i find it interesting that you think the Wii name is dumb, and then your sig references two of the stupidest sounding names for software ever.;)
Also, the market that Nintendo is going after is not the the non-gamer market so much as the casual gamer market, which you yourself might be becoming a member of without relizing it. You said:
I no longer always want to play a System Shock or a Baldur's Gate. Well I want too but I can't because there are so few of them and the light bubbly Nintendo games pass the time.
That's the impulse Nintendo is trying to catch. There are a lot of people out there who either a) do not want to play a lengthy involved game but want to play a game or b) want to play a lengthy involved game but do not have the time to invest in it, and so would rather play something 'light' and 'bubbly' than nothing at all.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a great, really involved, time consuming game on the Wii/Revolution/whatever the heck they want to call it, but N is courting the people that want really good games that are good for killing that spare.5 hour a day that you have.
I would say very naive. most tax-evasion is done by the extremely wealthy and by mega-corporations, who fully disclose all their holdings, then avoid paying taxes on as much of it as possible through completely legal tax loopholes that their lobbyist bought for them.
actually, the requiring people to get licensed before they have kids part of all that sounds like a pretty good idea. There're a lot of stupid people having a lot of stupid kids out there. The kind of stupid people that would allow all of the rest of that to pass.
I think what the GP was refering to is that many "pocket metronome" type devices also have a function where they will play a pure A440, such that they can be used as tuners of a sort as well as metronomes.
Any truly great poet will take a poetic form and make sure that it has encoded into it some kind of meaning. In English poetry the easiest place to see this is the sonnet. The English (Shakespearean) sonnet is 14 lines, divided into groups of 4-4-4-2; each quattrain, if written skillfully, describes some separate aspect of the subject matter of the poem. The concluding couplet features a turn or reversal of thought. The rhyme scheme (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) re-inforces this division of thought in the English sonnet. If used successfully, then the sonnet will carry part of the meaning simply in its form, apart from the words. There are similar divisions of thought encoded into Italian (Petrarchan), and Spenserian sonnet forms as well.
That's only a concern if your online identity, email address, and so on is somehow worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Inheritance has to be extremely high in order for it to actually be taxed, and realistically, the vast majority online properties that are really that valuable are owned by corporate entities.
He didn't mention the dark ages, where there wasn't much in the way of development for over 500 years from 500AD onwards after the fall of Rome.
That's true for Western Europe, but not for the whole world. The eastern empire (Byzantium) continued much as it was for another couple hundred years. The Arabic culture was in its golden age, inventing Algebra and writing philosophical commentaries. Other parts of the world were doing ok, too (China undertook a little engineering feat called the Great Wall, for example).
It could happen again.
True, any major catastrophe now could affect the entire planet, but any civilization that would survive would probably survive with a lot of its knowledge in tact. Hopefully, Cheney will have the foresight to take a few of our best eggheads to his undisclosed location when the ICBMs start flyin'. Somthing like that would slow development, but it wouldn't halt. It might even spur new development as new technologies would have to be invented to deal with new problems.
They didn't do the same thing! Bush was doing his spying without a warrant. Carter and Clinton both followed the guidelines of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and their administrations went to the SECRET FISA court to get warrants for any surveillance that was being done. Duh-bya did not. He broke the law. Period. End of story. There was not a security threat in getting a warrant. It was a SECRET FUCKING COURT that he had to go to to get the warrant, but he didn't. Why? Who knows. Probably because this administration is so arrogant and ridiculous as to think the rules never apply to them. Of course, we the peopole have let them get away with just about everything sneaky and underhanded that they've done, so one can't really blame them for thinking that way.
And BTW, you neo-cons need to get a new rejoinder. the whole "but..but Clinton" thing is getting really fucking stale.
There are, literally, in any given generation of wasps and roaches anywhere from 10^5 to 10^7 individuals. You could easily cover all of those individual variations in a single generation. The ones that were not successful would be gone in another 2 generations, tops, which would explain why we don't see all of these unsuccessful versions swarming around. Like you said, evolution wouldn't follow through on those unsuccessful variations, but that one that was successful is going to reproduce and pass that particular trait on.
There are laws in place already to protect against various forms of descrimination.
One, I've never heard of any company firing someone who smokes. Could you provide a source.
However, even if they did, smoking is a choice, having a gene that puts you more at risk for heart disease is not a choice. Firing someone for their personal choices is somewhat defensible, but firing someone for things they cannot help or change (for example handicaps, race, gender) has been generally frowned upon by congress and the courts in modern US society.
I was hoping that I could begin watching Pixar films again seeing as how they had freed themselves from Disney's grasp, but alas, 'tis not meant to be.
Your father's situation reminds me of my father-in-law. He works for Northrup-Grumann (sp?) and doesn't reallt like it. However, it pays a ridiculously large amount of money along with really good benefits (my hypocondriac sister-in-law is constantly going to the doctor). He has been able (because of the financial security of this job) to teach part-time as a philosophy professor.
My own father, on the other hand, spent his whole life pursuing his dreams. At one point when I was very young, he had reached a point where pursuing those dreams had reached a point where, though he wasn't really making it big time, he had reached a point where his dream was paying the bills and then some and he had gained a little bit of notoriety. He droppped it all, picked up everything, and moved us from NY to TX to try and pursue his dream there b/c he thought he could really make it big down there. Long story short, he didn't. We lived just above poverty, basically, and my father squandered his remaining years pursuing get-rich quick schemes (he was especially fond of getting duped by Ponzi schemes), and no longer pursuing his dream at all.
I agree that these activities could certainly easily--and fairly efficiently, too--deal with those few truly whacko professors, I still feel uneasy about it. I imagine that it is my inability to trust most people with a "conservative" (I use the term only as a label anymore; in practice it means nothing for the "conservative" party in this country) agenda. I see just how the "conservatives" in Washington have been acting and can't help but begin to see them all that way.
Completely OT: you responded cogently and insightfully to my reply, and you have a great.sig, therefore you are now on my friends list.
your post demonstrates that you would be one of the "academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal"
I am a teacher (middle and high school English). My students can never tell my political leanings one way or another, and never find out, unless I am directly questioned and I deign to answer directly. For example, just recently, I asked my 8th grade students to write persuasive essays about the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams (a very good case for examining both sides of the death penalty debate I felt). None of my students still can say with any definitiveness what my own personal views on the death penalty are. Furthermore, my own personal views on the death penalty had absolutely no bearing on the way that I graded their essays. So, no, I would not be one of those "academics."
In my post, I pointed out something that I have noticed. I had yet to encounter (the poster of the original post seems, actually, to be the exception I had not previously seen) someone defending McCarthy who was not rabidly neo-conservative like the first person I encountered defending him, Ann Coulter. If anyone can be called a neo-con fetishist, it is Ms. Coulter along with the ditto-heads who hang on her every word.
1) McCarthy was right - he did find a lot of communists A lot of Neo-conservative fetishists seem to be throwing this around nowadays as though it were a foregone conclusion. McCarthy did find communists. He did not find "a lot" of communists, however. The adjective "few" is much more appropriate here. I imagine they (neo-cons) began doing this in a pre-emptive sort of way, in order to head off comparisons b/t W and McCarthy by saying "but, but, McCarthy was right! He wound Brazillians of Commie-pinkos hiding in the state department!"
2) What the hell is wrong with collecting documents and recordings of things that the profs themselves said? Well, first of all, disseminating said information (especially for profit) is a violation of copyright law (the profs. lectures are copyrighted either by the prof. himself or his university). Second, as someone has already said, it is very easy to quote things out of context and make it look much worse than it actually is.
Furthermore, I would point out that McCarthy, regardless of any actual soviet spies he found--recall, it is not a crime to be a member of the communist party (remember free speech?) so it doesn't matter if he found communists, only spies--he destroyed a number of innocent people's lives. Also, it doesn't matter what a proffesor says or thinks; all that matters is how he grades. Does he grade papers that take a conservative position consistently worse than papers that take a liberal position? That would be a cause for protest and cries of innappropriate professorial bias.
For the record, there are professors who can separate their own beliefs from their grading. I once got a paper back from a prof. and the only comments on it were about how my position was completely wrong and how he disagreed with me in every aspect of my argument. I got an A- on it.
If Debian is so scalable, why does it take them so much longer than any other OS vendor to simply do a release?
scalability has nothing to do with release time.
the biggest OS vendors new OS longhorn is due out when, exactly? and how far past due?
just sayin'...
Google to solve problems in an improbable way?
on
"St Lawrence of Google"
·
· Score: 5, Funny
deus ex machina - n
In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation.
An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot.
A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty.
Of the three definitions, I would say only 2 or 3 would make sense in the context that the phrase is used. So, the ultimate goal of the company is to have Google pop up unexpectedly and resolve conflicts in an artificial and contrived manner.
Read my post again. He was making a joke about the infamous goatse picture and its similarity to a black hole (or in-between black hole). Like I said, it's not a very good joke, but it was on-topic, after a fashion.
The parent comment was obviously intended as a joke. Maybe not a very good joke, but a joke, nevertheless. The off-topic mod is unfair as the poster is clearly making a joke with reference to the topic of the article (in-between black holes). Is there some sort of mechanism on/. to automatically mod down as off-topic any post with the word goatse somewhere in the title?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait. This isn't an "Ask Slashdot"?
Nevermind...
i find it interesting that you think the Wii name is dumb, and then your sig references two of the stupidest sounding names for software ever. ;)
.5 hour a day that you have.
Also, the market that Nintendo is going after is not the the non-gamer market so much as the casual gamer market, which you yourself might be becoming a member of without relizing it. You said:
I no longer always want to play a System Shock or a Baldur's Gate. Well I want too but I can't because there are so few of them and the light bubbly Nintendo games pass the time.
That's the impulse Nintendo is trying to catch. There are a lot of people out there who either a) do not want to play a lengthy involved game but want to play a game or b) want to play a lengthy involved game but do not have the time to invest in it, and so would rather play something 'light' and 'bubbly' than nothing at all.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a great, really involved, time consuming game on the Wii/Revolution/whatever the heck they want to call it, but N is courting the people that want really good games that are good for killing that spare
"Your neutralness, it's a beige alert."
"If I don't survive, tell my wife, 'hello'"
I would say very naive. most tax-evasion is done by the extremely wealthy and by mega-corporations, who fully disclose all their holdings, then avoid paying taxes on as much of it as possible through completely legal tax loopholes that their lobbyist bought for them.
You have just posted one of the most insghtful and astute statements I think I have ever read on /. And it was pithy to boot.
Thank you.
actually, the requiring people to get licensed before they have kids part of all that sounds like a pretty good idea. There're a lot of stupid people having a lot of stupid kids out there. The kind of stupid people that would allow all of the rest of that to pass.
Fuel Cell Powered Japanese Trains on Trial in July
What are they on trial for?
Huh? Ohhhhhh....
what do metronomes have to do with tuning??
I think what the GP was refering to is that many "pocket metronome" type devices also have a function where they will play a pure A440, such that they can be used as tuners of a sort as well as metronomes.
Any truly great poet will take a poetic form and make sure that it has encoded into it some kind of meaning. In English poetry the easiest place to see this is the sonnet. The English (Shakespearean) sonnet is 14 lines, divided into groups of 4-4-4-2; each quattrain, if written skillfully, describes some separate aspect of the subject matter of the poem. The concluding couplet features a turn or reversal of thought. The rhyme scheme (ABABCDCDEFEFGG) re-inforces this division of thought in the English sonnet. If used successfully, then the sonnet will carry part of the meaning simply in its form, apart from the words. There are similar divisions of thought encoded into Italian (Petrarchan), and Spenserian sonnet forms as well.
That's only a concern if your online identity, email address, and so on is somehow worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Inheritance has to be extremely high in order for it to actually be taxed, and realistically, the vast majority online properties that are really that valuable are owned by corporate entities.
He didn't mention the dark ages, where there wasn't much in the way of development for over 500 years from 500AD onwards after the fall of Rome.
That's true for Western Europe, but not for the whole world. The eastern empire (Byzantium) continued much as it was for another couple hundred years. The Arabic culture was in its golden age, inventing Algebra and writing philosophical commentaries. Other parts of the world were doing ok, too (China undertook a little engineering feat called the Great Wall, for example).
It could happen again.
True, any major catastrophe now could affect the entire planet, but any civilization that would survive would probably survive with a lot of its knowledge in tact. Hopefully, Cheney will have the foresight to take a few of our best eggheads to his undisclosed location when the ICBMs start flyin'. Somthing like that would slow development, but it wouldn't halt. It might even spur new development as new technologies would have to be invented to deal with new problems.
They didn't do the same thing! Bush was doing his spying without a warrant. Carter and Clinton both followed the guidelines of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and their administrations went to the SECRET FISA court to get warrants for any surveillance that was being done. Duh-bya did not. He broke the law. Period. End of story. There was not a security threat in getting a warrant. It was a SECRET FUCKING COURT that he had to go to to get the warrant, but he didn't. Why? Who knows. Probably because this administration is so arrogant and ridiculous as to think the rules never apply to them. Of course, we the peopole have let them get away with just about everything sneaky and underhanded that they've done, so one can't really blame them for thinking that way.
And BTW, you neo-cons need to get a new rejoinder. the whole "but..but Clinton" thing is getting really fucking stale.
There are, literally, in any given generation of wasps and roaches anywhere from 10^5 to 10^7 individuals. You could easily cover all of those individual variations in a single generation. The ones that were not successful would be gone in another 2 generations, tops, which would explain why we don't see all of these unsuccessful versions swarming around. Like you said, evolution wouldn't follow through on those unsuccessful variations, but that one that was successful is going to reproduce and pass that particular trait on.
Yes, I know...that was part of the funny in my post.
/. that day didn't have their sarcasm detectors turned on.
Of course, since it was modded flamebait, I'm guessing a lot of people on
I was hoping that I could begin watching Pixar films again seeing as how they had freed themselves from Disney's grasp, but alas, 'tis not meant to be.
Shame, too, as Cars sounded pretty good.
2008 is looking more and more like 1984.
I don't know that there is a Republican around right now who could pull this off.
Unless, of course, the Dems run another milquetoast like Mondale.
(The Dems are too afraid of people like Dean to let them run...and that's why they lose)
Your father's situation reminds me of my father-in-law. He works for Northrup-Grumann (sp?) and doesn't reallt like it. However, it pays a ridiculously large amount of money along with really good benefits (my hypocondriac sister-in-law is constantly going to the doctor). He has been able (because of the financial security of this job) to teach part-time as a philosophy professor.
My own father, on the other hand, spent his whole life pursuing his dreams. At one point when I was very young, he had reached a point where pursuing those dreams had reached a point where, though he wasn't really making it big time, he had reached a point where his dream was paying the bills and then some and he had gained a little bit of notoriety. He droppped it all, picked up everything, and moved us from NY to TX to try and pursue his dream there b/c he thought he could really make it big down there. Long story short, he didn't. We lived just above poverty, basically, and my father squandered his remaining years pursuing get-rich quick schemes (he was especially fond of getting duped by Ponzi schemes), and no longer pursuing his dream at all.
I agree that these activities could certainly easily--and fairly efficiently, too--deal with those few truly whacko professors, I still feel uneasy about it. I imagine that it is my inability to trust most people with a "conservative" (I use the term only as a label anymore; in practice it means nothing for the "conservative" party in this country) agenda. I see just how the "conservatives" in Washington have been acting and can't help but begin to see them all that way.
.sig, therefore you are now on my friends list.
Completely OT: you responded cogently and insightfully to my reply, and you have a great
your post demonstrates that you would be one of the "academics who proselytize students from either side of the ideological spectrum, conservative or liberal"
I am a teacher (middle and high school English). My students can never tell my political leanings one way or another, and never find out, unless I am directly questioned and I deign to answer directly. For example, just recently, I asked my 8th grade students to write persuasive essays about the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams (a very good case for examining both sides of the death penalty debate I felt). None of my students still can say with any definitiveness what my own personal views on the death penalty are. Furthermore, my own personal views on the death penalty had absolutely no bearing on the way that I graded their essays. So, no, I would not be one of those "academics."
In my post, I pointed out something that I have noticed. I had yet to encounter (the poster of the original post seems, actually, to be the exception I had not previously seen) someone defending McCarthy who was not rabidly neo-conservative like the first person I encountered defending him, Ann Coulter. If anyone can be called a neo-con fetishist, it is Ms. Coulter along with the ditto-heads who hang on her every word.
1) McCarthy was right - he did find a lot of communists
A lot of Neo-conservative fetishists seem to be throwing this around nowadays as though it were a foregone conclusion. McCarthy did find communists. He did not find "a lot" of communists, however. The adjective "few" is much more appropriate here. I imagine they (neo-cons) began doing this in a pre-emptive sort of way, in order to head off comparisons b/t W and McCarthy by saying "but, but, McCarthy was right! He wound Brazillians of Commie-pinkos hiding in the state department!"
2) What the hell is wrong with collecting documents and recordings of things that the profs themselves said?
Well, first of all, disseminating said information (especially for profit) is a violation of copyright law (the profs. lectures are copyrighted either by the prof. himself or his university). Second, as someone has already said, it is very easy to quote things out of context and make it look much worse than it actually is.
Furthermore, I would point out that McCarthy, regardless of any actual soviet spies he found--recall, it is not a crime to be a member of the communist party (remember free speech?) so it doesn't matter if he found communists, only spies--he destroyed a number of innocent people's lives. Also, it doesn't matter what a proffesor says or thinks; all that matters is how he grades. Does he grade papers that take a conservative position consistently worse than papers that take a liberal position? That would be a cause for protest and cries of innappropriate professorial bias.
For the record, there are professors who can separate their own beliefs from their grading. I once got a paper back from a prof. and the only comments on it were about how my position was completely wrong and how he disagreed with me in every aspect of my argument. I got an A- on it.
just sayin'...
Of the three definitions, I would say only 2 or 3 would make sense in the context that the phrase is used. So, the ultimate goal of the company is to have Google pop up unexpectedly and resolve conflicts in an artificial and contrived manner.
Sorta like Clippy. *ducks*
Read my post again. He was making a joke about the infamous goatse picture and its similarity to a black hole (or in-between black hole). Like I said, it's not a very good joke, but it was on-topic, after a fashion.
The parent comment was obviously intended as a joke. Maybe not a very good joke, but a joke, nevertheless. The off-topic mod is unfair as the poster is clearly making a joke with reference to the topic of the article (in-between black holes). Is there some sort of mechanism on /. to automatically mod down as off-topic any post with the word goatse somewhere in the title?