The problem with a state run insurance plan is that that the state has never made anything more efficient. Ever.
Yeah! Things were so much better and more efficient in the US before fire departments became government-run! Just think, back then you got to find a local fire department and pay them to cover you, then call them specifically in an emergency. Now you have to dial 911 and they'll send out whatever is needed! It's mind-bogglingly ineffecient!
Oh yeah, and how about those interstate freeways? Don't you miss the good old days in which you couldn't easily and quickly travel large distances in your car? Fuck, think of all the poor truckers who'll never get to experience driving a thousand miles along winding, narrow highways and surface streets!
Bullshit. I never owned an SNES, and I never even played Super Metroid until around 2002, and it's still an amazing game.
An even better example, Cave Story, is one of the finest games I've ever played, and it was released in 2004. The only "nostalgia" factor that could be argued is the Metroid-esque format and pixel graphics, which is pretty moot. People don't love it because it reminds them of older games, they love it because it's a fun, challenging, beautiful game that Pixel obviously put a lot into.
I think TFA makes some great points. A big problem with most of these Flash platformers is that they're all pretty art with little substance gameplay-wise. I've played Scary Girl, which is beautiful, but it's not that fun to play.
I wouldn't think so. The other low-stress regions are in the north where the winters are longer and harsher. I'd hazard it's more to do with local culture (and population density) than anything else. Having lived in Hawaii, despite people whingeing about how expensive everything is, it really is a far more laid back place than say, California. I've heard it's pretty laid-back in most of Wisconsin too.
Uh, I don't think you understood what you're replying to. Your analogy applies to pre-cap service, which no one was complaining about. To further your analogy, the addition of the caps is like having gone there for years and typically eaten 2-4 plates, then one day they take your plate away after you've finished your first helping, and tell you there's a one-plate limit. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like nearly as good a deal.
It's not bigotry to call someone who believes in something there's no evidence for the existence of "insane/delusional/stupid." Just because millions of people believe it doesn't make it not a delusion.
"God" is nebulous, and inherently impossible to disprove. So is anything else anyone could make up that is untestable! That was kind of the whole point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It's perfectly fair for Dawkins to use the term "delusion", because theists have made an outlandish claim with no evidence to back it up. You can't assert something, provide no evidence for it, then claim you're right until someone proves you wrong. That's literally the logic of an insane person. The sane person observes a phenomenon, comes up with a testable hypothesis, and tests it, and doesn't claim their hypothesis is true unless it holds up to repeated and rigorous testing, and even then, there's no 100% "proven."
Uh... if someone starts hallucinating magic pink slugs that sing Beatles songs, and claims only they can see them, you can't disprove that, but you wouldn't have to disprove it to call them delusional.
I never even bought it (thank gods) and it caused me problems. I demo'd it for a while, and found it not as good as VMWare Fusion at the time, so I uninstalled it. My Mac Pro took an impressive dive in stability after that, and IIRC, I couldn't even do a software shutdown due to a kernel extension Parallels had left behind. I had to go on the web to find out what files it left behind, and how to remove them, and sure enough, my computer worked fine after that.
I'm not a huge fan of VMWare Fusion nowadays either, though. I suspect it's what broke my XP Boot Camp partition twice (made it hang at the loading screen when booting it native) and I know it somehow managed to make it so when using X Chat Aqua, in OS X, without VMWare Fusion even _on_, XCA would crash if I right-clicked anything in it. I uninstalled VMWare Fusion, and everything went back to normal.
I'm thinking of trying Virtual Box out, but I kind of am reluctant, considering the current track record of virtualization on my machine.:/
Seconding this. I've been using the Silverlight-based player, and it's been ace on OS X. The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.
Only problems I've had with it were occasional movies with audio out of sync, but it's a rare problem. (I've had it happen two or three times out of at least 50)
The DRM doesn't really bother me in this case. I'm renting these movies, not buying them. The DRM isn't depriving me of anything. (I'm really anti-DRM for things one owns, but seriously, for rental services, DRM makes perfect sense to me.)
A demo for a good game will increase sales, and for a bad game it will decrease sales. Solution: stop publishing bad games.
I wouldn't have bought Starcraft, Diablo 2, or anything made by Spiderweb Software, for example, if not for their demos. Can't think of many bad games I actually bothered with the demo (if it existed) of, though.
You can't get away with not supporting a bunch of hardware without lock-in with something as big as an OS, in that even if you don't offer tech support to them, the generic PC customers will call anyway. When you consider how many people they'd have to turn away, that's a lot of money wasted on telling people "we only provide support for licensed hardware." It would also, frankly, piss more people off than it pleases. Keep in mind, the average customer is no techie. They expect everything to Just Work regardless of whether their machine is officially supported or not.
You're being facetious, I hope. Do you realize that the IRS can and will ruin people over tax evasion? Bye bye house, car, savings, a chunk of income, etc.
Being under coercion that strong assuages guilt. To say American taxpayers are guilty in this situation is like saying a person who got mugged is guilty of murder because the mugger used their money to buy a weapon he killed someone with.
If you are against software patents, the best thing you can do is get your own patents in the current state of things. Then you can choose to not enforce them, while having strong grounds to prevent anyone else from patenting it and suing you despite your work being prior art. (It can and does happen.)
Yes, but what good will Spanish do you as an engineer? China is rapidly industrializing and in need of engineers. What Spanish-speaking country is in need of them?
A scientific theory is a theory which conforms to very strict rules. A theory in general does not.
My objection to Dawkins principles is that he suggests that all theories of god should be rejected without any critical assessment. So if a theory of god appears tomorrow which conforms to scientific principles (I'm not saying it will - I am merely hypothesizing) then we must reject it because it refers to supernatural beings. I'm sorry but that lacks the plain objectivity of the scientific mind. The problem herein seems to stem from lack of understanding of what a scientific theory _is_. In science, "theory" refers to an explanation for observable phenomenon that has been tested so rigorously and so many times without being disproved that the probability of its being disproved is near zero. (A scientific law is essentially a theory that is so fleshed out that there are few unknowns left. IE, the theory of evolution is not a law because there's still plenty of room for more details on how it works, while gravity is a law because it's almost entirely complete.)
In scientific terms, theory pretty much = fact. What most other laypeople confuse for theory is actually conjecture. (Sometimes hypothesis, but not where religion is concerned, for a hypothesis by definition must be testable.)
There do not exist any theories backing religion. Period. There are many conjectures out there, but never has someone come up with a testable (can be proven or disproved) hypothesis that has not been disproved.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with a state run insurance plan is that that the state has never made anything more efficient. Ever.
Yeah! Things were so much better and more efficient in the US before fire departments became government-run! Just think, back then you got to find a local fire department and pay them to cover you, then call them specifically in an emergency. Now you have to dial 911 and they'll send out whatever is needed! It's mind-bogglingly ineffecient!
Oh yeah, and how about those interstate freeways? Don't you miss the good old days in which you couldn't easily and quickly travel large distances in your car? Fuck, think of all the poor truckers who'll never get to experience driving a thousand miles along winding, narrow highways and surface streets!
Bullshit. I never owned an SNES, and I never even played Super Metroid until around 2002, and it's still an amazing game.
An even better example, Cave Story, is one of the finest games I've ever played, and it was released in 2004. The only "nostalgia" factor that could be argued is the Metroid-esque format and pixel graphics, which is pretty moot. People don't love it because it reminds them of older games, they love it because it's a fun, challenging, beautiful game that Pixel obviously put a lot into.
I think TFA makes some great points. A big problem with most of these Flash platformers is that they're all pretty art with little substance gameplay-wise. I've played Scary Girl, which is beautiful, but it's not that fun to play.
I wouldn't think so. The other low-stress regions are in the north where the winters are longer and harsher. I'd hazard it's more to do with local culture (and population density) than anything else. Having lived in Hawaii, despite people whingeing about how expensive everything is, it really is a far more laid back place than say, California. I've heard it's pretty laid-back in most of Wisconsin too.
Uh, I don't think you understood what you're replying to. Your analogy applies to pre-cap service, which no one was complaining about. To further your analogy, the addition of the caps is like having gone there for years and typically eaten 2-4 plates, then one day they take your plate away after you've finished your first helping, and tell you there's a one-plate limit. Suddenly, it doesn't seem like nearly as good a deal.
That bei--wait, you mean the Onion, don't you?
We do it because Sony fanboys are almost as fun to troll as furries. :)
Well, it tries to, but it's more like it sees "conut" and thinks the programmer probably meant "wildebeest".
It's not bigotry to call someone who believes in something there's no evidence for the existence of "insane/delusional/stupid." Just because millions of people believe it doesn't make it not a delusion.
"God" is nebulous, and inherently impossible to disprove. So is anything else anyone could make up that is untestable! That was kind of the whole point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It's perfectly fair for Dawkins to use the term "delusion", because theists have made an outlandish claim with no evidence to back it up. You can't assert something, provide no evidence for it, then claim you're right until someone proves you wrong. That's literally the logic of an insane person. The sane person observes a phenomenon, comes up with a testable hypothesis, and tests it, and doesn't claim their hypothesis is true unless it holds up to repeated and rigorous testing, and even then, there's no 100% "proven."
Uh... if someone starts hallucinating magic pink slugs that sing Beatles songs, and claims only they can see them, you can't disprove that, but you wouldn't have to disprove it to call them delusional.
I never even bought it (thank gods) and it caused me problems. I demo'd it for a while, and found it not as good as VMWare Fusion at the time, so I uninstalled it. My Mac Pro took an impressive dive in stability after that, and IIRC, I couldn't even do a software shutdown due to a kernel extension Parallels had left behind. I had to go on the web to find out what files it left behind, and how to remove them, and sure enough, my computer worked fine after that.
I'm not a huge fan of VMWare Fusion nowadays either, though. I suspect it's what broke my XP Boot Camp partition twice (made it hang at the loading screen when booting it native) and I know it somehow managed to make it so when using X Chat Aqua, in OS X, without VMWare Fusion even _on_, XCA would crash if I right-clicked anything in it. I uninstalled VMWare Fusion, and everything went back to normal.
I'm thinking of trying Virtual Box out, but I kind of am reluctant, considering the current track record of virtualization on my machine. :/
No, it really, truly doesn't bother me in this case, it just bothers you. I am not you, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth.
Seconding this. I've been using the Silverlight-based player, and it's been ace on OS X. The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.
Only problems I've had with it were occasional movies with audio out of sync, but it's a rare problem. (I've had it happen two or three times out of at least 50)
The DRM doesn't really bother me in this case. I'm renting these movies, not buying them. The DRM isn't depriving me of anything. (I'm really anti-DRM for things one owns, but seriously, for rental services, DRM makes perfect sense to me.)
A demo for a good game will increase sales, and for a bad game it will decrease sales. Solution: stop publishing bad games.
I wouldn't have bought Starcraft, Diablo 2, or anything made by Spiderweb Software, for example, if not for their demos. Can't think of many bad games I actually bothered with the demo (if it existed) of, though.
And then there's the whole communication with the Wii aspect of it, too. Something bothers me about the thought of my Wii being exposed to AiDS.
Spore is to Will Wright as Daikatana is to John Romero.
You can't get away with not supporting a bunch of hardware without lock-in with something as big as an OS, in that even if you don't offer tech support to them, the generic PC customers will call anyway. When you consider how many people they'd have to turn away, that's a lot of money wasted on telling people "we only provide support for licensed hardware." It would also, frankly, piss more people off than it pleases. Keep in mind, the average customer is no techie. They expect everything to Just Work regardless of whether their machine is officially supported or not.
Obviously, Lord Xenu has a Slashdot account.
You're being facetious, I hope. Do you realize that the IRS can and will ruin people over tax evasion? Bye bye house, car, savings, a chunk of income, etc.
Being under coercion that strong assuages guilt. To say American taxpayers are guilty in this situation is like saying a person who got mugged is guilty of murder because the mugger used their money to buy a weapon he killed someone with.
If you are against software patents, the best thing you can do is get your own patents in the current state of things. Then you can choose to not enforce them, while having strong grounds to prevent anyone else from patenting it and suing you despite your work being prior art. (It can and does happen.)
Yes, but what good will Spanish do you as an engineer? China is rapidly industrializing and in need of engineers. What Spanish-speaking country is in need of them?
It does, but that's not saying much. The PS2 still gets a lot more.
Uhhh... DD-WRT is free. I use it on my WRT54GL, and it works marvelously.
I don't think even Fark would greenlight this. _Maybe_ to the videos section.
2. A theory - no.
A scientific theory is a theory which conforms to very strict rules. A theory in general does not.
My objection to Dawkins principles is that he suggests that all theories of god should be rejected without any critical assessment. So if a theory of god appears tomorrow which conforms to scientific principles (I'm not saying it will - I am merely hypothesizing) then we must reject it because it refers to supernatural beings. I'm sorry but that lacks the plain objectivity of the scientific mind. The problem herein seems to stem from lack of understanding of what a scientific theory _is_. In science, "theory" refers to an explanation for observable phenomenon that has been tested so rigorously and so many times without being disproved that the probability of its being disproved is near zero. (A scientific law is essentially a theory that is so fleshed out that there are few unknowns left. IE, the theory of evolution is not a law because there's still plenty of room for more details on how it works, while gravity is a law because it's almost entirely complete.)
In scientific terms, theory pretty much = fact. What most other laypeople confuse for theory is actually conjecture. (Sometimes hypothesis, but not where religion is concerned, for a hypothesis by definition must be testable.)
There do not exist any theories backing religion. Period. There are many conjectures out there, but never has someone come up with a testable (can be proven or disproved) hypothesis that has not been disproved.