i can't believe you're only the second post i've seen on this thread that pointed it out. it's pretty messed up how the trolls come out of the woodwork with the sarcasm "oh wait i thought bush lied to us, that's what the liberals said!" as if the nuke documents weren't decades old.
but of course over in la-la land, the documents prove that bush was right about everything and the war is the most honest and just thing. evar.
Poor people don't perpetuate myths like that. Hack authors and movie-makers perpetuate myths like that. It's poor people themselves who know better than anyone that some more money would ease a lot of immediate burdens in their life.
Re-read the quote you italicized. He didn't say money MAKES people miserable. He said some money-gainers aren't content, and therefore he thinks money in itself isn't the wisest of goals. The present topic is living a contented healthy life, not some nonsense about choosing "poverty" over money because of happiness, which nobody's proposed. You're being a reactionary, along with your mods, and you've only agreed with him by saying "Money can't buy happiness." --The implications of that principle are worth considering. Which is what we're all doing, dispensing with cliches about poor people consoling themselves with delusion.
"No matter what the US gives to North Korea, they can always renege on it and start making nukes."
Yeah, then you stop giving them things. That's how it works. You could exchange "Getting Gifts" for "Remaining Unkilled"-- it's the same exact thing. You give somebody incentive to do/not-do something. North Korea could renege on obedience to a threat of physical force in the same way they could renege on exchange agreements. The only thing you CAN'T renege on is your complete conquest, when it's finished.
By your reasoning, no peace treaties should ever be signed, because it's only a hope/promise of future behavior-- the victor should just annihilate the defeated enemy.
Anyway, abstractions aside, the situation is escalating now, which wasn't so in the 90's. NK had less plutonium, no nukes, and active oversight.
a few years ago bush said loud and clear we would not "tolerate" a nuclear north korea. yet the administration did nothing to deter the advent and now the standard-line is that it was inevitable.
north korea also had more weapons-grade plutonium under bush senior. clinton was the one to make progress in the interim, and now under bush II north korea has nukes. the idea that diplomatically averting nuclear flashpoints ("carrot" approach or whatever you want to call it) is somehow inferior to aggression, threats, and war, is absurd. clinton had his problems, but just read the time-line yourself and you make the call about what the wiser more responsible policy was.
i also can't even believe that somebody earlier in the thread said clinton merely achieved "international oversight" of north korea's nuclear programs--- as if that's worthless. (first of all it's not true: he accomplished an actual reduction of the korean weapons program, in addition to oversight). part of W. bush's rationale for the iraq war was that iraq was a rogue nation that refused "international oversight" of their weapons programs, which isn't even true. (see: paul o'neil)
just read the timeline. read the facts. i'm not saying "conservative rule = bad" "democratic rule = great"-- just read the facts. it's a severe understatement to say bush II dropped the ball big-time. we're at war in iraq, thousands upon thousands people are dead there, and they have no weapons of mass destruction. north korea just detonated a nuke and the administration takes no responsibility whatsoever. and beyond that even, bush lied about his north korea policy plain and simple.
"Osama bin Laden must be ROFL wherever he is that he was able to destroy the ideals of the United State of America that took centuries to build so easily."
Point taken but in fact bin Laden can't destroy those ideals. Our own government, with the hearty support of idiots, is tearing it down.
No terrorist can actually wreak this kind of havoc-- they can only kill and frighten people.
yeah. i almost dropped dead when i booted up my shiny new ibook with 30GB hdd and found that i only had about 10 gigs free for starters.
deleting printer drivers, multi-lingual support, and that dinosaur game definitely did me a lot of good. and yes: iDVD templates.
if you want another tip, although you have 60GB drive instead of 30GB like me: i've recently started going into all my app packages and deleting the superfluous.lproj (multi-lingual) support folders. depending on the app, you can save yourself dozens of megs, and multiplied across many apps, you can save hundreds of megs. in fact, by doing this, you'll massively cut down a lot of canonical apps (quicktime, safari, etc-- everything's skipping my mind now since i'm on a windows machine at work, and i also forget which ones had the hugest lproj files) down to reasonable size.
anyway i like being able to delete things without a broken "Add-Remove Programs" uninstaller. also very happy with the mac.
human brains do have corrupt memory problems though.
pretty bad ones in my experience, and that i've heard about.
i think that in the neurological analog to the hardware failure, the bypasses won't properly occur.
"Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this "fault-tolerant" characteristic "
our brains keep working-- in the sense that they don't shut down, or explode, usually-- but they don't necessarily keep working WELL. i mean sheesh, even with some paltry uptime, like 15 or 24 hours and you start getting major crashes freezes and hangs.
it's true that hollywood makes a lot of silly depictions, in my opinion. but about "@ job 3:15" and all this, you might actually argue something else: that the text conventions for workable web/email addresses are THEMSELVES absurd.
no spaces? WHERE DO THEY COME UP WITH THIS STUFF? (i'm just making a point with the emphasis)
i'm somebody can point out the current, present mess of dilemma that makes certain formats unusable. cause 'space' isn't encoded as a standard character, or something. and so forth. i don't know.
imagine if we were in a reality where all movie depictions of computers were crappy tube-monitor CLI's? and all computers in real life were actually like that? and then somebody made a movie depicting a cool, intuitive, aesthetically pleasing GU interface (resembling, say, OS X in the present reality), and then there was a slashdot thread talking about how absurd that depiction was?
from a "realistic" standpoint, yes. but you may tend to see things differently, or at least in a slightly more complex way, if you're interested in Human user interface.
(naturally i haven't rtfa, so maybe it actually talks about cases that are much more absurd than the spaces-in-the-email-addy-OH-NOES! example)
"There is no opportunity in the book for the reader, whatever their stripe, to sympathize with the Ingsoc regime. To argue otherwise is just plain stupid."
on some level i actually agree with you. but sadly the truth is that too many people sympathize with practitioners of totalitarianism when it's THEIR OWN government, nation, and police force.
people don't read 1984 and say "nice system." yeah. but the idea that a government wiretapping its own citizens in violation of federal law and in circumvention of ALREADY EXISTING intel laws, and that soldiers torturing (and murdering) their captive enemies, is AN OKAY thing is all over the airwaves.
the problem is that too many people are blinded when its their own flesh and blood, so to speak, committing the crimes. and in fact, works like 1984 serve as psychic "contrasts" to a person's idealistic vision of their own [police] state. "ha! evil, evil fascists. good thing i live in mighty america, with a government i can trust, and nobody comes knockin on my door!"
my point is like this: despite obvious condemnations of the things depicted in something like 1984, "See no evil" persists as a dangerous and crippling societal disease.
you (i) REALLY FEEL as though you are descending into the depths of a planet. you have a purpose, but its lonely in there. and it's so immersive and lonely even when you arrive on the surface, and it's raining. before you descend.
the visuals and lifeforms make it pseudo-less lonely, in the same way that squirrels make a lone walk in a forest less lonely. the diversity in the game is such an artistic achievement in my opinion: i love going into the heavy green vegetarian area of Brinstar, when that music kicks in. or coming across those FLUTTERING MANTA RAY things in maridia. or when the music changes to the real maridia music. and the statues in the deep part of norfair, the hawk-like things (not chozos). every element in the game feels natural and unique, and like it "belongs" in the given environ. the entire game is so coherently designed.
not to mention..... the "friendly" lifeforms who show you special techniques. like the speedbursting ostrich, or the wall-jumping green yibbityelper dudes. fantastic.
and samus's spaceship hovering there. the whole game is goddam perfect. (after reading the threads earlier today, i started a game and played up to the entrance to tourian.)
the designers are all geniuses.
what's also cool is that there's apparently a kind of artistic continuity in japan that gets drawn from as a resource. for example, i was watching Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was made around 1980, and for the first 10 minutes i was thinking "that's super metroid!". there's an underground cavern, spores, carapaces, greenish tints, huge kraid-like bugs, and the only human character [at first] among it is a heroic girl.
when i finally realized there was a such thing as SPC-extraction, and SPC music players, and that the super metroid soundtrack was easily available online in this format, it was like i'd died and gone to heaven.
Super Metroid, Earthbound (or Mother 2 in Japan), and Final Fantasy 3 (or VI, the one before 7), aside from having great stories and gameplays just had incredible soundtracks that pull you through the whole thing.
the immersion in the [super] metroid world is uncanny. i think i need to fire up my emulator right now. the cartridge is at home, with my little brother.
i've done some Dell acquisitions/purchases at a large organization, and our liason fucked it all up. fucked up the sound cards, can't answer simple questions, has no idea what he's doing.
anyway the article seems a little strange considering that the last time i was looking at a server catalog, the tag on a box was 27,000 dollars. which is a wee bit more then the computers that i and other "individuals" i know tend to buy for ourselves. so comparing #'s of machines instead of total dollar value between different social sectors seems a little opaque.
the poster didn't mention a line, and didn't mention that it was stopping other people from using the lab. anyway in a university setting it would make some amount of sense to give priority to academic and scholastic use.
i agree with the guy next down below, for the record.
Here's Tim's brief list of his envisioned uses of the web, from 1990:
Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has its specific requirements in the way of features required.
* General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc.
* Completely centralized publishing - online help, documentation, tutorial etc
* More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life
* Collaborative authoring
* Collaborative design of something other than the hypertext itself
* Personal notebook
The guy isn't an idiot. Apparently you haven't noticed that. He helped devise something that would have myriad uses, essentially limited only by the needs and imaginations of its users.
It's a MEDIUM.
For SHARING INFORMATION. And BEING CREATIVE. With MEANS for MOST ANYBODY to contribute and participate. And despite what you may tend to think, personal and interpersonal details (even on the level of gossip or the ravings of a hyper teenybopper) in fact qualify as information.
Care to explain how people using myspace makes you suffer? Maybe if they were wasting a limited resource like computer stations or bandwidth which you or someone else needed for a more urgent or immediate purpose, but it seems like you're simply ideologically opposed to people doing whatever they want.
Even today the web serves the same purposes that the guy laid out in 1990, just in much more fanciful ways, and more importantly on a web itself that is infinitely richer and wider.
hi. listen. you're wrong about a lot of things. --you still seem like a good person though, polite, well-intentioned, and that's an achievement.
"You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another."
isn't that redundant? the only way you can consider a cell "parallel" in the first place is if has a similar function.
"Brain cells, (in humans and in other species) are amazingly versatile. While capable of specializing (vision centers, speech centers, etc.), these cells seem to be capable of taking on any function necessary for the benefit of the organism. For example, humans brains in which a specific part has been damaged (such as the vision center) have actually re-mapped other cell groups to take over that function. They do what they have to to survive."
a brain "cell" doesn't actually take on any function at all-- or if it does, we have no idea how it does. in fact, it's entire REGIONS of the brain, which are huge collections of cells, that are associated with cognitive processes that you mentioned-- vision, different aspects of lanaguage/speech. and a "brain" doesn't actually do what it has to to survive. its cells simply grow and interact in accordance with various principles of biochemistry and physics. saying that a brain "does what it has to to survive" is like saying that your skin does what it has to survive, just because a small cut on your skin will heal over. --it's a very misleading of confused way of stating it.
"It doesn't necessarily matter how you arrange them, the brain cells can sort those details out--somehow."
that is also extremely wrong or extremely misleading. you're completely misconstruing or overestimating the so-called flexible relationship between brain regions and particular cognitive processes. your statement implies that we took your neurons and stuffed them into a grab-bag, and shook it around like a caesar salad, we'd still have a functional brain. in fact, we wouldn't. and in fact, a brain is useless without an organism to supply it with resources. (although, as you can see, it's more apt to say that [many] organisms are useless without a brain...)
brain cells don't 'sort out' details in ways that you're describing. there's a such thing as congenital brain "defects." neurons don't just somehow magically cooperate to automatically create a perfect brain. the brain's its proper morphogenesis relies on particular constraints, just like any other biological organ. and a brain CELL doesn't do anything other than act as a link in a circuit, offering resistance, conduction, and voltage spikes.
"if you take neurons out of an organism and place them together, they'll form a brain. Probably not as complex or capable a brain as you started with, but a brain none the less. Actually this is the ideal brain to study, as you're starting "from scratch": there's no evolutionary specialization involved. Each cell will attempt to make sense of its neighbors, and as a result, the organism as a whole will attempt to make sense of its environment (brain processes are the ultimate in emergent algorithms). The brain will follow this behavior as if it were necessary to the brain's survival."
i don't know what you're smoking. what ORGANISM? you just said [in the scenario] that you've taken the brain out of the organism. even if "each cell will begin to make sense of its neighbors" (which is a nonsensical thing to say; if you really mean something else you need to be more specific), there's NO NECESSARY connection with the "organism" suddenly beginning to make sense of its neighbors. --there is no organism. there's no input/output, you've taken the brain out. in essence, you're talking about taking a bunch of ants-- which are individually sentient and will even cooperate in various ways-- and sticking them into the body of another organism, and thereby giving that organism sentience.
it makes no sense. my formulation is intentionally starkly ab
because he's wrong about practically everything he said. no offense to him but i've never seen such a polite, well-intentioned post be so completely full of wrongness.
if you read most any basic text on human neurology and cognitive psychology, and you start thinking about the questions involved, and the facts, you'll why that poster-person doesn't know what he's talking about.
i guess this thread is over and done with, but i'll respond anyway (i came back to check my post and figure out why i gotted modded up):
science when done properly is "stridently atheist" in the following sense: it doggedly seeks to explain and understand natural phenomena WITHOUT making reference to an omnipresent/omnipotent/omniscienct god or creator.
i didn't mean that there is no such thing as a strident atheist anywhere on the planet. i meant that in the specific context of the evolution-in-science-class controversy, the "strident atheist" is a straw man. it's not like high school teachers get up in front of class and start denigrating and degrading peoples religion. on the contrary, they mostly present or "teach" some of the results of scientific investigation undertaken over the last few centuries. and like the original person said, even if there are crackpot science teachers who say "SCIENCE DISPROVES GOD!", they can simply be asked to present the proof. and at that point, it's a theological non-starter.
the opponents of traditional science class are NOT TARGETING the fallacy of thinking that science disproves god. instead, their ill-conceived objective is to discredit evolution by relabelling it in textbooks as "just a theory" and present a bunch of ghost stories alongside it as if these stories have any place whatsoever in a science class. some of the claims of science are a threat to their doctrinal authority (and to their fragile egos), and they cannot reconcile with any rational means of inquiry, because that very inquiry has exposed so much of their narrative as fraudulent. and now they're simply trying to brute-force their ideology onto equal footing with "science", not with any investigative argumentation, but by cooking the books.
here are the things to really pity: most of their lack of education. the harm they may do to the education of future generations. the fact that they haven't, and don't want to, elevate the level of the discourse by accepting naturalistic inquiry into the universe and taking the opportunity to maybe pamphleteer about the reasons why science can't actually "disprove" the existence of god. their unwillingness (or lack of vision?) for reconciling with the facts of evolution by attributing the biological/chemical fundamentals of the universe to an original creator.
it's sad. they hear the word "science" and they think "bunch of wrong stuff! attack on my faith!". they do not actually grasp what science is, let alone evolution, so they are unable to sincerely propose something as simple as "maybe a god engineered evolution from the start..."
and i don't think i've ever seen a science textbook that DIDN'T cover creationist geology in a very informative manner, interestingly.
the NG article is absurd. i generally find popular science writing to be pretty terrible, but this is just pathetic.
4 meters. and they're calling it godzilla?
"Fossils from a real-life sea monster--a massive crocodile-like species--have been unearthed in Patagonia, Argentina. The animal likely measured 13 feet (4 meters) long from nose to tail."
a MASSIVE SEA MONSTER? it's 13 feet. there was a 14-foot alligator practically in my grandparents backyard a few years ago. big whoop.
this is probably the single-most bizarre distortion i've ever seen any popular science/nature magazine. ever. i'd still respect NG if they talked about the actual significance of the new creature, if it has any; at least to my senses it seems notable for its non-reptilian properties.
i mean this is even more ridiculous than the article about the giant squid, which showed a single live picture, and then the photo-series gradually degraded into.... pieces of dead squid, then to paintings of fictional monsters, then to photographs of the scientists, and then to shoddy line-drawing maps of the sea of japan. it was like a bad dream: with each picture in the series, i swore to myself that it couldn't possibly get any worse, yet it kept surpassing itself.
and this..... THIS 15-foot "GODZILLA".... this, this is worse. god have mercy on us all.
the links and facts about some truly monstrous reptiles posted above by other commentators here are infinitely more worth of our attention.
Slashdot Mirror
i can't believe you're only the second post i've seen on this thread that pointed it out. it's pretty messed up how the trolls come out of the woodwork with the sarcasm "oh wait i thought bush lied to us, that's what the liberals said!" as if the nuke documents weren't decades old.
but of course over in la-la land, the documents prove that bush was right about everything and the war is the most honest and just thing. evar.
Poor people don't perpetuate myths like that. Hack authors and movie-makers perpetuate myths like that. It's poor people themselves who know better than anyone that some more money would ease a lot of immediate burdens in their life.
Re-read the quote you italicized. He didn't say money MAKES people miserable. He said some money-gainers aren't content, and therefore he thinks money in itself isn't the wisest of goals. The present topic is living a contented healthy life, not some nonsense about choosing "poverty" over money because of happiness, which nobody's proposed. You're being a reactionary, along with your mods, and you've only agreed with him by saying "Money can't buy happiness." --The implications of that principle are worth considering. Which is what we're all doing, dispensing with cliches about poor people consoling themselves with delusion.
"No matter what the US gives to North Korea, they can always renege on it and start making nukes."
Yeah, then you stop giving them things. That's how it works. You could exchange "Getting Gifts" for "Remaining Unkilled"-- it's the same exact thing. You give somebody incentive to do/not-do something. North Korea could renege on obedience to a threat of physical force in the same way they could renege on exchange agreements. The only thing you CAN'T renege on is your complete conquest, when it's finished.
By your reasoning, no peace treaties should ever be signed, because it's only a hope/promise of future behavior-- the victor should just annihilate the defeated enemy.
Anyway, abstractions aside, the situation is escalating now, which wasn't so in the 90's. NK had less plutonium, no nukes, and active oversight.
a few years ago bush said loud and clear we would not "tolerate" a nuclear north korea. yet the administration did nothing to deter the advent and now the standard-line is that it was inevitable.
north korea also had more weapons-grade plutonium under bush senior. clinton was the one to make progress in the interim, and now under bush II north korea has nukes. the idea that diplomatically averting nuclear flashpoints ("carrot" approach or whatever you want to call it) is somehow inferior to aggression, threats, and war, is absurd. clinton had his problems, but just read the time-line yourself and you make the call about what the wiser more responsible policy was.
i also can't even believe that somebody earlier in the thread said clinton merely achieved "international oversight" of north korea's nuclear programs--- as if that's worthless. (first of all it's not true: he accomplished an actual reduction of the korean weapons program, in addition to oversight). part of W. bush's rationale for the iraq war was that iraq was a rogue nation that refused "international oversight" of their weapons programs, which isn't even true. (see: paul o'neil)
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/10/07/nk-timeline/
just read the timeline. read the facts. i'm not saying "conservative rule = bad" "democratic rule = great"-- just read the facts. it's a severe understatement to say bush II dropped the ball big-time. we're at war in iraq, thousands upon thousands people are dead there, and they have no weapons of mass destruction. north korea just detonated a nuke and the administration takes no responsibility whatsoever. and beyond that even, bush lied about his north korea policy plain and simple.
hopefully they won't try money/hookers.
"hey, as long as they don't charge an arm and a leg for the stuff, i'll be happy."
I'm afraid things aren't looking up for you.
bypass TFA
"We found out pretty quickly that people loved owning things," Ms. Smith says.
there you have it folks.
"Osama bin Laden must be ROFL wherever he is that he was able to destroy the ideals of the United State of America that took centuries to build so easily."
Point taken but in fact bin Laden can't destroy those ideals. Our own government, with the hearty support of idiots, is tearing it down.
No terrorist can actually wreak this kind of havoc-- they can only kill and frighten people.
yeah. i almost dropped dead when i booted up my shiny new ibook with 30GB hdd and found that i only had about 10 gigs free for starters.
.lproj (multi-lingual) support folders. depending on the app, you can save yourself dozens of megs, and multiplied across many apps, you can save hundreds of megs. in fact, by doing this, you'll massively cut down a lot of canonical apps (quicktime, safari, etc-- everything's skipping my mind now since i'm on a windows machine at work, and i also forget which ones had the hugest lproj files) down to reasonable size.
deleting printer drivers, multi-lingual support, and that dinosaur game definitely did me a lot of good. and yes: iDVD templates.
if you want another tip, although you have 60GB drive instead of 30GB like me: i've recently started going into all my app packages and deleting the superfluous
anyway i like being able to delete things without a broken "Add-Remove Programs" uninstaller. also very happy with the mac.
yes, it's revolutionized the spread of information, BUT
BUT! it's become the greatest enabler of pleasures ever invented.
horrible.
everybody get back to your miserable farmwork!
human brains do have corrupt memory problems though.
pretty bad ones in my experience, and that i've heard about.
i think that in the neurological analog to the hardware failure, the bypasses won't properly occur.
"Our brains keep working despite frequent failures of their component neurons, and this "fault-tolerant" characteristic "
our brains keep working-- in the sense that they don't shut down, or explode, usually-- but they don't necessarily keep working WELL. i mean sheesh, even with some paltry uptime, like 15 or 24 hours and you start getting major crashes freezes and hangs.
yeah, and how about the amusement park full of cloned dinosaurs?
totally implausible!
(couldn't resist)
"absurd Hollywood conventions"\
it's true that hollywood makes a lot of silly depictions, in my opinion. but about "@ job 3:15" and all this, you might actually argue something else: that the text conventions for workable web/email addresses are THEMSELVES absurd.
no spaces? WHERE DO THEY COME UP WITH THIS STUFF? (i'm just making a point with the emphasis)
i'm somebody can point out the current, present mess of dilemma that makes certain formats unusable. cause 'space' isn't encoded as a standard character, or something. and so forth. i don't know.
imagine if we were in a reality where all movie depictions of computers were crappy tube-monitor CLI's? and all computers in real life were actually like that? and then somebody made a movie depicting a cool, intuitive, aesthetically pleasing GU interface (resembling, say, OS X in the present reality), and then there was a slashdot thread talking about how absurd that depiction was?
from a "realistic" standpoint, yes. but you may tend to see things differently, or at least in a slightly more complex way, if you're interested in Human user interface.
(naturally i haven't rtfa, so maybe it actually talks about cases that are much more absurd than the spaces-in-the-email-addy-OH-NOES! example)
i agree completely. the web was dead a decade ago.
i never touch it anymore. who wants to touch an unsustainable failure!
this post isn't even happening, such is the degree of the catastrophic mismanagement and just plain uneconomic thinking!
goodbye!
"There is no opportunity in the book for the reader, whatever their stripe, to sympathize with the Ingsoc regime. To argue otherwise is just plain stupid."
on some level i actually agree with you. but sadly the truth is that too many people sympathize with practitioners of totalitarianism when it's THEIR OWN government, nation, and police force.
people don't read 1984 and say "nice system." yeah. but the idea that a government wiretapping its own citizens in violation of federal law and in circumvention of ALREADY EXISTING intel laws, and that soldiers torturing (and murdering) their captive enemies, is AN OKAY thing is all over the airwaves.
the problem is that too many people are blinded when its their own flesh and blood, so to speak, committing the crimes. and in fact, works like 1984 serve as psychic "contrasts" to a person's idealistic vision of their own [police] state. "ha! evil, evil fascists. good thing i live in mighty america, with a government i can trust, and nobody comes knockin on my door!"
my point is like this: despite obvious condemnations of the things depicted in something like 1984, "See no evil" persists as a dangerous and crippling societal disease.
it really is lonely.
you (i) REALLY FEEL as though you are descending into the depths of a planet. you have a purpose, but its lonely in there. and it's so immersive and lonely even when you arrive on the surface, and it's raining. before you descend.
the visuals and lifeforms make it pseudo-less lonely, in the same way that squirrels make a lone walk in a forest less lonely. the diversity in the game is such an artistic achievement in my opinion: i love going into the heavy green vegetarian area of Brinstar, when that music kicks in. or coming across those FLUTTERING MANTA RAY things in maridia. or when the music changes to the real maridia music. and the statues in the deep part of norfair, the hawk-like things (not chozos). every element in the game feels natural and unique, and like it "belongs" in the given environ. the entire game is so coherently designed.
not to mention..... the "friendly" lifeforms who show you special techniques. like the speedbursting ostrich, or the wall-jumping green yibbityelper dudes. fantastic.
and samus's spaceship hovering there. the whole game is goddam perfect. (after reading the threads earlier today, i started a game and played up to the entrance to tourian.)
the designers are all geniuses.
what's also cool is that there's apparently a kind of artistic continuity in japan that gets drawn from as a resource. for example, i was watching Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, which was made around 1980, and for the first 10 minutes i was thinking "that's super metroid!". there's an underground cavern, spores, carapaces, greenish tints, huge kraid-like bugs, and the only human character [at first] among it is a heroic girl.
amen.
when i finally realized there was a such thing as SPC-extraction, and SPC music players, and that the super metroid soundtrack was easily available online in this format, it was like i'd died and gone to heaven.
Super Metroid, Earthbound (or Mother 2 in Japan), and Final Fantasy 3 (or VI, the one before 7), aside from having great stories and gameplays just had incredible soundtracks that pull you through the whole thing.
the immersion in the [super] metroid world is uncanny. i think i need to fire up my emulator right now. the cartridge is at home, with my little brother.
i've done some Dell acquisitions/purchases at a large organization, and our liason fucked it all up. fucked up the sound cards, can't answer simple questions, has no idea what he's doing.
anyway the article seems a little strange considering that the last time i was looking at a server catalog, the tag on a box was 27,000 dollars. which is a wee bit more then the computers that i and other "individuals" i know tend to buy for ourselves. so comparing #'s of machines instead of total dollar value between different social sectors seems a little opaque.
and no, i haven't..... RTFA. tee hee.
the poster didn't mention a line, and didn't mention that it was stopping other people from using the lab. anyway in a university setting it would make some amount of sense to give priority to academic and scholastic use.
i agree with the guy next down below, for the record.
Here's Tim's brief list of his envisioned uses of the web, from 1990:
Here are some of the many areas in which hypertext is used. Each area has its specific requirements in the way of features required.
* General reference data - encyclopaedia, etc.
* Completely centralized publishing - online help, documentation, tutorial etc
* More or less centralized dissemination of news which has a limited life
* Collaborative authoring
* Collaborative design of something other than the hypertext itself
* Personal notebook
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Uses.html
The guy isn't an idiot. Apparently you haven't noticed that. He helped devise something that would have myriad uses, essentially limited only by the needs and imaginations of its users.
It's a MEDIUM.
For SHARING INFORMATION. And BEING CREATIVE. With MEANS for MOST ANYBODY to contribute and participate. And despite what you may tend to think, personal and interpersonal details (even on the level of gossip or the ravings of a hyper teenybopper) in fact qualify as information.
Care to explain how people using myspace makes you suffer? Maybe if they were wasting a limited resource like computer stations or bandwidth which you or someone else needed for a more urgent or immediate purpose, but it seems like you're simply ideologically opposed to people doing whatever they want.
Even today the web serves the same purposes that the guy laid out in 1990, just in much more fanciful ways, and more importantly on a web itself that is infinitely richer and wider.
you crazy asshole.
I LOVE THAT POST. the ending stunk. but then your signature made up for it.
bravo goodshow attaboy
hi. listen. you're wrong about a lot of things. --you still seem like a good person though, polite, well-intentioned, and that's an achievement.
"You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another."
isn't that redundant? the only way you can consider a cell "parallel" in the first place is if has a similar function.
"Brain cells, (in humans and in other species) are amazingly versatile. While capable of specializing (vision centers, speech centers, etc.), these cells seem to be capable of taking on any function necessary for the benefit of the organism. For example, humans brains in which a specific part has been damaged (such as the vision center) have actually re-mapped other cell groups to take over that function. They do what they have to to survive."
a brain "cell" doesn't actually take on any function at all-- or if it does, we have no idea how it does. in fact, it's entire REGIONS of the brain, which are huge collections of cells, that are associated with cognitive processes that you mentioned-- vision, different aspects of lanaguage/speech. and a "brain" doesn't actually do what it has to to survive. its cells simply grow and interact in accordance with various principles of biochemistry and physics. saying that a brain "does what it has to to survive" is like saying that your skin does what it has to survive, just because a small cut on your skin will heal over. --it's a very misleading of confused way of stating it.
"It doesn't necessarily matter how you arrange them, the brain cells can sort those details out--somehow."
that is also extremely wrong or extremely misleading. you're completely misconstruing or overestimating the so-called flexible relationship between brain regions and particular cognitive processes. your statement implies that we took your neurons and stuffed them into a grab-bag, and shook it around like a caesar salad, we'd still have a functional brain. in fact, we wouldn't. and in fact, a brain is useless without an organism to supply it with resources. (although, as you can see, it's more apt to say that [many] organisms are useless without a brain...)
brain cells don't 'sort out' details in ways that you're describing. there's a such thing as congenital brain "defects." neurons don't just somehow magically cooperate to automatically create a perfect brain. the brain's its proper morphogenesis relies on particular constraints, just like any other biological organ. and a brain CELL doesn't do anything other than act as a link in a circuit, offering resistance, conduction, and voltage spikes.
"if you take neurons out of an organism and place them together, they'll form a brain. Probably not as complex or capable a brain as you started with, but a brain none the less. Actually this is the ideal brain to study, as you're starting "from scratch": there's no evolutionary specialization involved. Each cell will attempt to make sense of its neighbors, and as a result, the organism as a whole will attempt to make sense of its environment (brain processes are the ultimate in emergent algorithms). The brain will follow this behavior as if it were necessary to the brain's survival."
i don't know what you're smoking. what ORGANISM? you just said [in the scenario] that you've taken the brain out of the organism. even if "each cell will begin to make sense of its neighbors" (which is a nonsensical thing to say; if you really mean something else you need to be more specific), there's NO NECESSARY connection with the "organism" suddenly beginning to make sense of its neighbors. --there is no organism. there's no input/output, you've taken the brain out. in essence, you're talking about taking a bunch of ants-- which are individually sentient and will even cooperate in various ways-- and sticking them into the body of another organism, and thereby giving that organism sentience.
it makes no sense. my formulation is intentionally starkly ab
because he's wrong about practically everything he said. no offense to him but i've never seen such a polite, well-intentioned post be so completely full of wrongness.
if you read most any basic text on human neurology and cognitive psychology, and you start thinking about the questions involved, and the facts, you'll why that poster-person doesn't know what he's talking about.
(no offense to him.)
i guess this thread is over and done with, but i'll respond anyway (i came back to check my post and figure out why i gotted modded up):
science when done properly is "stridently atheist" in the following sense: it doggedly seeks to explain and understand natural phenomena WITHOUT making reference to an omnipresent/omnipotent/omniscienct god or creator.
i didn't mean that there is no such thing as a strident atheist anywhere on the planet. i meant that in the specific context of the evolution-in-science-class controversy, the "strident atheist" is a straw man. it's not like high school teachers get up in front of class and start denigrating and degrading peoples religion. on the contrary, they mostly present or "teach" some of the results of scientific investigation undertaken over the last few centuries. and like the original person said, even if there are crackpot science teachers who say "SCIENCE DISPROVES GOD!", they can simply be asked to present the proof. and at that point, it's a theological non-starter.
the opponents of traditional science class are NOT TARGETING the fallacy of thinking that science disproves god. instead, their ill-conceived objective is to discredit evolution by relabelling it in textbooks as "just a theory" and present a bunch of ghost stories alongside it as if these stories have any place whatsoever in a science class. some of the claims of science are a threat to their doctrinal authority (and to their fragile egos), and they cannot reconcile with any rational means of inquiry, because that very inquiry has exposed so much of their narrative as fraudulent. and now they're simply trying to brute-force their ideology onto equal footing with "science", not with any investigative argumentation, but by cooking the books.
here are the things to really pity: most of their lack of education. the harm they may do to the education of future generations. the fact that they haven't, and don't want to, elevate the level of the discourse by accepting naturalistic inquiry into the universe and taking the opportunity to maybe pamphleteer about the reasons why science can't actually "disprove" the existence of god. their unwillingness (or lack of vision?) for reconciling with the facts of evolution by attributing the biological/chemical fundamentals of the universe to an original creator.
it's sad. they hear the word "science" and they think "bunch of wrong stuff! attack on my faith!". they do not actually grasp what science is, let alone evolution, so they are unable to sincerely propose something as simple as "maybe a god engineered evolution from the start..."
and i don't think i've ever seen a science textbook that DIDN'T cover creationist geology in a very informative manner, interestingly.
the NG article is absurd. i generally find popular science writing to be pretty terrible, but this is just pathetic.
4 meters. and they're calling it godzilla?
"Fossils from a real-life sea monster--a massive crocodile-like species--have been unearthed in Patagonia, Argentina. The animal likely measured 13 feet (4 meters) long from nose to tail."
a MASSIVE SEA MONSTER? it's 13 feet. there was a 14-foot alligator practically in my grandparents backyard a few years ago. big whoop.
this is probably the single-most bizarre distortion i've ever seen any popular science/nature magazine. ever. i'd still respect NG if they talked about the actual significance of the new creature, if it has any; at least to my senses it seems notable for its non-reptilian properties.
i mean this is even more ridiculous than the article about the giant squid, which showed a single live picture, and then the photo-series gradually degraded into.... pieces of dead squid, then to paintings of fictional monsters, then to photographs of the scientists, and then to shoddy line-drawing maps of the sea of japan. it was like a bad dream: with each picture in the series, i swore to myself that it couldn't possibly get any worse, yet it kept surpassing itself.
and this..... THIS 15-foot "GODZILLA".... this, this is worse. god have mercy on us all.
the links and facts about some truly monstrous reptiles posted above by other commentators here are infinitely more worth of our attention.