So let me tell you about the next CEO at that company. From the day he arrived people were saying "is he deliberately trying to sink this company or what?"
Anyway, a few months later we hear news from Bangkok (of all places) of a stock scam. Guys in a "boiler room" had been selling a bunch of stocks in various companies. They would deliberately pick companies that were heading for bankruptcy (or could be pushed in that direction) and make press releases about the amazing stuff they were doing and produce nice glossy brochures. They'd then use this material to hard sell the stocks by phone. When the companies failed they'd then run off with the money paid for stocks knowing that they'd never have to pay out. (I don't fully understand the mechanics of this despite reading an article in Time about this exact scam.) Anyway, on the list of companies being traded, there was our company!
The key staff (who actually did work) at the company jumped ship. Almost everyone else followed. But bizarrely the company didn't need any staff to continue its scamming. They carried on making press releases describing their (imaginary) work and I remember reading a news story in which I myself was quoted talking about my work there, long after I left! On the basis of this they managed to get multi-million dollar grants from a US city famous for its Mafia connections and presumably, with few staff to pay, the CEO could pay himself very handsomely.
One day I want to write a book about our company. (I did start a Wikipedia entry which hasn't been deleted yet.) Sadly I think of it as 'ours' because a bunch of us worked hard to make it a world-class company that competitors looked up to. Unfortunately, due to the large number of Italian names of the people involved, and the aforementioned reputation of the city that was involved, I might wait a few years.
The CEO of my old company gambled (and lost) our salaries at Vegas and on stocks and when he decided his salary wasn't enough he created a money funnel^H^H^H^H^Hconsulting company of which he was one of two employees and charged our company for consulting alongside his salary. When all this was uncovered he simply skipped town. He seems to have done this all his life. When he was caught running a mutual fund scam a few years back he got a little slap on the wrist and was banned from trading on certain markets. And he was the nice guy compared to the sleazebag who took over from him (especially when he was buying the drinks). These people just jump from job to job wearing teflon coated suits to which nothing sticks.
Over a year of Netflix I once received a DVD that skipped a bit on my $40 DVD player.
Either I have a super error-correcting DVD player, or I watch movies that are unpopular or are only rented by people who know how to handle DVDs, or your DVD player is lame, or you are a liar, or I am a liar.
You need to be tech savvy to understand the concept of renting? You need to be savvy to understand you're looking at a small screen? What are you talking about?
Haskell does OK. But compare to Clean, another pure lazy functional language. Clean blows away Haskell most of the time and competes favourably with C, sometimes beating it.
There is no moral difference between a threat of prosecution and simply shooting someone in the head,
I can tell the difference, but you can't. That puts you at a certain advantage compared to most others when thinking about these kinds of issues. I suggest you keep out of political discussion until you've learned to see the difference, otherwise you'll only make a fool of yourself.
Well, I agree it's outrageous. But Intelligent Design is an order of magnitude more outrageous. I mean, suggesting that there may be some subtle undiscovered connections between human minds is one thing (for example, people might not have predicted the existence of pheromones a few decades ago), but claiming that the universe was created, to look like it was 12 billion years old, by an old guy, with multiple personalities, with a predilection for Middle-Eastern virgins, in 6 days, 6,000 years ago, is stretching the imagination a little too far.
Eh!??! The biggest cause of accidents is surely having a spouse/significant other with you in the car. If they're not telling you how to drive, or giving you incorrect directions, or setting the air conditioning incorrectly, they're probably berating you for some chore or other you're not doing (as if you could do it when you're trying to get from A to B).
I now completely refuse to drive my wife anywhere. If she wants to drive, she can do it from the driver's seat.
With conceptions of "state" varying from the night watchman state all the way up to the totalitarian Stalinist state you can only see "State" and "No State". I hope you improve your vision before you reach the age of majority wherever you live.
there would really be no efficient mechanism to "clean up" any stuff that does nothing
How do you define "does nothing"? If you mean "isn't transcribed", sure. But DNA can serve structural purposes, act as sites for various types of receptor binding and possibly serve other purposes we haven't figured out yet. People have known for a long time now that untranscribed DNA might serve all kinds of interesting purposes.
OK, this is a troll. However, I've never seen a reference to the daytime moon in any pre-1950 literature, ever. The moon is frequently visible during the day. And yet every piece of literature from before 1950 talks about the moon solely as a nighttime phenomenon. Look through art galleries and you won't find a single painting of the moon during the day. So it seems pretty clear that the daytime moon is in fact a new phenomenon.
Hey! I was going to post about A Mind Forever Voyaging but then I figured that nobody else would even have heard of it. So I was surprised to see your comment.
I think people should play this game today - it's astonishing just how prescient the game was with it's emphasis on notions like asymmetric warfare. And playing it 20 years later it acquires a new kind of self-referentiality that wasn't there when it was originally published.
As far as I know, there hasn't been another game anything like it. I wonder if it'll work on my old Psion III which I still use for my old Infocom games. It's one of the the best portable platforms for playing them.
Hmmm...I thin I found those weird women's legs upside down on another pair of women's legs creatures in Silent Hill 2 as disturbing as they were creepy.
Whatever. Life doesn't stop in one part of the world just because a bunch of people in another part of the world decide they'd rather kick the sh*t out of each other.
Isn't it time to stop talking about "junk DNA" as being junk? The idea that it might not be junk has been popular in the popular science press for decades now. Presumably the idea that it's useful has been around for much longer in academia. Every single article I have ever read in the last decade that mentions the stuff points out that it might serve a purpose. So isn't it time to stop saying "Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk" just like you no longer have to preface every discussion about relativity with the statement "people used to think there was an absolute zero velocity with respect to which the aether was at rest". It's kind of insulting, don't you think?
This is terrible. We know that in the far future the crew of the Battlestar Galactica intercept some of these recordings but it seems that they just miss the transmissions from the moon. These recordings are doomed to be lost forever.
The obvious culprits are the researchers who make preposterous claims in order to get funding. But one can easily imagine a government body having aninterested in investing in a system like this because it serves as a deterrent by giving the impression that they have access to powerful technology, even if it doesn't really exist. And of course magazines like Wired are complicit in the scam because it makes a great story for them. All in all, everyone scores.
One question I think is interesting is this: what kind of stories can be transferred from movies (or literature) to games? A serious love story probably has no chance of succeeding as a game. On the other hand, many types of story that hinge on a denouement work well: eg. stories where you finally discover who the bad guy really is. Do people care much about character development in a game or is at all plot? And might computer generated plots work in a game (eg. think of Propp's work in formalizing fairy tales).
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The SciFi channel is the History channel. It just got beamed back in time a few hundred years.
Really, it's a more humane than this long dragged out suffering.
Anyway, a few months later we hear news from Bangkok (of all places) of a stock scam. Guys in a "boiler room" had been selling a bunch of stocks in various companies. They would deliberately pick companies that were heading for bankruptcy (or could be pushed in that direction) and make press releases about the amazing stuff they were doing and produce nice glossy brochures. They'd then use this material to hard sell the stocks by phone. When the companies failed they'd then run off with the money paid for stocks knowing that they'd never have to pay out. (I don't fully understand the mechanics of this despite reading an article in Time about this exact scam.) Anyway, on the list of companies being traded, there was our company!
The key staff (who actually did work) at the company jumped ship. Almost everyone else followed. But bizarrely the company didn't need any staff to continue its scamming. They carried on making press releases describing their (imaginary) work and I remember reading a news story in which I myself was quoted talking about my work there, long after I left! On the basis of this they managed to get multi-million dollar grants from a US city famous for its Mafia connections and presumably, with few staff to pay, the CEO could pay himself very handsomely.
One day I want to write a book about our company. (I did start a Wikipedia entry which hasn't been deleted yet.) Sadly I think of it as 'ours' because a bunch of us worked hard to make it a world-class company that competitors looked up to. Unfortunately, due to the large number of Italian names of the people involved, and the aforementioned reputation of the city that was involved, I might wait a few years.
The CEO of my old company gambled (and lost) our salaries at Vegas and on stocks and when he decided his salary wasn't enough he created a money funnel^H^H^H^H^Hconsulting company of which he was one of two employees and charged our company for consulting alongside his salary. When all this was uncovered he simply skipped town. He seems to have done this all his life. When he was caught running a mutual fund scam a few years back he got a little slap on the wrist and was banned from trading on certain markets. And he was the nice guy compared to the sleazebag who took over from him (especially when he was buying the drinks). These people just jump from job to job wearing teflon coated suits to which nothing sticks.
Either I have a super error-correcting DVD player, or I watch movies that are unpopular or are only rented by people who know how to handle DVDs, or your DVD player is lame, or you are a liar, or I am a liar.
You need to be tech savvy to understand the concept of renting? You need to be savvy to understand you're looking at a small screen? What are you talking about?
Haskell does OK. But compare to Clean, another pure lazy functional language. Clean blows away Haskell most of the time and competes favourably with C, sometimes beating it.
Well, I agree it's outrageous. But Intelligent Design is an order of magnitude more outrageous. I mean, suggesting that there may be some subtle undiscovered connections between human minds is one thing (for example, people might not have predicted the existence of pheromones a few decades ago), but claiming that the universe was created, to look like it was 12 billion years old, by an old guy, with multiple personalities, with a predilection for Middle-Eastern virgins, in 6 days, 6,000 years ago, is stretching the imagination a little too far.
I now completely refuse to drive my wife anywhere. If she wants to drive, she can do it from the driver's seat.
OK, this is a troll. However, I've never seen a reference to the daytime moon in any pre-1950 literature, ever. The moon is frequently visible during the day. And yet every piece of literature from before 1950 talks about the moon solely as a nighttime phenomenon. Look through art galleries and you won't find a single painting of the moon during the day. So it seems pretty clear that the daytime moon is in fact a new phenomenon.
I think people should play this game today - it's astonishing just how prescient the game was with it's emphasis on notions like asymmetric warfare. And playing it 20 years later it acquires a new kind of self-referentiality that wasn't there when it was originally published.
As far as I know, there hasn't been another game anything like it. I wonder if it'll work on my old Psion III which I still use for my old Infocom games. It's one of the the best portable platforms for playing them.
Hmmm...I thin I found those weird women's legs upside down on another pair of women's legs creatures in Silent Hill 2 as disturbing as they were creepy.
Whatever. Life doesn't stop in one part of the world just because a bunch of people in another part of the world decide they'd rather kick the sh*t out of each other.
Isn't it time to stop talking about "junk DNA" as being junk? The idea that it might not be junk has been popular in the popular science press for decades now. Presumably the idea that it's useful has been around for much longer in academia. Every single article I have ever read in the last decade that mentions the stuff points out that it might serve a purpose. So isn't it time to stop saying "Scientists once thought of that stuff as junk" just like you no longer have to preface every discussion about relativity with the statement "people used to think there was an absolute zero velocity with respect to which the aether was at rest". It's kind of insulting, don't you think?
I guess you use India as an example because you think Americans blend right in with the locals in, say, London. He he he...
This is terrible. We know that in the far future the crew of the Battlestar Galactica intercept some of these recordings but it seems that they just miss the transmissions from the moon. These recordings are doomed to be lost forever.
Hmmm...documentary game...interesting idea...
The obvious culprits are the researchers who make preposterous claims in order to get funding. But one can easily imagine a government body having aninterested in investing in a system like this because it serves as a deterrent by giving the impression that they have access to powerful technology, even if it doesn't really exist. And of course magazines like Wired are complicit in the scam because it makes a great story for them. All in all, everyone scores.
You know too much about guns. You must be some kind of terrorist. Expect a visit from the men in black shortly.
One question I think is interesting is this: what kind of stories can be transferred from movies (or literature) to games? A serious love story probably has no chance of succeeding as a game. On the other hand, many types of story that hinge on a denouement work well: eg. stories where you finally discover who the bad guy really is. Do people care much about character development in a game or is at all plot? And might computer generated plots work in a game (eg. think of Propp's work in formalizing fairy tales).