binary state between good and evil--I agreed with that from the get-go. But the increased complexity of the middle does not in any part diminish the truth of the extremes.
Yes, abortion is more than a black or white issue. But at the extremes we have no one agreeing that strangling a walking talking child is OK, and no one proposing to require childbirth.
Calling them imaginary might offend you, but that's your limitation. You're too sensitive, and perhaps insecure in your faith. Or you'd be willing to debate their reality.
the answer to "that's offensive" is never, EVER "you're too sensitive."
Our language has a wide enough variety that the precise word can always be used--and "imaginary" isn't the precise word for something someone believes to be true. Just as "kike" isn't the precise word to refer to a jew.
That said.
But now it's clear that your faith is the very popular one that equates right with good, and wrong with evil. I don't share that faith.
It's not a faith. It's a definition. If Jeohvah is not Right, then He's not Good and Lucifer really is the way to go.
My faith is "God is Good." Not, "good is godly", but the exact opposite derivation.
If you'd like to continue this debate, I would welcome it. But I'd like to start with a simple question:
Pick a situation that you think has "good" and "right" being different things.
I can still run applications as administrator on our school network, if you wish to buy, configure and maintain 1500 cheap PDAs for us by all means feel free.
One of the easiest cost-saving methods a school district can do is to let the students administer their own computer network. Keep the teacher's files segregated, off-network, and have at.
Some school districts have done far more than I suggest, btw. Your school district's incompetence is a measure of your school, not all schools.
Under 17 USC 1201, enacted as part of the DMCA, the copyright owner has the right to prohibit the making and/or use of even "fair" copies made pursuant to 17 USC 117 if such use requires circumvention of CD-ROM/CD-R detection or any other technological measure.
No, it doesn't. In fact, while 17 USC 1201 (a)(1)(A) seems to make a bitcopy a crime, (B)-(E) make it clear that (A) is far from absolute.
And even if you never read down to 1201(c)(1)*, 1201(a)(1)(A) uses the verb CIRCUMVENT. A bit-for-bit copy doesn't circumvent any effective control.
(17 US 1201(c)(1) reads, exactly, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title [17 U.S.C.A. S 1 et seq.]." If it's fair use, the DMCA doesn't apply.)
A lot of programs' installers require administrator privileges, and a driver installed by a administrator can make all the ioctl() calls it wants (or the equivalent under other operating systems).
Yes, it can. But WinXP shouts when someone tries to install a driver--and installing custom drivers to read documents from a perfectly working drive is a great way to grant a legal right for a user to crack your CD, archival rights notwithstanding.
(Don't believe me? Go crack unpatented DRM and release it as a closed-sorce reader that doesn't reveal how to perform the crack. Behold as no one tries to file suit against you, save perhaps the FSF.)
1: Resale value is irrelevant to the discussion. Schools are the very end-user of the textbooks, as they are of most equipment they buy.
2: A school student has about 5 different subjects each year. Each book costs "about" $40. Ergo, $200 replacement cost.
A $150 laptop or palm pilot wouldn't be "the school's property." It would be given to the student, either to keep for their time throughout school or as an outright gift.
Students don't generally lose their textbooks, and if they had a reason to keep their cheap electronic textbook-reader they wouldn't lose that, either.
Of course, if your experience with schools is such that students don't even have books, well, then you have bigger problems than the cost of textbooks. And in any case, cheaply-printed handouts would probably be a better fiscal choice.
Calling something that someone else believes in, espeically when you have reasonable cause to know that they believe in it, is rude. Please don't do it. (This applies from the inverse; show me a christian telling an atheist that his free will is imaginary, and I'll react similiarly.)
My point is that good and evil, right and wrong, are not identical dualities.
For the most part, they are. There are a very, very few instances where "good" is not always the right thing to do, but doing right is always good, and every instance I can concieve of where doing good might be wrong can be dramatically argued to be different values of "how good" or "how right."
Which is why I'd like to see a space opera deriving its morality from a different text, and why Star Wars' moral message is inadequate to convince me, or to fully entertain me.
Don't go to the movies or television for the moral message. You'll never, EVER be satisfied. The mediums are simply too shallow and too staged for a moral message--and parables require a certain level of genius beyond that which can swallow the inequities to see a movie made.
For space opera, Star Wars is amazingly complex and nuianced in its morality. But that's as much a coincidence as anything else. If Darth Vader being a ruthless horror-style character would have inspired as many ticket sales, you can bet he would have been the Sith that killed Qui-Gon and not Luke's father.
What happens when the program used to read the manual detects whether the manual is being loaded from a pressed CD-ROM or from a CD-R?
You return it back and demand your money back. Small claims court is good for this.
IIRC, US federal law guarantees you the right to make archival copies of every digital thing you purchase.
(And let's not forget the "you shouldnt' make doing the right thing harder than doing the wrong thing" line. Or that telling the medium of the CD-ROM requires a more direct interface to the drive than Windows or Mac allow, and guarantees that your software won't be worth anything when the next OS version or drive system comes along.)
I'm all in favour of giving all the kids laptops, but they'd get stolen.
Just like textbooks do?
The replacement cost of a student's yearly school library is well over $200 in any given year. There are any number of ways to get sub-$200 electronics into student's hands, especially when you factor in the inevitable discounts for volume and educational use. You could probably even get it below $150, which leaves a healthy 1/4 of the original cost for the texts--which is more than fair, given the continually soaring costs of printing.
"The devil" is an amalgram of a wide variety of wicked spirits, similar to how the US military amalgrates its enemy into "Charlie" or "Muhammad."
You're losing theological credibility by forgetting something so basic to Christian teachings. But I'll let that slide and assume that you meant "Lucifer" or "ha'satan". (sorry, don't know the hebrew-english spelling).
Lucifer is widey thought to be 100% evil, and we can even presume that God removed all goodness from him when He threw him down from heaven. (Presuming that there's no goodness in wicked souls is a bit presumptious and goes against mainstream christian thelogy, but still).
Your argument is that, if God is 100% Good, and Lucifer is 100% evil, then we have a contradiction. In mainstream theolgoy, you're simply wrong because the creation of evil was the product of an imperfect being (Lucifer) choosing to defy perfect goodness (God). It's a fairly easy reconciliation, that no one really has a problem with save atheists looking for an excuse.
Now, of course, there are certain theological arguments that don't hold God the Father as being 100% Good or Evil, and instead have God be "beyond good and evil" while Christ is 100% good. And still other arguments have God be both 100% evil and 100% good, and acting out the latter part becuase of His infinite wisdom instead of His innate nature.
But I'm rambling.
Even at the poles, good/evil are asymptotic, and fractally self-referential.
You could say the same thing about Right and Wrong. What's your point? (That sometime an act benefits both another and yourself? That makes it right/good, not both good and evil.)
I can order the manuals on CDROM but I do not want them on CDROM. I can't take a laptop out into my driveway when I'm all greasy, trying to find stuff and can't read it in the sun, worrying about dropping and breaking it, spilling something in it, etc.. That's stupid. With the book I can drop it, get it dirty, etc. Big deal. And I can hold that book in my hand and flip the pages and find something in a fraction of the time I would spend trying to find it on a computer.
For about $150--which is pocket change compared to a guy that maintains an antique mercedes--you can buy a laser printer, which will let you print out as many copies of the relevant sections as you need.
With these "printouts" (as we in the 21st century call them), you really can get them dirty, soiled in oil, worn out by the sun, or whatever, and just recycle them and replace them as you need to.
I have a set of manuals for the '98 Astro I bought from my father. I have to be fairly paranoid about them, and if I want to look up a specific term, it takes me quite awhile to first learn the organization system (which no two manuals have the same...) and then find what I'm looking for.
And one last thing. When those books are mine, in my house, on my shelf, no one is going to virus them up and knock them offline. I can read them anytime I like, under MY terms and conditions, not some draconian bullshit DRM communist copyright shit.
Oh, yes, the printed word as the epitomy of security. As if there's never been a fire, wild party, or "lost box" in a private home.
I have some DRM'd documents, and for every legitimate use I have for them--reading, printing, searching, backup, annotation, transfer to PDA, et cetera--the DRM is no problem whatsoever.
(Oh, and let's not forget that if you have the manual as a CD-ROM, you can do a bitcopy and back it up even if the darn thing uses DRM.)
Your school--EVERY school--should stop buying and selling textbooks. They should be buying and distributing texts, either billed individually or as part of tuitition, and letting students print the books if they have a need.
Especially if the school requires every student to have a wireless laptop. Textbooks are expensive, drain money from the school, and aren't even all that good for what they do. (How many times has your teacher said "read Chapter 5, 2, 21, and 17, in order" or something similar?)
Good and Evil are the bright and dark edges of morality. ALL drama is fundamentally a question of where the characters stand on the middle ground.
Bitching about this simple human truth isn't cool; it's just a sign of foolishness.
(Now, there are two or three better ways to get the point "SW morality is too simple" across, but dening the difference between Right and Wrong isn't one of them.)
(Oh, and your complex nonlinear space opera would be Babylon 5.)
At what point did the Emperor decide that it was time to change Storm Troopers into a zesty new outfit and cut back on the accuracy training budget?
Who said anything about cutting back on the training budget?
Stormtroopers can hit--they just can't always hit the heroes. The *only* times stormtroopers lose in VI-IV is when they are facing a much smaller foe that maximises every strategic advantage--including misinformation.
Off the top of my head:
Stormtoopers destroyed the guards on the Organa friggate.
Stormtroopers let Luke and co. "get away" in Ep. IV.
Stormtroopers made short work of the rebels on Hoth & the guards on cloud city.
Stormtroopers conquered Endor for a short while, and were only bested by a massive uprising by natives intimately familiar with the terrain.
"who would win, red shirts or stormtroopers" is an old joke, but one made only by folk who don't make allowances for plot.
(And, really, from Jango fett on they're not that good pilots, so Tie Fighters don't really count, do they?)
I made my contract with the cashier at the store, not with the manufacturer.
Skip the rest, and stick with this one.
Depending on your jurisdiction, a solid "it's an uncomplicated purchase, and an EULA is an attempt to modify the contract after my agreement, thus voiding my Acceptance" is enough to render the EULA toothless.
OTOH, most EULA terms are based around a common understanding--you may install the software on one computer at a time, and must delete it if you install it anywhere else. The few other terms are likely unenforceable (such as "you may not use clipart to make fun of us") or actually grant more rights to the user than a simple one-copy purchase (such as "you may install this on X computers.")
I'm not saying I agree with these sentiments, but if you ask the average woman in the US if she wants a "new" diamond or a larger pawn shop diamond, I'm betting "new" wins 100% of the time.
I wager if you put the two rings in front of the "average woman", she'll go for the bigger one. Especially if you get it appraised first, so she can compare the cost difference.
FWIW, though, any women worth marrying is either smart enough to see through the whole deBeers scam on her own, or trusts you enough when you say "it's a criminal organization that wants to rip you off; if you really want a diamond, how about we not pay the inflated price for one?"
bring a car (suitcase) with a home-built nuke over...
You seem to be operating under an amazingly naive view of all of the following:
The size of a nuclear weapon
Nukes are big. We had our biggest bombers deliver the single-bombs that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the high-tech ones we have today are still far too large to carry, let alone stash in anything smaller than a delivery truck.
And while suitcase nukes are concievably possible, no one's built them--and if anyone did bother to, the would take out perhaps a building or a city block, not an entire city. (The thing about converting matter into energy is that you need to have a certain ammount of matter to get a certain level of energy...)
The degree of skill necessary to create one
Very smart people all across the globe have tried to create nuclear weaposn on the sly. The only ones that have been successful have been multiple-person teams, usually with either stolen intel or multiple PhDs.
The degree of effort needed to create one
Again, even if you know how to make a nuclear weapon, you need some considrable resources to build one. We're talking a scale of such a size that there's no way you can do it unless you're a fair-sized country.
The ammount of radiation a nuke gives off
Sure, CBS sent a depleted uranium round through the mail. But if you tried to turn that into a nuke without a breeder reactor first, it simply wouldn't work. A working nuclear bomb would have a detectable radiation signal unless your delivery truck had foot-thick lead walls--and that's presuming that there isn't a top secret nuke-detection principle they don't tell everyone about.
The size of a military base
Fort Knox has a tank base on the east coast around it. Which means that the tanks will actually fire their mile-long range weapons, plus have room to manuver, plus a safety barrier. It's entirely possible that, even if you set a nuke right on the edge of the base and just hit "detonate", most of the base would survive.
The ammount of security US military bases have
Yes, I know they look like just an empty fence where no one watches. But someone is watching, and they have very good, very violent security guards trained to take down and incapacitate angry soldiers. Espeically around high-value bases, like Fort Knox.
Hollywood is has finally woken up and realized that the videogame industry is almost as big as them...
When you ignore DVD and Television, and judge size only by dollars.
I am not knocking voice over actors; they truly have talent, but they should not be compensated more than the poor bastards working 60 hour weeks to make the game in the first place.
Go read TFA. Voice actors want standard voice-actor industry rates--and coders want the same residual piece of the pie.
A contract merely requires Consideration on both sides and Acceptence of the contract by both sides. No 'offer', although for some reason people often try to assert so. An offer is made by one side, whereas a contract is made by two.
Here's the thing--that's flatly against what the lawyers who taught me about contracts said. There's definitly a jurisdictional or grammatical difference here.
I suspect, at the moment, that it's more grammatical and academic than substantive. If you and I agree to yard-care, and I sell you my lawn mower at the same time, and we go sour, we wind up in court either way.
A similar difference is that, for example, while there are torts of "Assault and Battery" are two different terms that mean "frightening someone and harming someone", in NY State there's just the tort of "Assault."
Slashdot Mirror
When I write a computer program that turns out to do the opposite of what I made it for, people interpret that as a sign of my imperfection...
When you write an AI that does the opposite of what you intended it for, it's a sign of your success at creating AI.
Having noted that 52% of all humans are female, I make that assumption when gender is not otherwise indicated.
Interesting. (And, to note, I certainly don't take offense at being called "she".)
FWIW, you're conciously being grammatically incorrect. The gender-neutral term in English for a creature is "he", for no other reason than it's shorter and more men have been active in shaping the language.
("human" and "man" should have their definitions reversed, so that "human" and "woman" would both be the genders of man. Not that it would happen...)
For the record:
Interesting thoughts, but I'm a happily married *man*.
Solemndragon's the one properly informally refered to as "she."
So... you're an atheist who agrees that God exists? (You said that you don't disagree--or I'm just poking fun at grammar.)
"Imaginary" is, in addition to being offensive, incorrect. Big Bird is imaginary--no adult thinks that he really exists as more than a character, and actor, and a costume. But the "ether" isn't imaginary--it just wasn't there.
Call religion "false" all you want. Call it "fictious" or "incorrect" or "erroneous." But don't call it "fiction" or "imaginary", because the vast majorty of those that taught for followed a religion throught the millenia believed it to be true, and using the other words implies otherwise.
What's "good" about creating a spirit which will lead a person into doing wrong things to another person?
In cronological order:
It adds to existance.
It gives the spirit a chance to turn against its nature.
It gives the first person a chance to face temptation.
It shows the first person their weaknesses
It gives the second person something to struggle against.
It shows other people the limits of humanity.
By extension, Satan does what God made Satan to do, so Satan is right, but evil.
Lucifer does not do what God made him to do. In fact, he does just about the opposite. And the other various spirits are similarly created--born innocent, even if with wicked tendencies, and then having chosen to be what they are.
You'll never get anywhere arguing right/evil in mythology. All we have are stories that were told and re-told by churches and churchmen that wanted to reinforce faith, and so there are reconciliations aplently.
In the temporal world, no one creates a spirit, anyway. Got another?
But that's just an exploration of the limits of the paradox of Christian morality.
For more than fifteen centuries, the smartest and most intelligent people in the world had occasion to bend their mind to stretching the simple morality at the base of the gospel story into a very broad base of morality. Calling it "limited" is, well, showing about as much standing as a guy shilling a perpetual motion machine.
As for arguing that morality is more than a binary state between good and evil--I agreed with that from the get-go. But the increased complexity of the middle does not in any part diminish the truth of the extremes.
Yes, abortion is more than a black or white issue. But at the extremes we have no one agreeing that strangling a walking talking child is OK, and no one proposing to require childbirth.
Calling them imaginary might offend you, but that's your limitation. You're too sensitive, and perhaps insecure in your faith. Or you'd be willing to debate their reality.
the answer to "that's offensive" is never, EVER "you're too sensitive."
Our language has a wide enough variety that the precise word can always be used--and "imaginary" isn't the precise word for something someone believes to be true. Just as "kike" isn't the precise word to refer to a jew.
That said.
But now it's clear that your faith is the very popular one that equates right with good, and wrong with evil. I don't share that faith.
It's not a faith. It's a definition. If Jeohvah is not Right, then He's not Good and Lucifer really is the way to go.
My faith is "God is Good." Not, "good is godly", but the exact opposite derivation.
If you'd like to continue this debate, I would welcome it. But I'd like to start with a simple question:
Pick a situation that you think has "good" and "right" being different things.
I can still run applications as administrator on our school network, if you wish to buy, configure and maintain 1500 cheap PDAs for us by all means feel free.
One of the easiest cost-saving methods a school district can do is to let the students administer their own computer network. Keep the teacher's files segregated, off-network, and have at.
Some school districts have done far more than I suggest, btw. Your school district's incompetence is a measure of your school, not all schools.
Under 17 USC 1201, enacted as part of the DMCA, the copyright owner has the right to prohibit the making and/or use of even "fair" copies made pursuant to 17 USC 117 if such use requires circumvention of CD-ROM/CD-R detection or any other technological measure.
No, it doesn't. In fact, while 17 USC 1201 (a)(1)(A) seems to make a bitcopy a crime, (B)-(E) make it clear that (A) is far from absolute.
And even if you never read down to 1201(c)(1)*, 1201(a)(1)(A) uses the verb CIRCUMVENT. A bit-for-bit copy doesn't circumvent any effective control.
(17 US 1201(c)(1) reads, exactly, "Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title [17 U.S.C.A. S 1 et seq.]." If it's fair use, the DMCA doesn't apply.)
A lot of programs' installers require administrator privileges, and a driver installed by a administrator can make all the ioctl() calls it wants (or the equivalent under other operating systems).
Yes, it can. But WinXP shouts when someone tries to install a driver--and installing custom drivers to read documents from a perfectly working drive is a great way to grant a legal right for a user to crack your CD, archival rights notwithstanding.
(Don't believe me? Go crack unpatented DRM and release it as a closed-sorce reader that doesn't reveal how to perform the crack. Behold as no one tries to file suit against you, save perhaps the FSF.)
1: Resale value is irrelevant to the discussion. Schools are the very end-user of the textbooks, as they are of most equipment they buy.
2: A school student has about 5 different subjects each year. Each book costs "about" $40. Ergo, $200 replacement cost.
A $150 laptop or palm pilot wouldn't be "the school's property." It would be given to the student, either to keep for their time throughout school or as an outright gift.
Students don't generally lose their textbooks, and if they had a reason to keep their cheap electronic textbook-reader they wouldn't lose that, either.
Of course, if your experience with schools is such that students don't even have books, well, then you have bigger problems than the cost of textbooks. And in any case, cheaply-printed handouts would probably be a better fiscal choice.
Point the first:
They're all imaginary symbols
Calling something that someone else believes in, espeically when you have reasonable cause to know that they believe in it, is rude. Please don't do it. (This applies from the inverse; show me a christian telling an atheist that his free will is imaginary, and I'll react similiarly.)
My point is that good and evil, right and wrong, are not identical dualities.
For the most part, they are. There are a very, very few instances where "good" is not always the right thing to do, but doing right is always good, and every instance I can concieve of where doing good might be wrong can be dramatically argued to be different values of "how good" or "how right."
Which is why I'd like to see a space opera deriving its morality from a different text, and why Star Wars' moral message is inadequate to convince me, or to fully entertain me.
Don't go to the movies or television for the moral message. You'll never, EVER be satisfied. The mediums are simply too shallow and too staged for a moral message--and parables require a certain level of genius beyond that which can swallow the inequities to see a movie made.
For space opera, Star Wars is amazingly complex and nuianced in its morality. But that's as much a coincidence as anything else. If Darth Vader being a ruthless horror-style character would have inspired as many ticket sales, you can bet he would have been the Sith that killed Qui-Gon and not Luke's father.
What happens when the program used to read the manual detects whether the manual is being loaded from a pressed CD-ROM or from a CD-R?
You return it back and demand your money back. Small claims court is good for this.
IIRC, US federal law guarantees you the right to make archival copies of every digital thing you purchase.
(And let's not forget the "you shouldnt' make doing the right thing harder than doing the wrong thing" line. Or that telling the medium of the CD-ROM requires a more direct interface to the drive than Windows or Mac allow, and guarantees that your software won't be worth anything when the next OS version or drive system comes along.)
I'm all in favour of giving all the kids laptops, but they'd get stolen.
Just like textbooks do?
The replacement cost of a student's yearly school library is well over $200 in any given year. There are any number of ways to get sub-$200 electronics into student's hands, especially when you factor in the inevitable discounts for volume and educational use. You could probably even get it below $150, which leaves a healthy 1/4 of the original cost for the texts--which is more than fair, given the continually soaring costs of printing.
Isn't "the devil" supposed to be "100% evil"?
"The devil" is an amalgram of a wide variety of wicked spirits, similar to how the US military amalgrates its enemy into "Charlie" or "Muhammad."
You're losing theological credibility by forgetting something so basic to Christian teachings. But I'll let that slide and assume that you meant "Lucifer" or "ha'satan". (sorry, don't know the hebrew-english spelling).
Lucifer is widey thought to be 100% evil, and we can even presume that God removed all goodness from him when He threw him down from heaven. (Presuming that there's no goodness in wicked souls is a bit presumptious and goes against mainstream christian thelogy, but still).
Your argument is that, if God is 100% Good, and Lucifer is 100% evil, then we have a contradiction. In mainstream theolgoy, you're simply wrong because the creation of evil was the product of an imperfect being (Lucifer) choosing to defy perfect goodness (God). It's a fairly easy reconciliation, that no one really has a problem with save atheists looking for an excuse.
Now, of course, there are certain theological arguments that don't hold God the Father as being 100% Good or Evil, and instead have God be "beyond good and evil" while Christ is 100% good. And still other arguments have God be both 100% evil and 100% good, and acting out the latter part becuase of His infinite wisdom instead of His innate nature.
But I'm rambling.
Even at the poles, good/evil are asymptotic, and fractally self-referential.
You could say the same thing about Right and Wrong. What's your point? (That sometime an act benefits both another and yourself? That makes it right/good, not both good and evil.)
I can order the manuals on CDROM but I do not want them on CDROM. I can't take a laptop out into my driveway when I'm all greasy, trying to find stuff and can't read it in the sun, worrying about dropping and breaking it, spilling something in it, etc.. That's stupid.
With the book I can drop it, get it dirty, etc. Big deal. And I can hold that book in my hand and flip the pages and find something in a fraction of the time I would spend trying to find it on a computer.
For about $150--which is pocket change compared to a guy that maintains an antique mercedes--you can buy a laser printer, which will let you print out as many copies of the relevant sections as you need.
With these "printouts" (as we in the 21st century call them), you really can get them dirty, soiled in oil, worn out by the sun, or whatever, and just recycle them and replace them as you need to.
I have a set of manuals for the '98 Astro I bought from my father. I have to be fairly paranoid about them, and if I want to look up a specific term, it takes me quite awhile to first learn the organization system (which no two manuals have the same...) and then find what I'm looking for.
And one last thing. When those books are mine, in my house, on my shelf, no one is going to virus them up and knock them offline. I can read them anytime I like, under MY terms and conditions, not some draconian bullshit DRM communist copyright shit.
Oh, yes, the printed word as the epitomy of security. As if there's never been a fire, wild party, or "lost box" in a private home.
I have some DRM'd documents, and for every legitimate use I have for them--reading, printing, searching, backup, annotation, transfer to PDA, et cetera--the DRM is no problem whatsoever.
(Oh, and let's not forget that if you have the manual as a CD-ROM, you can do a bitcopy and back it up even if the darn thing uses DRM.)
G'ha.
Your school--EVERY school--should stop buying and selling textbooks. They should be buying and distributing texts, either billed individually or as part of tuitition, and letting students print the books if they have a need.
Especially if the school requires every student to have a wireless laptop. Textbooks are expensive, drain money from the school, and aren't even all that good for what they do. (How many times has your teacher said "read Chapter 5, 2, 21, and 17, in order" or something similar?)
Part of the nonlinearity of real ethics is that !("Good vs Evil" = "Right vs Wrong").
It's always right to be 100% good.
It's always wrong to be 100% evil.
that's simple. Everything else is complex.
Evil isn't getting any cooler, even though I am.
No, not really.
Good and Evil are the bright and dark edges of morality. ALL drama is fundamentally a question of where the characters stand on the middle ground.
Bitching about this simple human truth isn't cool; it's just a sign of foolishness.
(Now, there are two or three better ways to get the point "SW morality is too simple" across, but dening the difference between Right and Wrong isn't one of them.)
(Oh, and your complex nonlinear space opera would be Babylon 5.)
Who said anything about cutting back on the training budget?
Stormtroopers can hit--they just can't always hit the heroes. The *only* times stormtroopers lose in VI-IV is when they are facing a much smaller foe that maximises every strategic advantage--including misinformation.
Off the top of my head:
Stormtoopers destroyed the guards on the Organa friggate.
Stormtroopers let Luke and co. "get away" in Ep. IV.
Stormtroopers made short work of the rebels on Hoth & the guards on cloud city.
Stormtroopers conquered Endor for a short while, and were only bested by a massive uprising by natives intimately familiar with the terrain.
"who would win, red shirts or stormtroopers" is an old joke, but one made only by folk who don't make allowances for plot.
(And, really, from Jango fett on they're not that good pilots, so Tie Fighters don't really count, do they?)
XP was to Win2K what Win98 was to Win95.
Spoken like someone who saw color and rounded graphics and never looked at XP again.
Succinctly, every worthwhile improvement in XP can't be had by a Win2k service pack. Especially if you allow for WinXP service packs as well.
"If you strike, strike truly. A false swing only encourages your demise."
Are we to assume that it can movie around at light speed?
Assume nothing. It's all but spelled out in the movie. "Move the station", "hey, where'd that come from?" and all the rest.
Practically speaking, what use is a planet-destroying weapon that can't move between planets to destroy?
I made my contract with the cashier at the store, not with the manufacturer.
Skip the rest, and stick with this one.
Depending on your jurisdiction, a solid "it's an uncomplicated purchase, and an EULA is an attempt to modify the contract after my agreement, thus voiding my Acceptance" is enough to render the EULA toothless.
OTOH, most EULA terms are based around a common understanding--you may install the software on one computer at a time, and must delete it if you install it anywhere else. The few other terms are likely unenforceable (such as "you may not use clipart to make fun of us") or actually grant more rights to the user than a simple one-copy purchase (such as "you may install this on X computers.")
You say that as if Paris were a woman worth marrying.
I'm not saying I agree with these sentiments, but if you ask the average woman in the US if she wants a "new" diamond or a larger pawn shop diamond, I'm betting "new" wins 100% of the time.
I wager if you put the two rings in front of the "average woman", she'll go for the bigger one. Especially if you get it appraised first, so she can compare the cost difference.
FWIW, though, any women worth marrying is either smart enough to see through the whole deBeers scam on her own, or trusts you enough when you say "it's a criminal organization that wants to rip you off; if you really want a diamond, how about we not pay the inflated price for one?"
bring a car (suitcase) with a home-built nuke over...
You seem to be operating under an amazingly naive view of all of the following:
The size of a nuclear weapon
Nukes are big. We had our biggest bombers deliver the single-bombs that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the high-tech ones we have today are still far too large to carry, let alone stash in anything smaller than a delivery truck.
And while suitcase nukes are concievably possible, no one's built them--and if anyone did bother to, the would take out perhaps a building or a city block, not an entire city. (The thing about converting matter into energy is that you need to have a certain ammount of matter to get a certain level of energy...)
The degree of skill necessary to create one
Very smart people all across the globe have tried to create nuclear weaposn on the sly. The only ones that have been successful have been multiple-person teams, usually with either stolen intel or multiple PhDs.
The degree of effort needed to create one
Again, even if you know how to make a nuclear weapon, you need some considrable resources to build one. We're talking a scale of such a size that there's no way you can do it unless you're a fair-sized country.
The ammount of radiation a nuke gives off
Sure, CBS sent a depleted uranium round through the mail. But if you tried to turn that into a nuke without a breeder reactor first, it simply wouldn't work. A working nuclear bomb would have a detectable radiation signal unless your delivery truck had foot-thick lead walls--and that's presuming that there isn't a top secret nuke-detection principle they don't tell everyone about.
The size of a military base
Fort Knox has a tank base on the east coast around it. Which means that the tanks will actually fire their mile-long range weapons, plus have room to manuver, plus a safety barrier. It's entirely possible that, even if you set a nuke right on the edge of the base and just hit "detonate", most of the base would survive.
The ammount of security US military bases have
Yes, I know they look like just an empty fence where no one watches. But someone is watching, and they have very good, very violent security guards trained to take down and incapacitate angry soldiers. Espeically around high-value bases, like Fort Knox.
Hollywood is has finally woken up and realized that the videogame industry is almost as big as them...
When you ignore DVD and Television, and judge size only by dollars.
I am not knocking voice over actors; they truly have talent, but they should not be compensated more than the poor bastards working 60 hour weeks to make the game in the first place.
Go read TFA. Voice actors want standard voice-actor industry rates--and coders want the same residual piece of the pie.
A contract merely requires Consideration on both sides and Acceptence of the contract by both sides. No 'offer', although for some reason people often try to assert so. An offer is made by one side, whereas a contract is made by two.
Here's the thing--that's flatly against what the lawyers who taught me about contracts said. There's definitly a jurisdictional or grammatical difference here.
I suspect, at the moment, that it's more grammatical and academic than substantive. If you and I agree to yard-care, and I sell you my lawn mower at the same time, and we go sour, we wind up in court either way.
A similar difference is that, for example, while there are torts of "Assault and Battery" are two different terms that mean "frightening someone and harming someone", in NY State there's just the tort of "Assault."