I'm not asking you to come to Jesus or anything. I'm just asking you to dial back the contempt a little, and recognize that like it or not, that 2000 year old book of fairy tales has had a profound and enduring influence on Western civilization. And even to entertain the possibility that its influence was not all bad.
The New Testament, which I assume you're talking about, isn't 2000 years old. The bible as it is It widely known and understood is at most 4-500 years old and the result of selective editing by people with agendas. The shocking thing is that much if any of the original message made it through at all. Even the oldest received text that the King James was based on was written hundreds of years after Jesus died and left widely open to interpretation in order to push the concept of Hell and damnation for non-believers that wasn't in the original text. If you allow that the Jewish tradition is the expert on Old Testament study, ask yourself why they don't conceive of Hell and the "popular" view of Satan.
If Christianity concentrated on what Christ had taught, humanists and secularists (two separate but intersecting groups) wouldn't have a problem with Christians - when your credo is love God and everybody else it's difficult to be too obnoxious. The problem arises from cherry-picking Old Testament blood and thunder to frighten believers and threaten non-believers. Jesus wouldn't recognise the self-aggrandizing, pompous, exclusionary churches that exist today, purportedly in His name.
Let's be clear here, I believe in Jesus and find value in much of what he taught, I just happen to be an atheist who doesn't consider him to be the son of God.
I haven't personally tried it but Google seems to suggest it works - install Opera and enable the turbo mode, which is basically a built-in proxy. This will let you get on to TPB from the UK right now, but I assume it doesn't offer the same security a paid VPN would.
I used to pirate a lot of music and also buy an awful lot of CDs. Same with movies and DVDs. Then they started suing consumers and adding those hateful anti-piracy ads to DVDs - did I pirate less? No. But I stopped buying discs. I'd like for me and the industry to get back to a position where I don't feel like I'm stabbing myself in the back when I pay for their goods.
He's pretty much quoting the "rules" from "The Millionaire Next Door" . It's actually a worthwhile read in my opinion, but there's no need for anyone to act all superior when they explain the "rules" to folk.
Big company thumps its chest about copyright violations - I don't care. Little guy wrings his hands about copyright violations - I don't care. Copyright is fucked up and I don't care if you're a big guy or a little guy, reform copyright so the public gets THEIR rights back and I might start caring again.
Technically the Andrew Oldham Orchestra owned the copyright on the original track that the sample came from (which was a properly licensed orchestral cover of a Rolling Stones song). Although the sample was licensed it was ABKCO Records that sued The Verve for using "too much" of the sample, not the Stones. The song-writing attribution on Bittersweet Symphony was a by-product of the litigation and nothing to do with Mick and Keith. But, yeah the whole episode was a horrible clusterfuck and if I no longer have any respect for copyright then stories like this are the reason why.
You nailed it. The "three" suggestions in the article lack the sort of elegance that you'd expect from a hack worth reporting on. Also, what kind of freak lies on their back in bed, when they could be curled up in a foetal position, whimpering?
Worse yet is the fact that Lego can reintroduce any of these collectible sets at any time. (Possibly owing a tied-in movie some additional revenue).
These sets are the ultimate in abandon-ware. Created for a short run, then the company moves on to some other fad, but always using the same parts.
The kids that find them under the Christmas tree could care less if its StarWars, or Dinosaurs, because they are only going to make little houses out of them, and become bored with them quickly.
Its easy to put inflated prices for particular sets on a web page, but who actually seeks these things out and spends good money on them?
I think you've managed to misunderstand how kids' brains work, the meaning of the term "abandonware" and the ultra-custom nature of modern Lego sets all in a single post.
My nephew likes Darth Maul and Lego. Hey, there's bound to be a Lego set with Maul in it, right? There is. Good luck finding it with a price tag less than five times the original RRP. Whether anyone buys them is, I agree, an entirely different manner. I got him Meccano instead.
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, as the classic Word format is just a memory dump of the objects that happen to be alive during editing.
Microsoft has a solution for that. You're supposed to upgrade to the latest version every time they release one. Buying Microsoft is buying built-in obsolescence.
Firstly, the Lego/Legos thing has been decided. People call them Legos. Language changes, get over it.
In my day we started out with a heap of blocks, gradually adding this, taking that away until we had something. Nowadays it's so different. You can melt down the blocks and use them in your own 3D printer, after adding the correct emulsion to lower the boiling point. Now I can literally turn my Legos into anything I want.
I'd go so far as to say that if it lets you die homeless and jobless your state has failed you. I'm not saying you shouldn't be encouraged into work, but some folk are just crazy. We shouldn't kill the crazy people, or let them die as you would have it. Most people like working. People who don't like working probably work twice as hard not working as they would working. It's not work they dislike, it's being told what to do. The don't dislike work, the dislike the idea of being made to work. Also, taxes.
Don't blame the work-shy for avoiding work, blame the media for making that look like an alternative. Every headline that screams about benefit cheats tells someone that cheating the benefit system is a thing that happens and apparently a lot of people can make six figures off it. The media drags this out, dusts it off, lauds it, decrys it, packs it away for a couple of weeks then goes through it all again.
Actually it's worse than that. If US jobs that moved to China become US jobs performed by robots you have still lost the jobs and you've also lost the potential market. Those Chinese workers? They used to buy US goods. Not any more.
Perhaps they're going to sell them for Bitcoins. The money and energy spent on hardware to mine Bitcoins must far exceed how much the entire Bitcoin economy is worth.
Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot - all still up and running. A lot more recent but rapidly failed as subscription MMOs, Warhammer Online, Dungeons and Dragons and Age of Conan are still going. Asherons Call 2 was the first big name failure I remember that was shuttered - somewhat interesting game that fell apart because they forgot that an RPG works better with NPCs, cities and such and not just a landscape.
Like most F2P games they had an item shop for buying character slots, buffs, customization choices, story arcs etc. I think that's where most of the income for these games comes from these days with even the subscribers having an incentive to speed over and above their subscription.
I suspect that City of Heroes was seeing diminishing returns from their story expansions. The user base had come to expect big new events a couple of times a year but they were likely making less of a return on each one.
(And I hear ya about GW2 and LOTRO both. LOTRO is still one of the best MMORPGs out there and a reasonable experience without paying a penny.)
Slashdot Mirror
What if the purported caches of "evil spells" proves to be false?
You mean the "spells of mass destruction"?
...starts talking about Bitcoin, it's time to get out of Bitcoin.
The New Testament, which I assume you're talking about, isn't 2000 years old. The bible as it is It widely known and understood is at most 4-500 years old and the result of selective editing by people with agendas. The shocking thing is that much if any of the original message made it through at all. Even the oldest received text that the King James was based on was written hundreds of years after Jesus died and left widely open to interpretation in order to push the concept of Hell and damnation for non-believers that wasn't in the original text. If you allow that the Jewish tradition is the expert on Old Testament study, ask yourself why they don't conceive of Hell and the "popular" view of Satan.
If Christianity concentrated on what Christ had taught, humanists and secularists (two separate but intersecting groups) wouldn't have a problem with Christians - when your credo is love God and everybody else it's difficult to be too obnoxious. The problem arises from cherry-picking Old Testament blood and thunder to frighten believers and threaten non-believers. Jesus wouldn't recognise the self-aggrandizing, pompous, exclusionary churches that exist today, purportedly in His name.
Let's be clear here, I believe in Jesus and find value in much of what he taught, I just happen to be an atheist who doesn't consider him to be the son of God.
That would be a lot of prostitution ads forgotten forever.
I haven't personally tried it but Google seems to suggest it works - install Opera and enable the turbo mode, which is basically a built-in proxy. This will let you get on to TPB from the UK right now, but I assume it doesn't offer the same security a paid VPN would.
I used to pirate a lot of music and also buy an awful lot of CDs. Same with movies and DVDs. Then they started suing consumers and adding those hateful anti-piracy ads to DVDs - did I pirate less? No. But I stopped buying discs. I'd like for me and the industry to get back to a position where I don't feel like I'm stabbing myself in the back when I pay for their goods.
He's pretty much quoting the "rules" from "The Millionaire Next Door" . It's actually a worthwhile read in my opinion, but there's no need for anyone to act all superior when they explain the "rules" to folk.
Big company thumps its chest about copyright violations - I don't care. Little guy wrings his hands about copyright violations - I don't care. Copyright is fucked up and I don't care if you're a big guy or a little guy, reform copyright so the public gets THEIR rights back and I might start caring again.
Technically the Andrew Oldham Orchestra owned the copyright on the original track that the sample came from (which was a properly licensed orchestral cover of a Rolling Stones song). Although the sample was licensed it was ABKCO Records that sued The Verve for using "too much" of the sample, not the Stones. The song-writing attribution on Bittersweet Symphony was a by-product of the litigation and nothing to do with Mick and Keith. But, yeah the whole episode was a horrible clusterfuck and if I no longer have any respect for copyright then stories like this are the reason why.
You nailed it. The "three" suggestions in the article lack the sort of elegance that you'd expect from a hack worth reporting on. Also, what kind of freak lies on their back in bed, when they could be curled up in a foetal position, whimpering?
I think they made the guppies middle-class.
Worse yet is the fact that Lego can reintroduce any of these collectible sets at any time. (Possibly owing a tied-in movie some additional revenue).
These sets are the ultimate in abandon-ware. Created for a short run, then the company moves on to some other fad, but always using the same parts.
The kids that find them under the Christmas tree could care less if its StarWars, or Dinosaurs, because they are only going to make little houses out of them, and become bored with them quickly.
Its easy to put inflated prices for particular sets on a web page, but who actually seeks these things out and spends good money on them?
I think you've managed to misunderstand how kids' brains work, the meaning of the term "abandonware" and the ultra-custom nature of modern Lego sets all in a single post.
My nephew likes Darth Maul and Lego. Hey, there's bound to be a Lego set with Maul in it, right? There is. Good luck finding it with a price tag less than five times the original RRP. Whether anyone buys them is, I agree, an entirely different manner. I got him Meccano instead.
It's quite trivial for this to happen. Suppose someone writes a Word document (with the latest version of Word), then sends it to another person who has Word 97, who maybe opens and edits it, then passes it along to someone with another version of Word again. Somewhere along the line the document will get corrupted, as the classic Word format is just a memory dump of the objects that happen to be alive during editing.
Microsoft has a solution for that. You're supposed to upgrade to the latest version every time they release one. Buying Microsoft is buying built-in obsolescence.
Firstly, the Lego/Legos thing has been decided. People call them Legos. Language changes, get over it.
In my day we started out with a heap of blocks, gradually adding this, taking that away until we had something. Nowadays it's so different. You can melt down the blocks and use them in your own 3D printer, after adding the correct emulsion to lower the boiling point. Now I can literally turn my Legos into anything I want.
I'd go so far as to say that if it lets you die homeless and jobless your state has failed you. I'm not saying you shouldn't be encouraged into work, but some folk are just crazy. We shouldn't kill the crazy people, or let them die as you would have it. Most people like working. People who don't like working probably work twice as hard not working as they would working. It's not work they dislike, it's being told what to do. The don't dislike work, the dislike the idea of being made to work. Also, taxes.
Don't blame the work-shy for avoiding work, blame the media for making that look like an alternative. Every headline that screams about benefit cheats tells someone that cheating the benefit system is a thing that happens and apparently a lot of people can make six figures off it. The media drags this out, dusts it off, lauds it, decrys it, packs it away for a couple of weeks then goes through it all again.
Now imagine THAT but you're a corporation.
...Facebook expects their share price to land. One dollar.
If Facebook remove all the accounts using fake names they'll have fewer members than Myspace.
That's right. The NeXT assembly plant was "automated". That whole thing wasn't just marketing crap, it was really, really automated. Yup.
No.
Actually it's worse than that. If US jobs that moved to China become US jobs performed by robots you have still lost the jobs and you've also lost the potential market. Those Chinese workers? They used to buy US goods. Not any more.
Perhaps they're going to sell them for Bitcoins. The money and energy spent on hardware to mine Bitcoins must far exceed how much the entire Bitcoin economy is worth.
Remember boys and girls, in bitcoin rainbow and unicorn land, deflation is good.
Like literally, the looneys recently celebrated the algorithm halving the new coin supply lol.
I mean sure a recession is just another word for deflation (it really is) , but lets not sweat the details.
Are you one of those clever spambots that assembles a comment from random words that kinda form a sentence?
I would not play it if the game lined my pockets with real gold.
I would. Where's the gold pocket-lining Beta sign-up?
Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot - all still up and running. A lot more recent but rapidly failed as subscription MMOs, Warhammer Online, Dungeons and Dragons and Age of Conan are still going. Asherons Call 2 was the first big name failure I remember that was shuttered - somewhat interesting game that fell apart because they forgot that an RPG works better with NPCs, cities and such and not just a landscape.
Like most F2P games they had an item shop for buying character slots, buffs, customization choices, story arcs etc. I think that's where most of the income for these games comes from these days with even the subscribers having an incentive to speed over and above their subscription.
I suspect that City of Heroes was seeing diminishing returns from their story expansions. The user base had come to expect big new events a couple of times a year but they were likely making less of a return on each one.
(And I hear ya about GW2 and LOTRO both. LOTRO is still one of the best MMORPGs out there and a reasonable experience without paying a penny.)