My favorite is when they include six or seven links to various things and then include a quote from "the article" at the end, and you have no idea which link leads to the A you're supposed to be RTFing before you comment about it.
5.77% increase for 100% failure... must be the *new* math.
It actually makes sense if the people doing the trading are actually inteligent. Akamai has a problem, and _half the internet goes down_. That's pretty impressive and shows how many contracts Akamai has and how much those companies are depending on Akamai.
If failures like this happened on a regular basis it would definitely screw with investor confidence. However as a (currently) one time thing it just serves to show how important and influential Akamai really is, which could lead to more people buying into the company if they didn't know that much about it beforehand.
"We know that in Florida Diebold machines gave Al Gore -15,000 votes."
" We know they screwed up in the California recall election,"
and finally
"We know there are Aliens out there".
All of them are of the same significance.
You are a political hack - go away...
Wow, i wish i'd read the rest of the thread before my first repsonse to you. Here's an article from ABC news (link stolen from earlier in the discussion) which talks about the negative votes for Gore among other things. The negative total was given by an electronic voting machine from a company that was bought by Diebold shortly thereafter. So to say it was Diebold machines that provided the drasticly wrong results might be considered wrong, or at least misleading, but i think the idea is the same since Diebold seems to have become synonymous with electronic voting.
I remember the problems here in California when some precincts reported results of several times the number of registered voters. The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
And the recount (which took many months, and was conducted by the Miami Herald, a less than friend of Repulicans, among others) found that Gore still lost Florida. Now get over it!
Actually they found the results would have depended on how the recount was done. I forget the exact numbers, but he would have won by several of the methods by which the republicans wanted the votes recounted, and would have lost by several of the methods the democrats wanted the votes recounted. How's that for irony?
Of course none of that really reflects on the fact that Gore would have come out the clear winner if thousands of legal voters hand't been "mistakenly" striken from the list of eligble voters because the Republican Florida administration claimed they were felons.
And why should i "get over" the republicans lawyering their way out of the recount? My complaint isn't that they won per se (not that that makes me happy, but they've won lots of elections i wish they hadn't and i didn't acuse them of foul play in those) but the fact that they refused to follow the law and let the recount occur the way it was supposed to. Nixon wasn't any less of a criminal just because he probably would have won the election even without spying on the democrats.
Interestingly, Swarc has the highest approval ratings of all Governors in decades...
Perhaps. I haven't seen the numbers myself, but it wouldn't suprise me. The majority of Californians are apparnetly idiots when it comes to anything involving celebrity status. Then again, so are most americans. Look at Reagan after all.
However the current popularity has nothing to do with the validity of the elections.
I don't remember any diebold screwups specifically in the recall election, but i remember hearing about them in other california elections, so again, it wouldn't suprise me.
It's 4 years AFTER the fact and you STILL read people on Slashdot who think it's delightfully clever to say that Bush never "won" an election since he really "stole" it. Wha? Come again? *blink blink* Mine eyes have been made open to a new scandal! I think it's practically diagnosable paranoia if a person honestly believes that the presidential election, covered around the clock by half a dozen news agencies, considered by the Supreme Court, was "stolen". That doesn't mean I like how it turned out or that I think Bush should have won, or would have won if we had a complete re-do in December, but for fuck's sake, Gore ceded victory.
What are you objecting to? The idea that Bush used unfair and malicious means to win the election? Or just the use of the word "stole" to descrive that action?
There doesn't seem much doubt that the Republicans paid people to go protest in Florida. (Unfortunatly i can't give you any good links for that one, most of the pages i've found reference a Wall Street Journal article, which i can't find because i'm not a paid subscriber.) Those protests delayed the recount enough to give the Supreme Court the excuse of declaring that Florida had passed the deadline and the recount shouldn't be considered. I think the intent of the Republican Party was pretty clear in that instance. They had no interest in finding out who the people actually wanted, they just wanted to make sure the initial verdict was maintained despite Florida law to the contrary.
"Steal" may be a bit of hyperbole, but certainly Bush was trying to claim something that did not yet legally and might never have legally belonged to him.
You can certainly claim that Gore wanted to win the election too. I can't speak for Gore personally of course, but although as a democrat i wanted him to win the election, i didn't think the rules should have been changed to allow him to win. After most elections in which the Democrats lose (which happens far to often in my opinion of course) i don't regularly protest that the election was flawed and that some kind of do-over should be made, unless i'm shown clear evidence of corruption and bribery or such.
In the case of Florida the close results triggered an automatic recount, as was mandated by the Florida constitution. Although that certainly gave me hope that the recount would favor Gore, i wanted the recount to happen fairly and if the new results still favored Bush i would have accepted that. That wasn't good enough for the Republicans however who seemed to feel that the same rules shouldn't apply to them.
There are a lot of accusations against Bush and his administration that fall under the conspiracy theory nonsense. (Bush hearing that a plane had hit one of the WTC towers and then deciding to continue on to an appearance at an elementary school is evidence of his vast stupidity, not an indication that he planed the 9/11 attacks.) However in this case there is pretty clear evidence that _something_ was going on. It's just a question of how much was by accident and how much be design, and who was arranging the by design bits. Yes the election was closely watched by a lot of people, however the stuff i cited still apparently happened. I haven't seen any news sources refuting it, in fact i've seen the felon thing repeated quite a number of times since, including reports that it may be happening again for the next presidential election. The problem is that even though news agencies knew about these issues, they don't seem to care and don't report them very much. Just like the whole slew of e-voting machine problems it seems.
However to get back to one of your original comments, i agree with you that Moore is a bloody idiot. He seems to twist facts at best and just make up shit outright at worst, and in the long run he's not really helping the democrats. And this is in spite of the fact that i seem to agree with most of his basic mesages.
And what has the history taught us about the (non-)equivalence of the morality and law?
I don't know what history you've been paying attention to, but what history has taught me about the the relation of morality and law is that the letter of the law tends to converge with the collective morality of the society, while the application of the law frequently tends to diverge.
The "moral majority" in the US likes to believe that it is a "christian nation." In fact many of the founders were not christians and had very nasty things to say about the organized christian religion. However the people who like to argue the point claim that our legal system was based in part on the Ten Comandmants. Although there are a lot of similarities between the two this is actually an example of the convergence of both different moralities with each other, and the the moral system with the legal system.
Examining the different legal and moral systems around the world in many different cultures will show that there are a lot basic similarities. Most of the holy texts and legal systems agree that you shouldn't take things you don't have a right to, you shouldn't hurt people without good reason, and you especially shouldn't kill people except under extreme provocation. The exact morality differes from time to time and place to place, but the stuff that almost everyone agrees on is usually of the nature of things that the majority of the population agrees "this thing sucks so much that i'd be willing to agree not to do it to anyone else if they'll all agree not to do it to me."
Whether by coincidence or design, these things are also the things you need to stop in order for a society to function effectively. (At least in all the cases i know of.) In effect, even though we all know that life isn't fair, we agree on rules to make things as fair as is necessary so that we can all get along, and then create governing systems, either religious or secular, to enforce that fair play.
As time passes and we develop more complicated socities, technology, and ways of thinking, our views on what is moral or fair changes. Clearly not everyone agrees on everything, but if the majority of the population holds a certain view, that view eventually becomes reflected in the legal system, either de jure or de facto. (In some cases the process may be delayed by an authoritarian society with a ruling class opposed to the views, but in the long run even those societies usually change one way or the other)
A few hundred years ago Adam Smith came up with the free market system. (At least in the simplified view of history.) However Adam Smith imagined a large number of small and medium sized companies competing on a fair and level playing field. Adam Smith certainly would not have proposed that it was "fair" for one company to attack another company with actual force to achieve dominance. However he failed to forsee the arise of large companies and even monopolies who could use economic force in "unfair" ways. The most famous method was for a large, wide-spread suplier to reduce prices below cost on one area in order to drive all the local supliers out of buisness while maintaining a non-negative cash flow through higher-priced sales in other areas. Once the competition was bankrupt prices would be raised to above the original level to maxmize profits.
The majority of the population felt this was immoral and unfair, and students of Adam Smith's free market economy realized that the use of overwhelming market share or capital to bully smaller competitors was not what had originally been intended. Because of this laws were passed to prevent large companies from using "unfair" buisness practices.
So the laws against illegal buisness practices that Microsoft was judged guilty of breaking are a reflection of an advanced moral code that believes that certain kinds of economic bullying are no better than physical bullying. The link between legality and morality is quite clear. The laws would never have been passe
Obviously tastes differ. I thought the original Zelda was great, as was LttP. Zelda 2 was a little strange, but not too bad.
However i really wasn't that impressed with Ocarina of Time. I got maybe halfway through before quiting in boredom. I wasn't interested in playing Celda, but unlike most people who complain about the game i had no issue with the graphics, but instead was put off by gameplay that seemed similar to OoT and MM.
To put it bluntly, people in general become more conservative as time progresses in their lives and they are most creative when the world is still "new" to them.
In general most people are stupid and complacent as well, but that doesn't mean that everyone is or that we should cater to those who are. My dad has actually become more liberal with age due to my mom's influence. My mom on the other hand just recently discovered punk rock at about the age of 60 and is busy collecting Ramones memorabilia and mixing her own punk CDs. I'm planning on following in their footsteps, in general if not in the particulars.
I'm slmost 30 and i keep getting ideas as time goes on with no real sign of slowing down. Perhaps i'll hit a sudden brick wall at the mythical three oh, but it doesn't seem likely. And if there's any physiological reason for the supposed decreased creativity in later life, wouldn't finding and reversing the cause be a part of the whole longevity thing in the long run?
If we ever hit complete immortality though, this is going to stop being the case. As long as the birth rate is even slightly higher than the rate of deaths due to accidents, killing, etc., you will have positive population growth. Forever.
That's a fallacy. Infinite growth only occurs if the birth rate is greater than or equal to one per person.
For example, suppose for simplicity sake that everyone has, on average, 0.5 kids, or one kid per possible couple. That means that 6 billion people would produce 3 billion people, who would produce 1.5 billion people, etc. If no one ever died, the population would max out at 12 billion, after which no one would be having any more kids.
Different numbers of kids would produce a different final amount, but for all values less than 1.0 the end result is a finite bounded value.
Whether or not you could get everyone to agree to an (on average) value of less than 1.0 is a good question, but it is technnically possible for people to produce kids at a rate greater than the death rate without approaching infinity.
3. Eat three reasonable meals a day. Find out what is reasonable for you. Eat meat, fish, and eggs (or soy if you're vegan) in decent amounts. You need these to keep muscle tissue.
4. Quit snacks. Period. Learn to live on your three meals a day, with the *occasional* treat.
I agree with most of what you said, except for these two. Just about all nutritionists (who aren't trying to sell some kind of fad diet at least) agree on the type of foods we should eat, which you covered. However there's a lot more disagreement about how much and how often we should be eating them.
Certainly what you suggest is one valid diet. However there have also been studies showing that eating smaller meals more often can work well (maintains the metabolic rate at a more steady level.) There are of course the studies that show that reducing calories by a lot (to 2/3rds of your recomended allowance i believe?) seems to promote longevity and general health. However they've also found that fasting for medium periods of time (between 24 and 48 hours i believe) and than eating a lot of food at once can provide some of the same benefits. (I'm unsure of the exact details, but it seems to trick your body into thinking it's starving, and thereby inducing the same effects as the low calorie diet.)
So in effect everyone agrees on what you should eat, and they mostly agree that you shouldn't eat more than your RDA, and probably not much less than 2/3rds your RDA (i believe) but there isn't any real agreement to how those calories should be split up. So if three meals a day with no snacks works for you, that's great. However if someone feels good having a (healthy) 250 calorie snack every two hours but no real meals, that would probably work too. Or they could have one 2000 calorie meal every day, and no snacks.
They do have cameramen and lighting technicians. In fact, if you read the closing credits of any 3-D film, there are more people dedicated to those tasks than in regular feature film. Sure they don't handle a physical camera or light, but the camera moves in 3-D and the lighting & shading take a whole lot of people pulling a whole lot of paychecks.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Sure, everything that gets done has someone doing it in both formats, but it takes a lot less people for Pixar. Taking a look at the cast list for Finding Nemo on IMDB shows that a lot of people worked on the movie, but it's still a lot less than many other big movies.
Troy, for example, lists 20 people under the various director categories, Nemo on the other hand lists 6. Nemo has 3 people listed for lighting, while Troy lists 5, and that's not even counting the gaffers, best boys, electricians, and other people who actually do the work. The other thing is that if Pixar works like many other CS companies, a lot of the people listed in the credits probably didn't spenf a lot of time working on the movie. It's common for people from other teams to be brought in for a few days or weeks during crunch time or for help on an especially difficult task.
They also tend to have to travel around a lot if they are doing a scene that takes place in a foreign city. In Finding Nemo, for instance, they sent the directors and animators over to Australia to get the look and feel right.
Flying a few people to a location to sight-see and take notes and pictures for a week or two is a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than flying an entire film crew to a location to film there for a several weeks or months.
In regular films, they have lots of B-roll. If they need to scrap a scene, they can pretty easily fill the time with a shot of something else.
That's a great idea! I can just make a movie that only uses B-roll stock, and that way i won't have to pay for any filming! Oh, wait, what do you mean they actually had to _pay_ to make all those B-roll shots in the first place?
Not to mention the fact that using exisitng footage is going to be a hit or miss proposition. Sure you can find _something_ to fit in if you just need to fill time, but that's not a really good way to make a movie. If the director/scriptwriter/whoever decides that they need a certain scene in the desert for later sequences to make sense, they'd better hope that they have something from their Mexico-shoot that at least aproximates it that they can edit, or they're going to have to pay several million dollars to go back and do more filming.
Pixar on the other hand probably has a pretty set day to day cost of operations. Adding a new scene is a lot of work, but not as much as doing a new shoot on location just for a single scene.
Re:Enlarge your sense of humor quickly and natural
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Geeks and Poker?
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For a limited time only, receive a pocket Sarcasm Detector absolutely FREE!
Oh, the irony.
"I belive that's moot, better be carefull or the grammar nazi will get after you."
They really should have used "grammer" instead of "grammar" though.
You're right, information on profit margins would be interesting. However the actors are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of savings. They don't have to buy cameras or film or ship the production halfway around the world to film on location. No cameramen or best boys or grips or lighting technicians or any of those people.
It's also a lot less of a disaster for them if they decide to scrap a scene or add a new one. By this point they've probably also got an instant storyboarding mode, where the director can say "let's see what it looks like with a helicoptor in this scene." They open up their directory of objects and find a helicoptor, drop it into the scene, and render it at low enough resolution that they can view it in real time.
One of the best american science fiction movies ever! The Iron Giant had a great twist on the standard "poor friendly alien comes to earth but the mean military wants to kill/capture/whatever it" plot. And yeah, Warner Brothers really botched the release. Very little advertising, and that advertising promoted it as a kids' movie.
I _so_ have to see The Incredibles when it comes out instead of waiting for the DVD.
Re:It has become the best studio because...
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Welcome To Planet Pixar
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· Score: 3, Insightful
it puts the creative minds first and in control, not the big wigs...I mean when Roy Disney gets kicked out of Disney itself, you know you have a problem.
That's because it's new and young. Disney is old, rich, successful (in the long run) and powerful. You know the proverbs; power corrupts, success breeds complacency, etc.
Someday Pixar will get old and crotchety too, but lets hope they have a good run while their youth lasts.
With 3.5 billion in sales at an average of 60 cents each (according to the article) it's more like 11,098 suckers born every minute. The number is probably lower due to repeat buyers, but i doubt there's one sucker born every minute who buys 11,098 ringtones:)
How many cellphone owners are there in the world? Maybe a billion? Two billion at most? I know cell phone rates are higher in many other countries than the US, but still, there are only 6 billion people on the world, and only a fraction of those have the means to buy a cellphone.
So if there are a billion cellphone owners, and i'm paying 0 a year for ringtones, who is the idiot who's paying $7.00+ a year who is balancing me out?
He's just as good as Arnold and about 10x better than Vin Diesel.
Have you actually _seen_ Pitch Black? The Chronicles of Riddick looks like it might be really cool as well.
And to top it off, he's been a long time D&D player, and had the name for one of his favorite characters as a tattoo in xXx. Sure beats being a former bodybuilder or profesional wrestler:)
I agree, this is kind of sad. I wasn't happy when Sega was forced out of the console market, and this is just one more step down for them. Especially since as you said, Sammy has expresed interest in them focusing more on the arcade market.
If Sega had to be bought out, i was hoping that Nintendo would get a clue and make the purchase. Between their rivalry back in the day and their more recent teamwork on some great games (Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, the Sonic GameCube games, the Skies of Arcadia remake, etc) i think they have a lot of common. I would have trusted Nintendo a lot more to deal with Sega the way in which they deserve.
According to all the reports i've seen that and every other chemical weapon you mentioned was identified by the military as being forgotten leftovers from before the first Gulf War, ie over a decade old. There's been no evidence to show that Saddam was manufacturing or stockpiling any WMDs since then.
There is strong evidence that shows he was at least harboring Al-Qaeda members if not providing training and support. The media just doesn't like reporting it and the public doesn't want to hear it.
What evidence is that? All the evidence i've seen shows that the fundamentalist Islamics hated the seculraist Saddam. Near the begining of the war Al-Queda released a tape stating that although they thought Saddam should be removed from power, they thought the Americans were the greater threat and should be resisted. There may well have been Al-Queda groups in Iraq, but it seems doubtful they were on good terms with Saddam.
In addition, the US put Sadam in power and is morally responsible for what he did. The US inflicted the SoB on the world and now they are paying the price to get rid of him. What goes around, comes around.
I agree with you on that one to some degree. Yes, we were responsible for him being in power, and in a certain way we needed to atone for that, however just because you _should_ do something doesn't mean that you can actually do it successfully.
You can only "liberate" a country if there is a vast majority of the population that supports you, and no minority that will forcibly oppose you other than those in power. We seem to have miscalculated for Iraq on at least one of those.
Things seem to be going better in Afghanistan except that A: the media doesn't pay much attention to it so it's hard to know for sure and B: the military doesn't seem to be paying much attention to it and is allowing the Taliban and other tribal lords to get away with far more than they should. Some reports seem to indicate that the entire country is in chaos except around the major cities where US forces are.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite is when they include six or seven links to various things and then include a quote from "the article" at the end, and you have no idea which link leads to the A you're supposed to be RTFing before you comment about it.
It actually makes sense if the people doing the trading are actually inteligent. Akamai has a problem, and _half the internet goes down_. That's pretty impressive and shows how many contracts Akamai has and how much those companies are depending on Akamai.
If failures like this happened on a regular basis it would definitely screw with investor confidence. However as a (currently) one time thing it just serves to show how important and influential Akamai really is, which could lead to more people buying into the company if they didn't know that much about it beforehand.
" We know they screwed up in the California recall election,"
and finally
"We know there are Aliens out there".
All of them are of the same significance.
You are a political hack - go away ...
Wow, i wish i'd read the rest of the thread before my first repsonse to you. Here's an article from ABC news (link stolen from earlier in the discussion) which talks about the negative votes for Gore among other things. The negative total was given by an electronic voting machine from a company that was bought by Diebold shortly thereafter. So to say it was Diebold machines that provided the drasticly wrong results might be considered wrong, or at least misleading, but i think the idea is the same since Diebold seems to have become synonymous with electronic voting.
I remember the problems here in California when some precincts reported results of several times the number of registered voters. The orignal poster may be confused about whether it happened during the special election for the recall or the normal election a few months later, (i think it was the second election, but i'm not sure either) but regardless you're just nitpicking.
You lose, go home troll.
Actually they found the results would have depended on how the recount was done. I forget the exact numbers, but he would have won by several of the methods by which the republicans wanted the votes recounted, and would have lost by several of the methods the democrats wanted the votes recounted. How's that for irony?
Of course none of that really reflects on the fact that Gore would have come out the clear winner if thousands of legal voters hand't been "mistakenly" striken from the list of eligble voters because the Republican Florida administration claimed they were felons.
And why should i "get over" the republicans lawyering their way out of the recount? My complaint isn't that they won per se (not that that makes me happy, but they've won lots of elections i wish they hadn't and i didn't acuse them of foul play in those) but the fact that they refused to follow the law and let the recount occur the way it was supposed to. Nixon wasn't any less of a criminal just because he probably would have won the election even without spying on the democrats.
Perhaps. I haven't seen the numbers myself, but it wouldn't suprise me. The majority of Californians are apparnetly idiots when it comes to anything involving celebrity status. Then again, so are most americans. Look at Reagan after all.
However the current popularity has nothing to do with the validity of the elections.
I don't remember any diebold screwups specifically in the recall election, but i remember hearing about them in other california elections, so again, it wouldn't suprise me.
What are you objecting to? The idea that Bush used unfair and malicious means to win the election? Or just the use of the word "stole" to descrive that action?
Nobody seems to disagree that the Republicans unfairly prevented thousands of people from voting by mistakenly labeling them as felons. The real question of course was if it was an honest mistake, or if there was a nefarious motivation.
There doesn't seem much doubt that the Republicans paid people to go protest in Florida. (Unfortunatly i can't give you any good links for that one, most of the pages i've found reference a Wall Street Journal article, which i can't find because i'm not a paid subscriber.) Those protests delayed the recount enough to give the Supreme Court the excuse of declaring that Florida had passed the deadline and the recount shouldn't be considered. I think the intent of the Republican Party was pretty clear in that instance. They had no interest in finding out who the people actually wanted, they just wanted to make sure the initial verdict was maintained despite Florida law to the contrary.
"Steal" may be a bit of hyperbole, but certainly Bush was trying to claim something that did not yet legally and might never have legally belonged to him.
You can certainly claim that Gore wanted to win the election too. I can't speak for Gore personally of course, but although as a democrat i wanted him to win the election, i didn't think the rules should have been changed to allow him to win. After most elections in which the Democrats lose (which happens far to often in my opinion of course) i don't regularly protest that the election was flawed and that some kind of do-over should be made, unless i'm shown clear evidence of corruption and bribery or such.
In the case of Florida the close results triggered an automatic recount, as was mandated by the Florida constitution. Although that certainly gave me hope that the recount would favor Gore, i wanted the recount to happen fairly and if the new results still favored Bush i would have accepted that. That wasn't good enough for the Republicans however who seemed to feel that the same rules shouldn't apply to them.
There are a lot of accusations against Bush and his administration that fall under the conspiracy theory nonsense. (Bush hearing that a plane had hit one of the WTC towers and then deciding to continue on to an appearance at an elementary school is evidence of his vast stupidity, not an indication that he planed the 9/11 attacks.) However in this case there is pretty clear evidence that _something_ was going on. It's just a question of how much was by accident and how much be design, and who was arranging the by design bits. Yes the election was closely watched by a lot of people, however the stuff i cited still apparently happened. I haven't seen any news sources refuting it, in fact i've seen the felon thing repeated quite a number of times since, including reports that it may be happening again for the next presidential election. The problem is that even though news agencies knew about these issues, they don't seem to care and don't report them very much. Just like the whole slew of e-voting machine problems it seems.
However to get back to one of your original comments, i agree with you that Moore is a bloody idiot. He seems to twist facts at best and just make up shit outright at worst, and in the long run he's not really helping the democrats. And this is in spite of the fact that i seem to agree with most of his basic mesages.
I don't know what history you've been paying attention to, but what history has taught me about the the relation of morality and law is that the letter of the law tends to converge with the collective morality of the society, while the application of the law frequently tends to diverge.
The "moral majority" in the US likes to believe that it is a "christian nation." In fact many of the founders were not christians and had very nasty things to say about the organized christian religion. However the people who like to argue the point claim that our legal system was based in part on the Ten Comandmants. Although there are a lot of similarities between the two this is actually an example of the convergence of both different moralities with each other, and the the moral system with the legal system.
Examining the different legal and moral systems around the world in many different cultures will show that there are a lot basic similarities. Most of the holy texts and legal systems agree that you shouldn't take things you don't have a right to, you shouldn't hurt people without good reason, and you especially shouldn't kill people except under extreme provocation. The exact morality differes from time to time and place to place, but the stuff that almost everyone agrees on is usually of the nature of things that the majority of the population agrees "this thing sucks so much that i'd be willing to agree not to do it to anyone else if they'll all agree not to do it to me."
Whether by coincidence or design, these things are also the things you need to stop in order for a society to function effectively. (At least in all the cases i know of.) In effect, even though we all know that life isn't fair, we agree on rules to make things as fair as is necessary so that we can all get along, and then create governing systems, either religious or secular, to enforce that fair play.
As time passes and we develop more complicated socities, technology, and ways of thinking, our views on what is moral or fair changes. Clearly not everyone agrees on everything, but if the majority of the population holds a certain view, that view eventually becomes reflected in the legal system, either de jure or de facto. (In some cases the process may be delayed by an authoritarian society with a ruling class opposed to the views, but in the long run even those societies usually change one way or the other)
A few hundred years ago Adam Smith came up with the free market system. (At least in the simplified view of history.) However Adam Smith imagined a large number of small and medium sized companies competing on a fair and level playing field. Adam Smith certainly would not have proposed that it was "fair" for one company to attack another company with actual force to achieve dominance. However he failed to forsee the arise of large companies and even monopolies who could use economic force in "unfair" ways. The most famous method was for a large, wide-spread suplier to reduce prices below cost on one area in order to drive all the local supliers out of buisness while maintaining a non-negative cash flow through higher-priced sales in other areas. Once the competition was bankrupt prices would be raised to above the original level to maxmize profits.
The majority of the population felt this was immoral and unfair, and students of Adam Smith's free market economy realized that the use of overwhelming market share or capital to bully smaller competitors was not what had originally been intended. Because of this laws were passed to prevent large companies from using "unfair" buisness practices.
So the laws against illegal buisness practices that Microsoft was judged guilty of breaking are a reflection of an advanced moral code that believes that certain kinds of economic bullying are no better than physical bullying. The link between legality and morality is quite clear. The laws would never have been passe
However i really wasn't that impressed with Ocarina of Time. I got maybe halfway through before quiting in boredom. I wasn't interested in playing Celda, but unlike most people who complain about the game i had no issue with the graphics, but instead was put off by gameplay that seemed similar to OoT and MM.
Wow, for once you actually said something i can agree with, even though (or perhaps because) i worked for them indirectly at one point.
*checks outside to see if the sky is falling*
Except, as yet other people have pointed out, for all those earlier CG movies that didn't use any voices at all :)
In general most people are stupid and complacent as well, but that doesn't mean that everyone is or that we should cater to those who are. My dad has actually become more liberal with age due to my mom's influence. My mom on the other hand just recently discovered punk rock at about the age of 60 and is busy collecting Ramones memorabilia and mixing her own punk CDs. I'm planning on following in their footsteps, in general if not in the particulars.
I'm slmost 30 and i keep getting ideas as time goes on with no real sign of slowing down. Perhaps i'll hit a sudden brick wall at the mythical three oh, but it doesn't seem likely. And if there's any physiological reason for the supposed decreased creativity in later life, wouldn't finding and reversing the cause be a part of the whole longevity thing in the long run?
That's a fallacy. Infinite growth only occurs if the birth rate is greater than or equal to one per person.
For example, suppose for simplicity sake that everyone has, on average, 0.5 kids, or one kid per possible couple. That means that 6 billion people would produce 3 billion people, who would produce 1.5 billion people, etc. If no one ever died, the population would max out at 12 billion, after which no one would be having any more kids.
Different numbers of kids would produce a different final amount, but for all values less than 1.0 the end result is a finite bounded value.
Whether or not you could get everyone to agree to an (on average) value of less than 1.0 is a good question, but it is technnically possible for people to produce kids at a rate greater than the death rate without approaching infinity.
4. Quit snacks. Period. Learn to live on your three meals a day, with the *occasional* treat.
I agree with most of what you said, except for these two. Just about all nutritionists (who aren't trying to sell some kind of fad diet at least) agree on the type of foods we should eat, which you covered. However there's a lot more disagreement about how much and how often we should be eating them.
Certainly what you suggest is one valid diet. However there have also been studies showing that eating smaller meals more often can work well (maintains the metabolic rate at a more steady level.) There are of course the studies that show that reducing calories by a lot (to 2/3rds of your recomended allowance i believe?) seems to promote longevity and general health. However they've also found that fasting for medium periods of time (between 24 and 48 hours i believe) and than eating a lot of food at once can provide some of the same benefits. (I'm unsure of the exact details, but it seems to trick your body into thinking it's starving, and thereby inducing the same effects as the low calorie diet.)
So in effect everyone agrees on what you should eat, and they mostly agree that you shouldn't eat more than your RDA, and probably not much less than 2/3rds your RDA (i believe) but there isn't any real agreement to how those calories should be split up. So if three meals a day with no snacks works for you, that's great. However if someone feels good having a (healthy) 250 calorie snack every two hours but no real meals, that would probably work too. Or they could have one 2000 calorie meal every day, and no snacks.
The buildup of ketones is very similar to what happens to diabetics who don't regulate themselves strictly enough. It's one of the leading causes of many of the health problems diabetics suffer from.
The buildup of ketones leads to metabolic acidosis. Specifically, "This can occur when the body uses fats for energy instead of carbohydrates. Conditions where metabolic acidosis can occur include chronic alcoholism, malnutrition, and diabetic ketoacidosis. Consuming a diet low in carbohydrates and high in fats can also produce metabolic acidosis."
F-Zero GX, Super Monkeyball, just to add to the list.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Sure, everything that gets done has someone doing it in both formats, but it takes a lot less people for Pixar. Taking a look at the cast list for Finding Nemo on IMDB shows that a lot of people worked on the movie, but it's still a lot less than many other big movies.
Troy, for example, lists 20 people under the various director categories, Nemo on the other hand lists 6. Nemo has 3 people listed for lighting, while Troy lists 5, and that's not even counting the gaffers, best boys, electricians, and other people who actually do the work. The other thing is that if Pixar works like many other CS companies, a lot of the people listed in the credits probably didn't spenf a lot of time working on the movie. It's common for people from other teams to be brought in for a few days or weeks during crunch time or for help on an especially difficult task.
They also tend to have to travel around a lot if they are doing a scene that takes place in a foreign city. In Finding Nemo, for instance, they sent the directors and animators over to Australia to get the look and feel right.
Flying a few people to a location to sight-see and take notes and pictures for a week or two is a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than flying an entire film crew to a location to film there for a several weeks or months.
In regular films, they have lots of B-roll. If they need to scrap a scene, they can pretty easily fill the time with a shot of something else.
That's a great idea! I can just make a movie that only uses B-roll stock, and that way i won't have to pay for any filming! Oh, wait, what do you mean they actually had to _pay_ to make all those B-roll shots in the first place?
Not to mention the fact that using exisitng footage is going to be a hit or miss proposition. Sure you can find _something_ to fit in if you just need to fill time, but that's not a really good way to make a movie. If the director/scriptwriter/whoever decides that they need a certain scene in the desert for later sequences to make sense, they'd better hope that they have something from their Mexico-shoot that at least aproximates it that they can edit, or they're going to have to pay several million dollars to go back and do more filming.
Pixar on the other hand probably has a pretty set day to day cost of operations. Adding a new scene is a lot of work, but not as much as doing a new shoot on location just for a single scene.
"I belive that's moot, better be carefull or the grammar nazi will get after you."
They really should have used "grammer" instead of "grammar" though.
It's also a lot less of a disaster for them if they decide to scrap a scene or add a new one. By this point they've probably also got an instant storyboarding mode, where the director can say "let's see what it looks like with a helicoptor in this scene." They open up their directory of objects and find a helicoptor, drop it into the scene, and render it at low enough resolution that they can view it in real time.
I _so_ have to see The Incredibles when it comes out instead of waiting for the DVD.
That's because it's new and young. Disney is old, rich, successful (in the long run) and powerful. You know the proverbs; power corrupts, success breeds complacency, etc.
Someday Pixar will get old and crotchety too, but lets hope they have a good run while their youth lasts.
With 3.5 billion in sales at an average of 60 cents each (according to the article) it's more like 11,098 suckers born every minute. The number is probably lower due to repeat buyers, but i doubt there's one sucker born every minute who buys 11,098 ringtones :)
How many cellphone owners are there in the world? Maybe a billion? Two billion at most? I know cell phone rates are higher in many other countries than the US, but still, there are only 6 billion people on the world, and only a fraction of those have the means to buy a cellphone.
So if there are a billion cellphone owners, and i'm paying 0 a year for ringtones, who is the idiot who's paying $7.00+ a year who is balancing me out?
Have you actually _seen_ Pitch Black? The Chronicles of Riddick looks like it might be really cool as well.
And to top it off, he's been a long time D&D player, and had the name for one of his favorite characters as a tattoo in xXx. Sure beats being a former bodybuilder or profesional wrestler :)
It's things like this that give me faint hope that someday we'll see Firefly, the tv series based on the movie based on the tv series.
If Sega had to be bought out, i was hoping that Nintendo would get a clue and make the purchase. Between their rivalry back in the day and their more recent teamwork on some great games (Super Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, the Sonic GameCube games, the Skies of Arcadia remake, etc) i think they have a lot of common. I would have trusted Nintendo a lot more to deal with Sega the way in which they deserve.
According to all the reports i've seen that and every other chemical weapon you mentioned was identified by the military as being forgotten leftovers from before the first Gulf War, ie over a decade old. There's been no evidence to show that Saddam was manufacturing or stockpiling any WMDs since then.
There is strong evidence that shows he was at least harboring Al-Qaeda members if not providing training and support. The media just doesn't like reporting it and the public doesn't want to hear it.
What evidence is that? All the evidence i've seen shows that the fundamentalist Islamics hated the seculraist Saddam. Near the begining of the war Al-Queda released a tape stating that although they thought Saddam should be removed from power, they thought the Americans were the greater threat and should be resisted. There may well have been Al-Queda groups in Iraq, but it seems doubtful they were on good terms with Saddam.
In addition, the US put Sadam in power and is morally responsible for what he did. The US inflicted the SoB on the world and now they are paying the price to get rid of him. What goes around, comes around.
I agree with you on that one to some degree. Yes, we were responsible for him being in power, and in a certain way we needed to atone for that, however just because you _should_ do something doesn't mean that you can actually do it successfully.
You can only "liberate" a country if there is a vast majority of the population that supports you, and no minority that will forcibly oppose you other than those in power. We seem to have miscalculated for Iraq on at least one of those.
Things seem to be going better in Afghanistan except that A: the media doesn't pay much attention to it so it's hard to know for sure and B: the military doesn't seem to be paying much attention to it and is allowing the Taliban and other tribal lords to get away with far more than they should. Some reports seem to indicate that the entire country is in chaos except around the major cities where US forces are.