Not really. You can only get the XBOX 360 in a bundle. There is no bundle that is under $500 right now (last time I checked, at least). Still, it's a good point. But it doesn't work for everyone. I am shifting my gaming from PC to console with the coming generation of consoles, but I'm going to have to give up a lot of m my CounterStrike enjoyment (less responsive controls on a console) and strategy/RPG games (they just aren't the same on the console - a different breed entirely). But since I don't use a PC anymore, I'm not going to maintain the cost for upkeep.
On the other hand, I would hope that Slashdotters know how to build their own frigging computer. I built my first when I was eleven years old, before there was a web and before the net hit big and before I had access to loca BBSes and I had no friends or adults around me who knew anything about computers. It jsut took a little initiative and common sense.
People who buy their own desktop machines without specific reasons for it (say, you just want to get a cheap office machine for Aunt Florence and you don't want the support responsibility) have always struck me as a cut from the same cloth as those who always pay for the extra in-store warranty at Best Buy or give up their social security number to anyone who asks in a business setting. That is, they just go with the flow and don't put much thought into things.
Then again, I suppose the same could be said of people in relation to cars (which I'm just now starting to get into in my late 30s).
I love to see people - especially younger people - who are not necessarily heavily into computers, but realize that they can build their own. Not only do they get a sense of accomplishment from it, but the magic box is demystified and they gain some control. In the long run, they become better consumers who help shape the market with a more thorough and educated demand.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had experienced the bible. You must be super old.
My faith is based on a collection of stories, too. You've heard of Harry Potter?
And your point is exactly what I was making. You don't care what science says. All you care about is whether or not something bolsters YOUR theological BELIEF. A belief you base on absolutely no data or evidence other than a bunch of dogma written and composed by the church selectively.
If anything, you've only convinced me that you're either quite impressionable or flat out insane. There are a lot of people who believe in things another dude wrote. He liked to write quatraines. It's just a bunch of jibber jabber, but people interpret it to mean what they want it to mean and read devine things from it. But it's still just as silly as a book full of parables.
In America, Halloween is a chance for grown women to dress like sluts (they always pick the same few costumes which are princess, dominatrix, vampiress, dorothy, school girl) and show off without feeling trampy and for guys to ogle them and, preferably, engage in semi-anonymous sex that you can probably not be incrimenated for by your significant other. You know, the kind of people who are serious attention whores, but on this special night, guys and jealous girls can't badmouth them for being all "hanging out of their outfit" and shit.
Halloween is sort of like St. Patty's day for ho's.
Of course, if you're a little kid, you dress up and go trick or treating. I think that's dying down, though. People are too afraid that their kids are going to eat food that has been poisoned or had razors or drugs impregnated into them (the candy, not the children). People are retarded. Halloween kicked ass when I was a little kid (though you do grow out of it eventually - around eight or ten years old it seems).
I'm not doing anything. I'm an adult. Left the halloween crap back in fifth grade where it belongs. Monday is a good day to sleep in and get some rest from the long work week (which ends on Sunday for me). Some time where I can shut the pager off, ignore the phone and not read any lines of code or compile anything or attend any meetings. I'll take that over just about anything else (except Thanksgiving, because turkey and mashed potatoes fucking RULE).
Evolution is a THEORY. Your suggestion that science doesn't support evolution is idiotic and extremely ignorant.
Creationism is NOT. In fact, it isn't even a hypothesis. It's a theological belief. Period.
a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"
What facts, laws and tested hypotheses do you have for your creation mythology?
by nature, born out of ignorance and not out of a deeply intellectual personal search for truth?
That isn't science. That's a feeling.
Also, science doesn't try to support at theory by defiling religion. Religious people only argue in favor of creaitonism by pointing out supposed (usually ignorant) flaws in evolution.
The point still remains, you can do all the "deep intellectual soul searching" that you want, but convincing yourself to accept the belief from the Christian bible or some Bhuddist teachings or whatever the hell else you want to attach yourself to doesn't have any scientific method whatsoever. You can believe that you're a unique, amazing, special creature born of some mythical creature all you want - that doesn't make it so. And just because you feel it doesn't establish any evidence for it. And it most certainly has nothing to do with "science".
So essentially, keep your new age spiritual crap or old school religious dogma and beliefs IN THE REALM OF THEOLOGY. I don't come to your church and insist that you let me educate your sunday school children on the big bang and evolution and gravity - so don't cram your baseless theological day dreams into children at school in science class.
U.S. school students perform relatively poorly in international tests of mathematics and science. For example, in 2003 U.S. students placed 24th in an international test that measured the mathematical literacy of 15-year-olds, below many European and Asian countries.
The problem is that those who are pro-god, anti-science think schools should be used to promote their non-scientific views (theology) in science classes. The more that progresses, the further our country falls. The less we're eventually able to compete and progress. It's like saying "there are racists and non-racists and even if 95% of the country were racist, that doesn't affect me". Well, it does - because these sorts of things are ingrained and branded into children and young adults by the family they grow up in and the church they go to. So you end up with children who are so confrontational and unaccepting of science, because in their mind, everything is "god's will" and if they can't comprehend something, it must not exist or be true. To them, "belief" becomes a one-step "scientific-method".
Eventually, you end up with a country basing their laws (which DO affect you) on narrow-minded, sub-pseudo-science mythologies. It no longer remains an issue of liberties and self-determination, but one in which everything is based on the new majority's morality. No longer are you punished for something that is harmful to others or prevented from doing things that harm others, but you're prevented from doing anything even to yourself or among consenting people that uninvolved parties do not like. What's to stop that 95% of the religious-nut run country from deciding (for your own good, mind you) that you must kneel and pray daily, because when you stop kneeling and praying, god gets angry and sends hurricanes?
Seriously, in a country where there are churches picketing at the funerals of young military men (because of homosexuality) and religious leaders blaming natural disasters on lesbians - is there any limit?
The problem with science being eroded and derided in this country is largely due to the same constructs that affect voting and politics. Think about it.
And there's not really a lot you can do about it. There are few things more addictive and difficult to argue with than religion, because you're not talking about sense or reality or science or rational thought. You can't scientifically argue with people who only can respond with "well, there must be a creator, because I feel it in my bones" - or people who can't possibly conceive that evolution doesn't in any way rule out there still being a creator.
Ignorance is hard to fight. Ever been around an extreme racist and tried to convince them why they're ignorant, stupid and wrong? Then you know what I mean.:/
In my experience, the person who does the most damage gets the punishment. If a bully picked on a kid, the bully would usually not get in trouble, because nobody would tell. If someone stepped in and kicked the bully's ass (which I did a lot, because even kids much older than myself weren't aware of my outside-of-school sports), the person who beat up the bully would get suspended or otherwise punish.
I also knew kids who would be picked on bullies and, finally, fight back. But the teachers always came into the mix after the bully had already started the fight, the other kid had kicked his ass, and the kid who was the victim of the bully got the suspension and punishment.
So, really, you can't win. And there are always ignorant adults who feel that one person under 18 assaulting another person under the age of 18 is just "kids being kids".
There are certainly times when a kid is clearly just whining. But there are more often than not times when a kid is clearly being harassed and violated and assaulted. I have no problem with treating these kids as criminals. Their age and location (school) should not excuse them from punishment.
And ironically, it seems these days that it's the quiet kids who are picked on that are singled out by adminsitrators as potential Columbine follow-ups --- rather than the punks who are acting out by harassing and terrorizing those kids in the first place.
Still, I hope adults continue to take these things more seirously. There's nothing I hate more than someone my age justifying what happens to kids in school today because "I was picked on and beat up and I turned out fine" or "I beat up and picked on other kids and they turned out fine". I mean . . . come on . . . If adults did this sort of thing to each other, they'd be imprisoned.
Oh, right. I completely forgot how poor and destitute Rockstar is.
Still, I'm not wasting a dime on this for the PC just to hold me over until the Mac version. Well, not unless they want to let me have one of them for free.
It's interesting how parents are more concerned with a game that involves bullies than they are with actual bullies. While things are changing, bullying is still considered a "right of passage" for victims (even though it compounds to the extent that many of these victims just drop out of school because they can't focus on education and surviving every day and nobody will take them seriously or extend a hand) and "boys will be boys" for the bullies.
I excelled in three sports simultaneously (wrestling starting at five, judo starting at eight and jujitsu starting at ten), and was always too much of a softy to ever bully anyone, but you did see it going on often. And while people like myself could step in whenever we saw someone being mistreated, you couldn't be there all the time and if someone steps in to prevent an act of bullying today, that bully is just going to come down twice as hard on the victim when nobody is around, tomorrow.
So, frankly, I'm glad to see that bullying is slowly being treated more like the crime it is than just "children being children". School is for educaiton - not abuse. Period. But I'm disapointed that more people are more upset over an innocent game than the actual bullying itself. And what - are they going to start claiming that Rockstar is responsible for encouraging and teaching children to e bullies? After all, it's not like bullying has been going on for oh.... at least a few millenia.
My much younger brother is going into computer science with a bent toward game programming and most of his courses focus on Visual C++. He is aware of Linux and Unix (because it's what I do for a living and all of my personal stuff runs either on that or OSX), but I doubt anyone is going to teach their programming courses on anything else (for the most part), for the same reason nobody is going to require that students have OpenOffice or StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
Fortuantely, I doubt anyone who had to pay for these tickets themselves (ie, are not living in mommy and daddy's basement with a weekly allowance) actually bought any tickets or intended to go. I mean... holy crap. If you want to watch video and listen to videogame music, you can do that at home. Granted, you wouldn't get ths tinky goodness of unwashed dorks, but...
No other devices with the certification will react negatively to the system's wireless output
That's strange, because I've never had a 2.4ghz phone that didn't interfere with my 2.4ghz wireless network (as in, killing the network connections entirely). The only solution was to move up to a 5.8ghz phone. So let me guess - Uniden, Panasonic and all the other phone manufacturers are manufacturing products completely out of spec and authorization of the FCC?
I haven't seen this at my company, either. Instead, they've either hired people through contracting agencies (and the agencies ripped the employee off) or as of recently, they just stopped hiring in this country all together and are limited all expansion to occur on foreign soil, entirely.
When you move your corporations campuses and employees to other countries, you can avoid all those pesky limitations and debates - and all your other expenses drop, too. Hurrah!
I've been building computers for 18 years and I've never even heard of the "CPU frame rate". How about the "frame rate of the hard drive" and "frame rate of the memory" and "frame rate of the CD ROM", too? Oh, and the sound card frame rate. That must be important.
Once you've decided on which company to go with (and most of us already have and stick with our choices), you look for the most powerful CPU just before the price break. Come on - this is nothing new. This is how people have been picking CPUs for at least a couple decades. And if powe consumption matters to you - and you're only buying a couple of these things and not hundreds - then maybe you should rethink the whole computer thing focus on affording your top ramen or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. You can only get the XBOX 360 in a bundle. There is no bundle that is under $500 right now (last time I checked, at least). Still, it's a good point. But it doesn't work for everyone. I am shifting my gaming from PC to console with the coming generation of consoles, but I'm going to have to give up a lot of m my CounterStrike enjoyment (less responsive controls on a console) and strategy/RPG games (they just aren't the same on the console - a different breed entirely). But since I don't use a PC anymore, I'm not going to maintain the cost for upkeep.
On the other hand, I would hope that Slashdotters know how to build their own frigging computer. I built my first when I was eleven years old, before there was a web and before the net hit big and before I had access to loca BBSes and I had no friends or adults around me who knew anything about computers. It jsut took a little initiative and common sense.
People who buy their own desktop machines without specific reasons for it (say, you just want to get a cheap office machine for Aunt Florence and you don't want the support responsibility) have always struck me as a cut from the same cloth as those who always pay for the extra in-store warranty at Best Buy or give up their social security number to anyone who asks in a business setting. That is, they just go with the flow and don't put much thought into things.
Then again, I suppose the same could be said of people in relation to cars (which I'm just now starting to get into in my late 30s).
I love to see people - especially younger people - who are not necessarily heavily into computers, but realize that they can build their own. Not only do they get a sense of accomplishment from it, but the magic box is demystified and they gain some control. In the long run, they become better consumers who help shape the market with a more thorough and educated demand.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize you had experienced the bible. You must be super old.
My faith is based on a collection of stories, too. You've heard of Harry Potter?
And your point is exactly what I was making. You don't care what science says. All you care about is whether or not something bolsters YOUR theological BELIEF. A belief you base on absolutely no data or evidence other than a bunch of dogma written and composed by the church selectively.
If anything, you've only convinced me that you're either quite impressionable or flat out insane. There are a lot of people who believe in things another dude wrote. He liked to write quatraines. It's just a bunch of jibber jabber, but people interpret it to mean what they want it to mean and read devine things from it. But it's still just as silly as a book full of parables.
In America, Halloween is a chance for grown women to dress like sluts (they always pick the same few costumes which are princess, dominatrix, vampiress, dorothy, school girl) and show off without feeling trampy and for guys to ogle them and, preferably, engage in semi-anonymous sex that you can probably not be incrimenated for by your significant other. You know, the kind of people who are serious attention whores, but on this special night, guys and jealous girls can't badmouth them for being all "hanging out of their outfit" and shit.
Halloween is sort of like St. Patty's day for ho's.
Of course, if you're a little kid, you dress up and go trick or treating. I think that's dying down, though. People are too afraid that their kids are going to eat food that has been poisoned or had razors or drugs impregnated into them (the candy, not the children). People are retarded. Halloween kicked ass when I was a little kid (though you do grow out of it eventually - around eight or ten years old it seems).
What would work?
My priest made a great pirate. Arr!
Yeah, an ass pirate.
I'm not doing anything. I'm an adult. Left the halloween crap back in fifth grade where it belongs. Monday is a good day to sleep in and get some rest from the long work week (which ends on Sunday for me). Some time where I can shut the pager off, ignore the phone and not read any lines of code or compile anything or attend any meetings. I'll take that over just about anything else (except Thanksgiving, because turkey and mashed potatoes fucking RULE).
I don't think these kids will be doing anything, either.
Do you actually understand what a THEORY is?
Evolution is a THEORY. Your suggestion that science doesn't support evolution is idiotic and extremely ignorant.
Creationism is NOT. In fact, it isn't even a hypothesis. It's a theological belief. Period.
a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses"
What facts, laws and tested hypotheses do you have for your creation mythology?
by nature, born out of ignorance and not out of a deeply intellectual personal search for truth?
That isn't science. That's a feeling.
Also, science doesn't try to support at theory by defiling religion. Religious people only argue in favor of creaitonism by pointing out supposed (usually ignorant) flaws in evolution.
The point still remains, you can do all the "deep intellectual soul searching" that you want, but convincing yourself to accept the belief from the Christian bible or some Bhuddist teachings or whatever the hell else you want to attach yourself to doesn't have any scientific method whatsoever. You can believe that you're a unique, amazing, special creature born of some mythical creature all you want - that doesn't make it so. And just because you feel it doesn't establish any evidence for it. And it most certainly has nothing to do with "science".
So essentially, keep your new age spiritual crap or old school religious dogma and beliefs IN THE REALM OF THEOLOGY. I don't come to your church and insist that you let me educate your sunday school children on the big bang and evolution and gravity - so don't cram your baseless theological day dreams into children at school in science class.
Just to add:
We are behind Hong Kong, Finland, South Korea, Netherlands, Leichtenstein, Japan, Canada, Belgium Macao (China), Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Iceland, Denmark, France, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Slovak Republic, Norway, Luxembourg, Poland, HUngary, Spain and Latvia.
We only barely edge out Russia Portugal, Italy, Greece, Serbia, Turkey, Utuguay, Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, Tunisia and Brazil.
U.S. school students perform relatively poorly in international tests of mathematics and science. For example, in 2003 U.S. students placed 24th in an international test that measured the mathematical literacy of 15-year-olds, below many European and Asian countries.
Enough said.
Theory . . .
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The problem is that those who are pro-god, anti-science think schools should be used to promote their non-scientific views (theology) in science classes. The more that progresses, the further our country falls. The less we're eventually able to compete and progress. It's like saying "there are racists and non-racists and even if 95% of the country were racist, that doesn't affect me". Well, it does - because these sorts of things are ingrained and branded into children and young adults by the family they grow up in and the church they go to. So you end up with children who are so confrontational and unaccepting of science, because in their mind, everything is "god's will" and if they can't comprehend something, it must not exist or be true. To them, "belief" becomes a one-step "scientific-method".
Eventually, you end up with a country basing their laws (which DO affect you) on narrow-minded, sub-pseudo-science mythologies. It no longer remains an issue of liberties and self-determination, but one in which everything is based on the new majority's morality. No longer are you punished for something that is harmful to others or prevented from doing things that harm others, but you're prevented from doing anything even to yourself or among consenting people that uninvolved parties do not like. What's to stop that 95% of the religious-nut run country from deciding (for your own good, mind you) that you must kneel and pray daily, because when you stop kneeling and praying, god gets angry and sends hurricanes?
Seriously, in a country where there are churches picketing at the funerals of young military men (because of homosexuality) and religious leaders blaming natural disasters on lesbians - is there any limit?
The problem with science being eroded and derided in this country is largely due to the same constructs that affect voting and politics. Think about it.
:/
And there's not really a lot you can do about it. There are few things more addictive and difficult to argue with than religion, because you're not talking about sense or reality or science or rational thought. You can't scientifically argue with people who only can respond with "well, there must be a creator, because I feel it in my bones" - or people who can't possibly conceive that evolution doesn't in any way rule out there still being a creator.
Ignorance is hard to fight. Ever been around an extreme racist and tried to convince them why they're ignorant, stupid and wrong? Then you know what I mean.
In my experience, the person who does the most damage gets the punishment. If a bully picked on a kid, the bully would usually not get in trouble, because nobody would tell. If someone stepped in and kicked the bully's ass (which I did a lot, because even kids much older than myself weren't aware of my outside-of-school sports), the person who beat up the bully would get suspended or otherwise punish.
I also knew kids who would be picked on bullies and, finally, fight back. But the teachers always came into the mix after the bully had already started the fight, the other kid had kicked his ass, and the kid who was the victim of the bully got the suspension and punishment.
So, really, you can't win. And there are always ignorant adults who feel that one person under 18 assaulting another person under the age of 18 is just "kids being kids".
There are certainly times when a kid is clearly just whining. But there are more often than not times when a kid is clearly being harassed and violated and assaulted. I have no problem with treating these kids as criminals. Their age and location (school) should not excuse them from punishment.
And ironically, it seems these days that it's the quiet kids who are picked on that are singled out by adminsitrators as potential Columbine follow-ups --- rather than the punks who are acting out by harassing and terrorizing those kids in the first place.
Still, I hope adults continue to take these things more seirously. There's nothing I hate more than someone my age justifying what happens to kids in school today because "I was picked on and beat up and I turned out fine" or "I beat up and picked on other kids and they turned out fine". I mean . . . come on . . . If adults did this sort of thing to each other, they'd be imprisoned.
Oh, right. I completely forgot how poor and destitute Rockstar is.
:)
Still, I'm not wasting a dime on this for the PC just to hold me over until the Mac version. Well, not unless they want to let me have one of them for free.
I'll just go back to FreeCiv in the meantime.
It's interesting how parents are more concerned with a game that involves bullies than they are with actual bullies. While things are changing, bullying is still considered a "right of passage" for victims (even though it compounds to the extent that many of these victims just drop out of school because they can't focus on education and surviving every day and nobody will take them seriously or extend a hand) and "boys will be boys" for the bullies.
I excelled in three sports simultaneously (wrestling starting at five, judo starting at eight and jujitsu starting at ten), and was always too much of a softy to ever bully anyone, but you did see it going on often. And while people like myself could step in whenever we saw someone being mistreated, you couldn't be there all the time and if someone steps in to prevent an act of bullying today, that bully is just going to come down twice as hard on the victim when nobody is around, tomorrow.
So, frankly, I'm glad to see that bullying is slowly being treated more like the crime it is than just "children being children". School is for educaiton - not abuse. Period. But I'm disapointed that more people are more upset over an innocent game than the actual bullying itself. And what - are they going to start claiming that Rockstar is responsible for encouraging and teaching children to e bullies? After all, it's not like bullying has been going on for oh.... at least a few millenia.
Early 2006? What, is it too difficult to comprehend that such a game would be extremely popular on OSX?
Now I know how the rest of the world feels when a good movie comes out in the states a year ahead of them.
My much younger brother is going into computer science with a bent toward game programming and most of his courses focus on Visual C++. He is aware of Linux and Unix (because it's what I do for a living and all of my personal stuff runs either on that or OSX), but I doubt anyone is going to teach their programming courses on anything else (for the most part), for the same reason nobody is going to require that students have OpenOffice or StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office.
*sigh*
Fortuantely, I doubt anyone who had to pay for these tickets themselves (ie, are not living in mommy and daddy's basement with a weekly allowance) actually bought any tickets or intended to go. I mean... holy crap. If you want to watch video and listen to videogame music, you can do that at home. Granted, you wouldn't get ths tinky goodness of unwashed dorks, but...
No other devices with the certification will react negatively to the system's wireless output
That's strange, because I've never had a 2.4ghz phone that didn't interfere with my 2.4ghz wireless network (as in, killing the network connections entirely). The only solution was to move up to a 5.8ghz phone. So let me guess - Uniden, Panasonic and all the other phone manufacturers are manufacturing products completely out of spec and authorization of the FCC?
I'm pretty sure that, in countries heading the direction ours is, dissenting voters get disappeared.
Too bad your comment was scored Funny, instead of Insightful. :/
I haven't seen this at my company, either. Instead, they've either hired people through contracting agencies (and the agencies ripped the employee off) or as of recently, they just stopped hiring in this country all together and are limited all expansion to occur on foreign soil, entirely.
When you move your corporations campuses and employees to other countries, you can avoid all those pesky limitations and debates - and all your other expenses drop, too. Hurrah!
I've been building computers for 18 years and I've never even heard of the "CPU frame rate". How about the "frame rate of the hard drive" and "frame rate of the memory" and "frame rate of the CD ROM", too? Oh, and the sound card frame rate. That must be important.
Once you've decided on which company to go with (and most of us already have and stick with our choices), you look for the most powerful CPU just before the price break. Come on - this is nothing new. This is how people have been picking CPUs for at least a couple decades. And if powe consumption matters to you - and you're only buying a couple of these things and not hundreds - then maybe you should rethink the whole computer thing focus on affording your top ramen or whatever.