I think the all-time uber-achievement goes to the person who can figure out wtf all the achievements mean and what events trigger each of them. People have asked before, and to the best of my knowledge they have heard crickets in response.

Although you've had one accepted more recently, it appears. If there were a credit for the most consecutive rejected submissions I would likely be in the running. They should also have one that counts "rejected submissions that became stories went submitted later by other users", my score on that would be much higher than my score of accepted submissions.

Some segments of brick and mortar retail (consumer electronics in particular) can survive if they evolve appropriately. Bookstores, however, might just not be a segment that can. With consumer electronics a retailer would be smart to focus on actually understanding what items consumers need immediately (ie, waiting for shipping would be a really big deal) and carry those. However with bookstores there isn't that much available for "need to have it" - especially when you consider digital distribution. Unless a large portion of B&N's brick and mortar business comes from titles that are not on the bestseller lists (which you can generally pick up at your favorite discount retailer), they don't have a lot to run with.

Pudge

You decided some time ago now to hate me, and you have not wavered from that decision under any circumstances. I see no reason to attempt to have a conversation with you any more, as the results are the same every time. Every. Single. Time. There is no reason to expect that you replied to my messages here with any intention of having a discussion, as you have never done any such thing any other time that you have replied to any message I have ever posted here on slashdot.

Considering you have a solid history of not answering my questions under any circumstances, I see no reason why I should be kind enough to you to answer any questions you ask, regardless of how on or off topic you claim them to be.

Go ahead, write another reply. Watch me be unimpressed by it and likely not bother replying to it.

How is it trolling when I point out that there is an obvious double standard in your reasoning? You claimed earlier that between the bible and science one does not explain the other well, yet you clearly show that you are willing to use the bible to discard science.

I'm calling you as someone who is using a double standard.

You are less than forthright, at the very least. You claim to hold to one set of values and then demonstrate yourself to hold to another.

I don't recall exactly when I first saw you write something here. I can, however, tell you why I added you to my friends list. You are on the list because unlike a lot of other slashdot conservatives, you have shown the ability to have a civil discussion with non-conservatives and actually elaborate beyond "because I said so" when asked about your values.

The emphasis, however, is now on have. You don't seem to want to exchange ideas with those who do not share your values any more. I added you to my list for the same reason that I had previously added Bill Dog to my list, and I am considering dropping you for the same reason I dropped him. Not that you should fear that happening or anything, as it wouldn't likely have any effect on you. I will also point out that unlike your friend pudge, I don't keep a foes list at all, let alone one that represents an inescapable list of eternal philosophical hatred.

I'm sorry to hear that you feel that way. I would like to point out however that I do answer questions you ask of me, I do not call you stupid or brush you off as a liar, nor do I repeatedly refer back to past discussions as justification for future mistreatment.

Whether or not ISPs can dictate what you can or cannot download should be directly related to whether or not they can be liable for you gaining access to illegal material. If they have no liability, then they should just bug off. If however the copyright holders can go after your ISP for allowing you to violate their copyright then it is in the best interest of your ISP to see that you do not.

... though I do recall at one point before I found a way that you could compare your achievements to those of any 1 other slashdot user. If you go to slashdot.org/~(user)/achievements it will show you how that user's achievements compare to your own. For example if you look at mine you can see that my story submissions have been shot down every time since 2009 - every. single. time. I suspect my incredible metamoderation streak probably ended the same time they broke it permanently back in '09.

Pudge are you writing these comments with the hopes of getting someone else to reply so that you can have a discussion with them, or is it just because you enjoy seeing your words displayed on the screen?

I have tried many, many, times over the years to have a discussion with you. With almost no exceptions, every attempt ends with you accusing me of lying, refusing to address questions, and continually attempting to change the topic of discussion. Hence I do not see any reason to expect that you are, in any degree of good faith, attempting to have a discussion with me.

Sure, all people are welcomed to write what they want on this site, yourself included. But why did you bother replying to comments that I posted, when you do not want to have a discussion with me? You have never given me reason to expect any different.

Being as you are willing to use the bible to discard science when science doesn't agree with your belief set, please forgive me for calling BS when you claim to believe that the bible does not explain science.

If you are suggesting then that creation will go somewhere beyond humans, that would indicate that all of creation did not happen at once - and that humans are not the top of life forms. That sounds quite a bit like evolution, to me.

Doesn't creation indicate that things were made, with a purpose?

The Wii U is the only console that isn't pegged on selling the latest sequel to the newest FPS. In other words, it is the only console that has titles that I care about. Between the PS4 and X720 there really are very few truly exclusive titles as those exclusive titles are so similar to non-exclusive titles that they don't matter.

People will rip on the Wii U for being insufficient in resolution or frame rate, but those are mostly people who want to buy Halo 27 and CoD 12 - Nintendo hasn't worried about those people for a long, long time.

You are using the bible as a tool for your aims. It appears that your claim to it being somehow a better tool (than scientific rigor) is based on its age, which is puzzling as you are really cherry picking some older and some newer parts of the bible as you see fit to support your claims. Really, if the bible is somehow the better tool for explaining how humans came to be - based on its age - then shouldn't you be focusing exclusively on the old testament as it is the older book?

In other words why did your book get better with time - though of course only up to a certain date in time - but then once we started to actually reach a point where we could demonstrate hypotheses to be valid you opt to disregard the results of testing?

I probably need not remind you what your church has done to those who dared to propose before that the earth was not the center of the universe.

The reason why I ask those questions is because creation tends to carry the assumption that the "creator" is similar to humans, and hence that humans are the pinnacle of creation. However if this is the case, then why didn't the creator just make humans right off the start? Creating all these other critters - particularly the ones that were long gone before humans came to be on the scene - is a huge waste of time, energy, resources, etc if creation has an end goal.

Though even more so, as I said before, if the human is the ultimate end of creation, why is it such an uninspired design? We don't make stealth bombers and space shuttles from reclaimed horse carriages, so why make humans from the same parts that have been in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years?

if carbon dating, plate tectonics, paleontology, the fossil record, sedimentation, and erosion are all "shiny theory" to you, then why do you accept any science at all? People who discard all of that are generally on par with those who say that fossils were planted by Satan to tempt the fate of mortals, or who claim that atomic theory is nonsense.

In other words, there is solid established science that can very confidently ascertain the age of fossils. I even intentionally use the oldest homonid as the start for "modern human" just to cut you some slack and give a smaller ratio of dinosaur rule to human existence.

We are not talking about shiny or new theories any more. The dates for fossils come from sites around the world from digs that were executed in exacting and scientific methodologies. The reason why the dates have changed since the bone wars isn't because the theories are new and "shiny" but because old digs were not as rigorous as new ones.

The point is the same that I brought up before. Religious adherents claim that humans are somehow superior and special. Yet humans have been on this planet for a very short period of time relative to other top species - so why would so much time have been wasted on "inferior" species? If the creator had a plan why take so long to execute it?

If "moral liberty" is the goal, how does current human physiology accommodate that any better than any other body plan? And being as our body plan is highly recycled, why don't we extend moral liberty to other species?

Well then I'm glad to see you at least don't deny all science.

Look at it this way. If you were an inventor, and had free run of any kind of materials, processes, manufacturing, etc that you wanted, would all your creations look the same? How much does the space shuttle look like a bicycle? Yet the physiological carry-over from a coelocanth to a human is enormous. It wreaks of lack of creativity, at the very least.

I thought the creator sets the rules. Again, if you have free reign to do everything - as implied by the adjective almighty - why just make little tweaks? Why not try things that are radically different?

Modern humans have been around for at most 2-3 million years, depending on how generously you define "modern" and "human". The Jurassic era itself was around 60 million years, and encompasses only a fraction of the total amount of time in which the largest and most dominant vertebrates were reptilian.

Now granted there is a chance that humans could survive another 60+ million years on this planet without extermination (at their own hands or otherwise), but that still leaves the question of why a creator would bother to leave the dinosaurs at the top for so long if his ultimate creation was still yet to come?

I'm not familiar with this new sense of liberty that you are applying here. A great number of physiologists, science fiction writers, comedians, comic book creators, and young children with crayons have proposed better ways to design a human body - which do not in any detectable way impede on liberty. What about the current design contributes in some way to liberty?

On the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels there is no substantial difference between humans and non-human primates. On the molecular and cellular level is no substantial difference between a human and a frog. On the molecular difference the difference between a human and a fungi is minimal.

This suggests, amongst other things, that if there is indeed a creator, he (or she, or whatever) was not very creative at all. If humans are so special then why are we made of a collection of recycled parts - shouldn't we have dramatically different parts?

And if humans are so special then why have we been on this planet for such a short period of time? Reptiles had the run of the place much much longer than mammals have. What was the point of a long age of reptiles if the goal was to produce humans?

And for that matter why produce humans which such a flawed physiological design?

Humans are not the only animals with a sense of community.

You can read - and discard - my response like that if you so choose. My point is that you are insisting there to be a point, and then asking other people to explain a point while seemingly ignoring the possibility of there being none. Furthermore your insistence of their being a point is based - at least in part - on a crowd-sourced book written an indeterminate amount of time ago by an indeterminate number of authors, who shared the goal of making a purpose for existence.