Why can't they just reduce the number of pickups at these boxes to save money? They've identified which boxes are underused, but that doesn't mean that in 10 years the box will still be so. Couldn't they just make those boxes like a M-W-F or M-Th pickups, so that the post office saves money by not servicing it as often, and people still have box access for routine mail, and should in the future the box become more popular, they can easily ramp up service?
The marshalls should just put everyone under the age of 5 on the "no fly" list. Marshall's meet their quota, and the flight is much more enjoyable for everyone else. Everybody wins.
A question I've always wondered is why is this a Nigerian scam predominantly? Why aren't people from Liberia or Gabon or Cameroon pulling these scams. Or at least pretend to be from these other countries, so that people may think "Oh, it's not from Nigeria, it must be ligit".
How do you (and other voice actors) go about fine tuning the voices you use? The voice of the professor in the first few episodes of futurama is somewhat different than the voice that the professor had for most of the series. I imagine there was similar tweaking of other characters as well, but they aren't as noticiable to an untrained listner such as I. How do you decide what kind of tweaking is needed in the voices as a series progresses? Is it personal preference, or are you directed to change the voice based on viewer feedback?
If this is the first instance of you having a panic attack like this without ever having been a "worried" person in the past, then you want to make sure you don't have a diagnosable problem. Personality changes generally aren't so sudden without an underlying pathological condition.
The synergy can come from selling pre-grouped meals. Imagin if in one click you can order the "Spaghetti and Meatball Dinner" combo, which comes with a box of spaghetti, jar of sauce, pound of hamburger, mushrooms, onions, loaf of italian bread, bag-o-salad, and italian pastries. So now instead of people doing piecemeal shopping, they're just going "Monday (click), Tuesday (click), Wednesday (click)" etc.
DM - As you enter the dimly lit room, you see a creature lurking in the corner, laughing in the corner. As you approach it, things to dark for a second and then the entire room is illuminated with a bright azure light. You have encountered - A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!
Fighter - I punch the the screen with my fist.
Rogue - I sneak around back and attempt to unplug it.
Wizard - I cast "Bigby's Typing Hands" to press Ctrl-Alt-Del
In regards to the password system on Metroid, the battery backed save did preceed it by a good 6 months. The Famicon version of Metroid had a battery save, and it was only the American release that utilized the password system.
Lets face it, nobody would have ever finished the original Zelda if you had to start from the beginning everytime. Saving is what made games evolve from 3-6 hours of maximum gameplay to the massive sprawling indepth masterpieces we know today. Playing a game over and over and over so that you're perfectly adept at every nook and cranny is for the kids who have hours to spend on it, and is frustrating as hell (Ninja Gaiden I through III, I'm looking in your direction). The older crowd doesn't have the patience or the time for that kind of thing. Saving has made replayability an option, rather than a requirement.
The same argument also applies the natural extension of saving, which is unlimited continues.
Starfleet commanders repeatedly order civilians around
In time of emergency or extenuating circumstances, this can be necessary. In the real world it's illegal to disobey the instructions of a police officer, and I presume the same law applies to obeying military officers too.
The only civilian space transport ever shown is on federation vehicles, at the discretion of the federation. No federation civilian-owned space (or even stratospheric) vehicles are portrayed.
In DS9, Kasidy Yates (Sisko's girlfriend/wife) was a civilian freighter captain who at one point was a convey leison officer between a convoy of civilian freighters and starfleet. In TNG, when Worf's mother brought Alexander to stay with him on the Enterprise, she mentioned how she got on a transport to get there. It is unlikely that the wife of a retired enlisted cheif petty officer would be given privlidges to use starfleet vessels for personal travel across the galaxy, so it was likely a civilian or commercial transport.
No private corporations are ever shown
In the TNG episode "Family", Picard was asked by his friend Louis to leave Starfleet and join a civilian project for terraforming the ocean floor. Picard's family also owns a vinyard. Sisko's father owns a restaurant. Ezri Dax's family owns some kind of mining operation.
Contrary to your assertion, I don't believe any election is ever portrayed.
During the changling crisis on earth, the Federation president wishes he had never entered his name onto the ballot for the office.
No civilian media organizations are ever shown
There were several mentions of a "Federation News Service" during DS9, something I imagine would be analogous to the AP.
No legal civilian energy weapons are ever shown (in fact, civilians appear not even to be allowed to have blades!) - yet starfleet personnel are rarely without a powerful sidearm
Well, first off the Star Trek universe is supposed to be idealic where civilians didn't need to be armed. However, Guinan did own a phaser rifle of some kind. About owning blades, if you're refering to Worf disarming Okana in TNG episode "The Outrageous Okona", it seems a resonable precaution to not allow armed civilians to roam around a starfleet vessel.
There appears to be no such thing as privacy, except for high-ranking Starfleet officers. The federation appears to have massive databases containing all known information on everyone, used liberally by Starfleet.
Starfleet is a branch of the government, so it makes sense that they'd have access to government data banks. If the FBI wanted to to a background check on you, how much information do you think they could dig up in various databases? Hell, how much information do you think you could dig up about a person on the internet?
Actual buying and selling appear to be officially prohibited (Picard didn't even understand the concept of "investment"!), reducing trade to barter and trading bars of latinum on the black market
The economy of the federation is a matter of protracted discussion, but doesn't exclude the possibility of some kind of modified socialism that actually works. Just because we can't think of how it could work, doesn't mean it can't (Kinda like Warp Drive).
In at least one case, a civilian is tried by a court with a Starfleet judge!
You'll need to be more specific of where that happened. However, if a person commited a criminal act against the military or government, I'm sure there's some kind of legal precident where they're tried in a military tribunal as an enemy combatant or something along those lines.
The most prestigious jobs in the federation appear to be starfleet offices
Dr. Bashir talked about how he was offered a position in a civilian hospital in Paris by his girlfriend's father.
I can't think of examples right now, but the point is that there is sufficient evidence that the Federation is not a military dictatorship.
Spock had the rank of captain from Star Trek II on, and was captain of the Enterprise, until Kirk took over during the Genesis affair. In the DS9 episode "Take me out to the holosuite", the captain of the U.S.S. T'Kumbra was vulcan, as was his entire crew. If you're like most people, I take it you stopped watching Enterprise because of the theme song or the font of the ending credits or something, and missed a good twist in the Vulcan government, where they switched from controlling high command to the more religious sect that was prominant in TOS and beyond. Plus, you have to remember that many planets in the federation have their own personal security forces in addition to federation forces, just like every state has their own police force in addition to the national armed forces. It makes sense that most vulcans who wanted to serve in the military would choose their own planetary defence force rather than starfleet which would consist of longer term deployments to different regions of space, just like there are people who prefer local police work to joining the marines. As for why humans make up most of starfleet, leaving aside how much cheaper it is to produce a show that doesn't require dozens of extras in makeup in a weekly syndicated show, it shows that humans are special in the Star Trek universe, and they have an explorer creedo mixed with a unique altruistic spirit, which is why they were the only species capable of uniting the vulcans, andorians, and tellarites into a united coalition.
I'd like to hear your explanation of that statement. The Federation is likely a government unlike one we have ever seen before, but is probably closer to a republic democracy than anything else. The president and the council of the federation seem to be elected by some means. Starfleet is the military and scientific branch of the Federation (like rolling the marines and NASA into one branch). Starfleet is definately under the control of the Federation, so much so that Starfleet has even attempted a coup on ocasion (http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/DS9/ episode/68250.html). We've seen federation life through a very limited perspective, through life on Starfleet vessels and stations. Trying to understand the intricacies of federation politics from watching Star Trek episodes would be like an alien trying to understand the US government by watching "JAG".
Viagara was an accident. They were testing phosphodiesterase inhibitors as a therapy for keeping heart vessels open. It didn't work so well, but they discovered the unexpected side effect of opening vessels in the penis when the subjects were reluctant to return their unused pills.
Solar powered airplanes make a lot of sense, since they fly above the cloud layer. During a day flight, they're exposed to a lot of sun. If plane could use this energy to fly, it could cut down on the amount of fuel required to fly. Obviously you'd carry a full fuel load because you don't want to be caught in a bind if the solar cells fail, but imagine the savings if you could reduce fuel consumption by something like 30% during day flights.
This technology will be a real boon for fickle New York City baseball fans at the Subway Series in the future (they can simply flip a switch to change from a Mets to a Yankees jersey.
Anyone who needs a jersey to switch from Yankees to the Mets doesn't deserve either.
I used to drink the regular stuff too, I thought diet tasted too chemical, and it didn't have a good flavor. Then I went home from college for summer, and my parents had decided to switch to diet soda, and as such that's all the soda there was in the house. I could have bought regular if I wanted, but I decided that drinking the soda my folks bought was good enough rather than spending my own money on more soda. Three months later when I returned to college, I had found that I lost all taste for the regular stuff. Regular mountain dew tasted like drinking a bottle of pancake syrup at that point, it was just too sugary. I also found it got me to enjoy other products with sugar substitute. I now put splenda in my coffee, and low calorie ice cream. I'd suggest just buckling down and drink only diet soda for a month, and you may just get to liking it.
MagicDude:... so I said that's no cell phone, it's a lobster.
Bluto: Arrgh, your jokes suck, and I'm taking your woman.
MagicBabe: Help me MagicDude. Heeeeeeeelllllp
(Cue Popeye Music)
(Reach inside shirt, pull out beer can. Squeeze contents into air and drink in one gulp).
MagicDude: Time to open up a Beowolf Cluster of Pain on your butt.
We talk about RFID now because it's the only current technology we have developed which will function the way we want it to, and work consistantly. Give it 10 or 20 years though, and at that point we might have gattaca-esque technology which will make RFID obsolete. Would we need these tags if we had a device the size of a credit card which could read your DNA in under a second? Put that on your car to unlock it, and you don't need an implanted chip. Jumping on RFID chips now is probably akin to jumping on the 8-track bandwagon too early, and then getting burned by it later when casettes suddenly take off.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't they just reduce the number of pickups at these boxes to save money? They've identified which boxes are underused, but that doesn't mean that in 10 years the box will still be so. Couldn't they just make those boxes like a M-W-F or M-Th pickups, so that the post office saves money by not servicing it as often, and people still have box access for routine mail, and should in the future the box become more popular, they can easily ramp up service?
Then ... who did I give my $100 to?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2005/20050826h. jpg
Hail Satan
The marshalls should just put everyone under the age of 5 on the "no fly" list. Marshall's meet their quota, and the flight is much more enjoyable for everyone else. Everybody wins.
The grumpy gamer ended his interview by shaking his fist and yelling "You damn kids! Get of my LAN!!"
Nature disguises weak products as Beta
http://lazybastard.ehuna.org/archives/000032.html
A question I've always wondered is why is this a Nigerian scam predominantly? Why aren't people from Liberia or Gabon or Cameroon pulling these scams. Or at least pretend to be from these other countries, so that people may think "Oh, it's not from Nigeria, it must be ligit".
How do you (and other voice actors) go about fine tuning the voices you use? The voice of the professor in the first few episodes of futurama is somewhat different than the voice that the professor had for most of the series. I imagine there was similar tweaking of other characters as well, but they aren't as noticiable to an untrained listner such as I. How do you decide what kind of tweaking is needed in the voices as a series progresses? Is it personal preference, or are you directed to change the voice based on viewer feedback?
If this is the first instance of you having a panic attack like this without ever having been a "worried" person in the past, then you want to make sure you don't have a diagnosable problem. Personality changes generally aren't so sudden without an underlying pathological condition.
The synergy can come from selling pre-grouped meals. Imagin if in one click you can order the "Spaghetti and Meatball Dinner" combo, which comes with a box of spaghetti, jar of sauce, pound of hamburger, mushrooms, onions, loaf of italian bread, bag-o-salad, and italian pastries. So now instead of people doing piecemeal shopping, they're just going "Monday (click), Tuesday (click), Wednesday (click)" etc.
DM - As you enter the dimly lit room, you see a creature lurking in the corner, laughing in the corner. As you approach it, things to dark for a second and then the entire room is illuminated with a bright azure light. You have encountered - A BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!
Fighter - I punch the the screen with my fist.
Rogue - I sneak around back and attempt to unplug it.
Wizard - I cast "Bigby's Typing Hands" to press Ctrl-Alt-Del
Cleric - I cast "curse" on Bill Gates
Sorceress - I summon Tech Support
Castlevania didn't have air control in a jump, and it most definately did not suck.
In regards to the password system on Metroid, the battery backed save did preceed it by a good 6 months. The Famicon version of Metroid had a battery save, and it was only the American release that utilized the password system.
_ System
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metroid#Famicom_Disk
I'll tell you what changed games - Saving
Lets face it, nobody would have ever finished the original Zelda if you had to start from the beginning everytime. Saving is what made games evolve from 3-6 hours of maximum gameplay to the massive sprawling indepth masterpieces we know today. Playing a game over and over and over so that you're perfectly adept at every nook and cranny is for the kids who have hours to spend on it, and is frustrating as hell (Ninja Gaiden I through III, I'm looking in your direction). The older crowd doesn't have the patience or the time for that kind of thing. Saving has made replayability an option, rather than a requirement.
The same argument also applies the natural extension of saving, which is unlimited continues.
Bring on Bass Hero.
Oh who am I kidding? Bass is the Luigi of Rock & Roll.
Starfleet commanders repeatedly order civilians around
In time of emergency or extenuating circumstances, this can be necessary. In the real world it's illegal to disobey the instructions of a police officer, and I presume the same law applies to obeying military officers too.
The only civilian space transport ever shown is on federation vehicles, at the discretion of the federation. No federation civilian-owned space (or even stratospheric) vehicles are portrayed.
In DS9, Kasidy Yates (Sisko's girlfriend/wife) was a civilian freighter captain who at one point was a convey leison officer between a convoy of civilian freighters and starfleet. In TNG, when Worf's mother brought Alexander to stay with him on the Enterprise, she mentioned how she got on a transport to get there. It is unlikely that the wife of a retired enlisted cheif petty officer would be given privlidges to use starfleet vessels for personal travel across the galaxy, so it was likely a civilian or commercial transport.
No private corporations are ever shown
In the TNG episode "Family", Picard was asked by his friend Louis to leave Starfleet and join a civilian project for terraforming the ocean floor. Picard's family also owns a vinyard. Sisko's father owns a restaurant. Ezri Dax's family owns some kind of mining operation.
Contrary to your assertion, I don't believe any election is ever portrayed.
During the changling crisis on earth, the Federation president wishes he had never entered his name onto the ballot for the office.
No civilian media organizations are ever shown
There were several mentions of a "Federation News Service" during DS9, something I imagine would be analogous to the AP.
No legal civilian energy weapons are ever shown (in fact, civilians appear not even to be allowed to have blades!) - yet starfleet personnel are rarely without a powerful sidearm
Well, first off the Star Trek universe is supposed to be idealic where civilians didn't need to be armed. However, Guinan did own a phaser rifle of some kind. About owning blades, if you're refering to Worf disarming Okana in TNG episode "The Outrageous Okona", it seems a resonable precaution to not allow armed civilians to roam around a starfleet vessel.
There appears to be no such thing as privacy, except for high-ranking Starfleet officers. The federation appears to have massive databases containing all known information on everyone, used liberally by Starfleet.
Starfleet is a branch of the government, so it makes sense that they'd have access to government data banks. If the FBI wanted to to a background check on you, how much information do you think they could dig up in various databases? Hell, how much information do you think you could dig up about a person on the internet?
Actual buying and selling appear to be officially prohibited (Picard didn't even understand the concept of "investment"!), reducing trade to barter and trading bars of latinum on the black market
The economy of the federation is a matter of protracted discussion, but doesn't exclude the possibility of some kind of modified socialism that actually works. Just because we can't think of how it could work, doesn't mean it can't (Kinda like Warp Drive).
In at least one case, a civilian is tried by a court with a Starfleet judge!
You'll need to be more specific of where that happened. However, if a person commited a criminal act against the military or government, I'm sure there's some kind of legal precident where they're tried in a military tribunal as an enemy combatant or something along those lines.
The most prestigious jobs in the federation appear to be starfleet offices Dr. Bashir talked about how he was offered a position in a civilian hospital in Paris by his girlfriend's father.
I can't think of examples right now, but the point is that there is sufficient evidence that the Federation is not a military dictatorship.
Spock had the rank of captain from Star Trek II on, and was captain of the Enterprise, until Kirk took over during the Genesis affair. In the DS9 episode "Take me out to the holosuite", the captain of the U.S.S. T'Kumbra was vulcan, as was his entire crew. If you're like most people, I take it you stopped watching Enterprise because of the theme song or the font of the ending credits or something, and missed a good twist in the Vulcan government, where they switched from controlling high command to the more religious sect that was prominant in TOS and beyond. Plus, you have to remember that many planets in the federation have their own personal security forces in addition to federation forces, just like every state has their own police force in addition to the national armed forces. It makes sense that most vulcans who wanted to serve in the military would choose their own planetary defence force rather than starfleet which would consist of longer term deployments to different regions of space, just like there are people who prefer local police work to joining the marines. As for why humans make up most of starfleet, leaving aside how much cheaper it is to produce a show that doesn't require dozens of extras in makeup in a weekly syndicated show, it shows that humans are special in the Star Trek universe, and they have an explorer creedo mixed with a unique altruistic spirit, which is why they were the only species capable of uniting the vulcans, andorians, and tellarites into a united coalition.
I'd like to hear your explanation of that statement. The Federation is likely a government unlike one we have ever seen before, but is probably closer to a republic democracy than anything else. The president and the council of the federation seem to be elected by some means. Starfleet is the military and scientific branch of the Federation (like rolling the marines and NASA into one branch). Starfleet is definately under the control of the Federation, so much so that Starfleet has even attempted a coup on ocasion (http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/DS9/ episode/68250.html). We've seen federation life through a very limited perspective, through life on Starfleet vessels and stations. Trying to understand the intricacies of federation politics from watching Star Trek episodes would be like an alien trying to understand the US government by watching "JAG".
Viagara was an accident. They were testing phosphodiesterase inhibitors as a therapy for keeping heart vessels open. It didn't work so well, but they discovered the unexpected side effect of opening vessels in the penis when the subjects were reluctant to return their unused pills.
It's even more impressive considering how much less buying power $200 has during every iteration.
Solar powered airplanes make a lot of sense, since they fly above the cloud layer. During a day flight, they're exposed to a lot of sun. If plane could use this energy to fly, it could cut down on the amount of fuel required to fly. Obviously you'd carry a full fuel load because you don't want to be caught in a bind if the solar cells fail, but imagine the savings if you could reduce fuel consumption by something like 30% during day flights.
This technology will be a real boon for fickle New York City baseball fans at the Subway Series in the future (they can simply flip a switch to change from a Mets to a Yankees jersey.
Anyone who needs a jersey to switch from Yankees to the Mets doesn't deserve either.
I used to drink the regular stuff too, I thought diet tasted too chemical, and it didn't have a good flavor. Then I went home from college for summer, and my parents had decided to switch to diet soda, and as such that's all the soda there was in the house. I could have bought regular if I wanted, but I decided that drinking the soda my folks bought was good enough rather than spending my own money on more soda. Three months later when I returned to college, I had found that I lost all taste for the regular stuff. Regular mountain dew tasted like drinking a bottle of pancake syrup at that point, it was just too sugary. I also found it got me to enjoy other products with sugar substitute. I now put splenda in my coffee, and low calorie ice cream. I'd suggest just buckling down and drink only diet soda for a month, and you may just get to liking it.
(Scene - Local pub, 20 years from now)
... so I said that's no cell phone, it's a lobster.
MagicDude:
Bluto: Arrgh, your jokes suck, and I'm taking your woman.
MagicBabe: Help me MagicDude. Heeeeeeeelllllp
(Cue Popeye Music)
(Reach inside shirt, pull out beer can. Squeeze contents into air and drink in one gulp).
MagicDude: Time to open up a Beowolf Cluster of Pain on your butt.
We talk about RFID now because it's the only current technology we have developed which will function the way we want it to, and work consistantly. Give it 10 or 20 years though, and at that point we might have gattaca-esque technology which will make RFID obsolete. Would we need these tags if we had a device the size of a credit card which could read your DNA in under a second? Put that on your car to unlock it, and you don't need an implanted chip. Jumping on RFID chips now is probably akin to jumping on the 8-track bandwagon too early, and then getting burned by it later when casettes suddenly take off.