Yes, the new feature is exactly like incorporating a feed reader, which is of course why I made that comparison. However, the purpose of Facebook -- or at least the purpose most users have for it -- is not to provide them and their acquaintances with instantaneous updates about each other's activities. It is a tool for social networking. A way of keeping in touch with your friends that is built in most ways like an extension of real life, not a replacement of real life with completely different features. When the features of the site get too far away from the ways in which information is shared in meatspace, people get uneasy because it's not the sort of social interaction that they have been living with for 20 years.
If my method of accessing the information changes, that *does* affect the other users, because it is *their* information. They are used to that information being delivered in certain ways based on the system that Facebook had set up. Because people care about the way information about them is presented, changing that system is going to upset people.
It doesn't matter *at all* that the information was already there. Everybody knows that the information was already there. It's about the *ways* in which people prefer to share certain types of information. Previously it was a way that most users thought felt natural, and now many users no longer feel that way. Maybe they'll change their minds after getting used to it, and maybe not.
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
So why should you put it up on a public website? There is no difference. None. End of story.
That is so not even *close* to the end of the story. You are creating a false dichotomy here, as if the only property of any piece of information is a binary "public" versus "not public" flag. (And, for the sake of this discussion, "public" means "visible only to people at your university and to people you have friended at other universities".) There may be no difference in principle between two delivery methods for a given datum, but there can be large practical differences -- which this is an example of -- as well as differences in perception based on those deliveries.
If you have ever used any sort of aggregation service, such as an RSS reader, a Livejournal friendslist, etc., then you should be aware of the difference this kind of feature makes. This is not a question of whether the information is "out there" or not, but a question of which information is available by which different methods. My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
Your claim that there is "no difference" between different methods of delivering the same information is ridiculous. Human beings are not fully rational. How you tell somebody something has an impact on how they receive it. How you tell somebody something about a third person affects how that third person feels about you spreading it around. There are differences in tone, timing, forcefulness, etc., all of which affect one's reaction to incoming (or outgoing) information. These factors are especially important when it comes to information that is of a personal nature. Facebook previously had a certain standard for how information was available, and have suddenly changed that standard in a drastic way that many users find distasteful and crass.
I'm not saying that Facebook shouldn't be "allowed" to make this change. They can do whatever the fuck they want. I'm not saying it's a great injustice. If they stick with this new feature, then obviously the people who don't like it can either stop using the site or at the very least stop posting some sorts of information. But it's perfectly reasonable for users to prefer things the way they were, and to wish the system to be changed back. It's not crazy that a user might *want* to have their relationship status listed, but not want changes in that status immediately broadcast to all of their acquaintances. If users want the site to operate in a certain way and not in other ways... then it should operate in the way they want it to.
Posession of violent pornography *is* a bad thing. Anyone who thinks otherwise is seriously bent. Posession indicates that a pleasure is obtained from having or viewing it, and anyone who obtains pleasure at the expense of others is partaking in a B-A-D thing.
By that argument, wouldn't you have to outlaw BDSM?
My favorite movie scientists are both from "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra". Dr. Paul Armstrong is a close second, but Roger Fleming is cooler becuase he's evil. Some choice quotes to demonstrate their brilliance:
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Betty, you know what this meteor could mean to science. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Dinner was delicious, honey. Keep cooking like that an I won't even be able to move, let alone do science. Betty Armstrong: That'd suit me fine Mr. Meteor. Dr. Paul Armstrong: Ouch, that hurt. Tomorrow let's say you and I go searching for our rocky glowing radioactive friend from space... together.
Dr. Roger Fleming: I've got to get that meteor but how? How? There must be a way inside that cabin. Think! Think! Cabin... cabin... cabin.
Dr. Roger Fleming: Ever since I was a child, I've been hated by skeletons!
And my favorite:
Ranger Brad: Oh, say...You don't believe those old legends about the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, do you? Dr. Roger Fleming: Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything.
I find it unfathomable that anybody would even TRY to go into the first dungeon without having walked around to see what they could find. Are there actually players who go and do what they're told to do before checking all the nooks and crannies for surprises? That's... so boring.
In an RPG, when the building is on fire and you have to rush to another floor to save somebody, do you rush to the other floor to save them? Instead of mucking about opening boxes, running around in circles, standing in front of the person you are supposed to save without talking to them, laying down on the bed to take a nap and restore your HP with the flames blazing all around you, etc.? Why?
I really don't think the game designers expect you to do that. Hell, DQ8 even has dialogue about it -- when there's a scare in the first town because the cursed king's appearance is frightening everybody, if you wander around talking to people several of them say things like "Aren't you worried about the monster they spotted? You have strange priorities." They ASSUME the player is going to dilly-dally because that's part of the fun of the game.
Before that first dungeon, aside from just exploring the landscape, there are several treasure chests and unique monsters out there in the field, two inaccesible bridges to discover (one of which, from the clues, clearly leads to your home castle), as well as a mini-sidequest with the guy in the hut on top of the mountain who lost his toolbox. I probably "grinded" for at least two or three hours before I even CONSIDERED moving on with the quest. I never found it even remotely tiresome. I hesitate to even use the word "grind" because it carries negative connotation.
If you're playing an RPG that has random battles, and you don't enjoy fighting in random battles, you should probably stop playing. Fighting random battles is PART OF THE GAME. It is part of the game because some people LIKE them. If you aren't one of those people, don't play those games.
No matter how many times I fight those floating bells, I never get sick of seeing them chuckle. The pelvic-thrusting Hipsters crack me up. The way the yellow, reptilian Jargons balance on one foot most of the time, but occasionally hop to the other foot like they're dancing makes me smile. I could just sit there watching them stand there, swaying, and enjoy myself without even entering any commands. All of the battles are simply DELIGHTFUL because the enemies are so clever, punnish, and cute. A man who doesn't enjoy slaughtering a band of bipedal foxes wearing muskateer outfits and dancing jigs is a man with no soul.
As for "no progression of character development"... I would say that's only true if you don't read any of the dialogue. I think the characters -- both in your party and all the major NPCs -- are very clearly defined by their manner of speech and the things that they choose to talk about. Even if you never his START to talk with your party (which you can do at any time while walking around) they still have plenty to say during cutscenes. You complain that there is no reason to go to that first dungeon aside from being forced to do it, but I would say that is itself a story/character progression -- the King insists that you take time out of chasing down the man who cursed him to help the girl because she reminds him of his daughter, and because he believes that she is a Good Person and feels that she deserves your help.
And... "You don't learn any background into many more hours into the game"? Seriously? In medias res is a staple storytelling technique. Granted, being staple doesn't mean you have to like it, but it's used so widely that it seems like a weird thing to complain about. (Especially when it is used to much more tiring effect in, for example, most Final Fantasy games, where an amnesiac main character is as common as not.) What more do you need to know at the beginning aside from the king and princess being cursed, you're a castle guard, and you're chasing the guy tha
I read, ok I skimmed the article and out of all the shenanigins it describes it doesn't go into how the current script and director, Bryan Singer, came to be.
I read this same report a few weeks ago, and despite the level of detail, found it to be a rather shitty write-up. It was posted by some guy who says he saw it someplace else, where it was posted anonymously. There is essentially no evidence cited for anything that the article claims. Much of it is stuff that couldn't possibly be known by somebody who wasn't very well connected. Granted, sometimes well-connected people post stuff on the Internet, but the level of "I know secret stuff that nobody else knows" made me a little wary. It reads like a compilation of rumors and hearsay rather than an actual account of what happened.
More worrisome, though, was that the author obviously had a HUGE axe to grind against the whole affair. Some of his criticisms of the various story ideas are valid, but much of it is thoughtless knee-jerking. Especially near the end he starts blithely accusing everybody involved of lying, seemingly ignoring the possibility that different groups of people were trying to accomplish different things and were talking about what they were trying/hoping to do, but somewhere got misquoted as "this is what is happening".
I love how he goes out of his way to insult Mark Millar even though whatever he dislikes about Millar is not mentioned, nor is it remotely relevant. Also how he says that at one point there was a rumor about infighting between different people at WB where some people wanted to change the movie's team, and then says how this rumor was obviously a lie because afterwards the team didn't change....bwah? Couldn't the "change things" group have simply lost the fight?
Lastly, as you mention, the story seems a few years out of date, since it says nothing about the movie that has actually been made, which might be completely different than the drafts he is commenting on.
It's clear that you haven't used Opera in many, many years, as you admit.
All the toolbars are completely customizable. It is far more customizable than Firefox (at least, without developing your own skin). The installer, as stated by another poster, is tiny, even with the email/news/rss client included (which, by the way, you don't have to use and will never even notice being there if you don't). It is WAY faster than Firefox on my system, and it loads cached pages instantaneously (ie. faster than I can perceive). It supports dozens of character encoding schemes. Java support comes from a plugin from Sun, so you can install it or not at your preference.
In other words... as far as I can tell, none of your complaints have been valid for years, except for the advertising/non-being-free, which is now gone. I strongly recommend that you give it another shot, since you say you thought it used to be a promising product.
Thought this would be a good post to air out my views on Software firms charging subscriptions for software (no sure linspire does this, but I know Opera & the OSS drivers do).
I would like to know that I can leave a box for 50 years, come back to it at some later point, and just update without having to shell out my credit card
Huh? You're saying that if you don't get free updates for all time that it amounts to a "subscription"? That's insane. A subscription would be if the software stops working unless you pay for it, not that the technology you paid for might become obsolete in five or ten years.
I'm not sure how a post that reads like a parody got modded to +5 Insightful. (At least I hope it's a parody. I've certainly seen parodies that are almost identical.)
He starts out saying how awesome the original series was, then questions why the recent shows which are clearly set in a different continuity aren't just like the old show, and then "reminisces" about the show by half-remembering a few things and misremembering a few others. And he decries the "90's Armada version", which began in 2002.
It's like saying, "Man, I hope they get this new Superman movie right. I loved in the old stories how Clark Kent was all suave, getting all the ladies, like that reporter chick he worked with sometimes. And then he would go off and fight a really brilliant and cunning villain like Mr. Mxyztplk. If they stay true to those stores, it will be a delight for all of us who watched them."
Honestly, I don't care if people can't remember anything about their childhood cartoons aside from liking them. I don't care if people haven't re-watched these things as adults and seen their flaws firsthand. But if they haven't, then their opinions on these things are uninformed ones, and they should present those opinions accordingly.
When a new line of TRANSFORMERS comics was first announced a few years ago from the now-bankrupt company Dreamwave, their president, Pat Lee, made a similar comment. He explained how Sideswipe had always been his favorite character, and how upset he was when he died in the movie. Except... Sideswipe isn't IN the movie. He doesn't appear in a single frame. He was never heavily featured in an episode of the cartoon, or in the comic book. His entire "character" is that he's brash, and he wears a jetpack. Oh, and that one time he made a tunnel with his pile drivers. This is what passed for character development in those days.
"I really liked that show when I was a kid. I hope I like the movie, too," is a perfectly reasonable wish. But that is not the same thing as hoping they make it just like it was in 1984. The animation is a mess of errors, every other episode involves the invention of a new and powerful device which gets destroyed and never rebuilt, and practically every character, including (if not especially) Prime and Megatron is a complete dumbass.
When Megatron made a clone of Prime, he carefully explained his plan to Soundwave, then brought the clone out. Soundwave exclaimed, "It is Optimus Prime!" and cowered in fear. When the Autobots realized that there were two Primes, they couldn't tell them apart even though one of them didn't know any his troops' names. They decided to discover the real Prime BY HAVING A RACE.
"Transformers" was a great children's program, and it has a lot of heart, and a lot of fun ideas. I still enjoy it, but for its nostalgia value, campiness, and lighthearted goofiness; not because it's some sort of perfect series of yesteryear that those cartoon makers today can't match. I watch a *lot* of cartoons, and have since I was young, and in my opinion the programming being produced today is better than ever before. At least, in terms of my current tastes. If I were 10, I don't know whether I would prefer the new TMNT to the old one, or Justice League Unlimited to Superfriends. Young-me *might* like the older shows better, but, I would guess not.
For anybody who is serious about wanting to reminesce about the Transformers cartoon, I recommend The Cybertron Chronicle, by far the most thorough TF cartoon website there is. As well as transcripts of every episode and an extensive character guide, it also has a bunch of interviews with voice actors, a producer, and the voice director. Nice sites for an overview of all of Transformers history (and in considerably less depth than the Chronicle) are Unicron.com and Ben's World of Transformers.
Um... the list you link to is of edits made to the show when it was aired on Cartoon Network in the *daytime*, as part of a Toonami "Giant Robot Week" event. It's not representative of the Eva dubs in general, and assuming the show ends up on Adult Swim when CN begins showing it, it's most likely not representative of what it will be like then, either.
Additionally, just to further nitpick your post, the list you linked to has eight items on it, only four of which are examples of editing the episode for content. Three of the items are things that it says were *not* cut, and the first is "opening animation cut" which, as anybody who watches much CN can tell you, is rather common for their programming. (I would much rather have a show's OP cut for time than something that's actually important or interesting.)
So... even if that list meant anything at all -- and it doesn't -- what we have to look forward to is some benign content cuts, plenty of adult content still in it, and no OP. "Torture" sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.
I take it you missed Dragon Warrior VII for the PS1?
Seemed like essentially everybody did, sadly.
I would put it on equal footing with Chrono Trigger and FF6. A very different game, but completely enjoyable for all 160+ hours I played it. I'd love to play it a second time, but... man, what a time investment.
Based on your comments, I suspect you have not *watched* the original series recently. Give it another look. Although there were some relatively serious episodes, it is on the whole quite clearly a show that was being written in a hurry and for the paycheck. It's just as full of ridiculous stories and plot holes as any other series. If you're looking for "scifi for adults" in Transformers, the only thing that comes close is the CG "Beast Wars" cartoon.
The first time I tried it, it didn't merely crash Firefox. When I clicked the "test now" link my entire system immediately died, and began rebooting. After reboot, the test now works (and confirms my vulnerability).
It's the concentration of mass that makes black holes special, not the magnitude of their mass. At any distance larger than the Sun's radius, it's gravity feels like the gravity of a point mass at its center. But at distances less than its radius, the "effective" mass of that imaginary point mass is reduced because some of the Sun's mass is now above you. Eventually, when you reach the center, the entire Sun is above you, and you feel no net gravitational force.
If you collapse the Sun to a black hole, though, you get the point-mass effect the whole way down to the event horizon.
I don't quite agree. Black holes do "suck", by which I mean attract things into themselves rather than having them orbit around them like a Newtonian black hole would. They only do this within a few gravitational radii of the hole - inside the "last stable orbit". A little way inside that, you have an actual event horizon which is the point at which gravity becomes the "unstoppable force" you claim doesn't exist.
GR black holes are different than Newtonian black holes, yes. But... at distances large compared to their event horizons, they are pretty much the same thing. And in neither case is a black hole more dangerous than any other object with the same mass. (Again, at distances large compared to the event horizon.) That's the misconception I wanted to address. The idea that a black hole in the solar system would mean death for everyone. The sun itself could magically compress into a black hole, and aside from it getting really cold here, it would make no difference.
I didn't claim that the "unstoppable force" doesn't exist; it is the very definition of the event horizon. I said that it doesn't reach out to consume everything around it. The gravity reaches out exactly as far and strong as it used to at all distances down to the previous radius of the object before crushification.
I agree with your other comments, though if you're talking about people near solar-mass holes you should mention the tidal forces...
I thought that was a bit beside the point, since the discussion was mainly about tiny ones.
I know there are a lot of jokes that can be made about the idea of building a black hole in a lab, but I just want to make sure people understand how not-dangerous a tiny black hole would be:
Black holes do not "suck". Most people -- even most smart people -- have this impression that black holes suck in everything around them with some sort of unstoppable force. This is completely inaccurate.
Black holes only influence things by their gravity. The force a black hole exerts on another object depends on their masses and the distance between them. Exactly the same as the gravitational force between any other two objects, black hole or no.
The part that makes black holes weird is that they can be significantly smaller (as measured by their event horizon) than normal objects. So if you've got an object with the mass of the Sun, normally it's quite large, so the distance between you and its center is big, and the gravity can only get so strong. If you compress that mass into a black hole, though, you can get much, much closer to its center. If you're only a few kilometers away from the center of gravity of something with the Sun's mass, *then* the gravity will be really strong.
When it comes to very small black holes -- especially the type that might be created by a particle accelerator, with masses far less than that of a single atom -- the mass involved is so miniscule that you'd have to get within femtometers or less before the strength of the gravity would even be noticeable.
Now, *if* black holes were indestructible, eternal objects, then yes, even a small one would eventually pick up enough stray neutrinos to start growing, and could eventually become a threat. But, Hawking radiation takes care of that. In fact, the rate of "evaporation" of a black hole *increases* as the black hole shrinks. So micro-black holes would be very short lived, and, again, therefore not a problem.
The lagrange point is where the gravity from the moon offsets the gravity from the earth, making a point where there is no gravitational pull towards either body.
Not quite -- it also includes the "centrifugal" pseudoforce. The Lagrangian points are fixed points within the rotating reference frame of the Earth/Moon system. Because the frame rotates, it is not an inertial frame, so pseudoforces contribute. If the Earth and Moon were held in place magically, instead of orbiting each other, the balance point between us would be in a different location than it is when the system rotates.
Also, of course, there are five Lagrangian points, only one of which is physically between the Earth and Moon. If only gravity mattered, it would be the only one. The other four arise thanks to the contribution of pseudoforces.
Re:Huygens enters atmo on Jan 14, released on Dec
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Sunova... how the hell did I misread that, when I went as far as to quote it? Man. Too bad I can't cancel embarrasing posts like on Usenet.:/
Huygens enters atmo on Jan 14, released on Dec 25
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The probe detaches from Cassini on Christmas for its atmospheric entry on 14 January 2005.
As the Cassini-Huygens website clearly explains, the Huygens probe will be released from Cassini on Dec 25. It will enter Titan's atmosphere on January 14, but it will have already been released three weeks prior.
A minor error, I guess, but I keep seeing it made.
If you have Winamp set up as the default program for xm files, you're vulnerable. All someone would have to do is redirect the web page to a malformed page that sends a Content-Type: audio/xm (or whatever) header. This would execute Winamp, attempt to load the location, and cause problems.
But... that's only if WinAmp actually executes, right? Like, I'd have to have it associated with XM files in my browser, not just in the operating system. Otherwise I just get a "save or open with [program x]?" dialog, wonder "why the hell is there an XM in this page?", and hit cancel. Or am I missing something?
The Economist is one of the most respected news magazines in the world. It's merely not well known in the United States. They focus on economics-related news, but all of their coverage, including policitcs and science, is superb.
I second the comment from "pclminion"; the parent comment should not have been modded "insightful". All it demonstrates is ignorance of what it's talking about.
I'm a McGill student. The system is being paid for partially by student fees. So, I'm spending money to make sure I'm not cheating. The school could just pay for more TAs, [...]
And how, exactly, would hiring more TAs to check for cheating instead of using a website *not* be a case of you paying to make sure you're not cheating? Where do you think the university's money comes from? Some from the government, some from you. (And of course the government's money comes from you, too.) You seem to be saying that if the University expends any resources at all to check for cheating, that you will be offended.
have smaller classes and offer an honour system with the penalty of expulsion for cheaters. This way, the TAs could teach smaller conferences, maybe get to know some of the students and learn which ones know enough that which was contained in their papers.
You go on to call this a "reasonably affordable solution". Each additional TA costs the university at *least* a thousand dollars a month, assuming they aren't getting a tuition waver on top of their stipend. Even ignoring the other costs of having more employees, that right there is a show stopper. The reason class sizes aren't really small is that it's way too expensive to make it that way in low-level classes. Unless, that is, you want to start paying significantly higher tuition?
I have a vested, sentimental interest in these places so I'm going to plug them:
The Big Ear telescope, operated by Ohio State University, was built on the grounds of Perkins Observatory, between Columbus and the town of Delaware. Delaware is the location of my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University, which owns and operates Perkins as a public outreach center. (OSU used to have some financial involvement, but pulled out a few years ago.) In other words, Perkins is no longer a research observatory: it is entirely dedicated to educating the public about astronomy and allowing people to look through their telescopes. (In other words, it's awesome.)
For a couple years after Big Ear had stopped being used it just stood there on the property. I remember taking a walk around the grounds in 1998 with a friend, peaking in the windows of the little building with the control room, filled with junk. It was sort of sad to see it so neglected. Even worse, the land on which it sat had been sold by my school to the neighboring golf course. We actually ran into a golfer while we were there, and he took the time to tell us how much he wished they would tear the telescope down so they could extend the driving range. And not too long afterwards, it happened. Big Ear is gone.
There's some really great stories to tell about Hiram Perkins, too, but I don't want to ramble on too long... The short version: Perkins Obs. was the second observatory he built, and at the time it was completed, it housed the third largest telescope in the world. That telescope, now with an even bigger mirror, lives at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, but was still owned by Ohio Wesleyan until around the time I graduated (1998) when OWU sold it completely to Lowell. It's now operated jointly by Lowell and Boston University, which happens to be where I went after OWU. I took two trips out there to use it before I got my masters in astronomy and left BU to come back to Ohio.
Ohio Wesleyan Astronomy Club, with info about the first Perkins Observatory. Some of the pages here are unchanged since I wrote them around 1997. Looks like they took down the page about how run down the building is and saying that we need money from the university to keep it from falling apart.
If you live anywhere near Columbus, I highly recommend visiting Perkins sometime. They have great facilities and a fantastic staff. It's a great way to spend an evening.
Stunts, aka 4-D Driving, is pretty easy to find these days. This site says it's "freeware", although their justification for this statement seems suspect. Still, you can get the game there if you believe in things like abandonware. There's a lot of tracks and replays to download from various Stunts sites.
The terms of the settlement permanently bar Network Solutions from misrepresenting that a consumer's domain name is about to expire or that the transfer of a domain name is actually a renewal.
I think it's a little scary that a settlement was required to bar them from doing this. As deceptive business practices, bordering on blatant lies, why aren't all registrars barred from such practices by default?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the new feature is exactly like incorporating a feed reader, which is of course why I made that comparison. However, the purpose of Facebook -- or at least the purpose most users have for it -- is not to provide them and their acquaintances with instantaneous updates about each other's activities. It is a tool for social networking. A way of keeping in touch with your friends that is built in most ways like an extension of real life, not a replacement of real life with completely different features. When the features of the site get too far away from the ways in which information is shared in meatspace, people get uneasy because it's not the sort of social interaction that they have been living with for 20 years.
If my method of accessing the information changes, that *does* affect the other users, because it is *their* information. They are used to that information being delivered in certain ways based on the system that Facebook had set up. Because people care about the way information about them is presented, changing that system is going to upset people.
It doesn't matter *at all* that the information was already there. Everybody knows that the information was already there. It's about the *ways* in which people prefer to share certain types of information. Previously it was a way that most users thought felt natural, and now many users no longer feel that way. Maybe they'll change their minds after getting used to it, and maybe not.
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
So why should you put it up on a public website? There is no difference. None. End of story.
That is so not even *close* to the end of the story. You are creating a false dichotomy here, as if the only property of any piece of information is a binary "public" versus "not public" flag. (And, for the sake of this discussion, "public" means "visible only to people at your university and to people you have friended at other universities".) There may be no difference in principle between two delivery methods for a given datum, but there can be large practical differences -- which this is an example of -- as well as differences in perception based on those deliveries.
If you have ever used any sort of aggregation service, such as an RSS reader, a Livejournal friendslist, etc., then you should be aware of the difference this kind of feature makes. This is not a question of whether the information is "out there" or not, but a question of which information is available by which different methods. My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
Your claim that there is "no difference" between different methods of delivering the same information is ridiculous. Human beings are not fully rational. How you tell somebody something has an impact on how they receive it. How you tell somebody something about a third person affects how that third person feels about you spreading it around. There are differences in tone, timing, forcefulness, etc., all of which affect one's reaction to incoming (or outgoing) information. These factors are especially important when it comes to information that is of a personal nature. Facebook previously had a certain standard for how information was available, and have suddenly changed that standard in a drastic way that many users find distasteful and crass.
I'm not saying that Facebook shouldn't be "allowed" to make this change. They can do whatever the fuck they want. I'm not saying it's a great injustice. If they stick with this new feature, then obviously the people who don't like it can either stop using the site or at the very least stop posting some sorts of information. But it's perfectly reasonable for users to prefer things the way they were, and to wish the system to be changed back. It's not crazy that a user might *want* to have their relationship status listed, but not want changes in that status immediately broadcast to all of their acquaintances. If users want the site to operate in a certain way and not in other ways... then it should operate in the way they want it to.
Posession of violent pornography *is* a bad thing. Anyone who thinks otherwise is seriously bent. Posession indicates that a pleasure is obtained from having or viewing it, and anyone who obtains pleasure at the expense of others is partaking in a B-A-D thing.
By that argument, wouldn't you have to outlaw BDSM?
My favorite movie scientists are both from "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra". Dr. Paul Armstrong is a close second, but Roger Fleming is cooler becuase he's evil. Some choice quotes to demonstrate their brilliance:
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Betty, you know what this meteor could mean to science. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Dinner was delicious, honey. Keep cooking like that an I won't even be able to move, let alone do science.
Betty Armstrong: That'd suit me fine Mr. Meteor.
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Ouch, that hurt. Tomorrow let's say you and I go searching for our rocky glowing radioactive friend from space... together.
Dr. Roger Fleming: I've got to get that meteor but how? How? There must be a way inside that cabin. Think! Think! Cabin... cabin... cabin.
Dr. Roger Fleming: Ever since I was a child, I've been hated by skeletons!
And my favorite:
Ranger Brad: Oh, say...You don't believe those old legends about the Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, do you?
Dr. Roger Fleming: Ranger Brad, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything.
www.lostskeleton.com !!
I find it unfathomable that anybody would even TRY to go into the first dungeon without having walked around to see what they could find. Are there actually players who go and do what they're told to do before checking all the nooks and crannies for surprises? That's... so boring.
In an RPG, when the building is on fire and you have to rush to another floor to save somebody, do you rush to the other floor to save them? Instead of mucking about opening boxes, running around in circles, standing in front of the person you are supposed to save without talking to them, laying down on the bed to take a nap and restore your HP with the flames blazing all around you, etc.? Why?
I really don't think the game designers expect you to do that. Hell, DQ8 even has dialogue about it -- when there's a scare in the first town because the cursed king's appearance is frightening everybody, if you wander around talking to people several of them say things like "Aren't you worried about the monster they spotted? You have strange priorities." They ASSUME the player is going to dilly-dally because that's part of the fun of the game.
Before that first dungeon, aside from just exploring the landscape, there are several treasure chests and unique monsters out there in the field, two inaccesible bridges to discover (one of which, from the clues, clearly leads to your home castle), as well as a mini-sidequest with the guy in the hut on top of the mountain who lost his toolbox. I probably "grinded" for at least two or three hours before I even CONSIDERED moving on with the quest. I never found it even remotely tiresome. I hesitate to even use the word "grind" because it carries negative connotation.
If you're playing an RPG that has random battles, and you don't enjoy fighting in random battles, you should probably stop playing. Fighting random battles is PART OF THE GAME. It is part of the game because some people LIKE them. If you aren't one of those people, don't play those games.
No matter how many times I fight those floating bells, I never get sick of seeing them chuckle. The pelvic-thrusting Hipsters crack me up. The way the yellow, reptilian Jargons balance on one foot most of the time, but occasionally hop to the other foot like they're dancing makes me smile. I could just sit there watching them stand there, swaying, and enjoy myself without even entering any commands. All of the battles are simply DELIGHTFUL because the enemies are so clever, punnish, and cute. A man who doesn't enjoy slaughtering a band of bipedal foxes wearing muskateer outfits and dancing jigs is a man with no soul.
As for "no progression of character development"... I would say that's only true if you don't read any of the dialogue. I think the characters -- both in your party and all the major NPCs -- are very clearly defined by their manner of speech and the things that they choose to talk about. Even if you never his START to talk with your party (which you can do at any time while walking around) they still have plenty to say during cutscenes. You complain that there is no reason to go to that first dungeon aside from being forced to do it, but I would say that is itself a story/character progression -- the King insists that you take time out of chasing down the man who cursed him to help the girl because she reminds him of his daughter, and because he believes that she is a Good Person and feels that she deserves your help.
And... "You don't learn any background into many more hours into the game"? Seriously? In medias res is a staple storytelling technique. Granted, being staple doesn't mean you have to like it, but it's used so widely that it seems like a weird thing to complain about. (Especially when it is used to much more tiring effect in, for example, most Final Fantasy games, where an amnesiac main character is as common as not.) What more do you need to know at the beginning aside from the king and princess being cursed, you're a castle guard, and you're chasing the guy tha
I read, ok I skimmed the article and out of all the shenanigins it describes it doesn't go into how the current script and director, Bryan Singer, came to be.
...bwah? Couldn't the "change things" group have simply lost the fight?
I read this same report a few weeks ago, and despite the level of detail, found it to be a rather shitty write-up. It was posted by some guy who says he saw it someplace else, where it was posted anonymously. There is essentially no evidence cited for anything that the article claims. Much of it is stuff that couldn't possibly be known by somebody who wasn't very well connected. Granted, sometimes well-connected people post stuff on the Internet, but the level of "I know secret stuff that nobody else knows" made me a little wary. It reads like a compilation of rumors and hearsay rather than an actual account of what happened.
More worrisome, though, was that the author obviously had a HUGE axe to grind against the whole affair. Some of his criticisms of the various story ideas are valid, but much of it is thoughtless knee-jerking. Especially near the end he starts blithely accusing everybody involved of lying, seemingly ignoring the possibility that different groups of people were trying to accomplish different things and were talking about what they were trying/hoping to do, but somewhere got misquoted as "this is what is happening".
I love how he goes out of his way to insult Mark Millar even though whatever he dislikes about Millar is not mentioned, nor is it remotely relevant. Also how he says that at one point there was a rumor about infighting between different people at WB where some people wanted to change the movie's team, and then says how this rumor was obviously a lie because afterwards the team didn't change.
Lastly, as you mention, the story seems a few years out of date, since it says nothing about the movie that has actually been made, which might be completely different than the drafts he is commenting on.
It's clear that you haven't used Opera in many, many years, as you admit.
All the toolbars are completely customizable. It is far more customizable than Firefox (at least, without developing your own skin). The installer, as stated by another poster, is tiny, even with the email/news/rss client included (which, by the way, you don't have to use and will never even notice being there if you don't). It is WAY faster than Firefox on my system, and it loads cached pages instantaneously (ie. faster than I can perceive). It supports dozens of character encoding schemes. Java support comes from a plugin from Sun, so you can install it or not at your preference.
In other words... as far as I can tell, none of your complaints have been valid for years, except for the advertising/non-being-free, which is now gone. I strongly recommend that you give it another shot, since you say you thought it used to be a promising product.
Thought this would be a good post to air out my views on Software firms charging subscriptions for software (no sure linspire does this, but I know Opera & the OSS drivers do).
I would like to know that I can leave a box for 50 years, come back to it at some later point, and just update without having to shell out my credit card
Huh? You're saying that if you don't get free updates for all time that it amounts to a "subscription"? That's insane. A subscription would be if the software stops working unless you pay for it, not that the technology you paid for might become obsolete in five or ten years.
I'm not sure how a post that reads like a parody got modded to +5 Insightful. (At least I hope it's a parody. I've certainly seen parodies that are almost identical.)
He starts out saying how awesome the original series was, then questions why the recent shows which are clearly set in a different continuity aren't just like the old show, and then "reminisces" about the show by half-remembering a few things and misremembering a few others. And he decries the "90's Armada version", which began in 2002.
It's like saying, "Man, I hope they get this new Superman movie right. I loved in the old stories how Clark Kent was all suave, getting all the ladies, like that reporter chick he worked with sometimes. And then he would go off and fight a really brilliant and cunning villain like Mr. Mxyztplk. If they stay true to those stores, it will be a delight for all of us who watched them."
Honestly, I don't care if people can't remember anything about their childhood cartoons aside from liking them. I don't care if people haven't re-watched these things as adults and seen their flaws firsthand. But if they haven't, then their opinions on these things are uninformed ones, and they should present those opinions accordingly.
When a new line of TRANSFORMERS comics was first announced a few years ago from the now-bankrupt company Dreamwave, their president, Pat Lee, made a similar comment. He explained how Sideswipe had always been his favorite character, and how upset he was when he died in the movie. Except... Sideswipe isn't IN the movie. He doesn't appear in a single frame. He was never heavily featured in an episode of the cartoon, or in the comic book. His entire "character" is that he's brash, and he wears a jetpack. Oh, and that one time he made a tunnel with his pile drivers. This is what passed for character development in those days.
"I really liked that show when I was a kid. I hope I like the movie, too," is a perfectly reasonable wish. But that is not the same thing as hoping they make it just like it was in 1984. The animation is a mess of errors, every other episode involves the invention of a new and powerful device which gets destroyed and never rebuilt, and practically every character, including (if not especially) Prime and Megatron is a complete dumbass.
When Megatron made a clone of Prime, he carefully explained his plan to Soundwave, then brought the clone out. Soundwave exclaimed, "It is Optimus Prime!" and cowered in fear. When the Autobots realized that there were two Primes, they couldn't tell them apart even though one of them didn't know any his troops' names. They decided to discover the real Prime BY HAVING A RACE.
"Transformers" was a great children's program, and it has a lot of heart, and a lot of fun ideas. I still enjoy it, but for its nostalgia value, campiness, and lighthearted goofiness; not because it's some sort of perfect series of yesteryear that those cartoon makers today can't match. I watch a *lot* of cartoons, and have since I was young, and in my opinion the programming being produced today is better than ever before. At least, in terms of my current tastes. If I were 10, I don't know whether I would prefer the new TMNT to the old one, or Justice League Unlimited to Superfriends. Young-me *might* like the older shows better, but, I would guess not.
For anybody who is serious about wanting to reminesce about the Transformers cartoon, I recommend The Cybertron Chronicle, by far the most thorough TF cartoon website there is. As well as transcripts of every episode and an extensive character guide, it also has a bunch of interviews with voice actors, a producer, and the voice director. Nice sites for an overview of all of Transformers history (and in considerably less depth than the Chronicle) are Unicron.com and Ben's World of Transformers.
Um... the list you link to is of edits made to the show when it was aired on Cartoon Network in the *daytime*, as part of a Toonami "Giant Robot Week" event. It's not representative of the Eva dubs in general, and assuming the show ends up on Adult Swim when CN begins showing it, it's most likely not representative of what it will be like then, either.
Additionally, just to further nitpick your post, the list you linked to has eight items on it, only four of which are examples of editing the episode for content. Three of the items are things that it says were *not* cut, and the first is "opening animation cut" which, as anybody who watches much CN can tell you, is rather common for their programming. (I would much rather have a show's OP cut for time than something that's actually important or interesting.)
So... even if that list meant anything at all -- and it doesn't -- what we have to look forward to is some benign content cuts, plenty of adult content still in it, and no OP. "Torture" sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.
I take it you missed Dragon Warrior VII for the PS1?
Seemed like essentially everybody did, sadly.
I would put it on equal footing with Chrono Trigger and FF6. A very different game, but completely enjoyable for all 160+ hours I played it. I'd love to play it a second time, but... man, what a time investment.
I hope the next Dragon Quest can live up to it.
Based on your comments, I suspect you have not *watched* the original series recently. Give it another look. Although there were some relatively serious episodes, it is on the whole quite clearly a show that was being written in a hurry and for the paycheck. It's just as full of ridiculous stories and plot holes as any other series. If you're looking for "scifi for adults" in Transformers, the only thing that comes close is the CG "Beast Wars" cartoon.
The first time I tried it, it didn't merely crash Firefox. When I clicked the "test now" link my entire system immediately died, and began rebooting. After reboot, the test now works (and confirms my vulnerability).
Windows 98 SE, Firefox 1.0.2.
Yes.
It's the concentration of mass that makes black holes special, not the magnitude of their mass. At any distance larger than the Sun's radius, it's gravity feels like the gravity of a point mass at its center. But at distances less than its radius, the "effective" mass of that imaginary point mass is reduced because some of the Sun's mass is now above you. Eventually, when you reach the center, the entire Sun is above you, and you feel no net gravitational force.
If you collapse the Sun to a black hole, though, you get the point-mass effect the whole way down to the event horizon.
I don't quite agree. Black holes do "suck", by which I mean attract things into themselves rather than having them orbit around them like a Newtonian black hole would. They only do this within a few gravitational radii of the hole - inside the "last stable orbit". A little way inside that, you have an actual event horizon which is the point at which gravity becomes the "unstoppable force" you claim doesn't exist.
GR black holes are different than Newtonian black holes, yes. But... at distances large compared to their event horizons, they are pretty much the same thing. And in neither case is a black hole more dangerous than any other object with the same mass. (Again, at distances large compared to the event horizon.) That's the misconception I wanted to address. The idea that a black hole in the solar system would mean death for everyone. The sun itself could magically compress into a black hole, and aside from it getting really cold here, it would make no difference.
I didn't claim that the "unstoppable force" doesn't exist; it is the very definition of the event horizon. I said that it doesn't reach out to consume everything around it. The gravity reaches out exactly as far and strong as it used to at all distances down to the previous radius of the object before crushification.
I agree with your other comments, though if you're talking about people near solar-mass holes you should mention the tidal forces...
I thought that was a bit beside the point, since the discussion was mainly about tiny ones.
I know there are a lot of jokes that can be made about the idea of building a black hole in a lab, but I just want to make sure people understand how not-dangerous a tiny black hole would be:
Black holes do not "suck". Most people -- even most smart people -- have this impression that black holes suck in everything around them with some sort of unstoppable force. This is completely inaccurate.
Black holes only influence things by their gravity. The force a black hole exerts on another object depends on their masses and the distance between them. Exactly the same as the gravitational force between any other two objects, black hole or no.
The part that makes black holes weird is that they can be significantly smaller (as measured by their event horizon) than normal objects. So if you've got an object with the mass of the Sun, normally it's quite large, so the distance between you and its center is big, and the gravity can only get so strong. If you compress that mass into a black hole, though, you can get much, much closer to its center. If you're only a few kilometers away from the center of gravity of something with the Sun's mass, *then* the gravity will be really strong.
When it comes to very small black holes -- especially the type that might be created by a particle accelerator, with masses far less than that of a single atom -- the mass involved is so miniscule that you'd have to get within femtometers or less before the strength of the gravity would even be noticeable.
Now, *if* black holes were indestructible, eternal objects, then yes, even a small one would eventually pick up enough stray neutrinos to start growing, and could eventually become a threat. But, Hawking radiation takes care of that. In fact, the rate of "evaporation" of a black hole *increases* as the black hole shrinks. So micro-black holes would be very short lived, and, again, therefore not a problem.
Here's the wikipedia article on Hawking radiation for reference.
The lagrange point is where the gravity from the moon offsets the gravity from the earth, making a point where there is no gravitational pull towards either body.
Not quite -- it also includes the "centrifugal" pseudoforce. The Lagrangian points are fixed points within the rotating reference frame of the Earth/Moon system. Because the frame rotates, it is not an inertial frame, so pseudoforces contribute. If the Earth and Moon were held in place magically, instead of orbiting each other, the balance point between us would be in a different location than it is when the system rotates.
Also, of course, there are five Lagrangian points, only one of which is physically between the Earth and Moon. If only gravity mattered, it would be the only one. The other four arise thanks to the contribution of pseudoforces.
Sunova... how the hell did I misread that, when I went as far as to quote it? Man. Too bad I can't cancel embarrasing posts like on Usenet. :/
As the Cassini-Huygens website clearly explains, the Huygens probe will be released from Cassini on Dec 25. It will enter Titan's atmosphere on January 14, but it will have already been released three weeks prior.
A minor error, I guess, but I keep seeing it made.
The Economist is one of the most respected news magazines in the world. It's merely not well known in the United States. They focus on economics-related news, but all of their coverage, including policitcs and science, is superb.
I second the comment from "pclminion"; the parent comment should not have been modded "insightful". All it demonstrates is ignorance of what it's talking about.
And how, exactly, would hiring more TAs to check for cheating instead of using a website *not* be a case of you paying to make sure you're not cheating? Where do you think the university's money comes from? Some from the government, some from you. (And of course the government's money comes from you, too.) You seem to be saying that if the University expends any resources at all to check for cheating, that you will be offended.
You go on to call this a "reasonably affordable solution". Each additional TA costs the university at *least* a thousand dollars a month, assuming they aren't getting a tuition waver on top of their stipend. Even ignoring the other costs of having more employees, that right there is a show stopper. The reason class sizes aren't really small is that it's way too expensive to make it that way in low-level classes. Unless, that is, you want to start paying significantly higher tuition?
I have a vested, sentimental interest in these places so I'm going to plug them:
The Big Ear telescope, operated by Ohio State University, was built on the grounds of Perkins Observatory, between Columbus and the town of Delaware. Delaware is the location of my alma mater, Ohio Wesleyan University, which owns and operates Perkins as a public outreach center. (OSU used to have some financial involvement, but pulled out a few years ago.) In other words, Perkins is no longer a research observatory: it is entirely dedicated to educating the public about astronomy and allowing people to look through their telescopes. (In other words, it's awesome.)
For a couple years after Big Ear had stopped being used it just stood there on the property. I remember taking a walk around the grounds in 1998 with a friend, peaking in the windows of the little building with the control room, filled with junk. It was sort of sad to see it so neglected. Even worse, the land on which it sat had been sold by my school to the neighboring golf course. We actually ran into a golfer while we were there, and he took the time to tell us how much he wished they would tear the telescope down so they could extend the driving range. And not too long afterwards, it happened. Big Ear is gone.
There's some really great stories to tell about Hiram Perkins, too, but I don't want to ramble on too long... The short version: Perkins Obs. was the second observatory he built, and at the time it was completed, it housed the third largest telescope in the world. That telescope, now with an even bigger mirror, lives at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, but was still owned by Ohio Wesleyan until around the time I graduated (1998) when OWU sold it completely to Lowell. It's now operated jointly by Lowell and Boston University, which happens to be where I went after OWU. I took two trips out there to use it before I got my masters in astronomy and left BU to come back to Ohio.
Here's a few links to entertain you:
If you live anywhere near Columbus, I highly recommend visiting Perkins sometime. They have great facilities and a fantastic staff. It's a great way to spend an evening.
Stunts, aka 4-D Driving, is pretty easy to find these days. This site says it's "freeware", although their justification for this statement seems suspect. Still, you can get the game there if you believe in things like abandonware. There's a lot of tracks and replays to download from various Stunts sites.