Um, that IS a problem. It's going to stay a problem. While the thing is attached his nerves are gradually adjusting to its parameters, doing biofeedback. He'll get more and more coordinated with time until it is, eventually, part of him, even though it doesn't have feedback via nerves. By the time he can reach out for something naturally, without thinking about it, taking the limb away would be an invasion of the man's body and brain, true corporal punishment. I doubt it would be constitutional.
"Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find that his will was beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the hyperspace ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta.
The game was not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and was played like this:
Two contestants would sit either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit (as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song "Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit").
Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent - who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again.
Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power.
As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological.
Ford Prefect usually played to lose."
Sure, but the advantage of the TIE fighter was always supposed to be its speed and maneuverability. That's also why they didn't shield it; without the extra mass and power consumption of a shield generator the TIE could accelerate more quickly. This particular ion engine is SLOW.
Because entry price is absolutely critical in China. The PS2 is mind-blowingly expensive to the rural Chinese. They're in that mental space you were in back in the 80s where you were willing to buy an NES and play Super Mario three hundred times, because it was a video game, god damn it, and you'd never had one.
Quite the opposite. The system will be priced at twice the cost of a high-end new game, and bundled with a game. At that point it's practically "if you need a GameCube to play a game, we'll let you grab one from the pile."
Easily defend yourself? Indeed. A man comes into your home, armed and ready to fight if necessary. You awake from slumber, tuck, roll, grab your gun from the rack, flip the lock off the trigger and fire before he can harm any of your children.
Nice work, Rambo. Now you're needed at the Pentagon.
A friend told me this rule abotu buying cars (CDN $): "If you buy a car that costs $1000, count on spending $1000 more on repairs before the year is out."
In third world countries it's not so much the cost of the repairs on an old junker that are the problem, it's the availability of parts. How is it useful to buy old 486 and P1 systems when those systems need an expert in the old ways and a nearby used computer store to be maintained? We in teh first world have the accumulation of ten years of commodity parts to draw on if we want to toy with an older system. It doesn't work that way in the Congo.
They never once suggest actually animating an ad. The article constantly refers to "selling ads by the hour." There are good reasons for this.
One is that a billboard ad is seen by people in passing. If you glance up from your car and take in a tenth of a second from an animated ad you may miss the whole point. A static ad at least has the brand logo on it at all times, which means it impinges on some part of a viewers mind.
The second reason is that angling for animated ads would probably put Magink out of business. Anytime the car crash statistics rose even slightly the public would blame those annoying animated ads. Bylaws would have them out of the cities for good. Joe may tolerate tobacco that gradually kills him, he may tolerate a cell-phone he chooses to use that distracts him at a critical moment, but if a supermodel flashes twelve-foot breasts at him just before a car accident, you can damn well believe Joe will blame the ad in his post-accident fury.
Be it resolved that charity is shameless greed. Now, debate! Shades of high school.
In this case, though, "getting paid" is wide open for problems. Does a stay-home parent get paid in smiles and hugs? Is an alcoholic hobo paid with his daily buzz? If anything people get some return from is considered something for which they are paid then the employment rate is a promising 100%, and the workforce is well over 95% of the population, counting out only catatonics and others who are incapable of voluntary action.
Hey, you know how much fun Mechassault and such are on the X-Box with the full voice support? What if at the same time as playing a game like that, you could see your teammate pop-up in a low-res comm window on your hud anytime he talked? Color-key his image onto a mech-cockpit and people will be out building their own helmets and costumes for various games. Get some decent use out of cosplay equipment.
You mentioned the word value, and said you feel it is subjective. That doesn't get you a special pass to a world where there are no absolutes or where relatives cannot be examined. Let's get down to business.
First, if you want to argue that the value of intelligence is not the same in all situations, that is fine, but it does not mean intelligence does not exist. I quote: "There is no such thing as skill and intelligence." To be very clear, even a correct argument that proved that there is no absolute value to intelligence or skill would not prove that either did not exist, any more than a correct demonstration of how gold is no use to a starving man proves gold does not exist.
Your post has no argument towards the notion that intelligence does not exist, let alone that skill does not exist. This was my original objection. Having said that...
It is also important to understand that a quantity which is not absolute is not a quantity which is meaningless. An iron bar weighs 300 lbs on Earth, 50 lbs on the Moon, and is weightless in space. Is weight meaningless? No. It can be defined as the size of the external force required to keep a body at rest in its frame of reference. Since the quantity is relative, the definition just includes what it is relative to. It's relative to where you're standing, so that's all the extra information you have to know.
Weight isn't a fictional term invented by ancient Greeks to keep the masses down, so to speak. It's a certain way of looking at how something is affected by other things. So is value.
A mathematician is valuable here and would not be valuable in a farming society. Does the fact that the mathematician would be useless in poverty-stricken Africa lessen her influence in her office in Chicago? When a chemist devises a new catalyst that will reduce the synthesis time for a plastic by ten times and make goods easier to produce for everybody, does it matter that the chemist would be useless alone on the Moon? The mathematician is valuable, the chemist is valuable. They're both skilled and intelligent. They are able to create change which affects other people.
Up to here we've dealt with logic and grammar. Let's get to the point you wanted to deal with. A potential thought is, "Ah, but the chemist's skill can be used to make dynamite, which is bad, so value is subjective and doesn't exist." This is an error in vocabulary and concept. Just because something is bad doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Valuable can mean "useful for a purpose." If you want to use valuable to mean "a good thing" you have to define your frame of reference, just as you would have to define it for the "useful" meaning. For "useful" you just say "useful for what." For "a good thing" you have the delightful task of explaining what good means. Guess what? That's what you really wanted to get at in your message.
You don't like that some people think "valuable" means good, and so you try to prove that value doesn't mean anything. It isn't that it doesn't mean anything at all ever. It's that to use valuable to mean good, you have to say what "good" is, and good is indeed a concept that humans made up. Without humans and without any god, there is apparently no good or bad. There are trees which are useful to toucans for shade and water which is valuable for cooling an elephant's back, and there are intelligent animals like monkeys and dumb animals like worms.
Humans filled in what they think good might be, and at one point humans decided that intelligence and skill might not only be useful, but also "good." This is a fiction. It isn't good to be intelligent in all situations. The second fiction was that because intelligence and skill are good, it is morally right that intelligent and skilled people be more privileged than others. This is what you object to, and this is what you need to attack. Why is this fiction a wrong fiction? It's important to understand that the idea that it is good for everyone to have equal privileges is also a fiction. All morals are. It
That would be very strange, LucasArts jumping on another mod team for making a better mod that was, oh, not based on Star Wars.
There's no category in the "Make Something Unreal" competition for "Star Wars Mods" that I can see. Make Something Unreal Categories.
So the other teams have to use original ideas or those of a company that doesn't jump on people? Is that a big ethical problem in a contest to create creative content? Presumably it is on the strength of the art assets and gameplay value that the Star Wars team puts together, not on the strength of "it's cool to be a jedi" appeal in an unplayable mess, that they intend to win.
A swimmer can swim the English channel, but she can't bench 450. A weight-lifter can bench 450, but he can't jump his height. A high jumper can jump his height, but he can't massage backs all day.
Clearly strength is an illusory concept invented by cavemen to justify getting women.
Or could it be that strength a property of many systems that allow one to move something from one place to another, and that one system can be stronger while another is weaker, and that a system can be trained to operate well under a certain kind of load but not strong under a different kind of load, or after a different time of exertion? Could this be? And could it be that strength, in a flexible language like english, is also used to refer to whether any of the systems in the body are strong, a sort of maximum function?
Indeed, even a moderately good parent is perfectly capable of turning a potential sociopathic maniac into a fully productive member of society. It's a simple matter of mental hygiene, really, neglected for the same sorts of reasons that people get herpes and don't floss. A few good lessons from the Bible, not too heavy on the "eye for an eye bit," good schooling in an upper-class neigbourhood, plenty of involvment in team sports, and by the time your young white male is 33 he'll be...
Wait a second, this is sounding like the FBI profile they always turn out five minutes after they find out there's a serial killer of any kind.
Slashdot Mirror
They sell you a sofa so you'll buy the silly end pillows. Everyone knows that when it's a couch you throw those away.
My TV weighs 180 pounds. I'd have to go to the gym for 18 months to throw it away. Wheeling it gently I can do.
Um, that IS a problem. It's going to stay a problem. While the thing is attached his nerves are gradually adjusting to its parameters, doing biofeedback. He'll get more and more coordinated with time until it is, eventually, part of him, even though it doesn't have feedback via nerves. By the time he can reach out for something naturally, without thinking about it, taking the limb away would be an invasion of the man's body and brain, true corporal punishment. I doubt it would be constitutional.
"Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find that his will was beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the hyperspace ports that served the madranite mining belts in the star system of Orion Beta. The game was not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling, and was played like this: Two contestants would sit either side of a table, with a glass in front of each of them. Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit (as immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song "Oh don't give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit"). Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass of his opponent - who would then have to drink it. The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played again. And again. Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic power. As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually obscenely biological. Ford Prefect usually played to lose."
Don't ever repeat that. Weird Al might hear you.
Sure, but the advantage of the TIE fighter was always supposed to be its speed and maneuverability. That's also why they didn't shield it; without the extra mass and power consumption of a shield generator the TIE could accelerate more quickly. This particular ion engine is SLOW.
Time to take up Mexican Masked Wrestling.
Because entry price is absolutely critical in China. The PS2 is mind-blowingly expensive to the rural Chinese. They're in that mental space you were in back in the 80s where you were willing to buy an NES and play Super Mario three hundred times, because it was a video game, god damn it, and you'd never had one.
There's "rpm meter exam, gringo" in extreme programming. Does that help?
Quite the opposite. The system will be priced at twice the cost of a high-end new game, and bundled with a game. At that point it's practically "if you need a GameCube to play a game, we'll let you grab one from the pile."
I guess that means she'll always have something to talk about at parties.
Nice work, Rambo. Now you're needed at the Pentagon.
In third world countries it's not so much the cost of the repairs on an old junker that are the problem, it's the availability of parts. How is it useful to buy old 486 and P1 systems when those systems need an expert in the old ways and a nearby used computer store to be maintained? We in teh first world have the accumulation of ten years of commodity parts to draw on if we want to toy with an older system. It doesn't work that way in the Congo.
One is that a billboard ad is seen by people in passing. If you glance up from your car and take in a tenth of a second from an animated ad you may miss the whole point. A static ad at least has the brand logo on it at all times, which means it impinges on some part of a viewers mind.
The second reason is that angling for animated ads would probably put Magink out of business. Anytime the car crash statistics rose even slightly the public would blame those annoying animated ads. Bylaws would have them out of the cities for good. Joe may tolerate tobacco that gradually kills him, he may tolerate a cell-phone he chooses to use that distracts him at a critical moment, but if a supermodel flashes twelve-foot breasts at him just before a car accident, you can damn well believe Joe will blame the ad in his post-accident fury.
Good point. I think you've made an excellent foniillcoiunhiiicpcliaicatfin.
In this case, though, "getting paid" is wide open for problems. Does a stay-home parent get paid in smiles and hugs? Is an alcoholic hobo paid with his daily buzz? If anything people get some return from is considered something for which they are paid then the employment rate is a promising 100%, and the workforce is well over 95% of the population, counting out only catatonics and others who are incapable of voluntary action.
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King."
-Oh, Better Far to Live and Die, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance
A file-sharing anthem.
Hey, you know how much fun Mechassault and such are on the X-Box with the full voice support? What if at the same time as playing a game like that, you could see your teammate pop-up in a low-res comm window on your hud anytime he talked? Color-key his image onto a mech-cockpit and people will be out building their own helmets and costumes for various games. Get some decent use out of cosplay equipment.
When you have a bowl of soup, do you eat it with a fork just because the fork was invented thousands of years later than the spoon?
Sometimes an older approach is the right approach for a specific job.
First, if you want to argue that the value of intelligence is not the same in all situations, that is fine, but it does not mean intelligence does not exist. I quote: "There is no such thing as skill and intelligence." To be very clear, even a correct argument that proved that there is no absolute value to intelligence or skill would not prove that either did not exist, any more than a correct demonstration of how gold is no use to a starving man proves gold does not exist.
Your post has no argument towards the notion that intelligence does not exist, let alone that skill does not exist. This was my original objection. Having said that...
It is also important to understand that a quantity which is not absolute is not a quantity which is meaningless. An iron bar weighs 300 lbs on Earth, 50 lbs on the Moon, and is weightless in space. Is weight meaningless? No. It can be defined as the size of the external force required to keep a body at rest in its frame of reference. Since the quantity is relative, the definition just includes what it is relative to. It's relative to where you're standing, so that's all the extra information you have to know.
Weight isn't a fictional term invented by ancient Greeks to keep the masses down, so to speak. It's a certain way of looking at how something is affected by other things. So is value.
A mathematician is valuable here and would not be valuable in a farming society. Does the fact that the mathematician would be useless in poverty-stricken Africa lessen her influence in her office in Chicago? When a chemist devises a new catalyst that will reduce the synthesis time for a plastic by ten times and make goods easier to produce for everybody, does it matter that the chemist would be useless alone on the Moon? The mathematician is valuable, the chemist is valuable. They're both skilled and intelligent. They are able to create change which affects other people.
Up to here we've dealt with logic and grammar. Let's get to the point you wanted to deal with. A potential thought is, "Ah, but the chemist's skill can be used to make dynamite, which is bad, so value is subjective and doesn't exist." This is an error in vocabulary and concept. Just because something is bad doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Valuable can mean "useful for a purpose." If you want to use valuable to mean "a good thing" you have to define your frame of reference, just as you would have to define it for the "useful" meaning. For "useful" you just say "useful for what." For "a good thing" you have the delightful task of explaining what good means. Guess what? That's what you really wanted to get at in your message.
You don't like that some people think "valuable" means good, and so you try to prove that value doesn't mean anything. It isn't that it doesn't mean anything at all ever. It's that to use valuable to mean good, you have to say what "good" is, and good is indeed a concept that humans made up. Without humans and without any god, there is apparently no good or bad. There are trees which are useful to toucans for shade and water which is valuable for cooling an elephant's back, and there are intelligent animals like monkeys and dumb animals like worms.
Humans filled in what they think good might be, and at one point humans decided that intelligence and skill might not only be useful, but also "good." This is a fiction. It isn't good to be intelligent in all situations. The second fiction was that because intelligence and skill are good, it is morally right that intelligent and skilled people be more privileged than others. This is what you object to, and this is what you need to attack. Why is this fiction a wrong fiction? It's important to understand that the idea that it is good for everyone to have equal privileges is also a fiction. All morals are. It
There's no category in the "Make Something Unreal" competition for "Star Wars Mods" that I can see. Make Something Unreal Categories.
So the other teams have to use original ideas or those of a company that doesn't jump on people? Is that a big ethical problem in a contest to create creative content? Presumably it is on the strength of the art assets and gameplay value that the Star Wars team puts together, not on the strength of "it's cool to be a jedi" appeal in an unplayable mess, that they intend to win.
Clearly strength is an illusory concept invented by cavemen to justify getting women.
Or could it be that strength a property of many systems that allow one to move something from one place to another, and that one system can be stronger while another is weaker, and that a system can be trained to operate well under a certain kind of load but not strong under a different kind of load, or after a different time of exertion? Could this be? And could it be that strength, in a flexible language like english, is also used to refer to whether any of the systems in the body are strong, a sort of maximum function?
Wait a second, this is sounding like the FBI profile they always turn out five minutes after they find out there's a serial killer of any kind.
I've been considering dropping out of life to hustle Puzzle Bobble for a living. Is there anywhere on this too-sad planet you can do that?
"Does Microsoft spit or swallow?" Spits, bottles it, sells it as a protein supplement.