I saw something similar, I think it was an early 'survive in the wilderness' reality tv show. The interesting bit was that the contestants tried the drink, half 'n' half blood and milk I think it was, made some funny faces, complained about it being disturbingly warm (straight from the cow, even more than usual), and then said that actually it was better than most of the other crap they'd eaten and they could get used to it.
Blood's very nutritious iirc; dog biscuits are pretty much wheat and beef blood.
I'm fascinated and horrified by the idea of selling 30 minute old coffee. I'm not in the US, and I don't have much experience of Starbucks in general. What do they do, churn out a bunch of popular coffees when it's busy and hope somebody buys them? This is espresso based, not filter?
Steamed milk drinks like lattes or cappuccinos are best immediately after they're made before the milk fully separates into hot milk and froth on top - especially so if the barista can steam the milk properly to get lots of tiny bubbles rather than big airy ones. I don't think anyone in their right mind would make those before an order was placed though.
Even black coffee changes noticably after (I think, about) 15 minutes even if it's kept hot*. Something about volatile (tasty) chemicals breaking down after extraction, but I don't know the details of the chemistry. Where I grew up there is a habit of drinking strong black coffee (2oz double espresso with 4oz hot water, tall glass of cold water on the side to alternate with the coffee) over a fairly long period of time while reading the newspaper or having a conversation. There's a definite point, about two thirds of the way through the coffee where you take a sip and think 'this coffee was really good, but now it's only ok'.
While I'm ranting, top two tips for home coffee making: french press, grind your beans right before you use them. Cheap blade grinders are a bit shit, and you really should pay 5 times as much for a burr grinder, but for God's sake don't buy pre-ground coffee.
*I've heard people say that it's the cooling that makes black coffee turn bad, but I'm more convinced that hot coffee naturally cools over time and it's actually the time that changes the flavour. Espresso with a little cold water tastes fine, and is quite a good way to taste all the flavours in a coffee if you're sampling.
I've heard some crazy things about how different starbucks franchises make their coffee, but if they're using normal manual machines there are a surprising number of ways to perform a mostly correct process but still fuck it up. Top of the list is messing up the coffee pack - either not getting enough coffee in there or having a fault somewhere that lets water through too quickly. Either way if they measure the time too much water will go through, or if they measure the water volume it will go through too quickly leading to watery, sour or otherwise lacking in taste. Bitter tastes would probably be over-packing leading to a slow extraction, crappy beans or a dirty machine. Someone who knows how to make a decent coffee can look at the streams of coffee coming out of the machine and know whether it's going to be ok or not based on colour and how fast it's pouring, assuming the machine is properly maintained.
Happily, I haven't been to Starbucks for a very long time but I do seem to recall that they use a very dark roast; I think it's some macho thing about not being 'proper' coffee if it doesn't taste like cigars and burnt toast.
The important thing is to find a cafe where they care about the coffee and their machine - coffee geeks.
Perhaps you know this and are simplifying, but an espresso machine (commercial, home ones are usually crappier) pushes water through densely packed coffee at ~9 atmospheres of pressure. That's a pretty important difference from the soaking-in-water method, but I don't know the details of how it effects caffeine extraction.
A bit off topic, but in New Zealand where I'm from we reserve 'drug' for the good stuff. Medicine is boring, and you get it from a pharmacy - not drugs from a drug store. I'm not saying it's correct usage, it's just local idiom. If you say you want some drugs for your headache, you'll be pointed towards the unwashed guy with dreadlocks;)
It makes the US 'war on drugs' particularly hilarious for us, since your country is full of self proffessed drug stores.
My mother was put through a similar exercise as part of some corporate development programme. Everyone was given a hokey little test which was meant to identify their personality type. Pah, thought my mother, voodoo and nonsense. Then all the employees were divided into groups of the SAME personality type and asked to organise an imaginary project. Hilarity ensued as my mother's group, 'enablers' or something, all patiently waited for someone to come up with a plan so they could chip in and make it work. Unfortunately I don't know any other details of the test or what happened to the other groups;)
with that many passengers someone probably had child porn as well
I think you vastly overestimate (1 in 246) the number of people who are sexually attracted to children, let alone indulge in and carry child pornography. As paedophiles are the flavour of the month bogey man it's fashionable to imagine that they're everywhere, but I'm pretty sure they're not. But to be fair a quick google/wikipedia implies that nobody really knows what paedophilia rates are.
All three of your points depend upon the terrorists being so stupid that they're discussing their plans on a phone system, in the clear, which is tapped. The government isn't at any risk from losing "intel" on those cases.
Those are details though, you're missing his point about strategy. Regardless of the technology used, knowing which sections of your communications have been compromised lets you immediately fix those leaks and furthermore make some inferences about what methods your opponent is using. If a 'charity' knows that their conversations with churches, public figures and a foreign extremist religious group have been tapped but certain other conversations with a chemical supplier and an arms dealer have not they have a lot of information about what the Feds know about them and which of their contacts are compromised.
I vaguely recall (wikipedia does not quickly confirm or deny) that when the Allies broke the enigma code in WWII they didn't act on all the advance warning they had of German attacks because it would be too obvious that the German commmunications had been intercepted, and the Germans would change their code. Or maybe I'm confusing Cryptonomicon with history, I hate it when that happens.
I suspect which one you played first matters. I played FF7 before I played FF6, and while I enjoyed FF6 immensely, I felt it was horribly linear. There wasn't much scope for wandering around the world map and finding cool stuff; the world map was a way to get from one place to THE NEXT PLACE YOU MUST GO.
Yeah, FF8 and 9 are crap though. 10 had some interesting aspects but don't lose any sleep over having not played it.
All this talk of old games is giving me a hankering for the Ultima IV-VII games. Good times. Basically an entirely open world, but if you go somewhere too early you'll get merrily killed by dragons, cyclopses or demons. It's also a bit like the Zelda games in that part of the challenge is finding out where the great items actually are, even though you could get them any time.
If we take the premises that child porn is terrible, and simulated child porn is nasty but probably only as bad as other gross but legal fetish porn, how about this:
Make porn depicting simulated children legal as long as it was plausibly created using widely available (or provably available to the defendant) technology. Won't the child abusers just run a photoshop filter over their porn, you say? That might happen, but if the result must be of a quality that could plausibly have been faked it should be much cheaper to just fake it in the first place. Child abusers should be driven out of business by money-grubbing porn kings. For the porn creators it would be easy to defend against legal charges by simply creating a new item of comparable quality. Of course it would only stop the for-profit abuse of children, but since that's the big problem with child pornography trading I think it would be a winning solution.
As an aside, is what I describe above the situation with rape porn? It's not my kind of thing, but I assume it's much cheaper to pay a porn actress to pretend to be raped than to actually commit a crime, videotape it, distribute the video and hope you don't go to jail.
The score stands a 2 each; one post criticises the Jewish border controls, one makes excuses for the election of Hamas without condoning their actions, two claim that palestinians as a group want to murder Jews. It's hardly a hotbed of anti-Jewish sentiment.
Do you plan to offer any evidence for your opinion?
Hi, I also replied to you above but I'm not stalking you I swear! Nice sweater, by the way.
In New Zealand 'Christmas holidays' is a pretty common term since most people have several days off around Christmas. It's a popular time to take annual leave by using one or two leave days to make a four or five day 'weekend' including Christmas - so you ask 'what are you doing for your christmas holidays?'. There's a difference in the usage of 'holidays' in New Zealand though, I think it lines up with 'vacation' in America - a word we understand but don't use. A holiday is any day off, and can refer to either a day off or a trip to another location. 'I'm going on holiday to Australia' / 'I stayed at home for the christmas holidays. Too many people at the beaches to make it worth going out.'
I don't mean any comment on whether 'christmas holidays' is stupid in America, just mentioning a curiosity of language.
Is there really a secular movement against Christmas in (I'm guessing) America? I'm extremely a-religious as are most of my associates but I like christmas apart from the nauseating carols and rampant commercialism. Of course, I'm from New Zealand in the crazy southern hemisphere where we have a barbecue and play cricket for christmas. You can pry my mid-summer holidays from my cold dead hands!
I assumed the 'holiday season' nonsense was political correctness run wild, what with the dredging up of non-christian holidays around the same time.
Interesting that you should mention Akira - I've recently finished re-watching the movie then reading the 6 manga volumes as a comparison (doing the same with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind next). My conclusion was that the movie was good but the manga was absolutely fantastic. Without wanting to spoil too much, the movie starts wrapping up when one of the characters reaches Akira and discovers something. IIRC, in the manga that happens at the end of the second of the six books, and something completely different is discovered.
I think the Japanese have a good scheme with their manga-movie transitions where the movie tells a roughly similar story and reuses some scenes, but changes some key plot points and has the same characters doing different things. It gives enough room to make a movie which can stand on its own merits and is also interesting even if you've read the manga.
Something similar could probably have been done with Watchmen; have a different character revealed as the killer and a different surprise revelation but still explore the same themes and interactions between the characters. Or not. But it's something I'd like to see more of in western filmmaking.
One of the first big redactions obviously describes the sigint capabilities of the Soviets at the time. Interesting to imagine why they're still concerned about that; someone must think that by knowing what we knew about them at a particular time, you could infer something that would be advantageous...
Or someone thinks that someone knowing what we knew at a particular time might let them infer something... or someone A thinks that making someone B think that A thinks that B could infer something about what A knew about B at a particular time will in fact make B infer something else...
The article sure reads like BS, but that's popular science for you. I read about this kind of thing back in first year psychology (never did second year, I don't claim to be an expert). The brain is, frankly, a complete fucking mess from a design perpsective. It's entirely possible to knock out random parts of abilities that would be unitary if the brain was well designed, particularly through strokes or other injuries that damage small parts of the brain exclusively. Speech centres are classic; people lose their nouns, or the ability to speak entirely but can still swear reflexively because the reflex is in a different part of the brain.
I read about this kind of blindsight too, I'm not sure how this case is exceptional except that it's recent news and it's an uncommon condition. It's not magical (except when pop sci journalists need a story), it's just that the brain doesn't store all its functionality in logical places. I forget what the explanation I read was, but most likely the hardware for visually identifying objects is in a different place from the hardware for avoiding objects (regardless of what they are). IIRC, there are edge detecting cells in the eye, so it's plausible that something like a wire frame model gets sent down the optic nerve even before the visual areas get to work on it. There's quite a lot of visual cortex, and I suspect the journalist was glossing over some of the details. As I said, it sounds like BS except for the background I already know.
Fun further experiments: throw balls of rolled up paper at his head and see if he can dodge them; get him to throw things at a target! Both are plausible if he has object-sensation but not object-identification.
'creationism' is usually shorthand for Young Earth Creationism; i.e. God made all the animals magically pop into existance in their modern forms and allowing for variations like dog breeds but NOT allowing dinosaurs to evolve into birds. It's a way fringe belief with a few very vocal supporters.
The last I heard the Catholic church was old earth/not completely loony creationist - God created the animals and evolution was his tool. No denial of fossil or genetic evidence required. The Catholic church is surprisingly science-friendly (for a system of unsupportable beliefs) in that they will interpret scripture in a way that doesn't contradict strong scientific evidence. Compare to biblical literalists who believe the bible is literal and infallible and if it disagrees with the real world, then the real world must be wrong!
That said, I don't follow what the pope says very closely, so the new bloke might have some strange ideas.
I think you've got a good point there about attracting people to linux then scaring them off. I'm a programmer and linux user but definitely not a linux admin, and I'm finding Ubuntu a mildly irritating experience. It works fine for starting my web browser or openoffice (just like I used windows for for several years) but is remarkably painful in other ways. Perhaps I'm just displaying my ignorance of Linux, but if I can't manage it what hope does the man on the street have?
That's the gist of my comment, here's the lengthy anecdote. Off the top of my head:
1 The Synaptic package manager is great, and yet also crap. It's full of cryptically named and poorly described applications/utilities/games/libraries I've never heard of. The other day I decided to get all the vaguely interesting looking games. A good number of them (how would I find out how many?) didn't install shortcuts in the applications/games menu, and a couple of the ones that did were of such poor quality I feel bad about those three minutes of my life I'm not getting back. To be fair, I think most of the ones that didn't give me a shortcut were roguelikes or other console games - but I got at least half a dozen of them and I can't remember what most of them were called. The solution seems to be to go back to Synaptic (requires root password), go to the games section, sort by install status and read through the list to see what I haven't tried yet... or trawl through/usr/bin,/usr/games,/bin/games, ~/bin/games,/etc/notgames/nowaitheressomegames.
Also, Synaptic could use a rating system (like every other software repository in existence), and some flag to say that an item is 'user level' - that is, it's out of beta and is actually an application or application package rather than some data files or libraries that are useless for an end user on their own. The first time I installed Wesnoth I somehow managed to get the game but no campaign files - clicking on the new campaign button silently failed (but changed the tip of the day). It wasn't until I was getting ready to file a bug report that I checked the information in the package manager and noticed that I didn't have the campaign pack installed.
Sorry about the rant. Of course I don't blame the synaptic or Ubuntu maintainers for this mess, but it's a failure of cohesion that totally sucks for an average user.
2. My other big gripe is Wine, or maybe gnome. I've been trying to get my gaming fix through wine with mixed success. Some things work OK, others take control of the screen and crash horribly. Sometimes I can switch to another terminal and kill-9 the offending process, but not always and it's tempting to just cycle the power if I don't have anything important running. Even a windowed game I tried the other day managed to drop a totally unresponsive, black, always on top window that was present on every workspace leaving me a small margin of live desktop around the edge through which to use the system monitor to kill it.
Again, wine is a million times better than nothing, but there's no way I could recommend it to my family.
As a New Zealander (very metric) in London, I can tell you from first hand experience that there's barely any adoption of the metric system here. The one concession seems to be that supermarkets will display produce prices in both pounds and kilos, with one measurement being in 'fine print'.
I guess you're being tongue in cheek there; just because the measurements are in ml doesn't stop colloquial names for them.
In New Zealand, a former British colony which has been metric since the 60's iirc, we get by quite nicely with 'handles' and 'jugs' in the bars. I think the handles are about 450ml, jugs 1L. Handles are sometimes referred to as pints for historical reasons (student bars often have 'pint night' one day a week) even though a pint is 568ml(?), but since the pint is not an official unit of measure it doesn't cause any confusion.
Millilitre is pronounced 'mil' and kilogram 'kilo'. In a bar, particularly when it's noisy (i.e. they're open), you can order by pointing at the tap of the beer you want.
Beer bottles are usually 330ml, but are referred to as 'a beer'. Some beers, particularly the cheaper ones, come in 440ml cans - when there is need to distinguish the different sizes are referred to as 'three-thirty' or 'four-fourty' respectively. "Chuck us a four-fourty of Ranfurly, mate. Cheers."
Due to alcohol laws, all packaging has to show the percentage of alcohol by volume and number of 'standard drinks' in the container. This is really great when you're planning some drinkng because it's easy to compare the economy of a six pack versus a bottle of cheap wine... er, I mean to avoid accidentally overindulging.
Is it really that way in the South? What a shame! I'm in England at the moment, and it's a delight on a freezing, rainy day to be able to say cheerfully 'lovely weather we're having' and expect an even reply like 'I may do a spot of gardening later', or perhaps 'can't stop and chat, I must swim off to work'. A dry exchange of absurdities is a great way to convey agreement that the situation is less than ideal, but what can we do except persevere?
Of course, you'll still get a filthy look if you try that line while you're warm and dry but the other person is soaking wet.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw something similar, I think it was an early 'survive in the wilderness' reality tv show. The interesting bit was that the contestants tried the drink, half 'n' half blood and milk I think it was, made some funny faces, complained about it being disturbingly warm (straight from the cow, even more than usual), and then said that actually it was better than most of the other crap they'd eaten and they could get used to it.
Blood's very nutritious iirc; dog biscuits are pretty much wheat and beef blood.
I'm fascinated and horrified by the idea of selling 30 minute old coffee. I'm not in the US, and I don't have much experience of Starbucks in general. What do they do, churn out a bunch of popular coffees when it's busy and hope somebody buys them? This is espresso based, not filter?
Steamed milk drinks like lattes or cappuccinos are best immediately after they're made before the milk fully separates into hot milk and froth on top - especially so if the barista can steam the milk properly to get lots of tiny bubbles rather than big airy ones. I don't think anyone in their right mind would make those before an order was placed though.
Even black coffee changes noticably after (I think, about) 15 minutes even if it's kept hot*. Something about volatile (tasty) chemicals breaking down after extraction, but I don't know the details of the chemistry. Where I grew up there is a habit of drinking strong black coffee (2oz double espresso with 4oz hot water, tall glass of cold water on the side to alternate with the coffee) over a fairly long period of time while reading the newspaper or having a conversation. There's a definite point, about two thirds of the way through the coffee where you take a sip and think 'this coffee was really good, but now it's only ok'.
While I'm ranting, top two tips for home coffee making: french press, grind your beans right before you use them. Cheap blade grinders are a bit shit, and you really should pay 5 times as much for a burr grinder, but for God's sake don't buy pre-ground coffee.
*I've heard people say that it's the cooling that makes black coffee turn bad, but I'm more convinced that hot coffee naturally cools over time and it's actually the time that changes the flavour. Espresso with a little cold water tastes fine, and is quite a good way to taste all the flavours in a coffee if you're sampling.
I've heard some crazy things about how different starbucks franchises make their coffee, but if they're using normal manual machines there are a surprising number of ways to perform a mostly correct process but still fuck it up. Top of the list is messing up the coffee pack - either not getting enough coffee in there or having a fault somewhere that lets water through too quickly. Either way if they measure the time too much water will go through, or if they measure the water volume it will go through too quickly leading to watery, sour or otherwise lacking in taste. Bitter tastes would probably be over-packing leading to a slow extraction, crappy beans or a dirty machine. Someone who knows how to make a decent coffee can look at the streams of coffee coming out of the machine and know whether it's going to be ok or not based on colour and how fast it's pouring, assuming the machine is properly maintained.
Happily, I haven't been to Starbucks for a very long time but I do seem to recall that they use a very dark roast; I think it's some macho thing about not being 'proper' coffee if it doesn't taste like cigars and burnt toast.
The important thing is to find a cafe where they care about the coffee and their machine - coffee geeks.
Perhaps you know this and are simplifying, but an espresso machine (commercial, home ones are usually crappier) pushes water through densely packed coffee at ~9 atmospheres of pressure. That's a pretty important difference from the soaking-in-water method, but I don't know the details of how it effects caffeine extraction.
A bit off topic, but in New Zealand where I'm from we reserve 'drug' for the good stuff. Medicine is boring, and you get it from a pharmacy - not drugs from a drug store. I'm not saying it's correct usage, it's just local idiom. If you say you want some drugs for your headache, you'll be pointed towards the unwashed guy with dreadlocks ;)
It makes the US 'war on drugs' particularly hilarious for us, since your country is full of self proffessed drug stores.
My mother was put through a similar exercise as part of some corporate development programme. Everyone was given a hokey little test which was meant to identify their personality type. Pah, thought my mother, voodoo and nonsense. Then all the employees were divided into groups of the SAME personality type and asked to organise an imaginary project. Hilarity ensued as my mother's group, 'enablers' or something, all patiently waited for someone to come up with a plan so they could chip in and make it work. Unfortunately I don't know any other details of the test or what happened to the other groups
</anecdote>
I think you vastly overestimate (1 in 246) the number of people who are sexually attracted to children, let alone indulge in and carry child pornography. As paedophiles are the flavour of the month bogey man it's fashionable to imagine that they're everywhere, but I'm pretty sure they're not. But to be fair a quick google/wikipedia implies that nobody really knows what paedophilia rates are.
Those are details though, you're missing his point about strategy. Regardless of the technology used, knowing which sections of your communications have been compromised lets you immediately fix those leaks and furthermore make some inferences about what methods your opponent is using. If a 'charity' knows that their conversations with churches, public figures and a foreign extremist religious group have been tapped but certain other conversations with a chemical supplier and an arms dealer have not they have a lot of information about what the Feds know about them and which of their contacts are compromised.
I vaguely recall (wikipedia does not quickly confirm or deny) that when the Allies broke the enigma code in WWII they didn't act on all the advance warning they had of German attacks because it would be too obvious that the German commmunications had been intercepted, and the Germans would change their code. Or maybe I'm confusing Cryptonomicon with history, I hate it when that happens.
Was that meant to be sad world-weariness or wry irony? You need to be clearer! I don't know whether to mis-moderate you Funny or Insightful!
I suspect which one you played first matters. I played FF7 before I played FF6, and while I enjoyed FF6 immensely, I felt it was horribly linear. There wasn't much scope for wandering around the world map and finding cool stuff; the world map was a way to get from one place to THE NEXT PLACE YOU MUST GO.
Yeah, FF8 and 9 are crap though. 10 had some interesting aspects but don't lose any sleep over having not played it.
All this talk of old games is giving me a hankering for the Ultima IV-VII games. Good times. Basically an entirely open world, but if you go somewhere too early you'll get merrily killed by dragons, cyclopses or demons. It's also a bit like the Zelda games in that part of the challenge is finding out where the great items actually are, even though you could get them any time.
Ah yes, good times. I just wish they'd made more games after The Black Gate.
I SAID THERE WERE NO MORE GAMES
Which one is it for you? For me it's usually the one just before I get slapped in the face.
What?
If we take the premises that child porn is terrible, and simulated child porn is nasty but probably only as bad as other gross but legal fetish porn, how about this:
Make porn depicting simulated children legal as long as it was plausibly created using widely available (or provably available to the defendant) technology. Won't the child abusers just run a photoshop filter over their porn, you say? That might happen, but if the result must be of a quality that could plausibly have been faked it should be much cheaper to just fake it in the first place. Child abusers should be driven out of business by money-grubbing porn kings. For the porn creators it would be easy to defend against legal charges by simply creating a new item of comparable quality. Of course it would only stop the for-profit abuse of children, but since that's the big problem with child pornography trading I think it would be a winning solution.
As an aside, is what I describe above the situation with rape porn? It's not my kind of thing, but I assume it's much cheaper to pay a porn actress to pretend to be raped than to actually commit a crime, videotape it, distribute the video and hope you don't go to jail.
Quick tally of +5 rated posts upthread expressing preference for one side:
anti-Israel/pro-palestine:
Israel has a blockade where aluminum and cooking gas ( from the article ) are not allowed in or in low supply. This punishes the "live and let live" types far more than the violent militant ones
The citizenry were tired of the corruption of Fatah, and had one real alternative open to them. That is not a mandate of the Hamas platform.
anti-Palestine/pro-Israel:
84% of Palestinians polled [nytimes.com] support the cold-blooded murder of unarmed Jewish students
The palestinians have made their motives towards the jews, all jews, absolutely clear
The score stands a 2 each; one post criticises the Jewish border controls, one makes excuses for the election of Hamas without condoning their actions, two claim that palestinians as a group want to murder Jews. It's hardly a hotbed of anti-Jewish sentiment.
Do you plan to offer any evidence for your opinion?
Hi, I also replied to you above but I'm not stalking you I swear! Nice sweater, by the way.
In New Zealand 'Christmas holidays' is a pretty common term since most people have several days off around Christmas. It's a popular time to take annual leave by using one or two leave days to make a four or five day 'weekend' including Christmas - so you ask 'what are you doing for your christmas holidays?'. There's a difference in the usage of 'holidays' in New Zealand though, I think it lines up with 'vacation' in America - a word we understand but don't use. A holiday is any day off, and can refer to either a day off or a trip to another location. 'I'm going on holiday to Australia' / 'I stayed at home for the christmas holidays. Too many people at the beaches to make it worth going out.'
I don't mean any comment on whether 'christmas holidays' is stupid in America, just mentioning a curiosity of language.
Is there really a secular movement against Christmas in (I'm guessing) America? I'm extremely a-religious as are most of my associates but I like christmas apart from the nauseating carols and rampant commercialism. Of course, I'm from New Zealand in the crazy southern hemisphere where we have a barbecue and play cricket for christmas. You can pry my mid-summer holidays from my cold dead hands!
I assumed the 'holiday season' nonsense was political correctness run wild, what with the dredging up of non-christian holidays around the same time.
Interesting that you should mention Akira - I've recently finished re-watching the movie then reading the 6 manga volumes as a comparison (doing the same with Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind next). My conclusion was that the movie was good but the manga was absolutely fantastic. Without wanting to spoil too much, the movie starts wrapping up when one of the characters reaches Akira and discovers something. IIRC, in the manga that happens at the end of the second of the six books, and something completely different is discovered.
I think the Japanese have a good scheme with their manga-movie transitions where the movie tells a roughly similar story and reuses some scenes, but changes some key plot points and has the same characters doing different things. It gives enough room to make a movie which can stand on its own merits and is also interesting even if you've read the manga.
Something similar could probably have been done with Watchmen; have a different character revealed as the killer and a different surprise revelation but still explore the same themes and interactions between the characters. Or not. But it's something I'd like to see more of in western filmmaking.
Or someone thinks that someone knowing what we knew at a particular time might let them infer something... or someone A thinks that making someone B think that A thinks that B could infer something about what A knew about B at a particular time will in fact make B infer something else...
NSA is the home of dizzying intellects.
The article sure reads like BS, but that's popular science for you. I read about this kind of thing back in first year psychology (never did second year, I don't claim to be an expert). The brain is, frankly, a complete fucking mess from a design perpsective. It's entirely possible to knock out random parts of abilities that would be unitary if the brain was well designed, particularly through strokes or other injuries that damage small parts of the brain exclusively. Speech centres are classic; people lose their nouns, or the ability to speak entirely but can still swear reflexively because the reflex is in a different part of the brain.
I read about this kind of blindsight too, I'm not sure how this case is exceptional except that it's recent news and it's an uncommon condition. It's not magical (except when pop sci journalists need a story), it's just that the brain doesn't store all its functionality in logical places. I forget what the explanation I read was, but most likely the hardware for visually identifying objects is in a different place from the hardware for avoiding objects (regardless of what they are). IIRC, there are edge detecting cells in the eye, so it's plausible that something like a wire frame model gets sent down the optic nerve even before the visual areas get to work on it. There's quite a lot of visual cortex, and I suspect the journalist was glossing over some of the details. As I said, it sounds like BS except for the background I already know.
Fun further experiments: throw balls of rolled up paper at his head and see if he can dodge them; get him to throw things at a target! Both are plausible if he has object-sensation but not object-identification.
'creationism' is usually shorthand for Young Earth Creationism; i.e. God made all the animals magically pop into existance in their modern forms and allowing for variations like dog breeds but NOT allowing dinosaurs to evolve into birds. It's a way fringe belief with a few very vocal supporters.
The last I heard the Catholic church was old earth/not completely loony creationist - God created the animals and evolution was his tool. No denial of fossil or genetic evidence required. The Catholic church is surprisingly science-friendly (for a system of unsupportable beliefs) in that they will interpret scripture in a way that doesn't contradict strong scientific evidence. Compare to biblical literalists who believe the bible is literal and infallible and if it disagrees with the real world, then the real world must be wrong!
That said, I don't follow what the pope says very closely, so the new bloke might have some strange ideas.
I think you've got a good point there about attracting people to linux then scaring them off. I'm a programmer and linux user but definitely not a linux admin, and I'm finding Ubuntu a mildly irritating experience. It works fine for starting my web browser or openoffice (just like I used windows for for several years) but is remarkably painful in other ways. Perhaps I'm just displaying my ignorance of Linux, but if I can't manage it what hope does the man on the street have?
That's the gist of my comment, here's the lengthy anecdote. Off the top of my head:
1 The Synaptic package manager is great, and yet also crap. It's full of cryptically named and poorly described applications/utilities/games/libraries I've never heard of. The other day I decided to get all the vaguely interesting looking games. A good number of them (how would I find out how many?) didn't install shortcuts in the applications/games menu, and a couple of the ones that did were of such poor quality I feel bad about those three minutes of my life I'm not getting back. To be fair, I think most of the ones that didn't give me a shortcut were roguelikes or other console games - but I got at least half a dozen of them and I can't remember what most of them were called. The solution seems to be to go back to Synaptic (requires root password), go to the games section, sort by install status and read through the list to see what I haven't tried yet... or trawl through /usr/bin, /usr/games, /bin/games, ~/bin/games, /etc/notgames/nowaitheressomegames.
Also, Synaptic could use a rating system (like every other software repository in existence), and some flag to say that an item is 'user level' - that is, it's out of beta and is actually an application or application package rather than some data files or libraries that are useless for an end user on their own. The first time I installed Wesnoth I somehow managed to get the game but no campaign files - clicking on the new campaign button silently failed (but changed the tip of the day). It wasn't until I was getting ready to file a bug report that I checked the information in the package manager and noticed that I didn't have the campaign pack installed.
Sorry about the rant. Of course I don't blame the synaptic or Ubuntu maintainers for this mess, but it's a failure of cohesion that totally sucks for an average user.
2. My other big gripe is Wine, or maybe gnome. I've been trying to get my gaming fix through wine with mixed success. Some things work OK, others take control of the screen and crash horribly. Sometimes I can switch to another terminal and kill-9 the offending process, but not always and it's tempting to just cycle the power if I don't have anything important running. Even a windowed game I tried the other day managed to drop a totally unresponsive, black, always on top window that was present on every workspace leaving me a small margin of live desktop around the edge through which to use the system monitor to kill it.
Again, wine is a million times better than nothing, but there's no way I could recommend it to my family.
Whoa, don't loose you're cool dude!
As a New Zealander (very metric) in London, I can tell you from first hand experience that there's barely any adoption of the metric system here. The one concession seems to be that supermarkets will display produce prices in both pounds and kilos, with one measurement being in 'fine print'.
I guess you're being tongue in cheek there; just because the measurements are in ml doesn't stop colloquial names for them.
In New Zealand, a former British colony which has been metric since the 60's iirc, we get by quite nicely with 'handles' and 'jugs' in the bars. I think the handles are about 450ml, jugs 1L. Handles are sometimes referred to as pints for historical reasons (student bars often have 'pint night' one day a week) even though a pint is 568ml(?), but since the pint is not an official unit of measure it doesn't cause any confusion.
Millilitre is pronounced 'mil' and kilogram 'kilo'. In a bar, particularly when it's noisy (i.e. they're open), you can order by pointing at the tap of the beer you want.
Beer bottles are usually 330ml, but are referred to as 'a beer'. Some beers, particularly the cheaper ones, come in 440ml cans - when there is need to distinguish the different sizes are referred to as 'three-thirty' or 'four-fourty' respectively. "Chuck us a four-fourty of Ranfurly, mate. Cheers."
Due to alcohol laws, all packaging has to show the percentage of alcohol by volume and number of 'standard drinks' in the container. This is really great when you're planning some drinkng because it's easy to compare the economy of a six pack versus a bottle of cheap wine... er, I mean to avoid accidentally overindulging.
Is it really that way in the South? What a shame! I'm in England at the moment, and it's a delight on a freezing, rainy day to be able to say cheerfully 'lovely weather we're having' and expect an even reply like 'I may do a spot of gardening later', or perhaps 'can't stop and chat, I must swim off to work'. A dry exchange of absurdities is a great way to convey agreement that the situation is less than ideal, but what can we do except persevere?
Of course, you'll still get a filthy look if you try that line while you're warm and dry but the other person is soaking wet.