I think you and I have different definitions of civilization. I'm not saying humans can't get there, but I wouldn't call that an interstellar civilization. I would call that multiple stellar civilizations. When you separate people by a wall of time that is a significant portion of a human lifespan, you've effectively separated out civilization. Round trip communications from one end of your 16 light year radius is 64 years (diameter 32 light years, there and back). Feel free to insert your own terminology.
I have to wonder what else you're assuming in your rejection of FTL
I didn't reject FTL. I said FTL implies time travel. It sounds like YOU are assuming time travel is impossible. Which would be fine except for the hypocrisy.
I also provided possible internally-consistent universes that could have FTL without causality violations. I honestly don't know how I could have given you more.
Here is a relatively understandable explanation of why beating a photon to its destination implies time travel, even if you don't locally travel faster than light: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html. Basically, if you can pass stuff along at FTL between people at sub-light speed, and those people are moving relative to one another, you can send stuff into the past.
There *are* workarounds. A fairly comprehensive list is here:
They're all kind of about relativity being wrong, and there's no evidence any of these are true. Mostly wishful thinking on the part of people that want to believe we can have an interstellar civilization but can't quite let go of causality. Briefly:
1. FTL takes you to a parallel universe. So if you try to kill your past self, there's no paradox and you keep living because it was actually your counterpart in a different universe. 2. There's some unknown physics that would prevent using FTL to violate causality. So even though there's technically time travel in some sense, it has no practical use and therefore you could say it isn't "really" time travel. 3. A specific case of the above: perhaps the act of travelling FTL prevents any other FTL travel within a certain spacetime "radius". 4. Violate relativity by having a "true" frame of reference with a "true" sequence of events. All FTL takes place in that context and is theoretically unlimited in speed. Within any other frame of reference, it looks like a speed limit, but still possibly faster than light speed.
He was responding to a guy who basically argued that thinness can't matter because people add a case that makes it less thin. The counterargument is that there's still a net gain in thinness.
The exact advantage you asked for is 1.7mm less thickness. Approximately 20% less thick if you don't use a case; a smaller reduction if you do.
It's not that difficult. Do you really not understand why somebody would want something that they carry around all the time, in their pockets or purses or whatever, to occupy less space? Would you be happy if they quadrupled the phone's size so that the battery lasted 5 times as long (or whatever that would work out to)? What if they made it a cube? There's an really obvious trade-off here, a UTILITY tradeoff, and I simply don't believe you don't see it. Disagreeing with the cutoff point (eg. maybe you'd rather have another 1.7mm thickness for another two hours of talk time, if that's what it worked out to -- I have no idea what's realistic there) is another thing.
Given that he's got a shorter commute, he's getting more time now AND more time later. What he's losing is potentially some of the quality of time now.
With perfect information there's probably a turning point; as is only the asker can really answer.
The ambiguity between years and months is going to disappear for a long time very shortly.
I'm not aware of any place that does year-day-month as standard. Are you? I'm used to day-month-year, Americans are used to month-day-year, that's legitimately confusing. Year-month-day seems pretty standard in my experience.
Why? Doesn't that discourage small business and generally discourage interchangeability, by providing financial incentives to massively vertically integrated markets?
An MP component forces certain design decisions though, which aren't always appropriate to a single-player game and are frustrating to encounter over and over, especially in certain genres. That, or you end up with two games, somewhat related but optimized very differently, packaged together in one box where most consumers are really only after one or the other playstyle.
Multiplayer components to sim type games can be awful burdens. Multiplayer for sports/racing/fighting games is pretty much expected. Multiplayer for RTS or FPS is also a given, though it tends to enforce play-balance decisions. Blizzard steps much farther away from play-balance with the single player game, which is interesting but also frustrating when I'm waiting for my single-player SC2 experience because they need to endlessly rebalance the multiplayer (and I have played some original Starcraft multiplayer and enjoyed it, but it's not my main thing). Though I recognize that maybe SC2 wouldn't exist at all if not for the giant pot of gold that is SC2 multiplayer. Multiplayer for adventure games is almost uniformly stupid. I say almost because sometimes they find unique ways of being stupid. RPGs are so profoundly different with a multiplayer component that you typically hear of MMORPGs as their own genre with little crossover. Most RPGs I encounter that have both single and multiplayer are really action games with minor RPG components. You could probably do Fallout as a straight shooter if you pull out VATS, so there's the potential there, but it's not really the same game at all and it would make a shitty shooter. Neverwinter Nights being an interesting sort of exception.
Blanket statements like that make it less likely that I'd get an EA game other than maybe an RTS. II don't like most of the genres that have multiplayer as a given anyway.
Oh come on. They didn't make claims on the genre of High Fantasy. They made claims on particular plot elements of LotR, which the mod is explicitly trying to copy. Straight from them:
Our goal as a team is to realize the world of J.R.R. Tolkien as closely as possible to his vision. We hold the lore to a very high standard and will try not compromise to it. We use the films for inspiration, but base our visual design mainly on the descriptions in the books and the works of Ted Nasmith and John Howe. We work very hard to bring a quality greater than that in vanilla Skyrim. We want our work to be looked at on the same level as that of a professional game.
So to your statements:
Disagree, and this is so much stronger than the claim at hand that it's irrelevant. Disagree, and I don't even see what you're getting at here. Unless 100% of authors throughout history deny permission for shared settings, which they haven't (some explicitly set out to create shared settings), so it's a moot scenario. Disagree, and here is where I agree you have a point. Dude's been dead nearly 40 years, and the LotR books were getting old even when he was still alive. The aspects introduced particularly to the movie or other recent licensed media may be claimable (in my mind; obviously they are all legally claimable) because they are much newer. Even so, there may be some argument that the estate has continued to curate the universe continuously between then and now, unlike Shakespeare's estate.
I guess I don't have strong evidence to the contrary, but I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that most people who are Jews, Christians, Muslims, and members of similar sects literally believe in the tower of Babel story, or their equivalent stories.
In my experience, literalists are very rare, especially if you exclude the people who claim the bible is literally true but go to great contortions to explain away discrepancies between reality and the story. I know there are places where literalists are more common.
For every binary taking a change that is recompiled by somebody other than the user, the still has to make a download, so that's just trading off computing resources and time for network resources and time. As such, all else being equal the ABI should not change.
I don't see how pinch zoom is obvious at all. In fact I distinctly recall arguments on slashdot that pinch zoom on the original iPhone was backwards, and the closer your fingers got together the more you should be zoomed in (this is kind of like the eternal argument over what "scroll up" -- most people say you start at the top of the document and scroll down, but some insist that you start at the top and scroll up to the bottom).
Don't get me wrong -- I don't want pinch to zoom to be patented and the touchscreen market to be fragmented, and I see your prior art and it looks good to me. But I don't even see how it's obvious in retrospect, although I guess it must be for people to claim it's obvious now. It's not particularly skeumorphic. I get that it's kind of like stretching some material but stretching doesn't persist that way without distortion and then allow itself to be pushed back together.
If it has less than 10 possible results, it could still be useful if the incorrect results were guaranteed to be achieved > 10% of the time. Then you find the answer it gives least, and that's your answer.
"(The hardest-working women are often the ugliest.)"
I'm going to need to ask for a cite on that. It fits your argument but I've neither seen nor heard of evidence to support that assertion. It seems unlikely to me, if for no other reason than that beauty is not just nature but also work.
I saw it long before DailyKos. I think it came from the days of threaded message subjects where the entire conversation could sometimes be in the subject, appended with *nt* or (NM) or what-have-you.
It could conceivably be that the highest-selling games are also the lowest-pirated games. Actually, I'd think that was likely if for no other reason than just random variance in piracy rates would show up as higher sales. Though with Skyrim in particular, you'd expect them both to be high.
If you move to a new city and want to know where the fastener store, you'll either ask somebody (word of mouth advertising), or look it up in a directory (print advertising). Or possibly just wander around until you see a sign (street advertising).
I think you have a very limited view of what advertising is.
No, I think raehl's argument holds even so. The highest-fertility couples are more likely to end up with a pregnancy before they even decide to want kids, and then decide to bring the fetus to term. Low-fertility couples are likely to last, with the help of birth control, until they decide it's time for a kid.
Not sure how significant that bias is though. And come to think of it, I'm not sure low-fertility when not on birth control maps cleanly to low-fertility when on birth control; that's just an assumption of mine.
Part of the arbitraryness comes in the fact that fetuses don't develop at a constant rate. Fetal viability is a common one.
But birth is not an arbitrary cutoff at all -- that's the point where the fetus is no longer uniquely tied to an individual. After birth, if you really don't want to be a caretaker you can in theory pass it along to somebody else. Before birth, that's not an option. To some extent you could remove the fetus pre-term if viable, but even that is an invasive medical procedure on the mother and you can only do that relatively late anyway. And if society doesn't provide a good-enough mechanism to pass off an already-born child, then that's what a pro-lifer has to work to fix.
Myself, I go with birth as a cutoff, and frankly I don't think there's a large number of women waiting 8 months to abort when they can do it early and avoid symptoms -- late term abortions would either be because something prevented access to abortion, that something essentially being responsible for the delay, or because a medical condition or similar came up that changed circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you and I have different definitions of civilization. I'm not saying humans can't get there, but I wouldn't call that an interstellar civilization. I would call that multiple stellar civilizations. When you separate people by a wall of time that is a significant portion of a human lifespan, you've effectively separated out civilization. Round trip communications from one end of your 16 light year radius is 64 years (diameter 32 light years, there and back). Feel free to insert your own terminology.
I have to wonder what else you're assuming in your rejection of FTL
I didn't reject FTL. I said FTL implies time travel. It sounds like YOU are assuming time travel is impossible. Which would be fine except for the hypocrisy.
I also provided possible internally-consistent universes that could have FTL without causality violations. I honestly don't know how I could have given you more.
Here is a relatively understandable explanation of why beating a photon to its destination implies time travel, even if you don't locally travel faster than light: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html. Basically, if you can pass stuff along at FTL between people at sub-light speed, and those people are moving relative to one another, you can send stuff into the past.
There *are* workarounds. A fairly comprehensive list is here:
http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_part4.html#subsec:specialframe
They're all kind of about relativity being wrong, and there's no evidence any of these are true. Mostly wishful thinking on the part of people that want to believe we can have an interstellar civilization but can't quite let go of causality. Briefly:
1. FTL takes you to a parallel universe. So if you try to kill your past self, there's no paradox and you keep living because it was actually your counterpart in a different universe.
2. There's some unknown physics that would prevent using FTL to violate causality. So even though there's technically time travel in some sense, it has no practical use and therefore you could say it isn't "really" time travel.
3. A specific case of the above: perhaps the act of travelling FTL prevents any other FTL travel within a certain spacetime "radius".
4. Violate relativity by having a "true" frame of reference with a "true" sequence of events. All FTL takes place in that context and is theoretically unlimited in speed. Within any other frame of reference, it looks like a speed limit, but still possibly faster than light speed.
He's quoting the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. So it's not his logical gap or his own problem. It belongs to Douglas Adams.
He was responding to a guy who basically argued that thinness can't matter because people add a case that makes it less thin. The counterargument is that there's still a net gain in thinness.
The exact advantage you asked for is 1.7mm less thickness. Approximately 20% less thick if you don't use a case; a smaller reduction if you do.
It's not that difficult. Do you really not understand why somebody would want something that they carry around all the time, in their pockets or purses or whatever, to occupy less space? Would you be happy if they quadrupled the phone's size so that the battery lasted 5 times as long (or whatever that would work out to)? What if they made it a cube? There's an really obvious trade-off here, a UTILITY tradeoff, and I simply don't believe you don't see it. Disagreeing with the cutoff point (eg. maybe you'd rather have another 1.7mm thickness for another two hours of talk time, if that's what it worked out to -- I have no idea what's realistic there) is another thing.
Given that he's got a shorter commute, he's getting more time now AND more time later. What he's losing is potentially some of the quality of time now.
With perfect information there's probably a turning point; as is only the asker can really answer.
What do you think moderation is, other than sitting there and judging people according to your personal standards?
The ambiguity between years and months is going to disappear for a long time very shortly.
I'm not aware of any place that does year-day-month as standard. Are you? I'm used to day-month-year, Americans are used to month-day-year, that's legitimately confusing. Year-month-day seems pretty standard in my experience.
Why? Doesn't that discourage small business and generally discourage interchangeability, by providing financial incentives to massively vertically integrated markets?
An MP component forces certain design decisions though, which aren't always appropriate to a single-player game and are frustrating to encounter over and over, especially in certain genres. That, or you end up with two games, somewhat related but optimized very differently, packaged together in one box where most consumers are really only after one or the other playstyle.
Multiplayer components to sim type games can be awful burdens.
Multiplayer for sports/racing/fighting games is pretty much expected.
Multiplayer for RTS or FPS is also a given, though it tends to enforce play-balance decisions. Blizzard steps much farther away from play-balance with the single player game, which is interesting but also frustrating when I'm waiting for my single-player SC2 experience because they need to endlessly rebalance the multiplayer (and I have played some original Starcraft multiplayer and enjoyed it, but it's not my main thing). Though I recognize that maybe SC2 wouldn't exist at all if not for the giant pot of gold that is SC2 multiplayer.
Multiplayer for adventure games is almost uniformly stupid. I say almost because sometimes they find unique ways of being stupid.
RPGs are so profoundly different with a multiplayer component that you typically hear of MMORPGs as their own genre with little crossover. Most RPGs I encounter that have both single and multiplayer are really action games with minor RPG components. You could probably do Fallout as a straight shooter if you pull out VATS, so there's the potential there, but it's not really the same game at all and it would make a shitty shooter. Neverwinter Nights being an interesting sort of exception.
Blanket statements like that make it less likely that I'd get an EA game other than maybe an RTS. II don't like most of the genres that have multiplayer as a given anyway.
Oh come on. They didn't make claims on the genre of High Fantasy. They made claims on particular plot elements of LotR, which the mod is explicitly trying to copy. Straight from them:
Our goal as a team is to realize the world of J.R.R. Tolkien as closely as possible to his vision. We hold the lore to a very high standard and will try not compromise to it. We use the films for inspiration, but base our visual design mainly on the descriptions in the books and the works of Ted Nasmith and John Howe. We work very hard to bring a quality greater than that in vanilla Skyrim. We want our work to be looked at on the same level as that of a professional game.
So to your statements:
Disagree, and this is so much stronger than the claim at hand that it's irrelevant.
Disagree, and I don't even see what you're getting at here. Unless 100% of authors throughout history deny permission for shared settings, which they haven't (some explicitly set out to create shared settings), so it's a moot scenario.
Disagree, and here is where I agree you have a point. Dude's been dead nearly 40 years, and the LotR books were getting old even when he was still alive. The aspects introduced particularly to the movie or other recent licensed media may be claimable (in my mind; obviously they are all legally claimable) because they are much newer. Even so, there may be some argument that the estate has continued to curate the universe continuously between then and now, unlike Shakespeare's estate.
School was always 9-3:30 where I grew up, approximately (one year started at 8:50, a different year ended at 9:40, it once ended as early as 9:15).
Sounds like half an hour extended to me, and much less summer -- I grew up with about 10 or 11 weeks.
I guess I don't have strong evidence to the contrary, but I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that most people who are Jews, Christians, Muslims, and members of similar sects literally believe in the tower of Babel story, or their equivalent stories.
In my experience, literalists are very rare, especially if you exclude the people who claim the bible is literally true but go to great contortions to explain away discrepancies between reality and the story. I know there are places where literalists are more common.
Games maybe. DLC no. It's not even sensible -- what are you downloading to, RAM? If they had the "DLC" on a disk they could maybe play it.
For every binary taking a change that is recompiled by somebody other than the user, the still has to make a download, so that's just trading off computing resources and time for network resources and time. As such, all else being equal the ABI should not change.
In science, that's considered a problem warranting further investigation, not a solution.
I don't see how pinch zoom is obvious at all. In fact I distinctly recall arguments on slashdot that pinch zoom on the original iPhone was backwards, and the closer your fingers got together the more you should be zoomed in (this is kind of like the eternal argument over what "scroll up" -- most people say you start at the top of the document and scroll down, but some insist that you start at the top and scroll up to the bottom).
Don't get me wrong -- I don't want pinch to zoom to be patented and the touchscreen market to be fragmented, and I see your prior art and it looks good to me. But I don't even see how it's obvious in retrospect, although I guess it must be for people to claim it's obvious now. It's not particularly skeumorphic. I get that it's kind of like stretching some material but stretching doesn't persist that way without distortion and then allow itself to be pushed back together.
If it has less than 10 possible results, it could still be useful if the incorrect results were guaranteed to be achieved > 10% of the time. Then you find the answer it gives least, and that's your answer.
"(The hardest-working women are often the ugliest.)"
I'm going to need to ask for a cite on that. It fits your argument but I've neither seen nor heard of evidence to support that assertion. It seems unlikely to me, if for no other reason than that beauty is not just nature but also work.
I saw it long before DailyKos. I think it came from the days of threaded message subjects where the entire conversation could sometimes be in the subject, appended with *nt* or (NM) or what-have-you.
Fallacy of division: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
It could conceivably be that the highest-selling games are also the lowest-pirated games. Actually, I'd think that was likely if for no other reason than just random variance in piracy rates would show up as higher sales. Though with Skyrim in particular, you'd expect them both to be high.
I think you must be in a bubble, video-game wise. Assassin's Creed is insanely popular (after all, the non-pirate sales are millions...)
Also, Ubisoft didn't claim that all their properties were pirated equally. Maybe the most popular ones are also disproportionately paid-for.
I really have insufficient data to confirm or deny their claim, and I expect the same is true for you.
If you move to a new city and want to know where the fastener store, you'll either ask somebody (word of mouth advertising), or look it up in a directory (print advertising). Or possibly just wander around until you see a sign (street advertising).
I think you have a very limited view of what advertising is.
No, I think raehl's argument holds even so. The highest-fertility couples are more likely to end up with a pregnancy before they even decide to want kids, and then decide to bring the fetus to term. Low-fertility couples are likely to last, with the help of birth control, until they decide it's time for a kid.
Not sure how significant that bias is though. And come to think of it, I'm not sure low-fertility when not on birth control maps cleanly to low-fertility when on birth control; that's just an assumption of mine.
Once you got your SSN you had memories retroactively introduced consistent with your life history to date.
Part of the arbitraryness comes in the fact that fetuses don't develop at a constant rate. Fetal viability is a common one.
But birth is not an arbitrary cutoff at all -- that's the point where the fetus is no longer uniquely tied to an individual. After birth, if you really don't want to be a caretaker you can in theory pass it along to somebody else. Before birth, that's not an option. To some extent you could remove the fetus pre-term if viable, but even that is an invasive medical procedure on the mother and you can only do that relatively late anyway. And if society doesn't provide a good-enough mechanism to pass off an already-born child, then that's what a pro-lifer has to work to fix.
Myself, I go with birth as a cutoff, and frankly I don't think there's a large number of women waiting 8 months to abort when they can do it early and avoid symptoms -- late term abortions would either be because something prevented access to abortion, that something essentially being responsible for the delay, or because a medical condition or similar came up that changed circumstances.