Second hand sales let you get (relatively) recent game for lower price. The same as do steam sales. Which is why you can support second hand sales and steam in the same breath. Heck I can at the moment buy a lot of gmae half price, on steam, some of which I saw full price or only 10% off in retail stores.
What you describe is a belief, an assumption, but not a religion. Even when some atheist DO make the statement they are 100% sure there is no gods, they still have no credo, no ceremony, no priest or priesthood, no leitmotiv, no church, no chants, no holy books, nothing BUT that belief in 100% surety non existence of gods. That does not make it a religon. Otherwise 9/11 truther , Alien landing believer, and other believer in woo stuff would be religion. They are not. It needs much much more than that to have a religion. Thus the assertion atheist are religious even pertaining to the 100% sure atheist , is false.
Consumerist is asking the consumer *which* company they felt was the worst (insert here "at consumer service"). The company you cited have a very small group as consumer, or no "consumer" at all (black water). You could be a morally abject company making oil out of live kitten, if no consumer whatsoever has contact with you, you won't appear on the poll.
The poll should read actually "Worst company of the year, as felt by consumer of their products vis a vis of their service". Not as catchy as "worst company of the year" though.
I am with you sis' but among my community only the mostr idealist of us were thinking this "We never thought that every government in the world, even traditional enemies, would ally themselves with one goal: Destroy this new vessel of human freedom." The msot realist (and I was among them) were more like "enjoy it while it last because very soon all gov & corp of the world will fall onto this new medium like a ton of brick".
They are dowsing rod using the idea motor effect to fool you into thinking it detects anything. Dowsing rode do not work. When properly tested for say, finding metal and water, in double blind, the dowser never find stuff above chance. it is pure flim flam. So even as a 13$ gold ball finder , it is a scam.
It is so heavily subsided it isn't funny. For example if you install solar panel, you get to sell your electricity back to utility at a *higher* price than what the utility sell normal electricty (from gas or coal) do. That "cost parity" you cite is actually quite artificial in germany. In fact would the subsidie disappear and the utilitiies pay the market price, nobody would by solar. Low insolation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Europe-en.png most germany is about 1000 kw.h/m^2/year with a bit of spike toward 1100 in the south) where the united state is mostly 2.400 kw.h./m^2/year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NREL_USA_PV_map_lo-res_2008.jpg multiply by 365) even the northern part of the US seems to get more than the southern part of germany.
And we are speaking of very heavy subsidy here , to the tune of more than 10 billion per year until recentely when they were slightly lowered.
The biggest war on the US soil was south versus north, american against american. I do not see the US military less likely to shoot other american, you would just have to give them the correct "justification" and select carefully which units you involve.
90+% of those going into politics are power hungry and relatively rich. They care only for more money and more pwoer. It does not matter if they are democain , repucrate, socialist, libs, communist, facism, neo nazi or whatever country they are in. The political process is self filtering and self selecting the sewage waste greedy corrupt to come up. Some are just much better at hiding they are as bad as the rest, and still fool other people. Some are less able. They will tell the populist things to do during the election, but care only for the end results : the power and money. Yep I am very cynical.
It is a speed camera, it is set up at place where there are no lights, to check if you speed, and usually they are set up so that if you are above 5% of the limit they blitz you. Frankly they are not a scam, and force people to slow to the speed the road is set at. We have 3 at our town and the number of accident and near accident reduced significantly, people were going into the town at high speed, thinking the high speed road was continuing despite all the warning signs on lower speed in the city.
The server are just handling simulating communication between region and saving the city data. That could be made local, just like your average LAN FPS. There is no part of the simulation which is on the server which could not be made local.
If you ban porn, you ban potential "pressure" outlet for some men, which instead of masturbating in their home, might simply fall down on the side of rapping what they find outside. I do see that as a real risk, and sadly those idiot might actually generate violence with their political shenanigan.
There are as many idiot on bike as in car. BUT and that is a really important point, idiot biker are far more likely to damage themselves than to damage other, on the contrary to idiot in car. In fact for many of the point you cited above , I saw in the last years at least one car doing it. Up to the point of having a geisterfahrer (guys which take the highway on the frigging wrong direction going coutner sense of the other car).
"- Let's speed down the middle of a one-way street, going the wrong way."
Have had car do that on me. At 40 mph in a city road because they were in a hurry.
- Let's ride down the middle of an actual highway... yeh, nothing bad will happen here. (Seriously, saw that and went WTF)
As said above see my paragraph about geisterfahrer.
- That red light (or stop sign) at the bottom of the hill is only for cars... I don't need to stop or even slow down
Was badly hurt by a car which tought red light don't count. There was no policeman so hey who the fuck care about red light, right RIGHT ? And I don't count the number of time where car think stops sign and "right of way" do not count if you ride a bike. And seems surprised when you fume at them ("You should not be in the road , it is for car only fucktard")
- Let's make a left turn here while on this 40MpH road without indicating or looking, I'm sure the car behind me can stop in time
My colleagues fumes about cars doing that all the time, never putting the blinker light. So I am guessing ehre it is actually a widespread "sport" of forgetting for everybody to put a indication. On the other hand nearly 1/3 of the time if I put my arm to the left, the guys whicha re up to 100m behind me REEVES their motor up the wazoo and accelerate to pass before I go to the left. I dunno for the US, but here once you put your harm to the elft, unless they were already engaged to pass over you, they should not accelerate , they should slow down and let the bike pass. As I said a full 1/3 of the population ignore that fully.
- Hmm, I think I'll dig in my pocket and look for my cellphone, then start talking on the cellphone, while weaving around like a drunk idiot
Like cars. Which is why there are so many law against driving with cellphone and so many fines distributed.
- Hmm, I'm obviously not a great cyclist... so let me ride carelessly on a 40MpH road, fall down in the middle of the road without a helmet, and nearly cause a bunch of accidents as they try not to drive over my head.
How often that happens ? get real.
Oh yeah and my all time classic. old driver thinking they will brake and accelerate instead I was nearly killed by one guy and his wife parking in a sport car, thankfully a tree stopped the car right in its track and they were not wounded,, the car totalled, but there hadn't been the tree I would probably be in a hospital or gone. At least old biker are not a menace to everybody else.
Facts is, I frankly think there are a higher number of idiot on bike than there is on car. But the idiots in cars provocate hundreds, thousands of death every year. Those in bike do not.
You do it once that preparation, and it is still much cheaper than buy tons of paper, print it, distribute it, get back unsold or even the breakage rate, and that does not even count shipping over sea. Ebook you can distribute internationally forever. There is no way in hell preparing a book would be cheaper than preparing an ebook even if there is more than 1 vendor.
Most support i get from US company is impolite, angry, terse, and have exactly the same type of behavior you describe. That is not because the stereotype about american is true, it is because some american are stupid and impolite, like some french are stupid and impolite. When you say the "prejudice" is sometimes true,you only confirm an inherent bias by not recognizing that the full breadth of character and behavior exists in all country. In fact as human we tend to do a lot of selection bias : we tend to not remember all the polite encounter and positive stuff which went without an hiccup, and remember very very well the very few negative one because they are so jarring compared to the rest.
Don't confuse selection bias with prejudice being real.
We were being tested on solving a frigging problem, and not on whether we could retain by heart 100 of equation. We were being tested on understanding not tore memory. We could have books, lessons, anything. The math was usually simple enough anyway, approximated to the first number after comma. In the end we did not have all perfect note we had a gaussian around the middle, because the problem given were real world physic, chemistry and engineering problem that we had to solve and show our reasoning.
Who cares about rote memoring ? In real life you can look up any reference. The most interresting stuff is : can you look the correct reference up, do you udnerstand what you were taught, and can you on your own solve a problem.
After you are 7 or 8 year old any rote memory teaching is *lazy* and icnredibly backward in our world.
There was no detail given, only concept art and CGI, no detail on gameplay at all. In fact it was pure 100% unadultered PR hype without basis. About the only things they announced is 1) it is not a MMO but use of its trapping (hu?) 2) probably not coming from PC
At this point I would say I am about as informed as I was yesterday i.e. not at all.
Pornography is mostly produced by willing people in the US/EU. But icelandic politic rather than admit they have a big dildo stuck in the ass and are conservative wanting to censure why they don't like, rename the issue as "progressive" and paint women doing porn as poor poor fragile forced doll unable to decide for themselves and which have to be protected against themselves and ban porn. In other word people stuck in the middle age thinking women are unable to decide for themselves, or horror , wanting to work in porn. *shrug* if the icelandic people keep electing conservatist, their problem, it is a democratic society, but calling the decision "progressive" irks me.
If we are reporting on "stuff who matters" then you may drop all pretense and rename slashotNN. Slashdot has always been about stuff that matter on the technological news , geek, and other similarly cultural references. Now it is all sort of news ? Non sense.
Many of the part of the ancient testament get stuff out of order, or even downright wrong (like the the "slave" in egypt), and the new testament is the same.
As for the "skeptic bible" I agree with you it is somewhat shrill, but a lot of point are valid even if not given politely. Like for example somebody getting cursed and bear mauling 40 children, or the amount of incest, drunken rape, massacre and terrible things happenning, or even the fact that *nothing* said in the bible be it scientifically or morally was new at the time (code of amurabi is older, golden rule too).
"And atheists are different? Big bang was the atheist answer to God for nearly a century."
Some of the basis for the big bang theopry came frpm a priest : "n 1927, the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître proposed an expanding model for the universe to explain the observed redshifts of spiral nebulae, and forecast the Hubble law. He based his theory on the work of Einstein and De Sitter, and independently derived Friedmann's equations for an expanding universe. Also, the red shifts themselves were not constant, but varied in such manner as to lead to the conclusion that there was a definite relationship between amount of red-shift of nebulae, and their distance from observers." Hoyle an opponent of the theory coined the term big bang. That makes you fully wrong.
But more importantely atheist need no big bang, no evolution to say "god dont exists" simply again point to absence of evidence of god. Theist NEVER provide non-personal , verifiable, evidence of god existence. That's why there is atheist, because if there was evidence it would not be called "faith", but rather "theory of chrisitanism". So. Yeah.
from the wiki on platypus :
"The platypus and other monotremes were very poorly understood, and some of the 19th century myths that grew up around themâ"for example, that the monotremes were "inferior" or quasireptilianâ"still endure.[60] In 1947, William King Gregory theorised that placental mammals and marsupials may have diverged earlier, and a subsequent branching divided the monotremes and marsupials, but later research and fossil discoveries have suggested this is incorrect.[60][61] In fact, modern monotremes are the survivors of an early branching of the mammal tree, and a later branching is thought to have led to the marsupial and placental groups.[60][62] Molecular clock and fossil dating suggest platypuses split from echidnas around 19â"48 million years ago"
Seeing that the article is speaking of older time, the split happenned after that common ancestor.
Inverse square law is a bitch. Even us we only sent 2 signals which had a chance to go beyond our solar system. Nothing else we sent would be heard beyond 1 light year.
Distance between stars, round trip, and power of the signal you have to send to a particular planet, point of time in civilisation development.... So many obstacle as to make communication improbable and a waste of time and resource (remember we are only *hearing* , *sending* is much much more costly especially when you do not know where you have to send to and how far, we have only 2* a few minutes signal we sent which went further away than a few light years 8back in the 70) all other radio/radar/tv they are all gone into noise latest by 1 light year many much nearer than that).
In other word the "aliens" might have already figurated that it is useless to try to spend energy on the off chance somebody might hear.
And frankly even if all alien are bad bad evil carnivorous paranoid invader whatever , what do you think they will do if they detect a civilisation 10000 light years away ? Come and invade ? pffft. Unless you come up with fantasy FTl drive it will be at best 10000 years trip and more probably a few millions years. *shrug*.
I published a few paper (Quantum physic), and i do care that people read them. But I would not want somebody to take them and CHANGE them potentially reflecting badly unto me because the guy changing it make a blunder. *shrug* not a surprise other feel the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Second hand sales let you get (relatively) recent game for lower price. The same as do steam sales. Which is why you can support second hand sales and steam in the same breath. Heck I can at the moment buy a lot of gmae half price, on steam, some of which I saw full price or only 10% off in retail stores.
What you describe is a belief, an assumption, but not a religion. Even when some atheist DO make the statement they are 100% sure there is no gods, they still have no credo, no ceremony, no priest or priesthood, no leitmotiv, no church, no chants, no holy books, nothing BUT that belief in 100% surety non existence of gods. That does not make it a religon. Otherwise 9/11 truther , Alien landing believer, and other believer in woo stuff would be religion. They are not. It needs much much more than that to have a religion. Thus the assertion atheist are religious even pertaining to the 100% sure atheist , is false.
Consumerist is asking the consumer *which* company they felt was the worst (insert here "at consumer service"). The company you cited have a very small group as consumer, or no "consumer" at all (black water). You could be a morally abject company making oil out of live kitten, if no consumer whatsoever has contact with you, you won't appear on the poll.
The poll should read actually "Worst company of the year, as felt by consumer of their products vis a vis of their service". Not as catchy as "worst company of the year" though.
See luke and leia were not the first to be tempted :P.
I am with you sis' but among my community only the mostr idealist of us were thinking this "We never thought that every government in the world, even traditional enemies, would ally themselves with one goal: Destroy this new vessel of human freedom." The msot realist (and I was among them) were more like "enjoy it while it last because very soon all gov & corp of the world will fall onto this new medium like a ton of brick".
They are dowsing rod using the idea motor effect to fool you into thinking it detects anything. Dowsing rode do not work. When properly tested for say, finding metal and water, in double blind, the dowser never find stuff above chance. it is pure flim flam. So even as a 13$ gold ball finder , it is a scam.
It is so heavily subsided it isn't funny. For example if you install solar panel, you get to sell your electricity back to utility at a *higher* price than what the utility sell normal electricty (from gas or coal) do. That "cost parity" you cite is actually quite artificial in germany. In fact would the subsidie disappear and the utilitiies pay the market price, nobody would by solar. Low insolation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Europe-en.png most germany is about 1000 kw.h/m^2/year with a bit of spike toward 1100 in the south) where the united state is mostly 2.400 kw.h./m^2/year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NREL_USA_PV_map_lo-res_2008.jpg multiply by 365) even the northern part of the US seems to get more than the southern part of germany.
And we are speaking of very heavy subsidy here , to the tune of more than 10 billion per year until recentely when they were slightly lowered.
The biggest war on the US soil was south versus north, american against american. I do not see the US military less likely to shoot other american, you would just have to give them the correct "justification" and select carefully which units you involve.
90+% of those going into politics are power hungry and relatively rich. They care only for more money and more pwoer. It does not matter if they are democain , repucrate, socialist, libs, communist, facism, neo nazi or whatever country they are in. The political process is self filtering and self selecting the sewage waste greedy corrupt to come up. Some are just much better at hiding they are as bad as the rest, and still fool other people. Some are less able. They will tell the populist things to do during the election, but care only for the end results : the power and money. Yep I am very cynical.
It is a speed camera, it is set up at place where there are no lights, to check if you speed, and usually they are set up so that if you are above 5% of the limit they blitz you. Frankly they are not a scam, and force people to slow to the speed the road is set at. We have 3 at our town and the number of accident and near accident reduced significantly, people were going into the town at high speed, thinking the high speed road was continuing despite all the warning signs on lower speed in the city.
The server are just handling simulating communication between region and saving the city data. That could be made local, just like your average LAN FPS. There is no part of the simulation which is on the server which could not be made local.
If you ban porn, you ban potential "pressure" outlet for some men, which instead of masturbating in their home, might simply fall down on the side of rapping what they find outside. I do see that as a real risk, and sadly those idiot might actually generate violence with their political shenanigan.
There are as many idiot on bike as in car. BUT and that is a really important point, idiot biker are far more likely to damage themselves than to damage other, on the contrary to idiot in car. In fact for many of the point you cited above , I saw in the last years at least one car doing it. Up to the point of having a geisterfahrer (guys which take the highway on the frigging wrong direction going coutner sense of the other car).
"- Let's speed down the middle of a one-way street, going the wrong way."
Have had car do that on me. At 40 mph in a city road because they were in a hurry.
- Let's ride down the middle of an actual highway... yeh, nothing bad will happen here. (Seriously, saw that and went WTF)
As said above see my paragraph about geisterfahrer.
- That red light (or stop sign) at the bottom of the hill is only for cars... I don't need to stop or even slow down
Was badly hurt by a car which tought red light don't count. There was no policeman so hey who the fuck care about red light, right RIGHT ? And I don't count the number of time where car think stops sign and "right of way" do not count if you ride a bike. And seems surprised when you fume at them ("You should not be in the road , it is for car only fucktard")
- Let's make a left turn here while on this 40MpH road without indicating or looking, I'm sure the car behind me can stop in time
My colleagues fumes about cars doing that all the time, never putting the blinker light. So I am guessing ehre it is actually a widespread "sport" of forgetting for everybody to put a indication. On the other hand nearly 1/3 of the time if I put my arm to the left, the guys whicha re up to 100m behind me REEVES their motor up the wazoo and accelerate to pass before I go to the left. I dunno for the US, but here once you put your harm to the elft, unless they were already engaged to pass over you, they should not accelerate , they should slow down and let the bike pass. As I said a full 1/3 of the population ignore that fully.
- Hmm, I think I'll dig in my pocket and look for my cellphone, then start talking on the cellphone, while weaving around like a drunk idiot
Like cars. Which is why there are so many law against driving with cellphone and so many fines distributed.
- Hmm, I'm obviously not a great cyclist... so let me ride carelessly on a 40MpH road, fall down in the middle of the road without a helmet, and nearly cause a bunch of accidents as they try not to drive over my head.
How often that happens ? get real.
Oh yeah and my all time classic. old driver thinking they will brake and accelerate instead
I was nearly killed by one guy and his wife parking in a sport car, thankfully a tree stopped the car right in its track and they were not wounded,, the car totalled, but there hadn't been the tree I would probably be in a hospital or gone.
At least old biker are not a menace to everybody else.
Facts is, I frankly think there are a higher number of idiot on bike than there is on car. But the idiots in cars provocate hundreds, thousands of death every year. Those in bike do not.
You do it once that preparation, and it is still much cheaper than buy tons of paper, print it, distribute it, get back unsold or even the breakage rate, and that does not even count shipping over sea. Ebook you can distribute internationally forever. There is no way in hell preparing a book would be cheaper than preparing an ebook even if there is more than 1 vendor.
Most support i get from US company is impolite, angry, terse, and have exactly the same type of behavior you describe. That is not because the stereotype about american is true, it is because some american are stupid and impolite, like some french are stupid and impolite. When you say the "prejudice" is sometimes true,you only confirm an inherent bias by not recognizing that the full breadth of character and behavior exists in all country. In fact as human we tend to do a lot of selection bias : we tend to not remember all the polite encounter and positive stuff which went without an hiccup, and remember very very well the very few negative one because they are so jarring compared to the rest.
Don't confuse selection bias with prejudice being real.
We were being tested on solving a frigging problem, and not on whether we could retain by heart 100 of equation. We were being tested on understanding not tore memory. We could have books, lessons, anything. The math was usually simple enough anyway, approximated to the first number after comma. In the end we did not have all perfect note we had a gaussian around the middle, because the problem given were real world physic, chemistry and engineering problem that we had to solve and show our reasoning.
Who cares about rote memoring ? In real life you can look up any reference. The most interresting stuff is : can you look the correct reference up, do you udnerstand what you were taught, and can you on your own solve a problem.
After you are 7 or 8 year old any rote memory teaching is *lazy* and icnredibly backward in our world.
There was no detail given, only concept art and CGI, no detail on gameplay at all. In fact it was pure 100% unadultered PR hype without basis. About the only things they announced is 1) it is not a MMO but use of its trapping (hu?) 2) probably not coming from PC
At this point I would say I am about as informed as I was yesterday i.e. not at all.
Pornography is mostly produced by willing people in the US/EU. But icelandic politic rather than admit they have a big dildo stuck in the ass and are conservative wanting to censure why they don't like, rename the issue as "progressive" and paint women doing porn as poor poor fragile forced doll unable to decide for themselves and which have to be protected against themselves and ban porn. In other word people stuck in the middle age thinking women are unable to decide for themselves, or horror , wanting to work in porn. *shrug* if the icelandic people keep electing conservatist, their problem, it is a democratic society, but calling the decision "progressive" irks me.
If we are reporting on "stuff who matters" then you may drop all pretense and rename slashotNN. Slashdot has always been about stuff that matter on the technological news , geek, and other similarly cultural references. Now it is all sort of news ? Non sense.
Many of the part of the ancient testament get stuff out of order, or even downright wrong (like the the "slave" in egypt), and the new testament is the same.
As for the "skeptic bible" I agree with you it is somewhat shrill, but a lot of point are valid even if not given politely. Like for example somebody getting cursed and bear mauling 40 children, or the amount of incest, drunken rape, massacre and terrible things happenning, or even the fact that *nothing* said in the bible be it scientifically or morally was new at the time (code of amurabi is older, golden rule too).
"And atheists are different? Big bang was the atheist answer to God for nearly a century."
Some of the basis for the big bang theopry came frpm a priest : "n 1927, the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître proposed an expanding model for the universe to explain the observed redshifts of spiral nebulae, and forecast the Hubble law. He based his theory on the work of Einstein and De Sitter, and independently derived Friedmann's equations for an expanding universe. Also, the red shifts themselves were not constant, but varied in such manner as to lead to the conclusion that there was a definite relationship between amount of red-shift of nebulae, and their distance from observers." Hoyle an opponent of the theory coined the term big bang. That makes you fully wrong.
But more importantely atheist need no big bang, no evolution to say "god dont exists" simply again point to absence of evidence of god. Theist NEVER provide non-personal , verifiable, evidence of god existence. That's why there is atheist, because if there was evidence it would not be called "faith", but rather "theory of chrisitanism". So. Yeah.
from the wiki on platypus :
"The platypus and other monotremes were very poorly understood, and some of the 19th century myths that grew up around themâ"for example, that the monotremes were "inferior" or quasireptilianâ"still endure.[60] In 1947, William King Gregory theorised that placental mammals and marsupials may have diverged earlier, and a subsequent branching divided the monotremes and marsupials, but later research and fossil discoveries have suggested this is incorrect.[60][61] In fact, modern monotremes are the survivors of an early branching of the mammal tree, and a later branching is thought to have led to the marsupial and placental groups.[60][62] Molecular clock and fossil dating suggest platypuses split from echidnas around 19â"48 million years ago"
Seeing that the article is speaking of older time, the split happenned after that common ancestor.
Inverse square law is a bitch. Even us we only sent 2 signals which had a chance to go beyond our solar system. Nothing else we sent would be heard beyond 1 light year.
Distance between stars, round trip, and power of the signal you have to send to a particular planet, point of time in civilisation development.... So many obstacle as to make communication improbable and a waste of time and resource (remember we are only *hearing* , *sending* is much much more costly especially when you do not know where you have to send to and how far, we have only 2* a few minutes signal we sent which went further away than a few light years 8back in the 70) all other radio/radar/tv they are all gone into noise latest by 1 light year many much nearer than that).
In other word the "aliens" might have already figurated that it is useless to try to spend energy on the off chance somebody might hear.
And frankly even if all alien are bad bad evil carnivorous paranoid invader whatever , what do you think they will do if they detect a civilisation 10000 light years away ? Come and invade ? pffft. Unless you come up with fantasy FTl drive it will be at best 10000 years trip and more probably a few millions years. *shrug*.
I published a few paper (Quantum physic), and i do care that people read them. But I would not want somebody to take them and CHANGE them potentially reflecting badly unto me because the guy changing it make a blunder. *shrug* not a surprise other feel the same.