This story actually made me stop and think about what I would do as I neared my last moments and I frankly can't think of a single thing I am quite that passionate about. Just crazy. And kind of awesome.
Would it really matter? I guess it helped us fuel other areas of advancement, but as far as space itself? All we've accomplished in the 42 years since we landed on the moon is sending out a bunch of probes and fancy RC cars. No doubt, the photographs from these endeavors are amazing and we're still acquiring knowledge. It's just too bad we've reached a point where we aren't willing to do anything that might put a person at risk of so much as chipping a fingernail, we've exhausted our shuttle program and are currently having to rely on transport from other nations, and are put off by spending any money on space at all, because we've got to save all that precious monopoly money to bail out corporations and foreign banks at a number that dwarfs the entire space program.
Don't get me wrong - I know that a lot of our advancements are being off-loaded to privacy industry and that we are making enough advances in other areas of technology and science so that whenever we really do make another massive push into space, we will be doing so from a more capable point (kind of like you might have been able to start a computer at the task of decrypting some data in 1980 and that same computer would still be trying to decode it in 2011, while a computer you got last month and set to the task of decrypting the same data would have finished by now).
However, can you really imagine people's responses in the last half of 1969 if you had told them "revel in this, because mankind won't touch the moon or any other soil or make it beyond our low orbit for the next fifty years"? They would have said you were a fucking lunatic.
I'm thrilled that the space race brought us the home computer and memory foam, but my mom was a little girl when we landed on the moon and I would love more than just about anything for us to have another world-stopping-all-eyes-on-television space-moment like that during my life time. I suspect I'll be long dead before that happens.
I'm pretty sure this was already announced a couple months ago.
Also, I'm sure in typical Netflix style, before you get 20% through it, you'll start getting notices that the content will expire in a couple weeks.
I'm pretty sure I have about 15% of my current Netflix queue about to expire and become unavailable. Hopefully they'll start to address this stuff soon, so we can have a consistent collection of content rather than a "here one day; gone the next" collection,.
Why not? That's how the whole Sacchrine/Nutrasweet thing finally reached shelves.
Anyway, the Merck CEO also is on the board of Exxon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was the lead attorney for Merck
a few years ago during all the lawsuits over its Vioxx drug (which was associated with increased heart attack and stroke risks).
Kind of like the Gardisil vaccine which was announced for young girls - supposedly around the age of twelve - to prevent HPV and possible cancer, later in life. Dumbass parents were against it, however (not because it was rational to look into any testing that was actually done or anything, but because they thought that protecting their children for the rest of their lives by giving them a shot at twelve would cause them to immediately start fucking on the way out of the doctor's office).
In fact, Merck lobbied heavily to get the government to make the vaccine a requirement for any girl 11-12 years of age attending public school.
Anyway, it didn't take off. Partially due to the above and partially due to various other criticisms by the medical profession (such required vaccines typically being to prevent things casually spread, such as mumps; not sexually transmitted).
Anyway, that having not become the huge cash cow the drug industry was hoping for, it magically turned into a cancer-prevention drug for girls and boys the following year. If that doesn't take off, I'm sure they'll find that it's also a great on-going treatment for low blood pressure or erectile dysfunction or a fantastic food additive or something. Gotta keep finding a way to make money off of it, of course.
Seriously? We're comparing actual alien invaders with super-powers to human beings crossing a border without official documentation or processes? I think we're just being a wee extreme here.:P
I could go for an iPad 2, easily. All it would take is a full fledged awesome MMO (or the ability to do everything in EVE-Online - except battles - that I can do in the real game). Even better, release some completely, no-holds-barred RPGs. Long, involved, deep RPG that I could spend the entire year exploring and playing. I don't care for these half-assed mini-sim games or FPS-ish games. If they started to offer that, the complexity that I could build on and explore a bit at a time for countless hours or weeks or months would compel me to part with my moolah.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Lex Luthor defending mankind from an alien invader.
Anyway, this isn't always something I've always thought about. It's also the topic of Superman: The Black Ring
"It's the story of Lex Luthor as he's trying to put together a vast new source of power for himself. Lex Luthor is an interesting character because he's about an inch from being a superhero. He thinks he's continually saving the world from a terrifying super-powered alien. And in this story we put him up against a bunch of villains that are worse than he is!"
Or . ..simply observing the generations of one's own family.
It isn't proof. To be fair, there is very little that is absolutely provable. But at least it is testable and we have gathered evidence to support it. Simply saying "but the bible says" is not evidence, proof, testable, or in any way on earth even remotely addressable by the scientific method. Having religion in science class makes absolutely no sense. Do religious people attend church or theology classes to learn about physics?
Science is all about questioning what we know of science. Science classes should be completely open to discussion of scientific issues.
Creationism is not science and has no basis in science and is not even positioned even remotely as a testable scientific theory with even an ounce of evidence. Creationism is theology. Leave it in the theology classes and churches.
I think they already realized that it's going to fail, so tying bonuses to a metric that they're certain won't succeed is a way to avoid paying bonuses.
Okay, I think we can assume that's not true. But it's conspiratorial and this is Slashdot, so . . .
Everyone I know freaking wet themselves over how amazing everything you could built in the game looked.
Then they played for a bit and realized that 98% of the cool things you've seen were created not by playing the game, but by using the world-editor.
Most of those people have since stopped playing it.
I bought the game ages ago. I dig it. I don't play it, though. Pretty much for the same reason and because while i like a sandbox, I like some sort of motivation which the game doesn't yet have.
Still, it's a fun story to watch unfold and I'm damned envious of Notch!
If a result is that good, I'm just going to add it to my pinboard.in account. I couldn't care less about clicking on a button to help people I don't even know when they search for something in the future.
I've always been a bit turned off by how people treat technology, in the last decade.
When I grew up (even in the 90s, which i know is later in the game to many of you), I had to figure out how to build a computer. How a modem worked. How to use a terminal. The difference between the different types of modem protocols. Then uncover awesome local boards. A short time later, I had to learn about the various BBS hosting software, telephony, semaphores and doorgames, some minor coding, FIDOnet and plenty of other things, just to setup a little BBS and communicate with other people around the world.
Getting the technology up and running then allowed me to explore a whole world in which I could create and learn and investigate.
What does someone that same age, today, do with the technology? They blab about themselves on Facebook and Twitter and wank off on instant messaging. While there are still plenty of creators and learners and doers, the almost complete majority does nothing but use it as a consumption device. As a toy. As a brain-numbing facilitator.
I always thought that was sad, since I was able to be involved in the tail end of the era when you could almost guarantee that anyone who had a computer also knew a lot *about* that computer. And computers in general. And wanted to know more.
Dilbert is a corporate tool intended to placate all of the cubicle-drones because they can have a chuckle and identify with him and think "well, gosh, things aren't so bad!" and move on with the status-quo.
Lex Luthor has always been a hero. He is nearly the only person on earth making it his life's duty to fight off the alien from another planet with super powers that imposes his will on our world and is a threat to us all.
More than Duke Nukem or anything else I've heard referenced recently, none have blasted me back to my youth more than hearing the words "kermit" and "zmodem". Right around the same time that you could go down to the local Hacker Shack (later renamed, due to conflicts with Radio Shack) and thumb through thousands of 5.25" floppies organized like mini-albums and you'd pay a buck just for a floppy with a looping black and white video you could watch on your grainy CGA.
God damn, I miss those days. I'm glad the internet is widespread and aiding tens of millions of people in their life on a daily basis, but there was something delightful about being part of a tiny group of weirdos connecting to each other with ATA commands and some guy's hobby board.
Can the government give me some gold stars on the chart on the back of the classroom door every time I do something nice or choose not to do something bad? Maybe you want to reward me for praying or choosing not to play violent videogames? Maybe give me two gold stars every time I go a month without a sick day? Yay!
Notice that in the last big dashboard update, they got rid of the ability to rate full games? If you bought a game, stuck it in, played it and hated it, you could rate it out of five stars and it would display an average score on any game you looked at through the dashboard.
They conveniently removed that and I've never heard it discussed in the months, since.
First TI popularizes auto-tune and now he enters the power management technology industry with an almost seven billion dollar buyout? This guy is AMAZING!
Slashdot Mirror
This story actually made me stop and think about what I would do as I neared my last moments and I frankly can't think of a single thing I am quite that passionate about. Just crazy. And kind of awesome.
Yeah, but the real money is in giving old men more hair and boners and reducing teenage acne.
Would it really matter? I guess it helped us fuel other areas of advancement, but as far as space itself? All we've accomplished in the 42 years since we landed on the moon is sending out a bunch of probes and fancy RC cars. No doubt, the photographs from these endeavors are amazing and we're still acquiring knowledge. It's just too bad we've reached a point where we aren't willing to do anything that might put a person at risk of so much as chipping a fingernail, we've exhausted our shuttle program and are currently having to rely on transport from other nations, and are put off by spending any money on space at all, because we've got to save all that precious monopoly money to bail out corporations and foreign banks at a number that dwarfs the entire space program.
Don't get me wrong - I know that a lot of our advancements are being off-loaded to privacy industry and that we are making enough advances in other areas of technology and science so that whenever we really do make another massive push into space, we will be doing so from a more capable point (kind of like you might have been able to start a computer at the task of decrypting some data in 1980 and that same computer would still be trying to decode it in 2011, while a computer you got last month and set to the task of decrypting the same data would have finished by now).
However, can you really imagine people's responses in the last half of 1969 if you had told them "revel in this, because mankind won't touch the moon or any other soil or make it beyond our low orbit for the next fifty years"? They would have said you were a fucking lunatic.
I'm thrilled that the space race brought us the home computer and memory foam, but my mom was a little girl when we landed on the moon and I would love more than just about anything for us to have another world-stopping-all-eyes-on-television space-moment like that during my life time. I suspect I'll be long dead before that happens.
I'm pretty sure this was already announced a couple months ago.
Also, I'm sure in typical Netflix style, before you get 20% through it, you'll start getting notices that the content will expire in a couple weeks.
I'm pretty sure I have about 15% of my current Netflix queue about to expire and become unavailable. Hopefully they'll start to address this stuff soon, so we can have a consistent collection of content rather than a "here one day; gone the next" collection,.
Why not? That's how the whole Sacchrine/Nutrasweet thing finally reached shelves.
Anyway, the Merck CEO also is on the board of Exxon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was the lead attorney for Merck
a few years ago during all the lawsuits over its Vioxx drug (which was associated with increased heart attack and stroke risks).
Kind of like the Gardisil vaccine which was announced for young girls - supposedly around the age of twelve - to prevent HPV and possible cancer, later in life. Dumbass parents were against it, however (not because it was rational to look into any testing that was actually done or anything, but because they thought that protecting their children for the rest of their lives by giving them a shot at twelve would cause them to immediately start fucking on the way out of the doctor's office).
In fact, Merck lobbied heavily to get the government to make the vaccine a requirement for any girl 11-12 years of age attending public school.
Anyway, it didn't take off. Partially due to the above and partially due to various other criticisms by the medical profession (such required vaccines typically being to prevent things casually spread, such as mumps; not sexually transmitted).
Anyway, that having not become the huge cash cow the drug industry was hoping for, it magically turned into a cancer-prevention drug for girls and boys the following year. If that doesn't take off, I'm sure they'll find that it's also a great on-going treatment for low blood pressure or erectile dysfunction or a fantastic food additive or something. Gotta keep finding a way to make money off of it, of course.
Seriously? We're comparing actual alien invaders with super-powers to human beings crossing a border without official documentation or processes? I think we're just being a wee extreme here. :P
I could go for an iPad 2, easily. All it would take is a full fledged awesome MMO (or the ability to do everything in EVE-Online - except battles - that I can do in the real game). Even better, release some completely, no-holds-barred RPGs. Long, involved, deep RPG that I could spend the entire year exploring and playing. I don't care for these half-assed mini-sim games or FPS-ish games. If they started to offer that, the complexity that I could build on and explore a bit at a time for countless hours or weeks or months would compel me to part with my moolah.
I'm not sure what that has to do with Lex Luthor defending mankind from an alien invader.
Anyway, this isn't always something I've always thought about. It's also the topic of Superman: The Black Ring
"It's the story of Lex Luthor as he's trying to put together a vast new source of power for himself. Lex Luthor is an interesting character because he's about an inch from being a superhero. He thinks he's continually saving the world from a terrifying super-powered alien. And in this story we put him up against a bunch of villains that are worse than he is!"
source: http://geek-news.mtv.com/2011/03/25/paul-cornell-talks-about-superman-the-black-ring-vol-1/
source: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/lex-luthor-superman-black-ring/
Not to mention, simple fruit-fly experiments.
Or . . .simply observing the generations of one's own family.
It isn't proof. To be fair, there is very little that is absolutely provable. But at least it is testable and we have gathered evidence to support it. Simply saying "but the bible says" is not evidence, proof, testable, or in any way on earth even remotely addressable by the scientific method. Having religion in science class makes absolutely no sense. Do religious people attend church or theology classes to learn about physics?
Science is all about questioning what we know of science. Science classes should be completely open to discussion of scientific issues.
Creationism is not science and has no basis in science and is not even positioned even remotely as a testable scientific theory with even an ounce of evidence. Creationism is theology. Leave it in the theology classes and churches.
I think they already realized that it's going to fail, so tying bonuses to a metric that they're certain won't succeed is a way to avoid paying bonuses.
Okay, I think we can assume that's not true. But it's conspiratorial and this is Slashdot, so . . .
Does anyone actually play minecraft?
Everyone I know freaking wet themselves over how amazing everything you could built in the game looked.
Then they played for a bit and realized that 98% of the cool things you've seen were created not by playing the game, but by using the world-editor.
Most of those people have since stopped playing it.
I bought the game ages ago. I dig it. I don't play it, though. Pretty much for the same reason and because while i like a sandbox, I like some sort of motivation which the game doesn't yet have.
Still, it's a fun story to watch unfold and I'm damned envious of Notch!
If a result is that good, I'm just going to add it to my pinboard.in account. I couldn't care less about clicking on a button to help people I don't even know when they search for something in the future.
I've always been a bit turned off by how people treat technology, in the last decade.
When I grew up (even in the 90s, which i know is later in the game to many of you), I had to figure out how to build a computer. How a modem worked. How to use a terminal. The difference between the different types of modem protocols. Then uncover awesome local boards. A short time later, I had to learn about the various BBS hosting software, telephony, semaphores and doorgames, some minor coding, FIDOnet and plenty of other things, just to setup a little BBS and communicate with other people around the world.
Getting the technology up and running then allowed me to explore a whole world in which I could create and learn and investigate.
What does someone that same age, today, do with the technology? They blab about themselves on Facebook and Twitter and wank off on instant messaging. While there are still plenty of creators and learners and doers, the almost complete majority does nothing but use it as a consumption device. As a toy. As a brain-numbing facilitator.
I always thought that was sad, since I was able to be involved in the tail end of the era when you could almost guarantee that anyone who had a computer also knew a lot *about* that computer. And computers in general. And wanted to know more.
Military Intelligence!
Dilbert is a corporate tool intended to placate all of the cubicle-drones because they can have a chuckle and identify with him and think "well, gosh, things aren't so bad!" and move on with the status-quo.
Lex Luthor has always been a hero. He is nearly the only person on earth making it his life's duty to fight off the alien from another planet with super powers that imposes his will on our world and is a threat to us all.
More than Duke Nukem or anything else I've heard referenced recently, none have blasted me back to my youth more than hearing the words "kermit" and "zmodem". Right around the same time that you could go down to the local Hacker Shack (later renamed, due to conflicts with Radio Shack) and thumb through thousands of 5.25" floppies organized like mini-albums and you'd pay a buck just for a floppy with a looping black and white video you could watch on your grainy CGA.
God damn, I miss those days. I'm glad the internet is widespread and aiding tens of millions of people in their life on a daily basis, but there was something delightful about being part of a tiny group of weirdos connecting to each other with ATA commands and some guy's hobby board.
This brings a whole new meaning to "pants check".
. . . Of money. A solid foundation of money.
Can the government give me some gold stars on the chart on the back of the classroom door every time I do something nice or choose not to do something bad? Maybe you want to reward me for praying or choosing not to play violent videogames? Maybe give me two gold stars every time I go a month without a sick day? Yay!
Notice that in the last big dashboard update, they got rid of the ability to rate full games? If you bought a game, stuck it in, played it and hated it, you could rate it out of five stars and it would display an average score on any game you looked at through the dashboard.
They conveniently removed that and I've never heard it discussed in the months, since.
First TI popularizes auto-tune and now he enters the power management technology industry with an almost seven billion dollar buyout? This guy is AMAZING!
I haven't received a single one, even though I've done business with some of those companies that were affected.