"The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games."
Hello? Haven't the sales of "Barbie Party Magic" or "Exxtreme Woodchuck Hunter 3D" *always* outsold 99.999% of what most people would call serious game titles? How is this news?
Look, while the percentage of people who 'game' either on console or PC has skyrocketed, it's still a vanishingly small minority. WoW is the most staggeringly successful online computer game on the planet with what, 12 million subscribers world wide? Wow...0.2% of the population plays!
Sure, everybody wants a multi-million seller, but not every title costs $50 million to make, either. Most businesses would be very pleased with a game that cost $100,000 to develop, and sells 50,000 units. So I'd venture that, far from dying out - ESPECIALLY with the internet's ability to allow people to find their niche-preference - core gamers will always be a niche that there will be a market demand to satisfy.
I'd like to predict the deaths of people predicting the deaths of things, if that wasn't dangerously circular.
...the problem with ALL forms of robotic exploration that we can manage at this time is that you have to know what you want to do BEFORE you get there, and there's very little ability to change the itinerary once the device is launched.
Certainly, I expect something like this would require something of a self-configuring and certainly autonomous unit, but STILL you are contrained by your design suppositions. Look at the Mars landers, since Viking(s). It seems that robotic devices now are a tradeoff: either broad-function with little ability to pull out detail in-depth data, or extremely narrowly configured to test very specific hypotheses. If you didn't pre-suppose you might find something of interest, you wouldn't design a device to test for it, obviously; in that sense sending humans is an exercise in sending grossly over-engineered capacity with maximum flexibility - sometimes it makes sense, most often not. I'd supposed that a few million years of evolution has made the human animal one of the more efficient data-gathering tools and once you design a machine with sufficient flexibility to even approximate human capability, you run into weight, size, and reliability issues that begin to dwarf even the life-support requirements for the fragile humans.
The constant flow of surprises from the Mars Rovers and Cassini (just to name a couple) suggests to me that it's really a very hard job to 'pre-expect' what you're going to find sufficiently to design the right instruments. We're not talking about known-unknowns, but the most unknowable unknowns. It's probably that I've been reading too much Silverberg, but part of me almost expects that despite sending dozens of probes to Mars already, once we get there we're going to be confronted with some gross and obvious weirdness that it just never occurred to us to check for, like the first explorers land and hear a pervasive music playing in the air.
This always seems to be presented as a false dichotomy, and I don't understand it. OF COURSE automated probes are going to do the bulk work of exploring. Frankly, I'd say anything else would be rather stupid. You could send a relatively simple 'standard' set of probes (a couple of orbiters, a couple of dropped landers, maybe a dropped rover) to a broad swath of targets at relatively low cost and very high speed. Maybe you send out 100 (1000?) probes and cull the data to draw down to one or two destinations that are "interesting" enough to send a team of humans.
Eventually humans will go, if only because the ultimate question isn't just data-gathering, it's about the HUMAN utility of such places. And you can only finally be sure of THAT once you send some human guinea pigs, er, explorers to check it out.
"But all the "global warming doesn't exist people" are going to jump on this like every bit of news about cold weather to claim it contradicts the idea that there's global warming"...as opposed to the Global Warming advocates, who jump on this like every bit of news about a drowning polar bear to claim that there IS global warming.
"Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users."...still others (*cough* *cough* BLIZZARD *cough* *cough*) engage in mild disingenuity when they claim that they are against gold selling, but only engage in banning methods when the gold grinders are clearly using bots. (And even then, the response is so slow it's hard to recognize.)
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but when "gold seller A" pops up in main faction cities, using a randomized name, that toon MUST be logged into an account, no? And if that toon is logged into an account, they must be uniquely identified to the company, no? And if that same account is repeatedly flagged as goldspamming general chat, how hard would it be to flag that account (and the flagged chat) for human review, to be banned upon confirmation that it is indeed goldspam? And if account A is banned for goldspam, and accounts B, C, D, E, and F are also banned for goldspam, wouldn't you just consider a basic IP ban on accounts from that origin?
Further, when I see bots grinding and report them, I don't expect INSTANT response. That would be nearly ridiculous in a game with 11+ million players. However, when I come back the next night, and 3 nights later and they're still grinding the same area? That's silly.
Checking wiki, apparently we're not even sure of what's in the L4/L5s in the Earth/Moon system. A Japanese probe failed to find the expected Kordylewski clouds.
I'm well aware of the vasty nature of space, but I guess I'm sometimes startled about how ignorant we are about our own very local neighborhood...
We tried CFLs over 2006-2007. We will be using incandescents until the government (probably) takes them away.
1) we live in a 100+ year old home. I'm guessing it's the varying voltage or line spikes, but we never saw nearly the life gains claimed by the tech. CFL typically lasted about as long (60% lasted a LITTLE longer - like a month or so, 40% actually didn't last as long as incandescents) but the last 15% of their lifespan their light output was noticeably dimmer or different in some annoying way.
2) we've been advised by our state pollution authorities that if a CFL breaks: - we are to open the windows to ventilate the room at least 15 minutes. - all people must leave immediately. - all the fragments must be picked up by cardboard and/or tape - the waste may not be thrown out, it must be disposed in a "haz waste collection area"
Higher cost, no significant gain in light life, MUCH more complicated disposal....nope, in MY PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCE they don't make sense.
Relevant and tragicomic bits from TFA (linked above, not the OP): "...together with her male associates from Japan and Austria appealed to their sponsoring agencies to discipline the offenders (Russian team members who had forcibly french-kissed her twice). But they were told that such behavior was the norm for Russians and that they should either tolerate it or leave the project. They were also told that Russian cultural patterns prohibited Lapierre from making a public complaint.... When Lapierre's team first entered the modules, Dr. Valery Gushin, the scientific coordinator of the project, voiced attitude that in hindsight could have been seen as warnings about the problem. "Men, they have some expectations from women," he told a Canadian television team. "They want them to be more like women, not just partners. At least Russians do." "
Lovely bunch. I will honestly say that Judith Lapierre is rather good-looking which I admit would be distracting, but any reasonable male should be able to control themselves.
"When you REALLY notice their apparent ability to sense pain is when you have to "clean" them, which involves shoving a long, barbed object (like a piece of their antennae) up their rectum, so you can pull out their intestine. They usually remain pretty calm as you handle them, even if you flip them over and touch the underside of their tail a bit. But the moment you try to jam that thing up their ass, the really lively/alert lobsters are sure to resist and flail about excessively. I truly think it is mighty unpleasant for them."
And this is where we differ from Lobsters: If lobsters were truly intelligent, they'd invent an internet where they could offer live anal-antenna-piercing webcams and archived videos for a small membership fee of 9.99 per month. I imagine that in any context, Rule 34 does apply to lobsters, tho.
"But undergraduate college years are an excellent time to take some risks and go after all that younger co-ed booty than you may have previously seen yourself going."
Fixed that for you.
Remember, you're a grownup, and some college chicks are going to be sick and tired of the immature jerks in college. Or, since they're going to be hitting their 'sexual experimentation' and 'I'm a grownup now!' phases, you can run with the "College is great, since we're all grownups and we can dispense with the artificial boundaries created by high school."
At least, those are the angles I'd play. Fish in a barrel, man. Fish in a freakin' barrel.
Perhaps when your country manages to accomplish its own space program, you can use whatever units YOU prefer. Then again, if you have trouble dividing lbs by two to get approximate kg, it may be a while.
Then you can have the pleasure of reading constant carping from the cheap seats complaining about the most trivial issues.
Wait until the day after someone blows up one of these, or it crashes into a school. If a child dies, this will go 180 degrees and be banned in a week.
...and what's so funny is that he gets the reputation of being a horrible, cruel person.
Generally, he simply cuts straight to the point and says what everyone's thinking anyway "You're really a horrible singer and should think of some other career." People are just so shocked by his lack of euphemism and unwillingness to play by certain overly polite rules of social interaction. He's a staggeringly successful businessman in a business that is ephemeral, superficial, and entirely about aesthetics: if he doesn't apply his judgement quickly and accurately, he will not be successful. The people he's reviewing are simply the products he will be promoting, and he's (essentially) given over the ability to choose which product is most likely to be marketable to a giant focus-group-vote.* That takes some courage, so he's GOT to control it by weeding as aggressively as possible. It's NOT a charity, so as much as the poor little crippled kid with the abusive mommy and the amputee daddy might *want* to be a famous singer, pity isn't going to get butts in the seats night after night after night in some mediocre auditorium in Vegas on a 3 year contract. Further, I can imagine it's a HARSH business. It's all about image and everything, and if your precious little snowflake of self-image melts at his criticism, you probably don't have the strength of character to be on stage.
* although I personally believe that after Ruben Studdard, he controls the voting behind the scenes, at least to some degree.
I have only once heard him say something that (by my standards) crossed the line, and that was when he told some woman she was disgustingly fat and an atrocious singer...and she was, honestly. But there IS a concept called tact - this was the selection process and at a certain point simply saying "No, sorry" is enough. (Then again, two points: first, I'd probably be a little cross after listening to 00's of people caterwauling and then being annoyed that you don't 'appreciate' their awesomeness; second, in that sense there is a filter-value to being a little intimidating in the early shows, to weed out the unserious long before they waste his time.)
"In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required."
I think that's the OP's point. Is the degree merely required to have the job, or are the things you could only know if you have a masters in Engineering actually the skills required for the tasks performed on the job?
While I understand that there's good political hay to be made out of showing why women are treated unfairly, the whole glass-ceiling (at least insofar as salaries are concerned) thing was debunked years ago when studies on wage gaps corrected for overtime and willingness to travel.
The simple fact is that in most nuclear families, the man is the primary wage earner, the woman the primary caregiver to the children. This is probably based on relatively obvious biological differences (the woman lactates, the man doesn't; females generally excel in a number of cognitive abilities that are extremely useful in child-raising; females are generally more resistant to garden-variety infections and sicknesses; etc etc etc) This isn't prescriptive, merely descriptive, and valid for (AFAIK) the bulk of human history.
While I understand the desire for some men to stay home and raise children, and the desire for some women to have a life not based around family, both of them must understand that they are simply outside of the norm and no amount of whinging is going to make them 'the norm'.
"Someone booked for DUI will always be slurring their speech, staggering, have bloodshot eyes, etc. Someone booked for resisting arrest will always have been waving his arms and cursing, etc. This isn't because all the offenses are the same. It's because the officer's testimony has no relation to the truth." Ballocks.
Utter ballocks.
Of course the alternative reason that the stories are similar is because...they're similar circumstances. Doh? People intoxicated enough to affect their driving visibly ALSO usually tend to have slurred speech, if they can't steer straight they tend to stagger when standing.
Lots and lots and lots of posts here about how unfair cops are. Yep, truly a 'who watches the watchmen' situation, but hardly new.
Of course, I've never hung out with dirtbags, never associated with people with publicly-known criminal records, never mouthed off to a cop, never done drugs, so I'm sure it's just COINCIDENCE that this never happened to me?
"The head of the lab said the rescindment of Bush era policy was a great relief because they no longer had to maintain an expensive and artificial wall between their efforts."
Granted. This is the only credible criticism I've seen of the Bush policy that isn't simply an empty partisan counterwhine to the antiabortion crowd's whine connecting stem cells to abortion.
However, let's be totally frank here: the rescindment of the Bush policy is a great relief not mainly for the reason that they don't have to run two labs. I'd guess it has more to do with the ability of all these private research efforts to join the gluttony of the pig trough of government funding which is now apparently nearly limitless.*
* defining "nearly limitless" as "a pile of money that would exceed that accumulated by spending $1 million every day SINCE THE DEATH OF JULIUS CAESAR."
...that the bulk of the comments here are some sort of ridicule for the Christian Right, instead of plaudits for the idea of an advancement that makes the 'farming' of stem cells morally neutral.
Are we really so shallow that rather than confronting someone else's (and it's not a trivial % of the populace) genuine moral questions in sympathy, that we simply mock them? Don't bother replying, we all know the answer.
I don't necessarily agree with the concept that every zygote is sacred; nevertheless I can well see the difficulty of harvesting something from those zygotes for the people who do. (More accurately stated, their fear that there will be a sudden discovery of 'value' in these zygotes, inspiring the full range morality-free behaviors which typically characterize humans when confronted by something of value.) What's more ironic is that the unbelievable, staggering values that's been postulated for embryonic stem cells remains apparently that after all these years: apparently the entire world outside the US is furiously researching uses for these cells, as well as any US lab capable of operating free of the US gov't largesse, but nobody's managed to come up with a real-world useful therapy yet? Curious.
To get back to the point, I feel however that Christians' furor over stem cells would be more accurately directed at the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fertilized eggs 'disposed of' in the artificial insemination process every year...but that cat is well out of its particular bag, culturally speaking.
I find it equally ironic that some of people that rail against the 'naive' Christians for their 'ridiculous' discomfort at harvesting a resource from zygotes, are some of the same people who express outrage at the ripping of inorganic resources from a not-potentially-a-person ground. I guess it just depends where a person sees value.
"...deceived into downloading it. Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account. The new player is supposedly still beta, but NF members are strongly encouraged (some say tricked) by NF into the so-called 'upgrade,' which is permanent -- there is no way to opt out."
This is complete and utter BS. I've been a Netflix user for a very long time. 3 yrs? I dunno. I saw in the config page when Silverlight came out, and it was very CLEARLY stated that this was a one-way choice. I wondered what would possibly be the advantage to it, maybe multiplatform support vs the canned netflix player?
In any case, it was absolutely evident from the description text that this was a ONE way decision, that it was implemented by ACCOUNT, not computer, and that essentially once you were committed you were stuck. SO I DIDN'T DO IT.
Simple as that.
To suggest that people are "strongly encouraged" is a lie. To say that any of this wasn't clear is a lie.
I call bullshit on this whole story. If you were stupid enough to commit to it and now you regret it? Sorry, but fuck you - live with it, cancel your Netflix account, or whatever, but quit crying about it.
We apparently have an economy FULL of stupid people who my tax dollars are now going to bail out from their dumbass or greedy financial choices. This is just one more (trivial) example of such behavior, and the article/summary are a perfect example of such morons who need to learn to live with the consequences of their choices, PARTICULARLY when it was laid out quite clearly at the front end.
Let's say you're working with documents or whatever in a directory on a remote server over VPN. I've found that in the daughter windows opened when MS Word or MS Excel perform file operations like save as, etc. (since almost the full explorer functionality is available ) you can manipulate files MUCH more quickly.
I don't know why, but for example if you use Explorer, drill down through some directories and then try to rename a file or create/rename a new folder, it can really take a long time. Go into Excel, and using whatever file you happen to have open, hit "save as..." and use THAT window to drill down and rename files or create/rename directories, there's almost no lag whatsoever. Then just hit cancel to prevent anything happening to your current open file.
Well, to be blunt, the reason "you are assumed to be straight" is because usually you are.
It's the same with left-handedness: something like 10% of the population is left-handed, so most things in life assume you're right handed. Likewise you're generally not assumed to be diabetic (although 12% of Americans are). It's not necessarily a pejorative, it's just the case that when you are a statistical outlier, you either learn to live with it or go nuts on the futile assertion that your uniqueness be recognized.
Slashdot Mirror
"Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body."
SOMEONE has forgotten the fact that porn has been the source and promoter of about every successful web tech to date.
Christ people, this is getting repetitive.
"The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games."
Hello? Haven't the sales of "Barbie Party Magic" or "Exxtreme Woodchuck Hunter 3D" *always* outsold 99.999% of what most people would call serious game titles? How is this news?
Look, while the percentage of people who 'game' either on console or PC has skyrocketed, it's still a vanishingly small minority. WoW is the most staggeringly successful online computer game on the planet with what, 12 million subscribers world wide? Wow...0.2% of the population plays!
Sure, everybody wants a multi-million seller, but not every title costs $50 million to make, either. Most businesses would be very pleased with a game that cost $100,000 to develop, and sells 50,000 units. So I'd venture that, far from dying out - ESPECIALLY with the internet's ability to allow people to find their niche-preference - core gamers will always be a niche that there will be a market demand to satisfy.
I'd like to predict the deaths of people predicting the deaths of things, if that wasn't dangerously circular.
"there's nothing objectionable about about LEGO"
Oh, there can be my friend....there can be.
http://www.amyhughes.org/lego/church/index.html
And for more internet-norm wierdness:
http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2008/09/lego-domination-sex.html
...I'd be fine with a filter that stops the GBT, but letting L through would be fine. :)
(And yes, I understand the idiomatic usage, but aren't L's actually just a subset of G? Why do they get their own category like that?)
...the problem with ALL forms of robotic exploration that we can manage at this time is that you have to know what you want to do BEFORE you get there, and there's very little ability to change the itinerary once the device is launched.
Certainly, I expect something like this would require something of a self-configuring and certainly autonomous unit, but STILL you are contrained by your design suppositions. Look at the Mars landers, since Viking(s). It seems that robotic devices now are a tradeoff: either broad-function with little ability to pull out detail in-depth data, or extremely narrowly configured to test very specific hypotheses. If you didn't pre-suppose you might find something of interest, you wouldn't design a device to test for it, obviously; in that sense sending humans is an exercise in sending grossly over-engineered capacity with maximum flexibility - sometimes it makes sense, most often not. I'd supposed that a few million years of evolution has made the human animal one of the more efficient data-gathering tools and once you design a machine with sufficient flexibility to even approximate human capability, you run into weight, size, and reliability issues that begin to dwarf even the life-support requirements for the fragile humans.
The constant flow of surprises from the Mars Rovers and Cassini (just to name a couple) suggests to me that it's really a very hard job to 'pre-expect' what you're going to find sufficiently to design the right instruments. We're not talking about known-unknowns, but the most unknowable unknowns. It's probably that I've been reading too much Silverberg, but part of me almost expects that despite sending dozens of probes to Mars already, once we get there we're going to be confronted with some gross and obvious weirdness that it just never occurred to us to check for, like the first explorers land and hear a pervasive music playing in the air.
This always seems to be presented as a false dichotomy, and I don't understand it. OF COURSE automated probes are going to do the bulk work of exploring. Frankly, I'd say anything else would be rather stupid. You could send a relatively simple 'standard' set of probes (a couple of orbiters, a couple of dropped landers, maybe a dropped rover) to a broad swath of targets at relatively low cost and very high speed. Maybe you send out 100 (1000?) probes and cull the data to draw down to one or two destinations that are "interesting" enough to send a team of humans.
Eventually humans will go, if only because the ultimate question isn't just data-gathering, it's about the HUMAN utility of such places. And you can only finally be sure of THAT once you send some human guinea pigs, er, explorers to check it out.
"But all the "global warming doesn't exist people" are going to jump on this like every bit of news about cold weather to claim it contradicts the idea that there's global warming" ...as opposed to the Global Warming advocates, who jump on this like every bit of news about a drowning polar bear to claim that there IS global warming.
I see, it is a HUGE difference.
"Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users." ...still others (*cough* *cough* BLIZZARD *cough* *cough*) engage in mild disingenuity when they claim that they are against gold selling, but only engage in banning methods when the gold grinders are clearly using bots. (And even then, the response is so slow it's hard to recognize.)
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but when "gold seller A" pops up in main faction cities, using a randomized name, that toon MUST be logged into an account, no? And if that toon is logged into an account, they must be uniquely identified to the company, no? And if that same account is repeatedly flagged as goldspamming general chat, how hard would it be to flag that account (and the flagged chat) for human review, to be banned upon confirmation that it is indeed goldspam? And if account A is banned for goldspam, and accounts B, C, D, E, and F are also banned for goldspam, wouldn't you just consider a basic IP ban on accounts from that origin?
Further, when I see bots grinding and report them, I don't expect INSTANT response. That would be nearly ridiculous in a game with 11+ million players. However, when I come back the next night, and 3 nights later and they're still grinding the same area? That's silly.
Because they're wankers with the "one thing per advertising filled page"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Software&articleId=9131281&taxonomyId=18
"These places may hold small asteroids..."
Really? We don't KNOW?
Checking wiki, apparently we're not even sure of what's in the L4/L5s in the Earth/Moon system. A Japanese probe failed to find the expected Kordylewski clouds.
I'm well aware of the vasty nature of space, but I guess I'm sometimes startled about how ignorant we are about our own very local neighborhood...
We tried CFLs over 2006-2007. We will be using incandescents until the government (probably) takes them away.
1) we live in a 100+ year old home. I'm guessing it's the varying voltage or line spikes, but we never saw nearly the life gains claimed by the tech. CFL typically lasted about as long (60% lasted a LITTLE longer - like a month or so, 40% actually didn't last as long as incandescents) but the last 15% of their lifespan their light output was noticeably dimmer or different in some annoying way.
2) we've been advised by our state pollution authorities that if a CFL breaks:
- we are to open the windows to ventilate the room at least 15 minutes.
- all people must leave immediately.
- all the fragments must be picked up by cardboard and/or tape
- the waste may not be thrown out, it must be disposed in a "haz waste collection area"
Higher cost, no significant gain in light life, MUCH more complicated disposal....nope, in MY PARTICULAR CIRCUMSTANCE they don't make sense.
Relevant and tragicomic bits from TFA (linked above, not the OP): ...
"...together with her male associates from Japan and Austria appealed to their sponsoring agencies to discipline the offenders (Russian team members who had forcibly french-kissed her twice). But they were told that such behavior was the norm for Russians and that they should either tolerate it or leave the project. They were also told that Russian cultural patterns prohibited Lapierre from making a public complaint.
When Lapierre's team first entered the modules, Dr. Valery Gushin, the scientific coordinator of the project, voiced attitude that in hindsight could have been seen as warnings about the problem. "Men, they have some expectations from women," he told a Canadian television team. "They want them to be more like women, not just partners. At least Russians do." "
Lovely bunch. I will honestly say that Judith Lapierre is rather good-looking which I admit would be distracting, but any reasonable male should be able to control themselves.
"When you REALLY notice their apparent ability to sense pain is when you have to "clean" them, which involves shoving a long, barbed object (like a piece of their antennae) up their rectum, so you can pull out their intestine. They usually remain pretty calm as you handle them, even if you flip them over and touch the underside of their tail a bit. But the moment you try to jam that thing up their ass, the really lively/alert lobsters are sure to resist and flail about excessively. I truly think it is mighty unpleasant for them."
And this is where we differ from Lobsters: If lobsters were truly intelligent, they'd invent an internet where they could offer live anal-antenna-piercing webcams and archived videos for a small membership fee of 9.99 per month.
I imagine that in any context, Rule 34 does apply to lobsters, tho.
"But undergraduate college years are an excellent time to take some risks and go after all that younger co-ed booty than you may have previously seen yourself going."
Fixed that for you.
Remember, you're a grownup, and some college chicks are going to be sick and tired of the immature jerks in college. Or, since they're going to be hitting their 'sexual experimentation' and 'I'm a grownup now!' phases, you can run with the "College is great, since we're all grownups and we can dispense with the artificial boundaries created by high school."
At least, those are the angles I'd play. Fish in a barrel, man. Fish in a freakin' barrel.
Perhaps when your country manages to accomplish its own space program, you can use whatever units YOU prefer. Then again, if you have trouble dividing lbs by two to get approximate kg, it may be a while.
Then you can have the pleasure of reading constant carping from the cheap seats complaining about the most trivial issues.
Wait until the day after someone blows up one of these, or it crashes into a school.
If a child dies, this will go 180 degrees and be banned in a week.
...and what's so funny is that he gets the reputation of being a horrible, cruel person.
Generally, he simply cuts straight to the point and says what everyone's thinking anyway "You're really a horrible singer and should think of some other career." People are just so shocked by his lack of euphemism and unwillingness to play by certain overly polite rules of social interaction. He's a staggeringly successful businessman in a business that is ephemeral, superficial, and entirely about aesthetics: if he doesn't apply his judgement quickly and accurately, he will not be successful. The people he's reviewing are simply the products he will be promoting, and he's (essentially) given over the ability to choose which product is most likely to be marketable to a giant focus-group-vote.* That takes some courage, so he's GOT to control it by weeding as aggressively as possible. It's NOT a charity, so as much as the poor little crippled kid with the abusive mommy and the amputee daddy might *want* to be a famous singer, pity isn't going to get butts in the seats night after night after night in some mediocre auditorium in Vegas on a 3 year contract. Further, I can imagine it's a HARSH business. It's all about image and everything, and if your precious little snowflake of self-image melts at his criticism, you probably don't have the strength of character to be on stage.
* although I personally believe that after Ruben Studdard, he controls the voting behind the scenes, at least to some degree.
I have only once heard him say something that (by my standards) crossed the line, and that was when he told some woman she was disgustingly fat and an atrocious singer...and she was, honestly. But there IS a concept called tact - this was the selection process and at a certain point simply saying "No, sorry" is enough. (Then again, two points: first, I'd probably be a little cross after listening to 00's of people caterwauling and then being annoyed that you don't 'appreciate' their awesomeness; second, in that sense there is a filter-value to being a little intimidating in the early shows, to weed out the unserious long before they waste his time.)
"In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required."
I think that's the OP's point. Is the degree merely required to have the job, or are the things you could only know if you have a masters in Engineering actually the skills required for the tasks performed on the job?
While I understand that there's good political hay to be made out of showing why women are treated unfairly, the whole glass-ceiling (at least insofar as salaries are concerned) thing was debunked years ago when studies on wage gaps corrected for overtime and willingness to travel.
The simple fact is that in most nuclear families, the man is the primary wage earner, the woman the primary caregiver to the children. This is probably based on relatively obvious biological differences (the woman lactates, the man doesn't; females generally excel in a number of cognitive abilities that are extremely useful in child-raising; females are generally more resistant to garden-variety infections and sicknesses; etc etc etc) This isn't prescriptive, merely descriptive, and valid for (AFAIK) the bulk of human history.
While I understand the desire for some men to stay home and raise children, and the desire for some women to have a life not based around family, both of them must understand that they are simply outside of the norm and no amount of whinging is going to make them 'the norm'.
"Someone booked for DUI will always be slurring their speech, staggering, have bloodshot eyes, etc. Someone booked for resisting arrest will always have been waving his arms and cursing, etc. This isn't because all the offenses are the same. It's because the officer's testimony has no relation to the truth."
Ballocks.
Utter ballocks.
Of course the alternative reason that the stories are similar is because...they're similar circumstances. Doh? People intoxicated enough to affect their driving visibly ALSO usually tend to have slurred speech, if they can't steer straight they tend to stagger when standing.
Lots and lots and lots of posts here about how unfair cops are. Yep, truly a 'who watches the watchmen' situation, but hardly new.
Of course, I've never hung out with dirtbags, never associated with people with publicly-known criminal records, never mouthed off to a cop, never done drugs, so I'm sure it's just COINCIDENCE that this never happened to me?
Finally a chance for a decent space war. We've been waiting for that since the friggin' '60s.
"The head of the lab said the rescindment of Bush era policy was a great relief because they no longer had to maintain an expensive and artificial wall between their efforts."
Granted. This is the only credible criticism I've seen of the Bush policy that isn't simply an empty partisan counterwhine to the antiabortion crowd's whine connecting stem cells to abortion.
However, let's be totally frank here: the rescindment of the Bush policy is a great relief not mainly for the reason that they don't have to run two labs. I'd guess it has more to do with the ability of all these private research efforts to join the gluttony of the pig trough of government funding which is now apparently nearly limitless.*
* defining "nearly limitless" as "a pile of money that would exceed that accumulated by spending $1 million every day SINCE THE DEATH OF JULIUS CAESAR."
...that the bulk of the comments here are some sort of ridicule for the Christian Right, instead of plaudits for the idea of an advancement that makes the 'farming' of stem cells morally neutral.
Are we really so shallow that rather than confronting someone else's (and it's not a trivial % of the populace) genuine moral questions in sympathy, that we simply mock them? Don't bother replying, we all know the answer.
I don't necessarily agree with the concept that every zygote is sacred; nevertheless I can well see the difficulty of harvesting something from those zygotes for the people who do. (More accurately stated, their fear that there will be a sudden discovery of 'value' in these zygotes, inspiring the full range morality-free behaviors which typically characterize humans when confronted by something of value.) What's more ironic is that the unbelievable, staggering values that's been postulated for embryonic stem cells remains apparently that after all these years: apparently the entire world outside the US is furiously researching uses for these cells, as well as any US lab capable of operating free of the US gov't largesse, but nobody's managed to come up with a real-world useful therapy yet? Curious.
To get back to the point, I feel however that Christians' furor over stem cells would be more accurately directed at the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fertilized eggs 'disposed of' in the artificial insemination process every year...but that cat is well out of its particular bag, culturally speaking.
I find it equally ironic that some of people that rail against the 'naive' Christians for their 'ridiculous' discomfort at harvesting a resource from zygotes, are some of the same people who express outrage at the ripping of inorganic resources from a not-potentially-a-person ground. I guess it just depends where a person sees value.
"...deceived into downloading it. Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account. The new player is supposedly still beta, but NF members are strongly encouraged (some say tricked) by NF into the so-called 'upgrade,' which is permanent -- there is no way to opt out."
This is complete and utter BS.
I've been a Netflix user for a very long time. 3 yrs? I dunno.
I saw in the config page when Silverlight came out, and it was very CLEARLY stated that this was a one-way choice. I wondered what would possibly be the advantage to it, maybe multiplatform support vs the canned netflix player?
In any case, it was absolutely evident from the description text that this was a ONE way decision, that it was implemented by ACCOUNT, not computer, and that essentially once you were committed you were stuck. SO I DIDN'T DO IT.
Simple as that.
To suggest that people are "strongly encouraged" is a lie.
To say that any of this wasn't clear is a lie.
I call bullshit on this whole story. If you were stupid enough to commit to it and now you regret it? Sorry, but fuck you - live with it, cancel your Netflix account, or whatever, but quit crying about it.
We apparently have an economy FULL of stupid people who my tax dollars are now going to bail out from their dumbass or greedy financial choices. This is just one more (trivial) example of such behavior, and the article/summary are a perfect example of such morons who need to learn to live with the consequences of their choices, PARTICULARLY when it was laid out quite clearly at the front end.
FWIW I've found a bit of a workaround in XP.
Let's say you're working with documents or whatever in a directory on a remote server over VPN.
I've found that in the daughter windows opened when MS Word or MS Excel perform file operations like save as, etc. (since almost the full explorer functionality is available ) you can manipulate files MUCH more quickly.
I don't know why, but for example if you use Explorer, drill down through some directories and then try to rename a file or create/rename a new folder, it can really take a long time.
Go into Excel, and using whatever file you happen to have open, hit "save as..." and use THAT window to drill down and rename files or create/rename directories, there's almost no lag whatsoever. Then just hit cancel to prevent anything happening to your current open file.
Well, to be blunt, the reason "you are assumed to be straight" is because usually you are.
It's the same with left-handedness: something like 10% of the population is left-handed, so most things in life assume you're right handed. Likewise you're generally not assumed to be diabetic (although 12% of Americans are). It's not necessarily a pejorative, it's just the case that when you are a statistical outlier, you either learn to live with it or go nuts on the futile assertion that your uniqueness be recognized.