of course, "satanic" means different things to different people.
what is "satanic" basically depends on whether or not you're asking a christian. People who identify themselves as "satanists" would most likely be offended at being compared to scientologists, since contemporary satanism is based around the idea of rejecting faulty moralism and decaying value systems while persuing a more genuine mode of behavior.
a company is only going to make a product as useful as they have to to charge you as much as they can get away with. Lots of math is involved. Board meetings. Statistical analysis. This is the reason everything costs too much and sucks.
Now, lots of people out there devote their time and energy to making the things people paid way to much for work better. Whats wrong with that?
not meaning to be pedantic, but if food service became mechanized, the chances of someone being stabbed by a robot would be at -least- just as likely as a biological waiterss flipping out and stabbing someone.
dont they already "pay" the robots in the form of maintaining them? Keeping them in working order and -paying- people to keep them in working order must cost a nontrivial amount of money..till we make robots that can diagnose problems and fix other robots themselves, of course...
its kinda fun making m3u playlists and sticking them all into the top directory. I want to organize things myself, i dont want the machine doing it -for- me, that would just be silly.
Also, as a cross-platform USB device, the archos is much more useful (despite all the messy junk finder.dat files that get seeded in all the dirs whenever i hook it up to a mac). If i want to take this to any particular aquaintance's place and be sure that i can hook it up to any computer i come across, all i need to do is hook up the usb and download a tiny driver. Are ipods even PC compatible? if so, firewire ports aren't nearly as common.
there's also some question as to whether this little pod allows you complete freedom to use your data as you see fit, as in connecting it to multiple pcs in the first place. i'm not 100-per-cent sure on this, of course, since the 2 or 3 times i had any amount of unsupervised access to one of these things i immediately got the owner to return it and get an archos.
Theres also the cost factor. The price per GB has always been much more reasonable on the archos units, even considering the disparity in release dates. The rediculous price hike for having a "Designer" computer product was what caused me to switch to the PC platform in the first place.
erm...but shouldn't the person paying for the webspace be able to use it however they want, as long as it dosen't conflict with the TOS they -agreed to- when they signed up?
of course livejournal isn't one homogenized community, there are simply too many people (1,277,648 total as of now, granted some of them are community blogs). The -point- of livejournal, however, -is- the community aspect, that blogging is combined with a social network framework based around which other journals you "subscribe" to by putting them on your "friends" list (a nomenclature that i think is somewhat tricky and emotionally loaded).
Because the extremly high variability in what each journal is, what its being used for, and who's authoring it, decrying it on the basis that its not a tightly-knit group of 1 million+ people is like saying that web page authors aren't a closely knit community...obviously they aren't, because the only thing they have in common is the medium through which they are communicating.
By creating a framework through which users can subscribe to a group of other user's blogs, however, juxtaposed with the somewhat essential blogging feature of discussion threads, a tangible community aspect is developed that is entirely responsible for the success (read- popularity) of livejournal. Take away friends lists and communities (livejournals shared by multiple users...you -did- know they had those before commenting on the communal nature of the service, right?) and search-by-interest and search-by-location and all you've got left is a blog with a commenting feature...not very interesting from a social networking perspective.
i think the issue at hand is that AOL users are -paying- for webspace as part of the subscription, and, in effect, are being told how they can and cannot use it.
lay off my crack pipe! the archos jukebox not only predates the ipod, they've had MORE innovative features that the ipod still dosent have, like video display, video output, webcam support, etc.
i don't know what you're babbling about IDv3 tags, i had the original archos jukebox 20 and it could read those just fine. It also supported m3u playlist files. that i could just author with winamp and keep in the top directory.
The JB20 held me in good stead until a lightning storm toasted it, now, nothing seems to even come close to the AV340 (same as the 320 but with 40gb hdd)
there's a huge difference between the widely practiced synthing of diamond dust for industrial uses, and growing stones that are indistinguishable from yellow diamonds worth tens of thousands of dollars, which is now occuring.
actually, diamonds can be synthesized now. There's a startup company somewhere (sorry, misplaced the link to the article) that is synth'ing 10,000USD diamonds with material and energy expenses of 100 dollars. They're selling the gems for startup capital so they can....you guessed it, break into the computing business.
Suspension of Disbelief is right up there with Correlation!=Causality on the list of things that should be banners at the top of each thread here.
The thing is, though, i don't think people are completely oblivious to these comments, its just that its this level of thought that gets eliminated first when people rush to toe the party line and get those warm fuzzies from expressing opinions they thing will garner them praise from people they think are smarter than them.
the heat is supposedly combined with some form of fusion, which would generate more power than is fed into it in the form of heat.
people who make gripes like this typically strike me as someone who should drop sci-fi altogether and stick to something like pulp-romance novels or maybe comic strips.
its called suspending disbelief, it tends to make things more enjoyable.
more frightening and malignant than the cultural emphasis i percieve on things like caffine, nicotine, and alcohol (which you may or may not recognise as a salient point) are *benzodiazepines* (think valium). These are the most commonly proscribed pills in the country by a wide margin. Legions of bored and depressed housewives take it so they won't raise their voices to their husbands. Funny that for us it was valiums where for the far east it's amphetamines.
because you have to start somewhere to end the socially destructive prohibition on "drugs". Since herb has the most obvious and most widely recognized medicinal benefits, it would make sense to start with that one rather than, say, LSD. Marijuana is also very widely used by people of all social backgrounds and geographical locations, so it stands the best chance of being taken seriously.
The idea is that once prohibition has been lifted on one substance, the ball can be kept rolling to take a more modern, enlightened standpoint on entheogens and personal freedom. Many of these substances, like psylocibin-bearing mushrooms, are a part of our spiritual and cognitive history as human beings, and our brutal suppression of these traditions that predate relegion and science have lead us to the point where we've grown into an evolutionary dead-end as a species.
It comes as no suprise to anyone taking even a cursory interest in the historical momentum of things for the past couple centuries that the biggest offender for culturally de-emphasizing substances that catalyze language and thought while -emphasizing- substances that make us more efficient drones or easier to control (caffine, nicotine, alcohol, SSRIs like prozac) is....::drumroll:: the US! Who woulda thunk?
Consider this. The bastille prison in france gave its prisoners three bottles of wine a day -each-. No one bothered escaping. Cross-reference that with alcohol in modern industrialized society, which is basically a large institutional prison, and suddenly having a bar and liquor store on every streetcorner makes a lot of sense.
I remember an episode of DS9 where miles o'brian delivers the classic line "i'm not a soldier....i'm an engineer!" moments before he hits a button on his tricorder making the room explode. That's right up there with my favorite obrian moments, right next to him sitting on the foot of his bed, looking back at himself just waking up in bed, and the two copies of himself smacking their foreheads and saying "i hate temporal anomolies" in unison. heheh.
of course, it is the scientific mindset that says that human desire and spontenaity have no place in the thought and evolution of our species. It is the engineering mindset, however, that figures that if it works, go with it, and adjust if you find that you are mistaken.
If we are not free to express our prejudices because of some arbitrary collection of ideas, ideology, or "ethics", than the terrorists have won!
RTSs bear that tendancy out, too. Sure, you can build a couple of overlord tanks and think you're tough, but all it takes is a couple dozen RPG troopers hiding in buildings to ruin your day. (sorry, i was up all night playing c&c generals)
Slashdot Mirror
of course, "satanic" means different things to different people.
what is "satanic" basically depends on whether or not you're asking a christian. People who identify themselves as "satanists" would most likely be offended at being compared to scientologists, since contemporary satanism is based around the idea of rejecting faulty moralism and decaying value systems while persuing a more genuine mode of behavior.
here's an alternate way of looking at it:
a company is only going to make a product as useful as they have to to charge you as much as they can get away with. Lots of math is involved. Board meetings. Statistical analysis. This is the reason everything costs too much and sucks.
Now, lots of people out there devote their time and energy to making the things people paid way to much for work better. Whats wrong with that?
i guess i don't see how the distinction's important..i mean..either way, someone got stabbed, yeah?
not meaning to be pedantic, but if food service became mechanized, the chances of someone being stabbed by a robot would be at -least- just as likely as a biological waiterss flipping out and stabbing someone.
dont they already "pay" the robots in the form of maintaining them? Keeping them in working order and -paying- people to keep them in working order must cost a nontrivial amount of money..till we make robots that can diagnose problems and fix other robots themselves, of course...
its kinda fun making m3u playlists and sticking them all into the top directory. I want to organize things myself, i dont want the machine doing it -for- me, that would just be silly.
Also, as a cross-platform USB device, the archos is much more useful (despite all the messy junk finder.dat files that get seeded in all the dirs whenever i hook it up to a mac). If i want to take this to any particular aquaintance's place and be sure that i can hook it up to any computer i come across, all i need to do is hook up the usb and download a tiny driver. Are ipods even PC compatible? if so, firewire ports aren't nearly as common.
there's also some question as to whether this little pod allows you complete freedom to use your data as you see fit, as in connecting it to multiple pcs in the first place. i'm not 100-per-cent sure on this, of course, since the 2 or 3 times i had any amount of unsupervised access to one of these things i immediately got the owner to return it and get an archos.
Theres also the cost factor. The price per GB has always been much more reasonable on the archos units, even considering the disparity in release dates. The rediculous price hike for having a "Designer" computer product was what caused me to switch to the PC platform in the first place.
erm...but shouldn't the person paying for the webspace be able to use it however they want, as long as it dosen't conflict with the TOS they -agreed to- when they signed up?
of course livejournal isn't one homogenized community, there are simply too many people (1,277,648 total as of now, granted some of them are community blogs). The -point- of livejournal, however, -is- the community aspect, that blogging is combined with a social network framework based around which other journals you "subscribe" to by putting them on your "friends" list (a nomenclature that i think is somewhat tricky and emotionally loaded).
Because the extremly high variability in what each journal is, what its being used for, and who's authoring it, decrying it on the basis that its not a tightly-knit group of 1 million+ people is like saying that web page authors aren't a closely knit community...obviously they aren't, because the only thing they have in common is the medium through which they are communicating.
By creating a framework through which users can subscribe to a group of other user's blogs, however, juxtaposed with the somewhat essential blogging feature of discussion threads, a tangible community aspect is developed that is entirely responsible for the success (read- popularity) of livejournal. Take away friends lists and communities (livejournals shared by multiple users...you -did- know they had those before commenting on the communal nature of the service, right?) and search-by-interest and search-by-location and all you've got left is a blog with a commenting feature...not very interesting from a social networking perspective.
i think the issue at hand is that AOL users are -paying- for webspace as part of the subscription, and, in effect, are being told how they can and cannot use it.
there's also a webcam quality camera plugin that does 640x480 video at 30fps. ::drool::
lay off my crack pipe! the archos jukebox not only predates the ipod, they've had MORE innovative features that the ipod still dosent have, like video display, video output, webcam support, etc.
i don't know what you're babbling about IDv3 tags, i had the original archos jukebox 20 and it could read those just fine. It also supported m3u playlist files. that i could just author with winamp and keep in the top directory.
The JB20 held me in good stead until a lightning storm toasted it, now, nothing seems to even come close to the AV340 (same as the 320 but with 40gb hdd)
there's a huge difference between the widely practiced synthing of diamond dust for industrial uses, and growing stones that are indistinguishable from yellow diamonds worth tens of thousands of dollars, which is now occuring.
actually, diamonds can be synthesized now. There's a startup company somewhere (sorry, misplaced the link to the article) that is synth'ing 10,000USD diamonds with material and energy expenses of 100 dollars. They're selling the gems for startup capital so they can....you guessed it, break into the computing business.
keeping it capitalized makes it clear that the word being spoken is an acronym, without having to resort to seperating everything with p.e.r.i.o.d.s.
Suspension of Disbelief is right up there with Correlation!=Causality on the list of things that should be banners at the top of each thread here.
The thing is, though, i don't think people are completely oblivious to these comments, its just that its this level of thought that gets eliminated first when people rush to toe the party line and get those warm fuzzies from expressing opinions they thing will garner them praise from people they think are smarter than them.
Oh well.
the oracles guardian is called Seraph, btw.
the heat is supposedly combined with some form of fusion, which would generate more power than is fed into it in the form of heat.
people who make gripes like this typically strike me as someone who should drop sci-fi altogether and stick to something like pulp-romance novels or maybe comic strips.
its called suspending disbelief, it tends to make things more enjoyable.
addendum to that:
more frightening and malignant than the cultural emphasis i percieve on things like caffine, nicotine, and alcohol (which you may or may not recognise as a salient point) are *benzodiazepines* (think valium). These are the most commonly proscribed pills in the country by a wide margin. Legions of bored and depressed housewives take it so they won't raise their voices to their husbands. Funny that for us it was valiums where for the far east it's amphetamines.
because you have to start somewhere to end the socially destructive prohibition on "drugs". Since herb has the most obvious and most widely recognized medicinal benefits, it would make sense to start with that one rather than, say, LSD. Marijuana is also very widely used by people of all social backgrounds and geographical locations, so it stands the best chance of being taken seriously.
The idea is that once prohibition has been lifted on one substance, the ball can be kept rolling to take a more modern, enlightened standpoint on entheogens and personal freedom. Many of these substances, like psylocibin-bearing mushrooms, are a part of our spiritual and cognitive history as human beings, and our brutal suppression of these traditions that predate relegion and science have lead us to the point where we've grown into an evolutionary dead-end as a species.
It comes as no suprise to anyone taking even a cursory interest in the historical momentum of things for the past couple centuries that the biggest offender for culturally de-emphasizing substances that catalyze language and thought while -emphasizing- substances that make us more efficient drones or easier to control (caffine, nicotine, alcohol, SSRIs like prozac) is....::drumroll:: the US! Who woulda thunk?
Consider this. The bastille prison in france gave its prisoners three bottles of wine a day -each-. No one bothered escaping. Cross-reference that with alcohol in modern industrialized society, which is basically a large institutional prison, and suddenly having a bar and liquor store on every streetcorner makes a lot of sense.
i wonder if any of this will occur to the person being commanded to press the button.
not that it matters, we're already murderers, we're just finding new and exotic ways to do it.
I remember an episode of DS9 where miles o'brian delivers the classic line "i'm not a soldier....i'm an engineer!" moments before he hits a button on his tricorder making the room explode. That's right up there with my favorite obrian moments, right next to him sitting on the foot of his bed, looking back at himself just waking up in bed, and the two copies of himself smacking their foreheads and saying "i hate temporal anomolies" in unison. heheh.
last i heard, linklater was doing scanner, keep your eyes peeled.
of course, it is the scientific mindset that says that human desire and spontenaity have no place in the thought and evolution of our species. It is the engineering mindset, however, that figures that if it works, go with it, and adjust if you find that you are mistaken.
If we are not free to express our prejudices because of some arbitrary collection of ideas, ideology, or "ethics", than the terrorists have won!
>A good scientist names his source without judgement : the reader can decide for himself whetehre it is good or not by its contents.
This guy's an engineer though. He probably cares less about the cult of scientism than he does about making his invention work.
"The scientist describes what is, the engineer creates what never was"
RTSs bear that tendancy out, too. Sure, you can build a couple of overlord tanks and think you're tough, but all it takes is a couple dozen RPG troopers hiding in buildings to ruin your day. (sorry, i was up all night playing c&c generals)