Let's put it this way: Ever seen that little note inside mass market paperbacks -- the small ones --about how if you bought the title without a cover, you're in league with the devil? Those coverless books, "strips," are thrown away. The covers get sent back to the publisher for partial credit on returns. Pitching the guts of the book saves on weight in shipping.
Which is to say, the traditional revenues we're talking about are derived from a system that is NUTS, and that couldn't need to be replaced more.
If there's an industry that's suffering from the costs of distribution more than book selling, I don't know what it is. Books weigh a ton, there's basically an infinite variety of them, and in order to sell a reasonable number you have to have a huge range on hand at any given moment.
Brick and mortar book stores apparently make money, but as someone who worked in them for years I can only say they do so because people have enormous, enormous love for the product and will overpay. People love the things -- it's not the text, it's the whole package.
This little publisher (or other academic presses) will keep cranking out books, and what Google and the big online sellers will do is change how the final products get distributed -- which is where the serious middleman's markup occurs. Maybe a small house will lose whatever barely-breaking-even gross revenues they get from the physical reproduction of the physical book, at some point. But that's not where the money is for them.
And they sell such huge quanitites that supply is a very important issue. Not.
I'm not drinking the Kool Aid as far as "innovation" goes. From any businessman that's just filler -- the word MicroSoft uses to justify abusing monopoly power. We won't know what it means to Jobs until we see what comes out of Apple's design labs using Pentium Ms.
But to say Apple hasn't had problems with supply is really pretty staggeringly wrong, no offense intended. Anyone who's ever tried to order the latest cool PowerBook knows that's been a serious problem for them.
Apple has had a longstanding "supply chain" problem across multiple generations of chips, going back to well before the original PPC machines. They haven't been able to get manufacturers -- Motorola conspicuously -- to produce enough of the designs they need. The fact that they had a niche market exacerbated that problem, because they had to get the other end of the chain to invest research dollars in new development.
As a result, on the consumer end, they've repeatedly had serious trouble keeping supplies up for whatever turned out to be the hot machines.
(You get additional demerits for using the "not," too. That's irony for the irony impaired, circa 1992.)
How can you be so excited about a console you know practically nothing about?
This is a great question. It isn't quite as good as:
How can the new XBox and PS offerings be so underwhelming that we're much more excited by the one we know practically nothing about?
I can see being worked up over both the one you know (and can soon buy) and the one you don't know -- but we're not, really, are we?
I'm more interested to see what Nintendo does with the DS version of Animal Crossing than I am to see shiny helmet reflections in Madden on the 360. Seriously.
Do you think this because you just like to bash cheap cars? Hyundai has gotten better reliability ratings on their cars than Toyota on more than one occasion.
Personally I love cheap cars. The original little Honda Civic made tons of sense to me: cheap, well-made, reliable commuter car. If the big two Japanese makers weren't bloating every model year over year, I'd have bought a Corolla or something this last time.
Digging around, and thanks for keeping me honest, basically two things are obvious:
Hyundai is improving in reliability, at least in the short term, since around 2001 or so -- though outfits like Consumer Reports and JD Power disagree about how much; and
Hyundai has a longstanding problem with people's perceptions of their cars as unreliable in the long term.
The 10 years/100,000 miles thing is an attempt to get at that second problem. It clearly is meant to say, like I put it before, "It's unreliable, but we cover for that." I'm their market, and that's the message they're sending me loud and clear.
But you know, point taken, and when my latest ridiculously durable (170k and going strong) Subaru gives out I'll maybe have Hyundai on my list where they weren't before.
Mini games -- check, yes, got those
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Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 2, Interesting
the question of why these role playing games never include any decent side games. From everything I have talked to this game has the pet-owner emotional attachment parts down to a tee, but then you have all the boring things, that you would have in real life... Why not make the contests where you earn money more fun mini-games?
Because, um, you didn't read the review or any other descriptions of Nintendogs, which does include what you're asking for? Whatever "everything" you're talking to, it seems not to have played this one.
My kids have a copy of Nintendogs. They play some sort of frisbee contest, a lot, and then there are actual agility training schools and contests. Both of those run as separate little arcade sequences, almost, with slight variations on the control system for each. The side games let you unlock various equipment and so on, as well as earning you money to purchase that stuff. Does this ring a bell, "mini side game" wise?
(And let me say, your Calvinball chases were a great example of positive reinforcement training. The game the dog was playing was called "keep away." They learn to do that because they get reinforced for doing it -- they enjoy the attention, running around, and so on. Check out a basic operant conditioning book for a description of how you trained Fido to do that. It's kind of an interesting topic -- and to its credit the Nintendogs model seems to "get" that sort of training, which a lot of real-life dog owners don't understand at all.)
You're right, the warranty implications of this are pretty far-reaching. People would be using the monthly check in place of all the $300 "30,000 mile service" packages dealers sell, which would suck for all those service departments.
The ideal thing from GM's POV might be for the user to have access to the monthly "checkup," with a log file or something to pore over. They could clearly identify stuff you *had* to address, and bury other information in the usual "computer codes" bucket.
GM is hardly doing this without thinking that stuff through. The monthly payments for OnStar probably make up for whatever extra maintenance costs they incur in the first some-odd years of your ownership. (You get a year free, or something, and then you pay a monthly fee. That first year isn't going to have major mechanical crackups, you wouldn't think. After that, I wonder how the math works, but it can't be a disaster for them.)
And either way, could it be more expensive than something like Hyundai's "We know they're unreliable but we cover for that" 10 year/100,000 mile warranties? This is a far more impressive way of addressing customer concerns about reliability.
Hopefully you're fishing for a "Funny" mod? Next you'll be posting the "fossils are stratified because the heavy animals sunk to the bottom after Noah's flood" article. Whoo hoo!
A representative sample of the hilariously specious logical turns included in those two links:
Even the hippopotamus doesn't fit all the facts, as this animal does not have a tail comparable to a cedar tree
Yep -- the Bible throws a collection of traits together, and if we can only cram some sort of known critter into the weird-ass description there, somehow it will prove the Bible was right.
The opening two paragraphs of that second link are bad enough -- implying that somehow science has neglected "sea monsters" out of a sense that they'd "prove the Bible" instead of being in line with secular science. What the heck that's about I don't know. I'll put the last 50 years of deep sea science up against the self-reinforcing sophisms of Biblical literalism any day of the week. One of them is about learning the truth, and has produced the most surprising discoveries in biology -- deep sea vent communities relying on chemosynthesis, etcetera. The other is about nothing more than reinforcing the position of those who claim they've got the word of God on their side. It's produced exacly no new information, instead regarding new knowledge as inherently threatening to its worldly power.
ICANN's FAQ explains away any Star Chamber ideas
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Iraq TLD In Legal Limbo
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· Score: 3, Informative
ICANN does have the chartered role of deciding which registrar in a given country gets to dole out the domains. In this case apparently back in 1997 they made a previous "delegation" for Iraq -- I don't see which element of Saddam's government had that authority. Now they're changing the registrar to the National Communications and Media Commission (NCMC) of Iraq.
(Don't blame them for SPAM or Web gambling, folks. They're just the cabal of international bankers and Star Chamber judges who decide who gets to map the IP addresses to the domains.)
People don't seem to realize that ALL paths lead to enlightenment. That means truths in any path can be applied to any other path if the person is smart enough to open themselves to different ways of looking at the universe. Divisionistic people like yourself are one of the reasons it's taking us so damn long to learn anything.
Believe me, I was raised by a family whose Southern wing -- as recently as last week at Grandma's funeral, in fact -- is dedidated to maintaining an absolute grip on Godly power for the white guys who claim that power. I've been to their church services, which despite being oh so into personal (as opposed to impersonal?) relationships with Jesus seem to be informed exclusively by the mindset of the Book of Numbers. They post tracts, whose message is invariably "Devote yourself to blindered obedience and abject worship or you will fry in Hell," at the entrance to the sanctuary.
I'm all for religious tolerance of exactly the sort you support. Essentially the problem I have with modern American fundamentalism, which you rightly suggest is largely a US (and Australian) thang, is that it's not about any of the things religion is about. We want enlightenment -- How do I live as a moral individual in a world with massive corporate structures like this? When does life begin? The answer from this authoritarian wing of Christianity is "Believe absolutely the right thing, and never waver in your obedience to us... Er, to God, yeah, that's right, to God."
The paths that don't lead to enlightenment are the ones that, specifically, determinedly, by any means necessary, will crush the individual's attempt to attain that enlightenment, through the use of worldly power and the threat of divine power. And I know my relatives, and that is what they seriously believe in: brainwashing, pure and simple. It's also exactly, exactly, the wing of Christianity that has so much trouble with evolution. And that's not a coincidence.
(Personally I have no trouble at all with belief in creation by God -- but the Biblical version is at best a poor Platonic shadow for my money, and certainly not worthy of the authoritarian baggage it's carrying for those folks.)
famous debates on the issue... but you know that since you read them written down things.
Odd aside in this troll tree: Actually US High School students don't learn much at all about Lincoln's position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Our history textbooks tend to emphasize stuff like Douglas's scintillating debate style and his sartorial panache, but they don't usually spend time on the actual content of the debates -- which was the justification of slavery based on Biblical morality, with Douglas on one side and Lincoln on the other.
James Lowen's fun little book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me," spends some time on that very subject. Just one more little example of how textbook makers are afraid of the truth, and in particular afraid of using primary sources, because they don't want to scare away potential buyers. We end up with a "History" that's told in a ponderous, self-satisfied voice quite similar to the original poster's Christian Troll here. Which is bogus and wrong, and leads to idiocies just like that post.
Arguments for the "literal" truth of the Bible are not about morality, or God, or truth. They are about the authority of human beings to speak in God's place about all those things.
You thought I was maybe playing Halflife with my pre-teens?? By that "we" I just meant, you know, us. (They'd have been maybe seven when your titles came out, or younger, I'm not keeping close track.)
There's a huge difference between what the bible says and what the bible translations say.
How charmingly relativistic you become when cornered by the incoherence of the position you're supporting. God's word has suddenly become sort of slippery, lost in translation, but somehow it's still on your side and it's still literally true if only I could believe?
I feel certain that you're about to re-translate the Genesis verses in question in order to comprehensively argue for a connection between (Genesis 2 in the KJV):
2:21. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept:and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;
2:22. And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
2:23. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
And mitochondrial DNA, or something? Or were you just posting a sort of dismissive B.S. meant to neatly wall off your ideology from any criticism?
Incidentally, my Southern Baptist background is totally adamant that the KJV is the ONLY worthwhile translation, and quite literal about the rib. If you'd really like to make the point about the mistranslation, perhaps you'd like to fight out your little schism with them. I don't claim to speak for God, personally; I just recognize the completely self-serving claptrap of those who do make that claim for what it is.
The basic theory of an intelligent creator could include everything
You're so right, and as a result whenever ID writers like Michael Behe get things completely refuted -- see his earlier arguments about fossil whales -- they can therefore just move the playing field to the edges of whatever scientists are working on how, claiming that whatever it is represents the very edges of human knowledge and ability to understand complexity.
Note though, that you have to actually press a mouse button to trigger any action, which might be a good thing, as it prevents accidently triggering something you don't want to trigger.
No kidding. There's a reason the easiest-to-reach spots on the monitor aren't the best place to put "close application" commands. Taking the optical trackball out to clean the thing routinely pushes my cursor to one corner or another. Oops! Closed my browser again.
The author's imagined operating system, in which the corners of the screen are used to directly manipulate applications and documents, would irritate me to no end.
Personally I'm 38, my kids were 11 when they played Windwaker, and I loved the emotive cartoon style. We haven't seen games that more gracefully bring across emotional reactions by the characters.
That said, there was almost nothing in the game that seriously challenged the kids. Despite the (deservedly) legendary depth of play from Zelda titles, I think the designers decided they were making a cartoony title so they should pitch it to kids in terms of the level of challenge too. Which sucked.
We can accept gritty realism or the cel shading thing. Either one has to be stylishly executed, and the game has to be far more than a shooter where I'm opening doors in order to hold my interest.
(Near as we can tell the delay with the new Zelda is the development group adding play depth. Props to them.)
Acting on your impulse, I decided to pare the original text down to its gist to see whether there was anything worthwhile left. Unfortunately the first clause --
"Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time:"
-- put me off somewhat. Oy oy oy. I imagine the author writing term papers in her or his Freshman courses in college. What attention getting device shall I employ this time? "Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time"? How about "One of the most profound challenges ever confronted by humanity..." instead? They're both such proven winners.
Continuing with the first paragraph, we get some other gems:
"Any five-year-old earth child..."
"...a better design team than any money-driven market thugs."
Personally I'm skeptical about the "earth" children. Maybe we should hold a focus group that includes some other types of children, too. When we hold it, we will keep those marketing "thugs" from intimidating the kids. That's always been the problem -- thuggishness, motivated by money.
I'm not the brightest bulb on the billboard, but come on -- this guy needs an editor.
In the sense that the article is essentially an overlong rant no better or worse than the usual slashdot missive, and that it's on the home page right now, it did at least get past one "editor." Let's see... Ahhh yes, that would be Taco.
We all have our peeves and pet ideas about user interfaces. Only the rare among us write so many ponderous, wooly rhetorical fluorishes into our opinions about those that our opinions undergo a sort of apotheosis, ascending to the level of "article" rather than mere "post."
It's times like this I wish we had that radical new mod option, "On topic." As in, "The original story missed the point, but here is a real topic for discussion." In this case: How do we discriminate between crackpot science and the real thing in the popular media?
That'd be a lot more useful than debunking yet another "fake moon landing"-level article. This is like making fun of the "intertial dampeners" on Star Trek, or complaining that pro wrestlers couldn't really inflict "pile drivers" without neck injuries.
If physics, chemistry, etc. still all work as expected, how is origin so critical?
Let's see, how exactly do we come up with a coherent world view in which a) DNA, genes, chromosomes and so on are the means of inheritance; and b) the first woman was created using a rib torn from the side of the first man? The best you can do is propose a "God set things in motion" model, in my view anyway, and then you've got all sorts of problems keeping that afloat if you've ever even seen meiosis or mitosis. (If God "set it in motion" then where exactly along the genetic chain does God intervene to make certain subcellular determinations in line with prophesy and so on? Michael Behe winds up proposing that sort of constant intervention in order to make his watch-watchmaker arguments for things like Cilia.)
At a basic foundational level, almost any science poses extreme challenges to a "literalist" (which of course always means selectively, conveniently literalist in actual practice) reading of the Bible.
In geology, for example, realizing that the world wasn't made exactly the way it is now, that it became this way over time on a scale unimaginable to the people who wrote the Bible, makes the "On the Xth day..." business staggeringly superficial by comparison, just to start with. The actual age of the earth is, in and of itself, a contradiction of any reasonable reading of the Bible's specific claims about human life. (Not that the whole 6,000 year thing is actually in the Bible, mind you, except indirectly.)
But c'mon -- "creationism" isn't about God. It's about the worldly authority of those who claim they speak for God. That's a completely different set of questions. Our Pharisees will tie themselves into intellectual knots to keep their hold on power, and to keep us from asking the obvious questions about their Oh So Divine knowledge... Which contrasted with the rigors of science, seems to come to them awfully, awfully easily, and to back their authority ever so conveniently.
So what? I can come up with a half dozen possible explanations and I'm not even formally educated.
All of which proposed reasons are silly to the point of not needing to be aired or refuted (except apparently for on Rush Limbaugh's show where he's continued to confuse prehistoric volcanoes with ones that erupted in the 1990s), and none of which do anything whatsoever to address the enormous weight of peer-reviewed science on the topic of global warming.
So, you know, you just did prove that point, by making arguments on the level of low-attention-span rubes and the news machines that feed them.
I hear a lot of people pointing at hurricanes lately as a result of global warming who don't even understand how a hurricane is formed. Warmer ocean water and cooler air. The claim with global warming is that the air is getting warmer. You can't have it both ways.
Boy, it's funny -- that idea has been getting zero play in the popular media, which is what we're talking about, and I haven't heard person one making that connection. Also hilariously oversimplified argument about the warm air. Nice straw man. It flies in the face of what the geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory at NOAA (for one example) says about Global Warming and Hurricanes. Sample:
Although we cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricanes will occur in the future with global warming, the hurricanes that do occur near the end of the 21st century are expected to be stronger and have significantly more intense rainfall than under present day climate conditions. This expectation... is based on an anticipated enhancement of energy available to the storms due to higher tropical sea surface temperatures.
Oops! Your "cold air vs. warm air" argument turns out to be, again, an oversimplified silliness committed by a lay person who cares about making plausible-sounding arguments rather than about the truth.
But let's discuss global warming, you seem to want that. Imagine that the sea level has risen, and that New Orleans is hit by a more intense hurricane. Does this sound like it's worth avoiding? Relative to the risk of nuclear war in the 1980s, which we spent untold billions to address, how much is it worth to us to prevent global warming -- which essentially every reputable scientist believes is already happening? I'm not looking for sophisms like the goofy ones you offered before. I'd rather have you face the real risks. Take a look at the images from New Orleans, and tell me again how a few degrees hotter would just mean Minnesota was more like Kansas.
Naturally it's called that because it was supposed to look for ice at the poles -- but, you know, you'd think if we were going to mimic the penguin, we'd want to imitate it in its element. Penguins survive harsh environments standing up and waddling around, okay, but they're basically jet fighters underwater. We take a look and decide to imitate the waddling, clumsy version.
Please, make it slide around on its belly instead.
The history of Soviet robotic lunar explorers also seems a little redundant, no? Presumably these Penguins would be for more than simple exploration?
Still, the idea of mimicking natural forms has a certain appeal. Evolution is a heck of an interesting engineer, even if billions of years of work result in kludges like the human nose. Designs like the penguin are amazingly successful in harsh environments. (I only hope Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman narrates the launches.)
The insinuation that Spotlight was a panicky reaction to MS's announcement of search features in "Vista" is about as "balanced" as the average Fox News on-air editorial "newscast."
This one is somewhere between a genuine paid shill and astroturf.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is to say, the traditional revenues we're talking about are derived from a system that is NUTS, and that couldn't need to be replaced more.
If there's an industry that's suffering from the costs of distribution more than book selling, I don't know what it is. Books weigh a ton, there's basically an infinite variety of them, and in order to sell a reasonable number you have to have a huge range on hand at any given moment.
Brick and mortar book stores apparently make money, but as someone who worked in them for years I can only say they do so because people have enormous, enormous love for the product and will overpay. People love the things -- it's not the text, it's the whole package.
This little publisher (or other academic presses) will keep cranking out books, and what Google and the big online sellers will do is change how the final products get distributed -- which is where the serious middleman's markup occurs. Maybe a small house will lose whatever barely-breaking-even gross revenues they get from the physical reproduction of the physical book, at some point. But that's not where the money is for them.
I'm not drinking the Kool Aid as far as "innovation" goes. From any businessman that's just filler -- the word MicroSoft uses to justify abusing monopoly power. We won't know what it means to Jobs until we see what comes out of Apple's design labs using Pentium Ms.
But to say Apple hasn't had problems with supply is really pretty staggeringly wrong, no offense intended. Anyone who's ever tried to order the latest cool PowerBook knows that's been a serious problem for them.
Apple has had a longstanding "supply chain" problem across multiple generations of chips, going back to well before the original PPC machines. They haven't been able to get manufacturers -- Motorola conspicuously -- to produce enough of the designs they need. The fact that they had a niche market exacerbated that problem, because they had to get the other end of the chain to invest research dollars in new development.
As a result, on the consumer end, they've repeatedly had serious trouble keeping supplies up for whatever turned out to be the hot machines.
(You get additional demerits for using the "not," too. That's irony for the irony impaired, circa 1992.)
This is a great question. It isn't quite as good as:
I can see being worked up over both the one you know (and can soon buy) and the one you don't know -- but we're not, really, are we?
I'm more interested to see what Nintendo does with the DS version of Animal Crossing than I am to see shiny helmet reflections in Madden on the 360. Seriously.
Personally I love cheap cars. The original little Honda Civic made tons of sense to me: cheap, well-made, reliable commuter car. If the big two Japanese makers weren't bloating every model year over year, I'd have bought a Corolla or something this last time.
Digging around, and thanks for keeping me honest, basically two things are obvious:
The 10 years/100,000 miles thing is an attempt to get at that second problem. It clearly is meant to say, like I put it before, "It's unreliable, but we cover for that." I'm their market, and that's the message they're sending me loud and clear.
But you know, point taken, and when my latest ridiculously durable (170k and going strong) Subaru gives out I'll maybe have Hyundai on my list where they weren't before.
Because, um, you didn't read the review or any other descriptions of Nintendogs, which does include what you're asking for? Whatever "everything" you're talking to, it seems not to have played this one.
My kids have a copy of Nintendogs. They play some sort of frisbee contest, a lot, and then there are actual agility training schools and contests. Both of those run as separate little arcade sequences, almost, with slight variations on the control system for each. The side games let you unlock various equipment and so on, as well as earning you money to purchase that stuff. Does this ring a bell, "mini side game" wise?
(And let me say, your Calvinball chases were a great example of positive reinforcement training. The game the dog was playing was called "keep away." They learn to do that because they get reinforced for doing it -- they enjoy the attention, running around, and so on. Check out a basic operant conditioning book for a description of how you trained Fido to do that. It's kind of an interesting topic -- and to its credit the Nintendogs model seems to "get" that sort of training, which a lot of real-life dog owners don't understand at all.)
The ideal thing from GM's POV might be for the user to have access to the monthly "checkup," with a log file or something to pore over. They could clearly identify stuff you *had* to address, and bury other information in the usual "computer codes" bucket.
GM is hardly doing this without thinking that stuff through. The monthly payments for OnStar probably make up for whatever extra maintenance costs they incur in the first some-odd years of your ownership. (You get a year free, or something, and then you pay a monthly fee. That first year isn't going to have major mechanical crackups, you wouldn't think. After that, I wonder how the math works, but it can't be a disaster for them.)
And either way, could it be more expensive than something like Hyundai's "We know they're unreliable but we cover for that" 10 year/100,000 mile warranties? This is a far more impressive way of addressing customer concerns about reliability.
Hopefully you're fishing for a "Funny" mod? Next you'll be posting the "fossils are stratified because the heavy animals sunk to the bottom after Noah's flood" article. Whoo hoo!
A representative sample of the hilariously specious logical turns included in those two links:
Yep -- the Bible throws a collection of traits together, and if we can only cram some sort of known critter into the weird-ass description there, somehow it will prove the Bible was right.
The opening two paragraphs of that second link are bad enough -- implying that somehow science has neglected "sea monsters" out of a sense that they'd "prove the Bible" instead of being in line with secular science. What the heck that's about I don't know. I'll put the last 50 years of deep sea science up against the self-reinforcing sophisms of Biblical literalism any day of the week. One of them is about learning the truth, and has produced the most surprising discoveries in biology -- deep sea vent communities relying on chemosynthesis, etcetera. The other is about nothing more than reinforcing the position of those who claim they've got the word of God on their side. It's produced exacly no new information, instead regarding new knowledge as inherently threatening to its worldly power.
It seems a little less Star Chamberish, given that we can review their minutes and look at the FAQ that explains their role.
(Don't blame them for SPAM or Web gambling, folks. They're just the cabal of international bankers and Star Chamber judges who decide who gets to map the IP addresses to the domains.)
Believe me, I was raised by a family whose Southern wing -- as recently as last week at Grandma's funeral, in fact -- is dedidated to maintaining an absolute grip on Godly power for the white guys who claim that power. I've been to their church services, which despite being oh so into personal (as opposed to impersonal?) relationships with Jesus seem to be informed exclusively by the mindset of the Book of Numbers. They post tracts, whose message is invariably "Devote yourself to blindered obedience and abject worship or you will fry in Hell," at the entrance to the sanctuary.
I'm all for religious tolerance of exactly the sort you support. Essentially the problem I have with modern American fundamentalism, which you rightly suggest is largely a US (and Australian) thang, is that it's not about any of the things religion is about. We want enlightenment -- How do I live as a moral individual in a world with massive corporate structures like this? When does life begin? The answer from this authoritarian wing of Christianity is "Believe absolutely the right thing, and never waver in your obedience to us... Er, to God, yeah, that's right, to God."
The paths that don't lead to enlightenment are the ones that, specifically, determinedly, by any means necessary, will crush the individual's attempt to attain that enlightenment, through the use of worldly power and the threat of divine power. And I know my relatives, and that is what they seriously believe in: brainwashing, pure and simple. It's also exactly, exactly, the wing of Christianity that has so much trouble with evolution. And that's not a coincidence.
(Personally I have no trouble at all with belief in creation by God -- but the Biblical version is at best a poor Platonic shadow for my money, and certainly not worthy of the authoritarian baggage it's carrying for those folks.)
Thanks, if it comes past my attention maybe we'll take a look.
(By that time my kids will be old enough to beg for something more halflifeish, probably. Sigh.)
Odd aside in this troll tree: Actually US High School students don't learn much at all about Lincoln's position in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Our history textbooks tend to emphasize stuff like Douglas's scintillating debate style and his sartorial panache, but they don't usually spend time on the actual content of the debates -- which was the justification of slavery based on Biblical morality, with Douglas on one side and Lincoln on the other.
James Lowen's fun little book, "Lies My Teacher Told Me," spends some time on that very subject. Just one more little example of how textbook makers are afraid of the truth, and in particular afraid of using primary sources, because they don't want to scare away potential buyers. We end up with a "History" that's told in a ponderous, self-satisfied voice quite similar to the original poster's Christian Troll here. Which is bogus and wrong, and leads to idiocies just like that post.
They are authoritarian, not moral, arguments.
You thought I was maybe playing Halflife with my pre-teens?? By that "we" I just meant, you know, us. (They'd have been maybe seven when your titles came out, or younger, I'm not keeping close track.)
How charmingly relativistic you become when cornered by the incoherence of the position you're supporting. God's word has suddenly become sort of slippery, lost in translation, but somehow it's still on your side and it's still literally true if only I could believe?
I feel certain that you're about to re-translate the Genesis verses in question in order to comprehensively argue for a connection between (Genesis 2 in the KJV):
And mitochondrial DNA, or something? Or were you just posting a sort of dismissive B.S. meant to neatly wall off your ideology from any criticism?
Incidentally, my Southern Baptist background is totally adamant that the KJV is the ONLY worthwhile translation, and quite literal about the rib. If you'd really like to make the point about the mistranslation, perhaps you'd like to fight out your little schism with them. I don't claim to speak for God, personally; I just recognize the completely self-serving claptrap of those who do make that claim for what it is.
You're so right, and as a result whenever ID writers like Michael Behe get things completely refuted -- see his earlier arguments about fossil whales -- they can therefore just move the playing field to the edges of whatever scientists are working on how, claiming that whatever it is represents the very edges of human knowledge and ability to understand complexity.
Scientific ideas can be disproved. ID cannot.
No kidding. There's a reason the easiest-to-reach spots on the monitor aren't the best place to put "close application" commands. Taking the optical trackball out to clean the thing routinely pushes my cursor to one corner or another. Oops! Closed my browser again.
The author's imagined operating system, in which the corners of the screen are used to directly manipulate applications and documents, would irritate me to no end.
That said, there was almost nothing in the game that seriously challenged the kids. Despite the (deservedly) legendary depth of play from Zelda titles, I think the designers decided they were making a cartoony title so they should pitch it to kids in terms of the level of challenge too. Which sucked.
We can accept gritty realism or the cel shading thing. Either one has to be stylishly executed, and the game has to be far more than a shooter where I'm opening doors in order to hold my interest.
(Near as we can tell the delay with the new Zelda is the development group adding play depth. Props to them.)
-- put me off somewhat. Oy oy oy. I imagine the author writing term papers in her or his Freshman courses in college. What attention getting device shall I employ this time? "Let me introduce you to one of the greatest mysteries of our time"? How about "One of the most profound challenges ever confronted by humanity..." instead? They're both such proven winners.
Continuing with the first paragraph, we get some other gems:
Personally I'm skeptical about the "earth" children. Maybe we should hold a focus group that includes some other types of children, too. When we hold it, we will keep those marketing "thugs" from intimidating the kids. That's always been the problem -- thuggishness, motivated by money.
Yeeck.
In the sense that the article is essentially an overlong rant no better or worse than the usual slashdot missive, and that it's on the home page right now, it did at least get past one "editor." Let's see... Ahhh yes, that would be Taco.
We all have our peeves and pet ideas about user interfaces. Only the rare among us write so many ponderous, wooly rhetorical fluorishes into our opinions about those that our opinions undergo a sort of apotheosis, ascending to the level of "article" rather than mere "post."
That'd be a lot more useful than debunking yet another "fake moon landing"-level article. This is like making fun of the "intertial dampeners" on Star Trek, or complaining that pro wrestlers couldn't really inflict "pile drivers" without neck injuries.
Let's see, how exactly do we come up with a coherent world view in which a) DNA, genes, chromosomes and so on are the means of inheritance; and b) the first woman was created using a rib torn from the side of the first man? The best you can do is propose a "God set things in motion" model, in my view anyway, and then you've got all sorts of problems keeping that afloat if you've ever even seen meiosis or mitosis. (If God "set it in motion" then where exactly along the genetic chain does God intervene to make certain subcellular determinations in line with prophesy and so on? Michael Behe winds up proposing that sort of constant intervention in order to make his watch-watchmaker arguments for things like Cilia.)
At a basic foundational level, almost any science poses extreme challenges to a "literalist" (which of course always means selectively, conveniently literalist in actual practice) reading of the Bible.
In geology, for example, realizing that the world wasn't made exactly the way it is now, that it became this way over time on a scale unimaginable to the people who wrote the Bible, makes the "On the Xth day..." business staggeringly superficial by comparison, just to start with. The actual age of the earth is, in and of itself, a contradiction of any reasonable reading of the Bible's specific claims about human life. (Not that the whole 6,000 year thing is actually in the Bible, mind you, except indirectly.)
But c'mon -- "creationism" isn't about God. It's about the worldly authority of those who claim they speak for God. That's a completely different set of questions. Our Pharisees will tie themselves into intellectual knots to keep their hold on power, and to keep us from asking the obvious questions about their Oh So Divine knowledge... Which contrasted with the rigors of science, seems to come to them awfully, awfully easily, and to back their authority ever so conveniently.
All of which proposed reasons are silly to the point of not needing to be aired or refuted (except apparently for on Rush Limbaugh's show where he's continued to confuse prehistoric volcanoes with ones that erupted in the 1990s), and none of which do anything whatsoever to address the enormous weight of peer-reviewed science on the topic of global warming.
So, you know, you just did prove that point, by making arguments on the level of low-attention-span rubes and the news machines that feed them.
I hear a lot of people pointing at hurricanes lately as a result of global warming who don't even understand how a hurricane is formed. Warmer ocean water and cooler air. The claim with global warming is that the air is getting warmer. You can't have it both ways.
Boy, it's funny -- that idea has been getting zero play in the popular media, which is what we're talking about, and I haven't heard person one making that connection. Also hilariously oversimplified argument about the warm air. Nice straw man. It flies in the face of what the geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory at NOAA (for one example) says about Global Warming and Hurricanes. Sample:
Oops! Your "cold air vs. warm air" argument turns out to be, again, an oversimplified silliness committed by a lay person who cares about making plausible-sounding arguments rather than about the truth.
But let's discuss global warming, you seem to want that. Imagine that the sea level has risen, and that New Orleans is hit by a more intense hurricane. Does this sound like it's worth avoiding? Relative to the risk of nuclear war in the 1980s, which we spent untold billions to address, how much is it worth to us to prevent global warming -- which essentially every reputable scientist believes is already happening? I'm not looking for sophisms like the goofy ones you offered before. I'd rather have you face the real risks. Take a look at the images from New Orleans, and tell me again how a few degrees hotter would just mean Minnesota was more like Kansas.
Please, make it slide around on its belly instead.
Still, the idea of mimicking natural forms has a certain appeal. Evolution is a heck of an interesting engineer, even if billions of years of work result in kludges like the human nose. Designs like the penguin are amazingly successful in harsh environments. (I only hope Morgan "Easy Reader" Freeman narrates the launches.)
The insinuation that Spotlight was a panicky reaction to MS's announcement of search features in "Vista" is about as "balanced" as the average Fox News on-air editorial "newscast."
This one is somewhere between a genuine paid shill and astroturf.