"Most public schools promote a materialistic secular humanistic world-view. Kids that do not come from strong homes cannot fend off the destructive effects of this philosophy."
I hate to be the first to draw an unpleasant line, but by your logic, the people who home school their children would be these "weak" parents whose children can't handle this most unnatural popular culture, and are removed from it to avoid further damage.
Also, I fail to see how keeping your children away from mainstream culture helps them develop strong social skills. You are aware that by definition the mainstream comprises the bulk of our population, yes? I don't claim that MTV and designer t-shirts are good for people, but it helps to know how to relate to people that buy into those ideas.
They didn't say the world, or the players, or your cat wasn't ready for online play. They said the market wasn't ready for it. Translation: "If we had rolled it out at the time, we wouldn't have made money." The fact that you count XBoxLive among this generation's online failures is evidence enough that this was, to some extent, true.
When the hardware and infrastructure became cheap enough for Ninty to offer the service for free bundled with the console (wireless for less than $100, broadband less than $50/month), then the market became "ready." In other words, now it seems profitable.
I know, you're thinking "but there's been online play in PC games since the dawn of time!" Think about the correlation between owning a gaming computer and having internet access. Pretty high! The correlation between owning a game console and having high-speed internet access suitable for online gaming is a moving target. If Nintendo had included networking from the getgo with the cube, there would inevitably be titles that could only be played online, or were only fun when played online. This would decrease sales to gamers who didn't have (necessarily third party and uncontrollable) high speed internet. Game developers would focus more on the online play, which means more games you can't sell to the un-wired. Which means less profit for the developers, and less love for Nintendo.
You may be asking yourself why, then, for the love of god, they released games like Crystal Chronicles and Four Swords Adventure. Obviously, if the extra things you need to play the game are being sold by Nintendo, it means that you're 99% guaranteed access to the peripherals if you have access to the system and games. And need I say it makes them more money? Weird peripherals and GBA connectivity are profitable.
As I recall, they're doing the same thing with HD in this generation, for exactly the same reasons.
You're half right. Trademark does not distinguish between for-profit commercial use and non-profit commercial use. (For example, the Red Cross still has to get permission to use another company's trademark. Likewise, a DM who only takes up money for the pizza makes no money, but still engages in commerce.)
But the purpose of trademark is to ensure that no unscrupulous person makes money off your company's good name. (This is why your trademark application includes a specific description of the goods and services you will offer under the trademark.) So in instances of private get togethers, where no money changes hands and the "advertising" is all by word of mouth, the trademark bears no authority.
This isn't to say that White Wolf is doing the right thing. If they were just doing this to keep play legal, the license would cost one dollar instead of twenty.
Okay, I know we're getting way off topic here, but I think you at least have to take the Athanasian creed out of that list, considering it explicitly names the Catholic faith in the first line. In fact, a quick Google of any of those names with the word "protestant" will pull up pages debating whether they are appropriate for various accepted Christian faiths.
I think the Mormons are an interesting reminder that we can't always count on a "secret handshake" of shared literature to recognize people of a faith. It's a good start, but it rarely gets to the heart of what a person really believes. Of course, I agree that a shared literature is immensely valuable for finding out what someone thinks through discussion. Simply knowing the text, however, indicates nothing.
If I recall correctly, the PSP was also priced early on at around $400 - competitive with palmtops that use a similarly sized screen. The justification for this being that the huge LCD screen actually cost more than $400 for each unit. Obviously, this was either more Sony hype or they eventually had to skimp on the hardware to make the price comparable to the DS, thus leading to cheaper screens that get dead pixels easily.
Also, I know you didn't mention this in your post, but I thought I'd sound off on the "everyone sells at a loss" idea. Nintendo claims that they never sold the GameCube at a loss, which is possible considering how much it went for in the first generation. Considering the high price tags on most of the new geeky toys that come out, I'm inclined to think that they aren't selling at a loss. Hardware companies depend on people who walk into Fry's looking to buy the newest cutting edge ShinyGadget(TM) and willing to pay whatever the cost. Derivative products come into the market later with cheaper solutions, but for new hardware it's always the rich early adopters that nurse the product through it's infancy.
Sony and Microsoft continue to sell at a loss because that 1) they have other products and divisions to bring in the loot while their game hardware gains credibility. 2) The subset of gamers who will pay "anything" for a new system is comparatively small. They need to be offering consumer-level pricing as soon as they can in order to push a large number of units and gobble up market share. For Nintendo, games are the whole of the business. They don't have the flexibility of being attached to a wealthy company that makes something else. So of course, they need to make money on every sale. You only sell at a loss when you have money to burn.
Hmm...it's a good conspiracy theory, but I think you've got the wrong evil empire there.
Marijuana DOES threaten a major U.S. industry: the tobacco industry, which by the way is much older than William Randolph Hearst. Older than the United States, in fact. I would guess (although I'm not an expert) that Big Tobacco has a very well established infrastructure that would have to be scrapped in order to truly capitalize on hemp.
Otherwise they think they might be run out of business while trying to move to the new market. And it's easy to see why. The new product has tons of profitable derivatives (rope, cloth, etc), it provides a more powerful effect in a smaller dose, and it has fewer of those nasty tobacco side effects (like say, cancer). Plus it's much easier to grow, so the chance of a small grower becoming a major industry player overnight are pretty good. In the meantime Big Tobacco has to scratch some of their existing infrastructure and rebuild part of their business from the ground up. In this case it's much, much cheaper to make the competing product illegal.
Of course, I'm no expert, but this is my educated guess at who's really behind the criminalization of marijuana. Take it as you will.
Did it seem odd to anybody else that they talked about these cheaters as though they were robbing convenience stores or running drug rings out of their basements? Like cheating in Halo 2 is the new drive by shooting. The whole thing seems a little over the top.
I know some people value their game rankings, but please. They're not taking anything from anybody and they're not causing harm beyond the tang of frustration (although, believe me, I know how frustrating even the illusion of cheat can be). They didn't even touch on the people who use hacks to steal your account or personal information, or anything else that's actually illegal or harmful. Do we really need an "expose" on people using cheat codes? Come now.
Schools and universities buy a LOT of black and white paper for introductory photography classes, either directly or through their students' supply lists. Schools are a very large market who purchase a lot of supplies that people don't normally use in their daily lives. (Blue Books, for example. If nobody uses them outside the universities then why does the campus bookstore carry five competing brands?)
I'd more likely predict that black and white paper will stay strong as an educational item, a position it's been settled into for the past decade. This market share more than makes up for the independent photographers that don't use the product.
Um...You have obviously never voted at one of these machines. Here's how it works.
I bring my drivers' license and voter registration to the polling place and wait in line. At the end of this line is a table where a real live human checks my name against a big paper list of registered voters. I show my ID and initial that I was at the polling place. In exchange the volunteer hands me a carnival ticket and puts me in a second line.
At the end of THAT line I will slip my ticket into a box without ever showing it to a volunteer. They use these to check that no one is slipping into the second line. The person who leads me to my voting booth has not seen my ID. It has not been logged in the computer. It was checked on paper by a completely separate human being. I could have cut in the second line, hung back, whatever. I can stay at the voting booth as long as I like. At the end of the day all they know is that I was there. I could even leave without voting if I felt like it. Hell, I early voted and they didn't even keep a record of what day you were there.
The ID masking system is rock solid already. We really should be focusing on making sure our votes get counted as we think they do.
Is it any wonder that half of all marriages end in divorce now?
This statistic is often quoted by people wishing to prove the eminent downfall of society. As with all statistics, we should be wary of it's claim. It is based on the observation that the divorce rate is slightly less than half (47%) the marriage rate in the United States. Comparing these two and then deriving this conclusion is highly fallacious.
To really know what percentage of marriages end in divorce, we need to weight the divorce statistics by age of the marriage and compare them to the number of marriages in the year they originated. The number of people marrying (and divorcing) is not constant and marriage rates have been known to spike (particularly right before troops are sent off to war).
The population is also fluctuating. Remember the baby boom, which coincidentally happened right after all those troops came home?
Last but not least, a small subset of the population will marry many times, skewing the statistics so that it seems that more people are both marrying AND divorcing. This is partly an error of the way the CDC and other agencies present their data in people per unit population. Really it should be occurences per unit population.
I'm sorry, but you've hit on a pet peeve of mine. And while I agree with your general sentiment, I just felt the need to speak out against this particular fallacy. Thanks for your time.
Well, as someone who is loath to even spend money on a regular TV, and only uses her current one as a console monitor, I can say that I would definitely appreciate it if games on the next gen consoles didn't count on my having too much fancy third party equipment.
I know HDTV is big here on Slashdot, but to tell the truth, almost everyone I know has at least one gaming console and none of them have HDTV. It seems like the latest offerings from Sony and Microsoft are going to target better hardware than most care to purchase if they push HDTV compatability as a major selling point. I can't blame Nintendo for not wanting to follow in their footsteps; designing for the E3 convention hall will only get you so far.
Let's see if I can think of anything that might have possibly diminished the experience for previous FF players in FFX. Let's see...
1. Horrible, badly-timed voice acting.
2. Prom dresses.
3. Underarm camera angles.
4. Rikku = Yuffie.
5. Yuna has no spine.
6. Monster capture quests.
7. Caesar cipher "languages." (Also used in such gripping titles as Starfox Adventures.)
8. No world map.
9. "Dodge 100 lightning bolts!"
10. The temple puzzles.
11. Stunning revelation: The creepy guy with the necrosis isn't our friend.
12. Kihmari want be most interesting but least used character.
13. I swear to God, they use the word "Macarena."
14. Invisible walls all over the place.
15. Why the hell is Tidus even there?
I limit myself to only 15 for spatial reasons. I was working a Day Calendar at one point.
It's not that I think this game didn't have some interesting qualities. Honestly, I think it was pushed out of the dev house too fast so it could launch with the PS2. With 6 more months of work, it could have really shone.
Maybe you don't already know this, but it is entirely legal for minors to watch R-rated movies in the theater. Or X-rated movies, for that matter. The rating system for the movies is enforced by the movie theaters themselves, not by the government. Games already have an equivalent rating system that is enforced by the game retailers, but apparently that's not enough in Illinois.
It probably has a little to do with the fact that people with real mental or mood disorders are often antisocial or even hostile to the idea of seeing a psychiatrist. Whereas the Emokids are actually friendly and open about telling anyone and everyone how much their life sucks. Psychiatrists are supposed to be above these kind of distinctions, but you can't treat people who won't come into the office or won't talk to the doctor. I'm not saying that it's the fault of those potential patients, just that it happens.
Especially applicable to those gifted kids who see their psychological problems as a challenge and want to tackle em on their own. (Yeah, Joe Slashdotter, I'm lookin at you.)
In the college town where I live, there is actually a special University bus that runs back and forth between the biggest dorm on campus and the bar district at night. On the one hand, maybe it's a bad thing that access to the bars is so easy. But having a ride back to campus late at night is definitely a good thing.
Of course, IANAL, but it seems to me that this would presuppose the defendant's guilt by virtue of allowing this evidence to be used in court. To me, that would be enough to contest and ask for a retrial. But then again, I'm no lawyer and I don't know all the rules.
Don't they have the investigative right, once you've been charged of a crime, to simply do whatever it takes to decrypt the files? Presumably, this would merely involve sitting down at your computer and using the same tool you used to encrypt them. I don't see why the existence of the encryption tool would be admissable. If you know that the tool was there, surely your warrant goes so far as to allow you to use it.
Unless, of course, there aren't any encrypted files to be decrypted. In which case you can either prove that the files were deleted or moved off the original computer with about the same amount of difficulty as actually decrypting those files. Otherwise how can you even know that he used the software once he downloaded it?
Of course, I could be going in entirely the wrong direction here. Maybe they wanted to keep the defendant from pleading insanity.
As long as you don't perform the songs, I'd say go for it. You CAN prove that you didn't perform them, right?;)
As far as I've been able to tell from working with music departments in schools, you can copy all you like if you use the song as an exercise rather than a performance piece. In fact, there's always an interesting point in the music year when all the performers get shiny new copies of pieces they've been practicing all year. Of course, this was in Choral Arts, where the music publishers have a lot of power. Instrumentals like the drumline just seem to copy whatever the hell they want. IANAL, TINLA, etc.
This just proves to my mind that we have forgotten the true meaning of the word "criticism." Criticism does not mean attacking people. Criticism means reading a text with depth of interest and understanding, and applying your own set of morals to it's meaning to figure out how to relate it to the real world. This is entirely what the O.P. was doing. Somehow, a few dozen posters have turned his lukewarm criticism into an attack.
In other words, I don't agree with your assertion that the critic should have a different plan for the author set up in his mind. In fact, I feel that that would be something of an insult to the author, who, though he may not ingratiate himself to his audience, is still in charge of his own work.
I don't think that the O.P., or for that matter any of the other people who have posted before me, truly expect anything different of C.S. Lewis. The only way that you manage to make these/.ers look bad is by pretending that they do, and proving that the things they want are irrational. This is a logical fallacy. They're merely saying that they don't like what he has already written. I fail to see how that is vicious or radical. It's literary criticism and frankly, I'm frightened that anyone would tell them not to do it.
To be fair, Hitler was probably more a follower of Spencer's "social Darwinism," from which we get the phrase "survival of the fittest." This theory has been widely criticised as a misuse of Darwin's name and theories, and hardly has anything to do with biological evolution except as a touchstone for social ideas.
I talked to an ex-science teacher and his whole argument came down to "Occam's Razor". But how is this different from having your whole argument coming down to believing that "A God exists"?
You're right in implying that it is no different. Even Descartes eventually said that the only reason to believe in an external universe was the assertion that God would not deceive him. At some point, a leap of faith or logic is required to accept the evidence of our senses, regardless of how you slice the world ideologically.
However, most people on slashdot telling you you're wrong are thinking in much narrower (and probably more realistic) terms about what it means to replace Occam's Razor with the existence of God. They see that "a God exists" prompts the question, "which God?" As soon as we answer this question, we set out to aqcuire additional assumptions and dogma which may be considerably much less reasonable than the simple assumption that God exists.
For example, if we answer the question, "which God?" with, "the God of the Bible," we will eventually HAVE to believe that the universe was created in six days, that God became human, that virgin birth is possible, et cetera. All to hold up the basic leap of faith that allows us to accept that the world exists. I think most people will agree that this is a bad thing, even as we agree that it's perfectly acceptable to base your metaphysic on the existence of a God (because some of the greatest epistemologists have done exactly that.)
I would point out that this exact train of thought was used by many secular scientists in the 19th century to prove that flowers were beautiful, or even that Africans were an inferior people. So if any slashdotters out there think this is confirmation of your dislike of religions, you should think again. Dogmatism and inflexibility are bad for human knowledge regardless of who employs them.
Having known Radical Right Christians who are not terribly evangelistic, I have to agree with you. Even if they don't let their beliefs break surface in everyday conversation, there are still problems. To name a few issues specific to the type of Religious Right people around here, there's family abuse, overreproduction, financial strife, self-alienation, poor educational performance, sexual recklessness, divorce, and excommunication.
Some of these problems stem from strict adherence to church rules. (For example, families are often short on funds here because they believe it sinful for the mother in a family to work.) Others stem from the close connection to dogma. (For example, some fundie kids wither under the instruction of any teacher who doesn't reward them for their piety.)
More women here go to college than men do, but the greater number of them quit when they find a husband. I've seen many kids raised in my hometown grow up to be the proud inheritors of zero college money, a pregnant 21-year-old wife and a job at the Olive Garden. Many do not even try to make a better life or smarter decisions because, through the combined effects of religion and youth, they believe themselves to be invincible. The thing that kills me is, growing up these were supposedly the best and the brightest children, the vanguard of a happy prosperous future. The religion here does not help. It is a thin veil over an agenda of consumerism and control.
On the most basic level, I find myself wanting to help these people. Their inflexibility is killing them. But then my good liberal instincts kick in and I realize I have no right to intervene. Their religion is their own, and I as an outsider have no right to tell them it's wrong. I sometimes wonder whether it isn't time to throw respect to the wind and try to to some good by them in spite of themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most public schools promote a materialistic secular humanistic world-view. Kids that do not come from strong homes cannot fend off the destructive effects of this philosophy."
I hate to be the first to draw an unpleasant line, but by your logic, the people who home school their children would be these "weak" parents whose children can't handle this most unnatural popular culture, and are removed from it to avoid further damage.
Also, I fail to see how keeping your children away from mainstream culture helps them develop strong social skills. You are aware that by definition the mainstream comprises the bulk of our population, yes? I don't claim that MTV and designer t-shirts are good for people, but it helps to know how to relate to people that buy into those ideas.
*Sigh*... Reading comprehension, people.
They didn't say the world, or the players, or your cat wasn't ready for online play. They said the market wasn't ready for it. Translation: "If we had rolled it out at the time, we wouldn't have made money." The fact that you count XBoxLive among this generation's online failures is evidence enough that this was, to some extent, true.
When the hardware and infrastructure became cheap enough for Ninty to offer the service for free bundled with the console (wireless for less than $100, broadband less than $50/month), then the market became "ready." In other words, now it seems profitable.
I know, you're thinking "but there's been online play in PC games since the dawn of time!" Think about the correlation between owning a gaming computer and having internet access. Pretty high! The correlation between owning a game console and having high-speed internet access suitable for online gaming is a moving target. If Nintendo had included networking from the getgo with the cube, there would inevitably be titles that could only be played online, or were only fun when played online. This would decrease sales to gamers who didn't have (necessarily third party and uncontrollable) high speed internet. Game developers would focus more on the online play, which means more games you can't sell to the un-wired. Which means less profit for the developers, and less love for Nintendo.
You may be asking yourself why, then, for the love of god, they released games like Crystal Chronicles and Four Swords Adventure. Obviously, if the extra things you need to play the game are being sold by Nintendo, it means that you're 99% guaranteed access to the peripherals if you have access to the system and games. And need I say it makes them more money? Weird peripherals and GBA connectivity are profitable.
As I recall, they're doing the same thing with HD in this generation, for exactly the same reasons.
You're half right. Trademark does not distinguish between for-profit commercial use and non-profit commercial use. (For example, the Red Cross still has to get permission to use another company's trademark. Likewise, a DM who only takes up money for the pizza makes no money, but still engages in commerce.)
But the purpose of trademark is to ensure that no unscrupulous person makes money off your company's good name. (This is why your trademark application includes a specific description of the goods and services you will offer under the trademark.) So in instances of private get togethers, where no money changes hands and the "advertising" is all by word of mouth, the trademark bears no authority.
This isn't to say that White Wolf is doing the right thing. If they were just doing this to keep play legal, the license would cost one dollar instead of twenty.
Okay, I know we're getting way off topic here, but I think you at least have to take the Athanasian creed out of that list, considering it explicitly names the Catholic faith in the first line. In fact, a quick Google of any of those names with the word "protestant" will pull up pages debating whether they are appropriate for various accepted Christian faiths.
I think the Mormons are an interesting reminder that we can't always count on a "secret handshake" of shared literature to recognize people of a faith. It's a good start, but it rarely gets to the heart of what a person really believes. Of course, I agree that a shared literature is immensely valuable for finding out what someone thinks through discussion. Simply knowing the text, however, indicates nothing.
If I recall correctly, the PSP was also priced early on at around $400 - competitive with palmtops that use a similarly sized screen. The justification for this being that the huge LCD screen actually cost more than $400 for each unit. Obviously, this was either more Sony hype or they eventually had to skimp on the hardware to make the price comparable to the DS, thus leading to cheaper screens that get dead pixels easily.
Also, I know you didn't mention this in your post, but I thought I'd sound off on the "everyone sells at a loss" idea. Nintendo claims that they never sold the GameCube at a loss, which is possible considering how much it went for in the first generation. Considering the high price tags on most of the new geeky toys that come out, I'm inclined to think that they aren't selling at a loss. Hardware companies depend on people who walk into Fry's looking to buy the newest cutting edge ShinyGadget(TM) and willing to pay whatever the cost. Derivative products come into the market later with cheaper solutions, but for new hardware it's always the rich early adopters that nurse the product through it's infancy.
Sony and Microsoft continue to sell at a loss because that 1) they have other products and divisions to bring in the loot while their game hardware gains credibility. 2) The subset of gamers who will pay "anything" for a new system is comparatively small. They need to be offering consumer-level pricing as soon as they can in order to push a large number of units and gobble up market share. For Nintendo, games are the whole of the business. They don't have the flexibility of being attached to a wealthy company that makes something else. So of course, they need to make money on every sale. You only sell at a loss when you have money to burn.
Actually, it was
"Cold is God's way of telling us to burn more Catholics."
and the line was said by Blackadder's crazy puritan aunt, who was played by, let's see here...Miriam Margoyles.
Hmm...it's a good conspiracy theory, but I think you've got the wrong evil empire there.
Marijuana DOES threaten a major U.S. industry: the tobacco industry, which by the way is much older than William Randolph Hearst. Older than the United States, in fact. I would guess (although I'm not an expert) that Big Tobacco has a very well established infrastructure that would have to be scrapped in order to truly capitalize on hemp.
Otherwise they think they might be run out of business while trying to move to the new market. And it's easy to see why. The new product has tons of profitable derivatives (rope, cloth, etc), it provides a more powerful effect in a smaller dose, and it has fewer of those nasty tobacco side effects (like say, cancer). Plus it's much easier to grow, so the chance of a small grower becoming a major industry player overnight are pretty good. In the meantime Big Tobacco has to scratch some of their existing infrastructure and rebuild part of their business from the ground up. In this case it's much, much cheaper to make the competing product illegal.
Of course, I'm no expert, but this is my educated guess at who's really behind the criminalization of marijuana. Take it as you will.
Did it seem odd to anybody else that they talked about these cheaters as though they were robbing convenience stores or running drug rings out of their basements? Like cheating in Halo 2 is the new drive by shooting. The whole thing seems a little over the top.
I know some people value their game rankings, but please. They're not taking anything from anybody and they're not causing harm beyond the tang of frustration (although, believe me, I know how frustrating even the illusion of cheat can be). They didn't even touch on the people who use hacks to steal your account or personal information, or anything else that's actually illegal or harmful. Do we really need an "expose" on people using cheat codes? Come now.
You can do better than that.
Economics 201: There is more than one market.
Schools and universities buy a LOT of black and white paper for introductory photography classes, either directly or through their students' supply lists. Schools are a very large market who purchase a lot of supplies that people don't normally use in their daily lives. (Blue Books, for example. If nobody uses them outside the universities then why does the campus bookstore carry five competing brands?)
I'd more likely predict that black and white paper will stay strong as an educational item, a position it's been settled into for the past decade. This market share more than makes up for the independent photographers that don't use the product.
Um...You have obviously never voted at one of these machines. Here's how it works.
I bring my drivers' license and voter registration to the polling place and wait in line. At the end of this line is a table where a real live human checks my name against a big paper list of registered voters. I show my ID and initial that I was at the polling place. In exchange the volunteer hands me a carnival ticket and puts me in a second line.
At the end of THAT line I will slip my ticket into a box without ever showing it to a volunteer. They use these to check that no one is slipping into the second line. The person who leads me to my voting booth has not seen my ID. It has not been logged in the computer. It was checked on paper by a completely separate human being. I could have cut in the second line, hung back, whatever. I can stay at the voting booth as long as I like. At the end of the day all they know is that I was there. I could even leave without voting if I felt like it. Hell, I early voted and they didn't even keep a record of what day you were there.
The ID masking system is rock solid already. We really should be focusing on making sure our votes get counted as we think they do.
Is it any wonder that half of all marriages end in divorce now?
This statistic is often quoted by people wishing to prove the eminent downfall of society. As with all statistics, we should be wary of it's claim. It is based on the observation that the divorce rate is slightly less than half (47%) the marriage rate in the United States. Comparing these two and then deriving this conclusion is highly fallacious.
To really know what percentage of marriages end in divorce, we need to weight the divorce statistics by age of the marriage and compare them to the number of marriages in the year they originated. The number of people marrying (and divorcing) is not constant and marriage rates have been known to spike (particularly right before troops are sent off to war).
The population is also fluctuating. Remember the baby boom, which coincidentally happened right after all those troops came home?
Last but not least, a small subset of the population will marry many times, skewing the statistics so that it seems that more people are both marrying AND divorcing. This is partly an error of the way the CDC and other agencies present their data in people per unit population. Really it should be occurences per unit population.
I'm sorry, but you've hit on a pet peeve of mine. And while I agree with your general sentiment, I just felt the need to speak out against this particular fallacy. Thanks for your time.
Hmm...
Well, as someone who is loath to even spend money on a regular TV, and only uses her current one as a console monitor, I can say that I would definitely appreciate it if games on the next gen consoles didn't count on my having too much fancy third party equipment.
I know HDTV is big here on Slashdot, but to tell the truth, almost everyone I know has at least one gaming console and none of them have HDTV. It seems like the latest offerings from Sony and Microsoft are going to target better hardware than most care to purchase if they push HDTV compatability as a major selling point. I can't blame Nintendo for not wanting to follow in their footsteps; designing for the E3 convention hall will only get you so far.
Let's see if I can think of anything that might have possibly diminished the experience for previous FF players in FFX. Let's see...
1. Horrible, badly-timed voice acting.
2. Prom dresses.
3. Underarm camera angles.
4. Rikku = Yuffie.
5. Yuna has no spine.
6. Monster capture quests.
7. Caesar cipher "languages." (Also used in such gripping titles as Starfox Adventures.)
8. No world map.
9. "Dodge 100 lightning bolts!"
10. The temple puzzles.
11. Stunning revelation: The creepy guy with the necrosis isn't our friend.
12. Kihmari want be most interesting but least used character.
13. I swear to God, they use the word "Macarena."
14. Invisible walls all over the place.
15. Why the hell is Tidus even there?
I limit myself to only 15 for spatial reasons. I was working a Day Calendar at one point.
It's not that I think this game didn't have some interesting qualities. Honestly, I think it was pushed out of the dev house too fast so it could launch with the PS2. With 6 more months of work, it could have really shone.
Maybe you don't already know this, but it is entirely legal for minors to watch R-rated movies in the theater. Or X-rated movies, for that matter. The rating system for the movies is enforced by the movie theaters themselves, not by the government. Games already have an equivalent rating system that is enforced by the game retailers, but apparently that's not enough in Illinois.
It probably has a little to do with the fact that people with real mental or mood disorders are often antisocial or even hostile to the idea of seeing a psychiatrist. Whereas the Emokids are actually friendly and open about telling anyone and everyone how much their life sucks. Psychiatrists are supposed to be above these kind of distinctions, but you can't treat people who won't come into the office or won't talk to the doctor. I'm not saying that it's the fault of those potential patients, just that it happens.
Especially applicable to those gifted kids who see their psychological problems as a challenge and want to tackle em on their own. (Yeah, Joe Slashdotter, I'm lookin at you.)
Rarely is the question asked, is our freedoms being breached?
In the college town where I live, there is actually a special University bus that runs back and forth between the biggest dorm on campus and the bar district at night. On the one hand, maybe it's a bad thing that access to the bars is so easy. But having a ride back to campus late at night is definitely a good thing.
Singular: Alumnus
;-)
Plural: Alumni
Can't anyone get this straight? It's absolutely rediculous!
Of course, IANAL, but it seems to me that this would presuppose the defendant's guilt by virtue of allowing this evidence to be used in court. To me, that would be enough to contest and ask for a retrial. But then again, I'm no lawyer and I don't know all the rules.
Don't they have the investigative right, once you've been charged of a crime, to simply do whatever it takes to decrypt the files? Presumably, this would merely involve sitting down at your computer and using the same tool you used to encrypt them. I don't see why the existence of the encryption tool would be admissable. If you know that the tool was there, surely your warrant goes so far as to allow you to use it.
Unless, of course, there aren't any encrypted files to be decrypted. In which case you can either prove that the files were deleted or moved off the original computer with about the same amount of difficulty as actually decrypting those files. Otherwise how can you even know that he used the software once he downloaded it?
Of course, I could be going in entirely the wrong direction here. Maybe they wanted to keep the defendant from pleading insanity.
As long as you don't perform the songs, I'd say go for it. You CAN prove that you didn't perform them, right? ;)
As far as I've been able to tell from working with music departments in schools, you can copy all you like if you use the song as an exercise rather than a performance piece. In fact, there's always an interesting point in the music year when all the performers get shiny new copies of pieces they've been practicing all year. Of course, this was in Choral Arts, where the music publishers have a lot of power. Instrumentals like the drumline just seem to copy whatever the hell they want. IANAL, TINLA, etc.
This just proves to my mind that we have forgotten the true meaning of the word "criticism." Criticism does not mean attacking people. Criticism means reading a text with depth of interest and understanding, and applying your own set of morals to it's meaning to figure out how to relate it to the real world. This is entirely what the O.P. was doing. Somehow, a few dozen posters have turned his lukewarm criticism into an attack.
/.ers look bad is by pretending that they do, and proving that the things they want are irrational. This is a logical fallacy. They're merely saying that they don't like what he has already written. I fail to see how that is vicious or radical. It's literary criticism and frankly, I'm frightened that anyone would tell them not to do it.
In other words, I don't agree with your assertion that the critic should have a different plan for the author set up in his mind. In fact, I feel that that would be something of an insult to the author, who, though he may not ingratiate himself to his audience, is still in charge of his own work.
I don't think that the O.P., or for that matter any of the other people who have posted before me, truly expect anything different of C.S. Lewis. The only way that you manage to make these
To be fair, Hitler was probably more a follower of Spencer's "social Darwinism," from which we get the phrase "survival of the fittest." This theory has been widely criticised as a misuse of Darwin's name and theories, and hardly has anything to do with biological evolution except as a touchstone for social ideas.
I talked to an ex-science teacher and his whole argument came down to "Occam's Razor". But how is this different from having your whole argument coming down to believing that "A God exists"?
You're right in implying that it is no different. Even Descartes eventually said that the only reason to believe in an external universe was the assertion that God would not deceive him. At some point, a leap of faith or logic is required to accept the evidence of our senses, regardless of how you slice the world ideologically.
However, most people on slashdot telling you you're wrong are thinking in much narrower (and probably more realistic) terms about what it means to replace Occam's Razor with the existence of God. They see that "a God exists" prompts the question, "which God?" As soon as we answer this question, we set out to aqcuire additional assumptions and dogma which may be considerably much less reasonable than the simple assumption that God exists.
For example, if we answer the question, "which God?" with, "the God of the Bible," we will eventually HAVE to believe that the universe was created in six days, that God became human, that virgin birth is possible, et cetera. All to hold up the basic leap of faith that allows us to accept that the world exists. I think most people will agree that this is a bad thing, even as we agree that it's perfectly acceptable to base your metaphysic on the existence of a God (because some of the greatest epistemologists have done exactly that.)
I would point out that this exact train of thought was used by many secular scientists in the 19th century to prove that flowers were beautiful, or even that Africans were an inferior people. So if any slashdotters out there think this is confirmation of your dislike of religions, you should think again. Dogmatism and inflexibility are bad for human knowledge regardless of who employs them.
Having known Radical Right Christians who are not terribly evangelistic, I have to agree with you. Even if they don't let their beliefs break surface in everyday conversation, there are still problems. To name a few issues specific to the type of Religious Right people around here, there's family abuse, overreproduction, financial strife, self-alienation, poor educational performance, sexual recklessness, divorce, and excommunication.
Some of these problems stem from strict adherence to church rules. (For example, families are often short on funds here because they believe it sinful for the mother in a family to work.) Others stem from the close connection to dogma. (For example, some fundie kids wither under the instruction of any teacher who doesn't reward them for their piety.)
More women here go to college than men do, but the greater number of them quit when they find a husband. I've seen many kids raised in my hometown grow up to be the proud inheritors of zero college money, a pregnant 21-year-old wife and a job at the Olive Garden. Many do not even try to make a better life or smarter decisions because, through the combined effects of religion and youth, they believe themselves to be invincible. The thing that kills me is, growing up these were supposedly the best and the brightest children, the vanguard of a happy prosperous future. The religion here does not help. It is a thin veil over an agenda of consumerism and control.
On the most basic level, I find myself wanting to help these people. Their inflexibility is killing them. But then my good liberal instincts kick in and I realize I have no right to intervene. Their religion is their own, and I as an outsider have no right to tell them it's wrong. I sometimes wonder whether it isn't time to throw respect to the wind and try to to some good by them in spite of themselves.
Actually, that IS part of the Peter Principle. Can't remember which corollaries these are, but:
1. To an incompetent manager, superincompetence is indistinguishable from supercompetence.
2. Since everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, the managerial staff will eventually be composed entirely of incompent people.
Therefore, at some point superincompetence will always be cause for promotion.