Was the propeller actually DESIGNED by the Navy, and then the contract to build it put out to bid? Or was it the case that the Navy just had an idea, made up the specifications, and asked contractors to see what they could come up with?
So is anything but Missionary Position in some states, what's your point?
He's just pointing out the IRS's eye-for-an-eye/crime-for-a-crime policy. You get caught for tax evasion, and they'll make sure you take it up the ass.
when I'm playing games alone I just want to sit down and relax, not be flailing around.
I managed to play through Zelda without any flailing around. In fact, I TRIED flailing and it just didn't add anything. Tiny movements were sufficient, and it really didn't amount to any more effort or exhaustion than moving around joysticks.
But, to top it off....when you really want to be lazy, and just kick back and play, the Wii controller excels here. Some games you can play single handed. When 2 hands are required, your hands don't need to be together on your lap. You can kick back in a recliner with one hand on each armrest. That's pretty much the ultimate in gaming comfort.
As for the name, I point to the countless jokes that the Wii name has spawned. Funny or not/juvenile or not, they persist. I know a few Wii-owners that are continually ridiculed over the name of the product (not by me, but I have to admit I do laugh at some of the jokes)....Said Wii-owners grow very tired of these jokes
It is so silly that anyone would let this get to them. You know what I say? Embrace the double entendre. If you beat someone to the punch and embrace the jokes before they even make them, how can they possibly make fun of you? I joke about going home and playing with my Wii all the time. I jokingly ask my friends if they want to come on over and play with my Wii.
Picking on other people works because it's fun to annoy them. If they pick on themselves first (and continuously) and if they laugh and join in on the joke when you try to make it, it's obviously not annoying them, and thats when it loses it's fun.
There are several popular & established gaming genres that do not lend themselves well to a wand controller: racing/driving games, shooters, flight sims, and fighting games to name a few.
I'll grant you fighting game might seem a bit unintuitive, but we'll have to wait for games like Super Smash Bros and Mortal Kombat to see just how well it works. For all we know, it could end up blowing away the standard controller. If you've seen any of those videos of Ed Boon demoing MK for the Wii, you might agree that it at least looks promising.
However, the other three...driving, shooting, and flight sims? Are you kidding me? Other than maybe sports games, those games have to be the BEST fit for a controller like the Wii. Saying what you did is kind of like saying a Hummer doesn't really lend itself well to rough terrain (and before anyone else says it....yes, there's probably a Wii joke in there, too)
I've read about various ISPs doing this from time to time, but have any of them actually stuck around for more than a month or so?
WideOpenWest has been doing this since at least November, and it's still going on. On the up side, they have a link where you can opt out of it. On the down side, the page has javascript errors in firefox, and when you use it in IE it doesn't seem to do anything (a week later it's still giving their stupid DNS error page).
"A couple systems on the shelf is not particularly abundant"
I have 2 Best Buys, 2 Circuit Citys, 1 Toys R Us, and 3 Targets near my home/work. I tend to stop by at least of couple of those stores each week. When I do, I usually swing by the video game area to see what they have in stock. Picking a random store at a random time, I have about an 80-90% chance of finding a PS3 in stock. How many they have isn't really much of a concern. When they are that easy to find without even making an effort, I consider that to be abundant.
I drove from NYC to Detroit and back a week ago. Gas prices ranged from $3.25 a gallon in Michigan to as high as $4.50/gallon in rural Ohio and Pennsylvania. I think the lowest I saw was about $2.75, and that was near Detroit.
I'm gonna call BS on this one. I live in the detroit area, and theres no way you paid $2.75 per gallon last week for regular unleaded. Right now, the HIGHEST prices are under $2.50. Most places are about $2.20-$2.30. About a week ago they were actually slightly lower than now.
You couldn't have paid $2.75/gal even if you tried. The only way would be if you are quoting a price for diesel or higher octane. If that's the case, then you were being deliberately misleading, since you must know when people quote gas prices without identifying the type, they mean regular unleaded.
Cool, so we can just turn any relevant parts of an article into "..." and then complain about the story, right? OK, let me give it a shot:
"The PCC submitted a proposal to the country's Copyright Board that suggests levies of....$75 for...a...music...c...d"
OK, now let me try to work up some outrage to go along with it: This article is a joke. The $75 levy wasn't for music CD's...it was for >30GB iPods. The story is inaccurate, and the submitter is an idiot.
Only pay what you can afford and what you think something is worth. If a seller out bids you on their own product. Fine, let them keep it.
But that is the less important aspect of it.
Say an item is currently going for $10. I decide I'll pay up to $20 for it. Ebay will start my bid at $11. If nobody else bids on the auction, I win the item for $11. However, if the seller fake-bids it up to $18, I'll end up paying $18 for the item instead of $11. In that case, as far as I'm concerned, the seller cheated me out of $7. I may not realize it, but I was cheated none the less.
Oops. I misread that, though I'll partially blame you for non keeping your pronouns consistent (in numbers 1, 2 and 4, you used "you" to refer to the recipient, and then in 5 you switched "you" to be the giver).:)
"What if they paid him minimum wage and filmed the whole thing to create a commercial?"
Yes, to me, that would seem to work. If they CAN'T get away with giving an "employee" paid travel as part of the "job", then the income tax bill must really suck for pilots and stewardesses.
You have made the whole thing so needlessly complex that you have actually screwed up your formula: T=S/(1-P)
You said T is tax paid, S is the award, and P is the tax rate (which you said is less than 100%). Well, lets plug in some numbers. If the award (S) is $100, and the tax rate (P) is 25% T=S/(1-P) T=$100/(1-.25) T=$100/.75 T=$133.33
The tax is larger than the award itself? No....in the formula, T should represent the total amount given, including extra to cover the taxes.
The simple way to do this without using a series is: A: Award amount they intend you to receive after taxes E: Extra amount to cover all taxes R: tax Rate
(A+E)*(1-R)=A
Solve this a few ways: Total amount to be paid: (A+E)=A/(1-R) Extra to cover taxes: E=(A/(1-R))-A=(A*R)/(1-R)
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
I've never lived there, but I learned about this "drizzle of doom" phenomenon a few months ago when I stumbled across the following article on a San Diego news website:
Anyone who buys stock because spam tells them to deserves what they get.
OK. So what about the people that are keeping an eye on the company, and have been seeing some positive progress, good earnings reports, etc. They are considering investing because the prospect looks positive, and then they see the stock price starting to rise. Now, mind you, these people are completely unaware of the spam...they didn't get it. They are genuinely interested in the company. So, they see the stock rise and think "it looks like the market is agreeing with me...I guess I was right", and so they jump in. Then the stock falls back to it's previous level (or worse) and they are already at a 5% loss.
Now, you might say "well, they were genuinely interested in the company, so it should be a long term investment for them anyway...if they were right, it won't matter". But it does matter, because someone has essentially stolen 5% of their investment from the get go.
It's kind of like saying that, if your house is torched by a vigilante mob because somebody tricked all your neighbors into thinking you were a child molester, then you deserve what you get.
I have heard people complain that some merchants had poor integration with Google Checkout (GC), and that it was taking a lot longer to get orders processed and shipped. If that were the case, I could see how orders get canceled. If the integration is poor, then by the time the merchant loads the GC orders into the system, the products could be out of stock, already being sold to customers using the stores native payment method. If that's the case, its hardly Google's fault (other than maybe they could have tried rolling it out several months before the holiday season to get all these kinks worked out with the merchants earlier).
I've used GC twice at Buy.com and once at Toys R Us, and it worked smoothly each time, and I very quickly got confirmation from the merchants.
Thats interesting....last time I looked, blockbuster was only giving you coupons for 2 in store rentals a month. None the less, I canceled Netflix over a year ago because I didn't even have time to keep up with my 1 movie at a time plan. I started ripping to my mythbox, but before I knew it I had 8 or 10 movies waiting for me. Now I just rent 1 or 2 movies a month from the local Family Video for $2.60 each.
Subscribers on Netflix's most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have 18 hours of online movie watching per month.
18 hours is about 9-12 movies per month, which is about how many movies you can get per month on the 3 at a time plan (maybe a bit better if you've been throttled). So this isn't going to substantially increase the problem over what people can do now by ripping the DVDs they get in the mail.
Exactly. Despite the fact that Best Buy cells "Media Center" PCs, very few people are actually hooking these things up to their TVs. They are mostly being used as regular PC that happen to have the Media Center stuff installed. Now, if they were to partner up with Tivo on something like this, then the the rental stores might BEGIN to see an effect, but even the Tivo subscriber base is relatively small.
Yet again, our pathetic public education system has let us down on something quite basic about our bodies.
Education system? Screw that...lets blame the corporations. Specifically, Pepsi. They had the perfect marketing campaign under their noses all these years: "Drink Gatorade or DIE!!!!!!1!!1!" The fact that they didn't capitalize on that (and educate everyone in the process) represents a failure to their shareholders (and everyone else).
I disagree... and yes, I'll probably get flamed for it.
I really think the entire concept of approximations and randomness is just flawed
Well, you certainly won't get flamed by me. I agree with you, which is why I proposed the question. The whole idea of "randomness when you aren't looking" seems to me to be a bunch of voodoo magic, and compared to the theory that we just don't know all the details, the randomness theory doesn't seem to pass Occam's Razor for me.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of the early sensorimotor stage of a child's cognitive development. Before they grasp the concept of object permanence, they don't seem to understand that things still exist even when they can't see them. Gone from view, gone from existence. It seems silly to revert to that type of logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the propeller actually DESIGNED by the Navy, and then the contract to build it put out to bid? Or was it the case that the Navy just had an idea, made up the specifications, and asked contractors to see what they could come up with?
He's just pointing out the IRS's eye-for-an-eye/crime-for-a-crime policy. You get caught for tax evasion, and they'll make sure you take it up the ass.
I heard the Killer NIC can lower your ping times.
I managed to play through Zelda without any flailing around. In fact, I TRIED flailing and it just didn't add anything. Tiny movements were sufficient, and it really didn't amount to any more effort or exhaustion than moving around joysticks.
But, to top it off....when you really want to be lazy, and just kick back and play, the Wii controller excels here. Some games you can play single handed. When 2 hands are required, your hands don't need to be together on your lap. You can kick back in a recliner with one hand on each armrest. That's pretty much the ultimate in gaming comfort.
Picking on other people works because it's fun to annoy them. If they pick on themselves first (and continuously) and if they laugh and join in on the joke when you try to make it, it's obviously not annoying them, and thats when it loses it's fun.
I'll grant you fighting game might seem a bit unintuitive, but we'll have to wait for games like Super Smash Bros and Mortal Kombat to see just how well it works. For all we know, it could end up blowing away the standard controller. If you've seen any of those videos of Ed Boon demoing MK for the Wii, you might agree that it at least looks promising.
However, the other three...driving, shooting, and flight sims? Are you kidding me? Other than maybe sports games, those games have to be the BEST fit for a controller like the Wii. Saying what you did is kind of like saying a Hummer doesn't really lend itself well to rough terrain (and before anyone else says it....yes, there's probably a Wii joke in there, too)
WideOpenWest has been doing this since at least November, and it's still going on. On the up side, they have a link where you can opt out of it. On the down side, the page has javascript errors in firefox, and when you use it in IE it doesn't seem to do anything (a week later it's still giving their stupid DNS error page).
"A couple systems on the shelf is not particularly abundant"
I have 2 Best Buys, 2 Circuit Citys, 1 Toys R Us, and 3 Targets near my home/work. I tend to stop by at least of couple of those stores each week. When I do, I usually swing by the video game area to see what they have in stock. Picking a random store at a random time, I have about an 80-90% chance of finding a PS3 in stock. How many they have isn't really much of a concern. When they are that easy to find without even making an effort, I consider that to be abundant.
I'm gonna call BS on this one. I live in the detroit area, and theres no way you paid $2.75 per gallon last week for regular unleaded. Right now, the HIGHEST prices are under $2.50. Most places are about $2.20-$2.30. About a week ago they were actually slightly lower than now.
You couldn't have paid $2.75/gal even if you tried. The only way would be if you are quoting a price for diesel or higher octane. If that's the case, then you were being deliberately misleading, since you must know when people quote gas prices without identifying the type, they mean regular unleaded.
Cool, so we can just turn any relevant parts of an article into "..." and then complain about the story, right? OK, let me give it a shot:
"The PCC submitted a proposal to the country's Copyright Board that suggests levies of....$75 for...a...music...c...d"
OK, now let me try to work up some outrage to go along with it:
This article is a joke. The $75 levy wasn't for music CD's...it was for >30GB iPods. The story is inaccurate, and the submitter is an idiot.
There, how'd I do?
Awesome. I've been wanting to play Guitar Hero on my Wii ever since I saw Prince's Superbowl Half Time Show.
Say an item is currently going for $10. I decide I'll pay up to $20 for it. Ebay will start my bid at $11. If nobody else bids on the auction, I win the item for $11. However, if the seller fake-bids it up to $18, I'll end up paying $18 for the item instead of $11. In that case, as far as I'm concerned, the seller cheated me out of $7. I may not realize it, but I was cheated none the less.
Oops. I misread that, though I'll partially blame you for non keeping your pronouns consistent (in numbers 1, 2 and 4, you used "you" to refer to the recipient, and then in 5 you switched "you" to be the giver). :)
"What if they paid him minimum wage and filmed the whole thing to create a commercial?"
Yes, to me, that would seem to work. If they CAN'T get away with giving an "employee" paid travel as part of the "job", then the income tax bill must really suck for pilots and stewardesses.
You have made the whole thing so needlessly complex that you have actually screwed up your formula:
T=S/(1-P)
You said T is tax paid, S is the award, and P is the tax rate (which you said is less than 100%). Well, lets plug in some numbers.
If the award (S) is $100, and the tax rate (P) is 25%
T=S/(1-P)
T=$100/(1-.25)
T=$100/.75
T=$133.33
The tax is larger than the award itself? No....in the formula, T should represent the total amount given, including extra to cover the taxes.
The simple way to do this without using a series is:
A: Award amount they intend you to receive after taxes
E: Extra amount to cover all taxes
R: tax Rate
(A+E)*(1-R)=A
Solve this a few ways:
Total amount to be paid: (A+E)=A/(1-R)
Extra to cover taxes: E=(A/(1-R))-A=(A*R)/(1-R)
Just like when 1500 sheep jump off a cliff.
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
I've never lived there, but I learned about this "drizzle of doom" phenomenon a few months ago when I stumbled across the following article on a San Diego news website:
0.02 inches of rain pummels the area
Anyone who buys stock because spam tells them to deserves what they get.
OK. So what about the people that are keeping an eye on the company, and have been seeing some positive progress, good earnings reports, etc. They are considering investing because the prospect looks positive, and then they see the stock price starting to rise. Now, mind you, these people are completely unaware of the spam...they didn't get it. They are genuinely interested in the company. So, they see the stock rise and think "it looks like the market is agreeing with me...I guess I was right", and so they jump in. Then the stock falls back to it's previous level (or worse) and they are already at a 5% loss.
Now, you might say "well, they were genuinely interested in the company, so it should be a long term investment for them anyway...if they were right, it won't matter". But it does matter, because someone has essentially stolen 5% of their investment from the get go.
It's kind of like saying that, if your house is torched by a vigilante mob because somebody tricked all your neighbors into thinking you were a child molester, then you deserve what you get.
I have heard people complain that some merchants had poor integration with Google Checkout (GC), and that it was taking a lot longer to get orders processed and shipped. If that were the case, I could see how orders get canceled. If the integration is poor, then by the time the merchant loads the GC orders into the system, the products could be out of stock, already being sold to customers using the stores native payment method. If that's the case, its hardly Google's fault (other than maybe they could have tried rolling it out several months before the holiday season to get all these kinks worked out with the merchants earlier).
I've used GC twice at Buy.com and once at Toys R Us, and it worked smoothly each time, and I very quickly got confirmation from the merchants.
Thats interesting....last time I looked, blockbuster was only giving you coupons for 2 in store rentals a month. None the less, I canceled Netflix over a year ago because I didn't even have time to keep up with my 1 movie at a time plan. I started ripping to my mythbox, but before I knew it I had 8 or 10 movies waiting for me. Now I just rent 1 or 2 movies a month from the local Family Video for $2.60 each.
18 hours is about 9-12 movies per month, which is about how many movies you can get per month on the 3 at a time plan (maybe a bit better if you've been throttled). So this isn't going to substantially increase the problem over what people can do now by ripping the DVDs they get in the mail.
Exactly. Despite the fact that Best Buy cells "Media Center" PCs, very few people are actually hooking these things up to their TVs. They are mostly being used as regular PC that happen to have the Media Center stuff installed. Now, if they were to partner up with Tivo on something like this, then the the rental stores might BEGIN to see an effect, but even the Tivo subscriber base is relatively small.
Yet again, our pathetic public education system has let us down on something quite basic about our bodies.
Education system? Screw that...lets blame the corporations. Specifically, Pepsi. They had the perfect marketing campaign under their noses all these years: "Drink Gatorade or DIE!!!!!!1!!1!" The fact that they didn't capitalize on that (and educate everyone in the process) represents a failure to their shareholders (and everyone else).
Punitive damages are only awarded on registered copyrights. Non registered copyrights can only be awarded actual damages.
Well, you certainly won't get flamed by me. I agree with you, which is why I proposed the question. The whole idea of "randomness when you aren't looking" seems to me to be a bunch of voodoo magic, and compared to the theory that we just don't know all the details, the randomness theory doesn't seem to pass Occam's Razor for me.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of the early sensorimotor stage of a child's cognitive development. Before they grasp the concept of object permanence, they don't seem to understand that things still exist even when they can't see them. Gone from view, gone from existence. It seems silly to revert to that type of logic.
When nobody is looking, they revert to approximations.
If NOBODY is looking, then how does anyone know they revert to approximations?