So, instead of wasting time trying to decide whether viruses are "really" alive or not, you should just accept the fact that our knowledge today is advanced enough to show that the question--which we inherited from people who knew less than we do--is flawed.
There was an interesting scifi story I read years ago with a modern guy going back to talk to the great philosophers and he explained the modern view on a great many of the questions these worthies had speculated on. His answers were so confounding, some declared him mad and others gave up on philosophy altogether. That's kind of the same reaction us moderns have coming from newtonian physics where everything is neat and logical and looking at QM where everything seems almost intentionally perverse and counter-intuitive.
I'm looking at a trip in December, the first time I've flown in several years, and already my teeth are starting to grind. Our transportation system is a fucking joke. Between the TSA bullshit and our airlines acting as if their brains were replaced by tapioca pudding, I just know I'm in for a miserable flight.
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
It's marginally easier to put many tags on one file as opposed to creating one file and then all the shortcuts you want in different folders as they apply. People just don't understand shortcuts. At one job, we had a big bunch of marketing cruft in a folder, 30gb of videos, pictures, etc. So and so would want that stuff in their personal folder and sure enough, they'd copy and paste. Management refused to let us set size limits on folders and so it would be a constant cycle of losing drive space, looking for the new offender, explaining how shortcuts work, making shortcuts for them, then watching some other idiot make the same mistake, then going back to the first idiot who forgot everything you told them making the mistake all over again. And any time we tried to put restrictions on things management would order them removed.
I'm of the opinion that if you can't let someone do something bad, then you won't end up being angry they did it. If people demonstrate they won't listen to instructions like "stay away from the angry bear" and management refuses to let you put the bear in a cage, you shouldn't be responsible for maulings. Doesn't work that way, though.
Someday, when holograms are commonplace, I will drive down the street, and instead of seeing my car, you will see a giant snake breathing fire on everything around me.
How likely is that? Once we have holographic projectors for cars, all the kids are going to default to screaming, angry penises. "Hey, that dick just cut me off!"
An attempt at such a game was made with the Battlecruiser:Unverisal Combat (www.3000ad.com) line of games, but I could never get into those. They lacked the polish of a AAA game title. Great concept, just poor execution.
Yeah, but the legendary flamewars were pretty funny. I remember usenet back in the day, dr so and so, the developer of the game, he was a trip, yelling and screaming at everyone who had something bad to say about his abortion of a game.
Man, talk about one of my all time favorite games along with Tie Fighter. Great story and overall game play. It's too bad that X-Wing vs Tie Fighter just didn't work out as well as the originals. Now, the game that I really wanted to play was the Babylon 5 space sim that was canceled waaay back in early 2000. That baby looked great!
you're talking about X-Wing Alliance. It is the final evolution of the X-Wing/TIE development line and by far the apex. LucasFarts expressly said they were going to avoid doing any more classic SW games in favor of the prequel universe. *barf* No word on whether they're relenting on that one yet.
The great thing about Alliance is you can see it's still the original engine, just with glossier graphics and more detail. Keyboard shortcuts, flight model, all are the same, just extra pretty.
Just about the only mission based space combat game I enjoyed was TIE Fighter; I'm still waiting for a decent Elite style game. I know there's X3 but it's just so dull.
The technology is pretty much here now. They nixed true flying in EVE Online because lag would have made it impossible to play. But with a more modest set of goals, a 3D flight sim version of Elite would be great. Provide a single-player game where you can trade, explore, etc, without having the MMO problem of keeping up with the Jonses. Multiplayer element would be for general combat. Just look at the way they did it in GTAIV, multiplay and singleplay are two entirely different experiences but both are tremendous fun.
The thing I remember wanting as a kid was what I always considered to be the impossible game. The way I put it at the time, "I want a space game you can fly around in like TIE Fighter but where you can land and get out of the ship like Doom." The technology is pretty much here now. The engines can handle taking off from a planetary surface and flying out into space. Games from Flashpoint to Halo to Oblivion have shown that frickin' massive worlds can be created on the current hardware and it's only going to get more impressive in time. The only drawback I can think of is that too much detail can clutter the game. The original Master of Orion was a great space empire game. The sequel threw in more detail but those details didn't really add to the game, it just made each turn take longer. There's a huge difference between adding depth versus annoying extraneous crap but it often isn't clear which is which until after it's been added.
I hear Mass Effect was along the lines of "imagine if they took Starflight and made it also more of an RPG and stuff" but there were some holes in the concept that made the game that were hard to overlook. I dunno, did anyone else like it?
I still want a game where I can get in my fighter, take a trip to a space station, explore it, take a jaunt to an alien world, take a stroll on the surface, and have all sorts of fun. The development costs would be huge, of course.
Yeah, every new space-sim I play is measured up against Gemini Gold [solsector.net] (successor to the Wing Commander Privateer Remake project). Universally, they are found wanting. It isn't just nostalgia talking; Privateer is still the funnest space-sim available.
Privateer was fun for the time but they chopped out a ton of gameplay to make the ship date. If you looked through the data files, there's tons of storyline that was simply commented out.
A better version of the Privateer concept was Escape Velocity: Nova. The gameplay was top-down but all the trade and exploration elements are there along with storylines. On the downside, the storyline scripting was kind of sucky and often times you ended up needing to play with the walkthrough to make sure that you didn't screw things up. Since this was an amateur shareware game, I'm willing to cut them some slack on that.
The whole Independence War flight model seemed like it would do well with a large expansion into a Privateer setting. They had the starmaps and everything but they stuck with the missions format.
I thought that EVE Online would give me my space exploration, trading, and combat fix but while it is a strong contender, it has too many of the inherent MMORPG weaknesses, namely being a huge bloody time sink.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but how seriously are they considering the possibility of contamination? Because unless I'm remembering something wrong, perchlorates are most excellent oxidizers and hence commonly used in, oh, say, solid rocket fuel, among other things.
More specifically, this probe didn't land like the rovers, a "bouncedown" on kevlar airbags. This probe set down like the Vikings, descend from parachute and then cut it away and use thrusters for the last bit of descent. The area around the lander should have exhaust particles strewn all around.
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
The second-most famous Lipshitz changed his name to Dirty Sanchez.
Lobbyists that represent and monied interests that are, well, citizens entitled to petition government just the same as you. The elected are their servants as well. It is beyond hubris why people like you believe that your voice is more important than the voice of a "monied interest", which has more to lose from overweening government power than you do, more likely than not.
Damn, I think I'm going to have to paint my face in woad to comment on this one. Remember the line in Braveheart where Mad Mel is asking the rabble in his army "Do you think that the rich man has anything more to lose than you in this fight?" The rich man is putting his life and fortune on the line, the poor man is putting his life and maybe a few pennies in a natty purse. Who is putting more at risk in such a fight? Who has lost more, the peasant trampled to death beneath heavy cavalry or the noble who escapes with his life yet forfeits his lands? If you say it's the noble then I pity you.
This isn't based totally on science, just the assumption that anything too good to be true usually is.
There are a couple of principles I might be getting wrong here, please correct me on that.
1. Mammalian hearts all tend to have a lifespan of x number of beats. The slower the heart beats, the longer-lived the critter is. This explains why small, jumpy rodents tend to have short lives and something like a whale is long-lived. This x number seems to be fairly consistent across species.
2. Scientists have shown that restricted calorie diets in mice will lengthen their lives and they believe this will hold true for humans as well. The more you eat, the sooner you die.
3. Exercise has more components than just body movement. Muscles are strengthened through use by the tearing of muscle fibers and the healing process of repairing those tears. There's been talk of direct electric stimulation of muscles to prevent atrophy, first brought up for long space voyages, later depicted in the first Matrix movie when they had the freshly decanted Neo done up like a pin-cushion.
My assumption is that this drug will turn out to be something like steroids. Do steroids work? Absolutely! All other conditions being equal, the athlete who uses steroids will typically outperform the athlete who remains clean. Of course, the one who remains clean will also retain important things like testicles, non-lactating breasts, and a future.
Typical Slashdotter, going for a cheap knockoff rather than enjoy the real thing. But then again, I shouldn't expect any different.;-)
If I went and got the real thing, that would be kidnapping. This does not deprive her husband of use of the original Monica Bellucci, I'm just committing a copyright violation. That's far more socially acceptable.
The adjective "pensive" has the meaning you stated.
"Pensieve," I believe, is a portmanteau of "pensive" and "sieve" or filter.
Too funny, I always thought it was called a "pensive", just like the word. Funny how that works, the brain throwing out the "mistake" and substituting the proper word. That's the same reason why I'm terrible at proofing my own work, I'll automatically correct for spelling, dropped words and the like. Much as I hate paper, I always have to print anything important I need to proof. I think because the hardcopy looks sufficiently different from the monitor, my eyes are not as familiar with it and so I overlook the errors less frequently.
Hello, gentlemen. I am interested in your offering. I am linking to my specification here: http://babes.com/monica_bellucci. How long should I expect to wait for delivery?
On a related note, where exactly would you play games on an iPhone? I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it. And if you just end up using it inside, you might as well play games on a PC.
Is it just me, or did you just divide the entire Earth into two categories:
1. Places where you're likely to get robbed, and
2. in front of your PC?
I'm still wondering about what kind of tea leaf jacks your iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
"Are you better off now than you were 8 years ago?"
JOHN MCCAIN
(picture of him embracing George Bush) http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/mccain%20bush%20hug%20twn.jpg
"Four more years!"
So, instead of wasting time trying to decide whether viruses are "really" alive or not, you should just accept the fact that our knowledge today is advanced enough to show that the question--which we inherited from people who knew less than we do--is flawed.
There was an interesting scifi story I read years ago with a modern guy going back to talk to the great philosophers and he explained the modern view on a great many of the questions these worthies had speculated on. His answers were so confounding, some declared him mad and others gave up on philosophy altogether. That's kind of the same reaction us moderns have coming from newtonian physics where everything is neat and logical and looking at QM where everything seems almost intentionally perverse and counter-intuitive.
I'm looking at a trip in December, the first time I've flown in several years, and already my teeth are starting to grind. Our transportation system is a fucking joke. Between the TSA bullshit and our airlines acting as if their brains were replaced by tapioca pudding, I just know I'm in for a miserable flight.
Except Gmail encourages you to use tags, which are functionally no different to folders/directories if you just use one.
It's marginally easier to put many tags on one file as opposed to creating one file and then all the shortcuts you want in different folders as they apply. People just don't understand shortcuts. At one job, we had a big bunch of marketing cruft in a folder, 30gb of videos, pictures, etc. So and so would want that stuff in their personal folder and sure enough, they'd copy and paste. Management refused to let us set size limits on folders and so it would be a constant cycle of losing drive space, looking for the new offender, explaining how shortcuts work, making shortcuts for them, then watching some other idiot make the same mistake, then going back to the first idiot who forgot everything you told them making the mistake all over again. And any time we tried to put restrictions on things management would order them removed.
I'm of the opinion that if you can't let someone do something bad, then you won't end up being angry they did it. If people demonstrate they won't listen to instructions like "stay away from the angry bear" and management refuses to let you put the bear in a cage, you shouldn't be responsible for maulings. Doesn't work that way, though.
Someday, when holograms are commonplace, I will drive down the street, and instead of seeing my car, you will see a giant snake breathing fire on everything around me.
How likely is that? Once we have holographic projectors for cars, all the kids are going to default to screaming, angry penises. "Hey, that dick just cut me off!"
I predict a total sausage fest.
Come on, ladies.
Geeks are great, once you get to know us.
Where's your geek pride? We're swinging more pipe than that. It's gonna be a kielbasa fest!
Yah? Does he pay CCP each month? If so, he's a soddin' carebear. Real pirates steal their accounts as well as their l00t.
An attempt at such a game was made with the Battlecruiser:Unverisal Combat (www.3000ad.com) line of games, but I could never get into those. They lacked the polish of a AAA game title. Great concept, just poor execution.
Yeah, but the legendary flamewars were pretty funny. I remember usenet back in the day, dr so and so, the developer of the game, he was a trip, yelling and screaming at everyone who had something bad to say about his abortion of a game.
Man, talk about one of my all time favorite games along with Tie Fighter. Great story and overall game play. It's too bad that X-Wing vs Tie Fighter just didn't work out as well as the originals. Now, the game that I really wanted to play was the Babylon 5 space sim that was canceled waaay back in early 2000. That baby looked great!
you're talking about X-Wing Alliance. It is the final evolution of the X-Wing/TIE development line and by far the apex. LucasFarts expressly said they were going to avoid doing any more classic SW games in favor of the prequel universe. *barf* No word on whether they're relenting on that one yet.
The great thing about Alliance is you can see it's still the original engine, just with glossier graphics and more detail. Keyboard shortcuts, flight model, all are the same, just extra pretty.
Just about the only mission based space combat game I enjoyed was TIE Fighter; I'm still waiting for a decent Elite style game. I know there's X3 but it's just so dull.
The technology is pretty much here now. They nixed true flying in EVE Online because lag would have made it impossible to play. But with a more modest set of goals, a 3D flight sim version of Elite would be great. Provide a single-player game where you can trade, explore, etc, without having the MMO problem of keeping up with the Jonses. Multiplayer element would be for general combat. Just look at the way they did it in GTAIV, multiplay and singleplay are two entirely different experiences but both are tremendous fun.
The thing I remember wanting as a kid was what I always considered to be the impossible game. The way I put it at the time, "I want a space game you can fly around in like TIE Fighter but where you can land and get out of the ship like Doom." The technology is pretty much here now. The engines can handle taking off from a planetary surface and flying out into space. Games from Flashpoint to Halo to Oblivion have shown that frickin' massive worlds can be created on the current hardware and it's only going to get more impressive in time. The only drawback I can think of is that too much detail can clutter the game. The original Master of Orion was a great space empire game. The sequel threw in more detail but those details didn't really add to the game, it just made each turn take longer. There's a huge difference between adding depth versus annoying extraneous crap but it often isn't clear which is which until after it's been added.
I hear Mass Effect was along the lines of "imagine if they took Starflight and made it also more of an RPG and stuff" but there were some holes in the concept that made the game that were hard to overlook. I dunno, did anyone else like it?
I still want a game where I can get in my fighter, take a trip to a space station, explore it, take a jaunt to an alien world, take a stroll on the surface, and have all sorts of fun. The development costs would be huge, of course.
Yeah, every new space-sim I play is measured up against Gemini Gold [solsector.net] (successor to the Wing Commander Privateer Remake project). Universally, they are found wanting. It isn't just nostalgia talking; Privateer is still the funnest space-sim available.
Privateer was fun for the time but they chopped out a ton of gameplay to make the ship date. If you looked through the data files, there's tons of storyline that was simply commented out.
A better version of the Privateer concept was Escape Velocity: Nova. The gameplay was top-down but all the trade and exploration elements are there along with storylines. On the downside, the storyline scripting was kind of sucky and often times you ended up needing to play with the walkthrough to make sure that you didn't screw things up. Since this was an amateur shareware game, I'm willing to cut them some slack on that.
The whole Independence War flight model seemed like it would do well with a large expansion into a Privateer setting. They had the starmaps and everything but they stuck with the missions format.
I thought that EVE Online would give me my space exploration, trading, and combat fix but while it is a strong contender, it has too many of the inherent MMORPG weaknesses, namely being a huge bloody time sink.
So, they start cutting a bunch of it into O2, and the next thing you know - KABOOM!!! The planet explodes. Awesome.
May as well do that. It's obstructing my view of Venus.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but how seriously are they considering the possibility of contamination? Because unless I'm remembering something wrong, perchlorates are most excellent oxidizers and hence commonly used in, oh, say, solid rocket fuel, among other things.
More specifically, this probe didn't land like the rovers, a "bouncedown" on kevlar airbags. This probe set down like the Vikings, descend from parachute and then cut it away and use thrusters for the last bit of descent. The area around the lander should have exhaust particles strewn all around.
If you hit google images, you'll find out that Microsoft named their OS after a porn star.
People who have odd names (it seems especially prevalent in the Jewish community) are at a serious disadvantage in the culture that considers the name odd. This is the reason that the most famous Lipshitz ever changed his name to Ralph Lauren.
The second-most famous Lipshitz changed his name to Dirty Sanchez.
Lobbyists that represent and monied interests that are, well, citizens entitled to petition government just the same as you. The elected are their servants as well. It is beyond hubris why people like you believe that your voice is more important than the voice of a "monied interest", which has more to lose from overweening government power than you do, more likely than not.
Damn, I think I'm going to have to paint my face in woad to comment on this one. Remember the line in Braveheart where Mad Mel is asking the rabble in his army "Do you think that the rich man has anything more to lose than you in this fight?" The rich man is putting his life and fortune on the line, the poor man is putting his life and maybe a few pennies in a natty purse. Who is putting more at risk in such a fight? Who has lost more, the peasant trampled to death beneath heavy cavalry or the noble who escapes with his life yet forfeits his lands? If you say it's the noble then I pity you.
This isn't based totally on science, just the assumption that anything too good to be true usually is.
There are a couple of principles I might be getting wrong here, please correct me on that.
1. Mammalian hearts all tend to have a lifespan of x number of beats. The slower the heart beats, the longer-lived the critter is. This explains why small, jumpy rodents tend to have short lives and something like a whale is long-lived. This x number seems to be fairly consistent across species.
2. Scientists have shown that restricted calorie diets in mice will lengthen their lives and they believe this will hold true for humans as well. The more you eat, the sooner you die.
3. Exercise has more components than just body movement. Muscles are strengthened through use by the tearing of muscle fibers and the healing process of repairing those tears. There's been talk of direct electric stimulation of muscles to prevent atrophy, first brought up for long space voyages, later depicted in the first Matrix movie when they had the freshly decanted Neo done up like a pin-cushion.
My assumption is that this drug will turn out to be something like steroids. Do steroids work? Absolutely! All other conditions being equal, the athlete who uses steroids will typically outperform the athlete who remains clean. Of course, the one who remains clean will also retain important things like testicles, non-lactating breasts, and a future.
Which is why I tagged this story dildo.
Seems like the perfect use for the service :)
Can they do cavities? ;/
Ssh, you'll anger the dentist lobby.
Typical Slashdotter, going for a cheap knockoff rather than enjoy the real thing. But then again, I shouldn't expect any different. ;-)
If I went and got the real thing, that would be kidnapping. This does not deprive her husband of use of the original Monica Bellucci, I'm just committing a copyright violation. That's far more socially acceptable.
The adjective "pensive" has the meaning you stated.
"Pensieve," I believe, is a portmanteau of "pensive" and "sieve" or filter.
Too funny, I always thought it was called a "pensive", just like the word. Funny how that works, the brain throwing out the "mistake" and substituting the proper word. That's the same reason why I'm terrible at proofing my own work, I'll automatically correct for spelling, dropped words and the like. Much as I hate paper, I always have to print anything important I need to proof. I think because the hardcopy looks sufficiently different from the monitor, my eyes are not as familiar with it and so I overlook the errors less frequently.
Hello, gentlemen. I am interested in your offering. I am linking to my specification here: http://babes.com/monica_bellucci. How long should I expect to wait for delivery?
sgt: Ok, men, wax your boards and hit the surf.
pvt: Hey, do you think it's safe?
sgt: Don't worry, Geeblort don't surf!
Proof: Any average couch potatoe watching TV 24/7
Well hello there, Mr. Vice-President.
On a related note, where exactly would you play games on an iPhone? I know for a fact I wouldn't feel comfortable having an expensive gizmo like that out in the open for extended periods of time, where some tea leaf could grab it. And if you just end up using it inside, you might as well play games on a PC.
Is it just me, or did you just divide the entire Earth into two categories:
1. Places where you're likely to get robbed, and
2. in front of your PC?
I'm still wondering about what kind of tea leaf jacks your iPhone.
There's a joke here about federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison and clogged tubes but I'm just going to savor the indictment instead.