But when it all comes down to it, all of the above feels dramatically unnecessary. Every bit of the essential Matrix story was told in one movie and trying to add to it will just be a mess, just like the sequels, just like the game.
You said *exactly* what I'd been thinking a week or so back. The Matrix was a film that *suggested* it was part of something more, that made you want more, that attracted the kind of obsessive fanbase that wanted more.
And yet when I thought about it I realised that, despite all impressions to the contrary, what was great about The Matrix was wrapped up and self-contained in the first (and "only") film for pretty much the reasons you give. It wasn't actually that good a candidate for a sequel.
It still might have been possible to do some great sequels, but not the ones that they actually made which lacked the driving force of the first film, and substituted universe/character bloat and headed up their own backside. With real creativity and skill, they could have been great, but they would have taken work to follow on a film which essentially *wasn't* that open to follow-ons.
I don't understand your joke, but the initial $40 was credited to my account and could be used in any fashion I chose.
My rather unfunny "joke" was merely an (intended) exaggeration to make a point. Specifically that the network could charge you $40 an hour for calls, so that your free calls only last an hour. Or they could charge calls at $40 per minute in which case your $40 "worth" of free calls only lasts a minute.
The joke fell flat when I realised that I actually did (or recently used to) pay almost $40 per hour on PAYG anyway. It seems to be cheaper now.
However a medium-complexity basic like Blitz Basic 2 on the Amiga allowed the creative side to be expressed,
I never really used Blitz Basic myself. However, I've heard that over the long term it's more highly regarded and powerful than AMOS, the once-popular BASIC-based programming system for the Amiga that IMHO was massively overated. So maybe it's good, but...
without having to wade through complex APIs like you would with a modern language.
As I said, never used BB, but that was a problem with old-school BASIC in general. There wasn't a clear separation between an API and the fundamental syntax, e.g. PRINT was a keyword, and functions were "hardwired", so that you couldn't expand it in a transparent and consistent way.
If it was possible to devise a hardwired syntax/system for BB that was easy to use, is there any reason it wouldn't have been possible to map it onto an equally straightforward API?
And the best way to learn programming to a young person (under 16) is to allow their ideas to be expressed and implemented [..] If that means using BASIC, e.g., RealBasic, then so be it. It needs to be pick-up-able.
I'm sure that there are plenty of more modern scripting languages that would meet that criteria.
I bet there are people saying Haskell and ML on this thread, for some academic reasons. The last thing a young person wants to be doing is learning how to manipulate data structures
Oh yeah, I agree. You have to balance the academic stuff with the motivation that feedback and the ability to create stuff gives. Suggesting Haskell or ML as first languages *is* academic self-indulgence.
Game type-ins promised rewards to typing, and learning was osmotic.
Not really; it was quite feasible to type in something without understanding it, and I never found it stimulating or educational in itself. Particularly not if it was a machine code program with a Basic loader; i.e. mostly stuff like
My phone cost $40 upfront, but they gave me 40 dollars of free calls, so essentially the phone was free and I was just paying for my airtime.
Yes, but that could be one hour of calls.
Actually, I meant that as an exaggerated joke to prove a point, but then I realised that a lot of "normal" phone-to-phone calls I could make on my pay-as-you-go phone work out at virtually that (in UK money) per hour.
Anyway, point I was going to make is that $40 "worth" of calls sounds nice, but isn't great if the calls are horribly expensive. In fact, they could charge twice as much for the calls, give you the same hour (or whatever's) worth and announce it as "OMG!!!!! $80 worth of free calls with this $40 phone".
Which sounds like an even better deal, when in reality it's way worse because you don't actually get any more free, and your calls are twice as expensive.
Same applies with dirt cheap printers that take horrendously priced ink carts. Buying a new printer because that $40 model comes with an ink cart worth $30 "free"? And the more they overprice the ink, the more that "free" cart is "worth", and the more the printer costs to run. It would make more sense to buy a printer where (e.g.) similar replacement carts were $10. But people don't think like that.
I don't know if you meant old-school 8-bit-style BASIC or Visual Basic.
If you meant the former then, WTF? There were technical reasons why it was popular and (to some extent) its use was justified on early microcomputers. These technical issues no longer apply, and it's entirely unsuited to programming on a modern scale.
And traditional Basic was *notorious* for fostering bad programming habits; I for one certainly suffered from that, and I really wish I'd used more languages sooner. With respect, anyone suggesting it be taught to a newcomer should be shot.:-/
If it's Visual Basic, then I'm certainly not convinced that for someone coming to it from scratch it's ultimately any easier to learn than (e.g.) C# or other C/C++ derived languages. It retains much of the syntactical clunkiness of old-fashioned basic, and its syntax isn't used much anywhere else, closing off the leveraging effect you get with C-style languages- learn one of those, and you partly know the others. Ironically, this will also make other languages appear more intimidating and locking that person into Visual Basic further.
VB's raison d'etre in the first place was that when it came out, many people had grown up using traditional BASIC a few years earlier, because *that* had been easy to learn. They'd migrated with BASIC through (I guess) familiarity, and because they "grew" and stayed with Visual Basic as it grew up it remained the sensible choice. But that's an advantage for existing users, not for newcomers, as it's really not that simple any more.
His argument is that as long as there is *just one* adequate quality photo of George Clooney under a free license, then the NYT and everyone else will use that for evermore, destroying any market for other photos.
How long would it be before people started seeing the same photograph of George Clooney so often in so many different articles that it became obvious, and from there seen as cheesy, lazy and/or cheap?
Some countries, such as the one where Slashdot is based, are conspicuous by their absence from Spotify's contracts with labels. So in order to use Spotify, I would have to find an employer in a supported country who would sponsor my immigration to that country. Then I would have to pay to meet the employer's qualifications, such as fluency in the local language and a master's degree, and pay whatever relocation costs the employer doesn't advance me.
Please. Are we supposed to take nonsense arguments like that seriously?
If you'd said that Spotify wasn't available in all countries, that would have been a fair criticism.
Trying to twist that into some stupid argument that it's not free because you'd have to pay to emigrate is just ludicrously contrived and downright silly.
A few years ago here in Germany, a study was conducted by a leading business consultancy company for a measly six or seven figure number to explain the big success of discount stores over here.
Six or seven figures *is* relatively measly if you're going to be basing your multi-billion dollar business's future strategy on the study's results.
If I was running a company that size, I'd want to be damn sure that what I thought was *probably* the case was definitely the case. Sometimes (as others have said in this thread) "obvious" things that "everyone knows" turn out not to be the case, or not to be as simple as they first appear.
After half a year of mulling over the data, they announced they were pretty sure it had something to do with the prices.
Yeah, I'm sure that the media didn't oversimplify it in order to get a good story (and make it slightly easier to poke fun at).
There's also money in pointless research proving what humankind has known since forever.
(1) These "obvious result" stories are often oversimplified or misreported by the media. There's often more to the study and/or conclusions than is clear from the report.
(2) Things everyone "knows" to be the case aren't always correct. Even if they're true 95% of the time, it's worth it for the other 5%. You can't base higher-level science and studies on things that "everyone knows that's true".
what happens if someone formats their pc nd the cloud data on it as well?? also, it might be possible to access the data stored by the cloud on ur pc...
These are the kind of problems that actual computer science (as opposed to software engineering or IT) is used to consider and solve.
I can't remember exactly how they do it (probably because I didn't know the exact details in the first place), but there are probably mathematical theories proving that you need x number of copies distributed across various machines in such and such a manner to have 99.99999999999999999999% (or whatever) chance of recovering that file.
And I'm guessing it's probably not as simple as simply having X straight copies of a file in different locations either; it's probably distributed in a more convoluted (but mathematically sound) manner as well.
And if the system uses a pseudo-filesystem, then the underlying distributed storage system will probably be block (rather than file) oriented, so parts of the same file on different blocks will probably be stored differently.
The other issue you raise- privacy- is possibly another factor; IIRC they'd want to distribute the data in such a manner that a given person didn't know whose data they actually had, and also that having access to that part of the data alone would be unlikely to provide anything meaningful, so it can be mathematically proven that a 14-year-old hacker wannabe having your data on his computer isn't a security risk).
Bear in mind that I know jack **** about the theory underlying this (I'm not a mathematician) and it might be misleading- it's based on extrapolating vague memories of stuff I learned bits of a few years ago as part of my degree- nothing more. But I think it's in the right ballpark.
Ok, but they thought that by now, we would have a base on the moon, and people could go see themselves the original moon landing.
No, they couldn't see the original moon landing. They could see *the site of* the original moon landing. It's not comparable at all- they're both important, but very different.
people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.
They probably didn't know they'd be considered *quite* as important as they are today (very high, even if one doesn't consider the obscene millions some paintings sell for as their true "worth".)
The major historical nature of the moon landings would have been glaringly obvious even before they happened.
It was The. First. Damn. Man. On. The. Moon.
I think you're cutting NASA way too much slack- and patronising the people of 40 years ago too much. Old 60s episodes of Doctor Who- bad loss in retrospect, but *almost* understandable in the context of the time (ephemeral, low budget, non-established medium, not reusable).
First man to ever land on the moon- that's blatantly important by itself. The fact they spent billions of dollars to get there you'd think was an added impetus. 40 years doesn't make *that* much difference to people's judgement.
Even if the cost of storing the footage was relatively high, it would have been trivial in comparison with what NASA spent on the programme overall. And even more trivial given its priceless historical and non-repeatable nature.
Atari when Warner owned was a billion dollar a year company.
Yeah, but remember Warner wanted to sell them because by that time they were *losing* like a billion dollars a year.;-)
Well, I exaggerate slightly, but they were losing a *lot* of money apparently.
BTW, if Wikipedia is to be believe, Jay Miner was one of the founder members of Amiga Corp., which was set up in late 1982, at least 18 months before Atari was sold.
Tramiel-era Atari and, er, post-Tramiel-era Commodore were pretty much as bad as each other anyway. They enjoyed some further success but never regained their heyday and in retrospect both showed the traits that would eventually lead to their downfall.
The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.
Much as the BBC should be smacked about with a blunt instrument for wiping, they at least have the defence that these were low-budget productions that were seen as ephemeral in nature at the time and of no obvious use. (Legal agreements meant that they couldn't be retransmitted, and there wasn't a home video market as such).
NASA spent billions (in *60s money*) getting the first human being to walk on the moon- which would have been an obviously massive historical event even before it happened- yet thanks to some beancounting jobsworths and bureaucrats, rather than being treated as a valuable historical document and archived as they should have been, the high-quality originals have been lost.
This both defies belief and is all too believable; but that doesn't make it any less of a disgrace.
Anyway, getting this digitally tarted-up version of the existing footage instead is a $50 consolation prize after being incorrectly told that you'd won a million on the lottery. Even if the image quality is good, the reprocessed footage still likely won't look as good as the original slow scan would have, and it certainly won't have the same veracity.
And that's the most important thing. They lost the damn originals, and regardless of how good the remasters *look*, they're not the damn originals.
You'll excuse me if I don't feel like breaking out the party poppers at NASA's DVD-age PR fluff hyping the remastering of their crappy fourth-generation footage as a minor success instead of the non-reversal of a massive loss of historical material.
Believe it or not, that was after Zimbabwe had lopped off a bunch of zeros from their currency the previous year.... twice. And then they did it a third time a month after they printed their first $100 trillion notes.
I was going to say something similar:-
On July 30, 2008, the Governor of the RBZ, Gideon Gono announced that the Zimbabwe dollar would be redenominated by removing 10 zeroes, with effect from August 1, 2008. ZWD10billion will become 1 dollar after the redenomination.
Then
[*After* the above revaluing] On 12 January 2009, Zimbabwe introduced the $50,000,000,000 note.
So you can multiply $50 billion by $10 billion (per new dollar) to get what it would have been if they hadn't done that sleight of hand; $500 billion billion.
Or let's put that another way (50 * 10^9) * (10 * 10^9) = 500 * 10^18 =
500 exadollars, or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars.
The cats won't mind that; size is likely the only reason you're seen as a provider and not prey. Go jump in the nearest lion enclosure if you think otherwise.;-)
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI.
Yeah, but that's missing the point. Mainly because you're taking the literal meaning of "losing weight" rather than what most people (slighly inaccurately) use it to mean- i.e. losing fat. For the most part, gaining muscle isn't a bad thing, regardless of whether it causes you to gain "weight".
And worrying about its effect on BMI is putting the horse before the cart for the same reason. Anyway, BMI is a crude and very badly designed metric that doesn't take build into account, scales incorrectly to heights significantly smaller/taller than average and doesn't account for muscle vs. fat.
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
Yet the bullying is socially acceptedas you're proving right this instance. Not only that but as they get older they're preyed upon by the weight loss industry etc. In other words you're beating people down then wondering why they don't raise themselves by the bootstraps and make a huge effort just to lead semi-normal lives.
Your interpretation of his comments as "bullying" might prove his point.
*Some* of the comments certainly have been dickish- but not all of them.
Please, I thought we'd left that behind with George Bush and Ronnie Reagan.
"We"? Who is "we"? You talk like the American public and their way of thinking are the same as that of the rest of the world.
And which George Bush? Because I can assure you that from where I was sitting, Dubya's arrogant, bullying and downright childish "with us or against us" mentality was every bit as laughable- and he's only been out of office for six months. So don't get too self-congratulatory and blase about having voted Obama in and left all that behind- it's still largely the same American public who *re*-elected Bush in 2004 by which time they knew *exactly* what they were getting.
And don't expect the rest of the world to change lock-step with American politics.
Slashdot Mirror
But when it all comes down to it, all of the above feels dramatically unnecessary. Every bit of the essential Matrix story was told in one movie and trying to add to it will just be a mess, just like the sequels, just like the game.
You said *exactly* what I'd been thinking a week or so back. The Matrix was a film that *suggested* it was part of something more, that made you want more, that attracted the kind of obsessive fanbase that wanted more.
And yet when I thought about it I realised that, despite all impressions to the contrary, what was great about The Matrix was wrapped up and self-contained in the first (and "only") film for pretty much the reasons you give. It wasn't actually that good a candidate for a sequel.
It still might have been possible to do some great sequels, but not the ones that they actually made which lacked the driving force of the first film, and substituted universe/character bloat and headed up their own backside. With real creativity and skill, they could have been great, but they would have taken work to follow on a film which essentially *wasn't* that open to follow-ons.
I don't understand your joke, but the initial $40 was credited to my account and could be used in any fashion I chose.
My rather unfunny "joke" was merely an (intended) exaggeration to make a point. Specifically that the network could charge you $40 an hour for calls, so that your free calls only last an hour. Or they could charge calls at $40 per minute in which case your $40 "worth" of free calls only lasts a minute.
The joke fell flat when I realised that I actually did (or recently used to) pay almost $40 per hour on PAYG anyway. It seems to be cheaper now.
However a medium-complexity basic like Blitz Basic 2 on the Amiga allowed the creative side to be expressed,
I never really used Blitz Basic myself. However, I've heard that over the long term it's more highly regarded and powerful than AMOS, the once-popular BASIC-based programming system for the Amiga that IMHO was massively overated. So maybe it's good, but...
without having to wade through complex APIs like you would with a modern language.
As I said, never used BB, but that was a problem with old-school BASIC in general. There wasn't a clear separation between an API and the fundamental syntax, e.g. PRINT was a keyword, and functions were "hardwired", so that you couldn't expand it in a transparent and consistent way.
If it was possible to devise a hardwired syntax/system for BB that was easy to use, is there any reason it wouldn't have been possible to map it onto an equally straightforward API?
And the best way to learn programming to a young person (under 16) is to allow their ideas to be expressed and implemented [..] If that means using BASIC, e.g., RealBasic, then so be it. It needs to be pick-up-able.
I'm sure that there are plenty of more modern scripting languages that would meet that criteria.
I bet there are people saying Haskell and ML on this thread, for some academic reasons. The last thing a young person wants to be doing is learning how to manipulate data structures
Oh yeah, I agree. You have to balance the academic stuff with the motivation that feedback and the ability to create stuff gives. Suggesting Haskell or ML as first languages *is* academic self-indulgence.
Game type-ins promised rewards to typing, and learning was osmotic.
Not really; it was quite feasible to type in something without understanding it, and I never found it stimulating or educational in itself. Particularly not if it was a machine code program with a Basic loader; i.e. mostly stuff like
410 DATA 235, 25, 235, 66, 67, 0, 128, blah blah blah
My phone cost $40 upfront, but they gave me 40 dollars of free calls, so essentially the phone was free and I was just paying for my airtime.
Yes, but that could be one hour of calls.
Actually, I meant that as an exaggerated joke to prove a point, but then I realised that a lot of "normal" phone-to-phone calls I could make on my pay-as-you-go phone work out at virtually that (in UK money) per hour.
Anyway, point I was going to make is that $40 "worth" of calls sounds nice, but isn't great if the calls are horribly expensive. In fact, they could charge twice as much for the calls, give you the same hour (or whatever's) worth and announce it as "OMG!!!!! $80 worth of free calls with this $40 phone".
Which sounds like an even better deal, when in reality it's way worse because you don't actually get any more free, and your calls are twice as expensive.
Same applies with dirt cheap printers that take horrendously priced ink carts. Buying a new printer because that $40 model comes with an ink cart worth $30 "free"? And the more they overprice the ink, the more that "free" cart is "worth", and the more the printer costs to run. It would make more sense to buy a printer where (e.g.) similar replacement carts were $10. But people don't think like that.
BASIC is another good choice
No it's not, it's a godawful choice.
:-/
I don't know if you meant old-school 8-bit-style BASIC or Visual Basic.
If you meant the former then, WTF? There were technical reasons why it was popular and (to some extent) its use was justified on early microcomputers. These technical issues no longer apply, and it's entirely unsuited to programming on a modern scale.
And traditional Basic was *notorious* for fostering bad programming habits; I for one certainly suffered from that, and I really wish I'd used more languages sooner. With respect, anyone suggesting it be taught to a newcomer should be shot.
If it's Visual Basic, then I'm certainly not convinced that for someone coming to it from scratch it's ultimately any easier to learn than (e.g.) C# or other C/C++ derived languages. It retains much of the syntactical clunkiness of old-fashioned basic, and its syntax isn't used much anywhere else, closing off the leveraging effect you get with C-style languages- learn one of those, and you partly know the others. Ironically, this will also make other languages appear more intimidating and locking that person into Visual Basic further.
VB's raison d'etre in the first place was that when it came out, many people had grown up using traditional BASIC a few years earlier, because *that* had been easy to learn. They'd migrated with BASIC through (I guess) familiarity, and because they "grew" and stayed with Visual Basic as it grew up it remained the sensible choice. But that's an advantage for existing users, not for newcomers, as it's really not that simple any more.
though it's been much maligned by many.
For very good reasons, too.
Interesting quote, but where's it from? It doesn't Google.
Yes, for more energy you should eat Ready Brek every morning, because it will wrap you in a warm visible glow.
Yeah, Ready Brek. WTF were they putting in that stuff?
*hopes that Americans have Ready Brek and used to get the same TV adverts*
Probably not, so here are a few videos of this exciting not-so-new source of energy:-
Very Retro #1, Pretty Retro Ad #2, Not so retro but still obviously around 20 years old #3.
we'll probably see mass produced flying cars when we see flying pigs
Really? That's great! I heard something about "swine flew" on the news recently. Probably nothing important though...
His argument is that as long as there is *just one* adequate quality photo of George Clooney under a free license, then the NYT and everyone else will use that for evermore, destroying any market for other photos.
How long would it be before people started seeing the same photograph of George Clooney so often in so many different articles that it became obvious, and from there seen as cheesy, lazy and/or cheap?
But you don't have to pay for Spotify.
Some countries, such as the one where Slashdot is based, are conspicuous by their absence from Spotify's contracts with labels. So in order to use Spotify, I would have to find an employer in a supported country who would sponsor my immigration to that country. Then I would have to pay to meet the employer's qualifications, such as fluency in the local language and a master's degree, and pay whatever relocation costs the employer doesn't advance me.
Please. Are we supposed to take nonsense arguments like that seriously?
If you'd said that Spotify wasn't available in all countries, that would have been a fair criticism.
Trying to twist that into some stupid argument that it's not free because you'd have to pay to emigrate is just ludicrously contrived and downright silly.
Was this study conducted by the ministry of cliched motherhood fears? Next on their agenda: if all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
Yeah, turns out that this *is* the case.
A few years ago here in Germany, a study was conducted by a leading business consultancy company for a measly six or seven figure number to explain the big success of discount stores over here.
Six or seven figures *is* relatively measly if you're going to be basing your multi-billion dollar business's future strategy on the study's results.
If I was running a company that size, I'd want to be damn sure that what I thought was *probably* the case was definitely the case. Sometimes (as others have said in this thread) "obvious" things that "everyone knows" turn out not to be the case, or not to be as simple as they first appear.
After half a year of mulling over the data, they announced they were pretty sure it had something to do with the prices.
Yeah, I'm sure that the media didn't oversimplify it in order to get a good story (and make it slightly easier to poke fun at).
There's also money in pointless research proving what humankind has known since forever.
(1) These "obvious result" stories are often oversimplified or misreported by the media. There's often more to the study and/or conclusions than is clear from the report.
(2) Things everyone "knows" to be the case aren't always correct. Even if they're true 95% of the time, it's worth it for the other 5%. You can't base higher-level science and studies on things that "everyone knows that's true".
Video of British police breaking up a party due to excessive music. The incident occurs at around the 55 second mark.
Er... I think he meant it wasn't such a good deal for the *buyers*!
what happens if someone formats their pc nd the cloud data on it as well?? also, it might be possible to access the data stored by the cloud on ur pc...
These are the kind of problems that actual computer science (as opposed to software engineering or IT) is used to consider and solve.
I can't remember exactly how they do it (probably because I didn't know the exact details in the first place), but there are probably mathematical theories proving that you need x number of copies distributed across various machines in such and such a manner to have 99.99999999999999999999% (or whatever) chance of recovering that file.
And I'm guessing it's probably not as simple as simply having X straight copies of a file in different locations either; it's probably distributed in a more convoluted (but mathematically sound) manner as well.
And if the system uses a pseudo-filesystem, then the underlying distributed storage system will probably be block (rather than file) oriented, so parts of the same file on different blocks will probably be stored differently.
The other issue you raise- privacy- is possibly another factor; IIRC they'd want to distribute the data in such a manner that a given person didn't know whose data they actually had, and also that having access to that part of the data alone would be unlikely to provide anything meaningful, so it can be mathematically proven that a 14-year-old hacker wannabe having your data on his computer isn't a security risk).
Bear in mind that I know jack **** about the theory underlying this (I'm not a mathematician) and it might be misleading- it's based on extrapolating vague memories of stuff I learned bits of a few years ago as part of my degree- nothing more. But I think it's in the right ballpark.
Ok, but they thought that by now, we would have a base on the moon, and people could go see themselves the original moon landing.
No, they couldn't see the original moon landing. They could see *the site of* the original moon landing. It's not comparable at all- they're both important, but very different.
people restoring and cleaning and analyzing old masters and paintings by students of old masters find they were recycling the canvases. Many layers of paintings, some by great old masters, are washed over and painted again.
They probably didn't know they'd be considered *quite* as important as they are today (very high, even if one doesn't consider the obscene millions some paintings sell for as their true "worth".)
The major historical nature of the moon landings would have been glaringly obvious even before they happened.
It was The. First. Damn. Man. On. The. Moon.
I think you're cutting NASA way too much slack- and patronising the people of 40 years ago too much. Old 60s episodes of Doctor Who- bad loss in retrospect, but *almost* understandable in the context of the time (ephemeral, low budget, non-established medium, not reusable).
First man to ever land on the moon- that's blatantly important by itself. The fact they spent billions of dollars to get there you'd think was an added impetus. 40 years doesn't make *that* much difference to people's judgement.
Even if the cost of storing the footage was relatively high, it would have been trivial in comparison with what NASA spent on the programme overall. And even more trivial given its priceless historical and non-repeatable nature.
Atari when Warner owned was a billion dollar a year company.
Yeah, but remember Warner wanted to sell them because by that time they were *losing* like a billion dollars a year. ;-)
Well, I exaggerate slightly, but they were losing a *lot* of money apparently.
BTW, if Wikipedia is to be believe, Jay Miner was one of the founder members of Amiga Corp., which was set up in late 1982, at least 18 months before Atari was sold.
Tramiel-era Atari and, er, post-Tramiel-era Commodore were pretty much as bad as each other anyway. They enjoyed some further success but never regained their heyday and in retrospect both showed the traits that would eventually lead to their downfall.
The BBC "recycled" tapes in the '70s and '80s, losing many episodes of well-known programs forever *coughdrwhoandmanyothers*.
Much as the BBC should be smacked about with a blunt instrument for wiping, they at least have the defence that these were low-budget productions that were seen as ephemeral in nature at the time and of no obvious use. (Legal agreements meant that they couldn't be retransmitted, and there wasn't a home video market as such).
NASA spent billions (in *60s money*) getting the first human being to walk on the moon- which would have been an obviously massive historical event even before it happened- yet thanks to some beancounting jobsworths and bureaucrats, rather than being treated as a valuable historical document and archived as they should have been, the high-quality originals have been lost.
This both defies belief and is all too believable; but that doesn't make it any less of a disgrace.
After initial jubilation, I was right to be sceptical about that the Sunday Express's accuracy (they were the ones who broke the- incorrect- story that the original tapes had been found).
Anyway, getting this digitally tarted-up version of the existing footage instead is a $50 consolation prize after being incorrectly told that you'd won a million on the lottery. Even if the image quality is good, the reprocessed footage still likely won't look as good as the original slow scan would have, and it certainly won't have the same veracity.
And that's the most important thing. They lost the damn originals, and regardless of how good the remasters *look*, they're not the damn originals.
You'll excuse me if I don't feel like breaking out the party poppers at NASA's DVD-age PR fluff hyping the remastering of their crappy fourth-generation footage as a minor success instead of the non-reversal of a massive loss of historical material.
Believe it or not, that was after Zimbabwe had lopped off a bunch of zeros from their currency the previous year.... twice. And then they did it a third time a month after they printed their first $100 trillion notes.
I was going to say something similar:-
On July 30, 2008, the Governor of the RBZ, Gideon Gono announced that the Zimbabwe dollar would be redenominated by removing 10 zeroes, with effect from August 1, 2008. ZWD10billion will become 1 dollar after the redenomination.
Then
[*After* the above revaluing] On 12 January 2009, Zimbabwe introduced the $50,000,000,000 note.
So you can multiply $50 billion by $10 billion (per new dollar) to get what it would have been if they hadn't done that sleight of hand; $500 billion billion.
Or let's put that another way (50 * 10^9) * (10 * 10^9) = 500 * 10^18 =
500 exadollars, or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 dollars.
If 1,000,000 US dollars in 100 dollar bills weighs 10kg, then assuming Zimbabwean 100 dollars had similar weight, the unrevalued currency would weigh:-
$5*(10^18) / ($100,000 per kilogram) = 5*(10^13) kilograms = 5*(10^10) metric tonnes....
i.e. 50 billion tonnes!!!
Soylent Green Cat Food is PEOPLE!!!!!!!
The cats won't mind that; size is likely the only reason you're seen as a provider and not prey. Go jump in the nearest lion enclosure if you think otherwise. ;-)
Benching weights increases muscle mass which will actually raise your BMI.
Yeah, but that's missing the point. Mainly because you're taking the literal meaning of "losing weight" rather than what most people (slighly inaccurately) use it to mean- i.e. losing fat. For the most part, gaining muscle isn't a bad thing, regardless of whether it causes you to gain "weight".
And worrying about its effect on BMI is putting the horse before the cart for the same reason. Anyway, BMI is a crude and very badly designed metric that doesn't take build into account, scales incorrectly to heights significantly smaller/taller than average and doesn't account for muscle vs. fat.
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
Yet the bullying is socially acceptedas you're proving right this instance. Not only that but as they get older they're preyed upon by the weight loss industry etc. In other words you're beating people down then wondering why they don't raise themselves by the bootstraps and make a huge effort just to lead semi-normal lives.
Your interpretation of his comments as "bullying" might prove his point.
*Some* of the comments certainly have been dickish- but not all of them.
I even had sex with my girlfriend as root.
Kind of appropriate!
Please, I thought we'd left that behind with George Bush and Ronnie Reagan.
"We"? Who is "we"? You talk like the American public and their way of thinking are the same as that of the rest of the world.
And which George Bush? Because I can assure you that from where I was sitting, Dubya's arrogant, bullying and downright childish "with us or against us" mentality was every bit as laughable- and he's only been out of office for six months. So don't get too self-congratulatory and blase about having voted Obama in and left all that behind- it's still largely the same American public who *re*-elected Bush in 2004 by which time they knew *exactly* what they were getting.
And don't expect the rest of the world to change lock-step with American politics.