CmdrTaco wrote: It's as if the director said "I really enjoyed The Matrix and Crouching
Tiger. Let's see how badly I can recreate those classic scenes for my movies". See, the cast of The Matrix trained forever to do just a few simple shots. And the cast of Crouching Tiger had actual skill to begin with.
Uh, I hope you don't think the Crouching Tiger actors all actually know martial arts? Unless you mean because Michelle Yeoh has done some other martial arts / action movies. But Zhang Ziyi (the young female lead) was a pretty new actress, and didn't have any martial arts training before as far as I know. I don't think Chow Yun Fat has done much martial arts stuff before either, although he's done some great gun-toting action movies. But most of the Crouching Tiger cast were not skilled martial artists (unlike say Jet Li, who was a martial arts champion in China before he made Shaolin Temple and became a big movie star, but he wasn't in Crouching Tiger).
(Story about Terry Gilliam finding his Usenet newsgroup, reading it, posting to it, and people not believing it was him...)
The very same thing happened with Douglas Adams. He visited the Santa Fe Institute when I was there (I think it was around 1993 or 1994). We showed him his newsgroup, which he got a kick out of. He posted replies to a couple of questions. Nobody believed it was him. (Adams was a really interesting guy in person, too.)
Because no one is ever home during the day when deliveries are made. I always send packages to the office.
I do this too. But what you can do is contact your credit card company, and give them extra "shipping addresses" that they keep on record. When (some) merchants contact them to verify the card and info, the credit card company basically says "yes, that is a valid address for this card". Most of the on-line merchants I deal with take longer to verify credit card info if the two addresses are different, but this is a way to get around that. Although some merchants make you wait longer for verification if the two addresses are different, whether or not the shipping address is listed with the credit card company...
Since several people here have been talking about (among other things) "if we do create ALife, what are the implications?", I just thought I would mention I wrote a paper on that topic back when I was an undergrad, titled "Implications of Creation". It was published in the journal Idealistic Studies vol. 23 no. 1 (Winter 1993), and you can also find it online at my publications page. Looking at it now, it's kinda embarassingly amateurish, but I feel that way about almost everything I've written after enough time passes...
I got that e-mail last night too. Ok, it's annoying that they reset my preferences. If they had simply said something like "we think you may really be interested in our special promotions, so we're signing you up for them; if you still don't like them, you can unsubscribe again" at least it would have been honest, although still annoying.
But to claim that opting out of their promotions is an error that they have corrected for me really takes some nerve. If they had computer problems and lost my preferences that would be acceptable too. But the e-mail says an error occurred "during your registration process". So basically they are telling me it was a mistake for me to say "no". That's what really ticked me off about this.
Many people have said (correctly in my opinion) that there's nothing wrong with using, say, 10-year-old computer technology now, because it's very reliable, not to mention cheap, as long as it can handle whatever you're throwing at it.
So 10 years from now, what will people be using as "old reliable cheap" hardware? Will Pentium-III, Pentium-4, or AMD PC's assume that role? Will they somehow become more reliable if they survive for another 10 years?:-)
(My own personal answer is, yes, a P-III or AMD running Linux *is* generally very stable. But I sure hope Windows98 doesn't seem comparatively "reliable" 10 years from now, when judged against the standards at the time.)
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CmdrTaco wrote: It's as if the director said "I really enjoyed The Matrix and Crouching Tiger. Let's see how badly I can recreate those classic scenes for my movies". See, the cast of The Matrix trained forever to do just a few simple shots. And the cast of Crouching Tiger had actual skill to begin with.
Uh, I hope you don't think the Crouching Tiger actors all actually know martial arts? Unless you mean because Michelle Yeoh has done some other martial arts / action movies. But Zhang Ziyi (the young female lead) was a pretty new actress, and didn't have any martial arts training before as far as I know. I don't think Chow Yun Fat has done much martial arts stuff before either, although he's done some great gun-toting action movies. But most of the Crouching Tiger cast were not skilled martial artists (unlike say Jet Li, who was a martial arts champion in China before he made Shaolin Temple and became a big movie star, but he wasn't in Crouching Tiger).(Quoting "How to Read Donald Duck"): What is Donald Duck's undying aim in life, and is it seen as admirable? ... plus other deep questions...
And more importantly, why doesn't Donald Duck wear pants? Is it because he has to be ready to swim at a moment's notice?
(Story about Terry Gilliam finding his Usenet newsgroup, reading it, posting to it, and people not believing it was him...)
The very same thing happened with Douglas Adams. He visited the Santa Fe Institute when I was there (I think it was around 1993 or 1994). We showed him his newsgroup, which he got a kick out of. He posted replies to a couple of questions. Nobody believed it was him. (Adams was a really interesting guy in person, too.)
Because no one is ever home during the day when deliveries are made. I always send packages to the office.
I do this too. But what you can do is contact your credit card company, and give them extra "shipping addresses" that they keep on record. When (some) merchants contact them to verify the card and info, the credit card company basically says "yes, that is a valid address for this card". Most of the on-line merchants I deal with take longer to verify credit card info if the two addresses are different, but this is a way to get around that. Although some merchants make you wait longer for verification if the two addresses are different, whether or not the shipping address is listed with the credit card company...
Since several people here have been talking about (among other things) "if we do create ALife, what are the implications?", I just thought I would mention I wrote a paper on that topic back when I was an undergrad, titled "Implications of Creation". It was published in the journal Idealistic Studies vol. 23 no. 1 (Winter 1993), and you can also find it online at my publications page. Looking at it now, it's kinda embarassingly amateurish, but I feel that way about almost everything I've written after enough time passes...
I got that e-mail last night too. Ok, it's annoying that they reset my preferences. If they had simply said something like "we think you may really be interested in our special promotions, so we're signing you up for them; if you still don't like them, you can unsubscribe again" at least it would have been honest, although still annoying.
But to claim that opting out of their promotions is an error that they have corrected for me really takes some nerve. If they had computer problems and lost my preferences that would be acceptable too. But the e-mail says an error occurred "during your registration process". So basically they are telling me it was a mistake for me to say "no". That's what really ticked me off about this.Many people have said (correctly in my opinion) that there's nothing wrong with using, say, 10-year-old computer technology now, because it's very reliable, not to mention cheap, as long as it can handle whatever you're throwing at it.
So 10 years from now, what will people be using as "old reliable cheap" hardware? Will Pentium-III, Pentium-4, or AMD PC's assume that role? Will they somehow become more reliable if they survive for another 10 years? :-)
(My own personal answer is, yes, a P-III or AMD running Linux *is* generally very stable. But I sure hope Windows98 doesn't seem comparatively "reliable" 10 years from now, when judged against the standards at the time.)