Ok, but I was trying to compare the quarried blocks to the poured blocks, and I thought that at least the outer blocks on the bottom were quarried and the outer blocks on the top were poured.
However, I'm assuming that the separation between the blocks is close to the same throughout the pyramid. Then, if the separation between the blocks on the bottom (which were mined from the quarries) is the same as the separation between the blocks on the top (which, at least some of were poured into moulds), then they must have been able to move blocks that closely together (because they would have had to on the bottom) and could have moved the poured concrete blocks together, although that doesn't necessarily mean that is how they did it. But that is under the assumption that the separation is the same, and my only reason for assuming that is that they didn't know there was a difference between the blocks on the top and bottom until they did chemical testing on the blocks.
I'm from the US and know nothing of concrete, but my use of the world "mould" came from the article's use of the word mould to describe how the blocks were created.
FTA: This wet "concrete" would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days.
Second, strip the forms. Clean them.
Third, set three forms, using the hardened block as the 4th wall. Pour this one.
Again, I know nothing about concrete, so I'm really just asking a question here, but wouldn't pouring concrete into a "form" that uses hardened concrete as one of the four walls result in "fusing" the two blocks of concrete together instead of leaving a tight crack in between the two? If so, I thought there was a clear separation between blocks at the pyramids.
Besides, making a sort of concrete from powdered stone and lime just to pour it at the bottom seems like a real bad idea - why not just carry the mud and forms to the top and save the effort of moving and aligning the final bricks?
It does seem like a bad idea at first, but that doesn't mean that that isn't how they did it. From other comments I've read so far, it seems that the blocks were created at the bottom and carried up. Most other threads seem to come to that conclusion, although that doesn't make them right.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. The point was that if that is the case, then this doesn't seem like such a big deal. I think my mistake was reading into this article and thinking that it was some revealing discovery of how the Egyptians built the pyramids, but its really a revealing study of how the Egyptians got stones to build the pyramids. It doesn't seem that the concrete helped at all with the construction of the pyramids, i.e. they still had to carry those huge stones all the way up to the top.
Really? First off, to have it "set in place" would mean to have a mould in the place where the stone was to be placed. As another person pointed out, there isn't enough space between the stones to allow for a mould.
So the natural response to that is that they made the molds up high and moved the stones a few feet or so into place instead of carrying them up the pyramid, but there isn't a whole lot of space at the top of the pyramid to allow for a whole bunch of moulds to be sitting around for a week or two. If its so blindingly obvious that they let it set in place, then show me one piece of evidence that supports that theory. If you read most of the other comments, most people seem to believe that the stones were created at the bottom, which was part of my initial question.
Since they were created at the bottom, this doesn't seem to be an "A-ha!" moment where some scientist found out a trick the Egyptians used to make the construction of the pyramids easier, its just an explanation of how they made moving the rocks to the pyramids easier (which is technically part of the construction, but still).
Did you actually read my post? Or the article for that matter? No where in the article does it say that they carried the liquid concrete up pyramid. The quote I posted says that the concrete was carried to "the site". When I read "the site", I read "the location of the building" not "the exact place where the concrete will set". My question was if anyone knew whether or not they carried the concrete up the pyramids, not how easy it is to carry liquid concrete in small batches as opposed to a large solid block.
I was unaware of that and was obviously mistaken. I just remember getting an update one day and then seeing the EA logo appear as I loaded the game, so I assumed it was bought out by EA at that point. After reading the wiki page, I think the time I am referring to is right around when EA cancelled most of Origin's products and Richard Garriot left. To me, that was the point that "Ultima was bought out by EA", although its more like EA took over Ultima in Garriot's absence.
This is definitely interesting, but I'm confused as to just what difference it makes other than that Egyptians used concrete.
FTA: This wet "concrete" would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days.
So they brought the concrete to the base of the pyramid to let it harden or to the top? If they brought it to the base and then carried it up the pyramid, then what's so special about it (again, besides the fact they used concrete). The article mentions the fact that the wheel hasn't been invented as if this concrete business makes sense of the pyramids, but didn't they still carry these large concrete blocks up it? I'm probably missing something, can anyone make sense out of that?
EA lost their direction a long time ago. I used to play Ultima Online until EA bought it out. EA realized that getting two new customers was more profitable than keeping one veteran customer. That's true in the short run at least, which seems to be all they are thinking about. They seem to adopt this policy to non-subscription based games, although it is slightly modified: selling two almost completely similar (or two shitty) games is better than selling one original (or quality) game. The 2007 annual sports game lineup that EA released were barely an upgrade from 2006 (and 2006 wasn't that much better than 2005, but I'll give it credit for being relatively significant). They should have just put it off until they worked out their issues with the next-gen consoles, or pulled their heads out of their asses. If they started thinking more about what the customers want instead of maximizing profit in the short run, they might do a lot better. I know a lot of people are going to get into the "companies only care about money" rant, but a lot of the time, caring about your customers will lead to more money.
Here's one point. Let's assume you use one email address for all of your registration needs, including forums (and shopping if you really want to drive this point home). Over time, that email address will be linked to a variety of sites, which together can be used to identify you. Of course, depending on how you use the sites connected to the email address, there may be nothing that can be used to get your actual identity or you may have used your name on a couple which leads people to you (or you might use your credit card on a shopping site). Now you, or your identity depending on how you want to look at it, is linked to that email. This probably isn't a big deal for most people. Now let's pretend you want to sign up on an Anarchists website, which is something I wouldn't recommend in the US right now, so now that email is linked to you and linked to anarchy. That might not be something you want. That example doesn't work for you? How about signing up for a porn site that requires email but no credit card? What about a torrent site? An email address that lasts only 10-minutes should make it harder for people to link things that you do back to you.
(Before anyone jumps down my throat, I said it "should make it harder" not impossible, and I didn't say that it makes it hard because I don't know the difficulty of doing such a thing. I just said it would be harder than using one email address for everything.)
In the past I've noticed most, not all, younger guys wouldn't be caught dead buying a game cube, or any of the previous Nintendo offers, as they we're "kid's games".
I'm sorry, but just like the parent of my original post, I think you're completely wrong. This is the same stupid stereotyping. I've bought every Nintendo system (except for the GameCube which my roommate bought) since the original Nintendo. Maybe that is what sets me apart from these people you're talking about who think that the Nintendo is for kids. I've played the Nintendo since the beginning and loved the games. I would call the systems more "light-hearted" than the others, but I wouldn't say its for kids. If you look back at the history of the systems, the Nintendo wasn't branded as the system for kids sometime between the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, so it isn't fair to say that all the Nintendo generations were for kids. This is something that is relatively new in the history of games.
Also, as I said before, I'm 23 and in college (at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign), and I would say that the GameCube is almost as commonplace as the PS2 or Xbox. Most of my friends who share apartments with a group have a GameCube. They may also have Xboxs and PS2s, but those are generally bought by single people where the GameCube is more of a community purchase. If you want to say that the GameCube is popular among kids or people living with friends or girls or Nintendo fanboys or any other group that likes it, that's fine, but enough with this bullshit that "adult males" won't buy Nintendo systems. I'm a 23 year old male in college, and I'm buying a Wii. One of my roommates is a 20 year old male (who drives an old Thunderbird and would fit your definition of someone who doesn't want to be an adult) and he is also buying a Wii so he has it when he goes home to play with friends. No one in my apartment plans to buy a PS3 until at least March when the next shipment comes in (and hopefully the prices will drop a little). We have tried to buy an Xbox 360 when we see special sales like the T-day Amazon 1000 for $100 sale, but we aren't going to spend full price for one. The Wii is not just for kids.
The Wii is the only one of the new systems that is made for adults. Single men under thirty don't count as adults.
You made a good point and sounded intelligent up until that comment.
I'd rather play a golf or baseball game than Gears of War for the same reason I'd rather spend Saturday playing real golf than I would hanging out with friends.
What? You don't like hanging out with friends? Have you lost your social life outside of your family? So single men under thirty aren't adults, and you'd rather play golf than hang out with friends. You sound like an unhappy married man (since you think single men don't qualify as adults) who probably didn't go to college (I say that because you seemed to allude to college students being the "adolescents" who play first person shooters) and is unhappy with his job that he started right out of high school, but that would just be my guess.
That doesn't really matter though. You do realize that you just stereotyped "single men under thirty" while bitching about the stereotype that Nintendo is for kids. Its a lot more convincing when you practice what you preach.
I'm a 23 year old college student, which is probably why I was so irritated with your comment, who loves the GameCube, not to mention the other systems. My roommates and I play Mario Tennis all the time when friends come over before we go out on the weekends. We play Mario Party with our girlfriends. The Mario games are our favorites on the system, and we have probably gotten more use out of the GameCube than the other systems we own.
I'm a little confused on why you say that the Wii is the only new system for your definition of adults while your only reason for that is that adults like sports games more than FPSs. Historically, the PS and XBox have more sports games than Nintendo, unless you are counting all of the Mario sports games. I admit I haven't reviewed the latest list of games for the systems, but even if there are more sports games out for the Wii at the moment, I doubt that that will be the case in another year since, as far as I know, it hasn't been the case in the past.
Finally, my 63 year old father loves the PS2 and plans to buy the PS3. This is because he doesn't like games that require manual dexterity, and the PS2 has the largest concentration of RPGs (which usually don't require hand-eye coordination). He doesn't like sports games and is not interested in the Wii or the thought of using its controllers. The PS3 is the system to most likely have a large number of "standard" RPGs (by that I mean games like Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior, and FF instead of Zelda or Secret of Mana), so that is what my father wants and the PS3 is the only system for him, a married man over 30.
That's a really good point. To me, it seems utterly ridiculous to add video games to a list of prohibited actions/items for criminals on probation, but that says a lot about video games in other ways. If most people think that it would be silly to ban video games for violent offenders, then obviously those people don't think that video games are a significant factor for violence. If we keep guns away from convicted felons because we don't want them to shoot someone yet we let them play video games, then how can video games be a larger problem than guns (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying ban guns, I'm just trying to put games in perspective)? How will some politicians respond to this? This argument can be applied to a variety of other aspects of games/movies and violence, but if you understand what I just said, there's no need for me to walk you through other examples.
I agree. Since I couldn't reach either of the ets.org links, I can't see any of their sample questions, if those were even posted. Without that, how do we know that the people giving the tests can even decide the validity of a web page?
I hate to bring it up cuz it will start the same old argument again, but since a lot of people can't decide whether or not wikipedia is a valid source, how can we trust most of them to know what's acceptable?
A\long with that, there are a lot of schools that teach certain guidelines as absolute. I was taught that that any web page with a "~" towards the end was bad, regardless of whether or not the webpage was.com or.edu. The problem is that a ~ means you can't necessarily trust a source from an edu because it is a personal page, not the edu's page (yes, that's a really loose explanation of how that works). The problem is that just because a page can't necessarily be trusted, doesn't mean that it can't be trusted absolutely. Now consider some of the so-called colleges out there that are teaching that the world is only 6000 years old (or the Museum created to support such an idea). Knowing that Liberty University would teach such a thing tells me that they are not a trusted site. To me, a professor's personal page at Stanford would have much more credibility, but that doesn't fit well into specific criteria.
Point is, I don't trust this study until I know what their criteria is or what their questions were. As for the questions, it's just like statistical surveys that ask "Do you drink A) never B) one or two drinks a night C) more than 2 drinks in a night" and conclude that 50% of people are binge drinking alcoholics because they answered C, even though that doesn't take into account how often they drink more than 2 drinks in a night, or a variety of other problems.
I know this is completely offtopic from the article, but I'm always amazed to see how many different variations of that bird open exist. This is the one I grew up with, short and sweet.
A little yellow bird
with a little yellow bill
sat upon my windowsill.
I fed it crumbs and bits of bread
and then I crushed its little head.
I don't know why anyone would think China is the worst, just listen to the Chinese government. They just have trouble accessing the internet sometimes, so you can't blame them for that. I mean, I'm sure they know if they're censoring their own people or not, and why would they lie to us anyway? What could they gain from that??? (was that sarcastic enough? I can never tell...)
However, in practice....I fear that we will only see exams getting easier and the children being taught less and less.
I don't think the exams will get easier since they are standardized tests (I did not RTFA, but the summary seems to say that). The teachers who stand to benefit from easier tests shouldn't be the ones creating the tests.
Funny how some people can easily lose faith in law enforcement while others won't ever. I live in an unincorporated subdivision 5 minutes outside of a town of only 4000 people surrounded by cornfields in north-central Illinois. Since we are outside of town, we fall under the county's jurisdiction, so if there's every a problem, a county cop shows up. We had a party at my house, and long story short, a neighbor called the cops because people were parking on his side of the street. My dad was asleep in the living room on the couch while the party was going on in the backyard. The police officer, upon seeing a note on the front door that said "come on in", walked right into the living room without knocking or ringing the doorbell and started to walk towards the back door. This woke up my dad, who was pretty shocked to see a cop in his living room. Now, I'm not sure how the privacy laws (or breaking and entering) apply when there is a note on your unlocked door that says "come on in", but it was not OK for that officer to just walk into our house, and my dad thought that too.
What's the point of that story? Both my parents were always defending the police when I would tell them stories about seeing my friends' rights abused because they didn't know better by the small town cops. My parents never believed me or something because they would always defend the cops. After this event, my dad was pissed. He filed a complaint with the police department and has always been watchful of what he is doing when police officers are around because he doesn't trust them anymore. My mom, on the other hand, doesn't see anything wrong with the situation at all. She thinks its fine that the office just walked into our house and says that if there weren't so many cars in the road, it never would have happened. She blames herself for having her rights violated. This just amazes me.
A year later, she is pulled over for speeding. My mom doesn't speed. If she got a ticket, it should be for driving too slow. The officer writes her a ticket for 52 in a 45 (or close to that, it was between 5 and 10 over). She complains say that she wasn't speeding, but that doesn't do any good of course and the cop just went back to his speed trap. My mom truly believes, and its probably true, that she was not speeding. Even after this incident, she blames the car. She took it in to see if the spedometer was broke, which it wasn't. Then she blames herself saying she didn't have her glasses on or something like that. Even though it is completely uncharacteristic of her to speed while it isn't uncommon to hear about a cop faking a ticket in our area, she still trusts them absolutely.
Most people are told all their lives that they can trust police officers, and some people will believe that without question while others won't. I truly amazes me. Anyway, to tie all that back to the original post, I think you would also be amazed at how many people will blindly trust law enforcement. (yeah, sorry that was such a long way to illustrate a rather insignificant point)
Commercial space travel is just still so much in its infancy that it seems hard to imagine that someone is actually willing to invest such huge amounts
Do you have a better idea for how to get commercial space travel out of its infancy? Seems to me that, one way or another, large sums of money will have to be spent before we can fly into space as often as we fly across the ocean.
From my original post: One of my roommates and I.... I thought it was clear that I was talking about the two of us each buying a ps3 and selling one, since we don't need two ps3's in our apartment, but I guess I wasn' that clear about that detail. Also, that does change things to make it only $13.50 an hour or so.
But, again, I would also easily believe that there are lots of cases where it was justified.
Sorry, it is never justified when the police do it.
I'm not the author, but if you take that into context with his previous sentence: I'm not surprised at all that there are hundreds of instances where an officer may have overstepped justified force., I think what he meant to say is that a lot of those cases were actually justified but appeared to be overstepping the bounds because people don't get to see the whole picture or something along those lines. That's just how I read it.
One of my roommates and I have been talking about camping out for a ps3. Have you seen what they are selling for on ebay? At those prices, you could buy two, sell one, and still make a profit.
$1400 for a ps3 on ebay? Assuming I'd spend about $800 on one with games and whatnot, that'd leave $600 for profit. 24 hours standing outside for $600 is about $27 an hour. It might suck (especially in the cold where I'm at), but that's pretty good money when you think about it.
On that note, I didn't think most stores were offering pre-orders. When I went to Best Buy a few months ago, they told me they weren't doing it. Is this true or did I get some idiot who ruined my chance at getting a ps3?
(repost: my apologies for being stupid and using quote instead of blockquote, along with not previewing)
So you're saying that because Clinton signed that act, that the Republicans are the party of gay people?
I'm not saying that, or anything even remotely like it.
I meant to add to that saying that your wording makes it sound like you were saying that. I didn't actually think that that was what you were trying to say.
That the law was passed by a Republican Congress does nothing to detract from the fact that it was signed into law by a Democrat.
I didn't mean to sound like I was putting on the owness on the republicans, just that it was both parties at the time.
Both parties were eager, as they are now, to put people's rights on the chopping block for the sake of popularity.
Ok, both parties will sacrifice people's rights (I'll give that to you if you are saying that they sacrifice different types of rights) in order to be more popular. Both parties will also say they will cut taxes in order to be more popular, or say they will be tough on terror, or a variety of other things. That's great. However, the parties aren't exactly the same and have some major (some minor also) differences in some areas. Since you have avoided stating your opinion on this, are you saying that you believe that republicans support gay rights more than democrats today? That question was my motivation in replying to your intitial post, because it sheds light on what you actually meant.
So you're saying that because Clinton signed that act, that the Republicans are the party of gay people?I'm not saying that, or anything even remotely like it.
I meant to add to that saying that your wording makes it sound like you were saying that. I didn't actually think that that was what you were trying to say.
That the law was passed by a Republican Congress does nothing to detract from the fact that it was signed into law by a Democrat.
I didn't mean to sound like I was putting on the owness on the republicans, just that it was both parties at the time.
Both parties were eager, as they are now, to put people's rights on the chopping block for the sake of popularity.
Ok, both parties will sacrifice people's rights (I'll give that to you if you are saying that they sacrifice different types of rights) in order to be more popular. Both parties will also say they will cut taxes in order to be more popular, or say they will be tough on terror, or a variety of other things. That's great. However, the parties aren't exactly the same and have some major (some minor also) differences in some areas. Since you have avoided stating your opinion on this, are you saying that you believe that republicans support gay rights more than democrats today? That question was my motivation in replying to your intitial post, because it sheds light on what you actually meant.
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Ok, but I was trying to compare the quarried blocks to the poured blocks, and I thought that at least the outer blocks on the bottom were quarried and the outer blocks on the top were poured.
Interesting, I didn't know that.
However, I'm assuming that the separation between the blocks is close to the same throughout the pyramid. Then, if the separation between the blocks on the bottom (which were mined from the quarries) is the same as the separation between the blocks on the top (which, at least some of were poured into moulds), then they must have been able to move blocks that closely together (because they would have had to on the bottom) and could have moved the poured concrete blocks together, although that doesn't necessarily mean that is how they did it. But that is under the assumption that the separation is the same, and my only reason for assuming that is that they didn't know there was a difference between the blocks on the top and bottom until they did chemical testing on the blocks.
FTA: This wet "concrete" would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days.
Again, I know nothing about concrete, so I'm really just asking a question here, but wouldn't pouring concrete into a "form" that uses hardened concrete as one of the four walls result in "fusing" the two blocks of concrete together instead of leaving a tight crack in between the two? If so, I thought there was a clear separation between blocks at the pyramids.
It does seem like a bad idea at first, but that doesn't mean that that isn't how they did it. From other comments I've read so far, it seems that the blocks were created at the bottom and carried up. Most other threads seem to come to that conclusion, although that doesn't make them right.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. The point was that if that is the case, then this doesn't seem like such a big deal. I think my mistake was reading into this article and thinking that it was some revealing discovery of how the Egyptians built the pyramids, but its really a revealing study of how the Egyptians got stones to build the pyramids. It doesn't seem that the concrete helped at all with the construction of the pyramids, i.e. they still had to carry those huge stones all the way up to the top.
Really? First off, to have it "set in place" would mean to have a mould in the place where the stone was to be placed. As another person pointed out, there isn't enough space between the stones to allow for a mould.
So the natural response to that is that they made the molds up high and moved the stones a few feet or so into place instead of carrying them up the pyramid, but there isn't a whole lot of space at the top of the pyramid to allow for a whole bunch of moulds to be sitting around for a week or two. If its so blindingly obvious that they let it set in place, then show me one piece of evidence that supports that theory. If you read most of the other comments, most people seem to believe that the stones were created at the bottom, which was part of my initial question.
Since they were created at the bottom, this doesn't seem to be an "A-ha!" moment where some scientist found out a trick the Egyptians used to make the construction of the pyramids easier, its just an explanation of how they made moving the rocks to the pyramids easier (which is technically part of the construction, but still).
People need to get their heads out of their asses and realize that this kind of thing is ridiculous and retarded.
I agree. We should leave that kind of thinking to the people who are best at it, the DHS.
Did you actually read my post? Or the article for that matter? No where in the article does it say that they carried the liquid concrete up pyramid. The quote I posted says that the concrete was carried to "the site". When I read "the site", I read "the location of the building" not "the exact place where the concrete will set". My question was if anyone knew whether or not they carried the concrete up the pyramids, not how easy it is to carry liquid concrete in small batches as opposed to a large solid block.
I was unaware of that and was obviously mistaken. I just remember getting an update one day and then seeing the EA logo appear as I loaded the game, so I assumed it was bought out by EA at that point. After reading the wiki page, I think the time I am referring to is right around when EA cancelled most of Origin's products and Richard Garriot left. To me, that was the point that "Ultima was bought out by EA", although its more like EA took over Ultima in Garriot's absence.
This is definitely interesting, but I'm confused as to just what difference it makes other than that Egyptians used concrete.
FTA: This wet "concrete" would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days.
So they brought the concrete to the base of the pyramid to let it harden or to the top? If they brought it to the base and then carried it up the pyramid, then what's so special about it (again, besides the fact they used concrete). The article mentions the fact that the wheel hasn't been invented as if this concrete business makes sense of the pyramids, but didn't they still carry these large concrete blocks up it? I'm probably missing something, can anyone make sense out of that?
EA lost their direction a long time ago. I used to play Ultima Online until EA bought it out. EA realized that getting two new customers was more profitable than keeping one veteran customer. That's true in the short run at least, which seems to be all they are thinking about.
They seem to adopt this policy to non-subscription based games, although it is slightly modified: selling two almost completely similar (or two shitty) games is better than selling one original (or quality) game. The 2007 annual sports game lineup that EA released were barely an upgrade from 2006 (and 2006 wasn't that much better than 2005, but I'll give it credit for being relatively significant). They should have just put it off until they worked out their issues with the next-gen consoles, or pulled their heads out of their asses. If they started thinking more about what the customers want instead of maximizing profit in the short run, they might do a lot better. I know a lot of people are going to get into the "companies only care about money" rant, but a lot of the time, caring about your customers will lead to more money.
Here's one point. Let's assume you use one email address for all of your registration needs, including forums (and shopping if you really want to drive this point home). Over time, that email address will be linked to a variety of sites, which together can be used to identify you. Of course, depending on how you use the sites connected to the email address, there may be nothing that can be used to get your actual identity or you may have used your name on a couple which leads people to you (or you might use your credit card on a shopping site). Now you, or your identity depending on how you want to look at it, is linked to that email. This probably isn't a big deal for most people. Now let's pretend you want to sign up on an Anarchists website, which is something I wouldn't recommend in the US right now, so now that email is linked to you and linked to anarchy. That might not be something you want. That example doesn't work for you? How about signing up for a porn site that requires email but no credit card? What about a torrent site? An email address that lasts only 10-minutes should make it harder for people to link things that you do back to you.
(Before anyone jumps down my throat, I said it "should make it harder" not impossible, and I didn't say that it makes it hard because I don't know the difficulty of doing such a thing. I just said it would be harder than using one email address for everything.)
In the past I've noticed most, not all, younger guys wouldn't be caught dead buying a game cube, or any of the previous Nintendo offers, as they we're "kid's games".
I'm sorry, but just like the parent of my original post, I think you're completely wrong. This is the same stupid stereotyping. I've bought every Nintendo system (except for the GameCube which my roommate bought) since the original Nintendo. Maybe that is what sets me apart from these people you're talking about who think that the Nintendo is for kids. I've played the Nintendo since the beginning and loved the games. I would call the systems more "light-hearted" than the others, but I wouldn't say its for kids. If you look back at the history of the systems, the Nintendo wasn't branded as the system for kids sometime between the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, so it isn't fair to say that all the Nintendo generations were for kids. This is something that is relatively new in the history of games.
Also, as I said before, I'm 23 and in college (at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign), and I would say that the GameCube is almost as commonplace as the PS2 or Xbox. Most of my friends who share apartments with a group have a GameCube. They may also have Xboxs and PS2s, but those are generally bought by single people where the GameCube is more of a community purchase. If you want to say that the GameCube is popular among kids or people living with friends or girls or Nintendo fanboys or any other group that likes it, that's fine, but enough with this bullshit that "adult males" won't buy Nintendo systems. I'm a 23 year old male in college, and I'm buying a Wii. One of my roommates is a 20 year old male (who drives an old Thunderbird and would fit your definition of someone who doesn't want to be an adult) and he is also buying a Wii so he has it when he goes home to play with friends. No one in my apartment plans to buy a PS3 until at least March when the next shipment comes in (and hopefully the prices will drop a little). We have tried to buy an Xbox 360 when we see special sales like the T-day Amazon 1000 for $100 sale, but we aren't going to spend full price for one. The Wii is not just for kids.
The Wii is the only one of the new systems that is made for adults. Single men under thirty don't count as adults.
You made a good point and sounded intelligent up until that comment.
I'd rather play a golf or baseball game than Gears of War for the same reason I'd rather spend Saturday playing real golf than I would hanging out with friends.
What? You don't like hanging out with friends? Have you lost your social life outside of your family? So single men under thirty aren't adults, and you'd rather play golf than hang out with friends. You sound like an unhappy married man (since you think single men don't qualify as adults) who probably didn't go to college (I say that because you seemed to allude to college students being the "adolescents" who play first person shooters) and is unhappy with his job that he started right out of high school, but that would just be my guess.
That doesn't really matter though. You do realize that you just stereotyped "single men under thirty" while bitching about the stereotype that Nintendo is for kids. Its a lot more convincing when you practice what you preach.
I'm a 23 year old college student, which is probably why I was so irritated with your comment, who loves the GameCube, not to mention the other systems. My roommates and I play Mario Tennis all the time when friends come over before we go out on the weekends. We play Mario Party with our girlfriends. The Mario games are our favorites on the system, and we have probably gotten more use out of the GameCube than the other systems we own.
I'm a little confused on why you say that the Wii is the only new system for your definition of adults while your only reason for that is that adults like sports games more than FPSs. Historically, the PS and XBox have more sports games than Nintendo, unless you are counting all of the Mario sports games. I admit I haven't reviewed the latest list of games for the systems, but even if there are more sports games out for the Wii at the moment, I doubt that that will be the case in another year since, as far as I know, it hasn't been the case in the past.
Finally, my 63 year old father loves the PS2 and plans to buy the PS3. This is because he doesn't like games that require manual dexterity, and the PS2 has the largest concentration of RPGs (which usually don't require hand-eye coordination). He doesn't like sports games and is not interested in the Wii or the thought of using its controllers. The PS3 is the system to most likely have a large number of "standard" RPGs (by that I mean games like Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior, and FF instead of Zelda or Secret of Mana), so that is what my father wants and the PS3 is the only system for him, a married man over 30.
That's a really good point. To me, it seems utterly ridiculous to add video games to a list of prohibited actions/items for criminals on probation, but that says a lot about video games in other ways. If most people think that it would be silly to ban video games for violent offenders, then obviously those people don't think that video games are a significant factor for violence. If we keep guns away from convicted felons because we don't want them to shoot someone yet we let them play video games, then how can video games be a larger problem than guns (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying ban guns, I'm just trying to put games in perspective)? How will some politicians respond to this? This argument can be applied to a variety of other aspects of games/movies and violence, but if you understand what I just said, there's no need for me to walk you through other examples.
I agree. Since I couldn't reach either of the ets.org links, I can't see any of their sample questions, if those were even posted. Without that, how do we know that the people giving the tests can even decide the validity of a web page?
.com or .edu. The problem is that a ~ means you can't necessarily trust a source from an edu because it is a personal page, not the edu's page (yes, that's a really loose explanation of how that works). The problem is that just because a page can't necessarily be trusted, doesn't mean that it can't be trusted absolutely. Now consider some of the so-called colleges out there that are teaching that the world is only 6000 years old (or the Museum created to support such an idea). Knowing that Liberty University would teach such a thing tells me that they are not a trusted site. To me, a professor's personal page at Stanford would have much more credibility, but that doesn't fit well into specific criteria.
I hate to bring it up cuz it will start the same old argument again, but since a lot of people can't decide whether or not wikipedia is a valid source, how can we trust most of them to know what's acceptable?
A\long with that, there are a lot of schools that teach certain guidelines as absolute. I was taught that that any web page with a "~" towards the end was bad, regardless of whether or not the webpage was
Point is, I don't trust this study until I know what their criteria is or what their questions were. As for the questions, it's just like statistical surveys that ask "Do you drink A) never B) one or two drinks a night C) more than 2 drinks in a night" and conclude that 50% of people are binge drinking alcoholics because they answered C, even though that doesn't take into account how often they drink more than 2 drinks in a night, or a variety of other problems.
I know this is completely offtopic from the article, but I'm always amazed to see how many different variations of that bird open exist. This is the one I grew up with, short and sweet. A little yellow bird with a little yellow bill sat upon my windowsill. I fed it crumbs and bits of bread and then I crushed its little head.
I don't know why anyone would think China is the worst, just listen to the Chinese government. They just have trouble accessing the internet sometimes, so you can't blame them for that. I mean, I'm sure they know if they're censoring their own people or not, and why would they lie to us anyway? What could they gain from that??? (was that sarcastic enough? I can never tell...)
However, in practice....I fear that we will only see exams getting easier and the children being taught less and less.
I don't think the exams will get easier since they are standardized tests (I did not RTFA, but the summary seems to say that). The teachers who stand to benefit from easier tests shouldn't be the ones creating the tests.
Funny how some people can easily lose faith in law enforcement while others won't ever. I live in an unincorporated subdivision 5 minutes outside of a town of only 4000 people surrounded by cornfields in north-central Illinois. Since we are outside of town, we fall under the county's jurisdiction, so if there's every a problem, a county cop shows up. We had a party at my house, and long story short, a neighbor called the cops because people were parking on his side of the street. My dad was asleep in the living room on the couch while the party was going on in the backyard. The police officer, upon seeing a note on the front door that said "come on in", walked right into the living room without knocking or ringing the doorbell and started to walk towards the back door. This woke up my dad, who was pretty shocked to see a cop in his living room. Now, I'm not sure how the privacy laws (or breaking and entering) apply when there is a note on your unlocked door that says "come on in", but it was not OK for that officer to just walk into our house, and my dad thought that too.
What's the point of that story? Both my parents were always defending the police when I would tell them stories about seeing my friends' rights abused because they didn't know better by the small town cops. My parents never believed me or something because they would always defend the cops. After this event, my dad was pissed. He filed a complaint with the police department and has always been watchful of what he is doing when police officers are around because he doesn't trust them anymore. My mom, on the other hand, doesn't see anything wrong with the situation at all. She thinks its fine that the office just walked into our house and says that if there weren't so many cars in the road, it never would have happened. She blames herself for having her rights violated. This just amazes me.
A year later, she is pulled over for speeding. My mom doesn't speed. If she got a ticket, it should be for driving too slow. The officer writes her a ticket for 52 in a 45 (or close to that, it was between 5 and 10 over). She complains say that she wasn't speeding, but that doesn't do any good of course and the cop just went back to his speed trap. My mom truly believes, and its probably true, that she was not speeding. Even after this incident, she blames the car. She took it in to see if the spedometer was broke, which it wasn't. Then she blames herself saying she didn't have her glasses on or something like that. Even though it is completely uncharacteristic of her to speed while it isn't uncommon to hear about a cop faking a ticket in our area, she still trusts them absolutely.
Most people are told all their lives that they can trust police officers, and some people will believe that without question while others won't. I truly amazes me. Anyway, to tie all that back to the original post, I think you would also be amazed at how many people will blindly trust law enforcement. (yeah, sorry that was such a long way to illustrate a rather insignificant point)
Commercial space travel is just still so much in its infancy that it seems hard to imagine that someone is actually willing to invest such huge amounts
Do you have a better idea for how to get commercial space travel out of its infancy? Seems to me that, one way or another, large sums of money will have to be spent before we can fly into space as often as we fly across the ocean.
From my original post: One of my roommates and I.... I thought it was clear that I was talking about the two of us each buying a ps3 and selling one, since we don't need two ps3's in our apartment, but I guess I wasn' that clear about that detail. Also, that does change things to make it only $13.50 an hour or so.
One of my roommates and I have been talking about camping out for a ps3. Have you seen what they are selling for on ebay? At those prices, you could buy two, sell one, and still make a profit.
$1400 for a ps3 on ebay? Assuming I'd spend about $800 on one with games and whatnot, that'd leave $600 for profit. 24 hours standing outside for $600 is about $27 an hour. It might suck (especially in the cold where I'm at), but that's pretty good money when you think about it.
On that note, I didn't think most stores were offering pre-orders. When I went to Best Buy a few months ago, they told me they weren't doing it. Is this true or did I get some idiot who ruined my chance at getting a ps3?
I meant to add to that saying that your wording makes it sound like you were saying that. I didn't actually think that that was what you were trying to say.
I didn't mean to sound like I was putting on the owness on the republicans, just that it was both parties at the time.
Ok, both parties will sacrifice people's rights (I'll give that to you if you are saying that they sacrifice different types of rights) in order to be more popular. Both parties will also say they will cut taxes in order to be more popular, or say they will be tough on terror, or a variety of other things. That's great. However, the parties aren't exactly the same and have some major (some minor also) differences in some areas. Since you have avoided stating your opinion on this, are you saying that you believe that republicans support gay rights more than democrats today? That question was my motivation in replying to your intitial post, because it sheds light on what you actually meant.
So you're saying that because Clinton signed that act, that the Republicans are the party of gay people?I'm not saying that, or anything even remotely like it.
I meant to add to that saying that your wording makes it sound like you were saying that. I didn't actually think that that was what you were trying to say.
That the law was passed by a Republican Congress does nothing to detract from the fact that it was signed into law by a Democrat.
I didn't mean to sound like I was putting on the owness on the republicans, just that it was both parties at the time.
Both parties were eager, as they are now, to put people's rights on the chopping block for the sake of popularity. Ok, both parties will sacrifice people's rights (I'll give that to you if you are saying that they sacrifice different types of rights) in order to be more popular. Both parties will also say they will cut taxes in order to be more popular, or say they will be tough on terror, or a variety of other things. That's great. However, the parties aren't exactly the same and have some major (some minor also) differences in some areas. Since you have avoided stating your opinion on this, are you saying that you believe that republicans support gay rights more than democrats today? That question was my motivation in replying to your intitial post, because it sheds light on what you actually meant.