You say that you stopped reading after the first sentence, but it appears that you didn't actually read (or failed to comprehend) the title, which says Book excerpt.
How, pray tell me, do the monsters get down there? Are they created anew each time along with the dungeon level, or have an infinite number of monsters gotten lost there? In either case, unless there's an infinite number of adventurers in the dungeon at a given time, your chances of meeting one down there are infinitely small. In theory.
*Side note* reading up a little on the relationship between then government and Coca Cola Inc is loads of fun, political intrique, espionage, and killing communism oh my.
Yeah, apparently the Communists choosing Pepsi was the decisive factor. The weapons race, economic problems, the war in Afghanistan -- in the end, none of these really mattered. In reality (and what a bizarre reality it was), it was the wrath of Coca Cola Company that, when unleashed against the Pepsi-drinking Commies, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In most cases, privacy on the Internet is an illusion. People simply don't realize that the things they post on their web page or in their blogs is, unless they protect it with a password or something, visible to everyone. I've already seen a few people deleting their blog entries because they didn't want some of the things they had posted to be public. And there's probably thousands of people that have gotten hurt because of something personal they posted, not realizing that what they wrote is going to be public.
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Hey, I have an idea. They could first launch a smaller satellite that would attract all kinds of space debris until it's big enough to take out an asteroid. It'd spin around the Earth until an asteroid came about, and then they could just fling it in the direction of the asteroid!
Better yet, they could have several of these things circling up there, just in case.
PS: yeah, I know it's not Tuesday, but I couldn't resist:7
I'd say that its intent was to INDIRECTLY cause terror.
You keep using that word, 'terror'. Are you sure you know what it means?
The fact that there was an explosion of such magnitude doesn't bother me a bit. And I bet the majority of the citizens of the USSR weren't shaken a bit by this explosion, because (drum roll) they never knew such an accident had happened (and that's, for me, the scary part). And nothing spells success better than an act of terror noone finds out about, now does it?
At the same time, it's much easier to destroy Google's massive RAID array than it is to destroy all the copies of a book. And even if all the copies of this one book are destroyed, there's still tons of evidence of its existence and it's still possible to (roughly) reconstruct it.
Of course you were right about me just being silly. But this is what I am, a silly person. There's nothing I can do about it.
Come to think of it, he does have a point, though. Making books electronically searchable does take them out of context. The reader will read the snippets, find the book he needs, order it, read it -- and that'll be it. He'll only read what he wanted to read, but quite often, the most interesting things are the ones we never intened to read. This is why I like libraries (and bookstores): quite often, I'll go looking for a specific book, but end up picking something completely different off the shelf, leading to...quite interesting results.
Books are fragile. They need to be preserved somehow/.../ which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.
Nonsense. Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap. Drop a book, and nothing bad happens to it (unless you drop it into water). Drop a hard drive, and it's dead. All in all, it is more likely that digitally stored information will be lost forever than a book.
FTA: "I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."
The sad thing is, scholarly texts are so abundant nowadays that it's neigh impossible to keep oneself current with all the new things published. Already there are magazines that only (or mostly) contain abstracts or reviews of new dissertations and articles. I fail to see how Google Print is a greater disaster than this. If anything, it'll only improve the situation.
Prophetic? Hardly. First of all, Orwell was only reporting what was already happening in the Soviet Union (and in other places), where history was rewritten and people did vanish from photos.
Works of art have been edited to fit the editor's taste/views/etc ever since when. You don't like this nude statue? Cover the nudity with a maple leaf. Don't like its painted eyes? Scrape the paint off. Or leave out a few chapters from this book (or have the author rewrite a few -- better yet, do it yourself!).
Slashdot Mirror
It's better than nothing.
Yeah, I saw your reply, but I just had to rub it in :7
You say that you stopped reading after the first sentence, but it appears that you didn't actually read (or failed to comprehend) the title, which says Book excerpt.
How, pray tell me, do the monsters get down there? Are they created anew each time along with the dungeon level, or have an infinite number of monsters gotten lost there? In either case, unless there's an infinite number of adventurers in the dungeon at a given time, your chances of meeting one down there are infinitely small. In theory.
Yet more proof that against clever rhetorics, reason is powerless :H
And I never said you were. I was merely suggesting that you shouldn't take everything you read on Slashdot for granted.
Yeah, apparently the Communists choosing Pepsi was the decisive factor. The weapons race, economic problems, the war in Afghanistan -- in the end, none of these really mattered. In reality (and what a bizarre reality it was), it was the wrath of Coca Cola Company that, when unleashed against the Pepsi-drinking Commies, caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Just because it's been said many times here, it doesn't automatically make this statement correct.
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Better yet, they could have several of these things circling up there, just in case.
PS: yeah, I know it's not Tuesday, but I couldn't resist :7
It was a bug until they found out it was actually sabotage.
I find it a bit ironic that while your username states "Yahweh Doesn't Exist", you still keep calling up His name...
-1, Dictionarist. You Fail It.
You keep using that word, 'terror'. Are you sure you know what it means?
The fact that there was an explosion of such magnitude doesn't bother me a bit. And I bet the majority of the citizens of the USSR weren't shaken a bit by this explosion, because (drum roll) they never knew such an accident had happened (and that's, for me, the scary part). And nothing spells success better than an act of terror noone finds out about, now does it?
Screw the Postmodernists, but in my case, every reading [of a Slashdot story title] is a misreading :7
Google has, what, three billion dollars in cash?
Will Google be able to pay the millions for all the downloads?
Don't you think it's a bit too optimistic to expect "millions of downloads"?
At the same time, it's much easier to destroy Google's massive RAID array than it is to destroy all the copies of a book. And even if all the copies of this one book are destroyed, there's still tons of evidence of its existence and it's still possible to (roughly) reconstruct it.
Of course you were right about me just being silly. But this is what I am, a silly person. There's nothing I can do about it.
Come to think of it, he does have a point, though. Making books electronically searchable does take them out of context. The reader will read the snippets, find the book he needs, order it, read it -- and that'll be it. He'll only read what he wanted to read, but quite often, the most interesting things are the ones we never intened to read. This is why I like libraries (and bookstores): quite often, I'll go looking for a specific book, but end up picking something completely different off the shelf, leading to...quite interesting results.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see then :7
Books are fragile. They need to be preserved somehow /.../ which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.
Nonsense. Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap. Drop a book, and nothing bad happens to it (unless you drop it into water). Drop a hard drive, and it's dead. All in all, it is more likely that digitally stored information will be lost forever than a book.
FTA: "I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."
The sad thing is, scholarly texts are so abundant nowadays that it's neigh impossible to keep oneself current with all the new things published. Already there are magazines that only (or mostly) contain abstracts or reviews of new dissertations and articles. I fail to see how Google Print is a greater disaster than this. If anything, it'll only improve the situation.
If you want to find out where she is hiding herself right now, just ask Google: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
I agree: Creationism is science. Pseudoscience.
Works of art have been edited to fit the editor's taste/views/etc ever since when. You don't like this nude statue? Cover the nudity with a maple leaf. Don't like its painted eyes? Scrape the paint off. Or leave out a few chapters from this book (or have the author rewrite a few -- better yet, do it yourself!).
So how, when you come register on my website, do I know YOU are SolemnDragon and that troll back then wasn't?
The pox on you and your kind for not knowing the difference between a Troll and the Dragon!