Hey don't lump ALL Asians into one group. Just among the ethnic Chinese, you have people from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and emigrants around the world. Are you going to argue that Singapore, which has some of the strictest laws in the world including those for littering, has a morality issue?
Religion has nothing to do with "cheating" or not. Its a social phenomenon that has everything to do with being indoctrinated into corrupt, flawed ideology and perpetuated by a dog-eat-dog system.
You just don't go through The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and not get totally screwed up by it as a culture.
Or maybe these advanced extraterrestrials believe in something akin to the "Prime Directive" like in Star Trek:
No identification of self or mission. No interference with the social development of said planet. No references to space or the fact that there are other worlds or civilizations.
Why should interface and display technology remain stagnant?
Flexible/foldable LCD "Paper" displays and projectable keyboards and gesture-based interfacing should solve that.
I once had a half-full bottle of diet coke I had absent-mindedly shoved into my carry-on bag confiscated by airport security. The guy calls out to his buddies "oh snap, we got another one here!" lobs the bottle into the trash, gives me a "you've just been served. move along."-look and proceeds to laugh it up with his co-workers/frat brothers.
The least he could've done is asked if I wanted to finish my drink before I passed through security check. I felt humiliated and emasculated in front of everybody.
I am the farthest thing from a terrorist, but at that moment I was wishing the most terrible things to happen to those security guards. Not only don't I feel any safer with these so-called "homeland security guards" on the job, I feel like fighting AGAINST them. Hows that for effective homeland security?
'only fear competition from other established giants... companies whose character as gatekeepers of video distribution and discovery won't be substantially different.'
Yes, because companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. all started out as established giants, right?
The character cut-scenes were hilarious and so are their super-powers. The Howard Dean scream attack and the Hulk Hogan attacks had me rolling. The Republican Evil-Boss caricatures were funny as well.
Used to run an RPG BBS on the C=64
on
D&D Is 30
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· Score: 1
Thats right. On a 1200 Baud modem, I ran an RPG BBS that basically consisted of a bunch of message boards in ASCII text (no color) and THAT WAS IT. My storage consisted of two 1581 3.5 floppy drives and two 1571 disk drives daisy chained together for a SWEET (at that time) 4 megs of storage. Only one person at a time could log on. At 1200 Baud you could actually kind of see the text print out character by character (well, 300 Baud was probably more prone to that).
The phone ringing at all hours of the night and the "EEeeeeEeeee-oooOooo-KrrkrrRrrrR" carrier signal would drive my parents crazy.
Once we got into the 90's I got into running MUDs (my fave was Island MUD), but before that, some people would go really nuts on the BBS's and get 26 phone lines and hookem up to 26 HST 14.4 modems running Searchlight or Wildcat software.
... it should be our voting machines. The new Diebold computerized voting system is a patented "black-box". Votes go in, tallies come out, and no one knows what goes on inside. Of all things that should be in the public domain and open for all to see, it should be the program thats used to calculate the votes which will determine the leaders of the "free world"
Eh, you've built a nice strawman. But unfortunately, like the one in Wizard of Oz, its brainless.
I don't know what "debunkers" are supposed to be, but skeptics, like Schermer, do not automatically assume that things are impossible because they have yet to see evidence. Only that they have yet to be sufficiently proven to exist. In other words, skeptics do not "disbelieve", they simply withhold belief, until it is deserved.
All a skeptic desires is evidence. Yes, you can say men can fly, but why in the world should anyone simply believe your word unless you show them some evidence? (for example, take them to an airport, explain the physics and aerodynamics behind the wing).
If you come up to me and claim that you have traveled to Alpha Centauri in a spaceship, why the heck should I believe you without sufficient evidence? Doing so is called "blind faith". That is the domain of religion.
I agree that the tomatometer is by no means an accurate measure of how much one will "like" a movie is, but it does give a pretty good ballpark idea of the quality of the film in terms of writing, pacing, acting, cinematography etc..
I have actually subconciously created a margin of error in my head of around ~10% on the Tomatometer score, so that a score of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes could potentially be as good as a personal 60% score to me or as bad a 40% personal score. It seems like a fairly good distribution for me. I will also add or subtract points based on the genre of the movie and also weigh some reviews heavier than others. But in general, I think a margin of 10-15% is good for me.
I consider a movie "good" if it is above at or above an 80% personal score or above, so a movie with a 70% Tomatometer could potentially be "good" to me.
Hell First Contact got a 93% and it wasn't even all that great. I can pretty much rest assure that Nemesis will be the same awful tripe that was Insurrection, which got a 59% rank. If this type of stuff is entertaining to the "average Star Trek fan", then the average Star Trek fan has set very low standards form themselves.
Lets see some other recent examples of the SF-bias in the media:
Movies with character development never succeed
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
Because movies that feature deep and original storylines with a lot of character dialogue and development are never successful in the theaters! MORE EXPLOSIONS AND BOOBIES!!!
Again, the source in the article didn't buy the VCD and check to see if it was an actual copy of The Two Towers. In other words, the dope saw some CD-cases with a jacket-cover that claimed the content was LOTR:TTT. People routinely get fooled by VCD vendors with fake movies.
There has been no sign of the TTT VCD on any of the VCD/SVCD release sites, like http://www.vcdquality.com and http://www.isonews.com nor on any of the Usenet newsgroups. I tend to believe that these reports are untrue. Episode 2 was out and all over the place 2-3 weeks before the actual theater premiere. The Two Towers, however, is nowhere to be seen except in reportedly in China in news releases and anecdotes only.
There a lot of programs that use the "Win" prefix in their names, like "WinZip, WinFax, WinAmp, et al". Or OTOH there are products with the descriptive appendix "...for Windows". Are these products under fire as well, or is this simply associated with putting Lindows out of business for good?
You don't think there are millions of Chinese just dying to move to Hong Kong? There are! The problem is the government won't let them, and Taiwan doesn't want them either.
After Epsiode one this became even more attractive to Darwinists. We learned that the force (in Lucas's world) is caused not by the supernatural, but by a scientifically proven biological symbiosis with this little mitichlorian dudes. Truly a cool and fantastic idea. Now if only the religious right would let us genetically engineer some . ..
Errr... I am an evolutionist and I find the whole "midichlorian" explanation to be extremely disagreeable. I like the idea of an inexplicable magical "Force" because unlike in real life, I was perfectly willing to accept supernatural phenomenon in the Star Wars universe, and it added a sense of fantasy to the setting.
The whole "bacterial" explanation for the Force opens a whole new can of worms for me and rather suddenly jolts me out of my suspension of disbelief:(
I wonder if it occurred to the retarded villains who committed this hideous act that they might have blown up a bunch of their own country-men. I know for a fact that there is a sizable population of Palestinian and Middle Eastern immigrants living and working in NYC.:(
I've always wanted to visit the 8th Plane of Hell and pop-off a "How do you do?" to Mephistopheles.
What once was lost, now is found..
on
TigerCloning
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· Score: 1
Yep, the Coelocanth, a giant prehistoric fish that was once considered extinct was found to be very much alive in the 1930's. Same thing could happen again to any number of extinct animals.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you might have a case of Hyperthymesia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymestic
The actress Marilu Henner supposedly has this condition. She claims to remember every day of her life since age 11.
Its rare, but it happens and apparently it can be a exhausting and a burden on the person.
Game manuals have long been a staple of my bathroom library.
Which usually meant that I had no idea what the heck I was doing until my bowels started moving...
Hey don't lump ALL Asians into one group. Just among the ethnic Chinese, you have people from Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and emigrants around the world. Are you going to argue that Singapore, which has some of the strictest laws in the world including those for littering, has a morality issue?
Religion has nothing to do with "cheating" or not. Its a social phenomenon that has everything to do with being indoctrinated into corrupt, flawed ideology and perpetuated by a dog-eat-dog system.
You just don't go through The Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and not get totally screwed up by it as a culture.
Or maybe these advanced extraterrestrials believe in something akin to the "Prime Directive" like in Star Trek:
Why should interface and display technology remain stagnant? Flexible/foldable LCD "Paper" displays and projectable keyboards and gesture-based interfacing should solve that.
The least he could've done is asked if I wanted to finish my drink before I passed through security check. I felt humiliated and emasculated in front of everybody.
I am the farthest thing from a terrorist, but at that moment I was wishing the most terrible things to happen to those security guards. Not only don't I feel any safer with these so-called "homeland security guards" on the job, I feel like fighting AGAINST them. Hows that for effective homeland security?
Yes, because companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. all started out as established giants, right?
The character cut-scenes were hilarious and so are their super-powers. The Howard Dean scream attack and the Hulk Hogan attacks had me rolling. The Republican Evil-Boss caricatures were funny as well.
Thats right. On a 1200 Baud modem, I ran an RPG BBS that basically consisted of a bunch of message boards in ASCII text (no color) and THAT WAS IT. My storage consisted of two 1581 3.5 floppy drives and two 1571 disk drives daisy chained together for a SWEET (at that time) 4 megs of storage. Only one person at a time could log on. At 1200 Baud you could actually kind of see the text print out character by character (well, 300 Baud was probably more prone to that).
The phone ringing at all hours of the night and the "EEeeeeEeeee-oooOooo-KrrkrrRrrrR" carrier signal would drive my parents crazy.
Once we got into the 90's I got into running MUDs (my fave was Island MUD), but before that, some people would go really nuts on the BBS's and get 26 phone lines and hookem up to 26 HST 14.4 modems running Searchlight or Wildcat software.
Being educated is elitism. Lets all just stay dumb and do as we're told no questions asked. Its so much easier to be told what to think.
The fact that MOST Americans don't mind having their liberties stifled and/or taken away, doesn't make it any more ethical or easier to swallow.
... it should be our voting machines. The new Diebold computerized voting system is a patented "black-box". Votes go in, tallies come out, and no one knows what goes on inside. Of all things that should be in the public domain and open for all to see, it should be the program thats used to calculate the votes which will determine the leaders of the "free world"
I don't know what "debunkers" are supposed to be, but skeptics, like Schermer, do not automatically assume that things are impossible because they have yet to see evidence. Only that they have yet to be sufficiently proven to exist. In other words, skeptics do not "disbelieve", they simply withhold belief, until it is deserved.
All a skeptic desires is evidence. Yes, you can say men can fly, but why in the world should anyone simply believe your word unless you show them some evidence? (for example, take them to an airport, explain the physics and aerodynamics behind the wing).
If you come up to me and claim that you have traveled to Alpha Centauri in a spaceship, why the heck should I believe you without sufficient evidence? Doing so is called "blind faith". That is the domain of religion.
I agree that the tomatometer is by no means an accurate measure of how much one will "like" a movie is, but it does give a pretty good ballpark idea of the quality of the film in terms of writing, pacing, acting, cinematography etc..
I have actually subconciously created a margin of error in my head of around ~10% on the Tomatometer score, so that a score of 50% on Rotten Tomatoes could potentially be as good as a personal 60% score to me or as bad a 40% personal score. It seems like a fairly good distribution for me. I will also add or subtract points based on the genre of the movie and also weigh some reviews heavier than others. But in general, I think a margin of 10-15% is good for me.
I consider a movie "good" if it is above at or above an 80% personal score or above, so a movie with a 70% Tomatometer could potentially be "good" to me.
Hell First Contact got a 93% and it wasn't even all that great. I can pretty much rest assure that Nemesis will be the same awful tripe that was Insurrection, which got a 59% rank. If this type of stuff is entertaining to the "average Star Trek fan", then the average Star Trek fan has set very low standards form themselves.
Lets see some other recent examples of the SF-bias in the media:
Minority Report - 93%
The Matrix - 87%
Galaxy Quest - 86%
Contact - 84%
Because movies that feature deep and original storylines with a lot of character dialogue and development are never successful in the theaters! MORE EXPLOSIONS AND BOOBIES!!!
Again, the source in the article didn't buy the VCD and check to see if it was an actual copy of The Two Towers. In other words, the dope saw some CD-cases with a jacket-cover that claimed the content was LOTR:TTT. People routinely get fooled by VCD vendors with fake movies.
All signs point to bullshit.
There has been no sign of the TTT VCD on any of the VCD/SVCD release sites, like http://www.vcdquality.com and http://www.isonews.com nor on any of the Usenet newsgroups. I tend to believe that these reports are untrue. Episode 2 was out and all over the place 2-3 weeks before the actual theater premiere. The Two Towers, however, is nowhere to be seen except in reportedly in China in news releases and anecdotes only.
I don't believe it.
There a lot of programs that use the "Win" prefix in their names, like "WinZip, WinFax, WinAmp, et al". Or OTOH there are products with the descriptive appendix "...for Windows". Are these products under fire as well, or is this simply associated with putting Lindows out of business for good?
I'm waiting for this thing to develop an A.I., sprout tentacles, become mobile then rumble out and start to destroy Tokyo.
You don't think there are millions of Chinese just dying to move to Hong Kong? There are! The problem is the government won't let them, and Taiwan doesn't want them either.
Errr care to explain how Singapore is a freedom hating regime? :\
After Epsiode one this became even more attractive to Darwinists. We learned that the force (in Lucas's world) is caused not by the supernatural, but by a scientifically proven biological symbiosis with this little mitichlorian dudes. Truly a cool and fantastic idea. Now if only the religious right would let us genetically engineer some . . .
:(
Errr... I am an evolutionist and I find the whole "midichlorian" explanation to be extremely disagreeable. I like the idea of an inexplicable magical "Force" because unlike in real life, I was perfectly willing to accept supernatural phenomenon in the Star Wars universe, and it added a sense of fantasy to the setting.
The whole "bacterial" explanation for the Force opens a whole new can of worms for me and rather suddenly jolts me out of my suspension of disbelief
I wonder if it occurred to the retarded villains who committed this hideous act that they might have blown up a bunch of their own country-men. I know for a fact that there is a sizable population of Palestinian and Middle Eastern immigrants living and working in NYC. :(
I've always wanted to visit the 8th Plane of Hell and pop-off a "How do you do?" to Mephistopheles.
Yep, the Coelocanth, a giant prehistoric fish that was once considered extinct was found to be very much alive in the 1930's. Same thing could happen again to any number of extinct animals.