I'm sure Heinlein would be upset at Starship Troopers... but at least it didn't take everything he stood for and turn it upside down... Every robot book/short story that Asimov wrote was about making sure that robots wouldn't be the 'Bad Guys'... Based on the Three Laws, I would love to know how there's a robot revolution...
I'm pretty sure that right now you could hook a turbine up to Asimov's corpse and have the Perpetual Motion Machine...
Nephilium
Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking. -- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
Actually... I would have to say that Neverwinter Nights is probably as close as you can get to a Single Player game with MMORPG options... some people have set up Persistant Worlds that you can log into, play your character, and play online with buckets of people... or you can just go and download a module and play single player or with friends.
Nephilium
Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. -- Michel de Montaigne
But do you think the majority of people here will have read the comic books? (Or watched the old TV show... or the old cartoon... or the old cartoon with his friends Iceman and Firestorm... or the new TV show... or the old movies...):)
And of course the modification of the old theme...
Nephilium
Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them. -- Mr. DuBois in Starship Troopers
Gah... Akira to me is the movie you *have* to watch... just so you've gone through the pain that everyone else has... I think it's the only movie to have more climaxes than Legend of the Overfiend...
I'd stick with Spirited Away as a second (or first) movie...
Nephilium
Here's to our noble selves! There are damned few of us left! -- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land
I know that I really enjoyed the Lain series... and from the one episode I've seen Witch Hunter Robin looks interesting. But there was plenty of crap in the old days as well... Crying Freeman was good... the sequels hurt...
Nephilium
The Patrician relaxed, in a way which only then drew gentle attention to the foregoing moment of tension. -- (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
1) Take beans, and let them soak in water, this leaches out the caffeine and the oils (the good parts)
2) Remove those beans and compost them... no good will come from them.
3) Remove the caffeine from the water, but leave the tasty oils.
4) Put new coffee beans into the water, the caffeine will be leached out, but the oils won't because the water is already saturated with them
So... what you get (supposedly) is coffee that still has all of the flavor, but none of the caffeine...
Still blasphemous though...
Nephilium
"The loose-tooth factor, by the way, relates to the fact that it is human nature to indulge in one's own pain. Even though it hurts, we all play with our loose teeth. Even though Al Gore is a giant toothache of a human being, the Democratic party cannot stop fiddling with him. " -- Jonah Goldberg
How are you going to keep all of those boxes sitting at a Best Buy, a CompUSA, an OfficeMax, or any other store up to date? They've been pre-built and sitting on a shelf for several months in a sealed box. The customers don't want to wait while someone opens the box up, hooks it up to the internet (if availible in the store) and spends four to five hours downloading patches. The CD issue is a matter of distribution, and getting the end users to run the disk.
Nephilium
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. -- Lazurus Long (Robert A Heinlein)
No... the "muzak" versions of current and old songs make me wish to grab my pen and seeing if I can learn mummification the Egyptian way... I still have flashbacks to the Muzak version of Karma Chameleon... it still haunts me... burning away my innocence...
Nephilium
My word, I'm not even a hundred yet. -- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in The moon is a harsh mistress
Another good band that split up years ago is The Articles (No referrer)... I've used them for hold music and in-store music (Back in the days of retail). There's about twelve words on the entire album, they're ska-jazz... and very mellow.
Nephilium
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. -- Thomas Paine
For this... what do you define as a rarely bought book?
Speaking as ignorant American... but the biggest variance in prices for books [fiction] is the format you buy them in (hardcover, paperback, trade paperback). I can find old E.E. Smith trade paperbacks for $13. And there is whole piles of rarely bought books... all for the same price as that POS bestseller.
Or does this specifically include things like technical manuals and academic text books?
Nephilium
- "ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL." - "Yeah?" - "JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE." - "Ngk," said Crowley. -- Crowley in conversation with his superiors (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Ummm... but the tax rates are weighted heavily towards the wealthy paying more (CBO Numbers for 2000 sorry... latest I could find [CBO = Congressional Budget Office])...
This is where the argument about what is fair for rich people to pay... and what is fair for poor people to pay... and what is fair for middle class people to pay...
And our CongressCritters here in the US aren't dumb... they know that there are less wealthy people then average/poor people... So the tax breaks and redistribution (not tax credits... not tax rebates...) so raising taxes on the rich is usually a popular idea...
Wow... wondered off topic far enough here...
But to try to put some tie into the main Topic... what about other Think Tanks... havn't any Think Tanks come out in favor of OSS???
Nephilium
"I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a camel will force children to become lifelong smokers." -- Jonah Goldberg
This was discussed by military some time back... It also was used in a couple of Sci-Fi novels as a defense mechanism... basically cheap anti-* missles... put a small guidance system that can recognize a profile... drop them in stable orbit... and activate them to come crashing down...
Nephilium
I like a man who grins when he fights. - Winston Churchill
DivX also had the point that you could make a disk "permanent" by paying extra for it. But, you had to have your DivX player plugged into a phone line, and it would dial out and check and see if you were allowed to use that disk or not. You also couldn't take your new permanent disk over to a friends house to watch it, because it would check your unit ID against the movie title. IIRC, they didn't physically degrade... Disney started that bandwagon...
Nephilium
Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort. -- Ace in Starship Troopers
I think you also forgot about intercepting the sales reps and managers and explaining why some things either can't or shouldn't get done. I've found that most of the troubles with my job come with sales reps promising things that can't be done (at a reasonable price) or that's such a technically horrible idea that it could be done, but would cause pain and suffering wherever it went.
Nephilium
Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. -- Col. Richard Colin Ames Campbell in The Cat who Walked through Walls
So the people who have problems following directions on where to click (not to mention the difficulties between left, right, and double) are people you would trust putting in hardware?
Nephilium
I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. -- Clarence Darrow
The opposite happened here... the movie theater didn't seem to understand what they were getting into... They had *one* booth open to buy tickets... and they sold out in under an hour (good on-line sales...)...
And memory from that day that sticks the longest was the massive boo-ing that occurred during the Mask 2 preview (which I haven't seen since)... turning towards the New Line Rep, and seeing them taking furious notes on a clipboard.
Nephilium
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. -- Bertrand Russell
I would say it's not fair to compare DVD's and CD's because the value you get for the DVD is so much greater... and the cost that went into it was so much higher... Correct me if I'm wrong (who am I kidding... if I'm wrong I'll get responses...) but for music deals, aren't most of those guesses based on what predicted sales are, and movie contracts actually have a set number (or percentage of gross/net)...
Look what's more expensive most of the time: Movie Soundtrack or Movie [barring special editions]
Nephilium
Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful. -- (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
Wow... as a Libertarian... I'm surprised to hear that my political views are the same as the left... I'd be surprised to hear that they are the same as the right as well...
The arguments against the left is the whole "Big Government is good for you"... the argument for the left is *some* of the beliefs on the personal rights side...
The arguments against the right is pretty centrilized into the religious right and the drug war... the arguments for the right is *most* of the tax policies fit closer into the Libertarian idea...
The arguments for the Libertarians are the stuff that most people don't care about and or know about... Personal property rights (Eminent Domain abuses)... licensing to keep business markets closed... The hamstringing of personal rights (smoking in bars... what I'm allowed to do on my own property)... and stuff like the enumerated powers act (Sure... right any law you want... then please reference inside the bill where the Constitution gives you the ability to regulate this...)
And starting a business to not pay taxes... are you insane??? Have you ever seen the tax laws for businesses??? Realize that employers need to match most of the taxes you pay...
Nephilium
"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked." -- H. L. Mencken
But treating everything on its ability to make money is what a business does... (Not necessarily just for next quarter...) But businesses also have to realize two simple rules:
1) Time does equal money, if you can speed up a system (take order processing for example) to take a tenth of the time it used to... you've made money. Those people processing orders can move on to the next thing faster.
2) Keeping your systems up makes you money (or rather causes you not to lose money)... especially if you have something critical. If you don't have the people to maintain it and keep it up, you're in trouble. (There was an article I remember seeing talking about the care and feeding of your hacker... it referenced keeping enough geeks around as a type of insurance...)
Nephilium
Pacifism is a shifty doctrin under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay--and claims a halo for his dishonesty. -- John Joseph Bonforte in Double Star
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure Heinlein would be upset at Starship Troopers... but at least it didn't take everything he stood for and turn it upside down... Every robot book/short story that Asimov wrote was about making sure that robots wouldn't be the 'Bad Guys'... Based on the Three Laws, I would love to know how there's a robot revolution...
I'm pretty sure that right now you could hook a turbine up to Asimov's corpse and have the Perpetual Motion Machine...
Nephilium
Men are more sentimental than women. It blurs their thinking. -- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
Actually... I would have to say that Neverwinter Nights is probably as close as you can get to a Single Player game with MMORPG options... some people have set up Persistant Worlds that you can log into, play your character, and play online with buckets of people... or you can just go and download a module and play single player or with friends.
Nephilium
Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. -- Michel de Montaigne
But do you think the majority of people here will have read the comic books? (Or watched the old TV show... or the old cartoon... or the old cartoon with his friends Iceman and Firestorm... or the new TV show... or the old movies...) :)
And of course the modification of the old theme...
Nephilium
Basic truths cannot change and once a man of insight expresses one of them it is never necessary, no matter how much the world changes, to reformulate them. -- Mr. DuBois in Starship Troopers
Gah... Akira to me is the movie you *have* to watch... just so you've gone through the pain that everyone else has... I think it's the only movie to have more climaxes than Legend of the Overfiend...
I'd stick with Spirited Away as a second (or first) movie...
Nephilium
Here's to our noble selves! There are damned few of us left! -- Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land
I know that I really enjoyed the Lain series... and from the one episode I've seen Witch Hunter Robin looks interesting. But there was plenty of crap in the old days as well... Crying Freeman was good... the sequels hurt...
Nephilium
The Patrician relaxed, in a way which only then drew gentle attention to the foregoing moment of tension. -- (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
The Swiss Water method works as follows:
1) Take beans, and let them soak in water, this leaches out the caffeine and the oils (the good parts)
2) Remove those beans and compost them... no good will come from them.
3) Remove the caffeine from the water, but leave the tasty oils.
4) Put new coffee beans into the water, the caffeine will be leached out, but the oils won't because the water is already saturated with them
So... what you get (supposedly) is coffee that still has all of the flavor, but none of the caffeine...
Still blasphemous though...
Nephilium
"The loose-tooth factor, by the way, relates to the fact that it is human nature to indulge in one's own pain. Even though it hurts, we all play with our loose teeth. Even though Al Gore is a giant toothache of a human being, the Democratic party cannot stop fiddling with him. " -- Jonah Goldberg
How are you going to keep all of those boxes sitting at a Best Buy, a CompUSA, an OfficeMax, or any other store up to date? They've been pre-built and sitting on a shelf for several months in a sealed box. The customers don't want to wait while someone opens the box up, hooks it up to the internet (if availible in the store) and spends four to five hours downloading patches. The CD issue is a matter of distribution, and getting the end users to run the disk.
Nephilium
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. -- Lazurus Long (Robert A Heinlein)
No... the "muzak" versions of current and old songs make me wish to grab my pen and seeing if I can learn mummification the Egyptian way... I still have flashbacks to the Muzak version of Karma Chameleon... it still haunts me... burning away my innocence...
Nephilium
My word, I'm not even a hundred yet. -- Manuel Garcia O'Kelly in The moon is a harsh mistress
Another good band that split up years ago is The Articles (No referrer)... I've used them for hold music and in-store music (Back in the days of retail). There's about twelve words on the entire album, they're ska-jazz... and very mellow.
Nephilium
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. -- Thomas Paine
For this... what do you define as a rarely bought book?
Speaking as ignorant American... but the biggest variance in prices for books [fiction] is the format you buy them in (hardcover, paperback, trade paperback). I can find old E.E. Smith trade paperbacks for $13. And there is whole piles of rarely bought books... all for the same price as that POS bestseller.
Or does this specifically include things like technical manuals and academic text books?
Nephilium
- "ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL." - "Yeah?" - "JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE." - "Ngk," said Crowley. -- Crowley in conversation with his superiors (Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens)
Hey... as an Irishman... I feel you left out some very important recipies:
Harp Lager
Tullamore Dew
Jameson's
Middleton's
Nephilium
"Remember your humanity, and forget the rest." -- Bertrand Russell
Ummm... but the tax rates are weighted heavily towards the wealthy paying more (CBO Numbers for 2000 sorry... latest I could find [CBO = Congressional Budget Office])...
This is where the argument about what is fair for rich people to pay... and what is fair for poor people to pay... and what is fair for middle class people to pay...
And our CongressCritters here in the US aren't dumb... they know that there are less wealthy people then average/poor people... So the tax breaks and redistribution (not tax credits... not tax rebates...) so raising taxes on the rich is usually a popular idea...
Wow... wondered off topic far enough here...
But to try to put some tie into the main Topic... what about other Think Tanks... havn't any Think Tanks come out in favor of OSS???
Nephilium
"I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a camel will force children to become lifelong smokers." -- Jonah Goldberg
This was discussed by military some time back... It also was used in a couple of Sci-Fi novels as a defense mechanism... basically cheap anti-* missles... put a small guidance system that can recognize a profile... drop them in stable orbit... and activate them to come crashing down...
Nephilium
I like a man who grins when he fights. - Winston Churchill
DivX also had the point that you could make a disk "permanent" by paying extra for it. But, you had to have your DivX player plugged into a phone line, and it would dial out and check and see if you were allowed to use that disk or not. You also couldn't take your new permanent disk over to a friends house to watch it, because it would check your unit ID against the movie title. IIRC, they didn't physically degrade... Disney started that bandwagon...
Nephilium
Marriage is a young man's disaster and an old man's comfort. -- Ace in Starship Troopers
Wow... now I feel old... I actually remember the He-Man video game...
Nephilium Faith is a euphemism for prejudice and religion is a euphemism for superstition. -- Paul Keller
Where do you get that Jade Empire will be coming out for the PC? BioWare says X-Box only, not X-Box and PC.
Nephilium
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. -- Friedrich von Schiller
No... you need to paint it black... black computers go faster... just like red cars go faster...
Nephilium
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not. -- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond The Sunset
I think you also forgot about intercepting the sales reps and managers and explaining why some things either can't or shouldn't get done. I've found that most of the troubles with my job come with sales reps promising things that can't be done (at a reasonable price) or that's such a technically horrible idea that it could be done, but would cause pain and suffering wherever it went.
Nephilium
Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. -- Col. Richard Colin Ames Campbell in The Cat who Walked through Walls
So the people who have problems following directions on where to click (not to mention the difficulties between left, right, and double) are people you would trust putting in hardware?
Nephilium
I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. -- Clarence Darrow
The opposite happened here... the movie theater didn't seem to understand what they were getting into... They had *one* booth open to buy tickets... and they sold out in under an hour (good on-line sales...)...
And memory from that day that sticks the longest was the massive boo-ing that occurred during the Mask 2 preview (which I haven't seen since)... turning towards the New Line Rep, and seeing them taking furious notes on a clipboard.
Nephilium
It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion. -- Bertrand Russell
Then of course there's the times when they change a great show and destroy it...
Why did they change it? Why?
Nephilium
Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. -- Michel de Montaigne
Don't forget the other genres of music:
Old School Master
And there was a Fresh Prince song called Human Video Game from years back...
Nephilium
The plural of spouse is spice. -- Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love
I would say it's not fair to compare DVD's and CD's because the value you get for the DVD is so much greater... and the cost that went into it was so much higher... Correct me if I'm wrong (who am I kidding... if I'm wrong I'll get responses...) but for music deals, aren't most of those guesses based on what predicted sales are, and movie contracts actually have a set number (or percentage of gross/net)...
Look what's more expensive most of the time: Movie Soundtrack or Movie [barring special editions]
Nephilium
Verence would rather cut his own leg off than put a witch in prison, since it'd save trouble in the long run and probably be less painful. -- (Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies)
Wow... as a Libertarian... I'm surprised to hear that my political views are the same as the left... I'd be surprised to hear that they are the same as the right as well...
The arguments against the left is the whole "Big Government is good for you"... the argument for the left is *some* of the beliefs on the personal rights side...
The arguments against the right is pretty centrilized into the religious right and the drug war... the arguments for the right is *most* of the tax policies fit closer into the Libertarian idea...
The arguments for the Libertarians are the stuff that most people don't care about and or know about... Personal property rights (Eminent Domain abuses)... licensing to keep business markets closed... The hamstringing of personal rights (smoking in bars... what I'm allowed to do on my own property)... and stuff like the enumerated powers act (Sure... right any law you want... then please reference inside the bill where the Constitution gives you the ability to regulate this...)
And starting a business to not pay taxes... are you insane??? Have you ever seen the tax laws for businesses??? Realize that employers need to match most of the taxes you pay...
Nephilium
"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked." -- H. L. Mencken
But treating everything on its ability to make money is what a business does... (Not necessarily just for next quarter...) But businesses also have to realize two simple rules:
1) Time does equal money, if you can speed up a system (take order processing for example) to take a tenth of the time it used to... you've made money. Those people processing orders can move on to the next thing faster.
2) Keeping your systems up makes you money (or rather causes you not to lose money)... especially if you have something critical. If you don't have the people to maintain it and keep it up, you're in trouble. (There was an article I remember seeing talking about the care and feeding of your hacker... it referenced keeping enough geeks around as a type of insurance...)
Nephilium
Pacifism is a shifty doctrin under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay--and claims a halo for his dishonesty. -- John Joseph Bonforte in Double Star