From a marketing perspective it sounds pretty ingenious.

How many quality actors do you know, with such a reputation that you may be interested in illegally downloading/paying to watch their movies, almost solely to see their performance suddenly announce, 'that's enough for me, I'm going to rap'?

Not many I don't think. And as much of a trainwreck I expect his new album to sound like, I don't think I can not resist listening to it. Perhaps not longer than 15 seconds, I'd actually want to hear what it sounds like.


also, I didn't ever think of it as a hoax until I saw that kaufman-esque comment - which I didn't read, but it goes along with the beard. The beard amplifies the shocking news doesn't it? But it also goes in with the idea that he's doing this behind a mask. Might be reading too much into the beard, but oh well. That said, didn't Letterman 'go along' with one of Andy's 'pranks' before?

>> ^vairetube:
the banana thing really explains... evolution and natural selection...
animals preference = most used; propagated seeds in excrement = natural selection of the most used = handy banany!
all he proves is that animals know what they like to eat... he could have made a much more confounding (read: better, to creationists) argument out of the origin of such preferences.


Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite the way you put it. I wish it did, because it would be so much more hilarious.

Cultivated bananas are sterile so the seeds in excrement don't do anything. Banana plants are propagated by offshoots. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana#Cultivation)

What it does demonstrate is evolution by artificial selection, which shares many similarities with evolution by natural selection.

Ray Comfort is right that the banana is intelligently and ingeniously designed. Humans made it.

if there were a society of robots with complex algorithms to do experiments there still would be science in the crude and vulgar sense. if the robots could be constantly experimenting ones (programmed to experiment, gather various types of matter, try to combine them etc.) they could for instance "discover" and create various new chemical compounds but they wouldn't have knowledge - scientific or otherwise.

these robots would need to have some sort of ingenious matter scanning technology to pull this of but that's beside the point.

Wow that's ingenious. Why isn't all money made this way? Especially new money like the €uro.

^ I think you're wrong, ant. It must be a deliberate, and quite ingenious might I say, marketing direction they're taking.

Oh yeah, and on a separate note - have the ingenious OS X creators figured it out yet that people might need to retrieve separate files from the (Recycle) Bin?

Because last I checked a mere couple of years ago on a then almost brand new Mac laptop, there was no way to restore or drag&drop a single file out of the Bin - one could either restore all the files to their original locations (imagine what you'd do if it's a couple hundred of them) or empty the bin, or permanently delete all the other files that you didn't need at that particular time and THEN use the Restore All option on the single file. Truly genius, the simplicity and usability.

Ah, The BEST Line is...
"I don't know what his beef is...."

How absolutely clueless..., or very a very ingenious way of throwing the insult back at the guy while still looking like he is taking the high road!

The treadmill is a good tool. Sure, relative to the handles there's no wind, but relative to the tread, there is wind. Think of standing on a moving sidwalk. If the sidewalk moves fast enough, even inside a building you'd feel wind blowing against you.

Also, this device doesn't break any laws of physics - it's not a perpetual motion device because when you take away its power source (the wind), it will slow down and stop on its own.

This is just an ingenious method from extracting more power from the wind than you could by friction alone. The sailboat link from above is another good example of this, one can sail almost directly into the wind and even against the current and still move forward relative to the shore.

I too enjoyed maintaining a high ratio of applauds to stars, though nowhere near as high as yours, but alas this joy is gone from my life. We can, however, still earn stars from sifttalk posts. I propose instead of making hilarious and ingenious comments, we now make hilarious and ingenious sifttalk posts and then make comments that link to them.

When I saw this title, I though "what an ingenious way to sneak in a rick roll".

I'm with Sarzy. I feel fortunate that in the last few years I have been able to convince my brain more and more to avoid the nagging/disbelief I used to suffer through in every such movie for retards.

(E.g., In Ghost Rider why the FUCK do they keep saying he's breaking a world record by jumping 300 yards "from goal post to goal post" when he was also jumping through the end zones???!!! Did those extra yards not count toward the world record???)

I went into Eagle Eye fully expecting endless stupidity and a ridiculous story with Michael Bay explosions to wow the kiddies. While most of it was pretty out there, I was able to enjoy the movie for what it was, a couple hours of simple entertainment, while ignoring what it was not, an intelligently complex tale of ingenious technology and intricately developed characters with a subplot about the duality of man's craving for and fear of technology.

I wouldn't recommend Eagle Eye to anyone with a well developed sense of reality or scrutiny, but I wouldn't call it the worst movie I've ever seen. Hollywood could definitely stand to improve its sewage, but it's hard to expect much better when all the people with the money are only interested in what will "earn" them more of it.

I hear what you're saying, spoco2. I have a beta key, I haven't played a lot yet, but my first impressions are that the professionally built stuff is really nice, but a lot of the user created stuff is just thrown together and kinda lame. Some of it's fun, some of it (like the computer) is ingenious, but most is meh. They have a "Hearted" system that essentially works like the Sift to bring popular stuff to the front. Dag should sue.

Absolutely innovative and ingenious!

The trick is you have to earn exactly $200,000.00. You can't be over by even 1/10th of a cent. And if you are over by only a few cents Shulman gets to bludgeon you to death with a sack of rolled quarters and then sell your organs on the black market. An ingenious plan really.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Enter Single, 0 dependents and Income at $200,000. Wow, I want to be single with no children and making upwards of $200,000 in Obama's America!

>> ^MINK:
first of all jonny, i have caught and eaten my own mackerel and trout, and it was fucking fantastic.

Wasn't it though? I just had some fresh caught trout a few weeks ago while camping in the sierras. Crazy good.

I wouldn't do it now, because the idea of the poor thing flapping around suffocating to death in a bucket kinda makes me sad, and it's unnecessary. In fact, fishing as a child might have subconsciously freaked me out enough to make me vegetarian later.

Why would that make you sad? I don't mean that to be flippant, but the depth of the conversation I'm heading towards with this might be very difficult through a forum like this.


Fact is, there's only a few kinds of meat

What? There's like a half dozen varieties of birds alone that are readily available. And if you live in the right place, you can get access to things like venison, rabbit, and other game (without hunting it yourself). And that's not even counting the immense variety of seafood to be had.

And another one for jonny... my choice has no impact? Er.... my choice reduces meat sales. I don't know how to put that more simply to you.

But your individual choice reduces sales by such an insignificant amount that it has virtually zero effect on supply or demand, and thus the farming and business practices don't change.

I have a friend who has also cut out red meat after seeing me eat no meat every day without dying. UK meat sales are down. More and more Lithuanians are going veg, especially the pretty girls.

Ok, even with reduced sales in the UK, have the common practices of ranchers and farmers there changed? If anything, I would expect large scale reduced sales of meat to cause the cattle industry to do exactly the opposite of what we would want. They would look for ever greater cost saving measures to boost their margins and offset the revenue reduction. That's just what businesses do.

My example has an impact. Small maybe, but hey, i am really not into the idea of paying thousands to a corrupt lobbyist so that they can go to a corrupt parliament and try to stop the meat industry mafia. Not gonna work. Simply don't buy, and they will produce something else.

Not all lobbyists are slime crawling blood suckers. Some of them actually do some good (think Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, etc.). Importantly, what they can accomplish through lobbying (not just congress or parliament, but the population in general) is on a much larger scale, and has the possibility of changing cultural attitudes, industry regulations, etc.

Maybe a chain of vegan restaurants.

Now that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Basically if you want to change an industry, you have to make it more profitable for those who adopt the changes, keeping in mind the sunk costs in the industry, which are enormous in the cattle industry.

Gradually, we are all going to go veg, and get back to the "natural" system of only eating meat occasionally, and paying much much more to have it produced properly. Meat is not healthy if you eat it at every meal in the place of a variety of vegetables.

I doubt health awareness will be a strong enough force it on its own - the U.S. is the perfect example of that not happening.

Climate change and population pressure is going to force us to cut it out anyway, not to mention the amount of oil it takes to produce one cow.

That may be - I really couldn't say. Humans are amazingly ingenious at coming up with ways to have their cow and eat it too.