And here in Michigan, the forcasts say not to expect clear sky until next week. The only time I can remember Michigan not having crappy weather during a major meteor shower was when I was in Florida - which of course, had crappy weather every night that week.
SNES - exceptionally durable console. I don't know of many broken ones, even this many years later.
Well, now you know of two broken ones. I had one die of apparant old age not long ago, but it got played very hard, though - once, I went through Chrono Trigger five times without turning the console off because the save battery in the cart was dead and I wanted to get a few endings I hadn't seen yet.
I also destroyed one shortly after the release, but you know, that giant worm in the Tower of Hera in Link to the Past was a bitch and a half, and the thirtieth time he knocks you down to the fifth floor, you've gotta let off some steam.
you begin to wonder if these people are really in the field to do reviews or to get kudos and free games
And then Driv3r comes by and proves that they're in it for money.
Seriously, if it weren't for so many blatant whorejob reviews like that, I would gladly excuse a few innaccurate reviews.
Then there are other reviews (good or bad) that are entirely based on the first hour of gameplay. With many games running 50 hours and more, that's like watching the first three minutes of the Matrix and saying how it's all about some guy sleeping in front of a computer in a dirty apartment drooling on his keyboard.
The prize is just for a manned trip 100 km up. Nothing specifying how you get there from what I understand. I suppose if you wanted to, you could try to build a bigass slingshot and it would qualify.
I initially taught my niece on KDE too, since my main Windows computer was tied up downloading things she shouldn't see, and my old Windows computer was packed up in their car. She caught on with Windows after a couple phone calls, though, and can use both fairly well now (although not as well as your son, heh). I have no doubt that if I sat her in front of a Mac, she'd have it figured out before I could explain it.
You gotta take advantage of the fact that kids learn so quickly and get them exposed to the kind of computers they'll be using for much of their lives, not a glorified toy. In my own experience, the move from email and chat to programming was a lot smaller than the move from a painfully maimed "training system" that the local school district had sold off for $25 to a fully capable computer.
Not only that, kids raised with computers can handle a considerably higher level of input than those just a couple generations ago, and can master at least basic GUI functions very quickly. It took me all of fifteen minutes to get my five year old niece to the point where she could connect, check her own email, and handle a web browser with minimal help the very first time she sat down at a computer. Her father took a week just to get him to turn it on without recoiling from the slight clicking sound the harddrive makes spinning up. Provided the parents aren't clueless about computers and the internet (both guarding against the risks and reaping the almost infinite rewards), the kids don't NEED a crippled computer to get started. They should target the crippled computers at clueless parents and have the kids teach them how to use them.
The commercials with the two year old pounding on the keyboard with a toy mallet and fixing a problem that had both his parents stymied are exaggerated, but not as absurdly so as they my look.
But am I the only one who gets a slightly off felling when I see words like "Extreme" anymore? Everything's "Extreme" "eXtreme" "Xtreme" "Xtreem" or "Xstream" now. The word's just lost all meaning to me.
I agree with everything you're saying. My point is that Creationists have built themselves into a fortress that can't be penetrated so long as you play by the rules, but has gaping holes as soon as you look around the corner.
They can't afford any allowances for evolution. Even when Henry Morris incorporated a blatantly Darwinian model of natural selection into his OWN flood-catastrophe theory, he not only continued to attack evolution on every point, but effectively turned around and called scientists plagiarists for using "his" theory of natural selection as part of evolutionary theory.
The problem of Creationism goes even deeper than its scientific nonexistence. About eighty years ago, when the Christian Fundamentalist movement really got started, they made a very bad mistake. They tied the moral teachings of Christianity to Genesis 1, despite the fact that Genesis 1 - a poetic masterpiece with a million interpretations of its own - makes no moral offering, and said that they must stand or fall together. An attack on Genesis 1, by Creationits own ideas, becomes an attack on everything else Christianity teaches, and the acceptance of evolution logically follows as the rejection of all things holy.
So that open fortress is built on the razors edge between a slippery slope and an abyss. Compromise with science weakens their position on moral matters, and if/when they fight it out to the final, bitter end, the entire Christian system falls to pieces.
There's an easy out for them. Theistic Evolutionists have already taken it (and indeed gone so far that they've made real and substantial contributions to scientific understanding). Just admit they were wrong. Genesis 1 is not the crux of Christian morality. As (I think it was Polkinghorne) said, "Genesis was written by man, not God. Imperfect man cannot write perfect history," and their moral position will stand on its own. Science can steamroll Creation, but Christianity remains intact, immune from any scientific advancements.
But, that's just the problem. There's no way out that doesn't involve admitting they were wrong. Their own stance has been too heardline, and they've espoused the idea that, since science hasn't always been 100% reliable on everything, it must be completely wrong on everything. Its impossible for them to get out without fundamentally weakening their entire platform and credibility.
It will eventually come down to Creationists calling the last thousand years of discovery nothing but an elaborate lie by an army of satanic straw men out to take away your tinfoil hats, because they just can't aford to admit fault on such a miniscule and irrelevant point.
Logically valid argument.
Sound means all the premises and conclusions are true or at least generally accepted. Valid means the conclusions follow logically from the premises, but says nothing about the accuracy of the premises or conclusions.
Dumb mistake on my part.
Not quite incomplete, but very unrewarding intellectually. The entire Creationist "theory" stands on a set of pillars:
1. God is God, God can do anything he wants to. 2. Gods thoughts and actions are so much above ours that we can never even understand them anyway. 3. Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test. So just take our word for it and stop asking questions.
Logically, it's a prefectly sound argument (albeit with premises that are not universally accepted), and can explain anything. The problem is, it explains things so well that there's no point in ANY scientific questioning, since the God card makes any questions of "How does that work?" "Why did that happen?" or "Where did that come from?" pointless, as the obvious anser is, "God made it work like that," "God made it happen," and "God put it there." Having self-asnswering questions like that isn't good for science.
Yes, you can. Just take it inside and warm it up a bit. You can also get reaction out of a hibernating rabit if you poke at it for a while. Its sluggish, and takes a good while to react, but they will react. Bears don't react rapidly, either. You can drag one out of its den by the legs, take blood samples, and weigh its cubs before they're awake enough to maul you.
Beyond negligence. This isn't like your kid doing drugs when you're not around to suprvise. This is like buying drugs for your kid because the dealers won't sell to them.
As the other reply said, most life on Earth will survive a nuclear attack, but my particular post was regarding intelligent life, particularly intelligent life with some level of civilization. Multicellular organisms, espeically ones with complex and/or delicate structures, would get torn apart by the forces involved in a nuclear blast, even if their individual cells aren't overly damaged. And even if they do survive, their material accomplishments, if they have any, wouldn't. In which case, to continue the theme, all their base would be blown to hell, and they wouldn't have much left to threaten us with. Never underestimate the human ability to come up with ways to kill stuff. If we run into intelligent life in our own solar system, we'll find a way to eradicate it in fairly short order - the test of character comes when we actually do or don't. We'll have to wait until we go beyond our solar system (or somebody else wanders into ours) to find anything that can compete with us, and then we'd probably be more likely to find something more at least as advanced, if not moreso, than us, since even one high-tech civilization could spread, either themselves or at least their technology, accross a very great distances and many worlds, where with a low-tech civiliazation still confined to a single planet, or short trips to other planets in their same solar system, we'd litterally have to stumble accross their home to find them. And in the event that they find us, then they will obviously be well in advance of us.
Like the AC said, it wouldn't solve anything. Henry Morris said if we could find one instance of helpful mutation actually occurring, it would severely impair his entire theory on origin of life, but that we never would find it.
Anyway, enter a common college lab experiment. In just about any bacteria, if you damage the gene that produces a neccessary enzyme in a population of bacteria, then the population will very often manage to recover and repair the gene, and sometimes it comes out slightly different - change in an amino acid in a nonactive point in the string, or different codons for the same amino acids - sometimes recognizeable fragments of completely different genes - eliminating the possibility that some of the bacteria escaped the original transformation.
After that, the creationists backpedaled and said that such mutations weren't irreducibly complex, and at least one creationists said that we'd have to find proof that a leg could turn into an arm or a leg or wing - a problem which is "irreducibly complex," and THEN evolution would, unfortunately win.
Enter the T-box genes, which did just that, and the debate has only gotten worse. Then it was bombadier beetles, but all the strucutres of their biochemical gun exist in all other insects, and all other insects use the same chemicals used in bombadier beetle's reaction, but only a few species of ant and beetle mix the two chemicals intentionally as a defense. Then it was the flagellum of bacteria, and even now nanotechnology is hinting at how such structures could be spontaneously self-assembled from simpler molocules.
We could litterally observe the moment that the spark of life kindles on Titan without quelling the debate. Even if it means falling back onto a wildly fantastic explanation that raises questions about their own beliefs (the creationists have never had problems taking positions in stark disagreement with most of the bible just to defend the first ten verses), there will be a fallback position somewhere.
That aside, if there's life on Titan advanced enough to have a sense of smell, it probably wouldn't be able to smell methane if it did have a smell. Just like we don't smell oxygen and nitrogen. Its part of our atmosphere, so we're always exposed to it. If we could smell it, we'd have a constant sensory input interfering with any other smells.
On the off chance that we actually do share the solar system with another intelligent species, all its base are most likely belong to us.
We've already got weapons capable of global devistation if deployed in sufficient numbers(easier on a smaller world like Titan), and so far, we haven't seen or heard them moving around. If they were within a century or two behind us, you'd expect some radio transmissions, or even an artificial satellite or two. If we ever do run into actual Europans, Titans, or Martians, the'll be lucky to be out of the stone age before we finish dressing them up in Nike shirts for TV commercials.
Real fans will be happy, but Fallout 1 and 2 were not big mega sellers. A new release with a now seven or eight year old engine will only bring in the die-hard fans who have stuck with the game since the initial release. If its bargain bin, they'll pick up a few impulse/curiosity buys, and if its free, they'll get all the freeloader tryouts, but they still have to shoot for a profit, or risk submarining themselves for future releases, so they need to make the game look nice enough to draw in new players as well as old players who have moved on to more advanced games since Fallout 2 came out in 1998.
Slashdot Mirror
And here in Michigan, the forcasts say not to expect clear sky until next week. The only time I can remember Michigan not having crappy weather during a major meteor shower was when I was in Florida - which of course, had crappy weather every night that week.
SNES - exceptionally durable console. I don't know of many broken ones, even this many years later.
Well, now you know of two broken ones. I had one die of apparant old age not long ago, but it got played very hard, though - once, I went through Chrono Trigger five times without turning the console off because the save battery in the cart was dead and I wanted to get a few endings I hadn't seen yet.
I also destroyed one shortly after the release, but you know, that giant worm in the Tower of Hera in Link to the Past was a bitch and a half, and the thirtieth time he knocks you down to the fifth floor, you've gotta let off some steam.
True, but those individuals are mostly owners of large corporations anyway, so its a moot point.
would this post be makred "insightful" instead of "funny."
you begin to wonder if these people are really in the field to do reviews or to get kudos and free games
And then Driv3r comes by and proves that they're in it for money.
Seriously, if it weren't for so many blatant whorejob reviews like that, I would gladly excuse a few innaccurate reviews.
Then there are other reviews (good or bad) that are entirely based on the first hour of gameplay. With many games running 50 hours and more, that's like watching the first three minutes of the Matrix and saying how it's all about some guy sleeping in front of a computer in a dirty apartment drooling on his keyboard.
The prize is just for a manned trip 100 km up. Nothing specifying how you get there from what I understand. I suppose if you wanted to, you could try to build a bigass slingshot and it would qualify.
I initially taught my niece on KDE too, since my main Windows computer was tied up downloading things she shouldn't see, and my old Windows computer was packed up in their car. She caught on with Windows after a couple phone calls, though, and can use both fairly well now (although not as well as your son, heh). I have no doubt that if I sat her in front of a Mac, she'd have it figured out before I could explain it. You gotta take advantage of the fact that kids learn so quickly and get them exposed to the kind of computers they'll be using for much of their lives, not a glorified toy. In my own experience, the move from email and chat to programming was a lot smaller than the move from a painfully maimed "training system" that the local school district had sold off for $25 to a fully capable computer.
Take her to the convention. If she hasn't changed her phone number come Monday, then you've found yourself marriage material there.
Not only that, kids raised with computers can handle a considerably higher level of input than those just a couple generations ago, and can master at least basic GUI functions very quickly. It took me all of fifteen minutes to get my five year old niece to the point where she could connect, check her own email, and handle a web browser with minimal help the very first time she sat down at a computer. Her father took a week just to get him to turn it on without recoiling from the slight clicking sound the harddrive makes spinning up. Provided the parents aren't clueless about computers and the internet (both guarding against the risks and reaping the almost infinite rewards), the kids don't NEED a crippled computer to get started. They should target the crippled computers at clueless parents and have the kids teach them how to use them.
The commercials with the two year old pounding on the keyboard with a toy mallet and fixing a problem that had both his parents stymied are exaggerated, but not as absurdly so as they my look.
But am I the only one who gets a slightly off felling when I see words like "Extreme" anymore? Everything's "Extreme" "eXtreme" "Xtreme" "Xtreem" or "Xstream" now. The word's just lost all meaning to me.
They patented it, you have it. You don't have a license to have it, therefore you obviously stole it. Therefore, you in fact owe THEM money.
Hasn't the whole SCO mess taught us anything about how patents work?
I agree with everything you're saying. My point is that Creationists have built themselves into a fortress that can't be penetrated so long as you play by the rules, but has gaping holes as soon as you look around the corner.
They can't afford any allowances for evolution. Even when Henry Morris incorporated a blatantly Darwinian model of natural selection into his OWN flood-catastrophe theory, he not only continued to attack evolution on every point, but effectively turned around and called scientists plagiarists for using "his" theory of natural selection as part of evolutionary theory.
The problem of Creationism goes even deeper than its scientific nonexistence. About eighty years ago, when the Christian Fundamentalist movement really got started, they made a very bad mistake. They tied the moral teachings of Christianity to Genesis 1, despite the fact that Genesis 1 - a poetic masterpiece with a million interpretations of its own - makes no moral offering, and said that they must stand or fall together. An attack on Genesis 1, by Creationits own ideas, becomes an attack on everything else Christianity teaches, and the acceptance of evolution logically follows as the rejection of all things holy.
So that open fortress is built on the razors edge between a slippery slope and an abyss. Compromise with science weakens their position on moral matters, and if/when they fight it out to the final, bitter end, the entire Christian system falls to pieces.
There's an easy out for them. Theistic Evolutionists have already taken it (and indeed gone so far that they've made real and substantial contributions to scientific understanding). Just admit they were wrong. Genesis 1 is not the crux of Christian morality. As (I think it was Polkinghorne) said, "Genesis was written by man, not God. Imperfect man cannot write perfect history," and their moral position will stand on its own. Science can steamroll Creation, but Christianity remains intact, immune from any scientific advancements.
But, that's just the problem. There's no way out that doesn't involve admitting they were wrong. Their own stance has been too heardline, and they've espoused the idea that, since science hasn't always been 100% reliable on everything, it must be completely wrong on everything. Its impossible for them to get out without fundamentally weakening their entire platform and credibility.
It will eventually come down to Creationists calling the last thousand years of discovery nothing but an elaborate lie by an army of satanic straw men out to take away your tinfoil hats, because they just can't aford to admit fault on such a miniscule and irrelevant point.
Logically valid argument. Sound means all the premises and conclusions are true or at least generally accepted. Valid means the conclusions follow logically from the premises, but says nothing about the accuracy of the premises or conclusions. Dumb mistake on my part.
No evidence at all, totally incomplete
Not quite incomplete, but very unrewarding intellectually. The entire Creationist "theory" stands on a set of pillars:
1. God is God, God can do anything he wants to.
2. Gods thoughts and actions are so much above ours that we can never even understand them anyway.
3. Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test. So just take our word for it and stop asking questions.
Logically, it's a prefectly sound argument (albeit with premises that are not universally accepted), and can explain anything. The problem is, it explains things so well that there's no point in ANY scientific questioning, since the God card makes any questions of "How does that work?" "Why did that happen?" or "Where did that come from?" pointless, as the obvious anser is, "God made it work like that," "God made it happen," and "God put it there." Having self-asnswering questions like that isn't good for science.
Even a bad ninja should be able to beat up one or two Linux geeks before running into one with a gun, though.
Yes, you can. Just take it inside and warm it up a bit. You can also get reaction out of a hibernating rabit if you poke at it for a while. Its sluggish, and takes a good while to react, but they will react. Bears don't react rapidly, either. You can drag one out of its den by the legs, take blood samples, and weigh its cubs before they're awake enough to maul you.
Beyond negligence. This isn't like your kid doing drugs when you're not around to suprvise. This is like buying drugs for your kid because the dealers won't sell to them.
As the other reply said, most life on Earth will survive a nuclear attack, but my particular post was regarding intelligent life, particularly intelligent life with some level of civilization. Multicellular organisms, espeically ones with complex and/or delicate structures, would get torn apart by the forces involved in a nuclear blast, even if their individual cells aren't overly damaged. And even if they do survive, their material accomplishments, if they have any, wouldn't. In which case, to continue the theme, all their base would be blown to hell, and they wouldn't have much left to threaten us with. Never underestimate the human ability to come up with ways to kill stuff. If we run into intelligent life in our own solar system, we'll find a way to eradicate it in fairly short order - the test of character comes when we actually do or don't. We'll have to wait until we go beyond our solar system (or somebody else wanders into ours) to find anything that can compete with us, and then we'd probably be more likely to find something more at least as advanced, if not moreso, than us, since even one high-tech civilization could spread, either themselves or at least their technology, accross a very great distances and many worlds, where with a low-tech civiliazation still confined to a single planet, or short trips to other planets in their same solar system, we'd litterally have to stumble accross their home to find them. And in the event that they find us, then they will obviously be well in advance of us.
Drop out the "ninja" part and you're halfway there. If they had ninjas, I think they would have actually won a few fights.
As said in my post above, I'm in for $20 that they sue somebody before that happens.
Very winning business strategy. You know what's more profitable? A betting pool on when exactly SCO will file their next lawsuit.
Like the AC said, it wouldn't solve anything. Henry Morris said if we could find one instance of helpful mutation actually occurring, it would severely impair his entire theory on origin of life, but that we never would find it.
Anyway, enter a common college lab experiment. In just about any bacteria, if you damage the gene that produces a neccessary enzyme in a population of bacteria, then the population will very often manage to recover and repair the gene, and sometimes it comes out slightly different - change in an amino acid in a nonactive point in the string, or different codons for the same amino acids - sometimes recognizeable fragments of completely different genes - eliminating the possibility that some of the bacteria escaped the original transformation.
After that, the creationists backpedaled and said that such mutations weren't irreducibly complex, and at least one creationists said that we'd have to find proof that a leg could turn into an arm or a leg or wing - a problem which is "irreducibly complex," and THEN evolution would, unfortunately win.
Enter the T-box genes, which did just that, and the debate has only gotten worse. Then it was bombadier beetles, but all the strucutres of their biochemical gun exist in all other insects, and all other insects use the same chemicals used in bombadier beetle's reaction, but only a few species of ant and beetle mix the two chemicals intentionally as a defense. Then it was the flagellum of bacteria, and even now nanotechnology is hinting at how such structures could be spontaneously self-assembled from simpler molocules.
We could litterally observe the moment that the spark of life kindles on Titan without quelling the debate. Even if it means falling back onto a wildly fantastic explanation that raises questions about their own beliefs (the creationists have never had problems taking positions in stark disagreement with most of the bible just to defend the first ten verses), there will be a fallback position somewhere.
That aside, if there's life on Titan advanced enough to have a sense of smell, it probably wouldn't be able to smell methane if it did have a smell. Just like we don't smell oxygen and nitrogen. Its part of our atmosphere, so we're always exposed to it. If we could smell it, we'd have a constant sensory input interfering with any other smells.
On the off chance that we actually do share the solar system with another intelligent species, all its base are most likely belong to us. We've already got weapons capable of global devistation if deployed in sufficient numbers(easier on a smaller world like Titan), and so far, we haven't seen or heard them moving around. If they were within a century or two behind us, you'd expect some radio transmissions, or even an artificial satellite or two. If we ever do run into actual Europans, Titans, or Martians, the'll be lucky to be out of the stone age before we finish dressing them up in Nike shirts for TV commercials.
Real fans will be happy, but Fallout 1 and 2 were not big mega sellers. A new release with a now seven or eight year old engine will only bring in the die-hard fans who have stuck with the game since the initial release. If its bargain bin, they'll pick up a few impulse/curiosity buys, and if its free, they'll get all the freeloader tryouts, but they still have to shoot for a profit, or risk submarining themselves for future releases, so they need to make the game look nice enough to draw in new players as well as old players who have moved on to more advanced games since Fallout 2 came out in 1998.