Interesting, this week I was watching the History Channel's TV show "Mega Disasters" and they were talking about comet impacts; some scientists are currently trying to determine if there was an actual catastrophic event that corresponded with "The Great Flood" which I believe is one of few myths that is almost completely universal among cultures (bear with me a little bit). According to the information provided by the TV Show (yeah yeah yeah, that's like using Wiki as a source I know:), they were arguing for a three mile comet to have impacted in the Indian Ocean about 4800 years ago. They were able to find a geologic structure that *COULD*, and I stress that word *COULD* because it yet to be proven, be an impact crater of enormous size (18 mile indent about 3000 meters under the ocean). According to the impact models, a comet of this size smacking in to our oceans would create three mile high waves that would wash over huge swathes of land and they were even able to find evidence of a massive tsunami hitting both Australia and Madagascar (and from that they triangulated a plausible location for the comet impact and it just so happened that there was a huge crater in there). Moreover, a huge amount of precipitation, ground particles and heat energy would be injected in to our atmosphere creating torrential down pours and some of the largest storms ever seen on earth.
So the years don't totally match but maybe there's some relationship between these events... Just throwing an idea out there, IANAG
Been looking for a good analogy on Chernobly for awhile; I find I get half way through the explanation and people just start to check out...if you're an American I think you understand that Pinto analogy:)
I've seen a few people go off on how Nuclear energy is only affordable when it's subsidized for various reasons, including storage. Well, with a proper network of reactors storage time goes down exponentially and ultimately are we not trying to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels to protect the environment? And in the end, as we spend more money on nuclear technologies the price goes down and this form of energy becomes even more productive.
All I can say about that image is wow! Set it as my work PC desktop and have just been sitting at my desk starring at it for the past five minutes....incredible.
Not sure if you're IT; but having done IT for a mere 3.5 years I have never once had what you described happen. Either the reboot instantly fixes the problem (because Windows probably did something stupid managing memory) or the problem persists in which case there is a bigger issue to be addressed. Three and a half years isn't a lot of time but my experience does not coincide with your perspective.
There's also these things called "books", they're just like TV but a little bit lower tech...and there are no images rendered for you, you have to use (another scary word coming up) your "imagination"! BUT, because you use your "imagination" the story can look and feel however you want!
I'm not saying that Bush is about to make a play for power but there are some very interesting and scary things going on in the world; like the US filling its Strategic Oil Reserve at fuck-all prices. Basically, the US is paying a premium to have a huge strategic oil supply and nations typically do that only when mobilizing for war. An argument could be made that all of Bush's saber rattling is, is an attempt to create an untenable situation in the middle east which will prohibit us from leaving that region and possibly even give Bush the leverage to not leave office. What scares me about this administration, is they thus far have demonstrated that they are willing to go to any means to achieve their objectives and the "my way or the highway" attitude.
Uh, Dogs like humans fail to "get the hint" all the time. About 10 years ago when I left for college, my mom got a black lab...you know a replacement thing (hmmmm not sure what that says about me...). Anyhow, she doesn't seem to understand that I'm not down with scratching her belly non-stop or getting my face licked or interacting with her in general (not a big dog person). She is a very intelligent dog, she just doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't like her...
And trust me, my mother will sit there going "Dakota, not everyone wants to be jumped on and slobbered on by you" and she persists anyways:)
Holy shit, if you put someone in a stressful situation, which playing GH can be when you're pooching the boot, they react to that stress! That's earth shattering:)
Oh but it must be the psuedo-violence depicted on the screen and not our bodies reacting to the stress of attempting to complete a task that causes this change!
Oh and we've been so civilized for so long, but these damn video games are making us soooooooooooooo violent.
Please. Natural selection requires violence; look at nature its vicious, violent and without any moral compass. What occurs is simply the species most capable of surviving, survives whatever way it has to and if that means being extraordinarily violent than so be it; it is the collective imperative of life developed through evolution.
The violence of video games is nothing new and we as a species are incredibly violent; why do you think this stuff sells in the first place?
Actually, from a business perspective, PC Gamers main customer is the companies advertising in their mag; their readership base probably barely covers the cost of production whereas advertisement is where the actual money is made. So the readership base is necessary for there to be ad sales but companies tend to listen to where the money comes from before the readership base...
It's a little tough to apply Vonnegut's quote to a video game in my opinion because of the nature of the work; Vonnegut's criticism of the critic is not as a consumer but rather as an artist. If you're familiar with the process of creating art in any of its forms you are also very familiar with the solitary nature of the process; games are collaborative efforts and have artistic aspects to them and many individual artists had to contribute to the creation of Bioshock but it's not the same as a book, a painting or a sculpture.
Vonnegut wasn't talk about the consumer and probably didn't particularly care about the consumer, I know I don't when working on my art, but what he was talking about was the incredibly difficult and personal creative process and how critics launch critiques without thought of the personal element.
Also, I'm not trying to say critics are useless, as you said they're very important to the consumer, just not the artist:)
The MPAA's core business is selling seats in theaters, and they're doing fairly well, not as well as in the mid-90's but that's a measure of the overall health of the economy I would make the argument that that was the MPAA's core business 20-25 years ago but if they have any business sense they know that this is no longer the case. The landscape has changed and the truth of the matter is for the MPAA to survive they need to understand that this is no longer their core business although they try to protect it as if it were its core business.
Music industry already got railroaded by something like this; they failed to see that their business had fundamentally changed and now they're trying to find a way to topple the iTunes market dominance. Motion picture folks still haven't totally missed the bus on this one...yet.
It's amazing how technology will cause there to be a fundamental shift in a business and these execs, like Mr. Glickman, are so locked in to their old modes of thought that they refuse to see the new doors that are opening as the old doors are closing. The automobile industry did it to the railroad industry, the internet age did it to the music industry and is on its way to doing it to the movie industry...
It's kinda like evolution, only you get to laugh at 65 year old men who throw temper tantrums about how these evil pirates are stealing billions of dollars a year from them.
We're not about to destroy the planet chicken little; we may make it very difficult for life to survive for 10,000 - 20,000 years but we do not have the capacity to destroy this planet save maybe detonating every single nuclear weapon that we have at the same time and that's not going to happen. That might not even do it when you consider the fact that four billion years ago we were hit by another celestial object (planet?) large enough that our moon was created and when that happened only 99% life was destroyed...there was still that dastardly 1% living in extreme conditions that went on to reseed this planet with all the various forms of life that we find both living and in the fossil record...
I would expect more Universities to go to bat on this, particularly after one of the preeminate law professors at Harvard issued a statement to the Universities telling them that the RIAA was full-of-it and should be fought tooth and nail because there is no case...it's taken five years to get this far and it's probably going to take another five years to get the RIAA tombstoned but so be it. On a somewhat related note, Wired ran an interesting article on Doug Morris the CEO of Universal...
Today, when he complains about how digital music created a completely new way of doing business, he actually sounds angry. "This business had been the same for 25 years," he says. "The hardest thing was to get something that somebody wanted to buy -- to make a product that anybody liked." Just because he's a CEO doesn't mean he's Smart Is anyone else really surprised, that with such a myopic attitude, that the recording industry has resorted to these sorts of tactics? It's like, come on man, businesses change...every business changes and any CEO worth his salt adjusts to those changes. Stupid assholes got caught with their pants down and now they want to change the laws of the land to take us back to 1997 when they had complete control.
The funniest thing about it to me, is at 16 year old I could see where the music industry was going. My stance on Napster was always "Create a service where I can buy songs for 99 cents a pop, get the songs I want and not an entire CD and I'll pay for the material"; iTunes came along and I have not illegally obtained a piece of music since then. Here's to Apple getting 20% more market share because I want to see this guy fail big time.
My problem with Greenpeace is very simple and has absolutely nothing to do with the spotted owl or throwing paint on fur coats; my problem with Greenpeace centers around the propaganda campaigns that they've waged against Nuclear Energy. According to Greenpeace's website, they "will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."The Ignorance is Bliss Dept.
But unfortantely the magnetic field produced by our iron core spinning will be greatly diminished and might not be strong enough to deflect the million mile per hour solar winds that our sun ejects periodically, as such our atmosphere will diminish over time!
Luckily, we'll probably kill ourselves before we have to worry about this tidal locking nonsense;)
Oh and I'm also under the impression that our tides actually make it so a much much larger portion of the earth is not under water as the gravitational affects of the moon actually cause the Earth's shape to more resemble that of a football (ellipse)[Much Better Explanation of this Phenomena].
Plus, isn't part of what will cause the tidal lock with the sun going to be the loss of the moon from an orbit that will still have a noticeable gravitational effect? And when we lose the moon, we also lose our "static" seasons (I realize they're not static but without the moon to hold us in check the North Pole would be going all over the place, instead our poles are fairly well locked).
Now your post may have all be in jest, in which case I deserve the toolbox award;)
What is the basis for this claim? To me it seems completely off base but if you can construct a cogent argument around your premise I'd love to read it.
Yeah, my boss would never make a request like that, not to mention I think it'd probably be an HR no-no. Although if I ever had a manager who did, I'd probably laugh at them for a really long time, hopefully long enough to get fired:) And as the parent said, being fired for that = some serious fun times ahead!:)
I never maintained separate identities but I was always aware that anything I posted online could be found by any one looking for it; if I don't want something to be "public domain" I don't put it online, doesn't matter how 'secure' the data is.
It's beyond me why people are so quick to spill their most personal secrets on a social networking site; it just seems to me that people have no idea that anything that they say, type or post is often available for the world to see. Sorry but I don't like that kind of invasion of privacy and I never have...I can remember being 13 years, being on AOL and being wary to give any personal information out that I would want to be in public domain, but I seem to be very alone in this idea in my peer group (26 now).
Heck, I've even had people I used to work attempt to add me to their friends list and I rejected them. Then again I'm one of those people who only accepts invitations from people I know in the flesh, don't allow myself to be searched for and never post anything on the profile anyways.
You want to know how you can tell that ID is not reflective of any sort of reality and is just a propaganda tool used by individuals with a certain value system to push their value system? Astrophysicists and quantum physicists don't have have to deal with any of this nonsense. String theory, which I assure you is just as complex as evolution, is probably understood less than evolution and actually deals with finding answers of our origin and yet no one is attempting to get string theory thrown out or to have the bibles creation story taught along side string theory. This is very intriguing to me...
Oh wait, I think I know, we don't teach string theory to 6th-12th graders and those are some great years of indoctrination. You, Sir along with all your ilk, have an Agenda with a capital A. Whether you're willing to face this reality or not, the ID movement is about getting religion taught in school not about real science.
You are incorrect sir; the store employee is not legally compelled to do anything. These are merely guidelines, and has been stated by multiple other posters, any attempt to make this mandatory has been shot down as unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, this week I was watching the History Channel's TV show "Mega Disasters" and they were talking about comet impacts; some scientists are currently trying to determine if there was an actual catastrophic event that corresponded with "The Great Flood" which I believe is one of few myths that is almost completely universal among cultures (bear with me a little bit). According to the information provided by the TV Show (yeah yeah yeah, that's like using Wiki as a source I know :), they were arguing for a three mile comet to have impacted in the Indian Ocean about 4800 years ago. They were able to find a geologic structure that *COULD*, and I stress that word *COULD* because it yet to be proven, be an impact crater of enormous size (18 mile indent about 3000 meters under the ocean). According to the impact models, a comet of this size smacking in to our oceans would create three mile high waves that would wash over huge swathes of land and they were even able to find evidence of a massive tsunami hitting both Australia and Madagascar (and from that they triangulated a plausible location for the comet impact and it just so happened that there was a huge crater in there). Moreover, a huge amount of precipitation, ground particles and heat energy would be injected in to our atmosphere creating torrential down pours and some of the largest storms ever seen on earth.
So the years don't totally match but maybe there's some relationship between these events...
Just throwing an idea out there, IANAG
Been looking for a good analogy on Chernobly for awhile; I find I get half way through the explanation and people just start to check out...if you're an American I think you understand that Pinto analogy :)
I've seen a few people go off on how Nuclear energy is only affordable when it's subsidized for various reasons, including storage. Well, with a proper network of reactors storage time goes down exponentially and ultimately are we not trying to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels to protect the environment? And in the end, as we spend more money on nuclear technologies the price goes down and this form of energy becomes even more productive.
Thanks for the analogy!
For those interested in a map of light pollution in the US: Light Pollution Map
All I can say about that image is wow! Set it as my work PC desktop and have just been sitting at my desk starring at it for the past five minutes....incredible.
Not sure if you're IT; but having done IT for a mere 3.5 years I have never once had what you described happen. Either the reboot instantly fixes the problem (because Windows probably did something stupid managing memory) or the problem persists in which case there is a bigger issue to be addressed. Three and a half years isn't a lot of time but my experience does not coincide with your perspective.
There's also these things called "books", they're just like TV but a little bit lower tech...and there are no images rendered for you, you have to use (another scary word coming up) your "imagination"! BUT, because you use your "imagination" the story can look and feel however you want!
Try it sometime.
I'm not saying that Bush is about to make a play for power but there are some very interesting and scary things going on in the world; like the US filling its Strategic Oil Reserve at fuck-all prices. Basically, the US is paying a premium to have a huge strategic oil supply and nations typically do that only when mobilizing for war. An argument could be made that all of Bush's saber rattling is, is an attempt to create an untenable situation in the middle east which will prohibit us from leaving that region and possibly even give Bush the leverage to not leave office. What scares me about this administration, is they thus far have demonstrated that they are willing to go to any means to achieve their objectives and the "my way or the highway" attitude.
Uh, Dogs like humans fail to "get the hint" all the time. About 10 years ago when I left for college, my mom got a black lab...you know a replacement thing (hmmmm not sure what that says about me...). Anyhow, she doesn't seem to understand that I'm not down with scratching her belly non-stop or getting my face licked or interacting with her in general (not a big dog person). She is a very intelligent dog, she just doesn't understand why anyone wouldn't like her...
:)
:)
And trust me, my mother will sit there going "Dakota, not everyone wants to be jumped on and slobbered on by you" and she persists anyways
All I'm saying is they're just like us
Holy shit, if you put someone in a stressful situation, which playing GH can be when you're pooching the boot, they react to that stress! That's earth shattering :)
Oh but it must be the psuedo-violence depicted on the screen and not our bodies reacting to the stress of attempting to complete a task that causes this change!
Oh and we've been so civilized for so long, but these damn video games are making us soooooooooooooo violent.
Please. Natural selection requires violence; look at nature its vicious, violent and without any moral compass. What occurs is simply the species most capable of surviving, survives whatever way it has to and if that means being extraordinarily violent than so be it; it is the collective imperative of life developed through evolution.
The violence of video games is nothing new and we as a species are incredibly violent; why do you think this stuff sells in the first place?
Actually, from a business perspective, PC Gamers main customer is the companies advertising in their mag; their readership base probably barely covers the cost of production whereas advertisement is where the actual money is made. So the readership base is necessary for there to be ad sales but companies tend to listen to where the money comes from before the readership base...
But that is the most important difference that can ever exist on slashdot....Microsoft.
Maybe Commander Taco should take Xbox Live to court over IP infringement, after all it was Slashdots idea first! THOSE BASTARDS!
It's a little tough to apply Vonnegut's quote to a video game in my opinion because of the nature of the work; Vonnegut's criticism of the critic is not as a consumer but rather as an artist. If you're familiar with the process of creating art in any of its forms you are also very familiar with the solitary nature of the process; games are collaborative efforts and have artistic aspects to them and many individual artists had to contribute to the creation of Bioshock but it's not the same as a book, a painting or a sculpture.
:)
Vonnegut wasn't talk about the consumer and probably didn't particularly care about the consumer, I know I don't when working on my art, but what he was talking about was the incredibly difficult and personal creative process and how critics launch critiques without thought of the personal element.
Also, I'm not trying to say critics are useless, as you said they're very important to the consumer, just not the artist
Music industry already got railroaded by something like this; they failed to see that their business had fundamentally changed and now they're trying to find a way to topple the iTunes market dominance. Motion picture folks still haven't totally missed the bus on this one...yet.
It's amazing how technology will cause there to be a fundamental shift in a business and these execs, like Mr. Glickman, are so locked in to their old modes of thought that they refuse to see the new doors that are opening as the old doors are closing. The automobile industry did it to the railroad industry, the internet age did it to the music industry and is on its way to doing it to the movie industry...
It's kinda like evolution, only you get to laugh at 65 year old men who throw temper tantrums about how these evil pirates are stealing billions of dollars a year from them.
We're not about to destroy the planet chicken little; we may make it very difficult for life to survive for 10,000 - 20,000 years but we do not have the capacity to destroy this planet save maybe detonating every single nuclear weapon that we have at the same time and that's not going to happen. That might not even do it when you consider the fact that four billion years ago we were hit by another celestial object (planet?) large enough that our moon was created and when that happened only 99% life was destroyed...there was still that dastardly 1% living in extreme conditions that went on to reseed this planet with all the various forms of life that we find both living and in the fossil record...
Actually, more aptly put, point taken...I'm not as anonymous as I want to think.
Creepy indeed.
Is anyone else really surprised, that with such a myopic attitude, that the recording industry has resorted to these sorts of tactics? It's like, come on man, businesses change...every business changes and any CEO worth his salt adjusts to those changes. Stupid assholes got caught with their pants down and now they want to change the laws of the land to take us back to 1997 when they had complete control.
The funniest thing about it to me, is at 16 year old I could see where the music industry was going. My stance on Napster was always "Create a service where I can buy songs for 99 cents a pop, get the songs I want and not an entire CD and I'll pay for the material"; iTunes came along and I have not illegally obtained a piece of music since then. Here's to Apple getting 20% more market share because I want to see this guy fail big time.
My problem with Greenpeace is very simple and has absolutely nothing to do with the spotted owl or throwing paint on fur coats; my problem with Greenpeace centers around the propaganda campaigns that they've waged against Nuclear Energy. According to Greenpeace's website, they "will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."The Ignorance is Bliss Dept.
But unfortantely the magnetic field produced by our iron core spinning will be greatly diminished and might not be strong enough to deflect the million mile per hour solar winds that our sun ejects periodically, as such our atmosphere will diminish over time!
;)
;)
Luckily, we'll probably kill ourselves before we have to worry about this tidal locking nonsense
Oh and I'm also under the impression that our tides actually make it so a much much larger portion of the earth is not under water as the gravitational affects of the moon actually cause the Earth's shape to more resemble that of a football (ellipse)[Much Better Explanation of this Phenomena].
Plus, isn't part of what will cause the tidal lock with the sun going to be the loss of the moon from an orbit that will still have a noticeable gravitational effect? And when we lose the moon, we also lose our "static" seasons (I realize they're not static but without the moon to hold us in check the North Pole would be going all over the place, instead our poles are fairly well locked).
Now your post may have all be in jest, in which case I deserve the toolbox award
What is the basis for this claim? To me it seems completely off base but if you can construct a cogent argument around your premise I'd love to read it.
Yeah, my boss would never make a request like that, not to mention I think it'd probably be an HR no-no. Although if I ever had a manager who did, I'd probably laugh at them for a really long time, hopefully long enough to get fired :) And as the parent said, being fired for that = some serious fun times ahead! :)
I never maintained separate identities but I was always aware that anything I posted online could be found by any one looking for it; if I don't want something to be "public domain" I don't put it online, doesn't matter how 'secure' the data is.
It's beyond me why people are so quick to spill their most personal secrets on a social networking site; it just seems to me that people have no idea that anything that they say, type or post is often available for the world to see. Sorry but I don't like that kind of invasion of privacy and I never have...I can remember being 13 years, being on AOL and being wary to give any personal information out that I would want to be in public domain, but I seem to be very alone in this idea in my peer group (26 now).
Heck, I've even had people I used to work attempt to add me to their friends list and I rejected them. Then again I'm one of those people who only accepts invitations from people I know in the flesh, don't allow myself to be searched for and never post anything on the profile anyways.
You want to know how you can tell that ID is not reflective of any sort of reality and is just a propaganda tool used by individuals with a certain value system to push their value system? Astrophysicists and quantum physicists don't have have to deal with any of this nonsense. String theory, which I assure you is just as complex as evolution, is probably understood less than evolution and actually deals with finding answers of our origin and yet no one is attempting to get string theory thrown out or to have the bibles creation story taught along side string theory. This is very intriguing to me...
Oh wait, I think I know, we don't teach string theory to 6th-12th graders and those are some great years of indoctrination. You, Sir along with all your ilk, have an Agenda with a capital A. Whether you're willing to face this reality or not, the ID movement is about getting religion taught in school not about real science.
You are incorrect sir; the store employee is not legally compelled to do anything. These are merely guidelines, and has been stated by multiple other posters, any attempt to make this mandatory has been shot down as unconstitutional.