It's not an example of inconsistency, it's an example of his complete inability to spell words right, and poor understanding of colloquialisms.
In the first sentence, he seems to mean they are "treading" on his good will. What that means, i don't know, but all terrible things he accuses Grocklaw of could certainly be considered, "treading on his good name," if he had one.
I'm a Christian, to some extent. Depends on who you ask, I suppose. I decided a long time ago I was through with my fellow Christians, and I'd try to get back to the lofty ideals and morality that the religion is supposed to be about. Everybody else is becomming very hung up on miniscule historical trivia and particulars of a book that's lost so many of those particulars through poor translation and intentional modification by kings and popes seeking to use it to their advantage.
The problem with biblical literalism is that they gleefully abandon, ignore, or even deny the existence of most of the bible in their quest to support one or two lines. Who cares that sodomy meant what we now call beastiality until only a few centuries ago, let's go out and burn down gay people's houses. Forget the tax collector who prayed quietly in his home and recieved his blessings, let's be like the pharisee who tore his shirt in public and cried out to God and country in thanks that we aren't as bad as everybody else.
One of the key things that gets harped on is Noah's flood. Three divergent bloodlines are mentioned before the flood (if I had my bible, or even one of my books my Rev. Polkinghorne, I could look them up and tell you), and their currently (currently as in when the old testament was assembled) living descendents are related (one was the ancestor of "all such who live in tents and keep herds" (probably the Arab and south Asian nomadic peoples), and two others. Noah was from one of these three bloodlines, and all three clearly survived the flood. Also, Goliath's bloodline is mentioned both before and after the flood (both by name and as "such people as have great stature"), so that makes three definite and one probable bloodline (and by their descriptions, indeed entire civilizations) that survived through the flood. Combine this with the use of "everything under heaven," (Which is used to describe cities that cover all things under heaven, and armies which span all lands under heaven. Obviously, earth has never had a global megalopolis, but its very easy to imagine a city or army spanning horizon to horizon), Noah's flood doesn't even sound global by the litteral wording.
Worse again, the parts they cling to are the parts that are not eye witness. They are humans interpreting divine revalation. "His thoughts are above your thoughs". Imagine the difficulty an ant would have making sense of what a human is telling it to describe a city. Not having seen a city, and having minimal understanding of our speech (pretend its one of those semi-intelligent super ants that eat dogs in movies or something), it would produce an image of a city that, although it would bear certain correlation with a real city, could not be taken for a literal description of one.
The test of how much they understand is if they deny the city exists when they see it and it doesn't look like what they imagined from the description.
A century ago, it was refusal to reconcile Christian beliefs with mainstream science, and things held together fairly well. If I lived then, I doubt I would have bought into evolution either. But now, especially with people like Henry Morris, it's gone beyond that: Changing Christian belief to preclude any and all mainstream science. It was unfortunate when one creationist published a book for preists saying that "It's better to lie to the people than to risk them seeking the facts for themselves. There is no sin in lying for God, and no sin in believing a lie." I see far too much of it now, wich churches outright lying about science, politics, medicine, business, current events, and religion (both their own and others) to manipulate congregations.
And as long as I've lost the point, a quote: "Oh, no, religions never kill people. Religions have lofty ideals and pure morality. Religious followers, on the other hand, are closed minded, hateful, spiteful people who will kill one another for no useful cause."
Screw the store. Microsoft fixed my harddrive after more than TWO years for just the cost of shipping the Xbox there and back, which overground only cost me around $25.
I was a bit more gullible than you, I guess. Considering some of the lame shit that has actually been made, I wasn't very bothered by a game company making Cthulu Kart Racing and Age of Monotremes. It wasn't until I went to the phobe.com main site that I realized I'd been had.
Just being picky, but "For Great Justice!" is one of the identifying lines from Zero Wing, a well known game produced for the Sega Genesis. By mentioning a Sega reltated trademark in a post relating to Nintendo products, you are hereby violating, I don't know, SOMETHING, so just be nice and send us your address so we can send Dr. Robotnik down there to "sue" your "ass".
Yeah, yeah, I read the front page for the domain. I realize its a joke. It was on Slashdot, so I assumed that SOMEBODY had checked it out or something. The site isn't even that funny.
Eighteen months after release date, "still working on it," nothing available except some boxart and meaningless stuff about branching tech trees which every strategy game has had for a decade, and haven't even updated the website since spring 2003.
I hate to say it, but 3D Realms is more on the ball with Duke Nukem Forever than these guys are. At least with DNF when they missed the release date, they changed to release date to "When it's done" and we did have that one screenshot in PC Gamer in 1999.
Really late reply since I was out of town on the weekend, and you'll never read this, but read the article before you act stupid.
It does produce the proteins itself. Over 100 of them. Read that carefully. It produces the proteins by itself, without any help from a host cell. Furthurmore, it produces protiens by itself from more genes than most viruses have at all.
It'd be noticeable unless its confined to the brain (since there are no receptors in the brain itself). 2 milliamps is quite a bit, in fact. 6 milliamps at the heart is sufficient to cause loss of muscle control and impair circulation. 4 milliamps will impair your muscle control enough that if it were applied to you, say, in your bathtub, you'd have a hard time getting out. It only takes 60 milliamps at the heart to kill you outright.
Although it could have been changed since I downloaded it, I've had the windows version for a long time. It looks and feels exactly like the NES version, no graphical update.
I never tried out any of the custom quests, though, so it's entirely possible somebody has put together the original quest using sprites from Link to the Past or something and I never knew about it.
The radio station WIOG in mid-Michigan is doing something like this. Basically a state-wide game of Clue. The whole idea is that some guy stole and later ditched a 2005 Ford Focus, and whoever finds the guy and asks him, "Are you the 102.5 WIOG fugitive?" wins the car and a big wad of cash. It's been going for a good month now, and too damn many people are involved right now. I've been accosted on the street twice myself when I refused to acknowledge somebody asking me if I was the fugitive, both shortly after it was said the fugitive had been seen in a gas station I go to several times a week. Stores have done loudspeaker announcements asking, "If the WIOG fugitive is in the building, would he please report to customer service desk B?" and the police get multiple complaints every day because of it. People follow mailmen around town waiting for them to get out of their trucks to make a delivery, people place bogus pizza orders to ask the delivery guy. The tri-cities are are the stalking capitol of the world right now. People have been arrested stopping traffic to ask people, they've been going door to door, calling thousands of phone numbers and getting hit with the do-not-call list (I get 30+ telemarketing calls a day. Apparantly the do-not-call list only enacts the $5000 fine if its just some idiot making calls out of his living room trying to win a car). It's all the "average Joes/Janes" doing it, too. For once, I think I'm justified in counting myself among the sane.
There is a scant possibility that the phenomenon has not been observed before
Actually, if I'm not too much mistaken, it hasn't on Saturn. The Voyager pictures all show pretty even, orderly cloud bands with relatively clean edges. You'd expect turbulenc, yes, and if it wasn't there, it's time to throw out everything we know about fluids, but it just takes much more detail to reveal it than any of our earlier spacecraft could provide.
The police charged him with numerous petty crimes
He's damn lucky. In 2002, most of the republican candidates for the our city council ended up with multiple felony convictions (destruction of property, voter intimidation, conspiracy to commit election fraud, tresspassing, and so on) and were rendered ineligible for their offices over stuff like this.
Perhaps it was once a bacterium which lost its selfreproductivity in a bid to maximize parasitivity.
Evolution or not, that would have been my first guess, too, from its size and the volume of its genome. However, if that were the case, you'd expect the genes it does have to be like their equivalents in bacteria, which isn't the case. The cnrs.fr link says that it shares key gene sturctures in common with viruses like smallpox.
An interesting possibility would be that it's actually a sort of "hybrid." A mutation in the protien structure of the viral coat might cause the abnormally large size (a reduction in the bonding angles, perhaps), allowing for the fused genome of the host bacterium and the original virus, along with various key molocules from the bacterium to all be packaged into the virus, instead of just the viral DNA alone.
Well, most viruses just have DNA or RNA. They enter a host cell, and the host (or more particularly, the polymerase and ribozomes in it) then proceeds to treat the new DNA as its own, producing the proteins incoded in it, which is mostly things like the protein "package" for the viral DNA. Viral DNA lacks the control sites that prevents normal cells from overproducing any particular protein, so the cell will continue to produce the viral proteins until it dies.
However, this virus is unique in that it can produce at least some of its proteins without a host cell. It's not much, but its still metabolism, so it is alive by definition. However, from what I read in the cnrs.fr link from the article, it sounds like it can't, among other things, produce its own ribosomal RNA (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't had biology since high school and there are some big words in that article), so its still dependant on host cells for reproduction, which makes it a virus by definition.
If they don't exceed it, I hope the media report exceeds what it was last year. All the way here in Michigan, the local news covered it, touting that they'd raised, "Nearly $5000 in various donations." The same site that had the article that peeved them into starting the charity lauded their success in raising $10,000. The only article I read that actually said how much they raised called them a Catholic school.
It did when I read it. M and AO games. Which isn't a big deal. In addition to cigarettes and beer, you have to show your card to buy porn, many medicines (at least in my area). Some of the stores here card for R rated movies too. Most rental stores make you show ID no matter what, since you have to have an account to rent.
My experience of siblings is generally that, although they may help you buy (booze/cigarettes/porn), they will then randomly blurt it out over dinner a week later. Cousins are generally more reliable for obtaining contraband.
It's much easier to trick your parents about a little 30x60 thumbnail image on a website than it is about the actual box at the store. Believe me, I still remember passing off Fallout 2 as "useful for my education."
I had to buy a second TV back in 1993 or 94 because the little antenna screws you used to connect consoles or VCRs or stuff with weren't long enough to add my Genesis without unplugging something else. I had three at one point. One for 8 bit, one for 16 bit, and one for everything else. It was commented that my room resembled the center of a Borg Cube.
Sometimes I wonder if I should get a life. Then I see something cool on the release list for next week.
I once saw the distance to the moon and back measured in twinkies, the amount of energy used by a Saturn V launch in AA batteries, etc.
As for LoC, I had a professor who had a pretty accurate opinion of using it as a unit of measurement: "The LoC is damn huge. You don't know how big it is exactly, because its just so damn huge. And its always getting bigger, so even in fifty years when our opinion of damn huge would be considered pretty damn small, it's still going to be damn big. So in effect, you use LoC as a unit to measure volumes of data so big that nobody cares anymore."
I'm not suprised by it either. It happens with most games.
However, who wants to start taking bets on if Gabe Noel just got his password guessed yet again? (after getting "gabe" and "gaben" hacked, maybe now its "GaBeN"?)
Slashdot Mirror
No, wait, yes, yes I guess it is, nevermind.
It's not an example of inconsistency, it's an example of his complete inability to spell words right, and poor understanding of colloquialisms. In the first sentence, he seems to mean they are "treading" on his good will. What that means, i don't know, but all terrible things he accuses Grocklaw of could certainly be considered, "treading on his good name," if he had one.
I'm a Christian, to some extent. Depends on who you ask, I suppose. I decided a long time ago I was through with my fellow Christians, and I'd try to get back to the lofty ideals and morality that the religion is supposed to be about. Everybody else is becomming very hung up on miniscule historical trivia and particulars of a book that's lost so many of those particulars through poor translation and intentional modification by kings and popes seeking to use it to their advantage.
The problem with biblical literalism is that they gleefully abandon, ignore, or even deny the existence of most of the bible in their quest to support one or two lines. Who cares that sodomy meant what we now call beastiality until only a few centuries ago, let's go out and burn down gay people's houses. Forget the tax collector who prayed quietly in his home and recieved his blessings, let's be like the pharisee who tore his shirt in public and cried out to God and country in thanks that we aren't as bad as everybody else.
One of the key things that gets harped on is Noah's flood. Three divergent bloodlines are mentioned before the flood (if I had my bible, or even one of my books my Rev. Polkinghorne, I could look them up and tell you), and their currently (currently as in when the old testament was assembled) living descendents are related (one was the ancestor of "all such who live in tents and keep herds" (probably the Arab and south Asian nomadic peoples), and two others. Noah was from one of these three bloodlines, and all three clearly survived the flood. Also, Goliath's bloodline is mentioned both before and after the flood (both by name and as "such people as have great stature"), so that makes three definite and one probable bloodline (and by their descriptions, indeed entire civilizations) that survived through the flood. Combine this with the use of "everything under heaven," (Which is used to describe cities that cover all things under heaven, and armies which span all lands under heaven. Obviously, earth has never had a global megalopolis, but its very easy to imagine a city or army spanning horizon to horizon), Noah's flood doesn't even sound global by the litteral wording.
Worse again, the parts they cling to are the parts that are not eye witness. They are humans interpreting divine revalation. "His thoughts are above your thoughs". Imagine the difficulty an ant would have making sense of what a human is telling it to describe a city. Not having seen a city, and having minimal understanding of our speech (pretend its one of those semi-intelligent super ants that eat dogs in movies or something), it would produce an image of a city that, although it would bear certain correlation with a real city, could not be taken for a literal description of one.
The test of how much they understand is if they deny the city exists when they see it and it doesn't look like what they imagined from the description.
A century ago, it was refusal to reconcile Christian beliefs with mainstream science, and things held together fairly well. If I lived then, I doubt I would have bought into evolution either. But now, especially with people like Henry Morris, it's gone beyond that: Changing Christian belief to preclude any and all mainstream science. It was unfortunate when one creationist published a book for preists saying that "It's better to lie to the people than to risk them seeking the facts for themselves. There is no sin in lying for God, and no sin in believing a lie." I see far too much of it now, wich churches outright lying about science, politics, medicine, business, current events, and religion (both their own and others) to manipulate congregations.
And as long as I've lost the point, a quote: "Oh, no, religions never kill people. Religions have lofty ideals and pure morality. Religious followers, on the other hand, are closed minded, hateful, spiteful people who will kill one another for no useful cause."
Screw the store. Microsoft fixed my harddrive after more than TWO years for just the cost of shipping the Xbox there and back, which overground only cost me around $25.
I was a bit more gullible than you, I guess. Considering some of the lame shit that has actually been made, I wasn't very bothered by a game company making Cthulu Kart Racing and Age of Monotremes. It wasn't until I went to the phobe.com main site that I realized I'd been had.
Just being picky, but "For Great Justice!" is one of the identifying lines from Zero Wing, a well known game produced for the Sega Genesis. By mentioning a Sega reltated trademark in a post relating to Nintendo products, you are hereby violating, I don't know, SOMETHING, so just be nice and send us your address so we can send Dr. Robotnik down there to "sue" your "ass".
Yeah, yeah, I read the front page for the domain. I realize its a joke. It was on Slashdot, so I assumed that SOMEBODY had checked it out or something. The site isn't even that funny.
Eighteen months after release date, "still working on it," nothing available except some boxart and meaningless stuff about branching tech trees which every strategy game has had for a decade, and haven't even updated the website since spring 2003.
I hate to say it, but 3D Realms is more on the ball with Duke Nukem Forever than these guys are. At least with DNF when they missed the release date, they changed to release date to "When it's done" and we did have that one screenshot in PC Gamer in 1999.
Really late reply since I was out of town on the weekend, and you'll never read this, but read the article before you act stupid. It does produce the proteins itself. Over 100 of them. Read that carefully. It produces the proteins by itself, without any help from a host cell. Furthurmore, it produces protiens by itself from more genes than most viruses have at all.
It'd be noticeable unless its confined to the brain (since there are no receptors in the brain itself). 2 milliamps is quite a bit, in fact. 6 milliamps at the heart is sufficient to cause loss of muscle control and impair circulation. 4 milliamps will impair your muscle control enough that if it were applied to you, say, in your bathtub, you'd have a hard time getting out. It only takes 60 milliamps at the heart to kill you outright.
re-play Zelda with new (more SNES-ish) graphics
Although it could have been changed since I downloaded it, I've had the windows version for a long time. It looks and feels exactly like the NES version, no graphical update.
I never tried out any of the custom quests, though, so it's entirely possible somebody has put together the original quest using sprites from Link to the Past or something and I never knew about it.
The radio station WIOG in mid-Michigan is doing something like this. Basically a state-wide game of Clue. The whole idea is that some guy stole and later ditched a 2005 Ford Focus, and whoever finds the guy and asks him, "Are you the 102.5 WIOG fugitive?" wins the car and a big wad of cash. It's been going for a good month now, and too damn many people are involved right now. I've been accosted on the street twice myself when I refused to acknowledge somebody asking me if I was the fugitive, both shortly after it was said the fugitive had been seen in a gas station I go to several times a week. Stores have done loudspeaker announcements asking, "If the WIOG fugitive is in the building, would he please report to customer service desk B?" and the police get multiple complaints every day because of it. People follow mailmen around town waiting for them to get out of their trucks to make a delivery, people place bogus pizza orders to ask the delivery guy. The tri-cities are are the stalking capitol of the world right now. People have been arrested stopping traffic to ask people, they've been going door to door, calling thousands of phone numbers and getting hit with the do-not-call list (I get 30+ telemarketing calls a day. Apparantly the do-not-call list only enacts the $5000 fine if its just some idiot making calls out of his living room trying to win a car). It's all the "average Joes/Janes" doing it, too. For once, I think I'm justified in counting myself among the sane.
There is a scant possibility that the phenomenon has not been observed before Actually, if I'm not too much mistaken, it hasn't on Saturn. The Voyager pictures all show pretty even, orderly cloud bands with relatively clean edges. You'd expect turbulenc, yes, and if it wasn't there, it's time to throw out everything we know about fluids, but it just takes much more detail to reveal it than any of our earlier spacecraft could provide.
More than that. The GBA down to $70 or $80 now, the games are cheaper than PS2/Xbox/Gamecube/PC games, and look how popular GBA ROM sites still are.
The police charged him with numerous petty crimes He's damn lucky. In 2002, most of the republican candidates for the our city council ended up with multiple felony convictions (destruction of property, voter intimidation, conspiracy to commit election fraud, tresspassing, and so on) and were rendered ineligible for their offices over stuff like this.
Perhaps it was once a bacterium which lost its selfreproductivity in a bid to maximize parasitivity.
Evolution or not, that would have been my first guess, too, from its size and the volume of its genome. However, if that were the case, you'd expect the genes it does have to be like their equivalents in bacteria, which isn't the case. The cnrs.fr link says that it shares key gene sturctures in common with viruses like smallpox.
An interesting possibility would be that it's actually a sort of "hybrid." A mutation in the protien structure of the viral coat might cause the abnormally large size (a reduction in the bonding angles, perhaps), allowing for the fused genome of the host bacterium and the original virus, along with various key molocules from the bacterium to all be packaged into the virus, instead of just the viral DNA alone.
Well, most viruses just have DNA or RNA. They enter a host cell, and the host (or more particularly, the polymerase and ribozomes in it) then proceeds to treat the new DNA as its own, producing the proteins incoded in it, which is mostly things like the protein "package" for the viral DNA. Viral DNA lacks the control sites that prevents normal cells from overproducing any particular protein, so the cell will continue to produce the viral proteins until it dies.
However, this virus is unique in that it can produce at least some of its proteins without a host cell. It's not much, but its still metabolism, so it is alive by definition. However, from what I read in the cnrs.fr link from the article, it sounds like it can't, among other things, produce its own ribosomal RNA (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't had biology since high school and there are some big words in that article), so its still dependant on host cells for reproduction, which makes it a virus by definition.
If they don't exceed it, I hope the media report exceeds what it was last year. All the way here in Michigan, the local news covered it, touting that they'd raised, "Nearly $5000 in various donations." The same site that had the article that peeved them into starting the charity lauded their success in raising $10,000. The only article I read that actually said how much they raised called them a Catholic school.
It did when I read it. M and AO games. Which isn't a big deal. In addition to cigarettes and beer, you have to show your card to buy porn, many medicines (at least in my area). Some of the stores here card for R rated movies too. Most rental stores make you show ID no matter what, since you have to have an account to rent.
My experience of siblings is generally that, although they may help you buy (booze/cigarettes/porn), they will then randomly blurt it out over dinner a week later. Cousins are generally more reliable for obtaining contraband.
It's much easier to trick your parents about a little 30x60 thumbnail image on a website than it is about the actual box at the store. Believe me, I still remember passing off Fallout 2 as "useful for my education."
now they will be able to track what our kids use too!
Good. I know a good few parents who could use that...
I had to buy a second TV back in 1993 or 94 because the little antenna screws you used to connect consoles or VCRs or stuff with weren't long enough to add my Genesis without unplugging something else. I had three at one point. One for 8 bit, one for 16 bit, and one for everything else. It was commented that my room resembled the center of a Borg Cube.
Sometimes I wonder if I should get a life. Then I see something cool on the release list for next week.
I once saw the distance to the moon and back measured in twinkies, the amount of energy used by a Saturn V launch in AA batteries, etc.
As for LoC, I had a professor who had a pretty accurate opinion of using it as a unit of measurement: "The LoC is damn huge. You don't know how big it is exactly, because its just so damn huge. And its always getting bigger, so even in fifty years when our opinion of damn huge would be considered pretty damn small, it's still going to be damn big. So in effect, you use LoC as a unit to measure volumes of data so big that nobody cares anymore."
I'm not suprised by it either. It happens with most games.
However, who wants to start taking bets on if Gabe Noel just got his password guessed yet again? (after getting "gabe" and "gaben" hacked, maybe now its "GaBeN"?)