I'm all for setting up this alternative drugie Olympics, if altitude training is ok, or lifting weights then why not a crack pipe.
I agree but I don't think it should be a free-for-all. No, I think each event should come with a mandatory drug.
Biathlon would be awesome with all the shooters jittery from doing eight lines of coke.
The challenge of the 100 Meter Dash/2 meter water bong event could be greatly increased by placing a couch just off the track near the starting line (or maybe the finish?), with a couple big bags of Doritos on it.
And how impressive would the Prozac Rowing events be? That's one hell of a coxswain who can get their crew to care enough to match the cadence.
The big bang is likely a ludicrous explanation that's helping to lead us down a gigantic blind alley in the advancement of science.
And let me guess: The Scientific Establishment, who worship the Big Bang like it is a religion, won't give your theory the proper credence it is due and admit that their theory is so obviously wrong even a random/.er can see it, because these heretical ideas threat the power of the Clergy of Science.
I won't go into the gross misunderstandings you have of the Big Bang theory (red shift must mean we're at the center of the 'explosion' amirite?), or try to explain why your theory is wrong. I'll let the reviewers for the peer-reviewed journals sort that one out. Can't wait to see you get published. Or rather prove the nefarious conspiracy against you when they refuse!
Yes, I am sure they do have people doing capacity planning. I am sure that time to market became a consideration so they did not want sit a stack a warchest of them in their warehouse, not to mention the risk had they not been big sellars, they know like all products in the electronics market demand will taper off no matter what they do in the end. Which would mean that not building out a lot more manufacturing facility might be wise, even if it means you can't sell as many units, because what will you do with it after the popularity fades?
Nintendo started off stockpiling a warehouse full of Wiis; they had a ridiculously successful launch in terms of consoles available on day 1. When even that wasn't enough to fill the demand, they increased their manufacturing capacity by 50%. This is not a simple thing to do, either, and constitutes risk like you say. Even still, wiis are hard to find.
It's time for people like the OP to wake up. Nintendo is not creating an artificial shortage. Nintendo is making and selling wiis as fast as it can; they have no reason not to unless you imagine Big N has a magical machine that can turn hype into money without having anything to sell. Whether you want to admit it or not, the answer is simple: The reason wiis are hard to find is because they really are selling that well. With numbers like the ones in the article, any other explanation sounds really, really stupid.
They are selling the units they can produce where the currency offers them the best excahnge rate so they take the most profit. Why they don't raise prices since the market will obviously bare it, I don't know, Good Will?
Well half the value proposition for the Wii is that it's cheap. Nintendo has always wanted their systems to be affordable, and isn't going to throw away that strategy/reputation any time soon. Especially in this generation -- half the strategy of getting the "casual gamer" aka the non-gamer to buy the Wii is the price, to make it seem worth taking a chance on. Far fewer people would want one if it cost more, so keeping the price low is their way of keeping demand high. That's my take anyway.
Note that this also shows how stupid the 'artificial shortage' theory is. Why would they create an artificial shortage, and then not charge more, resulting in them making less money over time?
One of the best lessons I learned in martial arts is there are two kinds of fights, those you fight dirty and those you lose.
And the best part is you can take advantage of people who don't know this by pretending to fight fair, losing, and then when they walk away you stab them in the back. They never see it coming!
They won't have the ability to get 500ft underground, to penetrate 10ft thick steel/concrete walls, or to open the individual containment vessels (designed to withstand a cargo aircraft crash).
They probably will eventually. If we're asking what will happen if we blow ourselves back to the Stone Age, well then that assumes we have survived, and humanity goes on. Humanity will learn, just as it always has. Humanity will progress from its new Stone Age to its new Bronze Age. They will learn how to work metals, and over time they will eventually learn how to dig into the ground to find more metals. Maybe even learning to harness some chemical reactions to make the job easier. Think of it this way -- a mid-1850s level society would be perfectly capable of digging that far into the ground and cutting through the barriers, but would have no idea what radiation is or what its dangers are.
Time doesn't stand still. We can't assume our society will last forever, and we can't assume that if that happens that no new society will develop, or that it will forever remain primitive. And especially with all the artifacts that will be left behind by the current civilization to serve as examples, 10,000 years is a long time for that to happen.
So what we should really do to warn off any future peoples is not try to create some language-less warning that will be ignored like every other symbolic "stay out, death awaits" warning found on an ancient tomb. No what we need to do is leave a Rosetta Stone, a durable and static writing that holds the same text in many different languages, so that any future scholar is likely to be familiar with at least one of them. And the text should be a lengthy and detailed description of what is inside the vault, not in vague scary terms, but in precise and scientific terms.
If we tell them exactly what the material is, exactly what its dangers are, and what precautions are necessary to avoid them, that will work a thousand times better than any "Don't look in the secret vault of mystery, trust us" style of warning.
And even if they could - If we end up reverting to a stone age culture, we really don't deserve to share this planet, so let 'em all die of radiation poisoning from playing with the pretty glowy powder.
Yeah, I'm sure that at its height some Romans felt that should their civilization fall, humanity was a lost cause. I'm not so ready to condemn far-flung future generations for the sins of their ancestors. I think they deserve their own shot, without us cynically placing land mines for them.
Hmm... the only resources I found on Luna was some Calcium. It's barely worth going there, other than to find out the Ur-Quan base has been abandoned...
This is almost as infuriating as Vons/Safeway and their "club card", tracking my purchases to try and "Better serve me". Horsefeathers! The fact that the products I want are in stock at any given point is PROOF that they've been using my spending habits to PREDICT MY NEEDS, which goes against everything I believe in.
That's clearly not true, because I've been to Safeway plenty of times and not ONCE have they offered me a blowjob.
"Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial 'Beacon' tracking service."
I should have known there was a problem when I was signing up and saw this:
[ ] Opt out of Beacon(tm) on-line tracking when logged into Facebook; opt in to Lighthouse(tm) on-line tracking when logged out of Facebook.
A state of the art human reclining space momentum chair will be attached in the middle to propel future explorers into space...or some where father out into the Atlantic Ocean.
I heard Scaled Composites is going to be doing this one for a tenth of the cost, and hopes to get it down to the point where many middle-class people could afford it. The downside is you won't quite reach the ocean.
It's like the short video experiment on seeing how many college students know the definition of suffrage by asking them to sign a petition against women's suffrage.
You're comparing the word hero to a word like suffrage in terms of common knowledge? Really?
Quite frankly, I don't think anyone who knows and respects the idea of a hero would use the word so nonchalantly.
I disagree, I think it's perfectly fine just like it's fine to use the word "tragedy" to describe things less awful than the Holocaust. It's commonly understood that you're talking about a different scale.
More to the point, I know and respect the idea of a hero, and I will use the word nonchalantly as well. Proof by example if you will.
Certainly, you are entitled to your ad hominem as you see fit, but even if I am being pedantic, I think this is something worthy of being pedantic for.
If you're going to be pedantic, and you are, don't use the phrase ad hominem as a replacement for the word insult. Saying you're being an un-useful pedantic was not part of the argument, it was the conclusion.
No, I think the average person makes a distinction between using hero in the truly honorific sense like when they describe a fireman carrying a child out of a fallen tower, and in the media-weakened non-serious sense that it is used in phrases like "Guitar Hero". Words have different meanings in different contexts. Ask the average person if they think the usage in the nasa article is the same as when they describe a 9/11 rescue worker. If they say yes, then you're right. If they say no, you're being a particularly unuseful kind of pedant.
Not to pick on you specifically, but you're the perfect example of someone whose understanding of hero is by and large accurate, but vague.
Yes, because a 5 line post was intended to be precise.
To directly reply, it doesn't really matter whether someone is a professional or an amateur, so long as the intended effect is accomplished.
My comment was not in any way intended to imply that. It was a simple statement of fact as to what happened. Firemen went into the building to rescue people. Civies didn't. If anything, it should have implied that being a professional, and thus simply doing your job, does not prevent you from being a hero in the course of said job.
The actual distinction I (and by extension from my assertion that this is how "the people" feel, everyone) was making is exactly the same as the only non-vague definition you gave, which is that being a hero is putting your life on the line to help others.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm all for setting up this alternative drugie Olympics, if altitude training is ok, or lifting weights then why not a crack pipe.
I agree but I don't think it should be a free-for-all. No, I think each event should come with a mandatory drug.
Biathlon would be awesome with all the shooters jittery from doing eight lines of coke.
The challenge of the 100 Meter Dash/2 meter water bong event could be greatly increased by placing a couch just off the track near the starting line (or maybe the finish?), with a couple big bags of Doritos on it.
And how impressive would the Prozac Rowing events be? That's one hell of a coxswain who can get their crew to care enough to match the cadence.
There's a lot of potential here.
The big bang is likely a ludicrous explanation that's helping to lead us down a gigantic blind alley in the advancement of science.
And let me guess: The Scientific Establishment, who worship the Big Bang like it is a religion, won't give your theory the proper credence it is due and admit that their theory is so obviously wrong even a random /.er can see it, because these heretical ideas threat the power of the Clergy of Science.
I won't go into the gross misunderstandings you have of the Big Bang theory (red shift must mean we're at the center of the 'explosion' amirite?), or try to explain why your theory is wrong. I'll let the reviewers for the peer-reviewed journals sort that one out. Can't wait to see you get published. Or rather prove the nefarious conspiracy against you when they refuse!
Here's a calendar designed to show when the LHC comes online and does its first experiment.
Yes, I am sure they do have people doing capacity planning. I am sure that time to market became a consideration so they did not want sit a stack a warchest of them in their warehouse, not to mention the risk had they not been big sellars, they know like all products in the electronics market demand will taper off no matter what they do in the end. Which would mean that not building out a lot more manufacturing facility might be wise, even if it means you can't sell as many units, because what will you do with it after the popularity fades?
Nintendo started off stockpiling a warehouse full of Wiis; they had a ridiculously successful launch in terms of consoles available on day 1. When even that wasn't enough to fill the demand, they increased their manufacturing capacity by 50%. This is not a simple thing to do, either, and constitutes risk like you say. Even still, wiis are hard to find.
It's time for people like the OP to wake up. Nintendo is not creating an artificial shortage. Nintendo is making and selling wiis as fast as it can; they have no reason not to unless you imagine Big N has a magical machine that can turn hype into money without having anything to sell. Whether you want to admit it or not, the answer is simple: The reason wiis are hard to find is because they really are selling that well. With numbers like the ones in the article, any other explanation sounds really, really stupid.
They are selling the units they can produce where the currency offers them the best excahnge rate so they take the most profit. Why they don't raise prices since the market will obviously bare it, I don't know, Good Will?
Well half the value proposition for the Wii is that it's cheap. Nintendo has always wanted their systems to be affordable, and isn't going to throw away that strategy/reputation any time soon. Especially in this generation -- half the strategy of getting the "casual gamer" aka the non-gamer to buy the Wii is the price, to make it seem worth taking a chance on. Far fewer people would want one if it cost more, so keeping the price low is their way of keeping demand high. That's my take anyway.
Note that this also shows how stupid the 'artificial shortage' theory is. Why would they create an artificial shortage, and then not charge more, resulting in them making less money over time?
There was a more recent one too where Tycho was fantasizing about rolling a protocol droid and saving the day with language.
Ah here it is.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/24/
How can you have a huge quest in front of you, but instead end up terrorizing the towns people and never get on to the actual quest in a CRPG?
This is one of the reasons why the Ultima series (in particular the 2nd trilogy) are some of the best CRPGs ever. :)
When you played the table-top game it didn't involve you waving around your 'wiimote'?
Guess that was just us then...
One of the best lessons I learned in martial arts is there are two kinds of fights, those you fight dirty and those you lose.
And the best part is you can take advantage of people who don't know this by pretending to fight fair, losing, and then when they walk away you stab them in the back. They never see it coming!
The Incredibles" stole the concept of the government forcibly retiring superheroes and covering up their existence from Frank Miller.
Wait, did I miss the part of "The Incredibles" where the government was trying to hide superheroes from Frank Miller?!
In that case, who cares?
They won't have the ability to get 500ft underground, to penetrate 10ft thick steel/concrete walls, or to open the individual containment vessels (designed to withstand a cargo aircraft crash).
They probably will eventually. If we're asking what will happen if we blow ourselves back to the Stone Age, well then that assumes we have survived, and humanity goes on. Humanity will learn, just as it always has. Humanity will progress from its new Stone Age to its new Bronze Age. They will learn how to work metals, and over time they will eventually learn how to dig into the ground to find more metals. Maybe even learning to harness some chemical reactions to make the job easier. Think of it this way -- a mid-1850s level society would be perfectly capable of digging that far into the ground and cutting through the barriers, but would have no idea what radiation is or what its dangers are.
Time doesn't stand still. We can't assume our society will last forever, and we can't assume that if that happens that no new society will develop, or that it will forever remain primitive. And especially with all the artifacts that will be left behind by the current civilization to serve as examples, 10,000 years is a long time for that to happen.
So what we should really do to warn off any future peoples is not try to create some language-less warning that will be ignored like every other symbolic "stay out, death awaits" warning found on an ancient tomb. No what we need to do is leave a Rosetta Stone, a durable and static writing that holds the same text in many different languages, so that any future scholar is likely to be familiar with at least one of them. And the text should be a lengthy and detailed description of what is inside the vault, not in vague scary terms, but in precise and scientific terms.
If we tell them exactly what the material is, exactly what its dangers are, and what precautions are necessary to avoid them, that will work a thousand times better than any "Don't look in the secret vault of mystery, trust us" style of warning.
And even if they could - If we end up reverting to a stone age culture, we really don't deserve to share this planet, so let 'em all die of radiation poisoning from playing with the pretty glowy powder.
Yeah, I'm sure that at its height some Romans felt that should their civilization fall, humanity was a lost cause. I'm not so ready to condemn far-flung future generations for the sins of their ancestors. I think they deserve their own shot, without us cynically placing land mines for them.
and kills puppies.
You mean it doesn't?! Damn.
All that wasted time...
Maybe try washing your dick.
They haven't offered to do that either! "Predict my needs" my ass...
That said, these don't look like rockets but are simply jets. Still interesting but not true rocket racing.
Jet racing, rocket racing... Why would I care about the difference? "Oh this is lame, these things aren't even carrying their own oxidizer!"
The resource on the moon is the isotope He3.
Hold on, let me fact-check this...
*loads up Star Control 2*
Hmm... the only resources I found on Luna was some Calcium. It's barely worth going there, other than to find out the Ur-Quan base has been abandoned...
What?
This is almost as infuriating as Vons/Safeway and their "club card", tracking my purchases to try and "Better serve me". Horsefeathers! The fact that the products I want are in stock at any given point is PROOF that they've been using my spending habits to PREDICT MY NEEDS, which goes against everything I believe in.
That's clearly not true, because I've been to Safeway plenty of times and not ONCE have they offered me a blowjob.
"Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial 'Beacon' tracking service."
I should have known there was a problem when I was signing up and saw this:
[ ] Opt out of Beacon(tm) on-line tracking when logged into Facebook; opt in to Lighthouse(tm) on-line tracking when logged out of Facebook.
Damn it, I *JUST YESTERDAY* posted to correct this fallacy. When will the Internet learn?
You just need to post this in every discussion on every web page everywhere, and then the Internet will finally know.
A state of the art human reclining space momentum chair will be attached in the middle to propel future explorers into space...or some where father out into the Atlantic Ocean.
I heard Scaled Composites is going to be doing this one for a tenth of the cost, and hopes to get it down to the point where many middle-class people could afford it. The downside is you won't quite reach the ocean.
Mmmmmmisquote!
http://www.flixster.com/articles/luke-i-am-your-father-movie-misquotes
M-m-m-m-m-m-m-Monster Nerd!
Seriously. You go fetch me the beer -- I recommend you buy a couple pallets worth -- and let me take care of the rest.
It's like the short video experiment on seeing how many college students know the definition of suffrage by asking them to sign a petition against women's suffrage.
You're comparing the word hero to a word like suffrage in terms of common knowledge? Really?
Quite frankly, I don't think anyone who knows and respects the idea of a hero would use the word so nonchalantly.
I disagree, I think it's perfectly fine just like it's fine to use the word "tragedy" to describe things less awful than the Holocaust. It's commonly understood that you're talking about a different scale.
More to the point, I know and respect the idea of a hero, and I will use the word nonchalantly as well. Proof by example if you will.
Certainly, you are entitled to your ad hominem as you see fit, but even if I am being pedantic, I think this is something worthy of being pedantic for.
If you're going to be pedantic, and you are, don't use the phrase ad hominem as a replacement for the word insult. Saying you're being an un-useful pedantic was not part of the argument, it was the conclusion.
No, I think the average person makes a distinction between using hero in the truly honorific sense like when they describe a fireman carrying a child out of a fallen tower, and in the media-weakened non-serious sense that it is used in phrases like "Guitar Hero". Words have different meanings in different contexts. Ask the average person if they think the usage in the nasa article is the same as when they describe a 9/11 rescue worker. If they say yes, then you're right. If they say no, you're being a particularly unuseful kind of pedant.
Try using your shoe, lad.
Couldn't, I'd eaten them for lunch the week before!
Not to pick on you specifically, but you're the perfect example of someone whose understanding of hero is by and large accurate, but vague.
Yes, because a 5 line post was intended to be precise.
To directly reply, it doesn't really matter whether someone is a professional or an amateur, so long as the intended effect is accomplished.
My comment was not in any way intended to imply that. It was a simple statement of fact as to what happened. Firemen went into the building to rescue people. Civies didn't. If anything, it should have implied that being a professional, and thus simply doing your job, does not prevent you from being a hero in the course of said job.
The actual distinction I (and by extension from my assertion that this is how "the people" feel, everyone) was making is exactly the same as the only non-vague definition you gave, which is that being a hero is putting your life on the line to help others.
In my day, we ate our rust-flavored snow cones and we liked 'em!
In my day they we didn't have the snow, they were just paper cones filled with rust!