What about all the other supposed species of beings out there who probably have not heard of Jesus? Are they all damned? Why would God only send his "son" down to one species. If one then thinks "well maybe He incarnated amongst them too" that definately throws the Christian doctrine in bind, about Jesus being unique and all, and rather relativizes the whole thing.
There was actually a science fiction story about this subject, whose name and author i unfortunatly forget.
It was set in a universe with lots of sentient races about. Some explorers found a planet where something very similar to the whole son of god/death/resurection/whetever thing had just happened a few years or decades ago.
One of the explorers decided this must mean that god sends christ down to every planet so that each species would be enlightened or whatever. So he becomes obsessed with having the chance to actualy meet the son of god, and sets out to visit every habitable planet in the universe in turn until he finds one where christ is actually there right then.
This is all told from theperspective of one of the explorers who choose to stay on the first planet and document everything as carefully as possible. I think he had some theory that if it was true, that the other guy would never be able to catch christ in the act and a few years off was the best anyone could do, so they might as well make the best of the current situation. His reason for this was that not only were there the obvious statistical difficulties, humans had already been "saved" once, so as a human the other guy would never be allowed to meet christ and get a "second chance," or something like that. I guess this was building off the "christ is unique" idea you mentioned, which i'd never heard before.
Interesting thought experiment type SF but probably a good thing it was a short story. As a non-christian i most likely would have gotten annoyed at a novel length treatment.
I guess CNN didn't think it was newsworthy.
They were right.
Support the First Amendment: Read at -1.
I sure hope you were joking. But if not, the disparity between your comment; that you don't think this news item was worth reading, and your sig; that we shouldn't pay attention to what other people think is worth reading, is amusing enough on it's own.
So i will follow your advice and, after a brief pause for laughter, ignore what you just said:)
I agree with pretty much everything you said. I think it's likely that someone in marketing at Sony just really dropped the ball.
If your company is trying to make backwards compatibility a selling point, and you announce that you're using technology that might or might not be backwards compatibility, go ahead and tell the press that you're planning on using a backwards compatible version up front. Leaving it an unanswered questions just leads to a whole lot of speculation that could have been avoided with just a sentence or two.
Yes, i am aware that a year ago a high ranking SCE official said in an interview that the PS3 would be backwards compatible. A year later they announce that they will be using blu-ray technology, which can be made backwards compatible but is not by nature backwards compatible, and GameSpot notes that they do not say say they will in fact be using backwards compatible blu-ray technology.
I agree it would be pretty damn stupid of them to go back on their word, and they would have the hardcore gamers howling for their blood. However i don't seem to have the same ingrained faith as you that a multi-national corporation will always tell the truth and keep it's word from year to year. It is possible, albeit unlikely, that Sony was planning backwards compatibility last year when they were (potentially) planning on using a normal red-laser reader, but have now decided to upgrade to blu-ray, unfortunatly making the PS3 no longer backwards compatible.
It is much more likely that they're planning on using backwards compatible blu-ray technology and just forgot to mention it at the press conference. But in any event, i'm not making the news up, i'm just repeating what GameSpot said.
go to the blu-ray link. it states in plain english that it can also read CDs and DVDs.
Yes, but the important word there is "can." They apparently don't do so by default. If you take a look at the FAQ it says...
2.4 Will Blu-ray support playback of DVDs?
Yes, several leading drive manufacturers have already demonstrated drives for consumer products such as video recorders that can read and write DVD and Blu-ray Discs, so you don't have to worry about your existing DVD collection becoming obsolete. Although there is no requirement for Blu-ray recorders to be backwards compatible with DVD, the format is far too popular to not be supported. With the vast amount of Blu-ray recorders that will be coming out, this will be an important feature for consumers.
So it would be pretty damn stupid for Sony to not make it backwards compatible, especially given their history as the first company to make their console backwards compatible. However they didn't specificaly say they were going to take those steps. Perhaps they assumed it was a no-brainer?
Sony, or at least the SCE boss, have claimed that the PS3 will play PS2 games and it would be just a bit disingenuous to make it capable of running the old code but not reading the old disks. However until they say something officially we won't know for sure.
Shawnmchorse and all you other typing speed demons, you're fast becasue you're already plugged into the computing world; you have to type fast to keep up. The article is more about kids who are being shut out of computing because they don't have the KB skills to get in the door yet.
You're kind of missing the point. The claim of the above posters is that they learned to type quickly just by using computers without any formal typing courses. (I taught myself to type using just two or three fingers on each hand. I took a typing course later and did okay, but afterwards i promptly went back to my own typing style.)
The kids they are talking about in the article _are_ using computers, but for some reason they're not picking up typing skills on their own.
"But three years ago, after watching some kids spend as long as 10 minutes searching for the letters to enter a single Google query, she decided to start formally teaching touch-typing."
You kind of have to wonder if there isn't something else going on with these kids though. Assuming you can actually read, it should take less than a minute to look at every letter key on the keyboard. So even a totaly incompetent typist should be able to type out a ten letter work in ten minutes at minimum. More like five minutes on average unless the word is made up of mostly b's and n's and m's.
However whatever the problem is, these kids were spotted because they _were_ being given access to computers. Presuming you don't try to pick out the "problem" children the very first day you sit them in front of a keyboard, they should progress rapidly on their own. Just explain the basic rules the typing the first few days of the class, and move on from there. Kids who may have some kind of learning disability might need special instruction, but i think the rest will figure out some reasonably fast method of typing by themselves as long as they're using the computer often enough.
As best as i can remember from elementary school (my memory isn't so hot though) learning to read was fairly relaxed. People who had problmes picking it up were put in more intensive courses, but the rest of us just kinda learned as we went along. I don't see any reason why typing shouldn't work the same way.
Except the moon _does_ circumnaviate everyone in russia, and everywhere else on earth as well. About once every month in fact. It's not a good "in soviet russia" joke if it's actually _true_:)
Renderware is considered one of the best, if not the best, platforms out there. EA is a very different company from Criterion. Criterion makes a couple games, probably one or two at a time at most. They also have their Renderware platform which they sell to many companies for (presumably a significant amount of money.)
If Criterion were to stop selling their platform to other companies the average quality of current games would go down slightly, with the exception of Criterion's own games of course. Criterion's games would therefore sell a little better, but probably not a huge amount better, so it's worth more to sell the platform to other companies at the cost of a slight decrease in sales of their own games.
EA on the other hand is involved in the production of dozens of game every year at the least, probably more like a hundred or more. When you're talking about that many games, a slight increase in sales for all of them becomes a significant amount of money. EA can sell Renderware at a discount to its affiliated companies, or offer it for "free" in exchange for favorable contracts. EA therefore gets more money from those companes (either directly or through better percentages in contracts) from the companies they work with, and if they they can pressure some non-EA companies into signing up with them by threatening to take away Renderware, and the rest will most likely see some fall in quality of their games, thereby increasing the perceived value of EAs games and increasing their sales. Again, only by a small amount, but a small amount spread over dozens or hundreds of games adds up to quite a bit.
It's pretty much like any other vertical monopoly. When Carnegie bought out iron mines he could have continued to do buisness like the old mine owners did, selling the ore to whoever offered the best price. However in the long run it was more advantageous to keep all the ore for his own foundries. In doing so he made getting iron ore more difficult for the other companies (yes, there were other mines out there, just like there are other platforms than Renderware, but every source taken out of circulation makes it more difficult for the other companies) and reduced his own prices as well. If the mines are just shipping the ore straight to his own foundries instead of selling it to others, he can cut out a lot of extraneous stuff that isn't necessary anymore. If EA does decide to enternalize Renderware you can bet that Criterion's marketing department is going byebye, thus reducing the costs of the company and making it cheaper for EA to produce Renderware for itself.
Carnegie wasn't fucking stupid for trying to get all aspects of steel production under his control, it ended up making him incredibly rich. If done right there would be nothing stupid about EA trying to get all aspects of game procution under its control as well. It might not be so good for the gamers, and it certainly wouldn't be so good for the non-EA companies, but it would be good buisness for EA.
Its not like they have any control over the companies using it. They can't exactly say 'Stop developing a competing product or we will pull the plug.'
The problem is that i'm pretty sure RenderWare is a licensed product. They probably can't revoke the license for any current games, but they can certainly refuse to renew it for any upcoming games. So yes, they can in fact threaten to pull the plug.
And even if i'm wrong about the licensing bit, they can always just refuse to release any new updates publically and keep them for themselves (and any companies who choose to cooperate with them) instead, which would be almost as bad.
Well yeah, the "think will make them feel younger again" was more refering to the motercycle and the boat and similar stereotypical mid-life crises purchases:)
Try... blah blah blah...Then repeat the above statement.
No. And since when did anyone ever need evangelical bikers?
What you're describing doesn't really sound that interesting to me, and besides, i'm a whimp. Going rollerblading and having sex is about the riskiest i want my entertainment to be, and i'm perfectly happy with that.
Besides, i've scraped myself up enough rollerblading and crashed enough cars driving that i don't think i could trust myself on a bike even if i thought it might be fun.
Okay, you said some things i agree with, and some things i disagree with.
let me start with what i said, "Sure our current election system encourages a two party system, but it's not writ in stone." I think that's pretty much true. There have been periods of time in our history in which there have been three viable parties, after awhile political forces encourage a narrowing down to two parties, but that in turn leads to the eventual development of yet another third party. You could say that our system inevitable leads to two parties, but you could just as easily say that it inevitable leads to three parties, it just depends on where you want to take your data points from.
A party is certain to win if it has 51% of votes. But the more its votes get above 50%, the less largess there is to go around ("largess" is the prizes given out by the winner to his supporters). So groups struggling for the optimal outcomes for themselves will naturally gravitate towards having as close to 51% support as possible. Any less than 50 and they risk losing- any more, and they've wasted money on extra votes that weren't needed to win.
This i think is just plain wrong. There have been pleanty of elections where the winning party had much more than 50%. In 1984 Reagan won by 60% of the popular vote and 98% of the Electoral College vote. The parties don't shy away from such landsides, instead they use them as "evidence" of a mandate to do whatever they want. As far as i can tell all parties collect as much money as they can and then spend it all.
I'm not sure who you mean by "supporters," but certainly there is no direct payment to the individual voters, and the link between financial supporters and voters is pretty much disconected, and the link between the amount of financial support and the favors returned to them (both financial and political) is definitely non-linear.
Because the chance of your vote actually changing anything, multiplied by the monentary value of any difference you'd personally experience from the preferred candidate, always comes out to less than $0.01. Usually a lot less (especially if you live in one of the 23 "noncontested" states where the Presidential winner is predetermined) Voting is a tax on people who can't do math. (If you're generous, then maybe you'll happily pay that extra tax for the good of the nation...)
And i thought _i_ was cynical. Do you actually calculate out how much you think you'll get in returns before going to the polls? Last i heard the whole idea of elections wasn't a direct monetary return. It was to make sure that the government reflects the wishes of the people. And how much does it cost you to vote anyways? It takes me five minutes to walk to my polling location, i expect it takes most people about a five or ten minute drive at most. That comes out to about a dollar in gas, which isn't much by itself and you get several hours of entertainment in exchange if you follow the results afterwards. Besides, there are groups that will drive you to the polls if you ask them, so the cost is extremely minimal.
It is incorrect to not capitalize "democrat" and "republican" in that sentence.
Are we discussing grammer or politics? Try to stay on topic please. If you want to get nitpicky, "G W Bush is a democrat whenever he talks about bringing Iraq the gift of democracy" is incorrect since we were speaking of "democrat" in reference to the american political party. Trying to switch between definitons in that manner is misleading.
And then the Democrats and Republicans would look at party Z, see which of it's platforms were attracting voters, check which of those were least likely to drive off their current supporters, and then add them into their position.
Now you're getting into what really encourages the two party system, and what i suspect also leads to the third party system again.
Despite the fact that there are many axes in the political spectrum, it tends to get narrowed down to a "lef
He mentioned RTS, but didn't touch on turn-based strategy at all. Games such as Civilization and Master of Orion have a lto of the key features he was talking about. You can save at just about any point, and if the game is well designed most of the information you need is presented in the game itself. I remember when i was a poor jr. high school student and i *ahem* "found" a copy of the original Civilization. I was able to figure out the entire game just from the Civlopedia. Of course there's still the risk of "death," but if that worries you excesively you can just play on the easy levels, and set optional challenges for yourself instead. Like, "can i actually build every single Wonder myself?" or "can i achieve spaceflight by 0 AD," etc. Of course you have to have the willpower to resist the one-more-turn syndrome:)
And incidentally, i've just started playing FF10-2 recently, and noticed that they seem to "follow" a couple of his suggestions. You have the airship right at the begining, allowing you to go anywhere and do whatever you want, lots of no hassle exploration. And like FF10, there are quite a number of save spheres, and you can use any of them to go back to the airship. Also like FF10 it has pretty good maps, often with arrows superimposed showing you where you're supposed to go. It has a jump command and some platform puzzles, but if you miss a jump your character just kind of staggers at the edge of the pit for a second and then lets you try again. No horrible punishments for failure, which makes it a lot more fun. You can still get killed in combat, quite easily if you wander into the wrong areas, and it still sends you back to the main menu of the game. An option to quick load back to the last save would have been convenient there.
But isn't the point of middle age to replace things such as video games with more adult activities. Hell, you got a job now, hopefully it's well paying. Your time should be occupied with things like your kids.
Yeah! Damn those middle aged people for wanting to have fun! Every minute they're not working at their jobs they should be at home taking care of their families! If they find a few minutes of spare time between changing diapers they should stare blankly at the tv so they know what comercialistic crap they should be spending their money on!
Sorry, i don't want to give up on having fun just cause i'm getting older.
You want fun, go buy a motorcycle or a boat. Go play golf or something.
Er, what? How are those fun? I don't want anything to do with a motorcycle, and if i want to go sit in the sun near the water i can go to the beach for a lot less money and trouble than buying a boat. Golf seems like the most pointless waste of time ever. Like i said, i want to have _fun_, not waste large amounts of cash on useless things that unenlightened middle age people think will make them feel younger again.
I'm quite happy contuing to stock pile video games, DVDs, and books. Unfortunatly the average video game takes somewhere between three to ten times as long to finish as a good sized book, which in turn usually takes at least three times as long to finish as an average movie. It's no suprise that i finish far more books and movies that video games, both because they're quicker and because when i have to decide between finishing one video game storyline and several book/movie storylines the video games seem to provide a lot less bang per minute when i'm under a tight schedule.
"If you are not voting, what does are you saying?" I'm saying plenty by not voting. "Americas 2 party electoral system is a sham, and I won't participate. Choosing between the lesser of 2 evils is not liberty or freedom."
And whose fault is it that we've got a 2 party system? YOURS!!!
Sure our current election system encourages a two party system, but it's not writ in stone, you could change the system, or at least see that one of the two parties was one worth voting for, but you're just sitting on your ass instead.
I give a damn about my country, so even though i think the democrats aren't that different from the republicans (well, other than the hard core fundamentalist republicans like Bush anyways) i think that difference is worth fighting for. There ar probably third parties out there i agree with more, but i'm more interested in results than fantasies. If i see party X which i really like with less than 5% support and the democrats who i somewhat agree with at 50% plus or minus a critical couple percent, i'm going to vote for the democrats. Lesser evil all the way.
YOU however aren't helping at all! You're not trying to get the lesser evil into office, and you're not trying to get the _good_ people into office either! If you won't vote for the lesser evil, get out there and vote for the people you actually support! About 50% of the population doesn't vote in most elections. If they all happened to agree on someone that's enough to get _anyone_ elected, and even if they didn't agree it's certainly enough to help shake things up. If you and everyone else who claims they don't like the two party system went out and voted for parties X, Y and Z, then X Y and Z would be getting 15-20% each, and the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%. At _that_ point people would realize they could switch away from the democrats and republicans and make a real difference.
Either you're just too lazy to get off your ass on election day, and you claim you're protesting against the "system" to cover up for it, or you just haven't really thought about the issue. Not voting doesn't send any kind of message, at least not the one you think. The politicians and those of us who vote just think it means you're lazy or stupid. Voting for a third party candidate _does_ send a message.
Whatever you think of Nader (personally i think he's a lying hypocritical bastard who is certainly a worse choice than the democrats) you have to admit that the 3-5% who actually voted for a third party sent a much louder and clearer message than did you and the others in the subset of the 40-50% who didn't vote because they "object to the two party system." It's only a two party system because you refuse to vote for the third parties!
Hmmmm, so the question is, can you make signing up for the game cheap and easy enough such that no one bothers selling/buying the currency on ebay and co, other than for your partners with whom you are colluding? And how many such rigged sales would you need to make before it was considered a valid amount?
I'm also wondering if this could even be considered fraud or something similar, although it would certainly be dishonest and underhanded. If you tried a similar trick on the stock market you'd certainly get nailed, but i'm not sure what laws cover this aspect of commerce.
In any case, although it's technically possible it would be damn hard to pull off. Amusing thought though.
How do they decide what the exchange rate is? (I'd try RTFAing, but there doesn't seem to be one)
Whatever the method, there's probably a way to corrupt the system. Someone just needs to come out with a cheapass MMO game that lets you collect vast amounts of money so you can exchange it for currency in another game. You are a cube, you go out into the flat featureless plain where you fight smaller cubes who leave large amounts of gold when defeated. You then go back to town (a really large cube) and save the game.
If the exchange rate is determined by total amount of gold in the game, you jut put caps on the total gold so no one can collect a truely huge amount at a time. Everyone quickly collects (say) a million gp and then converts it to another MMO before collecting more. If it's determined by the compared cost of items, you can have the monsters drop a small amount of gold, but make a dagger cost a copper, and the Uber-Sword of Godslaying cost a single gold, etc.
Whatever the system, just figure out the right exploit, and charge a minimum monthly fee so people can just sit there collecting loot for the game they really care about. Sure, you'd probably get locked out of the exchange program after a while, but you might be able to get a month or so of decent income in before that happened:)
I usually handle people like you by getting even closer on their tail (since at the new reduced speed i have a better stopping distance.) Eventually they get the hint and get out of the far left lane, either that or i take satisfaction in the fact that they've slowed down so much in the attempt to annoy me that i'm significantly increasing their travel time. One guy got down to the 30s or 40s in the left lane of a 65 zone. What an asshole. I enjoyed staying right behind him for about ten minutes until my exit came up.
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the left lane! On the other hand, i try to be nice to the people in the right couple lanes. They presumably don't want to deal with left lane traffic, and they're being considerate and using the right lanes like slower traffic is supposed to.
he Jedi beat the Sith down brutally and to the point where the Jedi think there are no Sith left. But, unknown to the Jedi, there is one left. He takes an apprentice and sets the Rule of Two (one Sith master, one Sith apprentice).
I like that theory, in that it dismises the "jedi can't count to two" thing.
The only problem is, if the surviving sith made the rule _after_ the jedi thought they had destroyed all the sith, how do the jedi know about the rule? If they heard about the rule at all after that point, believing it to be true would presupose believing there were sith around to make the new rule, which would contradict their belief that they had already killed all the sith.
I suspect there is some shoddy reporting going on here with the reporter thinking 'hmmm, immunisation, this must be a childhood thing.
From the article: "Professor David Nutt, a leading government drugs adviser who sits on the committee, told the IoS that anti-drug vaccines for children are likely to be among the panel's recommendations when it reports next March."
Now did you not read that, or do you think they were just lying about that? Drawing unfounded conclusions is shoddy reporting, lying about what people have actually said is far beyond that into the range of libel.
So at least as far as the claim that they're considering imunization of children, there doesn't seem to be any shoddy reporting going on. There might very well be some shoddy thinking going on by those who are developing the vaccines and those who are planning how to use them, but that is an entirely different (and more serious) issue.
You are lying to yourself if you believe that anyone in Washington would consider purging nuclear weapons from our arsenal.
I don't really want to get into a debate about the basic issue right now, but you're completly misinterpreting what the grandparent poster originally said. They suggested we should get rid of _ICBMs_ NOT all nuclear weapons. This was followed up by a question about whether we really needed ICBMs when we've got nuclear cruise missiles.
That may or may not be a good idea, but if you're going to debate the issue, at least address the points made instead of changing the topic.
However, if it's available only illegally, then a fan who wants to hear the album has no choice but to break the law. Having acquired the music, the fan will be less likely to pay for it when it is released legally.
The lesson here is that U2 has crappy fans?
When Rush was about to release Vapor Trails a year or two ago, i happened to find mp3s of the complete album a month or so before it hit stores on a P2P network. I had actually been looking for older Rush mp3s and was suprised but very excited to find the new ones as well.
I downloaded the mp3s, spent a few weeks listening to them at work, and then bought the CD the first week it was out.
At the time i don't remember Rush complaining about the mp3s being out there. They certainly didn't move their release date because of it. And as a solitary representative of their fans, i at least did not feel less inclined to go out and buy the album. So what's up with U2 and their fans?
I tend to think of commas in a list of descriptors as "and"s. However you have to judge by context whether it's inclusive(?) or not. Ie, "I like the colors red and green" means they like both colors, and although something with both colors would be great, something with just one color would be good too. "I like sandwiches with pastrami and mustard" tends to imply that the two are required together.
Slashdot Mirror
There was actually a science fiction story about this subject, whose name and author i unfortunatly forget.
It was set in a universe with lots of sentient races about. Some explorers found a planet where something very similar to the whole son of god/death/resurection/whetever thing had just happened a few years or decades ago.
One of the explorers decided this must mean that god sends christ down to every planet so that each species would be enlightened or whatever. So he becomes obsessed with having the chance to actualy meet the son of god, and sets out to visit every habitable planet in the universe in turn until he finds one where christ is actually there right then.
This is all told from theperspective of one of the explorers who choose to stay on the first planet and document everything as carefully as possible. I think he had some theory that if it was true, that the other guy would never be able to catch christ in the act and a few years off was the best anyone could do, so they might as well make the best of the current situation. His reason for this was that not only were there the obvious statistical difficulties, humans had already been "saved" once, so as a human the other guy would never be allowed to meet christ and get a "second chance," or something like that. I guess this was building off the "christ is unique" idea you mentioned, which i'd never heard before.
Interesting thought experiment type SF but probably a good thing it was a short story. As a non-christian i most likely would have gotten annoyed at a novel length treatment.
They were right.
Support the First Amendment: Read at -1.
I sure hope you were joking. But if not, the disparity between your comment; that you don't think this news item was worth reading, and your sig; that we shouldn't pay attention to what other people think is worth reading, is amusing enough on it's own.
So i will follow your advice and, after a brief pause for laughter, ignore what you just said :)
If your company is trying to make backwards compatibility a selling point, and you announce that you're using technology that might or might not be backwards compatibility, go ahead and tell the press that you're planning on using a backwards compatible version up front. Leaving it an unanswered questions just leads to a whole lot of speculation that could have been avoided with just a sentence or two.
Yes, i am aware that a year ago a high ranking SCE official said in an interview that the PS3 would be backwards compatible. A year later they announce that they will be using blu-ray technology, which can be made backwards compatible but is not by nature backwards compatible, and GameSpot notes that they do not say say they will in fact be using backwards compatible blu-ray technology.
I agree it would be pretty damn stupid of them to go back on their word, and they would have the hardcore gamers howling for their blood. However i don't seem to have the same ingrained faith as you that a multi-national corporation will always tell the truth and keep it's word from year to year. It is possible, albeit unlikely, that Sony was planning backwards compatibility last year when they were (potentially) planning on using a normal red-laser reader, but have now decided to upgrade to blu-ray, unfortunatly making the PS3 no longer backwards compatible.
It is much more likely that they're planning on using backwards compatible blu-ray technology and just forgot to mention it at the press conference. But in any event, i'm not making the news up, i'm just repeating what GameSpot said.
Yes, but the important word there is "can." They apparently don't do so by default. If you take a look at the FAQ it says...
2.4 Will Blu-ray support playback of DVDs?
Yes, several leading drive manufacturers have already demonstrated drives for consumer products such as video recorders that can read and write DVD and Blu-ray Discs, so you don't have to worry about your existing DVD collection becoming obsolete. Although there is no requirement for Blu-ray recorders to be backwards compatible with DVD, the format is far too popular to not be supported. With the vast amount of Blu-ray recorders that will be coming out, this will be an important feature for consumers.
So it would be pretty damn stupid for Sony to not make it backwards compatible, especially given their history as the first company to make their console backwards compatible. However they didn't specificaly say they were going to take those steps. Perhaps they assumed it was a no-brainer?
Sony, or at least the SCE boss, have claimed that the PS3 will play PS2 games and it would be just a bit disingenuous to make it capable of running the old code but not reading the old disks. However until they say something officially we won't know for sure.
You're kind of missing the point. The claim of the above posters is that they learned to type quickly just by using computers without any formal typing courses. (I taught myself to type using just two or three fingers on each hand. I took a typing course later and did okay, but afterwards i promptly went back to my own typing style.)
The kids they are talking about in the article _are_ using computers, but for some reason they're not picking up typing skills on their own.
"But three years ago, after watching some kids spend as long as 10 minutes searching for the letters to enter a single Google query, she decided to start formally teaching touch-typing."
You kind of have to wonder if there isn't something else going on with these kids though. Assuming you can actually read, it should take less than a minute to look at every letter key on the keyboard. So even a totaly incompetent typist should be able to type out a ten letter work in ten minutes at minimum. More like five minutes on average unless the word is made up of mostly b's and n's and m's.
However whatever the problem is, these kids were spotted because they _were_ being given access to computers. Presuming you don't try to pick out the "problem" children the very first day you sit them in front of a keyboard, they should progress rapidly on their own. Just explain the basic rules the typing the first few days of the class, and move on from there. Kids who may have some kind of learning disability might need special instruction, but i think the rest will figure out some reasonably fast method of typing by themselves as long as they're using the computer often enough.
As best as i can remember from elementary school (my memory isn't so hot though) learning to read was fairly relaxed. People who had problmes picking it up were put in more intensive courses, but the rest of us just kinda learned as we went along. I don't see any reason why typing shouldn't work the same way.
Except the moon _does_ circumnaviate everyone in russia, and everywhere else on earth as well. About once every month in fact. It's not a good "in soviet russia" joke if it's actually _true_ :)
If Criterion were to stop selling their platform to other companies the average quality of current games would go down slightly, with the exception of Criterion's own games of course. Criterion's games would therefore sell a little better, but probably not a huge amount better, so it's worth more to sell the platform to other companies at the cost of a slight decrease in sales of their own games.
EA on the other hand is involved in the production of dozens of game every year at the least, probably more like a hundred or more. When you're talking about that many games, a slight increase in sales for all of them becomes a significant amount of money. EA can sell Renderware at a discount to its affiliated companies, or offer it for "free" in exchange for favorable contracts. EA therefore gets more money from those companes (either directly or through better percentages in contracts) from the companies they work with, and if they they can pressure some non-EA companies into signing up with them by threatening to take away Renderware, and the rest will most likely see some fall in quality of their games, thereby increasing the perceived value of EAs games and increasing their sales. Again, only by a small amount, but a small amount spread over dozens or hundreds of games adds up to quite a bit.
It's pretty much like any other vertical monopoly. When Carnegie bought out iron mines he could have continued to do buisness like the old mine owners did, selling the ore to whoever offered the best price. However in the long run it was more advantageous to keep all the ore for his own foundries. In doing so he made getting iron ore more difficult for the other companies (yes, there were other mines out there, just like there are other platforms than Renderware, but every source taken out of circulation makes it more difficult for the other companies) and reduced his own prices as well. If the mines are just shipping the ore straight to his own foundries instead of selling it to others, he can cut out a lot of extraneous stuff that isn't necessary anymore. If EA does decide to enternalize Renderware you can bet that Criterion's marketing department is going byebye, thus reducing the costs of the company and making it cheaper for EA to produce Renderware for itself.
Carnegie wasn't fucking stupid for trying to get all aspects of steel production under his control, it ended up making him incredibly rich. If done right there would be nothing stupid about EA trying to get all aspects of game procution under its control as well. It might not be so good for the gamers, and it certainly wouldn't be so good for the non-EA companies, but it would be good buisness for EA.
The problem is that i'm pretty sure RenderWare is a licensed product. They probably can't revoke the license for any current games, but they can certainly refuse to renew it for any upcoming games. So yes, they can in fact threaten to pull the plug.
And even if i'm wrong about the licensing bit, they can always just refuse to release any new updates publically and keep them for themselves (and any companies who choose to cooperate with them) instead, which would be almost as bad.
Yeah, it sucks to keep playing those kiddy nintendo games like Eternal Darkness, Metroid Prime and Rogue Squadron.
Well yeah, the "think will make them feel younger again" was more refering to the motercycle and the boat and similar stereotypical mid-life crises purchases :)
No. And since when did anyone ever need evangelical bikers?
What you're describing doesn't really sound that interesting to me, and besides, i'm a whimp. Going rollerblading and having sex is about the riskiest i want my entertainment to be, and i'm perfectly happy with that.
Besides, i've scraped myself up enough rollerblading and crashed enough cars driving that i don't think i could trust myself on a bike even if i thought it might be fun.
let me start with what i said, "Sure our current election system encourages a two party system, but it's not writ in stone." I think that's pretty much true. There have been periods of time in our history in which there have been three viable parties, after awhile political forces encourage a narrowing down to two parties, but that in turn leads to the eventual development of yet another third party. You could say that our system inevitable leads to two parties, but you could just as easily say that it inevitable leads to three parties, it just depends on where you want to take your data points from.
A party is certain to win if it has 51% of votes. But the more its votes get above 50%, the less largess there is to go around ("largess" is the prizes given out by the winner to his supporters). So groups struggling for the optimal outcomes for themselves will naturally gravitate towards having as close to 51% support as possible. Any less than 50 and they risk losing- any more, and they've wasted money on extra votes that weren't needed to win.
This i think is just plain wrong. There have been pleanty of elections where the winning party had much more than 50%. In 1984 Reagan won by 60% of the popular vote and 98% of the Electoral College vote. The parties don't shy away from such landsides, instead they use them as "evidence" of a mandate to do whatever they want. As far as i can tell all parties collect as much money as they can and then spend it all.
I'm not sure who you mean by "supporters," but certainly there is no direct payment to the individual voters, and the link between financial supporters and voters is pretty much disconected, and the link between the amount of financial support and the favors returned to them (both financial and political) is definitely non-linear.
Because the chance of your vote actually changing anything, multiplied by the monentary value of any difference you'd personally experience from the preferred candidate, always comes out to less than $0.01. Usually a lot less (especially if you live in one of the 23 "noncontested" states where the Presidential winner is predetermined) Voting is a tax on people who can't do math. (If you're generous, then maybe you'll happily pay that extra tax for the good of the nation...)
And i thought _i_ was cynical. Do you actually calculate out how much you think you'll get in returns before going to the polls? Last i heard the whole idea of elections wasn't a direct monetary return. It was to make sure that the government reflects the wishes of the people. And how much does it cost you to vote anyways? It takes me five minutes to walk to my polling location, i expect it takes most people about a five or ten minute drive at most. That comes out to about a dollar in gas, which isn't much by itself and you get several hours of entertainment in exchange if you follow the results afterwards. Besides, there are groups that will drive you to the polls if you ask them, so the cost is extremely minimal.
It is incorrect to not capitalize "democrat" and "republican" in that sentence.
Are we discussing grammer or politics? Try to stay on topic please. If you want to get nitpicky, "G W Bush is a democrat whenever he talks about bringing Iraq the gift of democracy" is incorrect since we were speaking of "democrat" in reference to the american political party. Trying to switch between definitons in that manner is misleading.
And then the Democrats and Republicans would look at party Z, see which of it's platforms were attracting voters, check which of those were least likely to drive off their current supporters, and then add them into their position.
Now you're getting into what really encourages the two party system, and what i suspect also leads to the third party system again.
Despite the fact that there are many axes in the political spectrum, it tends to get narrowed down to a "lef
And incidentally, i've just started playing FF10-2 recently, and noticed that they seem to "follow" a couple of his suggestions. You have the airship right at the begining, allowing you to go anywhere and do whatever you want, lots of no hassle exploration. And like FF10, there are quite a number of save spheres, and you can use any of them to go back to the airship. Also like FF10 it has pretty good maps, often with arrows superimposed showing you where you're supposed to go. It has a jump command and some platform puzzles, but if you miss a jump your character just kind of staggers at the edge of the pit for a second and then lets you try again. No horrible punishments for failure, which makes it a lot more fun. You can still get killed in combat, quite easily if you wander into the wrong areas, and it still sends you back to the main menu of the game. An option to quick load back to the last save would have been convenient there.
Yeah! Damn those middle aged people for wanting to have fun! Every minute they're not working at their jobs they should be at home taking care of their families! If they find a few minutes of spare time between changing diapers they should stare blankly at the tv so they know what comercialistic crap they should be spending their money on!
Sorry, i don't want to give up on having fun just cause i'm getting older.
You want fun, go buy a motorcycle or a boat. Go play golf or something.
Er, what? How are those fun? I don't want anything to do with a motorcycle, and if i want to go sit in the sun near the water i can go to the beach for a lot less money and trouble than buying a boat. Golf seems like the most pointless waste of time ever. Like i said, i want to have _fun_, not waste large amounts of cash on useless things that unenlightened middle age people think will make them feel younger again.
I'm quite happy contuing to stock pile video games, DVDs, and books. Unfortunatly the average video game takes somewhere between three to ten times as long to finish as a good sized book, which in turn usually takes at least three times as long to finish as an average movie. It's no suprise that i finish far more books and movies that video games, both because they're quicker and because when i have to decide between finishing one video game storyline and several book/movie storylines the video games seem to provide a lot less bang per minute when i'm under a tight schedule.
And whose fault is it that we've got a 2 party system? YOURS!!!
Sure our current election system encourages a two party system, but it's not writ in stone, you could change the system, or at least see that one of the two parties was one worth voting for, but you're just sitting on your ass instead.
I give a damn about my country, so even though i think the democrats aren't that different from the republicans (well, other than the hard core fundamentalist republicans like Bush anyways) i think that difference is worth fighting for. There ar probably third parties out there i agree with more, but i'm more interested in results than fantasies. If i see party X which i really like with less than 5% support and the democrats who i somewhat agree with at 50% plus or minus a critical couple percent, i'm going to vote for the democrats. Lesser evil all the way.
YOU however aren't helping at all! You're not trying to get the lesser evil into office, and you're not trying to get the _good_ people into office either! If you won't vote for the lesser evil, get out there and vote for the people you actually support! About 50% of the population doesn't vote in most elections. If they all happened to agree on someone that's enough to get _anyone_ elected, and even if they didn't agree it's certainly enough to help shake things up. If you and everyone else who claims they don't like the two party system went out and voted for parties X, Y and Z, then X Y and Z would be getting 15-20% each, and the democrats and republicans would be down to around 25%. At _that_ point people would realize they could switch away from the democrats and republicans and make a real difference.
Either you're just too lazy to get off your ass on election day, and you claim you're protesting against the "system" to cover up for it, or you just haven't really thought about the issue. Not voting doesn't send any kind of message, at least not the one you think. The politicians and those of us who vote just think it means you're lazy or stupid. Voting for a third party candidate _does_ send a message.
Whatever you think of Nader (personally i think he's a lying hypocritical bastard who is certainly a worse choice than the democrats) you have to admit that the 3-5% who actually voted for a third party sent a much louder and clearer message than did you and the others in the subset of the 40-50% who didn't vote because they "object to the two party system." It's only a two party system because you refuse to vote for the third parties!
Geez, lighten up dude. It's not like anyone is going to try this, so just enjoy the amusement factor :)
I'm also wondering if this could even be considered fraud or something similar, although it would certainly be dishonest and underhanded. If you tried a similar trick on the stock market you'd certainly get nailed, but i'm not sure what laws cover this aspect of commerce.
In any case, although it's technically possible it would be damn hard to pull off. Amusing thought though.
Whatever the method, there's probably a way to corrupt the system. Someone just needs to come out with a cheapass MMO game that lets you collect vast amounts of money so you can exchange it for currency in another game. You are a cube, you go out into the flat featureless plain where you fight smaller cubes who leave large amounts of gold when defeated. You then go back to town (a really large cube) and save the game.
If the exchange rate is determined by total amount of gold in the game, you jut put caps on the total gold so no one can collect a truely huge amount at a time. Everyone quickly collects (say) a million gp and then converts it to another MMO before collecting more. If it's determined by the compared cost of items, you can have the monsters drop a small amount of gold, but make a dagger cost a copper, and the Uber-Sword of Godslaying cost a single gold, etc.
Whatever the system, just figure out the right exploit, and charge a minimum monthly fee so people can just sit there collecting loot for the game they really care about. Sure, you'd probably get locked out of the exchange program after a while, but you might be able to get a month or so of decent income in before that happened :)
If you can't handle the heat, get out of the left lane! On the other hand, i try to be nice to the people in the right couple lanes. They presumably don't want to deal with left lane traffic, and they're being considerate and using the right lanes like slower traffic is supposed to.
I like that theory, in that it dismises the "jedi can't count to two" thing.
The only problem is, if the surviving sith made the rule _after_ the jedi thought they had destroyed all the sith, how do the jedi know about the rule? If they heard about the rule at all after that point, believing it to be true would presupose believing there were sith around to make the new rule, which would contradict their belief that they had already killed all the sith.
From the article: "Professor David Nutt, a leading government drugs adviser who sits on the committee, told the IoS that anti-drug vaccines for children are likely to be among the panel's recommendations when it reports next March."
Now did you not read that, or do you think they were just lying about that? Drawing unfounded conclusions is shoddy reporting, lying about what people have actually said is far beyond that into the range of libel.
So at least as far as the claim that they're considering imunization of children, there doesn't seem to be any shoddy reporting going on. There might very well be some shoddy thinking going on by those who are developing the vaccines and those who are planning how to use them, but that is an entirely different (and more serious) issue.
I don't really want to get into a debate about the basic issue right now, but you're completly misinterpreting what the grandparent poster originally said. They suggested we should get rid of _ICBMs_ NOT all nuclear weapons. This was followed up by a question about whether we really needed ICBMs when we've got nuclear cruise missiles.
That may or may not be a good idea, but if you're going to debate the issue, at least address the points made instead of changing the topic.
The lesson here is that U2 has crappy fans?
When Rush was about to release Vapor Trails a year or two ago, i happened to find mp3s of the complete album a month or so before it hit stores on a P2P network. I had actually been looking for older Rush mp3s and was suprised but very excited to find the new ones as well.
I downloaded the mp3s, spent a few weeks listening to them at work, and then bought the CD the first week it was out.
At the time i don't remember Rush complaining about the mp3s being out there. They certainly didn't move their release date because of it. And as a solitary representative of their fans, i at least did not feel less inclined to go out and buy the album. So what's up with U2 and their fans?
I tend to think of commas in a list of descriptors as "and"s. However you have to judge by context whether it's inclusive(?) or not. Ie, "I like the colors red and green" means they like both colors, and although something with both colors would be great, something with just one color would be good too. "I like sandwiches with pastrami and mustard" tends to imply that the two are required together.