For every positive what if, I can construct a negative one, and it's more likely to come true. We want the government that governs least; that's the best (to paraphrase). When any action from the government is likely to make the problem worse (evidence: I point to the economy), the best course is to forbid it from meddling at all.
The nature of the world is such that authorities, by their very nature of being authoritative, are subject to pressures to provide biased or invalid information. Not always, and not even most of the time, but sometimes. That's why one must always maintain a critical attitude.
The opinion of an intelligent layman who has done extensive research can be better than that of a professional. He doesn't have many of the professional's motivations to lie, for instance; and can bring cross-disciplinary knowledge to bear.
Usually they're just cranks, of course; but not always.
In fairness, this movie does not have to be that good to be better than a number of the Star Trek movies. Their quality has been... inconsistent, at best. I'm skeptical, but I'll give it a chance.
After all, this is supposed to be modeled after the original series, which (while cerebral) also had a good share of fist-fighting and babes. More than any of the later series did, I think, at least considering the time it was aired.
Hmm... or what you think is meaningful morality when you're childless turns out to be meaningless, after your enlightenment comes when you finally reproduce.
Neither is true, of course, and those sorts of arguments are completely irrational in and of themselves; they're all variants of well-known logical fallacies. It can be pretty much cleanly disproven by the fact that there are childless individuals, and people with children, on both sides of the argument.
I love my children very much, and I am terrifically concerned about their future. Most of what I do is for the children. I do indeed 'think of the children.' That means that I would hate to see their human rights abrogated over a non-issue like a flirtatious picture. Concern for children isn't the problem; that's a good thing. Irrational and misplaced concern is the problem.
Math still somewhat grates my aesthetic sensibilities in that respect. Ubuntu takes 33% longer than XP, while XP is 25% slower than Ubuntu. It just doesn't seem symmetrical... although it really is.
Yeah, I think it's completely a pump-and-dump scheme to bilk gullible investors. Gamers get irritated if the LCD has a slow refresh rate; they aren't going to settle for the lag between client and server and back, plus frame encoding time... that's going to be over 100ms in almost every case, often over 200. That's eliminates all action games from the mix, and action games are the ones that require the high-end machines they're claiming to have or emulate.
Plus, who is their audience? People with old and clunky pc systems, who have blazing fast internet connections? There's not a whole lot of overlap, there.
You know, ChronoTrigger on the SNES had a budget probably 1% of Final Fantasy 12, and yet has just (or more) as epic story and gameplay that you can lose yourself into for many dozens of hours. Gameplay and quality storelines don't require massive budgets for CGI, and inexpensive games don't need to be simple fluff.
Go by Heinlein's adage that you can track all costs eventually to labor. Figure a game takes three years to develop, and they pay an average salary of $50,000. That's 166 warm bodies. Probably half are artists, modelers, and other creative types; the other half are designers, coders, quality assurance, project managers, and so on. That seems in line with the length of credits I've seen for big-budget games. And remember to figure in $200,000 to get a big-name Hollywood star to spend four hours in the voice recording studio.
The designers of Ninjabread man have figured out a way to save money when they later created Ramses II:
Many critics have called it a carbon copy of Ninjabread Man, due to the identical music, gameplay and level layout, the same basic attacks, and enemies (as well as having most of the same bugs and glitches), because of the use of DDI's GODS engine. (wikipedia)
Make some more damn games for the Wii. Bigger market, cheaper development... why are the big publishers focusing so hard on the smaller, more costly, 360 and PS3 market? They're cutting their own throats.
And onlive is a farce; I can't believe that anybody on Slashdot believes that company has magical 22nd century technology.
You know, I might really end up liking the console. Even if I loved it, though, I still hope it can be turned off. Or, at the least ignored without it impacting the browsing experience, because somebody else might legitimately dislike it.
The problem with the "Awesomebar" is not that it exists. The problem is that those of us who hate it can't turn it off. The option to do so, which existed during beta, was removed. There are add-ins that that restore much of the previous behavior, but not all.
So add options; new isn't bad. But if they have a significant intrusive effect, allow them to be turned off.
We don't generally have kids designing rockets right out of high school.
I'm not arguing that those aren't more precise formulations. Just that they are, at the level of high-school, needless complications. The important thing to beat into the kids' head is that force goes up proportionately with mass, and proportionately with acceleration. Yes, it changes if mass is variable over the relevant time period, but all that stuff is obvious if a kid understands the principle; and if they don't understand the principle, the more generalized formulations will be of no use anyway.
For instance, kids must know that f=ma, even though we know that it is a highly inaccurate expression.
I find your use of 'highly inaccurate' to be highly inaccurate. 'Slightly inaccurate in exceptional cases' would be more accurate. All the other formula you mention simplify down to F=MA in all but very unusual cases, such as traveling near the speed of light. Newtonian physics is perfectly reasonable to teach high-schoolers, since it is a valid subset of General Relativity that deals with typical behavior at the human scale.
For eternity people will be able to buffer-overflow zelda, it's a pressed disc.
No, it's easy enough for an OS update to close the hole. If you tried to use the buffer-overflow trick with Zelda on an updated Wii, it will no longer work. If you mean that it will always work for an non-updated Wii, with an older OS, you are correct.
Losing an exploit, but gaining significant and long-anticipated new features. This is only a downgrade to a fraction of a percent of Wii users... and the majority of them are playing copied games, and Nintendo doesn't really need to worry too much about irritating them. They'll crack it again soon anyway; Nintendo just has to make these exploits irritating enough that normal people would have no desire to use them.
Just because someone is arguing a side that most of us support, doesn't mean that their argument isn't ridiculous. We need to keep our intellectual honesty about us. Taking their reasoning, it could be argued the TCP/IP never violates copyright; that a file broken out on disk clusters never violates copyright; and so on.
If you're sharing a copyrighted file via torrent without permission, I think you indisputably are violating copyright law. Perhaps copyright law is poorly conceived... I certainly think it is. However, I don't think arguing through silly loopholes is going to help the core problem. The law needs reformed.
Right. People are far more likely to make poor decisions regarding sex than they are regarding violence. Sex is a temptation, and can't be directly compared to violence... I'm not worried that my teenage son will go out and kill people. I am worried he'll let his hormones take control of him some weekend.
That said, hiding info about sex isn't productive in my opinion; it doesn't reduce the temptation. Better to be open about it. I just wanted to point out that it's not hypocritical to draw a distinction between sex and violence.
Slashdot Mirror
For every positive what if, I can construct a negative one, and it's more likely to come true. We want the government that governs least; that's the best (to paraphrase). When any action from the government is likely to make the problem worse (evidence: I point to the economy), the best course is to forbid it from meddling at all.
Parent is the most important post in this thread.
Bad form to reply to myself, but I just wanted to add in a link.
Given "Expert" Advice, Brains Shut Down
The nature of the world is such that authorities, by their very nature of being authoritative, are subject to pressures to provide biased or invalid information. Not always, and not even most of the time, but sometimes. That's why one must always maintain a critical attitude.
The opinion of an intelligent layman who has done extensive research can be better than that of a professional. He doesn't have many of the professional's motivations to lie, for instance; and can bring cross-disciplinary knowledge to bear.
Usually they're just cranks, of course; but not always.
In fairness, this movie does not have to be that good to be better than a number of the Star Trek movies. Their quality has been... inconsistent, at best. I'm skeptical, but I'll give it a chance.
After all, this is supposed to be modeled after the original series, which (while cerebral) also had a good share of fist-fighting and babes. More than any of the later series did, I think, at least considering the time it was aired.
Hmm... or what you think is meaningful morality when you're childless turns out to be meaningless, after your enlightenment comes when you finally reproduce.
Neither is true, of course, and those sorts of arguments are completely irrational in and of themselves; they're all variants of well-known logical fallacies. It can be pretty much cleanly disproven by the fact that there are childless individuals, and people with children, on both sides of the argument.
I love my children very much, and I am terrifically concerned about their future. Most of what I do is for the children. I do indeed 'think of the children.' That means that I would hate to see their human rights abrogated over a non-issue like a flirtatious picture. Concern for children isn't the problem; that's a good thing. Irrational and misplaced concern is the problem.
Math still somewhat grates my aesthetic sensibilities in that respect. Ubuntu takes 33% longer than XP, while XP is 25% slower than Ubuntu. It just doesn't seem symmetrical... although it really is.
The attach rate for the Wii is better than the PS3.
I think that's very likely true. Same as with Hollywood claiming that they lose money on almost every film. Apply Occam's razor: They're lying.
Yeah, I think it's completely a pump-and-dump scheme to bilk gullible investors. Gamers get irritated if the LCD has a slow refresh rate; they aren't going to settle for the lag between client and server and back, plus frame encoding time... that's going to be over 100ms in almost every case, often over 200. That's eliminates all action games from the mix, and action games are the ones that require the high-end machines they're claiming to have or emulate.
Plus, who is their audience? People with old and clunky pc systems, who have blazing fast internet connections? There's not a whole lot of overlap, there.
No, that's not what he said at all. Pity you can't delete posts on Slashdot; once you understand the parent post, you'll wish you could.
You know, ChronoTrigger on the SNES had a budget probably 1% of Final Fantasy 12, and yet has just (or more) as epic story and gameplay that you can lose yourself into for many dozens of hours. Gameplay and quality storelines don't require massive budgets for CGI, and inexpensive games don't need to be simple fluff.
Go by Heinlein's adage that you can track all costs eventually to labor. Figure a game takes three years to develop, and they pay an average salary of $50,000. That's 166 warm bodies. Probably half are artists, modelers, and other creative types; the other half are designers, coders, quality assurance, project managers, and so on. That seems in line with the length of credits I've seen for big-budget games. And remember to figure in $200,000 to get a big-name Hollywood star to spend four hours in the voice recording studio.
The designers of Ninjabread man have figured out a way to save money when they later created Ramses II:
Many critics have called it a carbon copy of Ninjabread Man, due to the identical music, gameplay and level layout, the same basic attacks, and enemies (as well as having most of the same bugs and glitches), because of the use of DDI's GODS engine. (wikipedia)
Make some more damn games for the Wii. Bigger market, cheaper development... why are the big publishers focusing so hard on the smaller, more costly, 360 and PS3 market? They're cutting their own throats.
And onlive is a farce; I can't believe that anybody on Slashdot believes that company has magical 22nd century technology.
You know, I might really end up liking the console. Even if I loved it, though, I still hope it can be turned off. Or, at the least ignored without it impacting the browsing experience, because somebody else might legitimately dislike it.
The problem with the "Awesomebar" is not that it exists. The problem is that those of us who hate it can't turn it off. The option to do so, which existed during beta, was removed. There are add-ins that that restore much of the previous behavior, but not all.
So add options; new isn't bad. But if they have a significant intrusive effect, allow them to be turned off.
Yes, that's correct.
We don't generally have kids designing rockets right out of high school.
I'm not arguing that those aren't more precise formulations. Just that they are, at the level of high-school, needless complications. The important thing to beat into the kids' head is that force goes up proportionately with mass, and proportionately with acceleration. Yes, it changes if mass is variable over the relevant time period, but all that stuff is obvious if a kid understands the principle; and if they don't understand the principle, the more generalized formulations will be of no use anyway.
For instance, kids must know that f=ma, even though we know that it is a highly inaccurate expression.
I find your use of 'highly inaccurate' to be highly inaccurate. 'Slightly inaccurate in exceptional cases' would be more accurate. All the other formula you mention simplify down to F=MA in all but very unusual cases, such as traveling near the speed of light. Newtonian physics is perfectly reasonable to teach high-schoolers, since it is a valid subset of General Relativity that deals with typical behavior at the human scale.
For eternity people will be able to buffer-overflow zelda, it's a pressed disc.
No, it's easy enough for an OS update to close the hole. If you tried to use the buffer-overflow trick with Zelda on an updated Wii, it will no longer work. If you mean that it will always work for an non-updated Wii, with an older OS, you are correct.
Losing an exploit, but gaining significant and long-anticipated new features. This is only a downgrade to a fraction of a percent of Wii users... and the majority of them are playing copied games, and Nintendo doesn't really need to worry too much about irritating them. They'll crack it again soon anyway; Nintendo just has to make these exploits irritating enough that normal people would have no desire to use them.
Just because someone is arguing a side that most of us support, doesn't mean that their argument isn't ridiculous. We need to keep our intellectual honesty about us. Taking their reasoning, it could be argued the TCP/IP never violates copyright; that a file broken out on disk clusters never violates copyright; and so on.
If you're sharing a copyrighted file via torrent without permission, I think you indisputably are violating copyright law. Perhaps copyright law is poorly conceived... I certainly think it is. However, I don't think arguing through silly loopholes is going to help the core problem. The law needs reformed.
Or just require that black cars cover 20% of their exterior with fancy chrome bling.
No, they dumped the GUI (workbench). They generally used the Kernel (Kickstart), which is still part of the operating system.
Right. People are far more likely to make poor decisions regarding sex than they are regarding violence. Sex is a temptation, and can't be directly compared to violence... I'm not worried that my teenage son will go out and kill people. I am worried he'll let his hormones take control of him some weekend.
That said, hiding info about sex isn't productive in my opinion; it doesn't reduce the temptation. Better to be open about it. I just wanted to point out that it's not hypocritical to draw a distinction between sex and violence.