it made me think that you either have to accept that the world just 'is' and somehow evolution came up with flight
Evolution doesn't "come up" with anything. The idea is that those with whatever advantage they have survive can breed, and the rest doesn't.
and all the other mind boggleing things animals are capable of
It's mindboggling to see what a computer is capable of if you had no previous looks at what the program did, or what the hardware does.
seriously, did a proto-bird jump out of a tree to get away from a snake and discovered it could fly? flap its arms like crazy and achieve lift off? then breed like mad? or is there a creator?
Let's tell a better story; that of the eye. A mutation causes certain cells to go haywire and become light-sensitive. This may or may not be a beneficial mutation, but if the input of the cell means that that part of the species survives/grows faster/thrives, it means it's going to be duplicated the next time - it's cheaper than removing functionality. I hope that answers your question of the wing - because even half a wing can be good.
i think both take a leap of faith.
This is not a sensible position, because by using this sentence you're trying to equalize both viewpoints while they're not. You'll piss of the scientists who have worked hard to collect the evidence, and you'll piss off the religious people who see their lifelong conviction turn into something that's reduced to a simple choice you can make at a whim, because hey, it's just a leap of faith.
Other key differences are that with evolution and science in general can observe what has happened and make predictions; that's a pretty powerful and convincing tool. If you read creationist literature, you'll find attacks on evolution and the research; the vast majority of the creationists don't do actual research; they'll go out to win converts and preach to the choir.
Just see Ars Technica's recently posted photo series about the creation museum; you'll see evolution and creation diametrically opposed with evolution always on the receiving end of the kicks - and meaningless fluff about gay marriage, school prayer and abortion that plays the heartstrings of the audience. It's in the interest of the founders to turn it into a black-and-white issue and make the visitors feel good because they've chosen the "right" side (or bad because they haven't). Ever seen a biology book that has several paragraphs littered through it about abuse of children by the clergy and the consequences of the Crusades? Yeah, that's just as irrelevant.
Do keep in mind that the "was there a creator" position is not compromised by this; whatever happened before Planck time, we know nothing of. Whatever happened afterwards, we can at least observe.
i guess my point is that if we are going to accept that existence 'just is' why cant a god 'just be'.
Because it's not right to skip the question at that god; namely, where'd he come from? And where'd the previous one come from? And so on; adding god to the equation doesn't actually make us wiser, which is why he's left out.
have you ever sat around and thought, just thought, how fucking wierd existence is?
No. If it wasn't there, I wouldn't be thinking about it, would I?;)
Me: "Thank you for calling, may I have your store's telephone number, area code first please?"
You're the kind of rude, arrogant bastard that loses companies customers.
Yeah, but only if he adds the insulting part to the call or changes tone with "your phone number?" (but that could indeed benefit from a "please").
Part of the problem is that when you call any company, you generally get a barrage of useless information such as "This is Quux speaking, Foo and Bar suppliers, we now have a wonderful FooBar for only $39.95, how can I help you?" - which is swiftly (and rightfully) ignored because it's just noise; it does not solve the customer's problem. Make enough calls like that and they become a protocol.
By trying to cut short and asking the phone number and area code, the call is made longer; for the customer it belongs to the last part of the first sentence and is therefore ignored, hence people will ask for it again. People generally want to identify themselves first after hearing contact has succeeded. To put it in computer terms; the AC is trying to cram the payload in the header of the packet and is then pissed off that the protocol doesn't support it.
More effective would probably be "Thank you for calling, I'm Anonymous Coward, how can I help you?" - the latter part of this sentence ("I'm Anonymous Coward, how can I help you") will be ignored, but at least that information is completely irrelevant to the rest of the call. Then ask for important information, since that's actual payload.
It also comes from proprietary software, namely Native Instruments Reaktor. You might have a chance rebuilding the Ensembles in Pure Data or something if you wanted to (and if they were published).
Extra bonus content: I also don't care what a "strawman fallacy" is, so I'll just ignore that last sentence of yours even though I'm sure it was insulting in some way.
Extra bonus content: it never hurts to educate yourself on debating techniques and logical fallacies, because it means you gain defensive weaponry in discussion. If someone makes an argument that has a logical fallacy, you can find a way to invalidate it besides shouting "you poopyhead!". It's something that can make discussion fun instead of frustrating, moreso if your opponent isn't well-versed in it.
The term simply means that you build a caricature (strawman) of the subject you want to discuss, and then attack the caricature for having the flaws.
I've done tech support for years for family as well as professionally.
Then you have an intelligent family or generally clued-in customers;).
It's true that there are a lot of people who remain ignorant of the features their bought-and-paid-for gizmos provide because they can't be bothered or don't have the time. I refuse to accept that as an excuse.
You will refuse - rightfully. They'll just see it as another useless hurdle because hey, internet works, why mess with it?
Non-technical people -can- learn to work their own stuff, or they can call someone with the technical knowledge to do it for them.
And so can the kids; with the advantage of them having the time and the most to gain from learning to work around any restriction. After all, technical sites usually don't have the naughty bits.
I've had dozens of parents bring computers or other equipment into my shop to do just that. These are non-technical people that still take responsibility for their children. If someone is serious about keeping their kid away from the bits of the internet they don't like, then they will do this. Otherwise, they obviously weren't that serious about it to begin with.
I still think the interface of the machines could use a good overhaul. Right now you have to worry about blocking certain IP addresses. We made people stop worrying about these numbers with DNS, yet we force them to use these numbers with a router. A router mfg might have an option to download a blacklist directly from their site with one click on a button - in the router interface itself. Dumb it down to having certain security levels (my kids are 13 and 15 so they can look at X but not at Y, or my kids are 6 and 8 so they can only look at Z), let the router phone home from time to time to update the list, and it will take off way, way faster than trying to make the non-tech people with their excuses learn how their hardware works.
Then again, that brings you back to the NetNanny idea, only this time an external hardware box is doing the work.
Why not build a mass driver (aka rail gun) on the Moon so it can be given a nice sling? At least you can give it a few years of acceleration in advance.
Every router on the market has connection logging functionality, along with blacklists, whitelists, and password-protected access. It's all the tools you need to keep your kid from seeing what you don't want them to see, provided you're willing to spend the time to set things up.
I've highlighted the important and difficult terms. Your intended audience will not have a clue. I repeat - they will not have a clue. All they know is that the little black box provides 'm with Internet and E-mail and Youtube and Google.
Regardless of the time spent, people generally will feel stupid and incompetent if they have to mess with this, especially seeing that most routers are cheap and have abysmal interfaces to work with. At best they'll know power cycling is preferable to running around screaming that the internet has been broken. I recommend doing a few jobs of tech support for your family.
Plus, it'll be useless, because a router can be reset with a paperclip. Even less work than trying to get around NetNanny or what the protection software du jour is.
or to re-encode all the redbook audio and fmv with real codecs
While the Saturn may have had this, I don't think this was the modus operandi for Neo Geo games - most of the animated sequences use parallax scrolling to suggest camera rotation and layers of sprites for panning. The audio is either ADPCM in a module-like format (tracker) with some FM synthesis sprinkled through.
The open reel tape used in the studio was recorded at ether 15 or 30 ips.
And you had to either pretty wealthy to use virgin tape or hope the previous recordings would be properly wiped. It's an analog medium with the main advantage that overdriving the inputs gives a nice effect ("warmth") - compared to early digital boxes who just clipped and truncated instead of dithered. Every time you have to play or record tape, it degrades a little bit; surely you know of the multitracking in Bohemian Rhapsody that went on and on until the tape was nearly transparent
Furthermore, vinyl is lowpass filtered at 16khz anyway. Gone are the harmonics. The higher fidelity is in the first few playings; after that, the medium degrades. What use is it to have something that'll play properly 10-20 times?
good CRO2 tape and a quality recording and playback deck and you really couldn't tell the difference between live and tape.
Live sound is always a compromise; always an unpredictable venue, crowd, and response (and in the worst case a clueless mixing engineer or band member who decides that eleven is just not enough for his guitar); soundchecks just can't fix this.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with digital. The whole 24/96 deal is a godsend because it means much more headroom. Having it in digital format means that you can play and record without ghosts from the past, without degradation. This caused some engineers to add noise afterwards to get rid of the sterility - but what they call sterility is simply unheard-of silence that couldn't be had previously. Engineers back in the day would've killed to have the possibilities we have now.
As for sounding plastic, I think you're confusing the medium with the mixing. Are you familiar with the term "loudness wars"?
Withdrawing from Israeli-Palestinian conflict on one hand and refusing to do any business with Islamic countries on the other would deprive terrorists of both recruits and resources and have a much bigger effect on new attacks.
If only that were possible. But, in the meantime, the business is oil which we can't do without and the conflict is because Israel is a little democratic island in a sea of theocracy.
We can also distinguish religious freedom from calls for violence against everyone and deport or deny visas to extremists of every faith - muslim, christian, scientology, falun gong...
Now you're raving. Surely, Pat Robertson would object to not being able to travel abroad.
There are two things here: actually there isn't a "business" behind every page.
Agreed - there isn't. But what's the goal of the business on the web? To get attention. That is exactly the same goal of that large number of people who make everything themselves - the difference being that they aren't designers, SEO specialists, server-side scripters or what-have-you and have to become a jack of all trades in the time it takes to browse through a Teach-Yourself-X-in-Y-minutes. You want your little place to be attention-generating or -friendly
Ideally these people don't have to worry about the standards - just about the content. Problem is that the vast majority with their own webpage just don't see that they're reinventing the square wheel with the crappy HTML, because they don't know about the existing solutions or they insist that they're unique snowflakes not deserving a cookie-cutter solution. The solution for them would be to have a visual programming environment that worries about the standards where you can just type, dump pictures, etc - and like an bungee rope, you're dragged back to the crappy HTML again because the IDE is clueless and doesn't use the standards because making it look exactly like in design view is more important. The CMS/blog/whatever is just too hard to install, but uploading Word documents converted to HTML resembles at least a little bit of the paradigm they're used to (count the links that start with "file:///C:/My Documents/John Doe" instead of "http://")
As for "target", it has its use - it Just Works when you don't want to send anyone away from the original page and you don't want to make a nifty Web 2.0-ish fade-to-black unclickable screen with a centered big version of the picture. It will only irritate if you're spawning a mass of new windows or tabs for no good reason.
I can already hear someone saying "If you don't know the XHTML/CSS specs by heart you shouldn't be making pages" but that's just arrogant.
No, it's overdone, but certainly not arrogant. Knowing not everything by heart is not a problem when there's a reference nearby, as long as you consistently follow it (which is why it helps to know stuff by heart so you don't have to look it up. Even then, in the end it makes your job easier instead of harder; CSS saves you a lot of headaches with consistency in design.
Adhering to standards and accessibility may give you the edge in the business while letting a hundred monkeys bang away in Frontpage '97 won't. It's probably more arrogant to say you don't need that edge.
If you have to go into about:config and twiddle parameters, there is something very wrong with your Firefox setup.
The "oomph" noise when you can't find something. Nowhere in the Windows sound scheme. Nowhere in the regular settings. Why?
Old style tabs - I don't want closing buttons on every tab, I prefer the 1.5 way of handling things.
30+ tabs on a screen without having it absorb 'm in a list, I prefer the 1.5 way of handling things.
(something I haven't killed yet) - the entirely superfluous usage of the apostrophe button to bring up another method of search. No, I don't care if it's handier for vi users.
If you're going to make design changes, give users the option to switch if they want to. Hiding it in about:config is like saying you can adjust it if you just looked in the poorly lit, derelict closet of the cellar with a door saying "Beware of the tiger".
But the N64's controller had as a glaring problem that the analog stick proved to be so popular that you'd hardly use the D-pad anymore, putting your left hand in a unnatural (cramped) position and shrinking the controller down.
Goldeneye was pretty good, though. It's a shame it'll probably never end up on the Virtual Console due to the licensing issues. It'd make an excellent on-line game (I'm aware of the mod they're building for this but it's not the same thing).
I like the Xbox 1 controller a little better than the GC controller - both are pretty great, and I wish I could hook it up to my old N64. Or finally get that N64 emulator installed on it, of course;).
So when the bible says that Noah was 600 years old, what did *that* mean?
A translation error. That's what you get for measuring ages in moons and translating them to years. It's why Methuselah is so old; divide by 12 or so and you get a really reasonable (but still high for that time) number. At a certain point you see a correction in the huge numbers for the ages and then you get to the "normal" ones again.
The problem isn't so much in the apologists; it's the literalists who don't want to admit that there could've been a translation error, and who don't want to see any parallels to other flood stories (try Googling for the Ziusudra epic) predating the one in the Bible.
and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites.
Any bets on if this was some shady guy who told 'm of the miracles of using Javascript and text with the same color as the background to up the number of keywords? There's several of those dirty SEO tricks that get punished.
As usual, the market would determine how much it's worth.
The target audience are all complete laymen who believe in any notion of "secure" with enough PR and handwaving. The market doesn't have a clue and there's no standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Blurring? I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. Smile!
Other key differences are that with evolution and science in general can observe what has happened and make predictions; that's a pretty powerful and convincing tool. If you read creationist literature, you'll find attacks on evolution and the research; the vast majority of the creationists don't do actual research; they'll go out to win converts and preach to the choir.
Just see Ars Technica's recently posted photo series about the creation museum; you'll see evolution and creation diametrically opposed with evolution always on the receiving end of the kicks - and meaningless fluff about gay marriage, school prayer and abortion that plays the heartstrings of the audience. It's in the interest of the founders to turn it into a black-and-white issue and make the visitors feel good because they've chosen the "right" side (or bad because they haven't). Ever seen a biology book that has several paragraphs littered through it about abuse of children by the clergy and the consequences of the Crusades? Yeah, that's just as irrelevant.
Do keep in mind that the "was there a creator" position is not compromised by this; whatever happened before Planck time, we know nothing of. Whatever happened afterwards, we can at least observe. Because it's not right to skip the question at that god; namely, where'd he come from? And where'd the previous one come from? And so on; adding god to the equation doesn't actually make us wiser, which is why he's left out. No. If it wasn't there, I wouldn't be thinking about it, would I?
Part of the problem is that when you call any company, you generally get a barrage of useless information such as "This is Quux speaking, Foo and Bar suppliers, we now have a wonderful FooBar for only $39.95, how can I help you?" - which is swiftly (and rightfully) ignored because it's just noise; it does not solve the customer's problem. Make enough calls like that and they become a protocol.
By trying to cut short and asking the phone number and area code, the call is made longer; for the customer it belongs to the last part of the first sentence and is therefore ignored, hence people will ask for it again. People generally want to identify themselves first after hearing contact has succeeded. To put it in computer terms; the AC is trying to cram the payload in the header of the packet and is then pissed off that the protocol doesn't support it.
More effective would probably be "Thank you for calling, I'm Anonymous Coward, how can I help you?" - the latter part of this sentence ("I'm Anonymous Coward, how can I help you") will be ignored, but at least that information is completely irrelevant to the rest of the call. Then ask for important information, since that's actual payload.
I'm honestly not trolling here but could you elaborate on that? (or is it one of those "if you have to ask, give up right now" things? ;) )
Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky describes such a scenario, but the story ends when they arrive on the planet.
The term simply means that you build a caricature (strawman) of the subject you want to discuss, and then attack the caricature for having the flaws.
Then again, that brings you back to the NetNanny idea, only this time an external hardware box is doing the work.
Why not build a mass driver (aka rail gun) on the Moon so it can be given a nice sling? At least you can give it a few years of acceleration in advance.
I've highlighted the important and difficult terms. Your intended audience will not have a clue. I repeat - they will not have a clue. All they know is that the little black box provides 'm with Internet and E-mail and Youtube and Google.
Regardless of the time spent, people generally will feel stupid and incompetent if they have to mess with this, especially seeing that most routers are cheap and have abysmal interfaces to work with. At best they'll know power cycling is preferable to running around screaming that the internet has been broken. I recommend doing a few jobs of tech support for your family.
Plus, it'll be useless, because a router can be reset with a paperclip. Even less work than trying to get around NetNanny or what the protection software du jour is.
You forgot something:
30 PROFIT
Furthermore, vinyl is lowpass filtered at 16khz anyway. Gone are the harmonics. The higher fidelity is in the first few playings; after that, the medium degrades. What use is it to have something that'll play properly 10-20 times?
Live sound is always a compromise; always an unpredictable venue, crowd, and response (and in the worst case a clueless mixing engineer or band member who decides that eleven is just not enough for his guitar); soundchecks just can't fix this.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with digital. The whole 24/96 deal is a godsend because it means much more headroom. Having it in digital format means that you can play and record without ghosts from the past, without degradation. This caused some engineers to add noise afterwards to get rid of the sterility - but what they call sterility is simply unheard-of silence that couldn't be had previously. Engineers back in the day would've killed to have the possibilities we have now.
As for sounding plastic, I think you're confusing the medium with the mixing. Are you familiar with the term "loudness wars"?
Ideally these people don't have to worry about the standards - just about the content. Problem is that the vast majority with their own webpage just don't see that they're reinventing the square wheel with the crappy HTML, because they don't know about the existing solutions or they insist that they're unique snowflakes not deserving a cookie-cutter solution. The solution for them would be to have a visual programming environment that worries about the standards where you can just type, dump pictures, etc - and like an bungee rope, you're dragged back to the crappy HTML again because the IDE is clueless and doesn't use the standards because making it look exactly like in design view is more important. The CMS/blog/whatever is just too hard to install, but uploading Word documents converted to HTML resembles at least a little bit of the paradigm they're used to (count the links that start with "file:///C:/My Documents/John Doe" instead of "http://")
As for "target", it has its use - it Just Works when you don't want to send anyone away from the original page and you don't want to make a nifty Web 2.0-ish fade-to-black unclickable screen with a centered big version of the picture. It will only irritate if you're spawning a mass of new windows or tabs for no good reason.
Adhering to standards and accessibility may give you the edge in the business while letting a hundred monkeys bang away in Frontpage '97 won't. It's probably more arrogant to say you don't need that edge.
- The "oomph" noise when you can't find something. Nowhere in the Windows sound scheme. Nowhere in the regular settings. Why?
- Old style tabs - I don't want closing buttons on every tab, I prefer the 1.5 way of handling things.
- 30+ tabs on a screen without having it absorb 'm in a list, I prefer the 1.5 way of handling things.
- (something I haven't killed yet) - the entirely superfluous usage of the apostrophe button to bring up another method of search. No, I don't care if it's handier for vi users.
If you're going to make design changes, give users the option to switch if they want to. Hiding it in about:config is like saying you can adjust it if you just looked in the poorly lit, derelict closet of the cellar with a door saying "Beware of the tiger".But the N64's controller had as a glaring problem that the analog stick proved to be so popular that you'd hardly use the D-pad anymore, putting your left hand in a unnatural (cramped) position and shrinking the controller down.
;).
Goldeneye was pretty good, though. It's a shame it'll probably never end up on the Virtual Console due to the licensing issues. It'd make an excellent on-line game (I'm aware of the mod they're building for this but it's not the same thing).
I like the Xbox 1 controller a little better than the GC controller - both are pretty great, and I wish I could hook it up to my old N64. Or finally get that N64 emulator installed on it, of course
It's Shigawire!
This will bring us one step closer to the Dune Universe. I call dibs on the first load of Spice!
The problem isn't so much in the apologists; it's the literalists who don't want to admit that there could've been a translation error, and who don't want to see any parallels to other flood stories (try Googling for the Ziusudra epic) predating the one in the Bible.
I think he's talking about power outages - and as for the "Western world" about some brownouts that have occurred in the past few years.
Cracked almost as fast as the previous one which got posted here on