I would immediately note that the mere fact that her work is cited by creationists to support a creationist perspective does not in any way imply that she agrees with them. Maybe she does; maybe she doesn't. Any paleontologist would be thrilled to find unfossilized dinosaur tissue, regardless of his opinion of the age of the earth, simply because we can learn a lot from such tissue.
I won't deny that this finding is exciting for creationists, but that's irrelevant to the existence of the tissue itself. The existence of the tissue is a matter of hard science. It will be peer reviewed (if it hasn't already been), and if it's faulty, those faults will be exposed. I expect that it will be scrutinized especially closely because unfossilized tissue does seem unlikely from the prevailing viewpoint. The reviewers will want to be meticulous in their examination of the finding, which is of course only proper.
It seems to me this is 100% a matter of taste. Personally, I would prefer to play something that looks real over something that is a cartoon. I prefer NOT to play anime-style games. When I was growing up with 8-bit Nintendo graphics, I would imagine the characters in my mind as being realistic, not cartoons. (8-bit graphics certainly left a lot to the imagination...) I've always seen the progress of video game graphics as moving toward realism. I want to see games reach a photorealistic level. I don't think they are there yet. So I want to see a Zelda game that looks like, say, the LOTR movies, as opposed to anime-style artwork.
Other people will disagree. They will prefer to see games that are more abstract and based on artistic styles like anime. That's fine. No one's opinion is more valid than anyone else's. I do, however, reserve the right to anticipate the new Zelda game because its graphics are more in line with what I enjoy, and I reserve the right to be disappointed with the graphics of Wind Waker because they aren't in line with what I want to see. I also respect that others may prefer the artistic style of WW to a realistic one, and it's certainly completely within their rights to have their own vision of what Zelda should look like.
None of that, of course, has any bearing on the game that actually gets made.;) But it might have some bearing on who buys it...
"While this movie sits in purgatory, possible lead actors age themselves out of the picture. OSC, though, is confident the actor who will play Ender has indeed been born:)"
It's not entirely a bad thing that the movie is in "purgatory". A few years back, I recall that OSC was interested in having Jake "yippee!!" Lloyd play Ender.
Sometimes it's a good thing when a kid actor gets too old for a role...;)
The trick here is that sometimes one wants a movie to be faithful to a book, and sometimes one doesn't.
If, for example, I think the ending to a particular book (such as Jurassic Park) is weak, and a movie gives it a different ending (even one that changes the 'heart' of the plot), then I may well consider the movie to be an improvement.
Or, if a change is made in the interest of making better use of the film format (such as removing Tom Bombadil from LOTR, for example --- a change that arguably streamlines the first part of the plot and allows for more important events to be included), I may agree with that change and consider the movie to be good in its own right, even though it is not completely faithful to the source material.
Or, if a change seems to be gratuitous and does not improve the original concept or make the story flow better on film, then I'm likely to think that it is a poor change. In LOTR, I would point to Frodo wrestling Gollum into the Crack of Doom as an example of a poor change. The scene in the book was perfect, and any change to that would be a poor one, in my estimation.
It all depends on how one views the source material. If one sees room for improvement in that source material, then it's likely a movie could make those improvements. If, however, one believes the source is already the best it can be, then I doubt any movie could truly live up to it.
As far as I'm concerned, the legality of EULAs is mostly irrelevant to Blizzard's decision to crack down on people selling in-game items. The fact remains that whether or not the EULA is enforceable, whether or not the concept of intellectual property is valid, one must still connect to Blizzard's servers to play the game. Those servers are Blizzard's property by any measure. As such they are well within their rights to ban people from them for whatever reason they choose. It doesn't matter whether or not the EULA has anything to say about it. Even if the EULA were to be completely voided by a court ruling and the sale of the game defaulted to standard copyright law, Blizzard would still have the right to control access to a server which is their private property.
There may be (and I daresay there are) good grounds for challenging the validity of EULAs, but this case really isn't one of them.
cnn.com had a unique solution. Their headline said "Ken Jennings Hits Jeopardy Milestone". You wouldn't know unless you clicked it that the "milestone" was actually losing. If you wanted to be surprised, you wouldn't be reading the article in the first place, and the headline wouldn't give it away explicitly.
One year I used up nearly my entire inventory of AOL floppies (yes, it was that long ago) and CDs in making a halloween costume. I simply taped them all to a normal set of clothes, used a floppy disk as an eyepatch, and presto --- I was a software pirate.
Possibly off-topic but, the three Blizzard games I have here (Warcraft III, StarCraft Diablo II) have warnings on the boxes that you will need to agree to a licence.
I wonder if any of companies do the same thing?
Yes, I've seen the warning on other games as well. I think I saw it on an EA Sports game, or perhaps one of the Total War games.
"So you assume that you can steal any game that doesn't have a EULA on the outside of the box?"
No, I assume I can buy that copy and use it however I please as long as I don't make more copies and distribute them. That is what copyright law prohibits. If I buy a copy of a game, I own that one copy, no matter what any text inside the box might say and no matter what stupid human tricks I have to perform in order to make it work. The only thing I don't own is the right to distribute it.
"58 million people voted for Bush, that doesn't mean "noone was upset about Bush's policy on Iraq.""
To extend your metaphor, many people who don't like Bush's Iraq policy ended up voting for him anyway, because they liked the alternative even less. Likewise, a lot of people put up with Steam because, while they don't like it, they like the idea of NOT playing Half-Life less.
Creationism and intelligent design are NOT the same thing.
Creationism is the belief that God created the universe from nothing. Intelligent design is the belief that living organisms are too complex to have arisen by random chance. They're complementary, to be sure, but they are not the same thing. One might be a deist, for example, and believe that God created the universe originally and then left it to run on its own --- which would imply that one believes in creation but NOT ID. Or, one might believe that some entity other than what we think of as "God" designed life on Earth, in which case one might believe in ID but not creation.
Creationism is a religious belief which is not testable and depends on fundamental assumptions that are at odds with mainstream science. ID, however, does not require those assumptions, and it does have some implications that can be tested and discussed from a scientific standpoint. It postulates, for example, that there is no possible mechanism for certain complex biological constructs to have evolved from simple molecules. Such a hypothesis could potentially be proved or disproved by applying known physical and chemical laws to the problem.
This is not meant to judge the truth of this stuff, merely to explain what it is. There's a ton of misunderstanding on all sides of the issue.
The other SG teams are the Stargate equivalent of the red-shirt crew members in Star Trek. If you see an SG team other than SG-1 in an episode, you can be pretty sure there are going to be fatalities before the show's over.
No, that was a real episode. Maybourne and Jack were stranded on an alien planet. After that Jack promised that they'd find Maybourne a nice, out-of-the way offworld location to drop him off where he could live out the rest of his days without fear of being rounded up and executed for treason. As far as I know he hasn't surfaced again since that, but if they did want to bring him back, they wouldn't have to do any cheesy resurrection crap.
Of course, they COULD be setting themselves up for a "Wrath of Khan" knockoff...
Slashdot Mirror
I won't deny that this finding is exciting for creationists, but that's irrelevant to the existence of the tissue itself. The existence of the tissue is a matter of hard science. It will be peer reviewed (if it hasn't already been), and if it's faulty, those faults will be exposed. I expect that it will be scrutinized especially closely because unfossilized tissue does seem unlikely from the prevailing viewpoint. The reviewers will want to be meticulous in their examination of the finding, which is of course only proper.
Other people will disagree. They will prefer to see games that are more abstract and based on artistic styles like anime. That's fine. No one's opinion is more valid than anyone else's. I do, however, reserve the right to anticipate the new Zelda game because its graphics are more in line with what I enjoy, and I reserve the right to be disappointed with the graphics of Wind Waker because they aren't in line with what I want to see. I also respect that others may prefer the artistic style of WW to a realistic one, and it's certainly completely within their rights to have their own vision of what Zelda should look like.
None of that, of course, has any bearing on the game that actually gets made. ;) But it might have some bearing on who buys it...
It's not entirely a bad thing that the movie is in "purgatory". A few years back, I recall that OSC was interested in having Jake "yippee!!" Lloyd play Ender.
Sometimes it's a good thing when a kid actor gets too old for a role... ;)
I don't know what's scarier --- that you referenced Star Trek in a debate about the Bible, or that I understood the reference.
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Never tell me the odds.
If, for example, I think the ending to a particular book (such as Jurassic Park) is weak, and a movie gives it a different ending (even one that changes the 'heart' of the plot), then I may well consider the movie to be an improvement.
Or, if a change is made in the interest of making better use of the film format (such as removing Tom Bombadil from LOTR, for example --- a change that arguably streamlines the first part of the plot and allows for more important events to be included), I may agree with that change and consider the movie to be good in its own right, even though it is not completely faithful to the source material.
Or, if a change seems to be gratuitous and does not improve the original concept or make the story flow better on film, then I'm likely to think that it is a poor change. In LOTR, I would point to Frodo wrestling Gollum into the Crack of Doom as an example of a poor change. The scene in the book was perfect, and any change to that would be a poor one, in my estimation.
It all depends on how one views the source material. If one sees room for improvement in that source material, then it's likely a movie could make those improvements. If, however, one believes the source is already the best it can be, then I doubt any movie could truly live up to it.
There may be (and I daresay there are) good grounds for challenging the validity of EULAs, but this case really isn't one of them.
They don't like yankees? I understand the feeling. I'm from Mississippi, and we don't like them either.
If you're going to start a Google bomb, it would help to spell the words in the link correctly.
cnn.com had a unique solution. Their headline said "Ken Jennings Hits Jeopardy Milestone". You wouldn't know unless you clicked it that the "milestone" was actually losing. If you wanted to be surprised, you wouldn't be reading the article in the first place, and the headline wouldn't give it away explicitly.
I'd pay better money if it were a REAL mace rather than the self-defense spray.
One year I used up nearly my entire inventory of AOL floppies (yes, it was that long ago) and CDs in making a halloween costume. I simply taped them all to a normal set of clothes, used a floppy disk as an eyepatch, and presto --- I was a software pirate.
I'd take those odds. If you think 1 in 500,000 is a realistic chance, I have some lottery tickets I'd like to sell you.
I wonder if any of companies do the same thing?
Yes, I've seen the warning on other games as well. I think I saw it on an EA Sports game, or perhaps one of the Total War games.
No, I assume I can buy that copy and use it however I please as long as I don't make more copies and distribute them. That is what copyright law prohibits. If I buy a copy of a game, I own that one copy, no matter what any text inside the box might say and no matter what stupid human tricks I have to perform in order to make it work. The only thing I don't own is the right to distribute it.
Haven't played Call of Duty, have you?
To extend your metaphor, many people who don't like Bush's Iraq policy ended up voting for him anyway, because they liked the alternative even less. Likewise, a lot of people put up with Steam because, while they don't like it, they like the idea of NOT playing Half-Life less.
Creationism is the belief that God created the universe from nothing. Intelligent design is the belief that living organisms are too complex to have arisen by random chance. They're complementary, to be sure, but they are not the same thing. One might be a deist, for example, and believe that God created the universe originally and then left it to run on its own --- which would imply that one believes in creation but NOT ID. Or, one might believe that some entity other than what we think of as "God" designed life on Earth, in which case one might believe in ID but not creation.
Creationism is a religious belief which is not testable and depends on fundamental assumptions that are at odds with mainstream science. ID, however, does not require those assumptions, and it does have some implications that can be tested and discussed from a scientific standpoint. It postulates, for example, that there is no possible mechanism for certain complex biological constructs to have evolved from simple molecules. Such a hypothesis could potentially be proved or disproved by applying known physical and chemical laws to the problem.
This is not meant to judge the truth of this stuff, merely to explain what it is. There's a ton of misunderstanding on all sides of the issue.
The other SG teams are the Stargate equivalent of the red-shirt crew members in Star Trek. If you see an SG team other than SG-1 in an episode, you can be pretty sure there are going to be fatalities before the show's over.
Is Adam Baldwin close enough? They already had him on the show...
Of course, they COULD be setting themselves up for a "Wrath of Khan" knockoff...
You know, you had a really good troll going until you added that little tidbit.
Funny, we have a saying like that here in Mississippi: "Thank God for Arkansas."
This feature already exists, after a fashion. Type about:config in the location bar and you get a nice long list of preferences you can tweak.