Doing this explicitly pisses off your playerbase, as it means people have characters they didn't "earn".
Interestingly, you can do exactly this by paying money to a third party to play your character for you for a period of time, though this is also banned according to the EULA.
Let's look at this from a different angle than "Comp Sci is usually in an engineering department at uni and Math isn't".
A computer is, essentially by definition, a machine that computes. As in, it performs mathematical operations (essentially nothing else besides math, input of data and output of data). Those mathematical operations are fed to it through a machine language (which is specific to the type of computer), and thus machine language is a direct statement of a series of mathematical operations, and thus is math (whether you write your derivatives in Leibniz notation or not does not change whether or not they are math). A high level language (the sort you generally actually write code in), is directly translatable into machine language and is thus, wait for it, shorthand for math!
Unless, of course, you can demonstrate for me where in the chain of events the math suddenly stops being math?
It could always be that the device pulls zero point energy from the pocket universe inside, and then stores it in some kind of capacitor or battery, thus leading to a constant stream of energy being maintainable for a semi-arbitrary amount of time, but unusually high draws being only available in the short term. In which case the city *could* fly on a single ZPM, but only until the additional stored charge had been exhausted (which might be a frighteningly short time, and nonsustainable flight is usually *bad*).
Of course, I'm referring to it as a city-like community despite being our state capitol since if things don't change it'll be off the most declining cities lists by caveat of being too small to qualify. =)
Alright, it sounds like we need some kind of controlled child rearing study that could never pass an ethics board, and even then if the result is that "boys and girls are not identical in interests and aptitudes" you would try to argue that somehow there was still a gender bias in how they were treated.
Maybe I just grew up in the wrong small town in the middle of Appalachia, but none of the boys around here ever showed any problem with a tomboy, though "girly" boys were put through all manner of hell, admittedly. The same thing applies all through school -- our valedictorian was female, two of the top three in my AP Calc class were female (although all the girls in the "Intro to Engineering" class I took as a junior dropped it, but so did 2/3 of the class as a whole), 11/12 of dual credit psychology and sociology were female, and all of AP Comp Sci was male (though that's not really fair, since all of AP Comp Sci was also all white, middle class, and shared the same blood type, name, girlfriend, genetics, and social security number). The lower Comp Sci classes were about 20% female, the three years of it having ~20, ~10, and 1 students. Teacher for Comp Sci (all classes) was also female.
Come college, Comp Sci classes were fairly male-dominated, although the girls in class seemed to consistently do average to above-average. Our particular social clique (which could be described largely as geek slackers) only had one female in the group, but so it goes.
I've been around cats basically my whole life (I had one die at 17 years old last year, her heart finally gave out). There is clearly some semi-complex communication that cats are capable of.
To put it simply, she could walk into the room, meow at me, and based upon tone, type, and cadence of the meow, you could determine exactly what she wanted. Literally, an "I would like to go out" meow sounded different than a "change position so I can sit on your lap" meow, is different than a "my box needs changed" meow is different than a "my food dish is empty" meow is different than an "I've gotten stuck somewhere, get me out" meow is different than etc, etc, etc.
Really? I personally wish more PC game companies put out genuinely representative demos, and then there's the fact that you essentially can't rent PC games (honestly surprised Steam doesn't devise some sort of timelocked release to allow "rentals"). Reviews may or may not be a help either (see Black and White, where all reviewers played chapter 1 and nothing else, and chapter 1 was the only really polished part of the game).
I'd just start protesting about how "Gravity is only a theory" and demand that we teach "intelligent falling" until they realize how stupid their argument is, but I'm a cynical asshole.
Err, there are plenty of examples of a beneficial mutation being passed on. We like to call them antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
After all, a given bacteria is the offspring (which in the case of something asexual means near-perfect copy [mutations being the differences between the two]) of some progenitor bacteria, which is itself the offspring of some other bacteria and so on and so forth. So that one or more bacteria in a culture will develop a resistance to a given antibiotic demonstrates a mutation, and that cultures derived from such bacteria maintain the resistance demonstrates inheritance.
How long it takes to demonstrate something wrt evolution relies entirely on the time between generations of the organism. This is why most clear examples of evolutionary progress are demonstrated in microorganisms such as bacteria, as they tend to reach reproduction very quickly and produce lots of offspring, thus providing a wide spread for a given mutation to show up, and lots of offspring for a beneficial mutation to get ahead.
ID in comparison fails on, if nothing else, being unfalsifiable. Give me an example of some test or some condition that could potentially be examined that would, given a specific set of results (regardless of if those are actual results obtainable [e.g. an apple falling away from the earth (barring another force acting on it or a larger mass than the earth being involved) might potentially violate all or part of the theory of gravity]) prove ID false. For evolution this is fairly trivial -- if you could somehow demonstrate that organisms do not inherit traits from their parents and/or that there is absolutely no variance -- ever -- between traits possessed by an offspring and it's parents, you would significantly damage evolutionary theory, as it relies on those two concepts (inheritance from parents and variation from parents) as primary assertions.
Heh, where I work, there are typically long stretches (as in quarters to years) where everyone is expected to work 50 hour weeks. If you can get everything related to the stuff that is explicitly your job done, well you just earned another hat to wear (there's always SOMETHING that needs done).
The main reason most of the guys here (from manual labor to production to shipping to sales to etc) put up with it is the owner of the business. It's pretty clear that he does everything in his power to take care of his employees. Our pay isn't incredible (though 10% raises if the company is doing well when evaluations hit is common, plus we have a profit sharing program that has handed out up to $2k (average is around $750) bonuses on the quarter, plus a fuel allowance, plus a christmas bonus of around $500), and our health insurance sucks (although he has outright shown several of us where it fits in our expenses, and he really, honestly couldn't do better), but otherwise it's not bad. Unfortunately, I think when he finally retires there's going to be a mass exodus of employees, since I know several of them are working here *because* of who the owner is, and several more explicitly dislike (to put it mildly) who things would be passed down to (family owned business).
Hits the nail on the head. I was big into fantasy/scifi/horror when I was a kid (I think that came about as being part of the family in general though -- we all seem to have a taste for it. When I was around 8-10, I read mostly Poe, King, Tolkein, Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis and of all things the Lone Wolf gamebooks by Joe Dever (I got into those when I was something like 5, but I'm atypical wrt reading [Mother taught me to read fairly young, and I took to it rapidly]). I didn't really get into any hard scifi until I was a bit older, but the more fantasy-like scifi I got into around 8ish (mostly as an outgrowth of watching Star Trek with my parents since I could hold my own head up).
I assume you also despise Jabberwocky, the Hunting of the Snark, and Alice in Wonderland, because of the considerable likelihood that their author was a pedophile?
One illicit and/or immoral actions/beliefs should not prevent the use of their intellectual output, unless the two are intrinsically related (since murder is unrelated to filesystems, that isn't the case).
Because it was never "conceived", per se?
It's a question at the theological considerations: If we manufacture something that is biochemically and genetically human, but which is composed entirely of artificially created parts (as in no actual human genetic material is used in the process whatsoever, and a non-human (synthetic or animal) egg is used to host the nucleus), does the result (being literally some chemicals in a test tube) have a soul? This is explicitly the sort of question that get the fundamentalist evangelicals attempting to have things banned for "moral" reasons -- because it asks questions they don't want to answer.
Where I live, we have two broadband options, Verizon DSL or Suddenlink Cable. I also live about 20 minutes via highway from the capital city of my state, who has the same two options as everyone else in the valley.
This what I've always hated about the abortion debate, and you guys just provided a grand example of it. Essentially one side argues that it's wrong to murder babies and the other argues that it's wrong for the government to be involved in a woman's private medical decisions. It's like ou talk past each other.
The real argument that needs to be decided on one way or another is this:
Assertions:
1. A newborn child is a human person.
2. An egg cell is not, by itself a human person.
3. A sperm cell is not, by itself a human person.
4. At some point between the egg and sperm cells joining together and birth, the resultant grouping of human cells becomes a human person.
5. It is morally wrong to kill a human person.
I think basically everyone can agree to those assertions. The question is at what point exactly 4 occurs.
Always noticed that. You need to go out of your way to make sure that no one is depicted as academically inferior, but then also of out of your way to put the athletes on a pedestal. Never understood that myself, especially in an institution that is supposedly about education.
In my area, when I was in elementary school, they had a system of "special instruction" for gifted students (actually, they still do, one of my nephews is in it now). Not as thorough as it should be, but they at least try (to be exact, they pull the gifted students from their normal classes one day a week to go to an accelerated class, which tries to give them a baseline in things that are outside normal curricula and then push deeper into whatever interests them than normal classes do).
The class size is incredibly tiny (mine was 6 students). We met at a high school towards the center of the region covered (which was basically 15 miles up or down river from the school).
Elementary school teachers would name potential students for entry (usually students who'd been promoted a year ahead and were still well ahead of the curve), who'd then be given an IQ test. Score 130 or higher for entry.
Seriously, looking at it now, and having been part of that program, it surprises me that it exists in this area as poorly as we do in most other academic measures.
I can think of numerous things my employer does with impunity that he wouldn't do if he couldn't hide behind the corporation as an entity (small employer, I am actually on a first name basis with the sole owner/shareholder/whatever term is most appropriate). Heck, in the past six months, that I know of, I can name at least one persistent environmental issue (a 10 foot long cone of oil being sprayed out at about 5 gallons per week since the beginning of the year), which after replacing the oil-spewing equipment was simply buried under a layer of gravel (pretty sure that's not the right way to clean up oil spills), a handful of OSHA violations, including some involving handling of strong acids (people applying them with no protective gear, storing glass bottles of concentrated nitric on overhead shelves with no guards of any kind, dust hazards, things like that), we've had unlicensed personnel drive vehicles that require a Class A CDL license, trespassing, and that's just to start with. I guarantee if he would have to take full brunt of the legal ramifications of his actions, his behavior would be substantially different.
Depepnding on your particular fish (I have seen them in bumper stickers before) maybe, but they most certainly count as "personalized items on or in people's vehicles" such as "seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys"
The W80 linked above isn't exactly a backpack nuke (clocking in at approx 250 lbs), but it is 100kT. So, yeah, car nukes (which take you from "need to hang on back" to "less than a few tons") FTW.
Oh, god. We've got a large-format scanner at my place of employment that is currently out of use because the Win95 box it was installed on died, the driver disc went missing in a move, and the manufacturer charges an arm and a leg for drivers (even more for driver for XP/2k as opposed to Win95).
There was a case (in Florida, I think? Heard about it second hand) where a 15 yo girl takes an indecent photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. Numb-nuts shows it off to his friends, and the next result is that he gets busted for possessing the image, she gets busted for both possessing it and for production.
Let's also consider that in some areas, any unclothed photo of a child is automatically child pornography, including the sort that many normal parents might have of their children and never consider them in that fashion (kids in bath, that kind of thing).
Actually, according to his bio, Marilyn Manson tried to use such a photo from his parents photo album in the liner notes for his first album, and the label refused because they might get into legal troubles over the possibility of child pornography (which was precisely his point -- this was a fairly common, normal sort of photo with no pornographic intent, so what does it say about a VIEWER who declres it to be CP?)
I would be willing to bet that there is a nontrivial amount of trace blood belonging to both myself and my closest friend at my home, in his home, in his car, and at our place of work, as well as in at least one company vehicle. We're both well and alive, thank you.
I'd think a body, a weapon (with some trace showing it was used on the alleged victim), or some other direct evidence a murder has occured (large enough blood spill that can be determined to be from one occasion of sufficient volume to necessarily kill a human being, or something. I though the result was that there was a small-to-moderate amount of blood in some places inconvenient to Hans, but insufficient to cover a volume necessary to bleed to death, and not necessarily verifiable as being from even the right approximate time.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing this explicitly pisses off your playerbase, as it means people have characters they didn't "earn".
Interestingly, you can do exactly this by paying money to a third party to play your character for you for a period of time, though this is also banned according to the EULA.
Let's look at this from a different angle than "Comp Sci is usually in an engineering department at uni and Math isn't".
A computer is, essentially by definition, a machine that computes. As in, it performs mathematical operations (essentially nothing else besides math, input of data and output of data). Those mathematical operations are fed to it through a machine language (which is specific to the type of computer), and thus machine language is a direct statement of a series of mathematical operations, and thus is math (whether you write your derivatives in Leibniz notation or not does not change whether or not they are math). A high level language (the sort you generally actually write code in), is directly translatable into machine language and is thus, wait for it, shorthand for math!
Unless, of course, you can demonstrate for me where in the chain of events the math suddenly stops being math?
It could always be that the device pulls zero point energy from the pocket universe inside, and then stores it in some kind of capacitor or battery, thus leading to a constant stream of energy being maintainable for a semi-arbitrary amount of time, but unusually high draws being only available in the short term. In which case the city *could* fly on a single ZPM, but only until the additional stored charge had been exhausted (which might be a frighteningly short time, and nonsustainable flight is usually *bad*).
Heh, we just got one neighborhood in our closest local city-like community a neighborhood-wide wifi setup as phase 1 of a municipal wifi project: http://oncee.blogspot.com/2008/06/free-east-end-wireless-up-and-running.html
Of course, I'm referring to it as a city-like community despite being our state capitol since if things don't change it'll be off the most declining cities lists by caveat of being too small to qualify. =)
Alright, it sounds like we need some kind of controlled child rearing study that could never pass an ethics board, and even then if the result is that "boys and girls are not identical in interests and aptitudes" you would try to argue that somehow there was still a gender bias in how they were treated.
Maybe I just grew up in the wrong small town in the middle of Appalachia, but none of the boys around here ever showed any problem with a tomboy, though "girly" boys were put through all manner of hell, admittedly. The same thing applies all through school -- our valedictorian was female, two of the top three in my AP Calc class were female (although all the girls in the "Intro to Engineering" class I took as a junior dropped it, but so did 2/3 of the class as a whole), 11/12 of dual credit psychology and sociology were female, and all of AP Comp Sci was male (though that's not really fair, since all of AP Comp Sci was also all white, middle class, and shared the same blood type, name, girlfriend, genetics, and social security number). The lower Comp Sci classes were about 20% female, the three years of it having ~20, ~10, and 1 students. Teacher for Comp Sci (all classes) was also female.
Come college, Comp Sci classes were fairly male-dominated, although the girls in class seemed to consistently do average to above-average. Our particular social clique (which could be described largely as geek slackers) only had one female in the group, but so it goes.
I've been around cats basically my whole life (I had one die at 17 years old last year, her heart finally gave out). There is clearly some semi-complex communication that cats are capable of.
To put it simply, she could walk into the room, meow at me, and based upon tone, type, and cadence of the meow, you could determine exactly what she wanted. Literally, an "I would like to go out" meow sounded different than a "change position so I can sit on your lap" meow, is different than a "my box needs changed" meow is different than a "my food dish is empty" meow is different than an "I've gotten stuck somewhere, get me out" meow is different than etc, etc, etc.
Really? I personally wish more PC game companies put out genuinely representative demos, and then there's the fact that you essentially can't rent PC games (honestly surprised Steam doesn't devise some sort of timelocked release to allow "rentals"). Reviews may or may not be a help either (see Black and White, where all reviewers played chapter 1 and nothing else, and chapter 1 was the only really polished part of the game).
I'd just start protesting about how "Gravity is only a theory" and demand that we teach "intelligent falling" until they realize how stupid their argument is, but I'm a cynical asshole.
Err, there are plenty of examples of a beneficial mutation being passed on. We like to call them antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
After all, a given bacteria is the offspring (which in the case of something asexual means near-perfect copy [mutations being the differences between the two]) of some progenitor bacteria, which is itself the offspring of some other bacteria and so on and so forth. So that one or more bacteria in a culture will develop a resistance to a given antibiotic demonstrates a mutation, and that cultures derived from such bacteria maintain the resistance demonstrates inheritance.
How long it takes to demonstrate something wrt evolution relies entirely on the time between generations of the organism. This is why most clear examples of evolutionary progress are demonstrated in microorganisms such as bacteria, as they tend to reach reproduction very quickly and produce lots of offspring, thus providing a wide spread for a given mutation to show up, and lots of offspring for a beneficial mutation to get ahead.
ID in comparison fails on, if nothing else, being unfalsifiable. Give me an example of some test or some condition that could potentially be examined that would, given a specific set of results (regardless of if those are actual results obtainable [e.g. an apple falling away from the earth (barring another force acting on it or a larger mass than the earth being involved) might potentially violate all or part of the theory of gravity]) prove ID false. For evolution this is fairly trivial -- if you could somehow demonstrate that organisms do not inherit traits from their parents and/or that there is absolutely no variance -- ever -- between traits possessed by an offspring and it's parents, you would significantly damage evolutionary theory, as it relies on those two concepts (inheritance from parents and variation from parents) as primary assertions.
Heh, where I work, there are typically long stretches (as in quarters to years) where everyone is expected to work 50 hour weeks. If you can get everything related to the stuff that is explicitly your job done, well you just earned another hat to wear (there's always SOMETHING that needs done).
The main reason most of the guys here (from manual labor to production to shipping to sales to etc) put up with it is the owner of the business. It's pretty clear that he does everything in his power to take care of his employees. Our pay isn't incredible (though 10% raises if the company is doing well when evaluations hit is common, plus we have a profit sharing program that has handed out up to $2k (average is around $750) bonuses on the quarter, plus a fuel allowance, plus a christmas bonus of around $500), and our health insurance sucks (although he has outright shown several of us where it fits in our expenses, and he really, honestly couldn't do better), but otherwise it's not bad. Unfortunately, I think when he finally retires there's going to be a mass exodus of employees, since I know several of them are working here *because* of who the owner is, and several more explicitly dislike (to put it mildly) who things would be passed down to (family owned business).
Hits the nail on the head. I was big into fantasy/scifi/horror when I was a kid (I think that came about as being part of the family in general though -- we all seem to have a taste for it. When I was around 8-10, I read mostly Poe, King, Tolkein, Douglas Adams, Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis and of all things the Lone Wolf gamebooks by Joe Dever (I got into those when I was something like 5, but I'm atypical wrt reading [Mother taught me to read fairly young, and I took to it rapidly]). I didn't really get into any hard scifi until I was a bit older, but the more fantasy-like scifi I got into around 8ish (mostly as an outgrowth of watching Star Trek with my parents since I could hold my own head up).
I assume you also despise Jabberwocky, the Hunting of the Snark, and Alice in Wonderland, because of the considerable likelihood that their author was a pedophile?
One illicit and/or immoral actions/beliefs should not prevent the use of their intellectual output, unless the two are intrinsically related (since murder is unrelated to filesystems, that isn't the case).
Clearly, and she would need to be thrown in jail for up to 5 years per access to the site under such an account.
Or it could be that violating a TOS or using an alias isn't quite the same thing as hacking/cracking.
Because it was never "conceived", per se? It's a question at the theological considerations: If we manufacture something that is biochemically and genetically human, but which is composed entirely of artificially created parts (as in no actual human genetic material is used in the process whatsoever, and a non-human (synthetic or animal) egg is used to host the nucleus), does the result (being literally some chemicals in a test tube) have a soul? This is explicitly the sort of question that get the fundamentalist evangelicals attempting to have things banned for "moral" reasons -- because it asks questions they don't want to answer.
^^This.
Where I live, we have two broadband options, Verizon DSL or Suddenlink Cable. I also live about 20 minutes via highway from the capital city of my state, who has the same two options as everyone else in the valley.
This what I've always hated about the abortion debate, and you guys just provided a grand example of it. Essentially one side argues that it's wrong to murder babies and the other argues that it's wrong for the government to be involved in a woman's private medical decisions. It's like ou talk past each other. The real argument that needs to be decided on one way or another is this: Assertions: 1. A newborn child is a human person. 2. An egg cell is not, by itself a human person. 3. A sperm cell is not, by itself a human person. 4. At some point between the egg and sperm cells joining together and birth, the resultant grouping of human cells becomes a human person. 5. It is morally wrong to kill a human person. I think basically everyone can agree to those assertions. The question is at what point exactly 4 occurs.
Always noticed that. You need to go out of your way to make sure that no one is depicted as academically inferior, but then also of out of your way to put the athletes on a pedestal. Never understood that myself, especially in an institution that is supposedly about education.
In my area, when I was in elementary school, they had a system of "special instruction" for gifted students (actually, they still do, one of my nephews is in it now). Not as thorough as it should be, but they at least try (to be exact, they pull the gifted students from their normal classes one day a week to go to an accelerated class, which tries to give them a baseline in things that are outside normal curricula and then push deeper into whatever interests them than normal classes do).
The class size is incredibly tiny (mine was 6 students). We met at a high school towards the center of the region covered (which was basically 15 miles up or down river from the school).
Elementary school teachers would name potential students for entry (usually students who'd been promoted a year ahead and were still well ahead of the curve), who'd then be given an IQ test. Score 130 or higher for entry.
Seriously, looking at it now, and having been part of that program, it surprises me that it exists in this area as poorly as we do in most other academic measures.
I can think of numerous things my employer does with impunity that he wouldn't do if he couldn't hide behind the corporation as an entity (small employer, I am actually on a first name basis with the sole owner/shareholder/whatever term is most appropriate). Heck, in the past six months, that I know of, I can name at least one persistent environmental issue (a 10 foot long cone of oil being sprayed out at about 5 gallons per week since the beginning of the year), which after replacing the oil-spewing equipment was simply buried under a layer of gravel (pretty sure that's not the right way to clean up oil spills), a handful of OSHA violations, including some involving handling of strong acids (people applying them with no protective gear, storing glass bottles of concentrated nitric on overhead shelves with no guards of any kind, dust hazards, things like that), we've had unlicensed personnel drive vehicles that require a Class A CDL license, trespassing, and that's just to start with. I guarantee if he would have to take full brunt of the legal ramifications of his actions, his behavior would be substantially different.
Depepnding on your particular fish (I have seen them in bumper stickers before) maybe, but they most certainly count as "personalized items on or in people's vehicles" such as "seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos, or plastic dashboard toys"
The W80 linked above isn't exactly a backpack nuke (clocking in at approx 250 lbs), but it is 100kT. So, yeah, car nukes (which take you from "need to hang on back" to "less than a few tons") FTW.
Oh, god. We've got a large-format scanner at my place of employment that is currently out of use because the Win95 box it was installed on died, the driver disc went missing in a move, and the manufacturer charges an arm and a leg for drivers (even more for driver for XP/2k as opposed to Win95).
Rethink the "that isn't themselves" part of that.
There was a case (in Florida, I think? Heard about it second hand) where a 15 yo girl takes an indecent photo of herself and sends it to her boyfriend. Numb-nuts shows it off to his friends, and the next result is that he gets busted for possessing the image, she gets busted for both possessing it and for production.
Let's also consider that in some areas, any unclothed photo of a child is automatically child pornography, including the sort that many normal parents might have of their children and never consider them in that fashion (kids in bath, that kind of thing).
Actually, according to his bio, Marilyn Manson tried to use such a photo from his parents photo album in the liner notes for his first album, and the label refused because they might get into legal troubles over the possibility of child pornography (which was precisely his point -- this was a fairly common, normal sort of photo with no pornographic intent, so what does it say about a VIEWER who declres it to be CP?)
I didn't think any serious investigation was actually performd against his claims...
I would be willing to bet that there is a nontrivial amount of trace blood belonging to both myself and my closest friend at my home, in his home, in his car, and at our place of work, as well as in at least one company vehicle. We're both well and alive, thank you. I'd think a body, a weapon (with some trace showing it was used on the alleged victim), or some other direct evidence a murder has occured (large enough blood spill that can be determined to be from one occasion of sufficient volume to necessarily kill a human being, or something. I though the result was that there was a small-to-moderate amount of blood in some places inconvenient to Hans, but insufficient to cover a volume necessary to bleed to death, and not necessarily verifiable as being from even the right approximate time.