Good thing we have Bush around to help us recover from the corporate scandals that his vice-president was implicated in and from the war that he started and lied to or mislead the people about in order to get support for.
For his next trick, the Secret Service will run around and hit people over the head with sticks, and we can then raise military spending to help defend americans from getting hit over the head with sticks.
"The Dean Campaign may have outsourced an email campaign to Emailresults.net, based on claims by Emailresults.net that the campaign would be opt-in. There was some sort of due diligence failure on the part of the Dean campaign, as a google search on "emailresults.net" shows numerous references to their propensity for spamming on the first two pages of search results.
After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day.. "
So they made a mistake, and when they were given evidence of the mistake they quickly took appropriate action to correct it.
The fact that they made a mistake isn't great, but I approve of the response. What else do you want them to do besides try to be more carefull in the future?
I suppose they could hire emailresults.net to mass email out an apology to everyone on the net...
I'll admit i'm biased, but i think i would feel the same about any other candidate who made the same response when prevented with evidence of spamming by their campaign.
To respond to you and the AC who responded to you...
I didn't forget about PC, however note the path that Halo has taken. It was originaly (and quite justifiably) being developed for the PC and Mac. Then Bungie got bought out by Microsoft, and it got coverted to an XBox game. They promised for awhile that it would come out in PC and Mac form as well, then it dropped off the radar for awhile. Now it's being ported to PC and XBox by a third party (Gearbox Studios)
I strongly suspect that as Microsoft continue to push the XBox more and more of their games will get switched over from PC, with PC versions coming later or never at all.
Note the 3DO property they did aquire, a sports game that can easily be done on XBox. I bet they'd do the same with any other 3DO property they aquired. Like i said, perhaps it was the knowledge that it wouldn't make a good console game that prevented them from buying it. However they might have looked at the Playstation 2 version and thought "we can do better than that!" Like i said, it could have been worse.
"It's a wake-up call," Bush said. "The grid needs to be modernized, the delivery systems need to be modernized."
Unless you mean that the wonder is that it's still working at all, despite the lack of upgrades?
I can think of only a few reasons for that state of affairs, maliciousness on the part of the power companies, which seems very unlikely, accountants getting unlucky at the cost-benefit analysis game in an attempt to make more money (what i cynically refered to as them "not caring") or unluckyness at the same game, but due to a shortage of capital, in which case this might have something to do with it?
"On Thursday, Bush said that he has supported the idea of improving the transmission grid "all along." However, the Bush administration has past fought efforts to revamp the nation's electrical delivery systems that were not part of broader energy legislation.
Republican allies of the Bush administration, including House Majority Whip Tom Delay, R-Texas, derailed just such a proposal from Democrats in June 2001. The measure, proposed during California's energy crisis, would have provided $350 million in federal loans and loan guarantees for the industry to improve power transmission systems around the country."
I expected it! I told you! I told you the Spanish Inquisition was nosing about! But did you listen to me? No!
*gets thwacked by Inquisition members in black and dragged off in a van*
Errr, anyways. I keep hearing good stuff about Fallout, which i unfortunatly have not had the chance to play yet, and i'm a big fan of alternate histories, so this sounds like a promising title.
*adds it to the list to play, after FF9, FF10, FFX-2, Skies of Arcadia...* ah fuck, who am i kidding?
Except it isn't a plausible theory. Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care. They just don't, and no amount of hating "big corporations" is going to change that and for you to even be floating it as a theory speaks volumes.
Depends on what it is they care about. If the accountants are in charge they'll okay necessary maintenance, obviously if the system stops working regularly they're going to lose customers (or face government inquiries.) However if the engineers say they want to install backup hardware to deal with certain contingencies, the accountants might ask them how likely such a problem is. The engineers will say there's a 5% chance a year that the problem will happen or some such. The accountants will ask when the last time it happened was, and the engineers will say 1960-something.
Cearly, if the accountants are most interested in improving short term profits they might decide that the small risk doesn't merit the cost of protecting against it. We've seen the same mindset happen in other industries, most spectacularly in the space program and Enron, so i'm wondering why you think it wouldn't be plausible in this case?
True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.
You were saying? I don't know if it's really as bad as he claims, but i'd be more inclined to believe that than that it's one of the "one of the wonders of the modern world already" which seems to be a bit of arogant hubris. If i had to guess with no other information available, i'd have to say that the former U.S. energy secretary was politicaly motivated for some reason or wanted to make the news, and that the truth is somewhere inbetween. But until you provide some facts to the contrary, his wild statements have a lot more authority behind them than your wild statement.
If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your.sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle.
Perhaps, but if someone who disagrees offers logical arguments against my position i'd be willing to discuss the issue with them. If they instead respond with something along the lines of, "you're an irrational loser and you suck!" i'm going to consider them to be a hypocritical troll. Guess which way you started of portraying yourself?
So do you have a reason for claiming Dean is in second place for "Candidate most menacing to our form of government."? Or do you only know how to flame?
It could be worse, Microsoft might have got it instead, in which case it would probably be only available on XBox. Of course it wouldn't be a very good console game, which is perhaps why Microsoft didn't try to get it.
Of course as a Dean supporter, brains and rational thought isn't likely to be your strong suit. Raw emotion, mostly a blind hatred of Shrub, are his draws.
Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory." It was an "imperfect systems built by imperfect humans" is also a plausible theory, however unlike you i'm not jumping to conclusions on the issue. I'd rather consider all the possiblities and then compare them to the evidence once we've got that information. Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the discussion, which seems less than rational to me. If you want to flame, go ahead, but flaming someone for being emotional rather than rational seems just a bit hypocritical. It seems to imple that you don't have the rational evidence to back up your arguments and therefore have to resort to insult to make your point and hope no one notices.
since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.
The fact that they're low on capacity isn't a problem for engineers. The fact that the entire grid got dragged down by a problem in one section is however. Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired. Better than putting several states in the dark.
Then what do you blame all the past outages on? This is not the first time large scale outages in major metropolitan areas has occured.
The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know." Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.
Obviously the power company didn't say "Haha! We've been deregulated!" and then intentionaly pull the plug. However reduced spending on maintenance and backups could reduce the threshold at which such an event occurs.
I don't know enough about the industry to say, but theoretically they've installed equipment since 1965 that should theoretically prevent occurances such as this. Why didn't those systems operate as intended? Was the overload just too big to prevent, or were they not installed or maintained properly?
The parallel with Hitler is valid. The philosophical argument is that some human beings are worthy of life, others are not. Pro-abortionists maintain the same philosophy. Getting offended does not change the logical equivalence.
No, the parallel is completly invalid.
Hitler believed that certain kinds of people were worthy of life and others are not.
Pro-choice people believe that there are certain developmental standards that a thing must meet before being considered human, and this standard is equally applied to all beings. Regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or anything else, a person is not a human until they've reached a certain stage, nor are they human any longer after they've passed a different stage.
Just as there are certain customs and restrictions relating to the treatment of corpses after a person has died, so there ace certain customs and restrictions relating to the treatment of fetuses. However those customs and restrictions are not the same as for a human, nor should they be.
You logic, both in this post and in the children posts you have made, is so full of fallacies that i can't even begin to count them.
How is Hitler deciding to kill several million people because of the way they look in any way similar to killing a bundle of cells that doesn't even have a brain?
Sure, that bundle of cells will become a human in a few months (barring miscariage and such) but so what? It's not a human at the point the abortion is performed.
If it is immoral to perform an abortion because the cells will eventually become a human, then it is immoral to use any form of contraception becuse that prevents what will form the cells that will become a human.
And hey! As the "moral majority" loves to point out, abstinence is a form of contraception! Which makes it immoral for any girl to say no when a guy asks to have sex with her, because that prevents the conception that will form the bundle of cells that will become the human.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating pollution, I'm simply saying a report that suggests the north pole will have lost all its ice by the next century is going to influence politicians, you're sadly mistaken, especially when this report suggests that all those negative side effects people talk about (flooding, etc...) will not happen.
You think the climate of all of Europe getting fucked up won't influence politicians? You think that's not a negative side effect?
And the reason the flooding won't be happening is because it's the Arctic ice instead of the Antarctic. The Arctic ice is floating in water, so it displaces as much water as it will when it melts, so no change. The Antarctic ice however is mostly on land. When it melts, it will flow down into the ocean and raise sea levels.
Look at the North Pole as a test case. If all the ice melts there, it's a sign that things are heading in the wrong direction and it's likely that the South Pole will go soon too unless the situation is changed.
The politicians will have a tough time justifying "We said the climate wouldn't change, and then the Arctic ice cap melted, and fucked up Europe. But now that that's over again, we firmly believe that climatic change was just a fad the Earth was going through, and we're telling you the climate won't change anymore now. So the Antarctic ice cap won't melt and fuck up the entire world. Really, trust us.
In general the explosions were touched up a bit, and i think they smoothed over the rocket trails in the second image. (It's been a few years, so i'm fuzzy on the details) In general units were added to make the pictures look more exciting. There seem to be more missiles in the second picture than can be accounted for by the number of Dreadnaughts.
The first pic has a very good example of this. First of all, when the game was finally released Carriers only launched three fighters at the time, although we experiemented with five and four fighters for a time. However i believe even if the carriers had five fighters at the time, the placement of the fighters in the pic is clearly artificial. You'd never see them in that perfect of a V formation in the game. And i can't remember for sure, but i don't think the fighters actually had contrails, don't quote me on that one though.
Perhaps people who have played the game more recently can spot more changes in the pics on the site. I wasn't involved in the process of touching the screenshots up, and i kind of lost interest in playing the game after they laid me off just after starting Generals (after we'd finished up the expansion pack of course,) so my memory of what the graphics and weapon stats in the release ended up being is a bit rusty.
That sounds excatly like a short story i read in James P. Hogan's "Minds, Machines & Evolution"
However in this story it was a captured assassin instead of a spy. And instead of cloning they had the technology to manufacture copies of any scanned in physical thing, including living beings.
Obviously he must have been heavily influenced by Philip K. Dick. In Hogan's version however one of the main focuses was the havoc that would be caused when the machine was released into the public and suddenly every portion of the economy based on manufacturing fell apart.
After seeing Gigli, I wished for a quick memory wipe.
Carefull, if you did that, you might decide to go see it again.
And when the memory wipe wore off (they always seem to in movies, don't they?) you'd have seen it twice. Or maybe more if you'd gotten the idea more than once!
At the company i used to work for, we would take screen shots of the game for EA's marketing team to use in advertisements and articles and such.
After a few days we'd get them back again with a list of what needed to be changed. Not changed in the game, just photoshopped on the screen shots.
Marketing would tell the head of the company, the head of the company would tell the producer, the producer would tell the lead artist to make the changes. I'm not sure what arguments marketing used against the head of the company (make the changes or your don't get any marketing?) but from there on down no one was willing to say no and force the issue with the higher authority.
Usually they were fairly minor changes, but sometimes not.
They should market these towards geeks
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 3, Insightful
DeBeers might succeed in convincing the average consumer that manufactured diamonds somehow aren't "real," however i suspect that even then they'll have a good market with geeks which can tide them over until the general public realizes they're being bamboozled.
As a geek/technologist, i like at the "real" diamond in one hand, and the synthesized diamond on the other, and think sure, the "real" diamond is kind of cool, it was formed under impressive conditions and has usefull, interesting, and pretty properties. However the syntehsized diamond, we _made_ that. Humans made a machine in a lab that can do what takes Nature a few million tons of 2,2000 degree magma to do. THAT is impressive.
Even if they were the same price i would be tempted to go with the synthesized diamond, just out of pride for the human race. The fact that the synthesized one would likely be orders of magnitude cheaper just sweetens the deal.
And on top of that, as a geek i pay enough attention to realize what an evil company DeBeers is, that a lot of the price of a "natural" diamond is artificially inflated, and in at least some cases, possibly a lot of them, there's a lot of blood that goes into extracting the diamond and delivering it to where i could purchase it.
Finally, a few years back i remember seeing a tv show that was talking about synthesized gemstones, back when they were doing it with emeralds and rubies and such and still trying to get diamonds working. Some or all of the companies, and i don't remember if this was voluntary, or if the gemstone industries got some kind of law passed, added traces of certain chemicals to the gemstones so that they would glow if you shined certain frequences of light on them.
Now that is a marketing gimick just waiting to happen. "New synthetics diamonds! 10 times the quality for one tenth of the price! Not only are you not supporting African dictaorships if you buy from us, our diamonds glow in the dark under blacklight! How cool is that?!"
Of course another benefit of this might be that if diamond prices crash, we might stop seeing so much jewelry that's been diamond encrusted. Because of both the percieved and monetary value, jewelers seem to find it hard to resist scattering little (or large!) bits of diamond on just about any piece of jewelry they produce. This obviously increases the price (and thus the markup) and apparently a lot of people think they look better that way. Rings are especially prone to this problem. Personally i don't think diamonds are that attractive, and it annoys me that every time my girlfriend wants a present, i have to wade through about nine saphire and diamond rings/bracelets/whatever for each plain saphire item, which is usually both more attractive and cheaper.
This guy is a troll. A quick glance shows that more than half his recent posts have been modded as Troll or Flamebait, and examining the responses to the last few positively modded ones shows that they're just trolls that fooled the moderators.
Here in the lab we're doing some work on using the principles of thermodynamics in order to improve search engines. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system ethalpy will alway increase, which is a lot like the disorder cause by sites spamming themselves to search engines.
Second of all, it looks like you mispelled "enthalpy". Second of all, enthalpy refers to the energy in the system, entropy refers to the amount of disorder. When you're speaking of disorder increasing you're speaking of entropy, not enthalpy. In closed systems enthalpy decreases as entropy increases.
Third of all, if the systems are so similar that the knowledge of one can be applied to the other, how is that you think you've found a way around the second law of thermodynamics? Either the systems are disimilar enough that your "expertise" isn't going to help, or they're similar enough that you could apply the results to actual physics and have created a device to generate infinite power rather than futzing around with search engines.
Finally, the above rules are only true in closed systems, which search engines are not. There are people writing new web pages all the time, and new pages getting referenced, and old references being improved, so the second law of thermodynamics doesn't even apply.
You can't even get your terms right and you're trying to apply them to the wrong sitaution. I'm not even going to bother finding counter examples to the rest of your drivel.
Wow, amazing the number of people who don't even read the post and realize that you're not talking about the Roomba.
If anyone actually manages to get Linux running on the RoboSweep, the only way they'd be able to one-up themselves is if they got it to run on a broom.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, is this the same Bush as in "the president credited two rounds of major of tax cuts with stabilizing the economy after recession, corporate scandals and a war."
Good thing we have Bush around to help us recover from the corporate scandals that his vice-president was implicated in and from the war that he started and lied to or mislead the people about in order to get support for.
For his next trick, the Secret Service will run around and hit people over the head with sticks, and we can then raise military spending to help defend americans from getting hit over the head with sticks.
After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day.. "
So they made a mistake, and when they were given evidence of the mistake they quickly took appropriate action to correct it.
The fact that they made a mistake isn't great, but I approve of the response. What else do you want them to do besides try to be more carefull in the future?
I suppose they could hire emailresults.net to mass email out an apology to everyone on the net...
I'll admit i'm biased, but i think i would feel the same about any other candidate who made the same response when prevented with evidence of spamming by their campaign.
Not all the Quake 3 game play elements, isn't the "but our primary focus is currently the single-player experience" bit from Doom 3?
I didn't forget about PC, however note the path that Halo has taken. It was originaly (and quite justifiably) being developed for the PC and Mac. Then Bungie got bought out by Microsoft, and it got coverted to an XBox game. They promised for awhile that it would come out in PC and Mac form as well, then it dropped off the radar for awhile. Now it's being ported to PC and XBox by a third party (Gearbox Studios)
I strongly suspect that as Microsoft continue to push the XBox more and more of their games will get switched over from PC, with PC versions coming later or never at all.
Note the 3DO property they did aquire, a sports game that can easily be done on XBox. I bet they'd do the same with any other 3DO property they aquired. Like i said, perhaps it was the knowledge that it wouldn't make a good console game that prevented them from buying it. However they might have looked at the Playstation 2 version and thought "we can do better than that!" Like i said, it could have been worse.
Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already
Oh, and since you seem to have a modicum of respect for Bush (at least comapred to some of the alternatives,)
Unless you mean that the wonder is that it's still working at all, despite the lack of upgrades?
I can think of only a few reasons for that state of affairs, maliciousness on the part of the power companies, which seems very unlikely, accountants getting unlucky at the cost-benefit analysis game in an attempt to make more money (what i cynically refered to as them "not caring") or unluckyness at the same game, but due to a shortage of capital, in which case this might have something to do with it?
*gets thwacked by Inquisition members in black and dragged off in a van*
Errr, anyways. I keep hearing good stuff about Fallout, which i unfortunatly have not had the chance to play yet, and i'm a big fan of alternate histories, so this sounds like a promising title.
*adds it to the list to play, after FF9, FF10, FFX-2, Skies of Arcadia...* ah fuck, who am i kidding?
Depends on what it is they care about. If the accountants are in charge they'll okay necessary maintenance, obviously if the system stops working regularly they're going to lose customers (or face government inquiries.) However if the engineers say they want to install backup hardware to deal with certain contingencies, the accountants might ask them how likely such a problem is. The engineers will say there's a 5% chance a year that the problem will happen or some such. The accountants will ask when the last time it happened was, and the engineers will say 1960-something.
Cearly, if the accountants are most interested in improving short term profits they might decide that the small risk doesn't merit the cost of protecting against it. We've seen the same mindset happen in other industries, most spectacularly in the space program and Enron, so i'm wondering why you think it wouldn't be plausible in this case?
True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.
"Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson described the United States as a "superpower with a Third World grid.""
You were saying? I don't know if it's really as bad as he claims, but i'd be more inclined to believe that than that it's one of the "one of the wonders of the modern world already" which seems to be a bit of arogant hubris. If i had to guess with no other information available, i'd have to say that the former U.S. energy secretary was politicaly motivated for some reason or wanted to make the news, and that the truth is somewhere inbetween. But until you provide some facts to the contrary, his wild statements have a lot more authority behind them than your wild statement.
If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your .sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle.
Perhaps, but if someone who disagrees offers logical arguments against my position i'd be willing to discuss the issue with them. If they instead respond with something along the lines of, "you're an irrational loser and you suck!" i'm going to consider them to be a hypocritical troll. Guess which way you started of portraying yourself?
So do you have a reason for claiming Dean is in second place for "Candidate most menacing to our form of government."? Or do you only know how to flame?
It could be worse, Microsoft might have got it instead, in which case it would probably be only available on XBox. Of course it wouldn't be a very good console game, which is perhaps why Microsoft didn't try to get it.
Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory." It was an "imperfect systems built by imperfect humans" is also a plausible theory, however unlike you i'm not jumping to conclusions on the issue. I'd rather consider all the possiblities and then compare them to the evidence once we've got that information. Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the discussion, which seems less than rational to me. If you want to flame, go ahead, but flaming someone for being emotional rather than rational seems just a bit hypocritical. It seems to imple that you don't have the rational evidence to back up your arguments and therefore have to resort to insult to make your point and hope no one notices.
since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.
The fact that they're low on capacity isn't a problem for engineers. The fact that the entire grid got dragged down by a problem in one section is however. Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired. Better than putting several states in the dark.
No, it wasn't a smoking gun, it was a smoking power station on East 14th street, haven't you been paying attention?
The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know." Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.
Obviously the power company didn't say "Haha! We've been deregulated!" and then intentionaly pull the plug. However reduced spending on maintenance and backups could reduce the threshold at which such an event occurs.
I don't know enough about the industry to say, but theoretically they've installed equipment since 1965 that should theoretically prevent occurances such as this. Why didn't those systems operate as intended? Was the overload just too big to prevent, or were they not installed or maintained properly?
The baby boom bit is an urban legend
That's the problem, they let the magic smoke out. Don't they know it stops working when you let the magic smoke out?
No, the parallel is completly invalid.
Hitler believed that certain kinds of people were worthy of life and others are not.
Pro-choice people believe that there are certain developmental standards that a thing must meet before being considered human, and this standard is equally applied to all beings. Regardless of race, color, creed, sex, or anything else, a person is not a human until they've reached a certain stage, nor are they human any longer after they've passed a different stage.
Just as there are certain customs and restrictions relating to the treatment of corpses after a person has died, so there ace certain customs and restrictions relating to the treatment of fetuses. However those customs and restrictions are not the same as for a human, nor should they be.
How is Hitler deciding to kill several million people because of the way they look in any way similar to killing a bundle of cells that doesn't even have a brain?
Sure, that bundle of cells will become a human in a few months (barring miscariage and such) but so what? It's not a human at the point the abortion is performed.
If it is immoral to perform an abortion because the cells will eventually become a human, then it is immoral to use any form of contraception becuse that prevents what will form the cells that will become a human.
And hey! As the "moral majority" loves to point out, abstinence is a form of contraception! Which makes it immoral for any girl to say no when a guy asks to have sex with her, because that prevents the conception that will form the bundle of cells that will become the human.
You think the climate of all of Europe getting fucked up won't influence politicians? You think that's not a negative side effect?
And the reason the flooding won't be happening is because it's the Arctic ice instead of the Antarctic. The Arctic ice is floating in water, so it displaces as much water as it will when it melts, so no change. The Antarctic ice however is mostly on land. When it melts, it will flow down into the ocean and raise sea levels.
Look at the North Pole as a test case. If all the ice melts there, it's a sign that things are heading in the wrong direction and it's likely that the South Pole will go soon too unless the situation is changed.
The politicians will have a tough time justifying "We said the climate wouldn't change, and then the Arctic ice cap melted, and fucked up Europe. But now that that's over again, we firmly believe that climatic change was just a fad the Earth was going through, and we're telling you the climate won't change anymore now. So the Antarctic ice cap won't melt and fuck up the entire world. Really, trust us.
The X-CowboyNealCubeStation you mean.
In general the explosions were touched up a bit, and i think they smoothed over the rocket trails in the second image. (It's been a few years, so i'm fuzzy on the details) In general units were added to make the pictures look more exciting. There seem to be more missiles in the second picture than can be accounted for by the number of Dreadnaughts.
The first pic has a very good example of this. First of all, when the game was finally released Carriers only launched three fighters at the time, although we experiemented with five and four fighters for a time. However i believe even if the carriers had five fighters at the time, the placement of the fighters in the pic is clearly artificial. You'd never see them in that perfect of a V formation in the game. And i can't remember for sure, but i don't think the fighters actually had contrails, don't quote me on that one though.
Perhaps people who have played the game more recently can spot more changes in the pics on the site. I wasn't involved in the process of touching the screenshots up, and i kind of lost interest in playing the game after they laid me off just after starting Generals (after we'd finished up the expansion pack of course,) so my memory of what the graphics and weapon stats in the release ended up being is a bit rusty.
SynthDiamondCoalition: "She'll never know!"
Or, to paraphrase one of the quotes in the article,
Geek: "Look! Cultured diamonds cost less, so I got you one twice as big!"
However in this story it was a captured assassin instead of a spy. And instead of cloning they had the technology to manufacture copies of any scanned in physical thing, including living beings.
Obviously he must have been heavily influenced by Philip K. Dick. In Hogan's version however one of the main focuses was the havoc that would be caused when the machine was released into the public and suddenly every portion of the economy based on manufacturing fell apart.
Carefull, if you did that, you might decide to go see it again.
And when the memory wipe wore off (they always seem to in movies, don't they?) you'd have seen it twice. Or maybe more if you'd gotten the idea more than once!
After a few days we'd get them back again with a list of what needed to be changed. Not changed in the game, just photoshopped on the screen shots.
Marketing would tell the head of the company, the head of the company would tell the producer, the producer would tell the lead artist to make the changes. I'm not sure what arguments marketing used against the head of the company (make the changes or your don't get any marketing?) but from there on down no one was willing to say no and force the issue with the higher authority.
Usually they were fairly minor changes, but sometimes not.
As a geek/technologist, i like at the "real" diamond in one hand, and the synthesized diamond on the other, and think sure, the "real" diamond is kind of cool, it was formed under impressive conditions and has usefull, interesting, and pretty properties. However the syntehsized diamond, we _made_ that. Humans made a machine in a lab that can do what takes Nature a few million tons of 2,2000 degree magma to do. THAT is impressive.
Even if they were the same price i would be tempted to go with the synthesized diamond, just out of pride for the human race. The fact that the synthesized one would likely be orders of magnitude cheaper just sweetens the deal.
And on top of that, as a geek i pay enough attention to realize what an evil company DeBeers is, that a lot of the price of a "natural" diamond is artificially inflated, and in at least some cases, possibly a lot of them, there's a lot of blood that goes into extracting the diamond and delivering it to where i could purchase it.
Finally, a few years back i remember seeing a tv show that was talking about synthesized gemstones, back when they were doing it with emeralds and rubies and such and still trying to get diamonds working. Some or all of the companies, and i don't remember if this was voluntary, or if the gemstone industries got some kind of law passed, added traces of certain chemicals to the gemstones so that they would glow if you shined certain frequences of light on them.
Now that is a marketing gimick just waiting to happen. "New synthetics diamonds! 10 times the quality for one tenth of the price! Not only are you not supporting African dictaorships if you buy from us, our diamonds glow in the dark under blacklight! How cool is that?!"
Of course another benefit of this might be that if diamond prices crash, we might stop seeing so much jewelry that's been diamond encrusted. Because of both the percieved and monetary value, jewelers seem to find it hard to resist scattering little (or large!) bits of diamond on just about any piece of jewelry they produce. This obviously increases the price (and thus the markup) and apparently a lot of people think they look better that way. Rings are especially prone to this problem. Personally i don't think diamonds are that attractive, and it annoys me that every time my girlfriend wants a present, i have to wade through about nine saphire and diamond rings/bracelets/whatever for each plain saphire item, which is usually both more attractive and cheaper.
Here in the lab we're doing some work on using the principles of thermodynamics in order to improve search engines. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system ethalpy will alway increase, which is a lot like the disorder cause by sites spamming themselves to search engines.
Is this the same lab as "Here in the lab for instance, many of my colleagues have been releasing their scientific papers onto Kazaa instead of through more established journals such as 'new scientist'." ? What kind of messed up lab is this exactly anyways? Got a reference?
And why are you working on applying thermodynamics to search engines? I thought you were working on _particle_ physics? "The word processor is good, although somewhere it is set to autoreplace the word lepton with leprechaun which is proving most annoying as I write my paper on particle physics."
Second of all, it looks like you mispelled "enthalpy". Second of all, enthalpy refers to the energy in the system, entropy refers to the amount of disorder. When you're speaking of disorder increasing you're speaking of entropy, not enthalpy. In closed systems enthalpy decreases as entropy increases.
Third of all, if the systems are so similar that the knowledge of one can be applied to the other, how is that you think you've found a way around the second law of thermodynamics? Either the systems are disimilar enough that your "expertise" isn't going to help, or they're similar enough that you could apply the results to actual physics and have created a device to generate infinite power rather than futzing around with search engines.
Finally, the above rules are only true in closed systems, which search engines are not. There are people writing new web pages all the time, and new pages getting referenced, and old references being improved, so the second law of thermodynamics doesn't even apply.
You can't even get your terms right and you're trying to apply them to the wrong sitaution. I'm not even going to bother finding counter examples to the rest of your drivel.
If anyone actually manages to get Linux running on the RoboSweep, the only way they'd be able to one-up themselves is if they got it to run on a broom.