Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment. And perhaps in doing so come more to the attention of the offer makers at google?
From personal experience as an engineer within a top-heavy business (although not with Microsoft) is that really there's no way to shine. They want you to do the job they want you to do and if there's something wrong with the process, the app, or the architecture there's no recourse.
If you want to learn a lot, be challenged and be a star, you need to be in a startup atmosphere. While I am sure there are many companies with that atmosphere, currently it seems as though the most public large company like that is Google.
Don't look at anything outside of tech if you want that atmosphere either. Non-tech companies (insurance, credit card companies, etc.) are run by business people and programmers are always a red in their ledger, they don't have a clue on how to deal with them.
Has anything changed with the Democrat controlled congress? Nope, more Pork Barrel Ear Marked spending on pet projects and no balls to actually live up to their "out of Iraq" promises.
Oh yes, let's blame the Democrats. They are in a situation which is unwinnable. They have tried to pass many times an Iraq timetable but it doesn't get past the senate because it doesn't have any Republican support and/or Bush will veto it anyways. Without overwhelming support in the house and senate it can't survive the veto. And that's not going to happen because the White House is playing partisan politics because Bush can't stand to lose.
Also, the Democrats have to vote for more war spending because if they don't they are sacrificing our military, and that doesn't go over well with any voter, whether you're blue state or red state.
Giving Bush his war will hopefully weigh on many of our elected officials for the rest of their lives. They are all guilty of being fed false information and not taking the time to question it. As one of the few who voted against it, Obama is literally the only sane choice for president. That is, unless you would like to have a war with Iran as well?
There's no reason I can't go through an intensive definition and design exercise prior to starting the project and outline all the business rules/operations.... Once the Project Plan is complete, iterative development can begin, working on chunks of functionality broken down into short term goals. Having experience with a project from the beginnings of a startup and a project within a multi-billion-dollar non-software corporation, I have to say that the above definition isn't iterative development. That's simply waterfall with the milestones labeled as 'iterations'.
True iterative, agile development works well in situations where you are developing something that is somewhat nebulous. Startups are where this happens a lot. You end up building your product and then market pressure dictates where you go next. Maybe you update an existing feature, maybe you work on a new feature. The point is that you still have milestones but with those milestones you could put many tasks on the back burner because they turned out to be not as important as first thought and have new tasks that weren't planned for even the day before.
Big companies (supposedly) know what they are doing and plan every little detail. Internal apps based on business process should simply be defined and done. Sometimes I think management just wants to hear the 'iterative development' and 'agile' buzzwords. If you want to wrap that bow around waterfall and call it a day, fine, do as you please. Management won't know the difference anyways. Just make sure for your next interview that YOU know the difference.
It also predicted my body age as 33 which I was a bit miffed about, as I think my balance is pretty good. It's a worthless metric. No one is quite sure how it's calculated but it's not done by anything resembling a valid or worthwhile calculation.
It's been posted here before but you should check out the experiment done by Vinnk over at 4-Color Rebellion. If you read the entire blog his balance age widely varied even as he was getting into good balance shape. Great read if you have the time, just be sure to start at the beginning.
... in a movie theatre, it would be the last time I would watch anything there. I don't abide even to the "do not bring your own popcorn" rules. If I want to enter the theatre with my Happy Meal inside my backpack, nobody can take a peek at it without a search warrant. Oh, they can give me my money back and impede my entering the premises, but they will lose their pants in court if they try that. The problem is that when you don't buy popcorn at a movie theater you aren't screwing over the MPAA you are screwing over the theater owners, who are most likely a corporation but sometimes just a mom and pop theater.
Having worked in a movie theater over a decade ago I got to see the low-margins that the theaters run on. Almost all the ticket money goes to the movie - that's why popcorn has to be so expensive, to offset the cost. Not that it's a hard job but the employees get minimum wage and the managers scrape by. If you want to screw the MPAA over while helping keep the theater running, buy popcorn and then use an old ticket stub to get into the movie you want to see.
On that note, I will say it was by far the best high school job ever. Free movies, easy work even on crazy summertime opening nights, and you even get some respect for the job you have from your friends.
Your interpretation does not match that of US law. In the US, a contract where you give up an inalienable right is automatically null and void. If people could sign themselves into slavery, there would by people out there manipulating them into doing so. If I had enough money, I could bankrupt you and leave you with no other option but to accept slavery voluntarily. Thankfully, we don't live in a country like that. I think the closest thing we have like that in this country is an intern or personal assistant.
What you just said is wrong on so many levels. All Christian religions have God being omniscient and controlling everything. He didn't just put a few laws in order and set it all spinning. If that were true why would you pray? Why would the Catholic church create saints? What would be the point of going to church? Why would you need a pope to talk to God if he doesn't have a say anymore? Why are homosexuals and birth control bad?
Either God controls everything that happens to everything (thus OMNISCIENT) including a kid getting molested or a woman getting raped or the World Trade Centers collapsing, which he has to be if he created the whole damn thing, or there isn't a god in the first place.
So I guess the question is: why is God such an asshole?
I have to say that I completely agree. I was in a moderately advanced raiding guild that hit a wall at Magtheridon. We had 3 Karazhan teams clearing it weekly and had Gruul on pseudo-farm - meaning we always killed him in a night but sometimes it took more than 1 shot.
Magtheridon was another issue altogether. We just couldn't get him down. With this bottleneck we couldn't get the other piece of the attunement, which resulted in a lack of progression which resulted in guild defections and, ultimately, the guild disbanded.
With the better, more open raids we could've moved on to more challenges and people wouldn't have felt so annoyed and left the guild or quit. Sure we couldn't have taken down anything in BT, but we could've been cleaning up Void Reaver in TK and maybe a few other bosses in SSC.
I had read the 'Best Places' a few days ago and felt that most of them were somewhat nice but still nothing great. When I saw this today I had to compare, and I was not disappointed.
This and this are considered 'the best'. This and this are considered the worst.
There's not a whole lot different between the open table, no privacy of Mahalo/Gawker and the cubicles from Yahoo/Six Apart. Yet one set is at the bottom and one at the top. Right. And the attempt at knocking Microsoft is low, even for/. standards.
The OP needs to protect the rights of himself while protecting the integrity of any investigation. That means a licensed private investigator or firm that handles cases like this is the way to go. The OP sounds like a nice guy who wants to help out but the best thing he can do is investigate the options, give those to the family, and then step back and let them handle it.
A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide...
Ah, I see where this is going. The OP likes the girl and is trying to be a hero. Great angle but if he's just supportive and comforting that's the best way to get her to notice him. If something gets f'ed up he'll be the fool who caused her family more harm than good.
Whoever directed the new Iron Man movie (I'm too lazy to check right now) seems to have potential, although until I see the movie I can't say for sure.
I just looked it up and the director is Jon Favreau. He's been in the business for a long time and knows how to tell a story although he has never tackled a comic book movie.
Most people would probably remember him as Mikey, the broken-hearted loser in 'Swingers' (directed by Doug Liman), the pot-head pseudo-frat boy Gutter in 'PCU' , or the looking-for-love college guy in 'Rudy'. All meaty roles with Swingers probably being his pinnacle. Everything I've seen him act in he's tip-top, even as Matt Murdock's friend in the crapacular 'Daredevil'.
This won't be his first movie he's directed. He's taken the right path by working his way up the directing ladder. He has directed some of his own stuff, 'Made', and then moved onto a holiday comedy with 'Elf'. After that he went on to do the unexpectedly good sci-fi family movie 'Zathura'. It's going to be interesting to see how he does with Ironman.
I have faith in Favreau, I think with the strong acting of Downey Jr this will be almost a guaranteed hit.
Obviously the game is not balanced around one-on-one PvP play, as you say in your second paragraph. But in your first paragraph you whinge about the exact same thing.
That was a troll but I guess I'll bite...
What I said was that the game wasn't balanced around 1v1 originally but it's moved more toward trying to balance 1v1 when a class imbalance is found. The problem is they over-buff which causes more imbalance.
An example of this is warlock vs. rogue. Warlocks couldn't kill rogues since a warlock's only way to kill a melee class is to keep it at distance and fear is their way to do that. With stunlock and kicks a rogue could keep a warlock locked down and kill him. So they added deathcoil to throw warlocks a bone - and now instead of it being used defensively to save a warlock it's used offensively to keep a character perma-feared while the DOTs tick away.
My issue is why wasn't it fine that rogues tore up warlocks? Since there were some classes that tore up rogues it seemed like a fair trade off.
Way too many games are designed just kinda based on what the developers feel is right and based on what plays well in testing. That works ok for single player games, but not really multiplayer and especially not MMORPGs. You need an extremely well thought out, well balanced system.
Never played a warlock or a rogue, did you?
Warlocks went from being an easy kill to being almost invincible. Rogues started off as overpowered, were somewhat ruined for both PvE and PvP before the expansion, and now are apparently overpowered again. The only viable shaman spec is resto, druid tanking got nerfed, etc. The list goes on. Blizzard consistently prescribes band aids for heart attacks.
I quit about 2 months ago after being moderately more invested than a casual player - raiding guild, netherdrake, full epics - but just got tired of chasing the flavor of the month. It didn't help that I had 3 characters who were all craptastic in the arenas (hunter, shaman, rogue). I think the greatest disservice Blizzard did was trying to balance individual classes against each other. Why does every class have to have a counter for another?
They trademarked their guildname. What an incredible way to waste money. Checking the armory for WoW I found that there were 61 guilds with the name 'The Syndicate'. So what was the point of the trademark?
That aside, I read the first chapter and it's rather worthless. So some guy created a guild and that guild (or guild name I should say) has stuck around for a long time. Big deal.
I wonder how much Slashdot got paid to main page this bit of tripe.
Miyamoto gains tons of respect from me for creating Pikmin which is light-years ahead of Halo. All his games have been unique, genre-creating blockbusters.
Besides, wasn't the genius of Halo the real-time IK (inverse kinematics) on the models? I thought I remembered hearing that this was their big addition to the FPS genre. Otherwise, I don't really know what's so great about Halo - it had a convoluted storyline with boring level design and bad voice acting.
Here we are, dissecting the whole mess on Slashdot, and you think they need to get a life?
Well, participating in a discussion about people acting like assholes to each other is not necessarily something that one would consider outside of the societal norms. I discuss many things with many people, some things in person, over the phone, over the internet, etc.
I would think that taking free time to publicly humiliate someone on the internet qualifies as being hateful and spiteful which, last I checked, isn't very socially acceptable. At that point it delves into a 'get a life' situation. Even though the bartender had very little contact with any of these 'outed' individuals she is injecting herself into their lives for some reason - maybe because she lacks one herself. From her blog it is clear that she gets off on doing this.
Will it still feel good when your friend is facing possible jail time and being booted out of school because she tried to pass the fake ID in the first place?
Oh please. No one is going to face jail time and/or get booted out of school. For possessing or creating a fake ID tops is a slap on the wrist, most likely a fine. Misusing the DMCA is somewhat reprehensible but not a crime either - those enforcing the DMCA must decide if something is infringing or not.
My two cents after reading the original post from the google cache is that the ID was very close to looking real except the girl failed the apparent 'Jew test' and questioning by the bartender. The girl is lame for not just accepting this as a life lesson and moving on, and the bartender is a sad, pathetic, grisled individual who gets off by busting people who use fake IDs. They both need to get a life.
Everyone does this sort of anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects. From an early age we teach kids to do this with teddy bears, Sponge Bob, etc. Animation is filled with this and Pixar is the most guilty party.
Even when we are older though we just can't replace some things. There's an innate level of superstition in us that won't let us disassociate. The best example I heard was about a wedding ring - the majority of people, even if given a ring that is exactly the same, would not get replace their wedding ring.
The same thing seems to be going on with this robot. The operator seems to appreciate the work it's doing and even though they know it's inanimate subconsciously they just can't accept that. The solution might be to have the robot be remotely controlled with the AI on a laptop or handheld with the controller, so there is possibly a disassociation between the brains and the body of the robot.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. Maybe the Wright Brothers didn't come up with the idea of flying or the first airplane but they made the first airplane that actually flew. Therefore they invented flying.
This is no different than preventing minors from purchasing tickets to R-rated movies.
And that's not illegal either. A guideline set forth by an independent ratings board isn't a law.
If I worked at a movie theater I could sell a ticket to a minor, and honestly, when I worked at one way back in high school I did it all the time. I never let someone grossly underage in, but I didn't give a second thought to those who looked close enough.
It's very difficult for a 17-year-old to ask some who 'could be' over 17 for their id. Also, some people look older or younger then they are. Was I supposed to ask for everyone's id? These are the people selling the games too - teenagers working at Wal-Mart. They just don't care. I know I didn't.
I'd be worried about the fact that Google has the spending habits and business plan of a late 90s dot-com.
It does beg the question of 'how long can it last?'. I mean eventually some manager is going to cut down on organic foods because it's a little more expensive. And then the in-house doctor will move on and not be replaced. They probably won't close the fitness center but they'll get rid of the personal trainer and masseuse.
Eventually this culture changes because of the bottom line. Wasn't Microsoft *the* place to work because of similar perks at one time? I'm not saying they possibly aren't a good place to work but eventually the perks fade out.
Isn't advertising something like 95% of their revenue?
Yes and no. It's not just banner ads but companies paying to be at the top (I mean above, it doesn't affect the search results) of the search lists. You pay by click so it's a rather interesting model. There's other stuff to that I don't know about but from what I do know from the marketting group where I work, it seems like it could be quite lucrative.
TFA seems to be right, as most of the top ranked Sci-fi flicks at the imdb are just future-based action movies:
1. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Star Wars
3. The Matrix
4. Metropolis
5. Alien
6. Aliens
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9. Blade Runner
10. Donnie Darko
And to think that if you remove the spaceships from a few of those movies they don't hold up as 'sci-fi' at all.
I think the biggest example is Alien and Aliens. I love both of those movies (one being a horror movie and the other being an action movie) but they are pretty far from sci-fi. They are just creature movies... in space. As it's been said, Star Wars is space opera but deals with technology more than one realizes. I'm glad to see Empire be the highest ranked Star Wars movie, since it is clearly the best of the 6.
The time travel aspect saves T2, and obviously the cloning/future-vision of Blade Runner make it clearly sci-fi. I'm torn over Donnie Darko since it seems to border sci-fi and fantasy. I guess it's close enough to stay.
Slashdot Mirror
Could not the "wiz kid" with a few freash ideas garner much more attention in such an envirnoment. And perhaps in doing so come more to the attention of the offer makers at google?
From personal experience as an engineer within a top-heavy business (although not with Microsoft) is that really there's no way to shine. They want you to do the job they want you to do and if there's something wrong with the process, the app, or the architecture there's no recourse.
If you want to learn a lot, be challenged and be a star, you need to be in a startup atmosphere. While I am sure there are many companies with that atmosphere, currently it seems as though the most public large company like that is Google.
Don't look at anything outside of tech if you want that atmosphere either. Non-tech companies (insurance, credit card companies, etc.) are run by business people and programmers are always a red in their ledger, they don't have a clue on how to deal with them.
Has anything changed with the Democrat controlled congress? Nope, more Pork Barrel Ear Marked spending on pet projects and no balls to actually live up to their "out of Iraq" promises.
Oh yes, let's blame the Democrats. They are in a situation which is unwinnable. They have tried to pass many times an Iraq timetable but it doesn't get past the senate because it doesn't have any Republican support and/or Bush will veto it anyways. Without overwhelming support in the house and senate it can't survive the veto. And that's not going to happen because the White House is playing partisan politics because Bush can't stand to lose.
Also, the Democrats have to vote for more war spending because if they don't they are sacrificing our military, and that doesn't go over well with any voter, whether you're blue state or red state.
Giving Bush his war will hopefully weigh on many of our elected officials for the rest of their lives. They are all guilty of being fed false information and not taking the time to question it. As one of the few who voted against it, Obama is literally the only sane choice for president. That is, unless you would like to have a war with Iran as well?
True iterative, agile development works well in situations where you are developing something that is somewhat nebulous. Startups are where this happens a lot. You end up building your product and then market pressure dictates where you go next. Maybe you update an existing feature, maybe you work on a new feature. The point is that you still have milestones but with those milestones you could put many tasks on the back burner because they turned out to be not as important as first thought and have new tasks that weren't planned for even the day before.
Big companies (supposedly) know what they are doing and plan every little detail. Internal apps based on business process should simply be defined and done. Sometimes I think management just wants to hear the 'iterative development' and 'agile' buzzwords. If you want to wrap that bow around waterfall and call it a day, fine, do as you please. Management won't know the difference anyways. Just make sure for your next interview that YOU know the difference.
It's been posted here before but you should check out the experiment done by Vinnk over at 4-Color Rebellion. If you read the entire blog his balance age widely varied even as he was getting into good balance shape. Great read if you have the time, just be sure to start at the beginning.
... in a movie theatre, it would be the last time I would watch anything there. I don't abide even to the "do not bring your own popcorn" rules. If I want to enter the theatre with my Happy Meal inside my backpack, nobody can take a peek at it without a search warrant. Oh, they can give me my money back and impede my entering the premises, but they will lose their pants in court if they try that. The problem is that when you don't buy popcorn at a movie theater you aren't screwing over the MPAA you are screwing over the theater owners, who are most likely a corporation but sometimes just a mom and pop theater.Having worked in a movie theater over a decade ago I got to see the low-margins that the theaters run on. Almost all the ticket money goes to the movie - that's why popcorn has to be so expensive, to offset the cost. Not that it's a hard job but the employees get minimum wage and the managers scrape by. If you want to screw the MPAA over while helping keep the theater running, buy popcorn and then use an old ticket stub to get into the movie you want to see.
On that note, I will say it was by far the best high school job ever. Free movies, easy work even on crazy summertime opening nights, and you even get some respect for the job you have from your friends.
I am a Roman Catholic and that's not true.
What you just said is wrong on so many levels. All Christian religions have God being omniscient and controlling everything. He didn't just put a few laws in order and set it all spinning. If that were true why would you pray? Why would the Catholic church create saints? What would be the point of going to church? Why would you need a pope to talk to God if he doesn't have a say anymore? Why are homosexuals and birth control bad?
Either God controls everything that happens to everything (thus OMNISCIENT) including a kid getting molested or a woman getting raped or the World Trade Centers collapsing, which he has to be if he created the whole damn thing, or there isn't a god in the first place.
So I guess the question is: why is God such an asshole?
Then again, would you want to see the new smash hit "Bush is great"? :)
I think Toby Keith made that song already.
I have to say that I completely agree. I was in a moderately advanced raiding guild that hit a wall at Magtheridon. We had 3 Karazhan teams clearing it weekly and had Gruul on pseudo-farm - meaning we always killed him in a night but sometimes it took more than 1 shot.
Magtheridon was another issue altogether. We just couldn't get him down. With this bottleneck we couldn't get the other piece of the attunement, which resulted in a lack of progression which resulted in guild defections and, ultimately, the guild disbanded.
With the better, more open raids we could've moved on to more challenges and people wouldn't have felt so annoyed and left the guild or quit. Sure we couldn't have taken down anything in BT, but we could've been cleaning up Void Reaver in TK and maybe a few other bosses in SSC.
I had read the 'Best Places' a few days ago and felt that most of them were somewhat nice but still nothing great. When I saw this today I had to compare, and I was not disappointed.
/. standards.
This and this are considered 'the best'.
This and this are considered the worst.
There's not a whole lot different between the open table, no privacy of Mahalo/Gawker and the cubicles from Yahoo/Six Apart. Yet one set is at the bottom and one at the top. Right. And the attempt at knocking Microsoft is low, even for
Mod parent up, please.
The OP needs to protect the rights of himself while protecting the integrity of any investigation. That means a licensed private investigator or firm that handles cases like this is the way to go. The OP sounds like a nice guy who wants to help out but the best thing he can do is investigate the options, give those to the family, and then step back and let them handle it.
A good friend of mine had her younger brother apparently commit suicide...
Ah, I see where this is going. The OP likes the girl and is trying to be a hero. Great angle but if he's just supportive and comforting that's the best way to get her to notice him. If something gets f'ed up he'll be the fool who caused her family more harm than good.
I just looked it up and the director is Jon Favreau. He's been in the business for a long time and knows how to tell a story although he has never tackled a comic book movie.
Most people would probably remember him as Mikey, the broken-hearted loser in 'Swingers' (directed by Doug Liman), the pot-head pseudo-frat boy Gutter in 'PCU' , or the looking-for-love college guy in 'Rudy'. All meaty roles with Swingers probably being his pinnacle. Everything I've seen him act in he's tip-top, even as Matt Murdock's friend in the crapacular 'Daredevil'.
This won't be his first movie he's directed. He's taken the right path by working his way up the directing ladder. He has directed some of his own stuff, 'Made', and then moved onto a holiday comedy with 'Elf'. After that he went on to do the unexpectedly good sci-fi family movie 'Zathura'. It's going to be interesting to see how he does with Ironman.
I have faith in Favreau, I think with the strong acting of Downey Jr this will be almost a guaranteed hit.
John Romero, for being John Romero.
But he made you his bitch, doesn't that count for something?
Obviously the game is not balanced around one-on-one PvP play, as you say in your second paragraph. But in your first paragraph you whinge about the exact same thing.
That was a troll but I guess I'll bite...
What I said was that the game wasn't balanced around 1v1 originally but it's moved more toward trying to balance 1v1 when a class imbalance is found. The problem is they over-buff which causes more imbalance.
An example of this is warlock vs. rogue. Warlocks couldn't kill rogues since a warlock's only way to kill a melee class is to keep it at distance and fear is their way to do that. With stunlock and kicks a rogue could keep a warlock locked down and kill him. So they added deathcoil to throw warlocks a bone - and now instead of it being used defensively to save a warlock it's used offensively to keep a character perma-feared while the DOTs tick away. My issue is why wasn't it fine that rogues tore up warlocks? Since there were some classes that tore up rogues it seemed like a fair trade off.
Way too many games are designed just kinda based on what the developers feel is right and based on what plays well in testing. That works ok for single player games, but not really multiplayer and especially not MMORPGs. You need an extremely well thought out, well balanced system.
Never played a warlock or a rogue, did you?
Warlocks went from being an easy kill to being almost invincible. Rogues started off as overpowered, were somewhat ruined for both PvE and PvP before the expansion, and now are apparently overpowered again. The only viable shaman spec is resto, druid tanking got nerfed, etc. The list goes on. Blizzard consistently prescribes band aids for heart attacks.
I quit about 2 months ago after being moderately more invested than a casual player - raiding guild, netherdrake, full epics - but just got tired of chasing the flavor of the month. It didn't help that I had 3 characters who were all craptastic in the arenas (hunter, shaman, rogue). I think the greatest disservice Blizzard did was trying to balance individual classes against each other. Why does every class have to have a counter for another?
They trademarked their guildname. What an incredible way to waste money. Checking the armory for WoW I found that there were 61 guilds with the name 'The Syndicate'. So what was the point of the trademark?
That aside, I read the first chapter and it's rather worthless. So some guy created a guild and that guild (or guild name I should say) has stuck around for a long time. Big deal.
I wonder how much Slashdot got paid to main page this bit of tripe.
Miyamoto gains tons of respect from me for creating Pikmin which is light-years ahead of Halo. All his games have been unique, genre-creating blockbusters.
Besides, wasn't the genius of Halo the real-time IK (inverse kinematics) on the models? I thought I remembered hearing that this was their big addition to the FPS genre. Otherwise, I don't really know what's so great about Halo - it had a convoluted storyline with boring level design and bad voice acting.
Here we are, dissecting the whole mess on Slashdot, and you think they need to get a life?
Well, participating in a discussion about people acting like assholes to each other is not necessarily something that one would consider outside of the societal norms. I discuss many things with many people, some things in person, over the phone, over the internet, etc.
I would think that taking free time to publicly humiliate someone on the internet qualifies as being hateful and spiteful which, last I checked, isn't very socially acceptable. At that point it delves into a 'get a life' situation. Even though the bartender had very little contact with any of these 'outed' individuals she is injecting herself into their lives for some reason - maybe because she lacks one herself. From her blog it is clear that she gets off on doing this.
Will it still feel good when your friend is facing possible jail time and being booted out of school because she tried to pass the fake ID in the first place?
Oh please. No one is going to face jail time and/or get booted out of school. For possessing or creating a fake ID tops is a slap on the wrist, most likely a fine. Misusing the DMCA is somewhat reprehensible but not a crime either - those enforcing the DMCA must decide if something is infringing or not.
My two cents after reading the original post from the google cache is that the ID was very close to looking real except the girl failed the apparent 'Jew test' and questioning by the bartender. The girl is lame for not just accepting this as a life lesson and moving on, and the bartender is a sad, pathetic, grisled individual who gets off by busting people who use fake IDs. They both need to get a life.
Everyone does this sort of anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects. From an early age we teach kids to do this with teddy bears, Sponge Bob, etc. Animation is filled with this and Pixar is the most guilty party.
Even when we are older though we just can't replace some things. There's an innate level of superstition in us that won't let us disassociate. The best example I heard was about a wedding ring - the majority of people, even if given a ring that is exactly the same, would not get replace their wedding ring.
The same thing seems to be going on with this robot. The operator seems to appreciate the work it's doing and even though they know it's inanimate subconsciously they just can't accept that. The solution might be to have the robot be remotely controlled with the AI on a laptop or handheld with the controller, so there is possibly a disassociation between the brains and the body of the robot.
The Wright brothers didn't invent the airplane
I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. Maybe the Wright Brothers didn't come up with the idea of flying or the first airplane but they made the first airplane that actually flew. Therefore they invented flying.
This is no different than preventing minors from purchasing tickets to R-rated movies.
And that's not illegal either. A guideline set forth by an independent ratings board isn't a law.
If I worked at a movie theater I could sell a ticket to a minor, and honestly, when I worked at one way back in high school I did it all the time. I never let someone grossly underage in, but I didn't give a second thought to those who looked close enough.
It's very difficult for a 17-year-old to ask some who 'could be' over 17 for their id. Also, some people look older or younger then they are. Was I supposed to ask for everyone's id? These are the people selling the games too - teenagers working at Wal-Mart. They just don't care. I know I didn't.
I'd be worried about the fact that Google has the spending habits and business plan of a late 90s dot-com.
It does beg the question of 'how long can it last?'. I mean eventually some manager is going to cut down on organic foods because it's a little more expensive. And then the in-house doctor will move on and not be replaced. They probably won't close the fitness center but they'll get rid of the personal trainer and masseuse.
Eventually this culture changes because of the bottom line. Wasn't Microsoft *the* place to work because of similar perks at one time? I'm not saying they possibly aren't a good place to work but eventually the perks fade out.
Isn't advertising something like 95% of their revenue?
Yes and no. It's not just banner ads but companies paying to be at the top (I mean above, it doesn't affect the search results) of the search lists. You pay by click so it's a rather interesting model. There's other stuff to that I don't know about but from what I do know from the marketting group where I work, it seems like it could be quite lucrative.
TFA seems to be right, as most of the top ranked Sci-fi flicks at the imdb are just future-based action movies:
1. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
2. Star Wars
3. The Matrix
4. Metropolis
5. Alien
6. Aliens
7. 2001: A Space Odyssey
8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
9. Blade Runner
10. Donnie Darko
And to think that if you remove the spaceships from a few of those movies they don't hold up as 'sci-fi' at all.
I think the biggest example is Alien and Aliens. I love both of those movies (one being a horror movie and the other being an action movie) but they are pretty far from sci-fi. They are just creature movies... in space. As it's been said, Star Wars is space opera but deals with technology more than one realizes. I'm glad to see Empire be the highest ranked Star Wars movie, since it is clearly the best of the 6.
The time travel aspect saves T2, and obviously the cloning/future-vision of Blade Runner make it clearly sci-fi. I'm torn over Donnie Darko since it seems to border sci-fi and fantasy. I guess it's close enough to stay.