A guy is retiring from working at a nuclear power plant, and at the end of his send-off, he leaves his co-workers with a nugget of advice: "Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor." And then he leaves. They spend the rest of the sketch trying to figure out whether he meant you should put lots and lots of water in, or be careful not to put too much. After much deliberation, they decide to drain the tanks completely just to be on the safe side. Well... FOOOOM!!!!
Far away, on a beach somewhere, the retired guy is getting served a drink, when a rumbling sounds in the distance, and he and the serving girl look across the water. She remarks at how pretty the cloud is. He recognizes the mushroom shape, and tells her that it must be from a nuclear test. He agrees that it's a beautiful sight. Then he tells her, "Just remember, you can't look too long at a radioactive cloud."
A look of deep puzzlement crosses her face as the sketch fades out...
I dunno, what do they get out of being the ones to report the flaw to MS? If I found a critical flaw and reported it directly to MS, would I get paid? I doubt it. So how does iDefense get their money back? An army of spamming/DDOSing zombies for a month or so, and then report it would be my guess. That's if I was prone to paranoia, which I'm not, so stop looking at me like that! There was a look there, don't deny it, I'm onto you!!
I wouldn't buy one, because I don't have the cash for the bloated price, but I'd have to say there's more benefit than just OSX. A closed-hardware platform is a stable platform. That's worth a lot, but it's expensive to run such an enterprise, hence the bloaty price. If the PC had never had a clone market, and remained under the control of just IBM, Windows would probably suck a lot less than it does now. Though by the same token (no pun inten... aw hell sure, take it), we might all be running OS/2 anyhow if that were the case, and PCs would still not suck as much as they do currently.
Personally, while I buy all my games, and like to feel good about that, there's a point where the ethics don't matter. If there's a game that exists and I want to play it, but the stores won't carry it, then it's time to fire up BitTorrent and have no qualms about it at all. Problem solved. Not my fault if they won't accept my money for it.
That's totally true. I do tech support for the unwashed masses, and those with broadband will say, when questioned, that they're not connected to the Internet right now, meaning that they're not running IE at that particular moment. They can mess with their cable modem's connection to split to a TV, but having knocked out their Internet as a consequence they will call their computer manufacturer and not their cable company, because that couldn't possibly be the problem since the Internet is supposed to be in the computer somewhere. And yes, those with dialup may insist they have to dial before going to the control panel or loading up Word or any number of things. Not all of them are like this, but way too many are.
Are you certain that borgification is not our natural path? Look at it this way, we as a species have been married to technology for a really really long time. We keep getting closer and closer to it, using it to ensure comfort, safety, and entertainment. Always trying to find better and more reliable ways to integrate tech into our lives so that our biological needs can be better served. Maybe it's actually inhuman to avoid technology?
I'm a die-hard, every single day of my life computer and Internet power user. Computers for 22 years, Internet for 16 of those years, spanning quite a few different fields of interest through those years. I don't have a notebook, PDA, or even a cellphone, but every single day I'm immersed in computers. All day at work, and all evening when I get home, until I go to sleep. Not counting work, which is, well, work, what am I doing the rest of the time? Heck, you name it. See a long time ago it stopped being about "being into computers" for me, it's simply the way I get things done that are important to me; like writing, making music, exploring graphic arts, learning things... Basically, stimulating my brain with everything including the kitchen sink. Can I do this without computers? Yeah, most of it, and here's my point: Any given day, I can go on a vacation, have somewhere else to be other than home, maybe all day, maybe for a week in another city somewhere. As I mentioned, I have no portable devices. If I'm not at home, then I don't give a crap about what my computers do for me there. When I'm at home, I'm glued there, because that's the most entertaining and enriching place in the apartment, no big deal. If I'm going to be at home, it's that or watch TV, or read a book. Oh hey, I can do those things on the computer too. Take me out of my home and put me in the mountains somewhere, I'm happy as a clam. There, I'm not thinking about my daily computer existance at all; and on returning home, I'll sink right back into them just as joyfully as I stepped away.
It's just life at this point... I think that the breadth of what one can be into with computers negates the addiction factor. If I was doing just one thing on my computer all the time, like play Evercrack or sit and refresh the front page of Slashdot for hours, every day, that would be an addiction, like sitting in front of the same slot machine all day. An addiction to Evercrack is only involving one particular aspect of the usage of a very versatile tool. I don't think that makes the tool an addiction at all.
Violent games can help prepare you to commit violence, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. They can also assist you to relax after a long day's work, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. Violent games can help you overcome squeamishness with violence, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. (Violent or other) games can help you build hand-eye coordination, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them.
Violent games don't make people kill people, people get their inspiration for that by whatever means they have available.
A friend of mine once described it to me this way: He used to run with a rough crowd, carried a gun, hurt people as favors for other people, etc. He told me, relaying one of his own experiences with having a gun pointed at him, "It doesn't matter how hardcore you are, it doesn't matter how much you've been through, if someone gets a gun to your head and you don't have yours, it all changes, and you turn into a total pussy instantly."
Probably not, except for designing safety protocols for the Holodeck so nobody really gets hurt. Aside from that, no I think we will continue to try improving simulation regardless of subject matter, to the point of it being BTL (Better Than Life), and that the motivation to pursue virtual reality will continue until we get there. If we never do get there, we will probably still keep trying as long as our species exists. We started all this a long time before computers, through plays and other writing, vocal traditions of storytelling, etc. We are ever seeking fantasy escape, always wanting to put our minds somewhere other than where we are. Subject matter is a secondary consideration. If something can be simulated, rest assured someone somewhere will want to simulate it. A bunch of people saying you shouldn't simulate subject x y or z isn't going to change that.
Yeah but if I leave my car running, unlocked, and it gets stolen, yeah the guy who took off with it is a criminal, but if my insurance company knew the facts of the matter, do you think I could expect them to not laugh me out of their office when I try to make a claim? Assuming that I told them the whole truth about what went down, I would be shit outta luck, and that is quite reasonable.
Back in my day we used to use a cord to hook our brains up to a little socket in the wall and download anything we wanted, right into our heads, and we liked it! None of this fancy telepathy and Borg implants like you spoiled whippersnappers today! I had a nice cord too, and I wore it in a loop around my left shoulder, which was the style at the time...
Gays are no more likely to be pedophiles than anyone else
I think you missed the point. Having a bunch of kids in the charge of someone who finds their gender attractive is not as safe as having them in the charge of someone who doesn't. You know, sending your 12 year old daughter with a 35 year old man, you read that part right? He doesn't have to be an actual pedophile, but he's still way scarier than if the chaperone for your daughter was female. It's not homophobic, and I'm getting tired of the whole P.C. movement that makes it so anything that has any amount of oppression against it is obviously oppressed in all possible ways, and can do no wrong because then you're not being PC. Fuck that. Gays are people too, realize that.
Golf is the next WoW! Picture it, you get together with your boss and a few other underlings, and head out to the golf course dressed up as orcs, and go around kicking the shit out of groups from rival companies dressed as alliance folk. Plenty of good bonding opportunities here, and you might get to permanently reduce market competition as well.
It does, whether or not the nanoparticles directly do their job on the skin that's making contact. You're going to leave germs on the surface if you touch it, or run your hand along it. So there's less germs on your hand now. Since the surface is self-cleaning, you can assume you didn't simply trade the germs on your hand with the ones that would normally be on a regular surface, but instead have a net loss of germs on your hand. Does the oxidizing take place right on your skin as you stay in contact with the surface? Given that it seems to need light to do its work I'd say no, but you would still come away with a cleaner hand since the self-cleaning surface itself is always clean and bodies tend to leave little bits of themselves on pretty much everything.
Easy. If you figure your mushrooms are worth more, charge more. If you find that you can't get away with that because nobody's buying them now, then charge less. You're still just a mushroom farmer regardless of whatever other people are figuring out what to do with your mushrooms. Too bad if the processing and decoration and whatever generates more money than the farming, guess you're just in the wrong line of work.
Actually, I'm totally the opposite and can't see how trackballs ever even got a chance. Personally, trackballs drive me completely insane. With a mouse, if I want to make a small movement and then have the pointer just sit there, I don't have to keep taking my hand off of the mouse, I just rest. With a trackball, I have to keep taking my finger or thumb off of it because, I don't know about you, but I haven't got 'surgeon's hands' that stay rock solid still while being suspended by their muscles. No I don't have any kind of 'tremors' I just find it difficult to keep a finger perfectly steady that is not resting on something solid. So then I put my digit back onto the trackball and 'zoom' there goes the pointer off in some random direction while I get my bearing again on what part of the ball I'm on... No trackballs at all for me, thanks. More for you I guess, so we both win.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The more important part there though is, if you meet a foxy chick in a bar, do NOT let her know that you have a binary watch.
Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live sketch:
A guy is retiring from working at a nuclear power plant, and at the end of his send-off, he leaves his co-workers with a nugget of advice: "Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor." And then he leaves. They spend the rest of the sketch trying to figure out whether he meant you should put lots and lots of water in, or be careful not to put too much. After much deliberation, they decide to drain the tanks completely just to be on the safe side. Well... FOOOOM!!!!
Far away, on a beach somewhere, the retired guy is getting served a drink, when a rumbling sounds in the distance, and he and the serving girl look across the water. She remarks at how pretty the cloud is. He recognizes the mushroom shape, and tells her that it must be from a nuclear test. He agrees that it's a beautiful sight. Then he tells her, "Just remember, you can't look too long at a radioactive cloud."
A look of deep puzzlement crosses her face as the sketch fades out...
And as far as I remember, Soviet Union was never much interested in VAXen.
Of course that's because in Soviet Russia, VAX steals you!
Are you sure you'll still have room for the mp3's? Might want to get two to be on the safe side.
Delete NTLDR and your system is safe forever.
I dunno, what do they get out of being the ones to report the flaw to MS? If I found a critical flaw and reported it directly to MS, would I get paid? I doubt it. So how does iDefense get their money back? An army of spamming/DDOSing zombies for a month or so, and then report it would be my guess. That's if I was prone to paranoia, which I'm not, so stop looking at me like that! There was a look there, don't deny it, I'm onto you!!
I wouldn't buy one, because I don't have the cash for the bloated price, but I'd have to say there's more benefit than just OSX. A closed-hardware platform is a stable platform. That's worth a lot, but it's expensive to run such an enterprise, hence the bloaty price. If the PC had never had a clone market, and remained under the control of just IBM, Windows would probably suck a lot less than it does now. Though by the same token (no pun inten... aw hell sure, take it), we might all be running OS/2 anyhow if that were the case, and PCs would still not suck as much as they do currently.
Personally, while I buy all my games, and like to feel good about that, there's a point where the ethics don't matter. If there's a game that exists and I want to play it, but the stores won't carry it, then it's time to fire up BitTorrent and have no qualms about it at all. Problem solved. Not my fault if they won't accept my money for it.
That's totally true. I do tech support for the unwashed masses, and those with broadband will say, when questioned, that they're not connected to the Internet right now, meaning that they're not running IE at that particular moment. They can mess with their cable modem's connection to split to a TV, but having knocked out their Internet as a consequence they will call their computer manufacturer and not their cable company, because that couldn't possibly be the problem since the Internet is supposed to be in the computer somewhere. And yes, those with dialup may insist they have to dial before going to the control panel or loading up Word or any number of things. Not all of them are like this, but way too many are.
Yes, but as bedfellows they are certainly not strang ers
Get back outside and get me my money before I open a can of GTA on your ass!
Are you certain that borgification is not our natural path? Look at it this way, we as a species have been married to technology for a really really long time. We keep getting closer and closer to it, using it to ensure comfort, safety, and entertainment. Always trying to find better and more reliable ways to integrate tech into our lives so that our biological needs can be better served. Maybe it's actually inhuman to avoid technology?
I'm a die-hard, every single day of my life computer and Internet power user. Computers for 22 years, Internet for 16 of those years, spanning quite a few different fields of interest through those years. I don't have a notebook, PDA, or even a cellphone, but every single day I'm immersed in computers. All day at work, and all evening when I get home, until I go to sleep. Not counting work, which is, well, work, what am I doing the rest of the time? Heck, you name it. See a long time ago it stopped being about "being into computers" for me, it's simply the way I get things done that are important to me; like writing, making music, exploring graphic arts, learning things... Basically, stimulating my brain with everything including the kitchen sink. Can I do this without computers? Yeah, most of it, and here's my point: Any given day, I can go on a vacation, have somewhere else to be other than home, maybe all day, maybe for a week in another city somewhere. As I mentioned, I have no portable devices. If I'm not at home, then I don't give a crap about what my computers do for me there. When I'm at home, I'm glued there, because that's the most entertaining and enriching place in the apartment, no big deal. If I'm going to be at home, it's that or watch TV, or read a book. Oh hey, I can do those things on the computer too. Take me out of my home and put me in the mountains somewhere, I'm happy as a clam. There, I'm not thinking about my daily computer existance at all; and on returning home, I'll sink right back into them just as joyfully as I stepped away.
It's just life at this point... I think that the breadth of what one can be into with computers negates the addiction factor. If I was doing just one thing on my computer all the time, like play Evercrack or sit and refresh the front page of Slashdot for hours, every day, that would be an addiction, like sitting in front of the same slot machine all day. An addiction to Evercrack is only involving one particular aspect of the usage of a very versatile tool. I don't think that makes the tool an addiction at all.
Oh, I just figured it was a new strategy to mitigate the slashdot effect since most of us don't read TFA anyhow.
Violent games can help prepare you to commit violence, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. They can also assist you to relax after a long day's work, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. Violent games can help you overcome squeamishness with violence, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them. (Violent or other) games can help you build hand-eye coordination, if that's what you're trying to accomplish by playing them.
Violent games don't make people kill people, people get their inspiration for that by whatever means they have available.
A friend of mine once described it to me this way: He used to run with a rough crowd, carried a gun, hurt people as favors for other people, etc. He told me, relaying one of his own experiences with having a gun pointed at him, "It doesn't matter how hardcore you are, it doesn't matter how much you've been through, if someone gets a gun to your head and you don't have yours, it all changes, and you turn into a total pussy instantly."
Is there ever a point where we have to say NO?
Probably not, except for designing safety protocols for the Holodeck so nobody really gets hurt. Aside from that, no I think we will continue to try improving simulation regardless of subject matter, to the point of it being BTL (Better Than Life), and that the motivation to pursue virtual reality will continue until we get there. If we never do get there, we will probably still keep trying as long as our species exists. We started all this a long time before computers, through plays and other writing, vocal traditions of storytelling, etc. We are ever seeking fantasy escape, always wanting to put our minds somewhere other than where we are. Subject matter is a secondary consideration. If something can be simulated, rest assured someone somewhere will want to simulate it. A bunch of people saying you shouldn't simulate subject x y or z isn't going to change that.
The perpetrators are at fault.
Yeah but if I leave my car running, unlocked, and it gets stolen, yeah the guy who took off with it is a criminal, but if my insurance company knew the facts of the matter, do you think I could expect them to not laugh me out of their office when I try to make a claim? Assuming that I told them the whole truth about what went down, I would be shit outta luck, and that is quite reasonable.
Back in my day we used to use a cord to hook our brains up to a little socket in the wall and download anything we wanted, right into our heads, and we liked it! None of this fancy telepathy and Borg implants like you spoiled whippersnappers today! I had a nice cord too, and I wore it in a loop around my left shoulder, which was the style at the time...
"Mom! Grandpa thinks he's time-travelling again!"
Gays are no more likely to be pedophiles than anyone else
I think you missed the point. Having a bunch of kids in the charge of someone who finds their gender attractive is not as safe as having them in the charge of someone who doesn't. You know, sending your 12 year old daughter with a 35 year old man, you read that part right? He doesn't have to be an actual pedophile, but he's still way scarier than if the chaperone for your daughter was female. It's not homophobic, and I'm getting tired of the whole P.C. movement that makes it so anything that has any amount of oppression against it is obviously oppressed in all possible ways, and can do no wrong because then you're not being PC. Fuck that. Gays are people too, realize that.
Golf is the next WoW! Picture it, you get together with your boss and a few other underlings, and head out to the golf course dressed up as orcs, and go around kicking the shit out of groups from rival companies dressed as alliance folk. Plenty of good bonding opportunities here, and you might get to permanently reduce market competition as well.
It does, whether or not the nanoparticles directly do their job on the skin that's making contact. You're going to leave germs on the surface if you touch it, or run your hand along it. So there's less germs on your hand now. Since the surface is self-cleaning, you can assume you didn't simply trade the germs on your hand with the ones that would normally be on a regular surface, but instead have a net loss of germs on your hand. Does the oxidizing take place right on your skin as you stay in contact with the surface? Given that it seems to need light to do its work I'd say no, but you would still come away with a cleaner hand since the self-cleaning surface itself is always clean and bodies tend to leave little bits of themselves on pretty much everything.
Easy. If you figure your mushrooms are worth more, charge more. If you find that you can't get away with that because nobody's buying them now, then charge less. You're still just a mushroom farmer regardless of whatever other people are figuring out what to do with your mushrooms. Too bad if the processing and decoration and whatever generates more money than the farming, guess you're just in the wrong line of work.
Actually, I'm totally the opposite and can't see how trackballs ever even got a chance. Personally, trackballs drive me completely insane. With a mouse, if I want to make a small movement and then have the pointer just sit there, I don't have to keep taking my hand off of the mouse, I just rest. With a trackball, I have to keep taking my finger or thumb off of it because, I don't know about you, but I haven't got 'surgeon's hands' that stay rock solid still while being suspended by their muscles. No I don't have any kind of 'tremors' I just find it difficult to keep a finger perfectly steady that is not resting on something solid. So then I put my digit back onto the trackball and 'zoom' there goes the pointer off in some random direction while I get my bearing again on what part of the ball I'm on... No trackballs at all for me, thanks. More for you I guess, so we both win. :)
But everything in books is true. They found out that hobbits were real didn't they?