Let's take that philosophy one step further... so you'd support a company that sold a product that caused Cancer or AIDS as long as you didn't use that product? Nice to see you've got principles.
Depends on what you mean by "support," but probably, yeah I would. As long as they were forthright and honest about what risks were entailed in using their products.
Yes, i have principles, it's called a belief in freewill and the right to make your own choices. If someone wants to use a cancer causing product, and they've been told upfront that the product may cause cancer, it's their life to do with as they wish.
I support drug legalization, but i don't think drug education is a bad thing either, as long as it's _real_ education, but "facts" the government is trying to brainwash you with.
Oh, and have you heard about the new chemical they've found in cooked starches that they think causes cancer? Am i supposed to boycott all baked goods producers because of my principles?
And as long as we're talking about principles, how about those "principled" health activists that are trying to force resturants who sell french fries to add a cancer warning but who don't seem to be urgent to get companies to label bread and pasta in the same fashion? They want to get people off of french fries but apparently have no problem supporting companies that make products with the exact same chemical in them but which are considered healthier in other aspects.
Depends on how many Vietnam War movies they watched perhaps? I don't know if you can get the same coditioning though empathy with others as through direct experience though.
All in all though, you're probably right. It's more likely that the annoyance factor is a property of the sound rather than a psychlogical association. But I Am Not A (whatever type of person who would actually know something about this)
It's been awhile since i've seen the trailer, but Dr. Octopus didn't look _anything_ at all like i expected him to. Of course my expectations are mostly based off of hazy memories of the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon, and i'm not sure how true that was to the original source.
btw, why is everyone making such a big deal about this trailer? Why is the tv refering to it as the "World Premiere"? Isn't it the same one that was shown before Return of the King?
Some brick and mortar retailers clearly are in trouble. Music and dvds (and even books) are easy targets for online retailing because they're small (easy to ship), pre-packaged, require little "service" around each sale, and people usually know what they want.
Less so for books and DVDs than for music, although maybe people who are really into music feel the same about it.
I spend far more at brick and mortar stores than i spend at Amazon or B&N online. No online retailer i know of has figured out a way to duplicate the ease with which you can browse through shelves of DVDs and books, and in the case of books even open them up and read a few pages if you wish.
I only go to B&N online if my local Borders and B&N don't have something i specifically want, and then i buy what i want and "leave."
I'll go into a "real" store looking for something specific or just because i want to find a new book to read, i'll frquently spend over and hour looking through the shelves, and almost always leave with more than i intended.
I also spend about 45 minutes driving to the (only) DVDPlanet.com store once every few months so i can actually look through what they've got and select things off the shelf, rather than trying to browse through their website.
A Lesson about Inventions - The best ones conform the invention's design to fit the environment, not the other way round.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
He [Linus Torvalds] "may" have an unfortunate "accident" which leaves him brain-dead. Darl McBride would be declared "enemy of state" and incarcerated and spiked in a Bamboo shoot -:))
Hmmmm, Darl McBride on a bamboo stake in exchange for Torvalds good health...
This reminds me of the "Your money or your life!" gag.
(pause) "Well?" "Don't rush me! I'm thinking about it!"
But in any case, I agree, China isn't exactly the best government out there, however I wouldn't say that Japan and South Korea are "known for their tight-handedness and disregard for world law."
How much does it cost to dig a mile of tunnel underground? How much would it cost to make a similar tunnel 3000 miles long, from one coast of the US to the other? Install a maglev train and evacuate the atmosphere from the tunnel, and see how fast you could get it going.
It probably wouldn't be cost effective, but wouldn't it be cool to catch a train from one coast to the other and have the trip last about six hours?:)
Again, why is "outside of the country" the critical variable? Why not "outside of your town", or "outside of your circle of aqcuaintances"? Or, indeed, given the terms of your post, "outside of your extended family"? You are aware that you are, by extension, advocating nepotism?
There are pleanty of people who thing "outside of your town" is a pretty bad deal when it comes to stores like Wal-Mart, and I can't really disagree with them. Wal-Mart has had a devestating effect on small town economies in the past.
Like all things, etremism in either direction is usually bad. If i as a person give all my money to someone else, my family will starve. If a town gives all their money to some other town, their economy will collaps, and so on up the scale. Likewise, complete insularism, while tehnically possible, usually has negative economic and social impacts down the road.
So the question really is how _much_ of our economy can we safely outsource, not if we should do it at all or not. At what point have we outsourced so much of our economy that we're endangering our stability? If we're actually dealing with a global economy it won't benefit anyone if the US economy collapses. We also have to ask what types of outsourcing we should allow, both for moral and economic reasons. Is a sweatshop laborer in some third-world country really better off for having that kind of job? Would the situation improve if we enforced some kind of minimum wage for goods intended for import into the US?
Yeah but an even cooler joke would be throwing something up that everyone thinks is an April Fool's joke, and then doing it for real. A meta-April Fool's joke, if you will.
# Brain switching (i think i saw a movie about that last days:) upload your brain to someone's else brain, do what you have to do in the other side of the world and reswich to go back. The risk is with who you made the switch.
Just make sure you and your spouse don't end up meeting while in switched bodies and have an "affair," and then decide to kill off your spouses so you can be together.
The fallacy here is your assumption that the earth contains a magically infinite amount of oil.
In 2001 the world used 77 million barrels of oil a day. It's predicted that that number will reach almost 119 million barrels a day by 2025, so lets go with 100 million as a nice round number.
As was pointed out later in the thread, the canadian oil sands contain about 300 billion barrels of proven reserve, about as much as Saudi Arabia. So the largest known source of oil sands is about the same as the largest known source of conventional oil. Let's assume that this similarity continues, and that there are 1.2 trillion barrels of proven reserves of oil sands around the world to match the 1.2 trillion barrels of conventional oil we know about.
Usually proven reserves account for about 25% of the total amount of the oil in a field, the rest being economically unrecoverable with current technology. If we could magically recover all of it, the 2.4 trillion proven reserves of oil above would become almost 10 trillion barrels.
So at our proposed "current" rate of use the world would go through that amount of oil in about 273 years. A long time, but certainly not forever. If we imagine that for every source of oil we know about there are 9 other sources we haven't found or considered yet, ten times the amount estimated above, 100 trillion barrels, about 14 trillion tons of the stuff, we'd still go through it all in less than 3000 years.
If you wish you can argue about how likely or unlikely it is that the human race will live that long, how likely that we'll still be using oil for that long (much more likely with the magical 100% recovery process) and whether or not the usage would remain stable (if anything it would most likely increase, if every country became at least as developed as the US, world wide usage would increase to at _least_ 400 million barrels a day.) However the point is that even at our current usage we could eventually burn through any reasonable supply of oil you care to propose.
Claiming that the earth will never run out of oil, period, is simply untenable.
Deregulation usually works best when you don't have a commons to worry about, and when there is no possibility of monopoly or oligopoly. The electricity industry has both.
The existing power grid is effectively a commons, because the companies can make far more money by pushing the existing grid to the limits before building new infrastructure.
We've already seen the results of oligopic behavior in California when price manipulations by the companies led to rolling blackouts and billions of dollars spent trying to "fix" the problem.
Don't make such a big deal out of it, you don't want to come off as some kind of extremist. After all, all extremists should be drug out into the street and shot.
The article clearly states that there was no intentional misconduct here, just that voters were given ballots for the wrong precinct. So, some precinct showed more tallied votes than registered voters, but its not like anyone voted more than once.
Of course you wouldn't know it by reading the headline...
Uh, how was the the headline misleading? It said more e-ballots cast than there were voters, and in some precincts more e-ballots were cast than there were voters. The headline didn't claim there was any misconduct and neither did the blurb, all it said was that there was a fuck-up, which there clearly was.
The fact that there was no misconduct doesn't really make the situation any better, in fact in some ways it makes it worse. If there was clear fraud involved it would probably be more likely for the vote to be redone, instead they're just shruging and saying oh well.
The fact that some precincts lost voters while others gained doesn't make it "even out" or anything like that either. The people who were given the wrong ballot _didn't_ get to vote for the person they wanted in their precinct and most likely voted for someone completly random in another precinct.
I think it's a big issue during the initial release when the number of new games is low. I would probably have thought my PS2 was a waste for the first six months if i hadn't been playing a lot of PSX games on it.
It's also become one of those magical checkmarks that may or may not really matter, like DVD playback. Whether or not it makes a big deal in the long run, if the other guys have backwards compatibility and you don't, it makes them look better.
I don't know what's wrong with the kid you're talking about, but it certainly wasn't the lack of competition, or at least not that alone. I never did any sports or anything else competitive, and when i got wait listed on my first choice college i didn't do any of that crap. I felt kind of sad but went on with my life and planed to go to my second choice.
Of course a few months later my first choice college realized they'd underadmited and started calling up people on the wait list and asking if they wanted to attend, and i was near the top of the list. Of course if i'd reacted like your example and had a hissy fit they probably wouldn't have considered me.
It sounds like the parents raised the kid all wrong, and the belief that he was too good for sports were only a small part of it. I'm sure there are pleanty of other spoiled brats who took sports and it didn't make them any better.
Its worth noting that they don't freeze just any account.
Yeah, they only freeze accounts where there's some indication of wrong doing, or if it's for a website that criticizes PayPal, or if it's a site that sells adult items, or even just has adult material for free but accepts donations.
From the inside cover of the first game manual i happened to pick up (F-Zero GX for GameCube):
! WARNING - Seizures
Some people (about 1 in 4000) may have seizures or blackouts triggered by light flashes or patterns, such as watching TV or playing video games, even if they have never had a seizure before.
Anyone who has had a seizure, loss of awareness, or other symptom linked to an epileptic condition should consult a doctor before playing a video game.
Parents should watch when their children play video games. Stop playing and consult a doctor if your or your child have any of the following symptoms
Convulsions - Eye or muscle twitching - Loss of awareness
Altered vision - Involunatry movements - Disorientation
To reduce the likelihood of a seizure when playing video games
1. Sit or stand as far from the screen as possible. 2. Play video games on the smallest available television screen.
3. Do not play if you are tired or need sleep. 4. Play in a well-lit room.
5. Take a 10 to 15 minute break every hour.
Actually, i've had the loss of awareness one on multiple occasions, it's called staying up too late and falling asleep while playing:)
This warning is followed by several other similar although less detailed warnings: "! WARNING - Repetitive Motion Injuries" "! WARNING - Electric Shock" "! CAUTION - Motion Sickeness" and "! CAUTION - Laser Device"
Nintendo has both made an attempt to eliminate the occurance of events most likely to cause an eplieptic fit _and_ put warnings in each and every game manual and in the instructions for the console itself i believe, which is a lot more than a lot of other companies do. Last i checked Netscape and IE weren't taking any precautions to prevent epileptic causing media from being viewed on the web.
Sure, there is some _very_ small percentage of people who are prone to epileptic fits but who haven't had an attack yet who won't take the warning seriously, however that's hardly Nintendo's fault.
These people are most likely going to have their first attack _sometime_, and given that reasonable precautions are taken it's not really the fault of whatever causes that first specific attack.
For almost _anything_ you can find some small percentage of people for whom it causes problems. Attempting to sugar coat _everything_ so that _nothing_ can hurt _anyone_ is not only extremely unfeasible, it may very well be technically impossible.
Conpanies should be legally responsbile to warn you of the contents of whatever product they provide. It's your job as the consumer to learn about what limits you need to live under and abide by them. Sure it will suck the first time you eat or try that thing that you have a medical condition involving, but pending the development of much more advanced genetic testing than we have now that's just the way life works.
Another non-Miyazaki/non-Takahata film "Ocean Waves" was not acquired by Disney for US distribution.
"Ocean Waves"? Is that the english title for Umi ga Kikoeru (literally "I Can Hear the Sea" i believe) or is there another Ghibli movie out there that i'm unaware of?
For bound encyclopedias, it's a cost/benefit analysis. For $1400, you can get 2 1/2 years of high speed internet access, with pretty much all the information you can handle. Encyclopedias are just too expensive for what you get.
Ironically, when first reading the blurb i thought "$1400? Wow, that's a lot of money for an encyclopedia set." However when you pointed out that i'd pay as much for two and a half years of high speed internet access, it didn't seem like so much money anymore.
Most of the information in a new encyclopedia set will be accurate for far longer than two and a half years. How often do they find out new information about Alexander the Great? Especially that invalidates what we alreay think we know? Plus you get the whole fun of oppening it at random and seeing where you end up. I should really look into buying a set for myself.
In my experience, and the experience of people I know coming from all kinds of backgrounds, homeschooling is a mixed bag that creates thoughtful, intelligent, and incredibly awkward people. I remember friends in college who had been homeschooled... they were the ones who people liked but had a permanent guard in place.
Wow! You've described me exactly! Er, wait, i went to a public school. I'm not sure if being homeschooled would have led to the same results, or if i would have ended up being even worse. I suppose it depends on if social "contact" in which you are ostracized by all your peers is better or worse than no social contact with your peers at all.
They are obvious fakes, but EB mostly stocks anime. Most companies that license anime in US aren't MPAA members.
That is like the multitudinous stores i know who specialize in anime merchandise and have huge racks of pirated CDs. I have no idea if the rest of their goods are legit, but it's easy to check the CDs.
I've thought about tipping off the RIAA, except as you said, most of the copyright holders aren't RIAA members, so i'm not sure it would do any good. So i just try to avoid buying anything at those kinds of stores (except for occasional relapses when my girlfriend really _really_ wants an anime figure that i can only find there =P)
It's really frigging annoying that the RIAA/MPAA is wasting so much time going after unimportant stuff like swaping files when there's _real_ piracy going on right under their noses.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what you mean by "support," but probably, yeah I would. As long as they were forthright and honest about what risks were entailed in using their products.
Yes, i have principles, it's called a belief in freewill and the right to make your own choices. If someone wants to use a cancer causing product, and they've been told upfront that the product may cause cancer, it's their life to do with as they wish.
I support drug legalization, but i don't think drug education is a bad thing either, as long as it's _real_ education, but "facts" the government is trying to brainwash you with.
Oh, and have you heard about the new chemical they've found in cooked starches that they think causes cancer? Am i supposed to boycott all baked goods producers because of my principles?
And as long as we're talking about principles, how about those "principled" health activists that are trying to force resturants who sell french fries to add a cancer warning but who don't seem to be urgent to get companies to label bread and pasta in the same fashion? They want to get people off of french fries but apparently have no problem supporting companies that make products with the exact same chemical in them but which are considered healthier in other aspects.
All in all though, you're probably right. It's more likely that the annoyance factor is a property of the sound rather than a psychlogical association. But I Am Not A (whatever type of person who would actually know something about this)
btw, why is everyone making such a big deal about this trailer? Why is the tv refering to it as the "World Premiere"? Isn't it the same one that was shown before Return of the King?
Less so for books and DVDs than for music, although maybe people who are really into music feel the same about it.
I spend far more at brick and mortar stores than i spend at Amazon or B&N online. No online retailer i know of has figured out a way to duplicate the ease with which you can browse through shelves of DVDs and books, and in the case of books even open them up and read a few pages if you wish.
I only go to B&N online if my local Borders and B&N don't have something i specifically want, and then i buy what i want and "leave."
I'll go into a "real" store looking for something specific or just because i want to find a new book to read, i'll frquently spend over and hour looking through the shelves, and almost always leave with more than i intended.
I also spend about 45 minutes driving to the (only) DVDPlanet.com store once every few months so i can actually look through what they've got and select things off the shelf, rather than trying to browse through their website.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
attributed to George Bernard Shaw
Hmmmm, Darl McBride on a bamboo stake in exchange for Torvalds good health...
This reminds me of the "Your money or your life!" gag.
(pause) "Well?" "Don't rush me! I'm thinking about it!"
But in any case, I agree, China isn't exactly the best government out there, however I wouldn't say that Japan and South Korea are "known for their tight-handedness and disregard for world law."
It probably wouldn't be cost effective, but wouldn't it be cool to catch a train from one coast to the other and have the trip last about six hours? :)
There are pleanty of people who thing "outside of your town" is a pretty bad deal when it comes to stores like Wal-Mart, and I can't really disagree with them. Wal-Mart has had a devestating effect on small town economies in the past.
Like all things, etremism in either direction is usually bad. If i as a person give all my money to someone else, my family will starve. If a town gives all their money to some other town, their economy will collaps, and so on up the scale. Likewise, complete insularism, while tehnically possible, usually has negative economic and social impacts down the road.
So the question really is how _much_ of our economy can we safely outsource, not if we should do it at all or not. At what point have we outsourced so much of our economy that we're endangering our stability? If we're actually dealing with a global economy it won't benefit anyone if the US economy collapses. We also have to ask what types of outsourcing we should allow, both for moral and economic reasons. Is a sweatshop laborer in some third-world country really better off for having that kind of job? Would the situation improve if we enforced some kind of minimum wage for goods intended for import into the US?
You mean like this?
"How Will We Get Around Near-Future Earth?" Why? Is it in the way of something?
Just make sure you and your spouse don't end up meeting while in switched bodies and have an "affair," and then decide to kill off your spouses so you can be together.
In 2001 the world used 77 million barrels of oil a day. It's predicted that that number will reach almost 119 million barrels a day by 2025, so lets go with 100 million as a nice round number.
As was pointed out later in the thread, the canadian oil sands contain about 300 billion barrels of proven reserve, about as much as Saudi Arabia. So the largest known source of oil sands is about the same as the largest known source of conventional oil. Let's assume that this similarity continues, and that there are 1.2 trillion barrels of proven reserves of oil sands around the world to match the 1.2 trillion barrels of conventional oil we know about.
Usually proven reserves account for about 25% of the total amount of the oil in a field, the rest being economically unrecoverable with current technology. If we could magically recover all of it, the 2.4 trillion proven reserves of oil above would become almost 10 trillion barrels.
So at our proposed "current" rate of use the world would go through that amount of oil in about 273 years. A long time, but certainly not forever. If we imagine that for every source of oil we know about there are 9 other sources we haven't found or considered yet, ten times the amount estimated above, 100 trillion barrels, about 14 trillion tons of the stuff, we'd still go through it all in less than 3000 years.
If you wish you can argue about how likely or unlikely it is that the human race will live that long, how likely that we'll still be using oil for that long (much more likely with the magical 100% recovery process) and whether or not the usage would remain stable (if anything it would most likely increase, if every country became at least as developed as the US, world wide usage would increase to at _least_ 400 million barrels a day.) However the point is that even at our current usage we could eventually burn through any reasonable supply of oil you care to propose.
Claiming that the earth will never run out of oil, period, is simply untenable.
Because I'll be too busy trying to figure out how to connect it using my 56k modem?
So you never use the highways, don't use any public utilities or public transportation, and live in an area where the cops don't respond to calls?
The existing power grid is effectively a commons, because the companies can make far more money by pushing the existing grid to the limits before building new infrastructure.
We've already seen the results of oligopic behavior in California when price manipulations by the companies led to rolling blackouts and billions of dollars spent trying to "fix" the problem.
Don't make such a big deal out of it, you don't want to come off as some kind of extremist. After all, all extremists should be drug out into the street and shot.
Of course you wouldn't know it by reading the headline...
Uh, how was the the headline misleading? It said more e-ballots cast than there were voters, and in some precincts more e-ballots were cast than there were voters. The headline didn't claim there was any misconduct and neither did the blurb, all it said was that there was a fuck-up, which there clearly was.
The fact that there was no misconduct doesn't really make the situation any better, in fact in some ways it makes it worse. If there was clear fraud involved it would probably be more likely for the vote to be redone, instead they're just shruging and saying oh well.
The fact that some precincts lost voters while others gained doesn't make it "even out" or anything like that either. The people who were given the wrong ballot _didn't_ get to vote for the person they wanted in their precinct and most likely voted for someone completly random in another precinct.
It's also become one of those magical checkmarks that may or may not really matter, like DVD playback. Whether or not it makes a big deal in the long run, if the other guys have backwards compatibility and you don't, it makes them look better.
Of course a few months later my first choice college realized they'd underadmited and started calling up people on the wait list and asking if they wanted to attend, and i was near the top of the list. Of course if i'd reacted like your example and had a hissy fit they probably wouldn't have considered me.
It sounds like the parents raised the kid all wrong, and the belief that he was too good for sports were only a small part of it. I'm sure there are pleanty of other spoiled brats who took sports and it didn't make them any better.
Yeah, they only freeze accounts where there's some indication of wrong doing, or if it's for a website that criticizes PayPal, or if it's a site that sells adult items, or even just has adult material for free but accepts donations.
! WARNING - Seizures
Some people (about 1 in 4000) may have seizures or blackouts triggered by light flashes or patterns, such as watching TV or playing video games, even if they have never had a seizure before.
Anyone who has had a seizure, loss of awareness, or other symptom linked to an epileptic condition should consult a doctor before playing a video game.
Parents should watch when their children play video games. Stop playing and consult a doctor if your or your child have any of the following symptoms
Convulsions - Eye or muscle twitching - Loss of awareness
Altered vision - Involunatry movements - Disorientation
To reduce the likelihood of a seizure when playing video games
1. Sit or stand as far from the screen as possible.
2. Play video games on the smallest available television screen.
3. Do not play if you are tired or need sleep.
4. Play in a well-lit room.
5. Take a 10 to 15 minute break every hour.
Actually, i've had the loss of awareness one on multiple occasions, it's called staying up too late and falling asleep while playing :)
This warning is followed by several other similar although less detailed warnings: "! WARNING - Repetitive Motion Injuries" "! WARNING - Electric Shock" "! CAUTION - Motion Sickeness" and "! CAUTION - Laser Device"
Nintendo has both made an attempt to eliminate the occurance of events most likely to cause an eplieptic fit _and_ put warnings in each and every game manual and in the instructions for the console itself i believe, which is a lot more than a lot of other companies do. Last i checked Netscape and IE weren't taking any precautions to prevent epileptic causing media from being viewed on the web.
Sure, there is some _very_ small percentage of people who are prone to epileptic fits but who haven't had an attack yet who won't take the warning seriously, however that's hardly Nintendo's fault.
These people are most likely going to have their first attack _sometime_, and given that reasonable precautions are taken it's not really the fault of whatever causes that first specific attack.
For almost _anything_ you can find some small percentage of people for whom it causes problems. Attempting to sugar coat _everything_ so that _nothing_ can hurt _anyone_ is not only extremely unfeasible, it may very well be technically impossible.
Conpanies should be legally responsbile to warn you of the contents of whatever product they provide. It's your job as the consumer to learn about what limits you need to live under and abide by them. Sure it will suck the first time you eat or try that thing that you have a medical condition involving, but pending the development of much more advanced genetic testing than we have now that's just the way life works.
"Ocean Waves"? Is that the english title for Umi ga Kikoeru (literally "I Can Hear the Sea" i believe) or is there another Ghibli movie out there that i'm unaware of?
Ironically, when first reading the blurb i thought "$1400? Wow, that's a lot of money for an encyclopedia set." However when you pointed out that i'd pay as much for two and a half years of high speed internet access, it didn't seem like so much money anymore.
Most of the information in a new encyclopedia set will be accurate for far longer than two and a half years. How often do they find out new information about Alexander the Great? Especially that invalidates what we alreay think we know? Plus you get the whole fun of oppening it at random and seeing where you end up. I should really look into buying a set for myself.
Wow! You've described me exactly! Er, wait, i went to a public school. I'm not sure if being homeschooled would have led to the same results, or if i would have ended up being even worse. I suppose it depends on if social "contact" in which you are ostracized by all your peers is better or worse than no social contact with your peers at all.
That is like the multitudinous stores i know who specialize in anime merchandise and have huge racks of pirated CDs. I have no idea if the rest of their goods are legit, but it's easy to check the CDs.
I've thought about tipping off the RIAA, except as you said, most of the copyright holders aren't RIAA members, so i'm not sure it would do any good. So i just try to avoid buying anything at those kinds of stores (except for occasional relapses when my girlfriend really _really_ wants an anime figure that i can only find there =P)
It's really frigging annoying that the RIAA/MPAA is wasting so much time going after unimportant stuff like swaping files when there's _real_ piracy going on right under their noses.