An old Bronze Age story - basically a Just-So story explaining why there are different languages. Seems that all the people of the world used to get along together in perfect harmony, and they decided to build a tower that would reach to heaven. God did not like this, and scrambled everyone's languages so that they couldn't understand each other and spent the rest of history fighting instead of cooperating.
No, I think they are annoyed as I am at the customers that come in every day looking at what is on the clearance rack or any other good deal. If they don't see anything they like they ask if there is anything else on clearance.
I used to work in a supermarket. Grocery department - a lot of stuff there with a very short shelf-life. Anything that's nearing the sell-by date gets reduced and reduced again to get rid of it quick.
So, every night just before closing at ten o'clock, these same few people would always turn up. They'd go through all the about-to-expire stuff we had out, and then they'd go through the rest to see if there was anything we'd missed - and if there was, they'd bring it up and offer to pay 10p for it. Bloody vultures... But they know if we don't sell now then we're taking the lot out back and putting it in the bin.
Well, fuck: the boss went home at five, and it's not our money. Out comes the stickering gun, 10p, no problem. Soon we realised that we needn't bother stickering all this stuff for discounts earlier in the day - leave it on the shelf, and these guys will do the job of sorting for us. Of course that meant they always got it for 10p rather than the 50p we might have got from the students / office workers / etc filing through at six or so, but it's not our money.
Of course, the best stuff we always found and hid behind the lettuce because we wanted that 10p price for ourselves. And anything like bags of apples or packs of mushrooms always got opened and poured into the loose produce if it was past sell-by.
Now, come on... Britain in 1984 was not only a privacy-free surveillance state, it was completely cut off from the rest of Europe and locked into a destructive alliance with the United States. You're exaggerating things enormously here.
Perhaps we're coming at this from different angles. You seem to define 'person' as the whole system: brain and body, while I'm considering 'person' to mean only the personality. I'd happily apply the word 'person' to a biologically normal human being, to a brain in a crippled body communicating by speech synthesiser, to a brain in a vat communicating only by computer, and to an artificial intelligence that passes the Turing test.
So, going by my meaning of 'person', I would say: 'I am a person, implemented as a brain, resident inside a head which I call mine'. Barring the possible changes produced by the different hormones, I'd still be me even if transplanted into a female body - and since you're communicating with me only by text, would you be able to tell the difference?
Unless, of course, you meant transplanting your brain into newborn or young child bodies, which makes a bit more sense, but is IMO sick.
In a situation where 'it's him or me', surely one cannot be blamed for choosing 'me'? Now, if I'm faced with the choice of either dying myself, or letting someone else die, I'll surely let them die. So why shouldn't I take the body of a child to house my brain, rather than permit my own death?
It's him or me. I choose me.
However, there is still this difficulty that it works both ways. Perhaps we could work out some genetic manipulation: produce a race of brainless humanoids, physically flawless but with no minds, to bypass this awkward technicality...
Ask any public librarian what the most frequently stollen book is. Most likely, it is the bible. The irony kills me.
But of course. The one book a thief can be guaranteed not to own is the Bible - if the thief did have a Bible he would not be a thief, because he would know that stealing is wrong. Naturally a thief will target books he does not already own, and so the Bible is the number-one most stolen book:-)
Umh, the person is the person, obviously. Just as the car is the car, and not the engine.
So - the rest of the body is necessary, then? IANANeuroscientist, but it seems to me that I'm still the same person even if I have prosthetic arms, or a transplanted heart or liver - the brain is the only organ I can think of for which I cannot say that.
Are you referring to the effects of hormones and so on? If so, you probably have a case there: I wonder what the effect would be if my brain were transplanted into a female body, for instance, with its very different chemical environment? It would be a fascinating experiment to conduct, though unfortunately it would probably be condemned as unethical.
NO, it's "technically" the equivillant to setting up your own printing press, manufacturing bibles, and giving them away.
People used to get in really deep trouble for doing that. You think the RIAA are harsh: they're nothing to what the Church used to do to people who dared violate their monopoly on salvation.
This just adds credence to a problem that Microsoft seems to be suffering from. The Marketing and Advertising divisions of Microsoft dictate the direction of the company.
With a commercial transmitter putting out several KW's but being 50 miles away and you putting out 100MW but being several yards away it is quite possible you will win out.
With 100MW from several yards away it is quite certain that I will win out. I'll not only take over the signal, I'll burn out the receiver, melt the car, blast a large hole through the building on the other side of the road and set fire to just about everything in the area. Of course I'll need a pretty impressive power supply to do this.
While it's not "normally" permitted, it's hard to say if they ever get turned down.
Tinfoil hat time:
The NSA spies on foreigners, not on Americans.
GCHQ spies on foreigners, not on Britons.
The UK and USA are pretty close allies and exchange a whole lot of intelligence anyway.
Hmm... now, if someone wanted to spy on some Americans but didn't want to get NSA hands dirty, how might they go about it... ?
They SAY that UNIT was disbanded. It's a lie! In fact the funding and many of the personnel were transferred to the X-COM project after the disappearance of the Doctor.
In the late 1990s X-COM was merged with the American MAJESTIC intelligence organsation and the Japanese engineering research group NERV to form a coordinated defence against alien threats. This is the context in which the Doctor is finally making his return... ooh, it's going to be good!
A close friend of mine who's 18 and getting ready to go off to college still isn't allowed on the computer when her mom is at work during the day. The computer is password protected so the mom has to be around when they're on it. They just accept it and deal with it.
Of course by 'deal with it', you mean with a Knoppix CD?
I think your use of the phrase 'bad guy' serves to reinforce the grandparent's comment, not contradict it.
Possibly - though since history is written by the winners, any counterfactual campaign would probably be 'being the bad guy'. One scenario I mentioned that I'd like to play out was the Spanish invasion of England in 1588: it could certainly be argued that England at that time was a rogue state openly sponsoring terrorist attacks, and Spain was quite justified in acting against Elizabeth's illegitimate regime. But the Armada was defeated, and in English minds to this day King Philip was undoubtedly the bad guy...
Just out of interest, how many games have you heard about where you have to stop domestic terrorists?
A further note to my previous post: Deus Ex.
Of course, halfway through you see the light and join the terrorists. Again, though, I'd like to have had the choice to be the bad guy, to stay with UNATCO - eliminate my treasonous brother, hunt down his terrorist backers and maybe just get something going with the hot cyborg girl...
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THIS is why I bought a forty-gig MP3 player!
It bloody does. Industrial Sabotage? Poison Water Supply? Plant Nuclear Device?
An old Bronze Age story - basically a Just-So story explaining why there are different languages. Seems that all the people of the world used to get along together in perfect harmony, and they decided to build a tower that would reach to heaven. God did not like this, and scrambled everyone's languages so that they couldn't understand each other and spent the rest of history fighting instead of cooperating.
Nice guy.
I used to work in a supermarket. Grocery department - a lot of stuff there with a very short shelf-life. Anything that's nearing the sell-by date gets reduced and reduced again to get rid of it quick.
So, every night just before closing at ten o'clock, these same few people would always turn up. They'd go through all the about-to-expire stuff we had out, and then they'd go through the rest to see if there was anything we'd missed - and if there was, they'd bring it up and offer to pay 10p for it. Bloody vultures... But they know if we don't sell now then we're taking the lot out back and putting it in the bin.
Well, fuck: the boss went home at five, and it's not our money. Out comes the stickering gun, 10p, no problem. Soon we realised that we needn't bother stickering all this stuff for discounts earlier in the day - leave it on the shelf, and these guys will do the job of sorting for us. Of course that meant they always got it for 10p rather than the 50p we might have got from the students / office workers / etc filing through at six or so, but it's not our money.
Of course, the best stuff we always found and hid behind the lettuce because we wanted that 10p price for ourselves. And anything like bags of apples or packs of mushrooms always got opened and poured into the loose produce if it was past sell-by.
Ah, the sordid memories... :-)
Now, come on... Britain in 1984 was not only a privacy-free surveillance state, it was completely cut off from the rest of Europe and locked into a destructive alliance with the United States. You're exaggerating things enormously here.
So, going by my meaning of 'person', I would say: 'I am a person, implemented as a brain, resident inside a head which I call mine'. Barring the possible changes produced by the different hormones, I'd still be me even if transplanted into a female body - and since you're communicating with me only by text, would you be able to tell the difference?
In a situation where 'it's him or me', surely one cannot be blamed for choosing 'me'? Now, if I'm faced with the choice of either dying myself, or letting someone else die, I'll surely let them die. So why shouldn't I take the body of a child to house my brain, rather than permit my own death?
It's him or me. I choose me.
However, there is still this difficulty that it works both ways. Perhaps we could work out some genetic manipulation: produce a race of brainless humanoids, physically flawless but with no minds, to bypass this awkward technicality...
But of course. The one book a thief can be guaranteed not to own is the Bible - if the thief did have a Bible he would not be a thief, because he would know that stealing is wrong. Naturally a thief will target books he does not already own, and so the Bible is the number-one most stolen book :-)
So - the rest of the body is necessary, then? IANANeuroscientist, but it seems to me that I'm still the same person even if I have prosthetic arms, or a transplanted heart or liver - the brain is the only organ I can think of for which I cannot say that.
Are you referring to the effects of hormones and so on? If so, you probably have a case there: I wonder what the effect would be if my brain were transplanted into a female body, for instance, with its very different chemical environment? It would be a fascinating experiment to conduct, though unfortunately it would probably be condemned as unethical.
Well, Wordpad's ridiculous. I'd use Excel.
Column A contains a lot of
23523: asdf[134] - foo bar : xyz
Column B is
=LEFT(A1,FIND(":",A1))
Column C is)
=RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-FIND(":",A1,(FIND(":",A1)+1))
Column D is
=CONCATENATE(B1," ",C1)
Now, isn't that lot much simpler than what you'd have had to do in Linux? ;-)
Scotland might contest that one.
So, just out of curiosity... if not the brain, what is?
But his deference is... and his laughter is...
People used to get in really deep trouble for doing that. You think the RIAA are harsh: they're nothing to what the Church used to do to people who dared violate their monopoly on salvation.
Someone already did. And would you believe it was the French?
Mindless jerks...
With 100MW from several yards away it is quite certain that I will win out. I'll not only take over the signal, I'll burn out the receiver, melt the car, blast a large hole through the building on the other side of the road and set fire to just about everything in the area. Of course I'll need a pretty impressive power supply to do this.
Perhaps you meant 100mW?
Tinfoil hat time:
The NSA spies on foreigners, not on Americans.
GCHQ spies on foreigners, not on Britons.
The UK and USA are pretty close allies and exchange a whole lot of intelligence anyway.
Hmm... now, if someone wanted to spy on some Americans but didn't want to get NSA hands dirty, how might they go about it... ?
In the late 1990s X-COM was merged with the American MAJESTIC intelligence organsation and the Japanese engineering research group NERV to form a coordinated defence against alien threats. This is the context in which the Doctor is finally making his return... ooh, it's going to be good!
0/2 = 0. You may rest easy: our planetary prestige is undamaged!
Of course by 'deal with it', you mean with a Knoppix CD?
But what's the deal with this Counterstrike guy? This Gerhard Duesten fellow - why googlebomb him?
Unless you want to know about Gentoo penguins, as opposed to the DIY Linux distro, of course.
Possibly - though since history is written by the winners, any counterfactual campaign would probably be 'being the bad guy'. One scenario I mentioned that I'd like to play out was the Spanish invasion of England in 1588: it could certainly be argued that England at that time was a rogue state openly sponsoring terrorist attacks, and Spain was quite justified in acting against Elizabeth's illegitimate regime. But the Armada was defeated, and in English minds to this day King Philip was undoubtedly the bad guy...
A further note to my previous post: Deus Ex.
Of course, halfway through you see the light and join the terrorists. Again, though, I'd like to have had the choice to be the bad guy, to stay with UNATCO - eliminate my treasonous brother, hunt down his terrorist backers and maybe just get something going with the hot cyborg girl...