Hold on, Hold on. The iPod is NOT a prosecutable monopoly. It's a natural Monopoly. Which is to say, it arises because that just what consumers are buying. There is not illegal about that at all. It is 100% legit. It is only illegal to use a monopoly in one area to force a monopoly in another. Like Microsoft using their Monopoly in Operating Systems to shut Corel out of the market for Office Suites. Like Microsoft using their Monopolies in Operating Systems and Office Suites to secure a Monopoly in the Browser Market. That's illegal. iPod/iTunes is not, despite complaints by overzealous European prosecutors. There are LOTS of (legal even) ways to get music onto an iPod. Buying CDs for one. Plenty of Musicians are distributing music themselves in MP3 or FLAC (which can't be played on an iPod Shame on you Apple! But FLAC can be converted to other formats that can be played on an iPod). iTunes Music Store "Lock-in" in pretty poor to be honest. The vast majority of iPod users are not filling up their iPods on ITMS purchases.
Please note: It's the creationists who start this stuff. Science just goes along and does its thing. Scientists, go out, collect data, form hypotheses, test them, ad nauseum. They just chug along ya' know? The trouble is, you've got these religions that make these ridiculous absolute statements. And sometimes, Science discovers that shit just ain't true. As in, "Noooo, we're about 99.999999999999999....% sure the world is more than 6000 years old." Or, "Huh, Who'd a thunk! Diseases seem to be caused by these tiny little animals and crystals! NOT the wrath of God after all!" (By "crystals", I mean Virus, noting that some can be crystallized out of a solution and still be functional) So the religions get all uppity because their turf is being infringed upon, and they go and start some shit.
I'm sorry, but as for good things religious people could be doing, for a lot of them in the 'states that includes coercing ignorant young girls that have made a mistake that "God wants you to have this baby..." Completely ignoring that means never going to school, living in poverty for the rest of their life, probably marrying some drunken abusive douchebag. Abrahamic religious nuts are a bunch of sick fucks and the world would be better off without them.
To go even further, e.coli that naturally exists in your gut is only beneficial because it is uninfected with a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) that turns e.coli into a dangerous form that causes food poisoning (such as the cases of e. coli you hear about from undercooked meat).
I love this shit. Don't you? When people argue that we don't have to worry about abuses by Corporations because "competition" will prevent it. Which completely ignores that most markets in the USA, and the world in general, are oligopolies (and oligopolies would never collude to raise prices, that's illegal!)at best, and in many cases outright monopolies. They're trying to pull a double whammy, by using arm waving to say that the free market will fix everything, while ignoring that the market isn't free in the first place, totally rendering an already suspicious argument moot.
The rich don't have to worry, but the rest of us, we're fucked. Proper Fucked. It's going to take decades to undo the damage of the last 30 years of Neo-Conservative/Libertarian Economics, and we probably don't have that much time. We've basically been brought back to all the excess and abuse of the 1920's. Except now, the United States isn't in anywhere near as strong as position. We are not the greatest center of manufacturing in the world, by any stretch of the imagination. The world is also faced with much more serious impending crises that the 1920's. The Energy Crisis, Global Warming, Proliferation of Biological and Nuclear Weapons, and other problems. Makes Nihilism seem all the more rational doesn't it?
Which is really yet another way Bush royally fucked us over. Yes this is off topic, but I don't give a shit. There are countries we actually needed to keep an eye on. Iran, North Korea, the PRC, etc. Iraq was not one of them. Now we've pretty much blown our hegemonic wad over this bullshit, leaving us in an extremely vulnerable military position. Let alone our economic situation which is poised to collapse any day now (even more than it already has, starting with the hedge fund market). Of course none of the responsible parties are ever going to be brought to justice (i.e. spend the rest of their lives in the Military Prison for International War Criminals at Hague in the Netherlands). Bush is going to piss off to his Ranch in South America. I'd guess the rest of them have similar arrangements made.
I would be very shocked if the Virtual Console software isn't loading the entire ROM image into RAM. The largest game on the Virtual console is only 32MB, being Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And the Wii doesn't have 64MB of RAM, it has 88MB. While there are larger games for the Neo-Geo, that's the biggest title for the N64.
Mod parent up. This is 100% correct. Back in the day, by which I mean 1980-1994 or so, AAA titles routinely had an MSRP in the range of $80 at release. Competition and mail-order discount stores combined with a larger mass market brought this down to about $40-$50 dollars by around 1996, and there they've stayed until the last couple of years. People just don't remember what games used to cost in the early 90's. There have always been bargain basement, clearance bin, and shovelware titles. But at release, most top tier games were $60+ dollars at a minimum.
Which is a reason that has nothing to do with its technical merit or utility for actual use. Utility through dysfunction?
I did make a mistake, I mistook the release date of Windows 95 as August '94 instead of August '95. The Macs you would have used at school were either horribly obsolete (quite likely given constrained school budgets) and with far too little RAM (a problem I've seen on every Mac in/from a school system), OR from the only series of piece of shit machines apple ever manufactured, the PowerMac 5000 series, which were worse than worthless and also widespread throughout school systems (they used POWER chips hacked onto motherboards designed for 68040s, a system bus that was far too slow for the CPU, and IDE with a software controller, all I/O went through the CPU and took a minimum of 8 cycles). The advantages of the Amiga were that they were cheap, comparatively powerful, and extremely hackable and expandable if you had the knowledge or willingness to learn, and many of the best arcade and other game ports. Linux was barely in existence, but other Unixes were rocking the high-end world.
eh? 1994? Let's see we have Windows 95, compared with Mac OS 7.1, Amiga OS 3.0, Solaris 2.4, and IRIX 6.0.1, and OS/2 3.0 WARP. And you pick Windows 95?!? What the fuck is wrong with you? Depending on your uses, at least one of those OSes is vastly better than Windows 95. Mac OS 7.1 was better for low end Desktop publishing/image editting, IRIX 6.0.1 was hugely better if you had the money for a $50,000 workstation (photoshop and other apps being available on both Mac OS and IRIX, the IRIX machines being faster). Amiga OS 3.0 was greatly better for gaming in 1994. OS/2 WARP was best if you wanted the best DOS/Windows 3.1 compatibility. Solaris or IRIX was better if you needed a commercial UNIX that wasn't on a POWER mainframe. Even if you wanted office Apps, Microsoft Office, running on a Powermac 8100 with an 80Mhz PowerPC and maxed out ram (264MB), was a better, faster option than the fastest Pentium desktop you could buy at the time (A 100 Mhz pentium with SCSI Hard drives and as much ram as you could afford below about 128MB)
Windows 95 at release was horrid. DirectX wasn't released for another few years (the first major game I can remember was Diablo in 1996), Hardware support was spotty, and plenty of features were missing altogether (Gee, its great that things have changed so much right?) I can't even imagine any set of criteria under which Windows 95 was the best option in 1994 that doesn't involve "Must use the latest products from Microsoft."
Alright, I'll bite. The "Big Bang" theory makes no assertions about what came before, because it can't. There is no (currently understood) mechanism for information from "before" (even saying that doesn't really make any sense) the Big Bang to be conveyed into our Universe, therefore no testable predictions can be made about what it could have been like. If it can't make testable predictions, it ain't science, therefore, scientists leave that one alone, leaving it to speculation and philosophy.
The Big Bang theory is scientific because it makes falsifiable predictions about what the universe ought to look like. It is the explanation most consistent with our observations of the universe. It accurately explains the red shift of distant objects, and the observed structure of the universe, and the cosmic background radiation, among other things. Creation isn't scientific because it isn't testable. The explanation for everything is always "Wizard did it." There is no way to falsify "Wizard did it."
Although really unrelated to this argument, One can show that Creationism is actually the more complex explanation, and therefore, according to Occam's Razor, more likely to be false. Creationism presupposes god, or some equivalent entity. God is, by definitions used in philosophy and theology, greater than the whole of the universe. Therefore, Creationism, by presupposing the existence of god, an entity more complex and powerful than the universe, who then creates the less complex universe, is a more complex argument than the Scientific explanation, which merely presupposes that the universe can come into existence. In order to be intellectually honest, you have to explain god, and how god comes into existence.
Friday, written in 1982, is really the only book that portrays computers as widespread multi functional tools. And it was written pretty well into the beginning of the home computer revolution. The Apple II was released in 1977, the Commodore 64 the same year Friday was published. In "The Moon is A Harsh Mistress," Mike is a vast underground complex of mainframes. It is only because he is interfaced to, and the switching system of, the Moon's telephone and communications systems that he accessible anywhere, and only then because he is sentient. The vision of Mike in the novel is consistent with a supersized ENIAC, that becomes sentient. Heinlein clearly subscribed to the view that intelligence is an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing systems. While in his late work particularly, he perceives that computers will become extremely important as general tools, it is still in a vague and largely unspecified way. But that is true of essentially everyone from his era, nobody in their 60's in 1970 had the remotest idea about what the year 2000 would truly look like, which we only know in hindsight.
However, despite that early use in WWI, it was not until WWII, and Germany's use of blitzkrieg tactics, that the tank would radically revolutionize warfare. That time was necessary for military theory to catch up to the tank's true implications for warfare. And while the V-2 rocket would utterly fail to save Germany in WWII, its descendants would be (and still are) critical in the development of the Cold War, and remain dominant in modern warfare.
One of the things that amazes me is that Robert Heinlein, admittedly like so many others of his time, completely failed to see the implications of the modern computer. His view of the computer was consistently that of a better sliderule. Although, I'm somewhat ignoring his ideas of Computer intelligence here, which arose by the end of the 50's. He was still imagining computers solely as massive installations, existing solely for special purpose uses, or as master control systems. Despite the fact that he was so prescient in so many others ways. And he was in the Navy, one of the first places to see widespread deployment of mechanical computers, although admitted these were not General Purpose and were for the calculation of ballistic trajectories for long range gunfire. He foresaw the profound impact of Computer Aided Design in Drafting, although he imagined it as a special purpose device, rather than an application of a general purpose computer. It wasn't really until the 1980's when visionaries really started to get a grasp on what the computer really meant.
In my opinion, the energy storage system to work for is a generalized alcohol fuel cell, designed to be able to handle methanol and ethanol mixtures in any proportion. This system has a number of advantages: for one, this would largely be a refinement of existing technology, and for another, light molecular weight alcohols are very easy to generate from waste biomass. Anything from hemp, to straw, harvested algae, to waste products from paper and other industries, and yet again that it is a carbon neutral technology no net carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Alcohols also have the considerable advantage of being liquid at standard conditions, which makes transport very easy. It's really just a matter of putting the infrastructure in place.
True, but that's still a problem with ultraportables. Below a certain size, keyboards start to become unusable. Voice recognition is slow, as is handwriting recognition. One answer I can think of is the use of laser projection to project keyboards on any random flat surface, that also scans to allow typing. These do exist, they sell them at thinkgeek.
Outpost for one. It was superhyped up Sierra title, it came out as a horribly buggy, mangled mess. Mad Dog McCree, came out on PCCD and 3DO, it was the poster child for bad FMV titles, along with Night Trap. Pretty much anything from the mid-90's FMV boom belongs on a worst games of all time list. With the sole exception of Phantasmagoria, which possibly manages to rise to the heights of mediocrity.
Oh it could be done. Starring Johnny Depp as Fighter, Ian McClellan as Sorceror (or Caine), and Angelina Jolie as Rogue it might even be watchable. You've got to mix it up, have some drama. "Please! Find this Butcher and slay him, so that our souls may finally rest!" Dude! Wirt played by Elijah Wood. He'd show up at odd times, and need saving, thus providing comedic relief, plus the antics of Fighter. It would the best horrible movie ever, one of the great camp exercises of our era.
This is an extremely good point. For materials already in digital form (DVD) and for which subtitles already exist, this is a fantastic solution. However, in the broader spectrum that TFA was about it's anything but the case. I think its important to realize that the fansub communities are basically doing extremely expensive, time consuming work for free as a hobby. And that while there are a number of very, very good, fansub groups, there are many very shoddy ones as ones. The disparity between the above case of University materials already on DVD, and TFA is very large, however. You've got people out there demanding that amateur stuff, with no budget to speak of, be expensively modified to accommodate them. That's utterly unreasonable. Because its not the case that this stuff can be put out with subtitles or without, its a matter of without or not at all. For Zero-budget stuff, expensive subtitling may not be an option. I really I have a limited amount of sympathy for the deaf especially. I perceive them to have developed a dysfunctional cripple culture, where they ostracize members who choose to have cochlear implants and hope and wait expectantly to find out if their child is going to be "like them." I find this perverse, and possibly somehow connected to Apotemnophilia. Why they don't want to have the same range of experience as the majority of people seems simply bizarre.
He also ignores that colonization of North America wasn't economically viable in the short term. Vast fortunes were sunk into this rat hole to make it happen, and a successful colony didn't happen for nearly a century. An even longer time (over 100+) passed before it became profitable, something that slaves, sugarcane, tobacco (drugs!), and rum made possible. Please don't take this as an endorsement of slavery, I'm just saying that they were a critical part of the economy in centuries past. A historical fact. Of course, our present economic systems make such long term investments much more unlikely, but hopefully we'll keep trying.
I also disagree with his statements on Alien biology. It is extremely unlikely to the point of being a statistical certainty that the genetic codes of life which evolved independently on separate planets would not be the same. That cuts out alien Viruses/Viroids. Other differences in biochemistry could easily make life very difficult for the alien equivalent of bacteria. They won't have evolved in concert with us (duh) and thus will have a very hard time coping with our chemistry and immune system. Speaking in terms of probability.
Sir, I take from your post that you are a Native American. I am sorry for what has happened to your people. An argument I would like to make, and please don't take this the wrong way, is that sometimes Diaspora can be the right choice. I, myself, am ethnically Irish, a descendant of the Diaspora from the potato famine as well as political refugee from British persecution (I have learned that my family were famous revolutionaries and opponents of the English occupation going back centuries before the easter rebellion in the early 1900's.) The Irish were severely persecuted by the English. Our language was outlawed, our people brought to poverty, "white nigger" was originally a term to describe my people, in centuries gone by. Yet, many of us, the descendants of those who left, retain our cultural identity, and our deep appreciation for our cultural heritage. So I think it could be for the native peoples of the Americas. I do not say that you should forget who you are, NO! Never forget! But to move on and remember is perhaps the best way to survive.
Again, I ask that you not please not take this the wrong way, for I mean no offense.
Yes, one of the assumption in the argument is that the fight is going evenly, because the bear is weak, or the human has a knife and is very strong or something. Implicit is the idea that you decide the outcome. The argument is supposed to conclude that you shoot the bear even if it is the last bear on earth, always, because humans are inherently "special." I reject that conclusion completely.
"To be honest, I'd really have less of a problem if they were conducting raids on white towns and carrying off the inhabitants for food. There's plenty more where they came from."
Now, after a significant cool down time, I will admit the when I said the above, it was intended to be inflammatory, and was a knee jerk kind of post. References to Swift's "A Modest Proposal" tend to be pretty outrageous and polarizing. I will, on the other hand, stand by my assertion that the last bear on earth, or indeed the last, or last few members of any species are worth more than any human. The idea that humans have a right to survive, at any cost, and the more extreme, that any human has the right to survive at any cost, seems so incredibly dangerous to me. How much blood staining our collective existence do we have to have? I'm not a vegetarian by any means, but Cows are in no danger of going anywhere as a species, and neither are chickens. But the mass slaughter of an entire genetic line? That is entirely different.
How are we supposed to justify to future generations (should they even exist) that there were once great marine mammals, the largest animals that ever lived, that swam through the seas and sang hauntingly beautiful songs to one another. And that, in that perhaps not so distant future, they no longer exist, because we destroyed their breeding grounds and hunted the last few and ate them. How are we supposed to explain, that there were once other close members of the human family tree living in the forests of Africa. That they could walk upright, some could learn a little sign language, that they used tools, and cared for their young. And that they are no more, because we burned down their forests, and they were hunted to extinction, for meat.
Simple, there's plenty of human intelligence in world, by comparison, there's relatively very few cetaceans. Hence, one is more valuable, more special than the other. Answer to the question: Random Human! Even it was me, it'd be worth it.
There is an argument in philosophy, derived from the tradition of Kant, and others that Holds that human intelligence is "special." The following scenario is derived from that argument: A bear and a human are locked in a fight to the death, and you happen along with a gun, who do you shoot? At this point in time, probably the bear, unless it was a Panda, which are far too near extinction. In that case or the normally offered case of "What if its the last bear on earth?" The answer is the same, the human, twice to be sure.
Acknowledged, and I see that now. But I still don't have to like it. Indigenous culture or not, Bowhead whales are still a species at fairly significant risk. There are no whale species that aren't endangered to some extent.
To be honest, I'd really have less of a problem if they were conducting raids on white towns and carrying off the inhabitants for food. There's plenty more where they came from.
And BTW, Trees aren't the subject of of active research into non-human intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
Hold on, Hold on. The iPod is NOT a prosecutable monopoly. It's a natural Monopoly. Which is to say, it arises because that just what consumers are buying. There is not illegal about that at all. It is 100% legit. It is only illegal to use a monopoly in one area to force a monopoly in another. Like Microsoft using their Monopoly in Operating Systems to shut Corel out of the market for Office Suites. Like Microsoft using their Monopolies in Operating Systems and Office Suites to secure a Monopoly in the Browser Market. That's illegal. iPod/iTunes is not, despite complaints by overzealous European prosecutors. There are LOTS of (legal even) ways to get music onto an iPod. Buying CDs for one. Plenty of Musicians are distributing music themselves in MP3 or FLAC (which can't be played on an iPod Shame on you Apple! But FLAC can be converted to other formats that can be played on an iPod). iTunes Music Store "Lock-in" in pretty poor to be honest. The vast majority of iPod users are not filling up their iPods on ITMS purchases.
I'm sorry, but as for good things religious people could be doing, for a lot of them in the 'states that includes coercing ignorant young girls that have made a mistake that "God wants you to have this baby..." Completely ignoring that means never going to school, living in poverty for the rest of their life, probably marrying some drunken abusive douchebag. Abrahamic religious nuts are a bunch of sick fucks and the world would be better off without them.
To go even further, e.coli that naturally exists in your gut is only beneficial because it is uninfected with a bacteriophage (a virus that infects bacteria) that turns e.coli into a dangerous form that causes food poisoning (such as the cases of e. coli you hear about from undercooked meat).
The rich don't have to worry, but the rest of us, we're fucked. Proper Fucked. It's going to take decades to undo the damage of the last 30 years of Neo-Conservative/Libertarian Economics, and we probably don't have that much time. We've basically been brought back to all the excess and abuse of the 1920's. Except now, the United States isn't in anywhere near as strong as position. We are not the greatest center of manufacturing in the world, by any stretch of the imagination. The world is also faced with much more serious impending crises that the 1920's. The Energy Crisis, Global Warming, Proliferation of Biological and Nuclear Weapons, and other problems. Makes Nihilism seem all the more rational doesn't it?
Which is really yet another way Bush royally fucked us over. Yes this is off topic, but I don't give a shit. There are countries we actually needed to keep an eye on. Iran, North Korea, the PRC, etc. Iraq was not one of them. Now we've pretty much blown our hegemonic wad over this bullshit, leaving us in an extremely vulnerable military position. Let alone our economic situation which is poised to collapse any day now (even more than it already has, starting with the hedge fund market). Of course none of the responsible parties are ever going to be brought to justice (i.e. spend the rest of their lives in the Military Prison for International War Criminals at Hague in the Netherlands). Bush is going to piss off to his Ranch in South America. I'd guess the rest of them have similar arrangements made.
I would be very shocked if the Virtual Console software isn't loading the entire ROM image into RAM. The largest game on the Virtual console is only 32MB, being Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. And the Wii doesn't have 64MB of RAM, it has 88MB. While there are larger games for the Neo-Geo, that's the biggest title for the N64.
Mod parent up. This is 100% correct. Back in the day, by which I mean 1980-1994 or so, AAA titles routinely had an MSRP in the range of $80 at release. Competition and mail-order discount stores combined with a larger mass market brought this down to about $40-$50 dollars by around 1996, and there they've stayed until the last couple of years. People just don't remember what games used to cost in the early 90's. There have always been bargain basement, clearance bin, and shovelware titles. But at release, most top tier games were $60+ dollars at a minimum.
I did make a mistake, I mistook the release date of Windows 95 as August '94 instead of August '95. The Macs you would have used at school were either horribly obsolete (quite likely given constrained school budgets) and with far too little RAM (a problem I've seen on every Mac in/from a school system), OR from the only series of piece of shit machines apple ever manufactured, the PowerMac 5000 series, which were worse than worthless and also widespread throughout school systems (they used POWER chips hacked onto motherboards designed for 68040s, a system bus that was far too slow for the CPU, and IDE with a software controller, all I/O went through the CPU and took a minimum of 8 cycles). The advantages of the Amiga were that they were cheap, comparatively powerful, and extremely hackable and expandable if you had the knowledge or willingness to learn, and many of the best arcade and other game ports. Linux was barely in existence, but other Unixes were rocking the high-end world.
Windows 95 at release was horrid. DirectX wasn't released for another few years (the first major game I can remember was Diablo in 1996), Hardware support was spotty, and plenty of features were missing altogether (Gee, its great that things have changed so much right?) I can't even imagine any set of criteria under which Windows 95 was the best option in 1994 that doesn't involve "Must use the latest products from Microsoft."
Sir, that is an insult to every ten-dollar hooker out there!
The Big Bang theory is scientific because it makes falsifiable predictions about what the universe ought to look like. It is the explanation most consistent with our observations of the universe. It accurately explains the red shift of distant objects, and the observed structure of the universe, and the cosmic background radiation, among other things. Creation isn't scientific because it isn't testable. The explanation for everything is always "Wizard did it." There is no way to falsify "Wizard did it."
Although really unrelated to this argument, One can show that Creationism is actually the more complex explanation, and therefore, according to Occam's Razor, more likely to be false. Creationism presupposes god, or some equivalent entity. God is, by definitions used in philosophy and theology, greater than the whole of the universe. Therefore, Creationism, by presupposing the existence of god, an entity more complex and powerful than the universe, who then creates the less complex universe, is a more complex argument than the Scientific explanation, which merely presupposes that the universe can come into existence. In order to be intellectually honest, you have to explain god, and how god comes into existence.
Friday, written in 1982, is really the only book that portrays computers as widespread multi functional tools. And it was written pretty well into the beginning of the home computer revolution. The Apple II was released in 1977, the Commodore 64 the same year Friday was published. In "The Moon is A Harsh Mistress," Mike is a vast underground complex of mainframes. It is only because he is interfaced to, and the switching system of, the Moon's telephone and communications systems that he accessible anywhere, and only then because he is sentient. The vision of Mike in the novel is consistent with a supersized ENIAC, that becomes sentient. Heinlein clearly subscribed to the view that intelligence is an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing systems. While in his late work particularly, he perceives that computers will become extremely important as general tools, it is still in a vague and largely unspecified way. But that is true of essentially everyone from his era, nobody in their 60's in 1970 had the remotest idea about what the year 2000 would truly look like, which we only know in hindsight.
One of the things that amazes me is that Robert Heinlein, admittedly like so many others of his time, completely failed to see the implications of the modern computer. His view of the computer was consistently that of a better sliderule. Although, I'm somewhat ignoring his ideas of Computer intelligence here, which arose by the end of the 50's. He was still imagining computers solely as massive installations, existing solely for special purpose uses, or as master control systems. Despite the fact that he was so prescient in so many others ways. And he was in the Navy, one of the first places to see widespread deployment of mechanical computers, although admitted these were not General Purpose and were for the calculation of ballistic trajectories for long range gunfire. He foresaw the profound impact of Computer Aided Design in Drafting, although he imagined it as a special purpose device, rather than an application of a general purpose computer. It wasn't really until the 1980's when visionaries really started to get a grasp on what the computer really meant.
In my opinion, the energy storage system to work for is a generalized alcohol fuel cell, designed to be able to handle methanol and ethanol mixtures in any proportion. This system has a number of advantages: for one, this would largely be a refinement of existing technology, and for another, light molecular weight alcohols are very easy to generate from waste biomass. Anything from hemp, to straw, harvested algae, to waste products from paper and other industries, and yet again that it is a carbon neutral technology no net carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Alcohols also have the considerable advantage of being liquid at standard conditions, which makes transport very easy. It's really just a matter of putting the infrastructure in place.
True, but that's still a problem with ultraportables. Below a certain size, keyboards start to become unusable. Voice recognition is slow, as is handwriting recognition. One answer I can think of is the use of laser projection to project keyboards on any random flat surface, that also scans to allow typing. These do exist, they sell them at thinkgeek.
Outpost for one. It was superhyped up Sierra title, it came out as a horribly buggy, mangled mess. Mad Dog McCree, came out on PCCD and 3DO, it was the poster child for bad FMV titles, along with Night Trap. Pretty much anything from the mid-90's FMV boom belongs on a worst games of all time list. With the sole exception of Phantasmagoria, which possibly manages to rise to the heights of mediocrity.
Oh it could be done. Starring Johnny Depp as Fighter, Ian McClellan as Sorceror (or Caine), and Angelina Jolie as Rogue it might even be watchable. You've got to mix it up, have some drama. "Please! Find this Butcher and slay him, so that our souls may finally rest!" Dude! Wirt played by Elijah Wood. He'd show up at odd times, and need saving, thus providing comedic relief, plus the antics of Fighter. It would the best horrible movie ever, one of the great camp exercises of our era.
This is an extremely good point. For materials already in digital form (DVD) and for which subtitles already exist, this is a fantastic solution. However, in the broader spectrum that TFA was about it's anything but the case. I think its important to realize that the fansub communities are basically doing extremely expensive, time consuming work for free as a hobby. And that while there are a number of very, very good, fansub groups, there are many very shoddy ones as ones. The disparity between the above case of University materials already on DVD, and TFA is very large, however. You've got people out there demanding that amateur stuff, with no budget to speak of, be expensively modified to accommodate them. That's utterly unreasonable. Because its not the case that this stuff can be put out with subtitles or without, its a matter of without or not at all. For Zero-budget stuff, expensive subtitling may not be an option. I really I have a limited amount of sympathy for the deaf especially. I perceive them to have developed a dysfunctional cripple culture, where they ostracize members who choose to have cochlear implants and hope and wait expectantly to find out if their child is going to be "like them." I find this perverse, and possibly somehow connected to Apotemnophilia. Why they don't want to have the same range of experience as the majority of people seems simply bizarre.
I also disagree with his statements on Alien biology. It is extremely unlikely to the point of being a statistical certainty that the genetic codes of life which evolved independently on separate planets would not be the same. That cuts out alien Viruses/Viroids. Other differences in biochemistry could easily make life very difficult for the alien equivalent of bacteria. They won't have evolved in concert with us (duh) and thus will have a very hard time coping with our chemistry and immune system. Speaking in terms of probability.
Again, I ask that you not please not take this the wrong way, for I mean no offense.
Yes, one of the assumption in the argument is that the fight is going evenly, because the bear is weak, or the human has a knife and is very strong or something. Implicit is the idea that you decide the outcome. The argument is supposed to conclude that you shoot the bear even if it is the last bear on earth, always, because humans are inherently "special." I reject that conclusion completely.
Now, after a significant cool down time, I will admit the when I said the above, it was intended to be inflammatory, and was a knee jerk kind of post. References to Swift's "A Modest Proposal" tend to be pretty outrageous and polarizing. I will, on the other hand, stand by my assertion that the last bear on earth, or indeed the last, or last few members of any species are worth more than any human. The idea that humans have a right to survive, at any cost, and the more extreme, that any human has the right to survive at any cost, seems so incredibly dangerous to me. How much blood staining our collective existence do we have to have? I'm not a vegetarian by any means, but Cows are in no danger of going anywhere as a species, and neither are chickens. But the mass slaughter of an entire genetic line? That is entirely different.
How are we supposed to justify to future generations (should they even exist) that there were once great marine mammals, the largest animals that ever lived, that swam through the seas and sang hauntingly beautiful songs to one another. And that, in that perhaps not so distant future, they no longer exist, because we destroyed their breeding grounds and hunted the last few and ate them. How are we supposed to explain, that there were once other close members of the human family tree living in the forests of Africa. That they could walk upright, some could learn a little sign language, that they used tools, and cared for their young. And that they are no more, because we burned down their forests, and they were hunted to extinction, for meat.
There is an argument in philosophy, derived from the tradition of Kant, and others that Holds that human intelligence is "special." The following scenario is derived from that argument: A bear and a human are locked in a fight to the death, and you happen along with a gun, who do you shoot? At this point in time, probably the bear, unless it was a Panda, which are far too near extinction. In that case or the normally offered case of "What if its the last bear on earth?" The answer is the same, the human, twice to be sure.
To be honest, I'd really have less of a problem if they were conducting raids on white towns and carrying off the inhabitants for food. There's plenty more where they came from.
And BTW, Trees aren't the subject of of active research into non-human intelligence.
That a bunch of Yayhoo's killed an animal over a century old?