Totally. The shortage of Luxuries has been a killer lately. I mean, sure, I got a Wii, but all those guys in red yelling outside? Poor guys missed out. And the Elvis impersonator doesn't seem to be impressing them much...
I guess it's a double standard to say that reliving WW2 in so many FPS games is the same idea, but to me being a kid going through a school killing your peers is something nobody should WANT to do...
So who should want to go to war?
At least the Columbine shooters were killing people they personally hated. I think there's something far sicker about going about killing people you have no personal quarrel with, on the orders of politicians thousands of miles away...
The error in your reasoning starts when you assume that self-appointed do-gooders have the right to infringe the rights of third parties.
Is it the right of the owner of a mail server freely to accept or refuse messages at will? Is it his right to define whatever rules he wishes for the acceptance or rejection of email? Is there anybody in the world who has the right to order him to do otherwise?
If the answers are 'yes', 'yes' and 'no' respectively, I submit to you that it is those who would silence SORBS, SPEWS and the like who are infringing the rights of third parties, by ordering mail admins to only use means of filtering email of which they personally approve.
They're also planning to announce a second-generation Cell
Why don't they seem to be making any kind of performance comparisons?
There've been no firm figures since the Frieza chip reached end-of-line. Exactly how much higher Cell-2 rates than Cell-1 is hard to say, although Piccolo/Kami in an SLI configuration falls somewhere between. The Bejita-SSJ+ beats both on all benchmarks, and Cell-3 'Perfect' beats everything unless you overclock a Gohan to the undocumented and unsupported SSJ2 setting.
Terrorism is the worst thing our country has had to face in possibly centuries, granted
What rubbish.
1) War of independence against the British Empire
2) Persistent threat from hostile Indians to frontier settlements
3) Another war with the Empire: Washington sacked, White House burned to the ground
4) Devastating Civil War
5) Wars with Spain and Mexico
6) War with Germany
7) Near-total economic collapse almost leading to revolt (see 'Bonus Army')
8) War with Germany and Japan
9) 50 years of continual threat of total nuclear annihilation
Next to this lot, does terrorism even come up on the radar? Three thousand killed in about a decade of bin Laden trying his very best? That's insignificant. Why the hell are Americans so damn frightened all of a sudden?
This leads to "news" organizations such as al-jazeera arising, and "reporting" bile-laden "stories" as "independent reporting". This "reporting" seems to follow the government line in most cases, and terrorists lines for the rest of the cases.
Al Jazeera's critical coverage has angered some Arab leaders. In Algeria, Iran, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, reporters were refused accreditation and bureaus' were denied permission to open this year.
They're nice about Qatar - self-censorship again, even in the absence of official coercion - but they're certainly not a mere propaganda mouthpiece. Indeed, I'd say that any channel which is denounced angrily by both the Americans and the Iranians must be doing something right - in the same way that the writers of Spitting Image used to feel proud of getting complaints of bias from all the parties:-)
Qatar, and all of the other arab/islamic governments censor what their citizenry can see.
Not so:
Qatar formally lifted censorship of the media in 1995 and since then the press has been essentially free from government interference. However, social and political constraints make self-censorship commonplace.
Now, NASA could have done something like Ares I and V back then. Ie, a smallish manned launcher and a heavy lifter designed to be cheaper to manufacture and launch than a Saturn V.
IIRC, there was a smaller Saturn, the IB, which was used for Earth orbital missions - Apollo 7 and 9, the ASTP, and visits to Skylab. Not sure what the economics looked like on that as compared to Ares, though. As for the heavy lifter, you're probably right there; there's not much commercial use for such a colossal rocket, and something rather smaller and cheaper would have been needed.
You'll notice how most other manufacturers you'd want in a racing game (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, Ford, RUF (as the standard Porsche cheat), Aston Martin, Jaguar, Pagani and so on and so forth) get the merry crap beaten out of them in the Project Gotham Racing series.
Indeed, Aston Martin in particular probably don't mind seeing their cars wrecked. Their top bit of product placement has always been James Bond, and 007 has never been an especially careful driver...
This is a terrible logical argument. I don't know if it's true that he was honest and kind as a president but his desire to be remembered as such does not make him so.
It's only bias if it's against the Republicans. If it's in their favour, the term we use is 'fair and balanced'.
I think Gerald Ford was doing what he honestly believed was best for the country when he pardoned Nixon. Isn't having to resign the presidency in disgrace a pretty heavy punishment?
For being a bad president, sure. For being a criminal, no.
The prosecution of Nixon would have dragged on forever, and to what purpose?
I'm the only person who plays Zelda on my Wii. Nobody else has the least interest, nobody else has even touched it. Zelda sold Wii to us fanboys waiting in line in the cold on launch night, but the viral demand from our families and friends who'll buy Wii in the spring when it's more available - that is being powered by Wii Sports. Everyone played Tennis when I brought Wii back to my parents' house over Christmas. Almost non-stop, all weekend.
The whole pencil's wavelength/uncertainty is extremely small, how can it cause it to fall?
I'd have to dig out the old textbooks to recall all the details, but here's the reasoning as best I remember it:
For a perfectly sharp pencil, even the smallest deviation from the perfect vertical is enough to cause it to fall. If a perfectly sharp pencil is standing up on its point on a hard, smooth surface, then we can be 100% certain that it is absolutely vertical, and also 100% certain that it is not moving away from vertical in any direction - otherwise it would fall. The uncertainty principle forbids that knowledge. The surer you are of the angle, the less sure you are of its state of motion, and vice-versa.
The uncertainty is extremely small for an object as massive as a pencil, but gravity magnifies it, and the larger the deviation from vertical gets the greater the unbalanced force becomes, and down comes the pencil. In a real scenario the quantum uncertainty would be far outweighed by, say, random thermal motion, air currents, radioactivity, cosmic rays and so forth, maybe even the solar neutrino flux - but in the idealised world of the physics homework problem, it's still enough.
The actual problem was about computing how long it would take a pencil to fall, given an initial deviation from the vertical. The quantum bit was just an interesting case: 'the minimum uncertainty of the angle due to quantum mechanics is thus-and-such, how long will the pencil take to fall given a deviation of this size?' or something like that. I don't recall having to actually write down the wave equation for a pencil.
Except that it IS determined that far in advance, it's just that we presently have no way of knowing these things that far in advance. Weather is a perfect example, but you're looking at it the wrong way. We currently have only limited ways to watch fault lines, to examine the physical impact of a giant explosion on the sun. There're far too many unaccounted variables
I recall for a mechanics homework once, having to work out how long it would take for a pencil balanced precisely on its point to fall over, assuming that it is perfectly upright to begin with and that the only deviation is due to quantum uncertainty in its position.
IIRC, the answer was about ten seconds. Even with the most accurate sensing equipment theoretically possible in this universe, you would not have been able to predict in which direction the pencil would be pointing ten seconds later.
Chaos magnifies uncertainty, and quantum mechanics makes sure there's always some uncertainty around. How long does it take for chaos coming from the quantum-mechanical uncertainties to swamp our meteorological predictions - to make the difference between, say, sunshine and rain? I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was less than three months.
I hope free will exists - it (in theory) allows us to help people improve themselves. Otherwise, as soon as someone is shown to have criminal tendencies you might as well just put a bullet in their head and dump them in a hole somewhere.
Free will is irrelevant to that, though. If we have no free will, then what we're looking at is a brain which has a higher than average statistical probability of committing criminal acts. This can be modified by education, or by deterrence, or even by the knowledge on the part of the brain that it is on a list of Likely Criminals at the police station and that it will therefore be high on the list of suspects when a crime is committed, and that it had therefore better keep its nose clean...
Just because we don't have free will doesn't suddenly mean we're perfectly predictable. It changes nothing unless you're a philosopher or a theologian.
so far, no one has any explanation of what determines which possibility becomes the actuality
Must something determine which possibility becomes the actuality? Can't God play dice with the universe?
and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I've often wondered about this view. Conscious observer? OK. Then what constitutes an observer? A scientist with a PhD? That's an observer. A grad student? That's an observer. Undergraduate? Yeah, that's an observer too. Some guy off the street? Also an observer. A retarded person? Yes? Then a chimpanzee? Or how about a cat with a gun aimed at its head with the trigger wired to a radioisotope? Does the cat count as an observer of the isotope? If so, then it damn well is either alive or dead and definitely not both. Is a housebrick an observer? Because it'll sure as hell collapse a superposition. Researchers in quantum computation have the devil of a time preventing decoherence; if the secret was just not to look, surely it would be easy.
If we're proposing that the observer needs to be conscious - as opposed to just being a system far larger than the quantum scale with which the quantum-mechanical system interacts - then just how smart does it need to be?
Joe L. Expert commented "With bandwidth at McMurdo at a premium, the sudden onslaught of traffic from a posting to the nerd news site Slashdot.org caused a gigantic power spike. The land lines carrying power and data to the McMurdo facility became superconducting in the ultra-cold temperatures there, and some sort of resonance field appears to have formed."
Someone notify Dr Katsuragi immediately... looks like the start of something big! Isn't this just what he was predicting?
Well, quite a lot of people do seem to be fumbling it lately...
Statistically?
I've walloped the ceiling at least three times while bowling, been cracked across the knuckles once during tennis causing surprising amounts of pain, and narrowly missed clubbing people across the head while playing baseball on a worrying number of occasions.
This may have to do with our habit of playing Wii Sports while drinking.
All that said, though, I don't think the wrist straps have come under any tension at all at any time during play. This console's dangerous, but at least the way we play it, there's no risk of strap breakage.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally. The shortage of Luxuries has been a killer lately. I mean, sure, I got a Wii, but all those guys in red yelling outside? Poor guys missed out. And the Elvis impersonator doesn't seem to be impressing them much...
So who should want to go to war?
At least the Columbine shooters were killing people they personally hated. I think there's something far sicker about going about killing people you have no personal quarrel with, on the orders of politicians thousands of miles away...
Is it the right of the owner of a mail server freely to accept or refuse messages at will? Is it his right to define whatever rules he wishes for the acceptance or rejection of email? Is there anybody in the world who has the right to order him to do otherwise?
If the answers are 'yes', 'yes' and 'no' respectively, I submit to you that it is those who would silence SORBS, SPEWS and the like who are infringing the rights of third parties, by ordering mail admins to only use means of filtering email of which they personally approve.
We shall probably issue a Joint Memorandum suggesting a mild disapproval of you!"
-- Punch magazine, in 1935, on the ineffectual response of Britain and France to the Abyssinian crisis The cartoon, found on an ebay auction
Why don't they seem to be making any kind of performance comparisons?
There've been no firm figures since the Frieza chip reached end-of-line. Exactly how much higher Cell-2 rates than Cell-1 is hard to say, although Piccolo/Kami in an SLI configuration falls somewhere between. The Bejita-SSJ+ beats both on all benchmarks, and Cell-3 'Perfect' beats everything unless you overclock a Gohan to the undocumented and unsupported SSJ2 setting.
I must have missed the memo. When did Saddam Hussein announce the successful test of a nuclear bomb, and when did seismographs worldwide confirm this?
What rubbish.
1) War of independence against the British Empire
2) Persistent threat from hostile Indians to frontier settlements
3) Another war with the Empire: Washington sacked, White House burned to the ground
4) Devastating Civil War
5) Wars with Spain and Mexico
6) War with Germany
7) Near-total economic collapse almost leading to revolt (see 'Bonus Army')
8) War with Germany and Japan
9) 50 years of continual threat of total nuclear annihilation
Next to this lot, does terrorism even come up on the radar? Three thousand killed in about a decade of bin Laden trying his very best? That's insignificant. Why the hell are Americans so damn frightened all of a sudden?
According to the IPI,
Al Jazeera's critical coverage has angered some Arab leaders. In Algeria, Iran, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, reporters were refused accreditation and bureaus' were denied permission to open this year.
They're nice about Qatar - self-censorship again, even in the absence of official coercion - but they're certainly not a mere propaganda mouthpiece. Indeed, I'd say that any channel which is denounced angrily by both the Americans and the Iranians must be doing something right - in the same way that the writers of Spitting Image used to feel proud of getting complaints of bias from all the parties :-)
Not so: Qatar formally lifted censorship of the media in 1995 and since then the press has been essentially free from government interference. However, social and political constraints make self-censorship commonplace.
(from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/count ry_profiles/791921.stm)
The very reason al-Jazeera is there is because there is no overt censorship.
IIRC, there was a smaller Saturn, the IB, which was used for Earth orbital missions - Apollo 7 and 9, the ASTP, and visits to Skylab. Not sure what the economics looked like on that as compared to Ares, though. As for the heavy lifter, you're probably right there; there's not much commercial use for such a colossal rocket, and something rather smaller and cheaper would have been needed.
... With you in a month or so.
I pity whoever goes into the next meeting. PHB Powerpoint mindset: "I've got these toys and by God I'm going to use them ALL!"
That reminds me, whatever became of that ARPANET thing they were all talking about way back?
Obviously. What they want is:
1) Halfwit employee loses laptop. Finder cannot recover data.
2) Halfwit employee forgets password. Government can recover data.
Indeed, Aston Martin in particular probably don't mind seeing their cars wrecked. Their top bit of product placement has always been James Bond, and 007 has never been an especially careful driver...
It's only bias if it's against the Republicans. If it's in their favour, the term we use is 'fair and balanced'.
For being a bad president, sure. For being a criminal, no.
The prosecution of Nixon would have dragged on forever, and to what purpose?
Justice?
I'm the only person who plays Zelda on my Wii. Nobody else has the least interest, nobody else has even touched it. Zelda sold Wii to us fanboys waiting in line in the cold on launch night, but the viral demand from our families and friends who'll buy Wii in the spring when it's more available - that is being powered by Wii Sports. Everyone played Tennis when I brought Wii back to my parents' house over Christmas. Almost non-stop, all weekend.
I'd have to dig out the old textbooks to recall all the details, but here's the reasoning as best I remember it:
For a perfectly sharp pencil, even the smallest deviation from the perfect vertical is enough to cause it to fall. If a perfectly sharp pencil is standing up on its point on a hard, smooth surface, then we can be 100% certain that it is absolutely vertical, and also 100% certain that it is not moving away from vertical in any direction - otherwise it would fall. The uncertainty principle forbids that knowledge. The surer you are of the angle, the less sure you are of its state of motion, and vice-versa.
The uncertainty is extremely small for an object as massive as a pencil, but gravity magnifies it, and the larger the deviation from vertical gets the greater the unbalanced force becomes, and down comes the pencil. In a real scenario the quantum uncertainty would be far outweighed by, say, random thermal motion, air currents, radioactivity, cosmic rays and so forth, maybe even the solar neutrino flux - but in the idealised world of the physics homework problem, it's still enough.
The actual problem was about computing how long it would take a pencil to fall, given an initial deviation from the vertical. The quantum bit was just an interesting case: 'the minimum uncertainty of the angle due to quantum mechanics is thus-and-such, how long will the pencil take to fall given a deviation of this size?' or something like that. I don't recall having to actually write down the wave equation for a pencil.
I recall for a mechanics homework once, having to work out how long it would take for a pencil balanced precisely on its point to fall over, assuming that it is perfectly upright to begin with and that the only deviation is due to quantum uncertainty in its position.
IIRC, the answer was about ten seconds. Even with the most accurate sensing equipment theoretically possible in this universe, you would not have been able to predict in which direction the pencil would be pointing ten seconds later.
Chaos magnifies uncertainty, and quantum mechanics makes sure there's always some uncertainty around. How long does it take for chaos coming from the quantum-mechanical uncertainties to swamp our meteorological predictions - to make the difference between, say, sunshine and rain? I've no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was less than three months.
Free will is irrelevant to that, though. If we have no free will, then what we're looking at is a brain which has a higher than average statistical probability of committing criminal acts. This can be modified by education, or by deterrence, or even by the knowledge on the part of the brain that it is on a list of Likely Criminals at the police station and that it will therefore be high on the list of suspects when a crime is committed, and that it had therefore better keep its nose clean...
Just because we don't have free will doesn't suddenly mean we're perfectly predictable. It changes nothing unless you're a philosopher or a theologian.
Must something determine which possibility becomes the actuality? Can't God play dice with the universe?
and some physicists believe the choice is made by the conscious observer.
I've often wondered about this view. Conscious observer? OK. Then what constitutes an observer? A scientist with a PhD? That's an observer. A grad student? That's an observer. Undergraduate? Yeah, that's an observer too. Some guy off the street? Also an observer. A retarded person? Yes? Then a chimpanzee? Or how about a cat with a gun aimed at its head with the trigger wired to a radioisotope? Does the cat count as an observer of the isotope? If so, then it damn well is either alive or dead and definitely not both. Is a housebrick an observer? Because it'll sure as hell collapse a superposition. Researchers in quantum computation have the devil of a time preventing decoherence; if the secret was just not to look, surely it would be easy.
If we're proposing that the observer needs to be conscious - as opposed to just being a system far larger than the quantum scale with which the quantum-mechanical system interacts - then just how smart does it need to be?
Someone notify Dr Katsuragi immediately... looks like the start of something big! Isn't this just what he was predicting?
Statistically?
I've walloped the ceiling at least three times while bowling, been cracked across the knuckles once during tennis causing surprising amounts of pain, and narrowly missed clubbing people across the head while playing baseball on a worrying number of occasions.
This may have to do with our habit of playing Wii Sports while drinking.
All that said, though, I don't think the wrist straps have come under any tension at all at any time during play. This console's dangerous, but at least the way we play it, there's no risk of strap breakage.
Hajimete no Wii is the Japanese name for Wii Play. You exaggerate slightly.
Now, if I might ask when we can expect Excite Truck in Europe? I want, and I want bad. I will want much worse once I finish Zelda.