McDonalds ships a buttload of stuff to their chains all around the world. Their supply logistics are pretty damned complex(I'm bidding on their transportation contract right now). Getting the same frenchfries sold in places where they can't grow potatoes isn't easy.
While the "sameness" of Mcdonalds food is repulsive to some, it's impressive that they manage to achieve such generic sameness in the markets they've established themselves in.
That's an interesting question, I'm quite sure that there are those who did well. In every recession there are those who are still making gains while the rest of the market falls as a whole.
However, the housing bubble crash was only a trigger of our economic woes, its effects spread beyond this. Credit default swaps (basically insurance on defaulted debt) are one way the woes from one company can bring down another at the same time. For example AIG and Lehman brothers held a huge amount of credit default swaps, they were taking money and betting that other companies wouldn't have defaults. But apparently they were wrong, and this destroyed confidence regarding financial portfolios all over the market because even giants like AIG and Lehman brothers failed to recognize the risk, and had overvalued assets.
So companies all over start writing down their portfolios to get a realistic picture of what they actually have now, after the financial crash.
Those "winners" in the housing market may have profited, but where did they put those profits? If they're in the housing market, I'll bet a lot of that money went into more houses in order to make more profitable sales. That money goes poof. If they were invested in financial products, and those are also heavily damaged as the financial firms are dragged down.
If they somehow believed that the economy was going to suddenly plunge and put the money into low-risk and low-return bonds then maybe they managed to hold onto those profits. Howeevr, none of them would be able to predict the future, so putting all the profit into low-return investments would be irrationally risk-averse. If they were smart and taken a long term view, they would have diversified between low and high risk investments and would have been hurt like the rest of us.
Pretty much everyone is exposed to economy, just to different degrees. The crisis has a global impact and other countries have been hurt as well because they were also invested in our companies.
There is intrinsic value and perceived value. However, just because the value is just perceived or imagined, doesn't mean that it has no effect.
The economy has a vast number of links that affect other areas. Banks find they no longer store enough money to pay out to their customers wanting a withdrawal. If customers find out and become afraid, they all want to pull out and protect their money and the bank goes tits up.
If the banks are too scared to loan, businesses might not get critical loans they need in order to work. Like a landscaper who needs to replace broken lawnmower. That's just a smallscale one-off example, but all over the economy, loans which facilitate growth are tightened up and this slows the "real" economy that creates "real" value.
Also, there's the chain of supplies. People have lower value in their savings so they spend less to protect themselves. Since people spend less. Businesses do the same, they've lost savings and need to spend less to protect themselves, and are also seeing fewer customers! Since the business sees fewer customers, they don't need to buy materials to make goods (The chemical sector has been particularly hard hit). That's a real decrease in overall productivity.
I work in international freight and we're seeing major drops in shipping volume on cargo ships because there's just fewer materials and finished goods that need moving around. This has impacted ME because despite record profits for the last year or so (weak US dollar means other countries can buy more products from us, meaning more exports for my company to carry out of the USA). I'm still going to get a shitty bonus or no bonus at all, because our forecasts for next year's shipping volume is so bleak. Our company has imposed a hiring freeze so that we don't bleed too much money. So the recession also impacts me and my money.
The value of money is subjective, so when the market as a whole starts to view something to be of lesser value, suddenly the value of that something is lower.
There is some intrinsic value in something like gold, which is shiny, heavy, and with good conductive properties, but mostly it's because people treat gold as a store of value. If other people don't want your gold buillon, you've just got a lump of shiny,heavy,conductive metal rather than the ability to buy hundred of thousands of dollars worth of products you want to have.
Same goes for the green paper, same goes for the stock number, and it even applies to houses. They're valuable in that they provide a place to live, but the housing bubble came from the growth of value far beyond the intrinsic value of the house as a place of living. It's not a business that grows and earns interest, it's just a place to live that people might want to buy in the future when you move out. Some return is possible because of increasing demand to live in that spot as population grows, but people believed in endless/high/ returns on a simple home.
Then they leveraged that imagined value to borrow and they used borrowed money as leverage to get more imagined value, which they used to borrow more, etc...and the numbers all went up. The imagined value got passed around through everone's hands while numbers soared, until eventually people started to wonder when to pull out before others realize these things aren't really worth that much...then the crash comes.
Now banks found that their asset's imagined value has collapsed, now they don't have the surplus of money they thought they had, so they cling to their reserves and fear lending it out so they can stay solvent when a client asks to make a withdrawal.
Tight times decreases loans, without loans, businesses have difficulty growing and functioning, and the crunch on everyone's savings has them reducing their spending, so businesses get fewer customers, reducing their purchases from supplier businesses, it all just loops continually throughout the economy. It's hard to see the exact end result or when it will all end.
I agree that bad controls are nothing to be missed. I'm just saying that it's exposed a new problem to face.
As for dynamic difficulty, L4D scales encounters, but also has different difficulty scales for the game to apply. The game "director" will still merrily murder you if you're not up to snuff. Expert is still for experts, only 2% of the player population has completed one of the campaigns on expert.
One of the problems with static difficulty and static obstacles is that players tend to memorize what's ahead instead, so they win through memorization rather than being better at the game (this was noted in Valve's developer commentary mode, and part of the reason for the procedural enemy placement). For example, players preparing to shoot at a particular window because they know a monster will jump out from it.
I definitely agree that these newer survival horror games need more tension. The Silent Hill series did a great job of teasing you with with unknown danger using fog, darkness, and sound. I also note that the player in Silent hill was also relatively underpowered, usually just swinging a pipe against 1-3 enemies at a time. I don't know about the new one with improved combat controls, but I'm going to guess it suffers the same problem that RE4 and Deadspace has.
I think the approach that would be the most successful in attracted new Linux users is one that will ease them into the transition.
Yes,/another/ distro ideology.
One that wraps the whole damn thing to work and look like Windows, but provide the stability and security of Linux under that hood. Basic users just want the computer to be a tool, not a job, so they don't want to relearn everything.
Just because the basic appearance looks like Windows doesn't means advanced features need to be stripped away. Leave advanced features to advanced users who can dig out the solutions. Stick them in "advanced mode" interfaces, or in seperate menus. Make it all easy to learn and hard to master instead of the current state of just being hard to master.
Even the most approachable distros end up forcing you to go to the command line for solutions, and that's something completely alien to basic windows users. Yes people should learn more about how to use Linux, but only when they want to, not when they need to. Otherwise they will be too put-off to even try to learn it at all.
(*side note* I don't see anything trollish about parent's post.)
While the control setup in RE4 fixed a major issue in the franchise, it enabled the player to trivialize the threat he/she faced and the same thing happened in Dead Space, which used similar controls. I'm not saying that bad controls are the good thing, I'm saying that the fixed controls exposed a new problem. Good controls allow skilled players to leverage their inventory to the point that there's not enough challenge left.
In these games, someone with good aim and calm reactions can tear the enemies to shreds at a moment's notice without taking any damage and using a minimum of ammo. There's nothing to fear when you know that you can beat any enemy you face. They can slink around as much as they want, but it doesn't matter since in the end you're really just waiting for them to give you a chance to shoot them.
I don't remember a survival horror game with good controls that actually scared me. It's a new challenge for design in this genre, how do you keep the player relatively weak but allowing them to stay in control?
Left 4 Dead, which has a very different atmosphere, handled the problem in an innovative way. Hand off difficulty control to the game rather than hand-placing everything. They track how the player is doing and scale the encounters accordingly, so the challenge is custom-fit to the player skill levels. Though Left 4 Dead is an action game, I think this technique would work well in the survival horror genre.
On the flipside, I wonder if our leaders will think twice before sending the robots.
It may reduce the deaths on our side, but people will continue to die on the other side. When we're only losing robots we're shielded from the consequences of our actions.
The war in Iraq may be pointless but the death of a soldier fighting in Iraq is not. When Americans die, America will have to wonder whether or not it's worth more American deaths. Even in death the soldier contributes to ending the war and possibly preventing another soldier from following him overseas and dying there. They don't have to "win" the war in Iraq for their death to mean something
Our leaders are already quite insulated from the war, but they are still vulnerable to erosion of their political base by supporting it, as we saw in this year's election. Maybe they already feel enough of the impact of the war, maybe they need to feel more, but I'm fairly sure that they don't need any more layers between them and the violence. War shouldn't become comfortable.
But it's all moot anyway.
War costs a buttload of money. Fielding modern soldiers is expensive, but I think fielding high-tech robot would be even more expensive. Especially when they have no sense of self-preservation. Over time, costs of production might go down, but upgrades to the specs will add to the the cost as well.
Until the robot matures significantly I don't think they'll play a major role in war. Right now we need smart soldiers who can handle a wide variety of assignments and handle themselves intelligently in uncertain circumstances. The robot won't compete with that for a long while.
Human deaths will never cease to be a part of war, each side will hit each other where it hurts the most. If combot robots somehow replaced the soldiers so that the enemy couldn't find any military personnel to kill, the enemy would just kill civilians instead. Terrorists are already doing this.
That's a rough definition. The data just exists. A bit can be "0"(I think that's the smallest unit in computer memory)? Is a tree considered data because it happens to be a tree? It just exists as a physical tautology, and there's not much more meaning behind that.
If you combine those units into a larger group, you could get a book, a harddrive, maybe vast libraries of information collected together. But it's still just a grouping of information. Add something to parse the information, perhaps a search engine like Google? But it's still just sifting the information, rearranging it, and in a way, interpreting as it sorts the information.
Humans interpret the information, but does that give us the significance to warrant the idea of an immortal soul? Humans die, then all that collected information and experience is lost. If a machine were capable of the same experience, even the machine will succumb to entropy and lose all that information.
The soul is just a made-up word with a very loose definition. It exists based on belief and/or how you choose to make your definition. But I don't think science covers this sort of thing since there's nothing firm enough to test without a definition to base a hypothesis on. And the major consensus regarding the soul is that it's not of this world, making experimentation impossible as well.
I think a series about Section 31 might be an interesting new path for a Star Trek series.
BSG tries to reflect the contemporary mood with fear, division, and the constant threat of terrorism. The mood of the show is grim in order to match the grim feel of current events. They lack subtlety at times in the way they've created parallels to Iraq and political partisanship; however, these parallels are why this new kind of sci-fi is so interesting to the audience.
Star Trek had always had a generally positive and optimistic outlook. These days that kind of outlook just seems campy and naive. It's harder for the audience to envision a human society where everyone gets along and the government really does have your best interests at heart. The past few years have made the USA a bit more cynical and pessimistic.
In DS9, things started to turn a little dark. Sometimes the Federation was wrong, or in some cases, the "bad guy". They stepped into some moral grey areas. Politics and persistent storylines became more important, and you saw fewer one-shot stories that had no consequences.
Would mirrors have to be exposed to the open air to work? Can't they just cover the mirrored helmet with some cloth and keep them looking the same as they do now? If the laser hits it'll just fry through the cloth immediately, but then meet the mirrored surface.
I don't know much about military equipment, but I believe even today's vests have the armor plates on the inside of the vest ratehr than the outside. They could just set the mirrors where the armor plates are. The outward appearance wouldn't have to change, though they may have to take care to ensure that the fabric just chars instead of catching fire or melting/dripping.
It's like prison, tell your kid on their first day of school, "Go in there, find the biggest kid in the cafeteria and kick his ass through his teeth."/sarcasm.
Widescreens have their uses. I have one horizontal and one vertical. Vertical is great for reading text top to bottom, and horizontal is great for arranging information left to right(for example, excel columns).
We were getting either paid by allied forces or getting IOUs from them. While IOUs sound kind of worthless they still have some value, otherwise the deficit we have towards the other country wouldn't really be an asset to them or a problem for us.
Unemployed people worked in factories that were used to make weapons to sell. Those unemployed have money to spend, so that a clothing store has a customer to sell to, etc. etc.
Once we actually participate in the war we make a massive expenditure in money and resources. But in bot world wars we only joined in once the major fighting was finished and all participants aside from us were already suffering from war weariness. Plus all the fighting was on their territory, not ours. This is why everybody else fell apart during that war but we came out better off.
Many of the early Christians were pretty much orthodox Jews plus a belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Messianic Jews are an extreme minority admist the masses of Christians today.
Christianity already started to branch between 0-2 generations out from Jesus's death with Paul preaching to the gentiles who didn't observe Mosaic law like the Jews. "Correct" Christianity is anything but clear, opinions on the subject fall all over the map. The letters composing the New Testament were written over a significant period, which shows that early christianity developed over time just like modern christian denominations. Heck, those letters weren't gathered up into a "bible" until hundreds of years later.
I think they were trying to offer a volume discount to the students, but they don't have a way to opt-out and save money!
In fact, a better idea would be to offer the devices for sale at a discount, so that the program is opt-in instead.
And the best idea would be to ditch it the program altogether because I don't see these devices significantly improving the student's education. However, I can easily see them distracting the students.
Internet on-the-go is neat and all, but there are computers available for that. You certainly wouldn't want to do any serious writing on a little gadget so you'll be at a computer to do your writing anyway.
I might be able to understand a program for buying EEEpcs(or a similar mini-laptop) but not Iphones and ipod touches.
All you've shown them so far is that you can't comply with a simple request.
They'll chalk up your non-compliance to either incompetence or arrogance, and in either case they haven't even seen your resume yet. They have a mountain of other resumes to get to, so they won't lose any sleep over this.
HR sure doesn't care to go ask IT for the rights to install a new document editor just for your special resume.
In earlier slashdot discussions on H-1B visas I was referred to the link above: We had a genius in the field of rocket science already working for us, then we kicked him out of the country from fear of immigrants. So he revolutionized China's missile program instead since he wasn't allowed to work here anymore.
That argument doesn't hold any water. If your goal was to hurt them then you just have to avoid purchasing it. Admit that you want their content.
I, on the otherhand have simply modified my ethics on the subject to "I don't care". I don't need to justify myself to the internet. There's no point in making up weak arguments; why would you need the respect of the anonymous masses?
It was safer when pirating was relatively unknown and traveled via word-of-mouth. Now it's known to even casual users and now there's lots of attention on what used to be a minor subset of internet users.
There is no course in highschool on careers. There is no information regarding what it's like to work in any job aside from school-related jobs. Aside from that they're going to have to pick up on hear-say and TV to choose what job to explore, and if they're wrong, they are set back by that much time until they pick one and find out that they want to stick with it.
There isn't even a course on "Cover your ass" or "Office politics", how can they really make an educated decisions about jobs in an office without understanding these subjects?
2) I also want to own a house, raise a child, and send him/her to a nice college.
I can tell you what I'm not passionate about. I don't know what I am passionate about. With that established, how do I FIND OUT what I'm passionate about.
The actual process is all guess and check. You don't know shit about a subject until you jump in and learn about it. Then you find out you don't like it, and then you've got to discard it and hope you like the next one better. I thought I would like programming and I found out that no, I was wrong. Then I had 2 years left to finish a degree and get out of college and make money.
Slashdot Mirror
McDonalds ships a buttload of stuff to their chains all around the world. Their supply logistics are pretty damned complex(I'm bidding on their transportation contract right now). Getting the same frenchfries sold in places where they can't grow potatoes isn't easy.
While the "sameness" of Mcdonalds food is repulsive to some, it's impressive that they manage to achieve such generic sameness in the markets they've established themselves in.
Jesus was force sensitive, and in death, he became more powerful than they could possibly imagine.
That's an interesting question, I'm quite sure that there are those who did well. In every recession there are those who are still making gains while the rest of the market falls as a whole.
However, the housing bubble crash was only a trigger of our economic woes, its effects spread beyond this. Credit default swaps (basically insurance on defaulted debt) are one way the woes from one company can bring down another at the same time. For example AIG and Lehman brothers held a huge amount of credit default swaps, they were taking money and betting that other companies wouldn't have defaults. But apparently they were wrong, and this destroyed confidence regarding financial portfolios all over the market because even giants like AIG and Lehman brothers failed to recognize the risk, and had overvalued assets.
So companies all over start writing down their portfolios to get a realistic picture of what they actually have now, after the financial crash.
Those "winners" in the housing market may have profited, but where did they put those profits? If they're in the housing market, I'll bet a lot of that money went into more houses in order to make more profitable sales. That money goes poof. If they were invested in financial products, and those are also heavily damaged as the financial firms are dragged down.
If they somehow believed that the economy was going to suddenly plunge and put the money into low-risk and low-return bonds then maybe they managed to hold onto those profits. Howeevr, none of them would be able to predict the future, so putting all the profit into low-return investments would be irrationally risk-averse. If they were smart and taken a long term view, they would have diversified between low and high risk investments and would have been hurt like the rest of us.
Pretty much everyone is exposed to economy, just to different degrees. The crisis has a global impact and other countries have been hurt as well because they were also invested in our companies.
There is intrinsic value and perceived value. However, just because the value is just perceived or imagined, doesn't mean that it has no effect.
The economy has a vast number of links that affect other areas. Banks find they no longer store enough money to pay out to their customers wanting a withdrawal. If customers find out and become afraid, they all want to pull out and protect their money and the bank goes tits up.
If the banks are too scared to loan, businesses might not get critical loans they need in order to work. Like a landscaper who needs to replace broken lawnmower. That's just a smallscale one-off example, but all over the economy, loans which facilitate growth are tightened up and this slows the "real" economy that creates "real" value.
Also, there's the chain of supplies. People have lower value in their savings so they spend less to protect themselves. Since people spend less. Businesses do the same, they've lost savings and need to spend less to protect themselves, and are also seeing fewer customers! Since the business sees fewer customers, they don't need to buy materials to make goods (The chemical sector has been particularly hard hit). That's a real decrease in overall productivity.
I work in international freight and we're seeing major drops in shipping volume on cargo ships because there's just fewer materials and finished goods that need moving around. This has impacted ME because despite record profits for the last year or so (weak US dollar means other countries can buy more products from us, meaning more exports for my company to carry out of the USA). I'm still going to get a shitty bonus or no bonus at all, because our forecasts for next year's shipping volume is so bleak. Our company has imposed a hiring freeze so that we don't bleed too much money. So the recession also impacts me and my money.
The value of money is subjective, so when the market as a whole starts to view something to be of lesser value, suddenly the value of that something is lower.
There is some intrinsic value in something like gold, which is shiny, heavy, and with good conductive properties, but mostly it's because people treat gold as a store of value. If other people don't want your gold buillon, you've just got a lump of shiny,heavy,conductive metal rather than the ability to buy hundred of thousands of dollars worth of products you want to have.
Same goes for the green paper, same goes for the stock number, and it even applies to houses. They're valuable in that they provide a place to live, but the housing bubble came from the growth of value far beyond the intrinsic value of the house as a place of living. It's not a business that grows and earns interest, it's just a place to live that people might want to buy in the future when you move out. Some return is possible because of increasing demand to live in that spot as population grows, but people believed in endless /high/ returns on a simple home.
Then they leveraged that imagined value to borrow and they used borrowed money as leverage to get more imagined value, which they used to borrow more, etc...and the numbers all went up. The imagined value got passed around through everone's hands while numbers soared, until eventually people started to wonder when to pull out before others realize these things aren't really worth that much...then the crash comes.
Now banks found that their asset's imagined value has collapsed, now they don't have the surplus of money they thought they had, so they cling to their reserves and fear lending it out so they can stay solvent when a client asks to make a withdrawal.
Tight times decreases loans, without loans, businesses have difficulty growing and functioning, and the crunch on everyone's savings has them reducing their spending, so businesses get fewer customers, reducing their purchases from supplier businesses, it all just loops continually throughout the economy. It's hard to see the exact end result or when it will all end.
I agree that bad controls are nothing to be missed. I'm just saying that it's exposed a new problem to face.
As for dynamic difficulty, L4D scales encounters, but also has different difficulty scales for the game to apply. The game "director" will still merrily murder you if you're not up to snuff. Expert is still for experts, only 2% of the player population has completed one of the campaigns on expert.
One of the problems with static difficulty and static obstacles is that players tend to memorize what's ahead instead, so they win through memorization rather than being better at the game (this was noted in Valve's developer commentary mode, and part of the reason for the procedural enemy placement). For example, players preparing to shoot at a particular window because they know a monster will jump out from it.
I definitely agree that these newer survival horror games need more tension. The Silent Hill series did a great job of teasing you with with unknown danger using fog, darkness, and sound. I also note that the player in Silent hill was also relatively underpowered, usually just swinging a pipe against 1-3 enemies at a time. I don't know about the new one with improved combat controls, but I'm going to guess it suffers the same problem that RE4 and Deadspace has.
I think the approach that would be the most successful in attracted new Linux users is one that will ease them into the transition.
Yes, /another/ distro ideology.
One that wraps the whole damn thing to work and look like Windows, but provide the stability and security of Linux under that hood. Basic users just want the computer to be a tool, not a job, so they don't want to relearn everything.
Just because the basic appearance looks like Windows doesn't means advanced features need to be stripped away. Leave advanced features to advanced users who can dig out the solutions. Stick them in "advanced mode" interfaces, or in seperate menus. Make it all easy to learn and hard to master instead of the current state of just being hard to master.
Even the most approachable distros end up forcing you to go to the command line for solutions, and that's something completely alien to basic windows users. Yes people should learn more about how to use Linux, but only when they want to, not when they need to. Otherwise they will be too put-off to even try to learn it at all.
(*side note* I don't see anything trollish about parent's post.)
While the control setup in RE4 fixed a major issue in the franchise, it enabled the player to trivialize the threat he/she faced and the same thing happened in Dead Space, which used similar controls. I'm not saying that bad controls are the good thing, I'm saying that the fixed controls exposed a new problem. Good controls allow skilled players to leverage their inventory to the point that there's not enough challenge left.
In these games, someone with good aim and calm reactions can tear the enemies to shreds at a moment's notice without taking any damage and using a minimum of ammo. There's nothing to fear when you know that you can beat any enemy you face. They can slink around as much as they want, but it doesn't matter since in the end you're really just waiting for them to give you a chance to shoot them.
I don't remember a survival horror game with good controls that actually scared me. It's a new challenge for design in this genre, how do you keep the player relatively weak but allowing them to stay in control?
Left 4 Dead, which has a very different atmosphere, handled the problem in an innovative way. Hand off difficulty control to the game rather than hand-placing everything. They track how the player is doing and scale the encounters accordingly, so the challenge is custom-fit to the player skill levels. Though Left 4 Dead is an action game, I think this technique would work well in the survival horror genre.
On the flipside, I wonder if our leaders will think twice before sending the robots.
It may reduce the deaths on our side, but people will continue to die on the other side. When we're only losing robots we're shielded from the consequences of our actions.
The war in Iraq may be pointless but the death of a soldier fighting in Iraq is not. When Americans die, America will have to wonder whether or not it's worth more American deaths. Even in death the soldier contributes to ending the war and possibly preventing another soldier from following him overseas and dying there. They don't have to "win" the war in Iraq for their death to mean something
Our leaders are already quite insulated from the war, but they are still vulnerable to erosion of their political base by supporting it, as we saw in this year's election. Maybe they already feel enough of the impact of the war, maybe they need to feel more, but I'm fairly sure that they don't need any more layers between them and the violence. War shouldn't become comfortable.
But it's all moot anyway.
War costs a buttload of money. Fielding modern soldiers is expensive, but I think fielding high-tech robot would be even more expensive. Especially when they have no sense of self-preservation. Over time, costs of production might go down, but upgrades to the specs will add to the the cost as well.
Until the robot matures significantly I don't think they'll play a major role in war. Right now we need smart soldiers who can handle a wide variety of assignments and handle themselves intelligently in uncertain circumstances. The robot won't compete with that for a long while.
Human deaths will never cease to be a part of war, each side will hit each other where it hurts the most. If combot robots somehow replaced the soldiers so that the enemy couldn't find any military personnel to kill, the enemy would just kill civilians instead. Terrorists are already doing this.
I think we'll just muddle through in confusion in the exact same way we are doing right now.
That's a rough definition. The data just exists. A bit can be "0"(I think that's the smallest unit in computer memory)? Is a tree considered data because it happens to be a tree? It just exists as a physical tautology, and there's not much more meaning behind that.
If you combine those units into a larger group, you could get a book, a harddrive, maybe vast libraries of information collected together. But it's still just a grouping of information. Add something to parse the information, perhaps a search engine like Google? But it's still just sifting the information, rearranging it, and in a way, interpreting as it sorts the information.
Humans interpret the information, but does that give us the significance to warrant the idea of an immortal soul? Humans die, then all that collected information and experience is lost. If a machine were capable of the same experience, even the machine will succumb to entropy and lose all that information.
The soul is just a made-up word with a very loose definition. It exists based on belief and/or how you choose to make your definition. But I don't think science covers this sort of thing since there's nothing firm enough to test without a definition to base a hypothesis on. And the major consensus regarding the soul is that it's not of this world, making experimentation impossible as well.
I think a series about Section 31 might be an interesting new path for a Star Trek series.
BSG tries to reflect the contemporary mood with fear, division, and the constant threat of terrorism. The mood of the show is grim in order to match the grim feel of current events. They lack subtlety at times in the way they've created parallels to Iraq and political partisanship; however, these parallels are why this new kind of sci-fi is so interesting to the audience.
Star Trek had always had a generally positive and optimistic outlook. These days that kind of outlook just seems campy and naive. It's harder for the audience to envision a human society where everyone gets along and the government really does have your best interests at heart. The past few years have made the USA a bit more cynical and pessimistic.
In DS9, things started to turn a little dark. Sometimes the Federation was wrong, or in some cases, the "bad guy". They stepped into some moral grey areas. Politics and persistent storylines became more important, and you saw fewer one-shot stories that had no consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_31
With Section 31, they have a clear avenue to explore a post-9/11 atmosphere in a Star-Trek context. Something for a new audience to connect to.
Would mirrors have to be exposed to the open air to work? Can't they just cover the mirrored helmet with some cloth and keep them looking the same as they do now? If the laser hits it'll just fry through the cloth immediately, but then meet the mirrored surface.
I don't know much about military equipment, but I believe even today's vests have the armor plates on the inside of the vest ratehr than the outside. They could just set the mirrors where the armor plates are. The outward appearance wouldn't have to change, though they may have to take care to ensure that the fabric just chars instead of catching fire or melting/dripping.
It's like prison, tell your kid on their first day of school, "Go in there, find the biggest kid in the cafeteria and kick his ass through his teeth." /sarcasm.
Widescreens have their uses. I have one horizontal and one vertical. Vertical is great for reading text top to bottom, and horizontal is great for arranging information left to right(for example, excel columns).
We were getting either paid by allied forces or getting IOUs from them. While IOUs sound kind of worthless they still have some value, otherwise the deficit we have towards the other country wouldn't really be an asset to them or a problem for us.
Unemployed people worked in factories that were used to make weapons to sell. Those unemployed have money to spend, so that a clothing store has a customer to sell to, etc. etc.
Once we actually participate in the war we make a massive expenditure in money and resources. But in bot world wars we only joined in once the major fighting was finished and all participants aside from us were already suffering from war weariness. Plus all the fighting was on their territory, not ours. This is why everybody else fell apart during that war but we came out better off.
Pre or post Paul?
Many of the early Christians were pretty much orthodox Jews plus a belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Messianic Jews are an extreme minority admist the masses of Christians today.
Christianity already started to branch between 0-2 generations out from Jesus's death with Paul preaching to the gentiles who didn't observe Mosaic law like the Jews. "Correct" Christianity is anything but clear, opinions on the subject fall all over the map. The letters composing the New Testament were written over a significant period, which shows that early christianity developed over time just like modern christian denominations. Heck, those letters weren't gathered up into a "bible" until hundreds of years later.
Agreed.
I think they were trying to offer a volume discount to the students, but they don't have a way to opt-out and save money!
In fact, a better idea would be to offer the devices for sale at a discount, so that the program is opt-in instead.
And the best idea would be to ditch it the program altogether because I don't see these devices significantly improving the student's education. However, I can easily see them distracting the students.
Internet on-the-go is neat and all, but there are computers available for that. You certainly wouldn't want to do any serious writing on a little gadget so you'll be at a computer to do your writing anyway.
I might be able to understand a program for buying EEEpcs(or a similar mini-laptop) but not Iphones and ipod touches.
All you've shown them so far is that you can't comply with a simple request.
They'll chalk up your non-compliance to either incompetence or arrogance, and in either case they haven't even seen your resume yet. They have a mountain of other resumes to get to, so they won't lose any sleep over this.
HR sure doesn't care to go ask IT for the rights to install a new document editor just for your special resume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsien_Hsue-shen
In earlier slashdot discussions on H-1B visas I was referred to the link above: We had a genius in the field of rocket science already working for us, then we kicked him out of the country from fear of immigrants. So he revolutionized China's missile program instead since he wasn't allowed to work here anymore.
That argument doesn't hold any water. If your goal was to hurt them then you just have to avoid purchasing it. Admit that you want their content.
I, on the otherhand have simply modified my ethics on the subject to "I don't care". I don't need to justify myself to the internet. There's no point in making up weak arguments; why would you need the respect of the anonymous masses?
It was safer when pirating was relatively unknown and traveled via word-of-mouth. Now it's known to even casual users and now there's lots of attention on what used to be a minor subset of internet users.
Evolution doesn't care whether or not you think it's making the right selections.
It just happens.
Parent is spot on.
There is no course in highschool on careers. There is no information regarding what it's like to work in any job aside from school-related jobs. Aside from that they're going to have to pick up on hear-say and TV to choose what job to explore, and if they're wrong, they are set back by that much time until they pick one and find out that they want to stick with it.
There isn't even a course on "Cover your ass" or "Office politics", how can they really make an educated decisions about jobs in an office without understanding these subjects?
1) I like video games, reading, and guitar.
2) I also want to own a house, raise a child, and send him/her to a nice college.
I can tell you what I'm not passionate about. I don't know what I am passionate about. With that established, how do I FIND OUT what I'm passionate about.
The actual process is all guess and check. You don't know shit about a subject until you jump in and learn about it. Then you find out you don't like it, and then you've got to discard it and hope you like the next one better. I thought I would like programming and I found out that no, I was wrong. Then I had 2 years left to finish a degree and get out of college and make money.
I do all my work on a binary abbacus.
That's right. Just one bead that I flip back and forth.