Where did it say that women were disproportionately represented in book selling? It just said that it was admirable.
I have no idea the gender breakdown of "traditional" book sales, by the way. Literally I have no guess. This is not something I have ever paid attention to.
Where are people getting the idea that the media isn't talking about the lack of male teachers? I hear about it constantly. In fact, I suspect you might have to be particularly plugged-in to tech news to be hearing significantly more about women in tech than male teachers.
They should make sense because I like stories that make sense, and I buy video games with stories I like.
You can have an entertaining game without any plot or with extremely little (eg. Super Mario Bros.), but a plot that actually doesn't make sense is going to bother me exactly as much as a movie that doesn't make sense, and the fact that "games don't work like movies" is an additional obstacle to writing a coherent plot, not an excuse for not trying.
I also suggest that he's probably talking to people who don't care about plots. The plot is the main thing I remember from most games. I can absolutely tell you what the characters were fighting about in any of my favourite games. I can list sideplots. I can't necessarily tell you what buttons you press to do certain actions.
I also suggest that the "looser thematic layer" is important to movies, too. The Matrix didn't get by on the strength of its plot, and the early "twist" that they were all living in a computer simulation was absolutely not novel. But it had a strong themes and, at the time, a unique artistic stance that is often summarized with reference to "bullet time". How many people remember why Neo went to see the Oracle?
Adventure games are nearly all plot. A strong subset of RPGs are like that too -- the Elder Scrolls games not so much, they are about theme, and I don't like those games and they bug me at every release by overshadowing all the RPGs I like. The Infinity Engine games had better plots, but not necessarily strong themes, although Planescape had both and is well-loved. The original Fallout also had strong theme & plot elements, but it strayed further into theme and away from plot as time went on, culminating in Fallout 3 (New Vegas backtracked a bit, to my delight).
Mass Effect tried for both too, and with the controversy over the ending you can absolutely see how important plot truly was.
Re:I don't think, they worry about non-US users
on
Hulu Blocks VPN Users
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· Score: 1
Aside from that, I don't think there's any evidence at all that people who use VPNs are more likely to use ad-blockers. I can only assume this is because you figure it requires technical knowledge to set up a VPN.
I think some people might not realize just how streamlined and easy some common VPN-services have become outside the US, because of just how bad video streaming services are outside the US. The same sort of people who have trouble finding the "Any Key" set these up by themselves. I know a person who to this day calls computers "Windows Sessions" because in Windows 3.1 when you shut down your computer You'd go File->Exit Windows, and it popped up "Are you sure you want to end your Windows session?". She set it up on her own. She's not using an adblocker.
(Also doesn't need one with Netflix).
Re:Hulu to studios: "You leave money on the table.
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Hulu Blocks VPN Users
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· Score: 1
It's a great question, and I don't know the answer, but nobody is doing it in practice.
Netflix in Canada vs. the US has an overlapping set of shows, but there are a set of Canada-only shows and a (much larger) set of US-only shows. Why? I don't know. Maybe just negotiating tactics, or maybe they feel the price the content producers are sticking to can't be recovered in a Canadian demographic like it can in a US demographic.
The premise is that we are knocked back technologically, so we don't have nuclear fission etc., and certainly no future technologies.
There is a theory that isn't completely crazy that practically speaking, intelligent species needs cheap & easy concentrated sources of energy to bootstrap technology. Which humans did have in oil, and we are peaking somewhere between 2007-2020 for worldwide production, after which it'll take millions of year for the Earth to recover those resources for the next attempt at civilization.
One, they got to the moon even faster with Communism! Nobody ever invented fire for the first time in 200 years. That's a ridiculous argument.
Two, I don't know on what basis you claim capitalism started 200 years ago. In what sense was the Roman empire not capitalistic? Or the "barbarians" that opposed the Roman Empire? The Phoenicians are infamous ancient traders.
That's an interesting alternate God. Most conceptions of singular-God that I'm familiar with have him as a creative force, not a destructive force actively eliminating all life in the universe that does not lead to humans on Earth, like a cosmic bansai bush cultivator.
But eg. every Clinton year was better than the previous year without fail. Bush II got 5 years that were each worse than the previous, but then reversed the trend until getting sucker-punched at the end of 2008 (shows up even more drastically in 2009 under Obama). Previous Bush had a neutral first year and then a downward trend. Reagan had a mixed record; things generally worsened but it was recovering by the end. etc.
To some extent there are economic factors outside of presidencies, e.g. no matter how much you think the economy stems from the singular person of the President, you can't fully blame Bush for 2001 or 2008 or Obama for 2009.
That's literally what cookie-cutting is. That's what happens when you use a cookie cutter to cut cookies. All the cookie shapes end up the same.
I actually got over that very quickly. Board games are often like that, and I like board games. I couldn't stand the repetitive combat with the continuous enemy respawn. I thought it was a very neat conceit the first time it happened, but I quickly realized that it was *every combat*, regardless of whether it made sense. Also didn't like the bland mechanics and the new fad of "everybody is a spellcaster; the warrior and thief characters just cast from stamina". The story was significantly improved though. DA1 seemed to go out of its way to invent a setting that was as derivative as possible while still counting as new IP.
I would expect that a leisurely pace is approximately an average pace, not 2/3 that speed. Your same link even calls out a "brisk" walking pace as 4 mph, as contrasted with the average walking pace.
Anyway, I walk about 1.9 miles to work according to google maps, and it takes me about 30 minutes, leisurely. Maybe I walk a bit fast but it's hard for me to imagine that taking an hour. I'm not a particularly athletic individual.
You seem to be confusing "middle" with "average". These are not the same thing.
A middle-aged human in Afghanistan is between 40 and 60. The average (median) age of a Afghani is about 18. The mean is probably a bit higher, but it won't be even close to 40 (I couldn't find stats on that).
The assumption here is that there is no set of genes that are guaranteed to be purely negative for humankind. That's just false. There's just no reason we'd want to let somebody grow up with cystic fibrosis, for instance. The sickle-cell anemia vs. malaria case is actually unusual, and a population high in sickle-cell anemic individuals is not actually a desirable outcome.
Also, if we can prevent genetic engineering, then surely we can prevent choosing the gender of children. If you can't prevent choosing the children's gender, then how do you think we can prevent other genetic engineering?
Why on Earth would you assume that he's opposed to GMO for other animals, once it's safe enough for humans?
What a bizarre assertion. I certainly would have no problems with that. In fact, if you can modify the animal to grow up without a brain, so that it's no longer an ethical concern for a certain subset of vegetarians and vegans, that's even better.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about genetic engineering being within a lifetime. But...15 years ago, seriously? Most of those things were considered plausible, not sci-fi. Hell, in 1999 we *assumed* we'd have incredibly powerful computers in our pockets and we often see articles disappointed that we haven't met 1999's expectations. Remember, it was 2001 when the infamous stem cell research funding ban came into effect. Drones were used in the first Gulf War in 1991, and it was big news when they were first used in a targeted killing in 2002.
I think if you asked the average educated person 15 years ago about these things, they'd call them all either plausible or obvious developments. You'd have to be stunningly ignorant to disbelieve some of those.
Mind you I still see people on slashdot arguing that self-driving cars are ridiculous sci-fi even though we have licensed robot cars *today*, so maybe you are right in a sense.
I'm not sure who you're talking about with media regulation and drug rehab etc. I can pretty much tell you that porno restrictions aren't some universally agreed-upon principle of feminists, and not all liberals consider themselves feminists in the first place.
For abortion, nobody disputes that a new organism was formed at conception. They dispute that the new organism's right to survive supercedes the mother's right to autonomy.
I don't actually disagree about the marriage thing, but I disagree that it had anything to do with Eich. Eich was fighting for discrimination, by donating to the cause of keeping certain rights arbitrarily designated to one class. A fight to get government out of marriage is a different fight entirely, and not one that many people seem to be seriously fighting.
First, in the abstract I can agree with definition one and definition two, but only by using a slightly different definition of "human being" each time. If you insist on having a consistent definition, then you have to display it and I'm sure I'll disagree with one or the other of those statements. Your #2 definition involves genetics. Your #1 definition involves moral culpability and is unrelated to genetics.
The second problem is that just because the unborn have the right to live which should be protected by law, it does not imply that abortions should be illegal. Otherwise this logic would hold:
IF: 1. Every human being has the right to live, which should be protected by law,
AND: 2. The person brutally assaulting your family is a human being.
THEN: 3. The person brutally assaulting your family has the right to live, which should be protected by law.
I agree with both premises and even the conclusion, but if you kill somebody in self defense or in the defense of another, it's not murder.
Likewise, nobody ever argues that any human being *other than a fetus* gets to attach themselves in a biologically parasitical fashion to another human being for months at a time. Why do the unborn get this special right that nobody else gets?
Call me when you make a Star Trek transporter that can zap a fetus out of the womb and into an incubator and we can ban abortions at that time, since then the fetus doesn't need a special right to remain inside somebody else's body.
The short answer is we don't know for sure "why now?", but we do know that unless humans were generated with seed-technology, they would inevitably ask "why now?" when they reach this point because there's a start to civilization *somewhere*.
But one point is that living in large groups is impractical without scaling agriculture, which at minimal technology is impractical to bootstrap in much of the world. The most low-tech-civilization-friendly places on Earth are the ones where we find the first evidence of civilization, and there's some evidence that some of those places had local climate change coinciding with the dawn of civilization.
Note that we *do* have human remains and artifacts from 30-40k years ago. That's when the first bow & arrows seem to have been produced. The evidence of wild grains being cultivated is more recent.
Premise 1: The Universe exists. Premise 2: Either something came from nothing, or something always existed. Hypothesis: That something is God. Counterargument: The Universe is also an internally consistent "something" to fit the premise. The Universe necessarily exists due to premise 1. God does not necessarily exist given the premises, and does not better fulfill either premise. Therefore the hypothesis is unsupported.
You need to introduce new premises or arguments in order to endow God with extra attributes so that the God hypothesis passes Occam's Razor.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly I found the Thrawn trilogy much better on TVTropes than as an actual book.
Where did it say that women were disproportionately represented in book selling? It just said that it was admirable.
I have no idea the gender breakdown of "traditional" book sales, by the way. Literally I have no guess. This is not something I have ever paid attention to.
Where are people getting the idea that the media isn't talking about the lack of male teachers? I hear about it constantly. In fact, I suspect you might have to be particularly plugged-in to tech news to be hearing significantly more about women in tech than male teachers.
Here's one: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/m...
Here's another: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
Another: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/s...
Another: http://www.dallasnews.com/news...
Another: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
They should make sense because I like stories that make sense, and I buy video games with stories I like.
You can have an entertaining game without any plot or with extremely little (eg. Super Mario Bros.), but a plot that actually doesn't make sense is going to bother me exactly as much as a movie that doesn't make sense, and the fact that "games don't work like movies" is an additional obstacle to writing a coherent plot, not an excuse for not trying.
I also suggest that he's probably talking to people who don't care about plots. The plot is the main thing I remember from most games. I can absolutely tell you what the characters were fighting about in any of my favourite games. I can list sideplots. I can't necessarily tell you what buttons you press to do certain actions.
I also suggest that the "looser thematic layer" is important to movies, too. The Matrix didn't get by on the strength of its plot, and the early "twist" that they were all living in a computer simulation was absolutely not novel. But it had a strong themes and, at the time, a unique artistic stance that is often summarized with reference to "bullet time". How many people remember why Neo went to see the Oracle?
Adventure games are nearly all plot. A strong subset of RPGs are like that too -- the Elder Scrolls games not so much, they are about theme, and I don't like those games and they bug me at every release by overshadowing all the RPGs I like. The Infinity Engine games had better plots, but not necessarily strong themes, although Planescape had both and is well-loved. The original Fallout also had strong theme & plot elements, but it strayed further into theme and away from plot as time went on, culminating in Fallout 3 (New Vegas backtracked a bit, to my delight).
Mass Effect tried for both too, and with the controversy over the ending you can absolutely see how important plot truly was.
Aside from that, I don't think there's any evidence at all that people who use VPNs are more likely to use ad-blockers. I can only assume this is because you figure it requires technical knowledge to set up a VPN.
I think some people might not realize just how streamlined and easy some common VPN-services have become outside the US, because of just how bad video streaming services are outside the US. The same sort of people who have trouble finding the "Any Key" set these up by themselves. I know a person who to this day calls computers "Windows Sessions" because in Windows 3.1 when you shut down your computer You'd go File->Exit Windows, and it popped up "Are you sure you want to end your Windows session?". She set it up on her own. She's not using an adblocker.
(Also doesn't need one with Netflix).
It's a great question, and I don't know the answer, but nobody is doing it in practice.
Netflix in Canada vs. the US has an overlapping set of shows, but there are a set of Canada-only shows and a (much larger) set of US-only shows. Why? I don't know. Maybe just negotiating tactics, or maybe they feel the price the content producers are sticking to can't be recovered in a Canadian demographic like it can in a US demographic.
Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
The premise is that we are knocked back technologically, so we don't have nuclear fission etc., and certainly no future technologies.
There is a theory that isn't completely crazy that practically speaking, intelligent species needs cheap & easy concentrated sources of energy to bootstrap technology. Which humans did have in oil, and we are peaking somewhere between 2007-2020 for worldwide production, after which it'll take millions of year for the Earth to recover those resources for the next attempt at civilization.
One, they got to the moon even faster with Communism! Nobody ever invented fire for the first time in 200 years. That's a ridiculous argument.
Two, I don't know on what basis you claim capitalism started 200 years ago. In what sense was the Roman empire not capitalistic? Or the "barbarians" that opposed the Roman Empire? The Phoenicians are infamous ancient traders.
That's an interesting alternate God. Most conceptions of singular-God that I'm familiar with have him as a creative force, not a destructive force actively eliminating all life in the universe that does not lead to humans on Earth, like a cosmic bansai bush cultivator.
They don't even have to do it before their planet/sun dies, so long as they leave before their planet/sun dies.
That's just one more filter term though. How unlikely is it really, on a cosmic scale, to have a large Luna-like moon and Earth-like axial tilt?
Debt, no; deficit, yes. Except it popped into existence in 2002.
There were previous deficits over the years though. Most years appear to have deficits:
http://www.davemanuel.com/hist...
But eg. every Clinton year was better than the previous year without fail. Bush II got 5 years that were each worse than the previous, but then reversed the trend until getting sucker-punched at the end of 2008 (shows up even more drastically in 2009 under Obama). Previous Bush had a neutral first year and then a downward trend. Reagan had a mixed record; things generally worsened but it was recovering by the end. etc.
To some extent there are economic factors outside of presidencies, e.g. no matter how much you think the economy stems from the singular person of the President, you can't fully blame Bush for 2001 or 2008 or Obama for 2009.
That's literally what cookie-cutting is. That's what happens when you use a cookie cutter to cut cookies. All the cookie shapes end up the same.
I actually got over that very quickly. Board games are often like that, and I like board games. I couldn't stand the repetitive combat with the continuous enemy respawn. I thought it was a very neat conceit the first time it happened, but I quickly realized that it was *every combat*, regardless of whether it made sense. Also didn't like the bland mechanics and the new fad of "everybody is a spellcaster; the warrior and thief characters just cast from stamina". The story was significantly improved though. DA1 seemed to go out of its way to invent a setting that was as derivative as possible while still counting as new IP.
I would expect that a leisurely pace is approximately an average pace, not 2/3 that speed. Your same link even calls out a "brisk" walking pace as 4 mph, as contrasted with the average walking pace.
Anyway, I walk about 1.9 miles to work according to google maps, and it takes me about 30 minutes, leisurely. Maybe I walk a bit fast but it's hard for me to imagine that taking an hour. I'm not a particularly athletic individual.
You seem to be confusing "middle" with "average". These are not the same thing.
A middle-aged human in Afghanistan is between 40 and 60. The average (median) age of a Afghani is about 18. The mean is probably a bit higher, but it won't be even close to 40 (I couldn't find stats on that).
Middle does not typically imply average.
The assumption here is that there is no set of genes that are guaranteed to be purely negative for humankind. That's just false. There's just no reason we'd want to let somebody grow up with cystic fibrosis, for instance. The sickle-cell anemia vs. malaria case is actually unusual, and a population high in sickle-cell anemic individuals is not actually a desirable outcome.
Also, if we can prevent genetic engineering, then surely we can prevent choosing the gender of children. If you can't prevent choosing the children's gender, then how do you think we can prevent other genetic engineering?
Why on Earth would you assume that he's opposed to GMO for other animals, once it's safe enough for humans?
What a bizarre assertion. I certainly would have no problems with that. In fact, if you can modify the animal to grow up without a brain, so that it's no longer an ethical concern for a certain subset of vegetarians and vegans, that's even better.
I don't necessarily disagree with you about genetic engineering being within a lifetime. But...15 years ago, seriously? Most of those things were considered plausible, not sci-fi. Hell, in 1999 we *assumed* we'd have incredibly powerful computers in our pockets and we often see articles disappointed that we haven't met 1999's expectations. Remember, it was 2001 when the infamous stem cell research funding ban came into effect. Drones were used in the first Gulf War in 1991, and it was big news when they were first used in a targeted killing in 2002.
I think if you asked the average educated person 15 years ago about these things, they'd call them all either plausible or obvious developments. You'd have to be stunningly ignorant to disbelieve some of those.
Mind you I still see people on slashdot arguing that self-driving cars are ridiculous sci-fi even though we have licensed robot cars *today*, so maybe you are right in a sense.
I'm not sure who you're talking about with media regulation and drug rehab etc. I can pretty much tell you that porno restrictions aren't some universally agreed-upon principle of feminists, and not all liberals consider themselves feminists in the first place.
For abortion, nobody disputes that a new organism was formed at conception. They dispute that the new organism's right to survive supercedes the mother's right to autonomy.
I don't actually disagree about the marriage thing, but I disagree that it had anything to do with Eich. Eich was fighting for discrimination, by donating to the cause of keeping certain rights arbitrarily designated to one class. A fight to get government out of marriage is a different fight entirely, and not one that many people seem to be seriously fighting.
There are a couple problems with your argument.
First, in the abstract I can agree with definition one and definition two, but only by using a slightly different definition of "human being" each time. If you insist on having a consistent definition, then you have to display it and I'm sure I'll disagree with one or the other of those statements. Your #2 definition involves genetics. Your #1 definition involves moral culpability and is unrelated to genetics.
The second problem is that just because the unborn have the right to live which should be protected by law, it does not imply that abortions should be illegal. Otherwise this logic would hold:
IF: 1. Every human being has the right to live, which should be protected by law,
AND: 2. The person brutally assaulting your family is a human being.
THEN: 3. The person brutally assaulting your family has the right to live, which should be protected by law.
I agree with both premises and even the conclusion, but if you kill somebody in self defense or in the defense of another, it's not murder.
Likewise, nobody ever argues that any human being *other than a fetus* gets to attach themselves in a biologically parasitical fashion to another human being for months at a time. Why do the unborn get this special right that nobody else gets?
Call me when you make a Star Trek transporter that can zap a fetus out of the womb and into an incubator and we can ban abortions at that time, since then the fetus doesn't need a special right to remain inside somebody else's body.
?
Because Asia is known for its right-wing politics, what with China and Russia?
Where are you getting this?
The short answer is we don't know for sure "why now?", but we do know that unless humans were generated with seed-technology, they would inevitably ask "why now?" when they reach this point because there's a start to civilization *somewhere*.
But one point is that living in large groups is impractical without scaling agriculture, which at minimal technology is impractical to bootstrap in much of the world. The most low-tech-civilization-friendly places on Earth are the ones where we find the first evidence of civilization, and there's some evidence that some of those places had local climate change coinciding with the dawn of civilization.
Note that we *do* have human remains and artifacts from 30-40k years ago. That's when the first bow & arrows seem to have been produced. The evidence of wild grains being cultivated is more recent.
He wasn't using it wrong.
The structure of this thread is:
Premise 1: The Universe exists.
Premise 2: Either something came from nothing, or something always existed.
Hypothesis: That something is God.
Counterargument: The Universe is also an internally consistent "something" to fit the premise. The Universe necessarily exists due to premise 1. God does not necessarily exist given the premises, and does not better fulfill either premise. Therefore the hypothesis is unsupported.
You need to introduce new premises or arguments in order to endow God with extra attributes so that the God hypothesis passes Occam's Razor.
Where are you getting 7 trillion years from?