You don't have to buy games to play them on consoles. Rent them - either from a Gamefly type place or any local video store. Most places will let you hold on to them pretty much indefinitely now, and some places (Blockbuster in my area does this) lets you do something where for $20 a month you can have up to 4 games out at any given time. The only new games I buy are ones that have really high replayability and are party games, like Rock Band and Brawl and the like.
Alternately, buy a PS2 used (well under $100) and you have a stupidly huge library of incredibly cheap games that'll work on it. Pretty clearly the OP isn't worried about having the latest and greatest, and there are a LOT of really fun PS1 and PS2 games out there that can be bought for under $5. A relative got me a gift card to a GameStop and I took advantage of a 2for1 sale to pick up a bunch of games for the equivalent of about $2 a game...
If they want to stick to the laptop and don't care about possibly violating the law, emulators are the way to go. MAME rocks and it's very easy to find a large selection of ROMs.
But personally, I'd go for the used PS2 and renting or buying used games. Cheap, absolutely legal, and a great deal of fun.
Hm, I could also see this leading to a problem of really weak memory skills for people who use it. I mean, I'm used to having to remember little things constantly, and there's good support for the idea that the more you use your memory the better it gets. What would happen if people began relying on this stuff as much as they do on, say, phonebooks in their cell phones?
When I was younger, I used to remember the phone numbers of dozens of people. Now, on a good day, I might be able to remember mine. Same thing for email addresses, URLs and so on.
I suppose the problem of weak memory due to overuse could be solved by having the user practice various memory tasks in their down-time - people who'd use a device like this would probably be open to using it to shore up a faltering memory etc.
Don't forget that eventually there would be LOTS of pre-assigned objects: every user of this system could potentially contribute various iterations of any kind of object to a communal database. Eventually, with enough examples and some clever software, new objects of a given class could very easily be recognized.
I believe someone's already using humans to sort photos right now - two humans will each view a picture on a web-site and both of them will write a caption the subject of it. Lots and lots of people caption the same image the same way and a database gets built up that's really quite good at figuring out what a given picture is of, and some decent analytical software could probably make excellent use of that database to look at new pictures.
Actually, I can easily see a business model for this, once the hardware is cheap and unobtrusive enough... Google builds the infrastructure for aggregating and sifting through all the data. Users of the service agree that when they are in "public" spaces the data their device picks up will get sent to Google, but "private" spaces would not be sent back unless a user so chose. Then they offer various levels of service: "free" would supply relatively unobtrusive ads ("You've been looking at (whatever) for quite some time - if you're thinking about buying a (whatever), blink twice and a link of local suppliers will be sent to your phone.") to the user. "Paid" would be ad-free. "Premium" would cost a substantial amount, but perhaps offer special analytical services or access to paid databases.
Honestly, I see this sort of analytical thing going on for all of our senses: something to evaluate the composition of air around you and can send an analysis to a display (we already have artificial noses); devices that constantly scan the sounds around us and could analyze them for known patterns/identify them ("That song you're hearing is Mmmbop - we suggest you evacuate the area immediately!"), pads worn on the finger-tips that would transmit to a display whatever you were running your fingertips over (nice for digitizing text - just zip your finger over it and it's in the system) and lots of other things.
And yes, just to head off the obligatory responses, this could very much be used for enhanced porn. "You've been staring at that woman's ass for several minutes now. Google ShopAssist has ordered Astroglide and Kleenex to be sent to your mom's basement for later use."
That's a pretty silly question, and hardly insightful. We are, as a species, interested in all kinds of things that aren't very similar to us. Why wouldn't there be interest in something that is completely alien - not even made of the same kinds of matter as we! - the study of which might yield all kinds of interesting bits of knowledge?
We have people who spend lifetimes studying the works of mediocre poets from 500 years ago, are you seriously suggesting that there wouldn't be an interest in dark matter life?
While it's certainly not possible to say with any certainty that dark matter life would be interested in us, given that the all "intelligent" species we know of so far show some evidence of curiosity, it's probably not unreasonable to imagine that alien life - even non-baryonic life - could be curious about us.
What kind of spam are you getting from Apple? I ask because, as I said, I bought Apple stuff and a quick search of my email for the last 2 years shows 23 emails with the word "Apple" in them and all but 3 of those are from my mom (the others are from Apple about my Apple Care registration, but that's not spam). Maybe they don't like spamming customers. Quick, buy an iPod shuffle and they'll stop!:D
I don't disagree that they are being babbled about all over the place, but even so, you don't have to pay attention to it or respond to it, you know? Kind of like how I'm doing with the US Presidential primary races that are going on right now - I'm sick to death of the minute by minute mood-swings as media outlets desperately try to boost readers/viewers by saying outlandish things ("Obama may have fathered black children!" "Hillary Clinton might have had sex with a man!"), so I just don't pay much attention to it.
My plan has rollover. Any unused minutes in my plan get shunted to the next month, and keep on getting moved over until I use them or 6 months have passed.
About 50% of the time, I don't use more than half of my minutes. Then, the other 50% of the time, I use my monthly minutes and then some (I'm a student, so half the time I'm swamped with classes and not on the phone, the other half of the time I'm swamped with work and do nothing but live with my phone to my ear). I pay the same amount every month and don't feel bad if I don't use all of my time or worry if I am on the phone a lot.
I like that, I like it a lot: a consistent bill and the ability to use my phone the way I want is a good thing. I guess I could save a couple of bucks by going with a pre-paid plan or something, but I don't really care; my plan is worth what I pay for it.
Nobody's telling you to approve of anything. In fact, I dare say, I was suggesting that people should make their disapproval known in the best way capitalism allows: not buying the product. It just seems silly to me that people bitch about something they don't have any intention of getting because the company isn't willing to give it to them in a way they want when it's a free market.
If Apple were the only game in town, then yeah, I could totally see complaining and criticizing as essential. But they aren't. There are plenty of cellular providers, plenty of phones that can be bought, so to me it seems pointless to waste time bitching at them when they could very obviously not care any less about your feelings.
Shake your fist at the heavens if you must, but I just don't think there's much of a point to it. They aren't going to change how they do business (based on the last 24 years of pretty much ignoring people who bitched about how they did business) and they're still going to make puh-lenty of money in the process. Seems to me like complaining just gives them more buzz, while not buying is better for your purposes.
You have to hear about them? I guess you had to click on this link and had to read about this story? Probably also faced a similarly impossible-to-resist requirement of having to post your comment, right?
Swear to god, reading slashdot, I'd think that people had no free will and just had to do whatever Steve Jobs wanted them to do.
For the record, I own 2 Macs and an iPhone, but I consider that a *choice*. Tell me, what part of the world do you live in where you have to buy/use/read about Apple products and have no choice in the matter? I'll avoid going there...
I don't like the way Microsoft behaves - I don't like being treated like a criminal and asked to prove that I bought something when I want to install software I bought. So, I don't run Windows and I don't use Office and I don't buy any Microsoft products that I know of.
If you have a problem with Apple, don't buy their stuff. It isn't like there's some kind of magical place where only iPhone users can go that makes the universe so much happier or anything like that: it's a phone and a PDAish/MP3playerish kind of thing, that's it. There are other devices out there that do the same thing, and most of them can be bought unlocked. So get one of those.
Honestly, I just don't get it. Apple and AT&T worked out a deal. The particulars, at least as they are relevant to consumers, are right out there in the open: you want to use an iPhone and all of its features, you have to have a 2 year contract with AT&T. There aren't any hidden gotchas or anything that isn't available to know to anyone willing to do a basic amount of research (and, if you're not doing research before spending $400 on a phone, you're an idiot or the money just doesn't matter to you). They spell it out before you buy the product what they're willing to do and all that stuff. If you're not on-board with what they're offering, simply don't buy it.
Very briefly (and probably incorrectly), people tend to use genetic to mean based on genes (disregarding environmental factors), while epigenetics is the study of how environmental factors (exposure to chemicals, stress during pregnancy, etc.) may affect the expression of genes for several generations.
I just assumed anyone who wasn't sure but was interested would google it - my own explanation is pretty bad, and the stuff from the first few pages of links for "epigenetics" is much more informative than I could be.
Don't fall into the trap that "biological" means "genetic." There is almost certainly a biological basis to homosexuality, but it may be epigenetic rather than "genetic" as most people mean the term. It seems to be more complicated than most - including myself - think.
If you're such a fan of libertarianism, why are you using the Internet?
I don't mean that as snark or a troll: I really mean it. The development of the 'net is a story that until very recently would be the complete counter-argument for libertarian ideals. It NEVER would have happened unless the government stepped in.
Sorry if this is off-topic, but I am trying to understand why the libertarian presence is so common on the least libertarian thing I can think of, and I figured I'd gamble some karma and ask someone who claims to be a proponent of libertarianism.
(For the record, I believe in maximizing individual liberty while minimizing suffering for all people, not just those who win the economic lottery. I'd be a libertarian myself, if not for that pesky belief that a couple of percentage points off of my personal earnings is a fair price to pay for helping people. And, while I don't mean this to brag, I probably earn a fair amount more than most libertarians, so I'm losing more with that notion than they are)
So I got to be some super-duper elite person (a Master Bounty Hunter, woo-woo) who was sent by the Hutts to kill womp rats. Because, you know, if you're hiring the best of the best when it comes to snipers, the thing you want them to do is kill womp rats. And, for some reason, Jabba the Hutt had nothing better to do than send highly skilled mercenaries to kill... rodents. The "faction" missions were even worse. I remember doing a whole string of missions for Jabba and being given... a fishing pole. On the desert planet of Tatooine. That's about as big a fuck you as getting a book of McDonald's gift certificates as your annual bonus.
City of Heroes/Villains tried this as well. "Hey, thesandtiger! Thank god you're here! My trousers need to be defeated by the magnificent generic_enemy_group_003!" The only parts that were any good were the story arcs, which were 100% scripted.
I still somewhat enjoy WoW's way of questing - they basically ignore the whole concept of other players in quests. Right now, my paladin just became queen of the Ogres and when I kill an ogre they reference that fact. Yeah, sure, I'm like the 9 billionth queen of the ogres to fuck some ogres up today, but that doesn't matter: I can pretend like that Night Elf Hunter "Toohawtforjoo" who is also being called the queen of the ogres doesn't exist.
But I still have a problem with Jabba the motherfucking Hutt telling me he really NEEDS my bounty hunting ass to go and blow up a nest of chupas. I mean, okay, the Fett family in the films met some rather anti-climactic ends, but come the fuck on, surely a Master Bounty Hunter ought to be getting hired to do something OTHER than kill froggish things.
If you're a "young Earth creationist" type of Christian, then ID beliefs are probably quite in line with your beliefs. People such as Kirk Cameron, who makes the argument that evolution cannot be possible because bananas fit easily in your hand and that peanut butter doesn't come to life (no, I'm not kidding) would fall into that camp. These people _definitely_ do wave their hands a lot whenever something gets tricky and say, "God did it." That "God did it" can be said in several ways - "irreducible complexity" is one of their current favorites. "Look at the human eye," they say, "there's no way that could have evolved!" My problem with this type of belief is that it tries to make religion answer the question of "How Things Work" which is a task VERY unsuited to religion. If this type of belief had been the most common from the start, we'd all be sitting in caves wondering if rocks were edible. I won't call it entirely unthinking nonsense, because, let's face it, it takes a certain kind of craftiness to keep on trying to come up with new ways to say the same old discredited stuff, but it's close enough to idiocy to make me queasy when I hear someone who otherwise might be a fine, intelligent person, espouse it.
If you're more of the camp that God might have said "Fiat Lux!" and then let the universe go from there to develop as it would, then you're in pretty good company. The father of the big bang theory was a Catholic priest, after all. These types of Christians use religion to address the question of "Why are we here?" which seems to me to be something that science cannot (and doesn't try to) answer.
Anyone who looks to religion to try to figure out how something in the physical world works is using the wrong tool for the job, just as anyone who looks to science to find answers to the question of why we are here is using the wrong tool. Two different fields entirely, and the only time there's a problem is when someone in one field tries to push the scope of their field into the other.
God's answer to that is a simple sentence: "I AM" Really, dude. God is capable of creating entire universes and living beings...we're not on a high enough knowledge level to understand how things really came to be, but that doesn't stop us from trying. What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it. You can't ask who created God, because creation (by the way we understand it) implies "time", a dimension that God Himself created. Do you even understand what "Eternity" means? It's not a "infinite period of time", you can be sure of that...
How sad it must be for you that your particular set of beliefs makes you angry and require that you not question or use that mind that, I am supposing, you believe your god gave to you.
Frankly, your god sounds like a petty tyrant if you aren't allowed to question the things you're told, and you sound like a fanatic if you really get pissed off when other people don't believe what you believe or dare to question it. Either your god is a really bad one or you are just a very, very, VERY poor spokesman for him.
I'm not a theist, but if I were, I'd like to think that any god or gods I chose to worship would want me to be curious, thoughtful and happy, not willfully ignorant and angry.
He said the ID crowd, not all people who believe in God.
Are you saying you're a proponent n ID? In that case, I'm sorry to say, you're not a scientist, or, at least, you are not being scientific about that aspect. If you're just saying you believe in God, then there isn't a problem.
Belief in god != ID proponent.
You might find it helpful to respond to what people actually said, rather than what is easier to slam. He specifically mentioned "the ID crowd" as the people he was saying settled for "God did it" and I'd say his characterization of the ID argument is pretty accurate.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Then why would you waste cycles posting to slashdot? If what you say is true, that folding should take precedence over "pointless" searches for noise-in-patterns, then surely it should take precedence over completely recreational wastes of time like slashdot.
So I expect to never, ever see a post from you again until protein folding and all other "more important" uses of cpu cycles are solved. Or are you a hypocrite?
Spiner could have been lying or joking. Lying in order to keep the guy from getting it signed and flipping it for a profit, or joking and the trekkie, like oh so many in that population, didn't grok the humor.
If I were a sci-fi idol, I think I'd find it very hard to resist fucking with fans from time to time.
It's entirely possible that the Chinese subs are good enough to escape detection by our fleet, or that we didn't detect it due to user error.
Or, perhaps, it was seen and detected all along but we're just saying it wasn't so that we don't give out an idea of what our tech is or isn't capable of.
Debt doesn't work like that in CoH. It's essentially negative experience points that accrue when a player is defeated - having it halves the rate of experience gain until it is paid off. It isn't like debt in the sense we usually think of it, where you get something in exchange for a future obligation; the player gets nothing for their debt in CoH.
Threat isn't the only way to make drama. It's an easy way, but it's not the only way.
With this, the question isn't, "Will they live?" it's "How will they go from being the unfamiliar versions of the characters we see in this movie to being the familiar characters we know?" Now, if they make the characters exactly as we know them already, just younger, THAT would remove a lot of opportunities for drama. The story would have to be, in and of itself, TRULY great in order for it to be worth telling if there's no character development and no threat.
An example of this in the past is, if we ignore the truly horrific way the stories were told, Star Wars. We know that Anakin becomes Vader, we know that virtually all the Jedi die, we know Kenobi kicks Vader's ass, etc. and so on - but we didn't know *how* those events took place. In the hands of someone who wasn't a clumsy oaf like Lucas is, the story - which we already know the end to - could have been told brilliantly. Unfortunately, it was told poorly and dumbed down from what it could have been greatly.
I have a Wii and a 360 already. I figured I'd be buying a PS3 eventually, but I chose to do it last week. I picked up the 60GB one in the US, which has hardware bc. Here's why I bought it:
- Cheap blu-ray player (and 5 "free" movies with it - 3 I'd actually want to own, the other 2 I can give away as stocking stuffers or something) - Plays PS3, PS2 and PS1 games. Nothing terribly exciting that is exclusive to the PS3 yet, but that'll change over time, I'm sure. - My PS2 hardware's trade-in value is not getting any better, and I was offered $100 credit towards a PS3 + 50% more for each game I traded in. With all the stuff I traded in, my PS3 went from a price of $499 to about $300, with tax. - The removal of hardware BC in the 80gb version and the removal of BC period in the lower end model. There are 60gb ones available now, but I don't know that they will be around all that much longer.
Honestly, I don't know what they were thinking with the removal of the bc entirely on the cheap one. Yes, people like me will go and buy a PS3 now while we can still get the hardware bc, but the people who'll buy a "budget" version are not the kind of people who'll want to spend $60+ on a game for it - they'll want to be able to go into a Gamestop and buy a half dozen used games for cheap (I just spent $100 on PS1 and PS2 games - I got 30 games (and some of those were arcade collections, so it's really more like 50-60 games) - MUCH better than spending $60 on Resistance, IMO).
For the record, I don't game THAT much. I recently decided to dump Windows entirely - gaming was the only reason I had a Windows machine. Sold my gaming rig, bought an the low-end iMac with the results (already have a MacBook for traveling and school and love it to pieces) and decided to just play games on the consoles. The only games that I would play ONLY on a computer rather than a console are out for Mac anyway and if I really just have to I can do bootcamp. The Wii is for parties, the 360 is great for multi-player games (and any title that comes out for multiple platforms will be a 360 title for me - the marketplace for added content and Live! play is just great), and the PS3 will be for PS3 exclusives, PS2 & PS1 games, and movies.
Anyway, that long-winded bit is my way of answering the question from the summary: Why'd I buy a PS3.
Pfft. Infant! In MY day we didn't even have days yet. We had to wait for nucleosynthesis and super-novae so we had Oxygen to begin with, and we were *GRATEFUL*.
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You don't have to buy games to play them on consoles. Rent them - either from a Gamefly type place or any local video store. Most places will let you hold on to them pretty much indefinitely now, and some places (Blockbuster in my area does this) lets you do something where for $20 a month you can have up to 4 games out at any given time. The only new games I buy are ones that have really high replayability and are party games, like Rock Band and Brawl and the like.
Alternately, buy a PS2 used (well under $100) and you have a stupidly huge library of incredibly cheap games that'll work on it. Pretty clearly the OP isn't worried about having the latest and greatest, and there are a LOT of really fun PS1 and PS2 games out there that can be bought for under $5. A relative got me a gift card to a GameStop and I took advantage of a 2for1 sale to pick up a bunch of games for the equivalent of about $2 a game...
If they want to stick to the laptop and don't care about possibly violating the law, emulators are the way to go. MAME rocks and it's very easy to find a large selection of ROMs.
But personally, I'd go for the used PS2 and renting or buying used games. Cheap, absolutely legal, and a great deal of fun.
Hm, I could also see this leading to a problem of really weak memory skills for people who use it. I mean, I'm used to having to remember little things constantly, and there's good support for the idea that the more you use your memory the better it gets. What would happen if people began relying on this stuff as much as they do on, say, phonebooks in their cell phones?
When I was younger, I used to remember the phone numbers of dozens of people. Now, on a good day, I might be able to remember mine. Same thing for email addresses, URLs and so on.
I suppose the problem of weak memory due to overuse could be solved by having the user practice various memory tasks in their down-time - people who'd use a device like this would probably be open to using it to shore up a faltering memory etc.
Don't forget that eventually there would be LOTS of pre-assigned objects: every user of this system could potentially contribute various iterations of any kind of object to a communal database. Eventually, with enough examples and some clever software, new objects of a given class could very easily be recognized.
I believe someone's already using humans to sort photos right now - two humans will each view a picture on a web-site and both of them will write a caption the subject of it. Lots and lots of people caption the same image the same way and a database gets built up that's really quite good at figuring out what a given picture is of, and some decent analytical software could probably make excellent use of that database to look at new pictures.
Actually, I can easily see a business model for this, once the hardware is cheap and unobtrusive enough... Google builds the infrastructure for aggregating and sifting through all the data. Users of the service agree that when they are in "public" spaces the data their device picks up will get sent to Google, but "private" spaces would not be sent back unless a user so chose. Then they offer various levels of service: "free" would supply relatively unobtrusive ads ("You've been looking at (whatever) for quite some time - if you're thinking about buying a (whatever), blink twice and a link of local suppliers will be sent to your phone.") to the user. "Paid" would be ad-free. "Premium" would cost a substantial amount, but perhaps offer special analytical services or access to paid databases.
Honestly, I see this sort of analytical thing going on for all of our senses: something to evaluate the composition of air around you and can send an analysis to a display (we already have artificial noses); devices that constantly scan the sounds around us and could analyze them for known patterns/identify them ("That song you're hearing is Mmmbop - we suggest you evacuate the area immediately!"), pads worn on the finger-tips that would transmit to a display whatever you were running your fingertips over (nice for digitizing text - just zip your finger over it and it's in the system) and lots of other things.
And yes, just to head off the obligatory responses, this could very much be used for enhanced porn. "You've been staring at that woman's ass for several minutes now. Google ShopAssist has ordered Astroglide and Kleenex to be sent to your mom's basement for later use."
That's a pretty silly question, and hardly insightful. We are, as a species, interested in all kinds of things that aren't very similar to us. Why wouldn't there be interest in something that is completely alien - not even made of the same kinds of matter as we! - the study of which might yield all kinds of interesting bits of knowledge?
We have people who spend lifetimes studying the works of mediocre poets from 500 years ago, are you seriously suggesting that there wouldn't be an interest in dark matter life?
While it's certainly not possible to say with any certainty that dark matter life would be interested in us, given that the all "intelligent" species we know of so far show some evidence of curiosity, it's probably not unreasonable to imagine that alien life - even non-baryonic life - could be curious about us.
What kind of spam are you getting from Apple? I ask because, as I said, I bought Apple stuff and a quick search of my email for the last 2 years shows 23 emails with the word "Apple" in them and all but 3 of those are from my mom (the others are from Apple about my Apple Care registration, but that's not spam). Maybe they don't like spamming customers. Quick, buy an iPod shuffle and they'll stop! :D
I don't disagree that they are being babbled about all over the place, but even so, you don't have to pay attention to it or respond to it, you know? Kind of like how I'm doing with the US Presidential primary races that are going on right now - I'm sick to death of the minute by minute mood-swings as media outlets desperately try to boost readers/viewers by saying outlandish things ("Obama may have fathered black children!" "Hillary Clinton might have had sex with a man!"), so I just don't pay much attention to it.
My plan has rollover. Any unused minutes in my plan get shunted to the next month, and keep on getting moved over until I use them or 6 months have passed.
About 50% of the time, I don't use more than half of my minutes. Then, the other 50% of the time, I use my monthly minutes and then some (I'm a student, so half the time I'm swamped with classes and not on the phone, the other half of the time I'm swamped with work and do nothing but live with my phone to my ear). I pay the same amount every month and don't feel bad if I don't use all of my time or worry if I am on the phone a lot.
I like that, I like it a lot: a consistent bill and the ability to use my phone the way I want is a good thing. I guess I could save a couple of bucks by going with a pre-paid plan or something, but I don't really care; my plan is worth what I pay for it.
Nobody's telling you to approve of anything. In fact, I dare say, I was suggesting that people should make their disapproval known in the best way capitalism allows: not buying the product. It just seems silly to me that people bitch about something they don't have any intention of getting because the company isn't willing to give it to them in a way they want when it's a free market.
If Apple were the only game in town, then yeah, I could totally see complaining and criticizing as essential. But they aren't. There are plenty of cellular providers, plenty of phones that can be bought, so to me it seems pointless to waste time bitching at them when they could very obviously not care any less about your feelings.
Shake your fist at the heavens if you must, but I just don't think there's much of a point to it. They aren't going to change how they do business (based on the last 24 years of pretty much ignoring people who bitched about how they did business) and they're still going to make puh-lenty of money in the process. Seems to me like complaining just gives them more buzz, while not buying is better for your purposes.
Just my 2 cents.
You have to hear about them? I guess you had to click on this link and had to read about this story? Probably also faced a similarly impossible-to-resist requirement of having to post your comment, right?
Swear to god, reading slashdot, I'd think that people had no free will and just had to do whatever Steve Jobs wanted them to do.
For the record, I own 2 Macs and an iPhone, but I consider that a *choice*. Tell me, what part of the world do you live in where you have to buy/use/read about Apple products and have no choice in the matter? I'll avoid going there...
Then don't use them.
I don't like the way Microsoft behaves - I don't like being treated like a criminal and asked to prove that I bought something when I want to install software I bought. So, I don't run Windows and I don't use Office and I don't buy any Microsoft products that I know of.
If you have a problem with Apple, don't buy their stuff. It isn't like there's some kind of magical place where only iPhone users can go that makes the universe so much happier or anything like that: it's a phone and a PDAish/MP3playerish kind of thing, that's it. There are other devices out there that do the same thing, and most of them can be bought unlocked. So get one of those.
Honestly, I just don't get it. Apple and AT&T worked out a deal. The particulars, at least as they are relevant to consumers, are right out there in the open: you want to use an iPhone and all of its features, you have to have a 2 year contract with AT&T. There aren't any hidden gotchas or anything that isn't available to know to anyone willing to do a basic amount of research (and, if you're not doing research before spending $400 on a phone, you're an idiot or the money just doesn't matter to you). They spell it out before you buy the product what they're willing to do and all that stuff. If you're not on-board with what they're offering, simply don't buy it.
Very briefly (and probably incorrectly), people tend to use genetic to mean based on genes (disregarding environmental factors), while epigenetics is the study of how environmental factors (exposure to chemicals, stress during pregnancy, etc.) may affect the expression of genes for several generations.
I just assumed anyone who wasn't sure but was interested would google it - my own explanation is pretty bad, and the stuff from the first few pages of links for "epigenetics" is much more informative than I could be.
Don't fall into the trap that "biological" means "genetic." There is almost certainly a biological basis to homosexuality, but it may be epigenetic rather than "genetic" as most people mean the term. It seems to be more complicated than most - including myself - think.
If you're such a fan of libertarianism, why are you using the Internet?
I don't mean that as snark or a troll: I really mean it. The development of the 'net is a story that until very recently would be the complete counter-argument for libertarian ideals. It NEVER would have happened unless the government stepped in.
Sorry if this is off-topic, but I am trying to understand why the libertarian presence is so common on the least libertarian thing I can think of, and I figured I'd gamble some karma and ask someone who claims to be a proponent of libertarianism.
(For the record, I believe in maximizing individual liberty while minimizing suffering for all people, not just those who win the economic lottery. I'd be a libertarian myself, if not for that pesky belief that a couple of percentage points off of my personal earnings is a fair price to pay for helping people. And, while I don't mean this to brag, I probably earn a fair amount more than most libertarians, so I'm losing more with that notion than they are)
SWG tried what you suggest.
So I got to be some super-duper elite person (a Master Bounty Hunter, woo-woo) who was sent by the Hutts to kill womp rats. Because, you know, if you're hiring the best of the best when it comes to snipers, the thing you want them to do is kill womp rats. And, for some reason, Jabba the Hutt had nothing better to do than send highly skilled mercenaries to kill... rodents. The "faction" missions were even worse. I remember doing a whole string of missions for Jabba and being given... a fishing pole. On the desert planet of Tatooine. That's about as big a fuck you as getting a book of McDonald's gift certificates as your annual bonus.
City of Heroes/Villains tried this as well. "Hey, thesandtiger! Thank god you're here! My trousers need to be defeated by the magnificent generic_enemy_group_003!" The only parts that were any good were the story arcs, which were 100% scripted.
I still somewhat enjoy WoW's way of questing - they basically ignore the whole concept of other players in quests. Right now, my paladin just became queen of the Ogres and when I kill an ogre they reference that fact. Yeah, sure, I'm like the 9 billionth queen of the ogres to fuck some ogres up today, but that doesn't matter: I can pretend like that Night Elf Hunter "Toohawtforjoo" who is also being called the queen of the ogres doesn't exist.
But I still have a problem with Jabba the motherfucking Hutt telling me he really NEEDS my bounty hunting ass to go and blow up a nest of chupas. I mean, okay, the Fett family in the films met some rather anti-climactic ends, but come the fuck on, surely a Master Bounty Hunter ought to be getting hired to do something OTHER than kill froggish things.
Let's clarify a little:
If you're a "young Earth creationist" type of Christian, then ID beliefs are probably quite in line with your beliefs. People such as Kirk Cameron, who makes the argument that evolution cannot be possible because bananas fit easily in your hand and that peanut butter doesn't come to life (no, I'm not kidding) would fall into that camp. These people _definitely_ do wave their hands a lot whenever something gets tricky and say, "God did it." That "God did it" can be said in several ways - "irreducible complexity" is one of their current favorites. "Look at the human eye," they say, "there's no way that could have evolved!" My problem with this type of belief is that it tries to make religion answer the question of "How Things Work" which is a task VERY unsuited to religion. If this type of belief had been the most common from the start, we'd all be sitting in caves wondering if rocks were edible. I won't call it entirely unthinking nonsense, because, let's face it, it takes a certain kind of craftiness to keep on trying to come up with new ways to say the same old discredited stuff, but it's close enough to idiocy to make me queasy when I hear someone who otherwise might be a fine, intelligent person, espouse it.
If you're more of the camp that God might have said "Fiat Lux!" and then let the universe go from there to develop as it would, then you're in pretty good company. The father of the big bang theory was a Catholic priest, after all. These types of Christians use religion to address the question of "Why are we here?" which seems to me to be something that science cannot (and doesn't try to) answer.
Anyone who looks to religion to try to figure out how something in the physical world works is using the wrong tool for the job, just as anyone who looks to science to find answers to the question of why we are here is using the wrong tool. Two different fields entirely, and the only time there's a problem is when someone in one field tries to push the scope of their field into the other.
God's answer to that is a simple sentence: "I AM" Really, dude. God is capable of creating entire universes and living beings...we're not on a high enough knowledge level to understand how things really came to be, but that doesn't stop us from trying. What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it. You can't ask who created God, because creation (by the way we understand it) implies "time", a dimension that God Himself created. Do you even understand what "Eternity" means? It's not a "infinite period of time", you can be sure of that...
How sad it must be for you that your particular set of beliefs makes you angry and require that you not question or use that mind that, I am supposing, you believe your god gave to you.
Frankly, your god sounds like a petty tyrant if you aren't allowed to question the things you're told, and you sound like a fanatic if you really get pissed off when other people don't believe what you believe or dare to question it. Either your god is a really bad one or you are just a very, very, VERY poor spokesman for him.
I'm not a theist, but if I were, I'd like to think that any god or gods I chose to worship would want me to be curious, thoughtful and happy, not willfully ignorant and angry.
He said the ID crowd, not all people who believe in God.
Are you saying you're a proponent n ID? In that case, I'm sorry to say, you're not a scientist, or, at least, you are not being scientific about that aspect.
If you're just saying you believe in God, then there isn't a problem.
Belief in god != ID proponent.
You might find it helpful to respond to what people actually said, rather than what is easier to slam. He specifically mentioned "the ID crowd" as the people he was saying settled for "God did it" and I'd say his characterization of the ID argument is pretty accurate.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Then why would you waste cycles posting to slashdot? If what you say is true, that folding should take precedence over "pointless" searches for noise-in-patterns, then surely it should take precedence over completely recreational wastes of time like slashdot.
So I expect to never, ever see a post from you again until protein folding and all other "more important" uses of cpu cycles are solved. Or are you a hypocrite?
Spiner could have been lying or joking. Lying in order to keep the guy from getting it signed and flipping it for a profit, or joking and the trekkie, like oh so many in that population, didn't grok the humor.
If I were a sci-fi idol, I think I'd find it very hard to resist fucking with fans from time to time.
Make a complaint about an Apple product though and you run headlong into a wall of denial a mile high
No you don't.
It's entirely possible that the Chinese subs are good enough to escape detection by our fleet, or that we didn't detect it due to user error.
Or, perhaps, it was seen and detected all along but we're just saying it wasn't so that we don't give out an idea of what our tech is or isn't capable of.
Debt doesn't work like that in CoH. It's essentially negative experience points that accrue when a player is defeated - having it halves the rate of experience gain until it is paid off. It isn't like debt in the sense we usually think of it, where you get something in exchange for a future obligation; the player gets nothing for their debt in CoH.
Threat isn't the only way to make drama. It's an easy way, but it's not the only way.
With this, the question isn't, "Will they live?" it's "How will they go from being the unfamiliar versions of the characters we see in this movie to being the familiar characters we know?" Now, if they make the characters exactly as we know them already, just younger, THAT would remove a lot of opportunities for drama. The story would have to be, in and of itself, TRULY great in order for it to be worth telling if there's no character development and no threat.
An example of this in the past is, if we ignore the truly horrific way the stories were told, Star Wars. We know that Anakin becomes Vader, we know that virtually all the Jedi die, we know Kenobi kicks Vader's ass, etc. and so on - but we didn't know *how* those events took place. In the hands of someone who wasn't a clumsy oaf like Lucas is, the story - which we already know the end to - could have been told brilliantly. Unfortunately, it was told poorly and dumbed down from what it could have been greatly.
I have a Wii and a 360 already. I figured I'd be buying a PS3 eventually, but I chose to do it last week. I picked up the 60GB one in the US, which has hardware bc. Here's why I bought it:
- Cheap blu-ray player (and 5 "free" movies with it - 3 I'd actually want to own, the other 2 I can give away as stocking stuffers or something)
- Plays PS3, PS2 and PS1 games. Nothing terribly exciting that is exclusive to the PS3 yet, but that'll change over time, I'm sure.
- My PS2 hardware's trade-in value is not getting any better, and I was offered $100 credit towards a PS3 + 50% more for each game I traded in. With all the stuff I traded in, my PS3 went from a price of $499 to about $300, with tax.
- The removal of hardware BC in the 80gb version and the removal of BC period in the lower end model. There are 60gb ones available now, but I don't know that they will be around all that much longer.
Honestly, I don't know what they were thinking with the removal of the bc entirely on the cheap one. Yes, people like me will go and buy a PS3 now while we can still get the hardware bc, but the people who'll buy a "budget" version are not the kind of people who'll want to spend $60+ on a game for it - they'll want to be able to go into a Gamestop and buy a half dozen used games for cheap (I just spent $100 on PS1 and PS2 games - I got 30 games (and some of those were arcade collections, so it's really more like 50-60 games) - MUCH better than spending $60 on Resistance, IMO).
For the record, I don't game THAT much. I recently decided to dump Windows entirely - gaming was the only reason I had a Windows machine. Sold my gaming rig, bought an the low-end iMac with the results (already have a MacBook for traveling and school and love it to pieces) and decided to just play games on the consoles. The only games that I would play ONLY on a computer rather than a console are out for Mac anyway and if I really just have to I can do bootcamp. The Wii is for parties, the 360 is great for multi-player games (and any title that comes out for multiple platforms will be a 360 title for me - the marketplace for added content and Live! play is just great), and the PS3 will be for PS3 exclusives, PS2 & PS1 games, and movies.
Anyway, that long-winded bit is my way of answering the question from the summary: Why'd I buy a PS3.
Pfft. Infant! In MY day we didn't even have days yet. We had to wait for nucleosynthesis and super-novae so we had Oxygen to begin with, and we were *GRATEFUL*.
Or he's using voice recognition software in Vista.
Eye yam woozy-sing hat cane clotbear.