That same signal has the potential to harm electronic media. Make sure you're not carrying any credit cards when you walk through that door or you REALLY won't have to worry about somebody tracking your purchases.
that these tags are going on the SHIPPING CONTAINERS! Not actual shelf-product.
They're not going on the actual products today. I'm not worried about what they're gonna do tomorrow or next week, I'm worried about what will happen five years from now when they decide to put it on every individual item, because you know it's gonna happen eventually. The technology's just too useful, and frankly I don't blame them for wanting to use it. I say pass the laws now before the problems get here. Make sure we let them know (with laws) what's kosher and what's not before they even start running with it. Better to prevent a problem than to clean up after it.
Fair enough. Then I'm sure you wouldn't mind driving an hour and a half to the closest Wal-Mart when the one in your town is done starving out the other businesses and decides to close down itself. I like my local community local, simply because it saves me money on gas.
I wish I could avoid it. K-Mart is five minutes away from my house, while Wal-Mart is 15. I'd really really love to go there instead, but whenever I do I'm faced with empty shelves and a less varied selection. Many times have I gone in there, only to come out empty handed and have to head to Wal-Mart yet again. I hate Wal-Mart for many reasons (one of which is I happened to work there for two summers), but the sad truth is that it's the best option. Sometimes it's the only option. I'm dreading the day that K-Mart will close shop, because then you know the Wal-Mart in town will close up, too, forcing me to go even farther to make my purchases. We're riding the rollercoaster down that spiral, but it's too late to get off without losing a limb.:P
I "get" the idea of self-sacrifice, thus my suggestion of buying her land. Or even something useful, like a collection of her 1000 favorite DVDs. Or a car.
There's something about having a tangible thing on your hand that you can wave around at people to say "look, I'm engaged!" It's a lot harder to bring a collection of 1000 DVDs to your parents house in order to show them you're gonna get hitched.;)
I did like the "mounting a rock from the land you bought" idea, though. That's unique and cool, along with being tangible.:)
The equating of "very expensive rock" with "love" has always stumped me. I'd have to rate it as one of the greatest PR scams ever pulled.
Agreed. Although, like a sibling post said, if I guy gave me a lower-quality fake (like cubic zirconia) diamond ring then I'd be a tad insulted. Not because it's not a diamond, but because it's a fake diamond, which symbolically doesn't speak well for the engagement. That being said, some of the manufactured diamonds I've heard about lately that are virtually indistinguisable from mined diamonds would be perfectly fine for me. They may be man-made, but those sound like "real" diamonds to me. Who cares if they're made in a lab? Who cares if they're cheaper? I don't need a guy to break himself trying to buy me an engagement ring. If he really wants to get me a diamond and he can save a ton of money by buying a man-made one, then go for it. Though, truth to be told, I'd rather not have a diamond. The tradition is artificial, diamond's aren't nearly as rare as the companies would have us believe, and frankly, there are lots of other gems out there that I think are far prettier. I'm a fan of color myself. One of my aunts has a sapphire engagement ring. Another one has an unpolished emerald (it looks like jade). I think those are tons prettier than my mom's plain ol' diamond (but I ain't tellin' her that...)
Guys, if your gal's educated and fairly inteligent she'll probably have no problem if you give her something other than a diamond. (Note the word "probably"... I can only speak for myself and if you don't wanna take that risk of royally pissing her off, I don't blame you.;) )
Well, this gamer, while not waiting with baited breath for prices to drop (I'm getting along just fine for now with my PC games), will actually consider buying a PS2 if the price goes down. The PS2 has always been the console I knew I would buy if I were going to buy one, but it's always been just too expensive. Now while I won't wait for it to go all the way down to $25 (like a sibling post mentioned), the chances of me buying one will increase greatly if it falls below the $150 range. So there's at least one more potential PS2 waiting to be sold.;)
Mount Ararat is named in the Bible as the resting place of the Ark. That section of the Bible was written more than 2000 years ago. Scientific principles absolutely demand that someone must go up there and search for it.
No, scientific principles demand no such thing. There is no law of nature to be proven or disproven. No fundemental theorem to examine. Nothing scientific at all.
Maybe nothing scientific makes folks want to find the ark, but something very human does: curiosity. It's a fact of our species that we have to know everything. This is why science exists in the first place. If no one had this burning desire to know why, to know the truth, then we wouldn't have science at all. So science may not dictate that we go up there and try to find the ark, but the root of science does. I don't neccesarily believe anything is up there (or even if it is, that it proves the Bible is truth), but I say "go for it."
It's interesting that you only adress the consequences of sucess. Your only comment on possible failure is "well, they'll just try again".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there have been quite a few scientific experiments where the answers come back "inconclusive." What do the scientists usually say? "Well, we'll just try again." Not finding anything doesn't mean failure unless they've systematically searched the entire mountain, and that's gonna take a lot more than a few people on one expedition.
I believe there is geological evidence that there was a major flood around Mesopotamia and the Mediteranian ocean at about the time Noah could have lived. Whether it was high enough to reach the top of a mountain or whether a man gathered two of each animal and built a boat is debatable, but the fact that *a* flood happened isn't that unreasonable. I remember when I was little I was enamored with Greco/Roman myths and I had a book full of them. One was about a great flood where the gods took one man and one woman and put them on top of a mountain so they'd be the only survivors. Sounded a little too coincidental to me, even as a little kid, and Greece ain't that far from Mesopotamia.
You can't "lose a zero" from the figure of 8,000 BC because that date is not actually written in the Bible, it was figured out by some priests who decided to add together all the "he begot him who begot her who begot..." with their ages to go all the way back to Adam and Eve. You can go back and do the calculations yourself if you want to. I don't think 8,000 BC is the right number, but whatever number it is has to be accurate because it's been checked and re-checked.
Not to say it's true. Just that there's no possibility of losing an order of magnitude.
First of all, I don't personally know anyone who doesn't readily understand that news on cnn.com comes from CNN, not from inside their computer, any more than they'd think that news on TV originates inside their television.
Ohhh, you'd be surprised what people will believe is going on inside of their computers. I'm sure you've all heard the coffee cup holder story. That really does happen. I know a help-desk person who actually had a man bring in his computer where the CD-ROM was bent and coffee-stained. Never underestimate stupid people, they will astound you every time.
Not so surprising. I think the rationale is along the lines of "This machine has to spew out a lot of money at SOME point in its existence. So the longer I stay with this one, the more my odds go up that I'll be the one who pulls the lever at the right time." They feel that if they go around to other machines, they'll catch them at different points in their lives and have lower risk of winning.
People who sit at the same slot machine all day are like rats in a Skinner box. Once the rat has learned to push the lever (because he gets a food pelet each time he does it), he can actually learn to keep pressing it even if it stops putting out food. There's a certain ratio of successes to failures that'll keep reinforcing the lever-push action. That same ratio is often programmed into slot machines. If every x times the player gets a win (even if it's only a few coins), then the lever-pull action is still being reinforced as if there had been a win each time.
The article I read was trying to explain the type of near-death experiences that deal with seeing your own body (out of body experience) and being able to describe things that happened or were said while they were clinically dead. They weren't talking about the tunnels and lost loved ones. One person was able to recal the exact words of a nearby nurse that were spoken while he was "dead". Of course, none of these things have been scientifically confirmed (or denied).
Oh, sorry, my bad then. I had assumed that when somebody was clinically dead (then later revived) that it could be based on brain-waves rather than just a pulse. Don't remember where I read that info, but if it's impossible to come back from brain-death then the near-death experiences are more explainable as random brain firings or other such "normal" experiences.
We, The People may not survive, but the Earth will be here for eons to come.
I once heard somebody say that we can't kill the earth, but we can piss it off enough that it may just decide to shrug us off.
But yes, most "tree huggers" do realize this, and if you ask me it makes their cause all the more important. If we're not trying to "save the planet" for our own survival, why the hell would we bother?
Yes, some Native American tribes believe that everything has a "soul," even grass and rocks.
Look up the thalamus, it evolved in vertabrates and is likely where this "spark of consciousness" is.
There's a little known theory that the "spark of consciousness" actually resides in all the cells, not just a part of the brain. This would help explain near-death experiences where the person who is clinically brain-dead can have experiences during this dead period. Note that this is simply a theory and there have been no efforts to prove it (that I am aware of), nor has it been proven that people can actually experience anything while brain-dead.
The reason why games usually make terrible movies is pretty obvious. It's because the movies are usually made out of high-profile action games - to cash in on the name, as is standard practise in Hollywood.
These kinds of games are, of course, plot-free zones. Hence, the movie makers fill the void in an ad-hoc fashion, usually with horrible results.
Exactly. The reason games based on movies suck is the same reason why movies based on other movies suck (usually called "sequels"). The only reason they are made is to try and suck more money out of the franchise. They know that most people who see the movie are already fans and they will be going to see the name alone, so the Hollywood folks put as little money into it as possible because they're already guaranteed a certain amount of sales.
You can make a good movie out of anything if you do it right. I mean, with enough cash and creativity you could even make Slashdot into a movie! It just takes effort, and effort is usually too expensive to waste on something you know is gonna make money anyway.
The plots of many computer games are worthy of movies, but the problem is that the plot's already been done. Making a movie with the exact same plot as the game it's based on might make some cash with those unfamiliar with the franchise, but it'll be boring to those who've already heard that plot before (once again, though, if you do it really well then you might be able to get away with it). But if you simply take the setting or the "unique" elements of the game then you're forced to come up with a good plot, and that's more effort that the suits aren't willing to pay for.
You can make a good movie out of a good game (or even a game that sucked major ass), it just needs to have the same effort and/or genius put into it that was put into, say, LotR or the original Matrix, and that's probably not gonna happen unless somebody wants to take a risk.
Anyone who saw Clue in the original theaters probably figured this out, but those of us who only saw it on video would have no way of knowing unless we were told.
When the movie played in the theaters they only showed one of the three possible endings. They gave no indication that there were other endings, but a different ending was shown at different times/theaters. So if you wanted to talk about the movie with somebody who'd seen it at a different theater you were in for quite a confusing conversation.;)
resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
Just FYI, the Matrix was orignally concieved as a trilogy. The sequels weren't afterthoughts to try and eek out more money, but were actually the point of the whole thing. The W-brothers wanted to do a superhero/comic book type story, and the original Matrix was just the story of how he got his powers. The last two movies were supposed to be the meat of the story. The only way Matrix is different from LoTR in that respect is that the first movie was shot separately because they weren't gonna take the risk of making all three if the first bombed. If the W-brothers had had enough cash they would've made all three movies at one go, just like LotR.
Though, yes, I do agree that the last two movies wouldn't have done well at all if it wasn't for the smashing success of the first movie.
Perhaps YOUR dealer doesn't bargin. Saturn has no such company policy. The price of the vehicle is entirely at the dealer's discresion.
Hmm, well they made it seem that it was company policy. The dealer set the price, yes, but I thought it was Saturn's policy not to bargain with that price.
Furthermore GM PAYS the dealer to keep the vehicles in stock (about 3% of the base MSRP). So if you buy the car as soon as it hits the lot, the dealer pockes the extra cash
Well, I bought the 2003 model instead of the 2004, so it was probably sitting there for quite a while.
And hey, if you wanna bargain, that's your choice. Little passive me who's never bought a car before probably would've been analy raped if I had tried to bargain for a car anyway. I didn't think it was an unreasonable price and I had a lot less stress and worrying afterwards about whether I had gotten the best deal I could.
Slashdot Mirror
That same signal has the potential to harm electronic media. Make sure you're not carrying any credit cards when you walk through that door or you REALLY won't have to worry about somebody tracking your purchases.
that these tags are going on the SHIPPING CONTAINERS! Not actual shelf-product.
They're not going on the actual products today. I'm not worried about what they're gonna do tomorrow or next week, I'm worried about what will happen five years from now when they decide to put it on every individual item, because you know it's gonna happen eventually. The technology's just too useful, and frankly I don't blame them for wanting to use it. I say pass the laws now before the problems get here. Make sure we let them know (with laws) what's kosher and what's not before they even start running with it. Better to prevent a problem than to clean up after it.
My local community is the world.
Fair enough. Then I'm sure you wouldn't mind driving an hour and a half to the closest Wal-Mart when the one in your town is done starving out the other businesses and decides to close down itself. I like my local community local, simply because it saves me money on gas.
Don't shop at Wal-Mart.
I wish I could avoid it. K-Mart is five minutes away from my house, while Wal-Mart is 15. I'd really really love to go there instead, but whenever I do I'm faced with empty shelves and a less varied selection. Many times have I gone in there, only to come out empty handed and have to head to Wal-Mart yet again. I hate Wal-Mart for many reasons (one of which is I happened to work there for two summers), but the sad truth is that it's the best option. Sometimes it's the only option. I'm dreading the day that K-Mart will close shop, because then you know the Wal-Mart in town will close up, too, forcing me to go even farther to make my purchases. We're riding the rollercoaster down that spiral, but it's too late to get off without losing a limb.You probably read this article from Wired.
I "get" the idea of self-sacrifice, thus my suggestion of buying her land. Or even something useful, like a collection of her 1000 favorite DVDs. Or a car.
There's something about having a tangible thing on your hand that you can wave around at people to say "look, I'm engaged!" It's a lot harder to bring a collection of 1000 DVDs to your parents house in order to show them you're gonna get hitched. ;)
I did like the "mounting a rock from the land you bought" idea, though. That's unique and cool, along with being tangible. :)
The equating of "very expensive rock" with "love" has always stumped me. I'd have to rate it as one of the greatest PR scams ever pulled.
Agreed. Although, like a sibling post said, if I guy gave me a lower-quality fake (like cubic zirconia) diamond ring then I'd be a tad insulted. Not because it's not a diamond, but because it's a fake diamond, which symbolically doesn't speak well for the engagement. That being said, some of the manufactured diamonds I've heard about lately that are virtually indistinguisable from mined diamonds would be perfectly fine for me. They may be man-made, but those sound like "real" diamonds to me. Who cares if they're made in a lab? Who cares if they're cheaper? I don't need a guy to break himself trying to buy me an engagement ring. If he really wants to get me a diamond and he can save a ton of money by buying a man-made one, then go for it. Though, truth to be told, I'd rather not have a diamond. The tradition is artificial, diamond's aren't nearly as rare as the companies would have us believe, and frankly, there are lots of other gems out there that I think are far prettier. I'm a fan of color myself. One of my aunts has a sapphire engagement ring. Another one has an unpolished emerald (it looks like jade). I think those are tons prettier than my mom's plain ol' diamond (but I ain't tellin' her that...)
Guys, if your gal's educated and fairly inteligent she'll probably have no problem if you give her something other than a diamond. (Note the word "probably"... I can only speak for myself and if you don't wanna take that risk of royally pissing her off, I don't blame you. ;) )
OMG, if it wasn't for the fact that she doesn't know Slashdot exists I would've sworn that AC was my sister.
Well, this gamer, while not waiting with baited breath for prices to drop (I'm getting along just fine for now with my PC games), will actually consider buying a PS2 if the price goes down. The PS2 has always been the console I knew I would buy if I were going to buy one, but it's always been just too expensive. Now while I won't wait for it to go all the way down to $25 (like a sibling post mentioned), the chances of me buying one will increase greatly if it falls below the $150 range. So there's at least one more potential PS2 waiting to be sold. ;)
Maybe nothing scientific makes folks want to find the ark, but something very human does: curiosity. It's a fact of our species that we have to know everything. This is why science exists in the first place. If no one had this burning desire to know why, to know the truth, then we wouldn't have science at all. So science may not dictate that we go up there and try to find the ark, but the root of science does. I don't neccesarily believe anything is up there (or even if it is, that it proves the Bible is truth), but I say "go for it."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but there have been quite a few scientific experiments where the answers come back "inconclusive." What do the scientists usually say? "Well, we'll just try again." Not finding anything doesn't mean failure unless they've systematically searched the entire mountain, and that's gonna take a lot more than a few people on one expedition.
I believe there is geological evidence that there was a major flood around Mesopotamia and the Mediteranian ocean at about the time Noah could have lived. Whether it was high enough to reach the top of a mountain or whether a man gathered two of each animal and built a boat is debatable, but the fact that *a* flood happened isn't that unreasonable. I remember when I was little I was enamored with Greco/Roman myths and I had a book full of them. One was about a great flood where the gods took one man and one woman and put them on top of a mountain so they'd be the only survivors. Sounded a little too coincidental to me, even as a little kid, and Greece ain't that far from Mesopotamia.
You can't "lose a zero" from the figure of 8,000 BC because that date is not actually written in the Bible, it was figured out by some priests who decided to add together all the "he begot him who begot her who begot..." with their ages to go all the way back to Adam and Eve. You can go back and do the calculations yourself if you want to. I don't think 8,000 BC is the right number, but whatever number it is has to be accurate because it's been checked and re-checked.
Not to say it's true. Just that there's no possibility of losing an order of magnitude.
First of all, I don't personally know anyone who doesn't readily understand that news on cnn.com comes from CNN, not from inside their computer, any more than they'd think that news on TV originates inside their television.
Ohhh, you'd be surprised what people will believe is going on inside of their computers. I'm sure you've all heard the coffee cup holder story. That really does happen. I know a help-desk person who actually had a man bring in his computer where the CD-ROM was bent and coffee-stained. Never underestimate stupid people, they will astound you every time.
Not so surprising. I think the rationale is along the lines of "This machine has to spew out a lot of money at SOME point in its existence. So the longer I stay with this one, the more my odds go up that I'll be the one who pulls the lever at the right time." They feel that if they go around to other machines, they'll catch them at different points in their lives and have lower risk of winning.
People who sit at the same slot machine all day are like rats in a Skinner box. Once the rat has learned to push the lever (because he gets a food pelet each time he does it), he can actually learn to keep pressing it even if it stops putting out food. There's a certain ratio of successes to failures that'll keep reinforcing the lever-push action. That same ratio is often programmed into slot machines. If every x times the player gets a win (even if it's only a few coins), then the lever-pull action is still being reinforced as if there had been a win each time.
The article I read was trying to explain the type of near-death experiences that deal with seeing your own body (out of body experience) and being able to describe things that happened or were said while they were clinically dead. They weren't talking about the tunnels and lost loved ones. One person was able to recal the exact words of a nearby nurse that were spoken while he was "dead". Of course, none of these things have been scientifically confirmed (or denied).
Oh, sorry, my bad then. I had assumed that when somebody was clinically dead (then later revived) that it could be based on brain-waves rather than just a pulse. Don't remember where I read that info, but if it's impossible to come back from brain-death then the near-death experiences are more explainable as random brain firings or other such "normal" experiences.
Any life arising from the hand of man is de facto synthetic, IMHO.
Well, I guess then you'd consider all babies to be "synthetic." Oh, wait, no that's not a man's hand that they arise from, I suppose.
Just think about what *one* lab escaped 'pregnant' self replicating lifeform could do to our ecology.
I think you're getting "synthetic life" mixed up with "tribbles." ;)
We, The People may not survive, but the Earth will be here for eons to come.
I once heard somebody say that we can't kill the earth, but we can piss it off enough that it may just decide to shrug us off.
But yes, most "tree huggers" do realize this, and if you ask me it makes their cause all the more important. If we're not trying to "save the planet" for our own survival, why the hell would we bother?
Does anyone actually argue that grass has a soul?
Yes, some Native American tribes believe that everything has a "soul," even grass and rocks.
Look up the thalamus, it evolved in vertabrates and is likely where this "spark of consciousness" is.
There's a little known theory that the "spark of consciousness" actually resides in all the cells, not just a part of the brain. This would help explain near-death experiences where the person who is clinically brain-dead can have experiences during this dead period. Note that this is simply a theory and there have been no efforts to prove it (that I am aware of), nor has it been proven that people can actually experience anything while brain-dead.
The reason why games usually make terrible movies is pretty obvious. It's because the movies are usually made out of high-profile action games - to cash in on the name, as is standard practise in Hollywood.
These kinds of games are, of course, plot-free zones. Hence, the movie makers fill the void in an ad-hoc fashion, usually with horrible results.
Exactly. The reason games based on movies suck is the same reason why movies based on other movies suck (usually called "sequels"). The only reason they are made is to try and suck more money out of the franchise. They know that most people who see the movie are already fans and they will be going to see the name alone, so the Hollywood folks put as little money into it as possible because they're already guaranteed a certain amount of sales.
You can make a good movie out of anything if you do it right. I mean, with enough cash and creativity you could even make Slashdot into a movie! It just takes effort, and effort is usually too expensive to waste on something you know is gonna make money anyway.
The plots of many computer games are worthy of movies, but the problem is that the plot's already been done. Making a movie with the exact same plot as the game it's based on might make some cash with those unfamiliar with the franchise, but it'll be boring to those who've already heard that plot before (once again, though, if you do it really well then you might be able to get away with it). But if you simply take the setting or the "unique" elements of the game then you're forced to come up with a good plot, and that's more effort that the suits aren't willing to pay for.
You can make a good movie out of a good game (or even a game that sucked major ass), it just needs to have the same effort and/or genius put into it that was put into, say, LotR or the original Matrix, and that's probably not gonna happen unless somebody wants to take a risk.
Another Fun Fact:
;)
Anyone who saw Clue in the original theaters probably figured this out, but those of us who only saw it on video would have no way of knowing unless we were told.
When the movie played in the theaters they only showed one of the three possible endings. They gave no indication that there were other endings, but a different ending was shown at different times/theaters. So if you wanted to talk about the movie with somebody who'd seen it at a different theater you were in for quite a confusing conversation.
TMNT wasn't based on a game though... was it?
resist at all costs the temptation to make film sequels. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Matrix).
Just FYI, the Matrix was orignally concieved as a trilogy. The sequels weren't afterthoughts to try and eek out more money, but were actually the point of the whole thing. The W-brothers wanted to do a superhero/comic book type story, and the original Matrix was just the story of how he got his powers. The last two movies were supposed to be the meat of the story. The only way Matrix is different from LoTR in that respect is that the first movie was shot separately because they weren't gonna take the risk of making all three if the first bombed. If the W-brothers had had enough cash they would've made all three movies at one go, just like LotR.
Though, yes, I do agree that the last two movies wouldn't have done well at all if it wasn't for the smashing success of the first movie.
Perhaps YOUR dealer doesn't bargin. Saturn has no such company policy. The price of the vehicle is entirely at the dealer's discresion.
Hmm, well they made it seem that it was company policy. The dealer set the price, yes, but I thought it was Saturn's policy not to bargain with that price.
Furthermore GM PAYS the dealer to keep the vehicles in stock (about 3% of the base MSRP). So if you buy the car as soon as it hits the lot, the dealer pockes the extra cash
Well, I bought the 2003 model instead of the 2004, so it was probably sitting there for quite a while.
And hey, if you wanna bargain, that's your choice. Little passive me who's never bought a car before probably would've been analy raped if I had tried to bargain for a car anyway. I didn't think it was an unreasonable price and I had a lot less stress and worrying afterwards about whether I had gotten the best deal I could.