>> ^Trancecoach:
death comes at any moment.


Just ask the perpetually unsatisfied Mrs. Death.

i would advocate to "advance the rights" of an individual woman if she needed some assistance after some personal tragedy, no more than i would advocate "advancing the rights" of any single man after a similar tragedy.
but just to say "advance the rights of woman" implies that we should advance them any farther than any other group of people. which is wrong. we should work to "advance the rights" all of people up to the point of equilibrium i suppose and beyond that to fight united against any oppressive power structure /ideology/institution.

im feel unsatisfied by the options, but im glad you started this poll.

the answer is equal rights for women. and of course american women today have the right to pursue any endeavor they would like but not without stigma and a culture of oppression and sexual subjugation.

im having trouble getting my thoughts out without alienating someone. perhaps i will try again later when im not so hopped up on sugar and irritable.

From Wired...

In the latest example of finding media innovation where you’d least expect it, CBS is embedding a video player in a print ad in Entertainment Weekly that will serve up a buffet of its fall TV lineup.

The CBS foray into a print-digital alliance plays full-motion video at a crisp resolution. The ad, dubbed by CBS and partner Pepsi Max “the first-ever VIP (video-in-print) promotion,” works like one of those audio greeting cards. Opening the page activates the player, which is a quarter-inch–thick screen seen through a cutaway between two pages concealing the larger circuit board underneath.

The audio quality is equally good (extremely poor video shot by this reporter notwithstanding), but beware: There are no volume controls, and in a quiet environment, it’s quite loud. This is surely a intentional design feature, aimed at getting the attention of people nearby.

Unlike the wholly unsatisfying debut of the e-ink cover in Esquire magazine last year, this works.

The video-enhancement will appear in the September issue of Entertainment Weekly, but only in what sounds like a relatively small subset of the circulation: The promo itself will be in every copy, but the video portion only in some subscriptions delivered to New York and Los Angeles. It was released Tuesday to media outlets.

Upon getting to the ad, there is a 5-second delay before anything happens — there is enough on the page to probably hold the unassuming reader’s attention for that long, if nothing else the eerie stare from Neil Patrick Harris — and then a 5-second still promo before the promo for the player’s developer, Americhip.

Next up is a pre-roll featuring a bespoke setup by three characters from the network’s hit Big Bang Theory sitcom. ”I weep for civilization,” opines Emmy-nominated Jim Parsons (Sheldon Cooper) at the end of the clip, scripted to reveal that the über nerd was tricked into appearing in an ad in Entertainment Weekly rather than “the current edition of Physics Today.”

As impressive as this step is, the true marriage of print and digital multimedia still seems quite far off, and eons away from the streaming updates in the newspapers of Minority Report fame.

Still, it is boldish, baby steps like this that bring about dramatic shifts in media. That said, the logical extreme of the current wave of tech innovation heads more toward digital reproduction of a print experience, as the Kindle DX aspires to do for newspapers, rather than to ultrathin hardware pasted to paper.

In a more-limited context, is there much of a future for this branch?

It’s an expensive undertaking, but it does seem well suited for milestone events like a new TV season or as part of a marketing blitz for a certain genre of movie — think a Watchman trailer in Entertainment Weekly.

Part of the lure of this technology as an advertising mechanism is that it adds a “medium is the message” value and thus reaps free publicity from stories like this. But when the novelty wears off, and without serendipitous newsstand sales — which Entertainment Weekly will not benefit from this time around — there’s not nearly as much upside.

And therein lies the dilemma of even bothering to extend the digital experience into a bits medium: In the end, how many people will actually see this rather than just hear about it?

I saw this earlier on liveleak and I thought, "great... another unsatisfying punk showdown"

... and then, by the end i was actually saying "Kill him! Kill him!" and making little punching motions. Those guys came out the total victors by not being more vicious than necessary in return for being threatened with murder...

they managed to satisfy my virtual bloodlust so well, i felt like they were listening to me!: Tide turns and brawl ensues (check), Skateboard comes into play as weapon (check), total face smashing ownage (check)

i need to get out more. i think ill go to the city this weekend.

It's rubbish because it basically means every single time it worked out for them, why that's because of God. So we are all tied down to a Destiny. One fate whose course we have no way of changing so expect we create robots which try to kill us only leading us back to God.

Satan is thus Technology.

That's a deeply unsatisfying viewpoint of anyone educated watching this show.

Alright, so now that the spoiler warning is in full-effect...

The finale was very disappointing for me. The ultimate answer seemed to be, “God did it.” I was thoroughly unsatisfied with various things: Kara’s revelation and her end, everyone splitting up and going their own way (which just doesn’t ring true at all), no real explanation as to why Hera was so important, the abandonment of technology, the last few minutes... I could go on, but those are the big ones.

A terribly disappointing end to an incredible television series. It left me in a melancholy limbo all day yesterday.

>> ^imstellar28:
2. evidence that government spending can increase demand, both short and long term.

The increase in long term demand by government spending is mostly just a fracture of the short term increase. But providing a long term demand is not the primary objective of a stimulus package.
It's a bandaid and as such only supposed to keep demand from plummeting until the underlying cause of the crisis is fixed. In this case, that would be the availability of credit. How that problem can be fixed is another issue altogether, so I'll ignore it for the moment.

Now, there are problems of government spending as a means to absorb a drop in demand. For instance, it has to be planned properly to be effective and it takes time until the first payments take place. Another issue is the previously mentioned misallocation: if spending increases demand in a particular area beyond available capacities, it will only raise prices (inflation) and not create any additional demand.
Getting the cash to the ones who are most likely to put it into consumption seems like the key, the unemployed come to mind or generally folks receiving social security.

And it has to be done quickly, because ...

>> ^imstellar28:
1. evidence that an output gap is undesirable

... an output gap causes deflation. Dropping demand leads to lower prices, which leads to reduced production, which leads to unused production capacity, which leads to production capacities being liquidized and people getting fired, which leads to a drop in demand ... happy hour!

So, if the drop in demand is not absorbed quickly, production capacities will be lost already and any additional demand through spending could be unsatisfiable. If capacities are to be kept and insolvencies to be avoided, demand has to be created as soon as possible. Any delay will have a multiplying effect on the cost.

So, wouldn't having too much demand, and not enough supply actually be the undesirable condition because then there are food shortages, gas shortages, etc?

Shortages make an increase in production capacity profitable and therefore create jobs. Oversupply makes production less profitable or even unprofitable and causes capacities to be reduced to keep efficiency high.


Now, everything I just wrote might as well be a load of horseshit. I neither have an economic background nor a particular interest in it and I'm limited to a European perspective, which might not be applicable to the USA. So I'm basically talking out of my ass here, hope you don't mind.

>> ^gwiz665:
Ooh, the Dune Series was great too, but I sort of lost interest by the fifth and sixth book. I never finished the sixth one, was that Chapterhouse Dune?


Chapterhouse is incomplete anyway. Herbert never finished it and leaves lots of subplots unresolved. A rather unsatisfying ending to the great (original!) series.

"sanctity of life" needs some deconstruction.

As already mentioned sanctity has problems in being theistic (therefor not amenable to verification), so I'm going to go with value, which exposes one of the fundamental flaws in the question at hand, since value is by it's vary nature subjective, the question needs to be phrased "value of life to you|me|john|The Pope|etc". We have no obvious need to agree, just as with anything value is not transitive, I don't need to base my valuation on yours, and vice versa, you may feel that a bucket of fried chicken is worth $10, while I, being vegan, value it at $0(or less).

The more absurd issue is "life". Before the last millennium humanity seemed to have a pretty solid grasp of what constituted life and none life, people from all over the world could agree on general categories to some extent, their mythology around this was different, but we understood that a lion is not like a rock in some meaningful way.

The problem is that the way we tended to make this distinction , as "life force" is demonstrably wrong, life is not magic, it's chemistry. The knowledge of this fact is extremely new in the course of human history, and we have certainly not integrated this fact into our general cultural context or language, and so part of the problem is that our language, our tool for making and analyzing distinctions, is fundamentally flawed in this regard, and so should be expected to be wrong.

"life" is not a thing or an attribute, it is an arbitrary categorization which we use in an attempt to save our old, cherished, incorrect notion from being discarded.The category life basically comes down to something along the lines of:

"that which we value more than a rock"

Of course this could be "life" in the standard bible-belt sense of "Christian life", or more magnanimously "human life", but neither of these get us a clearer picture. How much "living stuff" which is "human" does it take to get human life? Skin cells, a kidney, a decapitated body on life support, a brain on life support, a group of cell which have the "potential" to become a living breathing adult human? How many "humans" are in a zygote? What if it splits into twins/sextuplets?

And in the end the question is what "should" be the value, so if we put it all back together we get:

What should be the value, to all entities, of an non-clearly defined category of objects of which all the entities seem to be members?

You can tweak the clarifications on that question to make ANY conclusion follow, but their is NO BASIS on which to tweak the clarifications to begin with.

All answers are bound to be meaningless and unsatisfying, because the question is meaningless and unsatisfying.

Societies decide in subtle and organic ways what is valuable and what is unacceptable, and it's a good thing™. I much prefer our current society to euro-diaspora society 100, or even 50 years ago.

Hear Hear! I've dabbled with hard core gaming for years, and once I stop playing for any amount of time (like when I have a new born) I can't get back into the franchises/genres that I like. The game industries recent solution to this has been shorter and/or easier games, but I've found those unsatisfying. I don't want to grind in a MMORPG, I want fast paced, skill based game play that doesn't provide so much negative feedback.

I haven't played the new Prince of Persia, and probably never will because of the price tag and the short game play, but I did play Braid, and it was an amazing experience. The puzzles were incredibly tough, but the in-exhaustible time reversal kept the focus on ONE obstacle at a time. Oh, and unlike Yahtzee I LOVED the story(s).

Games like Burn Out are also on the right track (no pun intended), minimizing the set backs and making failure, and therefore risk taking, fun.

I tried the latest Tomb Raider demo. I love the franchise, but after missing that jump from the sliding ramp for the 4th time, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to climb that rock face again (despite the much improved models and animation).

Wow, I can honestly say the people that made this video are fucking retarded. You don't make a job safer by making it illegal. You make a job safer by lobbying for the rights of the employees. This is a job that will always exist, legal or not. So instead of saying "it's just as bad when it's legal as when it's illegal," try doing what any other unsatisfied employee does. You lobby for better regulations, better benefits, etc. Make a union and then show the governments of the countries you live in that you all want better conditions. The only example of this was making tougher consequences for pimps and buyers in Sweden. There are significantly better strides that can be made to make violence against sex worker come closer to an end. You can't just say "No one's making this better for me" and give up. Jesus. Fucking self righteous twats.

~I only rant here, because they don't allow comments on the website this came from.

>> ^jwray:
The trouble with those exclusive contracts that prohibit employers from hiring nonunion employees is that the if the employees become unsatisfied with the union they can't quit it to form a different union without losing their jobs. It's a monopoly. So the union can be as corrupt and inefficient as it wants and the employees in the industry can't divest from the union without moving to a different industry where they have no experience.

That's a change to unions I could agree with, though I'd probably want the EFCA to be wrapped in with that, so it's trivially easy to form a new union.

The trouble with those exclusive contracts that prohibit employers from hiring nonunion employees is that the if the employees become unsatisfied with the union they can't quit it to form a different union without losing their jobs. It's a monopoly. So the union can be as corrupt and inefficient as it wants and the employees in the industry can't divest from the union without moving to a different industry where they have no experience.

Nationalize healthcare by having the government directly hire doctors and build its own hospitals, which will care for anyone who presents, no questions asked. No secretaries for billing paperwork, no insurance filing overhead, etc. Then cease all government subsidies and regulations of private sector health care (let it sink or swim on the free market). Most of the insurance industry would go under, as it should, since they're useless middlemen like the RIAA. The amount of man-hours required to deal with the insurance paperwork usually exceeds the amount of man-hours required for the actual operation or treatment.

I was disappointed with Hitchens' performance in this debate. It was almost as though he's bored with debating the same arguments over and over and just couldn't be bothered any more.

Whilst its true that Turek's arguments could all be refuted, Hitchens generally did not refute them. His rambling style, while on another occasion may be diverting to listen to, far too often took him away from the points that were being debated. This left me feeling unsatisfied and did a disservice to the audience.

@Kommie

Sorry, that's not a myth, it's the absolute, total, utter truth: women are only interested in chocolate or shoes if they're seriously unsatisfied with their love lives (wait, seriously, let me get it, there is a website somewhere to support this...).

As for the money shots, that's exactly what made me wonder. I mean, you are looking at another guy's money shot/imprinting/territorial demarcation, aren't you? (To be honest, I've always wondered the same about guys visiting prostitutes and not using condoms.) So is the idea that you, any man watching, identifies with the male lead to the point where you think it's yours? Because, other/macho/Darwin-wise, I would think that it should be a serious turn off.

On the other hand, this might be the equivalent of my of Why Women Care About Fashion theory: let's face it, no (heterosexual) guy will ever notice new clothes, shoes, haircut, not to mention obscurities like handbags or a French manicure on your toe nails. But other women will, and thus send the message: this gall is hot and that is what guys respond to.

Wow, from cum shots to French manicures, I sure messed up this thread, didn't I?

Sorry, have to go back to youporn.com asap ;-).