I can already see the market for switch boxes that on setting A turn on the mod chip but disconect the ethernet cable, and on setting B turn off the mod chip and reconnect the cable, so you can't accidently forget to kill the chip before logging in.
"Assume you are a "completely inocent person" who bought a 2nd-hand car. Later it turned out the previous owner drowned it, so it is all rusty inside, does not drive, breaks, etc. Would you blame the car manufacturer or the person you bought it from for this?"
That's a very different case. Someone who gets their XBox modded isn't causing inherent damage to the system. The XBox works just fine, but Microsoft is choosing to punish people for taking that action. That makes the issue much less clear-cut, and given the motives behind the people at Microsoft for instituting this policy, i would place the blame more on their heads.
So this film was fun, and I hope the other four I'll be seeing in the next few weeks (Treasure Planet, Die Another Day, LotR: The Two Towers, ST: Nemesis) are as good. This is a great movie season.
How exactly is he getting cut tons of slack? He gets detention and punishment just like everyone else at the school. Yes he gets lots of attention from the other students for being famous, at least in the begining, but the only attention he gets from any of the professors other than the Defense against the Dark Arts prof is a whole lot of negative attention from Snape.
Only because we don't live in that world. Note that when Harry is introduced to Mr. Weasely, he wants to know all about the mundane items that are commonplace to Harry.
Wow, you're right, it's _so_ like LotR. There's a magic ring, er, well, there's a quest, um, a volcano?
Oh! I know! There's a bad guy, who seems to get killed, but keeps coming back! Just like half the fantasy books out there!
Or how about the fact that it uses archetypes, like just about every work of fiction in existance? (Start with the perennial slashdot favorite of Star Wars and work your way on from there.)
Really, when reading the HP series, the _last_ thing i thought of was LotR, in fact, my mind has been running a lot more along the lines of Babylon 5, which fits a lot better from a socio-political point of view. I think you may just have LotR on the brain.
The reason Frodo stands (figuratively) head and shoulders above Harry is because, in the end, he fails, or more, because he tries and fails. In LOTR, it is the struggle which makes Frodo a hero, despite his failure. In HP, it is circumstances which turn Harry into an accidental hero. But Harry never really struggles.
It's been awhile since i've read LotR, however i seem to recall that things didn't start getting _really_ bad for Frodo until the third book, about two thirds of the way through. So you're looking at a series thatis just barely over halfway done, and loudly pointing out much easier Harry has it than Frodo.
As best as i recall from the end of the fourth book, things had just started to go straight to hell. There are a lot of merits and flaws about both HP and LotR you can debate, but perhaps you should wait until HP is finished before trying to compare the overall plot and who had to suffer more than who.
I don't really expect HP to reach the depths of despair that LotR did, but let's be fair about it and not judge what hasn't been written.
It relates to the article and the accusations against Harry. That author points out that Harry has a large trust fund, he's given cool gadgets (Nimbus 2000, Invisibility Cloak) by friends and relatives, and has natural magical talents. Therefore according to the author Harry doesn't "deserve" to be a hero because his sucess is built upon the works of others/pure luck, or something along those lines.
Using the same logic, Batman doesn't "deserve" to be a hero, he was given a fortune by his parents, and was naturally born with slightly superior abilities to most people.
Taken to it's illogical extreme, no one is responsible for anything, cause we're all products of our enviroment. However a lot of people choose to believe that it's what you do with your abilities that says if you're a hero or not.
Batman could have become a spoiled playboy. Superman could have conquered Earth instead of trying to save everyone. Harry could have chosen Slytherin and used his money and fame to make life easy for himself and eventually become Vodlemort's right hand man.
So Batman's fortune and how he got it are very relevant to this discussion, but not as relevant to real life or a comparison between Batman and Superman for example.
It's only partially a paradox. Yes Harry provided a way to get the stone out, but what if Harry hadn't shown up at all? Valdemort and Quirrell would have spent a few hours puzzling over the mirror, and maybe figured a way to get it out. And if not, they would have said fuck this, and dragged the mirror out and taken it somewhere where they could study it at their leisure.
Dumbledore never explained how exactly he set that up in the first place, or where the hell the stone was before it showed up in the mirror or Harry's pocket or wherever it was. It would be naive to suppose that given unlimited access to the mirror they couldn't have figured out some other way to get it out given enough time. If the mirror was 100% fullproof, why bother with all the other traps?
And even if they didn't figure it out, you'd still have them out their causing mischef and possibly finding yet another way to give Voldemort a new body. All in all, although this case is really simplified, you have to take risks if you're going to win battles. Confronting Voldemort then gave him an advantage he wouldn't have had otherwise, but he needed to be confronted at some point.
Second thing, i agree with you on why Dumbledore did what he did with the points. However i'm still not entirely sure how fair what he did was. I'm not sure if there are specific guidelines for how the points work, but for the most part they're supposed to be rewards for doing good in classes or quidditch, or penalties for misbehaving. I'm not sure that saving the world really qualifies. Sure, it's a good thing, and they should be comended, but why should they get points?
And besides, i'm not sure that telling the rest of the students "If you do something really dangerous and reckless, and almost get yourself and your friends killed, but you somehow manage to survive and something good happens, then we'll give you lots of points!" is really the best attitude to be encouraging:)
"Who kicked him[Satan/Lucifer] out of heaven, Pastor?"
"His Creator... the Lord Jesus Christ!"
Okay, i haven't read the New Testament, but i'm pretty sure that's _not_ what the bible said.:) Particularly, the angels were around in the Old Testament if i recall correctly, long before christ was born.
You're only half right. Their dream is to get into your living room and stay there. They want everything in your house to be centerd around their products. The XBox is a step in that direction. If they think they have a snowballs chance in hell of establishing themselves in the majority of the living rooms out there, they'll keep throwing money down the tube for as long as necessary.
2) I'd rather have Microsoft grow and create jobs for the parents of the children, rather than have the government take MORE of our money. The government has more than enough money to fix the schools. Insist on efficiency, not higher taxes.
Gee, i'm sure glad Microsoft will be around to take care of us in the future. Come on! Microsoft has thousands of temp workers to mass produce code so they can avoid paying for benefits. You think with profits of multiple billions per year they could afford to pay benefits for a few thousand more workers. Furthermore, about one third of Microsoft's employees aren't even in the USA.
If Microsoft found a way to replace all their workers with trained monkeys, they wouldn't hesitate an instant. Believing that Microsoft is somehow more concerned about our welfare than the government or that Microsoft becoming more successfull will result in benefits to the average american is ludicrous.
How can they possibly make money off of this? These self-destructing disks must cost _more_ to make than normal disks, right? And the RIAA has been telling us for years that they're losing money while CDs are selling for $14-$18 in stores. So clearly CDs already cost at least $15 to make, and these new-fangled ones will cost $20 or $30 to make, right? No one would be willing to rent something for that price.
Didn't he already sell them the rights to the characters back when he created them? I don't think he legally has any ability to tell them what to do or not to do with them anymore. All he has is the contract that says he gets 10% of the profits from whatever they do.
That's the problem! Nader _should_ have done that!
As long as it's done openly, i fail to see the corruption angle.
The voters choose you because they believed in the issues you supported. (At least that's the way it should work.) However you don't get enough votes to get elected. If you then have the opportunity to help the major contender who's party views most align with your own get elected in exchange for support of some of your agenda, don't you have a _duty_ to the people who voted for you to do so?
Imagine (if such a deal were possible with our election system) if Nader had cut a deal with Gore where he gives Gore his 9000 some odd votes in Florida in exchange for guaranteed protection of the Artic Wildlife Preserve and support of the Kyoto Treaty (for example.)
As a result, Nader has become more relevant to the election process, the party who most of his supporters would prefer as an alternative to himself gains power, and sme of the issues they care about now have more support than if those people had just voted for Gore in the first place.
How are any of these results bad for Nader or the people who voted for him?
I think it would be a lot better if after the election there was a process where the candidates can "trade" their collected votes.
After the election Nader would have had 95,000 votes that he could trade to either Bush or Gore based on who was willing to make the best deal with him. Presumably Gore, having philosophies more aligned with Nader, would have been willing to promise the most and would have ended up with his votes.
Of course it's possible to just lie to get the votes and then do nothing about your promises, but in the long run that problem tends to be self-correcting, even more so than in our current elections. Individuals tend to remember broken promises much more so than large groups.
Presumably because all of Europe is under one DVD region. The EU's purpose is to handle things between it's different member states, it has no authority over trade between EU states and other non-EU states, or at least not the same level of authority.
I would hope you know about this already, but go to the main menu, and select the video game background (button 13 i believe) and then mouse over the email button:)
Okay, am i crazy and making this up in my head, or is this something you could do in the original:
I thought i remembered a trick where you could drop two items in front of you, and then run into them, and you would pick up the first item and then drop it a little ahead of the second item when you ran into it, repeat ad infinitum. So in effect you could make a stack of two itmes and push it ahead of you. When i tried it in the Flash version it make the right sound, but only one of the items gets moved so you end up walking through it.
We survived 20,000 years without cell phones. Why is it now we cannot?
For most of the last 20,000 years any flight taking place was unintentional and involved a gread deal of terrified screaming. It was also usually fatal.
So next time you're on a flight with people talking on cellphones, be glad that A: you're most likely going to survive the experience and B: you only have to listen to people talking on cellphones instead of your own screaming voice along with the voice of anyone else unlucky enough to have gone over the cliff with you.
Slashdot Mirror
I can already see the market for switch boxes that on setting A turn on the mod chip but disconect the ethernet cable, and on setting B turn off the mod chip and reconnect the cable, so you can't accidently forget to kill the chip before logging in.
That's a very different case. Someone who gets their XBox modded isn't causing inherent damage to the system. The XBox works just fine, but Microsoft is choosing to punish people for taking that action. That makes the issue much less clear-cut, and given the motives behind the people at Microsoft for instituting this policy, i would place the blame more on their heads.
Don't forget about Solaris!
How exactly is he getting cut tons of slack? He gets detention and punishment just like everyone else at the school. Yes he gets lots of attention from the other students for being famous, at least in the begining, but the only attention he gets from any of the professors other than the Defense against the Dark Arts prof is a whole lot of negative attention from Snape.
Only because we don't live in that world. Note that when Harry is introduced to Mr. Weasely, he wants to know all about the mundane items that are commonplace to Harry.
Nowhere near as pitiful as those who feel the need to deride others' religious beliefs.
Oh! I know! There's a bad guy, who seems to get killed, but keeps coming back! Just like half the fantasy books out there!
Or how about the fact that it uses archetypes, like just about every work of fiction in existance? (Start with the perennial slashdot favorite of Star Wars and work your way on from there.)
Really, when reading the HP series, the _last_ thing i thought of was LotR, in fact, my mind has been running a lot more along the lines of Babylon 5, which fits a lot better from a socio-political point of view. I think you may just have LotR on the brain.
It's been awhile since i've read LotR, however i seem to recall that things didn't start getting _really_ bad for Frodo until the third book, about two thirds of the way through. So you're looking at a series thatis just barely over halfway done, and loudly pointing out much easier Harry has it than Frodo.
As best as i recall from the end of the fourth book, things had just started to go straight to hell. There are a lot of merits and flaws about both HP and LotR you can debate, but perhaps you should wait until HP is finished before trying to compare the overall plot and who had to suffer more than who.
I don't really expect HP to reach the depths of despair that LotR did, but let's be fair about it and not judge what hasn't been written.
Using the same logic, Batman doesn't "deserve" to be a hero, he was given a fortune by his parents, and was naturally born with slightly superior abilities to most people.
Taken to it's illogical extreme, no one is responsible for anything, cause we're all products of our enviroment. However a lot of people choose to believe that it's what you do with your abilities that says if you're a hero or not.
Batman could have become a spoiled playboy. Superman could have conquered Earth instead of trying to save everyone. Harry could have chosen Slytherin and used his money and fame to make life easy for himself and eventually become Vodlemort's right hand man.
So Batman's fortune and how he got it are very relevant to this discussion, but not as relevant to real life or a comparison between Batman and Superman for example.
It's only partially a paradox. Yes Harry provided a way to get the stone out, but what if Harry hadn't shown up at all? Valdemort and Quirrell would have spent a few hours puzzling over the mirror, and maybe figured a way to get it out. And if not, they would have said fuck this, and dragged the mirror out and taken it somewhere where they could study it at their leisure.
Dumbledore never explained how exactly he set that up in the first place, or where the hell the stone was before it showed up in the mirror or Harry's pocket or wherever it was. It would be naive to suppose that given unlimited access to the mirror they couldn't have figured out some other way to get it out given enough time. If the mirror was 100% fullproof, why bother with all the other traps?
And even if they didn't figure it out, you'd still have them out their causing mischef and possibly finding yet another way to give Voldemort a new body. All in all, although this case is really simplified, you have to take risks if you're going to win battles. Confronting Voldemort then gave him an advantage he wouldn't have had otherwise, but he needed to be confronted at some point.
Second thing, i agree with you on why Dumbledore did what he did with the points. However i'm still not entirely sure how fair what he did was. I'm not sure if there are specific guidelines for how the points work, but for the most part they're supposed to be rewards for doing good in classes or quidditch, or penalties for misbehaving. I'm not sure that saving the world really qualifies. Sure, it's a good thing, and they should be comended, but why should they get points?
And besides, i'm not sure that telling the rest of the students "If you do something really dangerous and reckless, and almost get yourself and your friends killed, but you somehow manage to survive and something good happens, then we'll give you lots of points!" is really the best attitude to be encouraging :)
"His Creator... the Lord Jesus Christ!"
Okay, i haven't read the New Testament, but i'm pretty sure that's _not_ what the bible said. :) Particularly, the angels were around in the Old Testament if i recall correctly, long before christ was born.
Ahhh, that would explain why my friends were commenting that the actors looked much older in the begining of the movie.
You're only half right. Their dream is to get into your living room and stay there. They want everything in your house to be centerd around their products. The XBox is a step in that direction. If they think they have a snowballs chance in hell of establishing themselves in the majority of the living rooms out there, they'll keep throwing money down the tube for as long as necessary.
Gee, i'm sure glad Microsoft will be around to take care of us in the future. Come on! Microsoft has thousands of temp workers to mass produce code so they can avoid paying for benefits. You think with profits of multiple billions per year they could afford to pay benefits for a few thousand more workers. Furthermore, about one third of Microsoft's employees aren't even in the USA.
If Microsoft found a way to replace all their workers with trained monkeys, they wouldn't hesitate an instant. Believing that Microsoft is somehow more concerned about our welfare than the government or that Microsoft becoming more successfull will result in benefits to the average american is ludicrous.
Woohoo! XBox dies! Let's pass that law right now!
Okay, it's possible that you have a reasonable point, but next time try to use an example where i'd actually feel sorry for the company being hurt :)
How can they possibly make money off of this? These self-destructing disks must cost _more_ to make than normal disks, right? And the RIAA has been telling us for years that they're losing money while CDs are selling for $14-$18 in stores. So clearly CDs already cost at least $15 to make, and these new-fangled ones will cost $20 or $30 to make, right? No one would be willing to rent something for that price.
Wow, it's amazing how much shorter the article looks when it isn't in MSNBC's super-tiny-narrow-column format.
Didn't he already sell them the rights to the characters back when he created them? I don't think he legally has any ability to tell them what to do or not to do with them anymore. All he has is the contract that says he gets 10% of the profits from whatever they do.
As long as it's done openly, i fail to see the corruption angle.
The voters choose you because they believed in the issues you supported. (At least that's the way it should work.) However you don't get enough votes to get elected. If you then have the opportunity to help the major contender who's party views most align with your own get elected in exchange for support of some of your agenda, don't you have a _duty_ to the people who voted for you to do so?
Imagine (if such a deal were possible with our election system) if Nader had cut a deal with Gore where he gives Gore his 9000 some odd votes in Florida in exchange for guaranteed protection of the Artic Wildlife Preserve and support of the Kyoto Treaty (for example.)
As a result, Nader has become more relevant to the election process, the party who most of his supporters would prefer as an alternative to himself gains power, and sme of the issues they care about now have more support than if those people had just voted for Gore in the first place.
How are any of these results bad for Nader or the people who voted for him?
After the election Nader would have had 95,000 votes that he could trade to either Bush or Gore based on who was willing to make the best deal with him. Presumably Gore, having philosophies more aligned with Nader, would have been willing to promise the most and would have ended up with his votes.
Of course it's possible to just lie to get the votes and then do nothing about your promises, but in the long run that problem tends to be self-correcting, even more so than in our current elections. Individuals tend to remember broken promises much more so than large groups.
Presumably because all of Europe is under one DVD region. The EU's purpose is to handle things between it's different member states, it has no authority over trade between EU states and other non-EU states, or at least not the same level of authority.
I would hope you know about this already, but go to the main menu, and select the video game background (button 13 i believe) and then mouse over the email button :)
I thought i remembered a trick where you could drop two items in front of you, and then run into them, and you would pick up the first item and then drop it a little ahead of the second item when you ran into it, repeat ad infinitum. So in effect you could make a stack of two itmes and push it ahead of you. When i tried it in the Flash version it make the right sound, but only one of the items gets moved so you end up walking through it.
Wow, the games are cool. The fact that starting one of the games maximizes IE _SUCKS_ though!
For most of the last 20,000 years any flight taking place was unintentional and involved a gread deal of terrified screaming. It was also usually fatal.
So next time you're on a flight with people talking on cellphones, be glad that A: you're most likely going to survive the experience and B: you only have to listen to people talking on cellphones instead of your own screaming voice along with the voice of anyone else unlucky enough to have gone over the cliff with you.