I have... Kinda. I got the newest update and things seemed fine, then I tried to access Pandora. I'd never used it before and thought I'd check it out. Big mistake. It crashed Firefox three attempts in a row, and I had no better luck with Opera. Ever since, anything I do in Firefox is painfully slow. Case and point, while typing this response, more than once I typed so fast that I had to wait for the letters on the screen to catch up with my typing to make sure I hadn't made an error. Also it takes me a few seconds to switch between tabs, and a second more to mouse-over something and have Firefox realize it was a link. I just assumed Pandora had somehow screwed up my computer, but now I'm considering using Opera and seeing if it's not just Firefox that's acting funny.
I can't find a link to the specific xkcd that I'm thinking of, but the upshot of it was that it is not the quality of the Mythbuster's scientific method that makes it valuable, but rather the fact that it instills in people the drive to hold ideas up to testing.
If Bill Nye hadn't been cancelled he'd be the perfect place to start, though I'm sure you could find old episodes on youtube or find torrents.
The other is Mythbusters. It may be a little over the head of a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old, but I think it has a fair chance of grabbing them. How can kids not love a show whose two most commonly repeated phrases are "If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing." and "When in doubt-- C4!"
Feasability aside, just because there's no financial benefit to doing something doesn't mean people won't do it. Some people just like a challenge or see personal benefits in deconstructing things. If I lost a limb and had it replaced with a mind-controlled prosthetic, I'd probably hack it for fun just to see how it worked.
On the flip side, some people are just sadistic enough to do things for the sake of torturing people. Remember when that girl died in car accident a few months back and people started emailing the leaked photos of her mangled body to her dad? There was no financial benefit to that, but it happened. Imagine the kind of people who did that with access to somebody's prosthetic limb. Can you say, "Stop hitting yourself?"
With the added benefit that at tax time they can report huge financial losses resulting from losing the lawsuit, while simultaneously report to their stockholders on their windfall from winning the lawsuit.
American kids aren't required to take the pledge, they are allowed to be silent throughout, but they must stand respectfully with everyone else while it is recited. From about 7th grade on, I skipped over the "Under God" part of the pledge because I realized it didn't make sense for someone as secular as me to be saying that (also about the same time I started saying "Gesundheit" instead of "God bless you" when people sneeezed).
When American schoolkids take the pledge every morning it's done with the about the same effort and investment that anything schoolkids do at 8 o'clock in the morning, which is not much. Just the same, the repetition of it for all 12 years of schooling (it doesn't continue on into college) and the ubiquity of the flag in American culture just engrains it in everyone as a symbol that's always there. Americans put flags on everything. Lapel pins, bumper stickers, regular stickers, cakes, cookies, product packaging, you can find flag-patterned clothing from boxer shorts to parkas if you look hard enough, they hang outside every school, inside just about every classrooom and auditorium within the schools, outside people's houses and around every national holiday they hang from every single telephone pole on the main drag of every town. If you see something all over the place every day, it becomes something you expect to see, whether it symbolizes something or not. I beleive people should be able to burn a flag as part of a peaceful protest, but if I woke up tomorrow and every flag had magically vanished, it would still feel a bit funny and I'd probably ask where they went. The flag is part of everyday life. It's an everyday object, not just something that gets trotted out for patriotic holidays and then put back into storage. So when someone burns the flag, they're burning something that's part of everyday American life.
I should note that not everyone feels this way about the flag. A good number of people like myself see it as the symbol of something larger, and not the end-all be-all of American ideals. It's those that fall into the latter category that usually end up getting more air-time so that's what the world sees of us.
What they did was not a crime in America, but it was racist. Americans fear the label of racism. Because of our history, it's pretty easy to make a claim like that stick.
I am an American and I've never quite figured it out either, but here's the best I can do for you. We're raised to love the flag. From a very early age, schoolkids take the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. First and foremost, it's directed at the flag. The first line is "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America." Not, "I pledge allegiance to the ideals/government/constitution of the United States." We're reminded constantly that the flag is a symbol of our American ideals, that the flag has been carried into countless battles, that people have been shot at simply for wearing the flag, that people have died for the flag. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone touting American ideals without simultaneously being reverent to the flag that symbolizes them. Additionally, Americans really love symbols, often to the point they immaturely overvalue the symbol and fail to seperate it from what it symbolizes. Combine the two and you have the recipe for people loving the flag as much as they do the country, and hating those who burn it as if they were burning the very Constitution itself.
"That undertone of racism is allowed to go unchallenged though, largely because as long as the racism isn't overtly public, it "isn't" really racism"
Don't forget that whites moving out because blacks are moving in isn't considered so much racism, at least in America. If you asked the average American what comes to their mind first when you say "racism" you'd probably hear a lot about guys in pointy white hoods burning crosses and lynching blacks. The American conception of racism tends to involve overt action against people rather than an individuals taking action that only affects themselves. America since the Civil War has seen lynchings, Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, segregated water fountains & bathrooms and fire-hoses turned on civil rights marchers. Moving out of a neighborhood is just as public as anything else, but it's so minor compared to the above that nobody bats an eye.
"Maybe it's in our nature: for so many generation, the next meal was uncertain, grab it while you still can."
[Tangent]
Sounds like my grandmother. She grew up in the post-WW I depression in Germany and went to bed hungry a lot of nights. Nowaday's she's as protective of food as she was trained to be growing up, and as a mother she's always looking to make sure everyone in the family has plenty to eat. She goes out to eat with her friend (a child of the American Great Depression) just about every week. They invariably go to the same diner. The diner is to food what Frank Burns was to medicine, but she loves it and refuses to go anywhere else when she eats out. The reason, as she is fond of telling my brother and I, is that if you go at lunch time, they give you dinner portions for a lower price, and you chose the meal option and get a drink, dessert and salad bar included for a dollar more. She gets so much food she always brings something home with her. I remember one time she took me out to eat there. We ordered the same thing: veal parmigana, she got the full meal and I just ordered the veal parm and a drink. She then interrogated me about why I should let such a fantastic deal on so much food pass me by. I said that I didn't want anything the salad bar had to offer and that the meal would fill me up enough I wouldn't need dessert. She went to the salad bar and got a double helping of everything and insisted I have some because she knew I would like it. Then after the meal, she looked at the dessert menu and asked me what sounded good, I answered and she ordered that. When it was brought around, she tried to give it to me, insisting she had ordered it for me because "you said you liked it."
"RIAA can say the letter contains pirated copyrighted material and go after the person who owns the house address listed as the return address, but that doesn't meant they got the right person."
Doesn't mean they care they got the wrong person, either.
Charisma has a short shelf life. Every charismatic person I've ever met seems interesting at first, but within about one to three years turns into an asshole.
Charisma has a short shelf life. Every charismatic person I've ever met seems interesting at first, but within about one to three years turns into an asshole.
True, but with god mode and unlimitted ammo you could chose exactly how you wanted to complete the parts that were too difficult and you could have fun sandboxing around the game world unafraid of death. With this function, you're effectively skipping it. I'd much rather just be given cheat codes and left to my own devices than to just have the character run the course himself.
I agree that personal worry is a bit overboard in this case, but let's face it: Pixar's made some damn good movies. To get me to see a Pixar film, all you have to do is tell me it's a Pixar film. That's the kind of quality and enjoyment I find in the films they make. In a world where studios keep turning to remakes, sequals and rehashes of old TV shows, Pixar has been consistantly original and entertaining for audiences of all ages, a claim most other movie makers can't even come close to. If you ask me if I'm going to lose sleep knowing they're making sequels, I'd say no. But would I be sad if their well dried up and the quality died? You bet.
Since I've switched over to digital I have found myself getting trigger happy. Then again, I was pretty trigger happy in my film days as well, I just work towards being judicious about what I choose to touch up and post like when I had to choose what to print and give away to people or mount and display. I worked out the numbers, my ratio for both is about 1 good photo for every 7 taken. Though to be fair, looking over the raw digital pictures on my computer screen allows me to take a much closer look and make a much more informed decision than I ever did when I was holding negatives up to the light or looking through a contact print.
Amen. In addition to the quality of the prints, working in the darkroom one develops a good eye for what is worth printing, since it was such a time investment to get one print right. Printing something well is a long, involved process that takes patience and dedication and a true devotion to the image, so you're not going to print just anything. On a good day in the lab, I'd get maybe five or six prints done really well, so I had to choose the best negatives from about twenty or so rolls of film I'd shot. Digital makes it easier to shoot and share, but as a result people seem to think they need to share everything completely uncut.
Slashdot Mirror
I have... Kinda. I got the newest update and things seemed fine, then I tried to access Pandora. I'd never used it before and thought I'd check it out. Big mistake. It crashed Firefox three attempts in a row, and I had no better luck with Opera. Ever since, anything I do in Firefox is painfully slow. Case and point, while typing this response, more than once I typed so fast that I had to wait for the letters on the screen to catch up with my typing to make sure I hadn't made an error. Also it takes me a few seconds to switch between tabs, and a second more to mouse-over something and have Firefox realize it was a link. I just assumed Pandora had somehow screwed up my computer, but now I'm considering using Opera and seeing if it's not just Firefox that's acting funny.
I can't find a link to the specific xkcd that I'm thinking of, but the upshot of it was that it is not the quality of the Mythbuster's scientific method that makes it valuable, but rather the fact that it instills in people the drive to hold ideas up to testing.
If Bill Nye hadn't been cancelled he'd be the perfect place to start, though I'm sure you could find old episodes on youtube or find torrents.
The other is Mythbusters. It may be a little over the head of a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old, but I think it has a fair chance of grabbing them. How can kids not love a show whose two most commonly repeated phrases are "If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing." and "When in doubt-- C4!"
Feasability aside, just because there's no financial benefit to doing something doesn't mean people won't do it. Some people just like a challenge or see personal benefits in deconstructing things. If I lost a limb and had it replaced with a mind-controlled prosthetic, I'd probably hack it for fun just to see how it worked.
On the flip side, some people are just sadistic enough to do things for the sake of torturing people. Remember when that girl died in car accident a few months back and people started emailing the leaked photos of her mangled body to her dad? There was no financial benefit to that, but it happened. Imagine the kind of people who did that with access to somebody's prosthetic limb. Can you say, "Stop hitting yourself?"
With the added benefit that at tax time they can report huge financial losses resulting from losing the lawsuit, while simultaneously report to their stockholders on their windfall from winning the lawsuit.
American kids aren't required to take the pledge, they are allowed to be silent throughout, but they must stand respectfully with everyone else while it is recited. From about 7th grade on, I skipped over the "Under God" part of the pledge because I realized it didn't make sense for someone as secular as me to be saying that (also about the same time I started saying "Gesundheit" instead of "God bless you" when people sneeezed).
When American schoolkids take the pledge every morning it's done with the about the same effort and investment that anything schoolkids do at 8 o'clock in the morning, which is not much. Just the same, the repetition of it for all 12 years of schooling (it doesn't continue on into college) and the ubiquity of the flag in American culture just engrains it in everyone as a symbol that's always there. Americans put flags on everything. Lapel pins, bumper stickers, regular stickers, cakes, cookies, product packaging, you can find flag-patterned clothing from boxer shorts to parkas if you look hard enough, they hang outside every school, inside just about every classrooom and auditorium within the schools, outside people's houses and around every national holiday they hang from every single telephone pole on the main drag of every town. If you see something all over the place every day, it becomes something you expect to see, whether it symbolizes something or not. I beleive people should be able to burn a flag as part of a peaceful protest, but if I woke up tomorrow and every flag had magically vanished, it would still feel a bit funny and I'd probably ask where they went. The flag is part of everyday life. It's an everyday object, not just something that gets trotted out for patriotic holidays and then put back into storage. So when someone burns the flag, they're burning something that's part of everyday American life.
I should note that not everyone feels this way about the flag. A good number of people like myself see it as the symbol of something larger, and not the end-all be-all of American ideals. It's those that fall into the latter category that usually end up getting more air-time so that's what the world sees of us.
What they did was not a crime in America, but it was racist. Americans fear the label of racism. Because of our history, it's pretty easy to make a claim like that stick.
I am an American and I've never quite figured it out either, but here's the best I can do for you. We're raised to love the flag. From a very early age, schoolkids take the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. First and foremost, it's directed at the flag. The first line is "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America." Not, "I pledge allegiance to the ideals/government/constitution of the United States." We're reminded constantly that the flag is a symbol of our American ideals, that the flag has been carried into countless battles, that people have been shot at simply for wearing the flag, that people have died for the flag. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone touting American ideals without simultaneously being reverent to the flag that symbolizes them. Additionally, Americans really love symbols, often to the point they immaturely overvalue the symbol and fail to seperate it from what it symbolizes. Combine the two and you have the recipe for people loving the flag as much as they do the country, and hating those who burn it as if they were burning the very Constitution itself.
"That undertone of racism is allowed to go unchallenged though, largely because as long as the racism isn't overtly public, it "isn't" really racism"
Don't forget that whites moving out because blacks are moving in isn't considered so much racism, at least in America. If you asked the average American what comes to their mind first when you say "racism" you'd probably hear a lot about guys in pointy white hoods burning crosses and lynching blacks. The American conception of racism tends to involve overt action against people rather than an individuals taking action that only affects themselves. America since the Civil War has seen lynchings, Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, segregated water fountains & bathrooms and fire-hoses turned on civil rights marchers. Moving out of a neighborhood is just as public as anything else, but it's so minor compared to the above that nobody bats an eye.
"Maybe it's in our nature: for so many generation, the next meal was uncertain, grab it while you still can."
[Tangent]
Sounds like my grandmother. She grew up in the post-WW I depression in Germany and went to bed hungry a lot of nights. Nowaday's she's as protective of food as she was trained to be growing up, and as a mother she's always looking to make sure everyone in the family has plenty to eat. She goes out to eat with her friend (a child of the American Great Depression) just about every week. They invariably go to the same diner. The diner is to food what Frank Burns was to medicine, but she loves it and refuses to go anywhere else when she eats out. The reason, as she is fond of telling my brother and I, is that if you go at lunch time, they give you dinner portions for a lower price, and you chose the meal option and get a drink, dessert and salad bar included for a dollar more. She gets so much food she always brings something home with her. I remember one time she took me out to eat there. We ordered the same thing: veal parmigana, she got the full meal and I just ordered the veal parm and a drink. She then interrogated me about why I should let such a fantastic deal on so much food pass me by. I said that I didn't want anything the salad bar had to offer and that the meal would fill me up enough I wouldn't need dessert. She went to the salad bar and got a double helping of everything and insisted I have some because she knew I would like it. Then after the meal, she looked at the dessert menu and asked me what sounded good, I answered and she ordered that. When it was brought around, she tried to give it to me, insisting she had ordered it for me because "you said you liked it."
[/Tangent]
"RIAA can say the letter contains pirated copyrighted material and go after the person who owns the house address listed as the return address, but that doesn't meant they got the right person."
Doesn't mean they care they got the wrong person, either.
"CHA is the only stat that matters in real life."
Charisma has a short shelf life. Every charismatic person I've ever met seems interesting at first, but within about one to three years turns into an asshole.
That's still plenty for a presidential campaign.
That explains a lot.
"I love a bad economy, it forces people to be less stupid."
Oh, I don't know. I think it just forces them to be stupid in new and different ways.
My bad, misread your post as "shits anytime politicians bullshit."
No good - it'd pile up so fast you'd need wings to stay above it.
"CHA is the only stat that matters in real life."
Charisma has a short shelf life. Every charismatic person I've ever met seems interesting at first, but within about one to three years turns into an asshole.
Upon seeing the bill I'm sure his first response was, "I reject your reality and replace it with my own!"
True, but with god mode and unlimitted ammo you could chose exactly how you wanted to complete the parts that were too difficult and you could have fun sandboxing around the game world unafraid of death. With this function, you're effectively skipping it. I'd much rather just be given cheat codes and left to my own devices than to just have the character run the course himself.
Games that play themelves and let you watch are not games. They are machinima.
I used my dad's Minolta SRT 102 with a 50mm lens.
"has the ftc ever fined anyone this much? Anything?"
Come on, it's the FTC we're talking about, not the RIAA.
I agree that personal worry is a bit overboard in this case, but let's face it: Pixar's made some damn good movies. To get me to see a Pixar film, all you have to do is tell me it's a Pixar film. That's the kind of quality and enjoyment I find in the films they make. In a world where studios keep turning to remakes, sequals and rehashes of old TV shows, Pixar has been consistantly original and entertaining for audiences of all ages, a claim most other movie makers can't even come close to. If you ask me if I'm going to lose sleep knowing they're making sequels, I'd say no. But would I be sad if their well dried up and the quality died? You bet.
Since I've switched over to digital I have found myself getting trigger happy. Then again, I was pretty trigger happy in my film days as well, I just work towards being judicious about what I choose to touch up and post like when I had to choose what to print and give away to people or mount and display. I worked out the numbers, my ratio for both is about 1 good photo for every 7 taken. Though to be fair, looking over the raw digital pictures on my computer screen allows me to take a much closer look and make a much more informed decision than I ever did when I was holding negatives up to the light or looking through a contact print.
Amen. In addition to the quality of the prints, working in the darkroom one develops a good eye for what is worth printing, since it was such a time investment to get one print right. Printing something well is a long, involved process that takes patience and dedication and a true devotion to the image, so you're not going to print just anything. On a good day in the lab, I'd get maybe five or six prints done really well, so I had to choose the best negatives from about twenty or so rolls of film I'd shot. Digital makes it easier to shoot and share, but as a result people seem to think they need to share everything completely uncut.
I recommend the fly swatter.