It's only already done if the only ddraw game you want to play is Wing Commander 1-4 (Windows versions). And only with conventional monitor setups and only if you never want to capture the window content, due to the kludges involved. And if you can stand the known bugs he mentioned, eg. the blinking screen effect described in Wing Commander 4.
So basically, it's only already done if you want a suboptimal experience. But you were just talking about how you wanted an optimal solution, and how a solution that basically works better than this is "never" the optimal solution. To be fair, it sounds like 1-3 work pretty well, but for 4 you have to put up with some crap. And any other ddraw game is unlikely to work all that well.
This is a fun an interesting reverse engineering project. Stop being such a prick about it.
I'm not sure how you can conclude that something has to have always existed. In fact, that seems to be the turtles all the way down position.
Perhaps the only thing that exists is a finite time-space. Or perhaps time is infinite only in the future direction, and not in the past.
I can't think of one single cogent reason why an infinite regress of time is more likely than a finite one. As for the opposite direction, I can cite entropy. Although I can also counter that because it may very well be that entropy is merely an expression of probability over the long term rather than a necessity, so given infinite time you would get "temporarily" reversed entropy for a handful of billions of years even through sheer chance.
I think the problem is that you're assuming that if time has a beginning, then there has to something "before" it that caused the beginning -- the uncaused cause. I think requiring a first mover or whatever is somewhat nonsensical (there is no before time, by definition; and if you invoke "outside of time" then it's exactly as relevant to universes with infinite time, so it's irrelevant), and anyway it's a leap of faith that I don't see any support for.
Funny... why the hell every almost every PC and Motherboard still comes with PS/2 connectors? I have not seen a PS/2 mouse or keyboard for sale in stores for years now, yet all PCs seem to keep the unnecessary ports there.
A lot of people still have a working mouse and keyboard for PS/2. Mostly I see those things sold with USB to PS/2 adapters, so they still work, anyway. Wikipedia tells me that non-Windows systems under KVM behave better under PS/2. and also that we're starting to see it dropped from motherboards. Personally, I use them to free up two USB slots without buying a hub. They'll go away eventually.
Yet everyone called Apple crazy, and bashed the hell out of them, when they removed Floppies from their machines all the way back in 1998. It was not until 5 years later that Dell decided to stop making fun of Apple and just also remove the floppy disks from their machines.
Are you serious? It really isn't difficult to see the difference. In 1998, a floppy drive wasn't worthless yet. It existed in an age when broadband penetration was very, very low; and even Internet connections were not ubiquitous (my home was first connected to the Internet in 1999, I believe), and yet a network or Internet connection was the only reasonable way to get digital data off of the iMac. In 2003, some things had changed. People stopped making fun of Apple not because they realized they had been idiots all along, but because having no floppy stopped meaning that your data was locked to one machine, so iMacs were no longer automatically terrible choices for a large swathe of potential customers.
I can agree with the rest of what you say. Apple's competitors are certainly looking at what works and what doesn't about what Apple does. One more source of data for all their competitors.
This isn't about arresting people, it's about fixing exploits. It doesn't matter how pure or foul their intentions were; if they send the exploit to Microsoft then Microsoft can detect and fix it.
I'm right with you on basically everything else you said, but I'd still like to suggest that in modern usage, "its" should be used for the possessive. Yes, it breaks the "rule" that you put an apostrophe for the possessive. It's a standard and useful convention that resolves ambiguity, and I can see essentially no benefit to allowing "it's" for the possessive other than shutting up pretentious douches on forums - which, don't get me wrong, is a noble pursuit.
I don't see why the rule of "its vs. it's" is any more baseless than the rule I'm inferring from your argument, "an s added to indicate the possessive is always [either allowed to or required] to have an apostrophe prepended". I have, at least, the OED backing me up on this.
If you go back far enough, you can find very strange spelling, grammar, words, and even letters in the English language, but that doesn't have much bearing on what's easy to understand today.
Also, insisting that flammable is not a word is a little odd. It's in lots of dictionaries, has latin roots semi-independent of the roots of inflammable, and came into English in the 19th century. Thus, it fits the prescriptivist view as well as the descriptivist one. Yes, inflammable is slightly older.
I would enjoy a world very much where people stopped getting pissy about starting a sentence with "and" or "because", or splitting infinitives, or other things that are perfectly valid, commonly used, and don't hurt much of anything.
"Sure, if by 'self sufficient' you mean 'living in stone age conditions'."
I don't.
"Sure a rural region can provide all three 'for themselves' so long as they have an industrial base to provide the tools and implements, otherwise it's back to the stone age."
Are you under the impression that "rural area" means "only farms"? You know more electricity is generated in rural areas than urban and suburban, and that there are factories in rural areas?
We're talking about the rural United States. We're not talking about Somalia.
Roads between cities and rural areas are primarily for the benefit of cities. Rural communities are often fairly self-sufficient, but sufficiently large cities are not.
People who produce goods in rural areas are generally either producing them for the local communities, or they are producing them because you cannot produce them en masse in a city (eg. food, certain sources of electricity); otherwise, they would produce much closer to where they sell.
But that's all beside the point. Instead of saying "tough shit" and avoiding the question, the GGP could have given an actual answer, such as: keep using cars in those areas, or it might be more economically viable to use . Instead, he went on a rant about subsidization.
What makes you so confident that Mozilla could easily receive the same income from Yahoo or Microsoft? I mean, maybe. But I didn't think either company made as much profit per ad as Google does, which would mean that even with the same revenue sharing agreement, you would predict a drop in Mozilla income.
(And if you're alluding to a source outside of search, then why aren't they tapping it today?)
I expect it's because during peak usage, you get less bandwidth. But also more users are using it during peak hours (by definition). So the bulk of people are using it primarily at peak hours and getting <= 3 Mbps, and the remainder get >> 4Mbps on average (possibly pretty close to 6.7 on off-peak hours).
Well no, the magic of creationism is that it can fit any evidence it wants to (this is also why it has no predictive power). Everything could be created to seem as though it were arrived at by non-creationistic processes.
Creationism fits the evidence as well as anything else because it fits any evidence, but it introduces something wacky and complicated that doesn't need to be there to explain all the evidence (that is, maybe instead of being created to look as though lifeforms evolved over time, lifeforms actually evolved over time).
There are a whole host of weirder cases, too, that imply that rape victims actually gave consent. Remember how Whoopi Goldberg ranting about how Roman Polanski's drugging and raping an unconscious child wasn't really rape? I'm not sure what she was getting at, but if it wasn't rape then it stands to reason that Whoopi thought something about the unconscious, drugged girl gave consent to Polanski.
But if you can produce mainstream commentators...
You are moving goalposts and putting them someplace strange and unnecessary. This isn't about political commentators blaming the victim, it's about members of the public blaming the victim, all the time. Fair enough that you can find a lone person with an insane definition of anything, but this is hardly a rare viewpoint.
If you read the article, neither Microsoft nor Intel are getting a free pass on anything. There's no free pass. The proportion of H1Bs at these companies isn't even close to the threshold beyond which it costs extra.
I really didn't like Civ III. I found myself playing Civ II after getting bored with Civ III. Civ IV, though, was great. It was different from Civ II and II had some advantages, but Civ IV is the one I'd keep loading up.
The one problem with Civ IV is that it seems unnecessarily perf-intensive for a turn based strategy game.
I don't know about other highways, but all those things are untrue of the highway 407 in Ontario.
There's a complicated pay structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407#Tolls), which includes per-trip fees, distance fees that vary depending on which section of highway you're driving on and when you're driving on it (which is used as a surrogate for depending on traffic) and your vehicle weight and size (which is as close to bandwidth as you get on a highway), and whether you have a transponder or they had to go to the difficulty of reading your license plate from a camera snapshot.
So "you only pay once" is false, and you do pay a different amount depending on where you're travelling and with what and how much, and while the cities themselves aren't directly paying for extra vehicles, their residents are being charged more because their section of highway is considered higher traffic.
Pedestrians should look both ways before they cross the road and observe the local traffic laws and customs. That's taking an active interest in your own personal security. But also, vehicle operators should be wary of pedestrians and certainly try not to run them over, even if they don't look both ways.
The problem here isn't that we shouldn't strive to educate users. The problem is that the user being poorly educated in these matters isn't an excuse for running somebody over.
He's not looking at it backwards at all. Games ARE artificial limitations. That's the point of them. You're looking at things sideways.
You could make a peripheral with a button, "win the game". Not implementing the "win the game" capability would make it more fair when playing against people with a mouse and keyboard. The solution is not to assign a "win the game" feature to a mouse button and gamepad to even things up. The solution is to not implement a "win the game" button. It's more fun that way. You'll note that games with cheat codes to win the game in single player usually disable them in multiplayer...
Your walking speed is capped, your ammo is often capped, this that and the other thing is capped, and ultimately if you get down to it your mouse speed *is* actually capped, you just don't notice it and the cap is higher than a stick.
In any case, the point isn't "let's make it a fair field for competing with different control schemes", the point is "just because users of one control scheme consistently beat users of another control scheme doesn't make the control scheme 'better'". The measure of a control scheme, when it comes to games, is not how easy it is to win, but how fun and ergonomic it is. And that gets a bit subjective at this point. I'd say that for many games, the gamepad really is superior just because it's easy to hold it for a long time. But at the same time I wouldn't want to play Starcraft II on a gamepad.
I agree, Kurzweil is really jumping the gun here, but making predictions about 1000 years is a bit ridiculous too -- it's far too long a timeframe to be making predictions like that. A millennium is nearly incomprehensibly long. We just don't have any clue where we'll be in 1000 years.
If nothing else, given 1000 years we might brute-force simulate the input/output responses of individual neurons and hook them up with the same connections and feedbacks to get an artificial human-level intelligence without truly understanding why it makes intelligence, then fiddle with it until it's smarter than humans and the singularity kicks off. I recall IBM was doing something like that with a mouse brain recently.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only already done if the only ddraw game you want to play is Wing Commander 1-4 (Windows versions). And only with conventional monitor setups and only if you never want to capture the window content, due to the kludges involved. And if you can stand the known bugs he mentioned, eg. the blinking screen effect described in Wing Commander 4.
So basically, it's only already done if you want a suboptimal experience. But you were just talking about how you wanted an optimal solution, and how a solution that basically works better than this is "never" the optimal solution. To be fair, it sounds like 1-3 work pretty well, but for 4 you have to put up with some crap. And any other ddraw game is unlikely to work all that well.
This is a fun an interesting reverse engineering project. Stop being such a prick about it.
I'm not sure how you can conclude that something has to have always existed. In fact, that seems to be the turtles all the way down position.
Perhaps the only thing that exists is a finite time-space. Or perhaps time is infinite only in the future direction, and not in the past.
I can't think of one single cogent reason why an infinite regress of time is more likely than a finite one. As for the opposite direction, I can cite entropy. Although I can also counter that because it may very well be that entropy is merely an expression of probability over the long term rather than a necessity, so given infinite time you would get "temporarily" reversed entropy for a handful of billions of years even through sheer chance.
I think the problem is that you're assuming that if time has a beginning, then there has to something "before" it that caused the beginning -- the uncaused cause. I think requiring a first mover or whatever is somewhat nonsensical (there is no before time, by definition; and if you invoke "outside of time" then it's exactly as relevant to universes with infinite time, so it's irrelevant), and anyway it's a leap of faith that I don't see any support for.
Funny... why the hell every almost every PC and Motherboard still comes with PS/2 connectors? I have not seen a PS/2 mouse or keyboard for sale in stores for years now, yet all PCs seem to keep the unnecessary ports there.
A lot of people still have a working mouse and keyboard for PS/2. Mostly I see those things sold with USB to PS/2 adapters, so they still work, anyway. Wikipedia tells me that non-Windows systems under KVM behave better under PS/2. and also that we're starting to see it dropped from motherboards. Personally, I use them to free up two USB slots without buying a hub. They'll go away eventually.
Yet everyone called Apple crazy, and bashed the hell out of them, when they removed Floppies from their machines all the way back in 1998. It was not until 5 years later that Dell decided to stop making fun of Apple and just also remove the floppy disks from their machines.
Are you serious? It really isn't difficult to see the difference. In 1998, a floppy drive wasn't worthless yet. It existed in an age when broadband penetration was very, very low; and even Internet connections were not ubiquitous (my home was first connected to the Internet in 1999, I believe), and yet a network or Internet connection was the only reasonable way to get digital data off of the iMac. In 2003, some things had changed. People stopped making fun of Apple not because they realized they had been idiots all along, but because having no floppy stopped meaning that your data was locked to one machine, so iMacs were no longer automatically terrible choices for a large swathe of potential customers.
I can agree with the rest of what you say. Apple's competitors are certainly looking at what works and what doesn't about what Apple does. One more source of data for all their competitors.
Why?
No, you are not. Those are attacks sent to microsoft.com. System crashes are a different number which are probably going to a different place.
This isn't about arresting people, it's about fixing exploits. It doesn't matter how pure or foul their intentions were; if they send the exploit to Microsoft then Microsoft can detect and fix it.
I'm right with you on basically everything else you said, but I'd still like to suggest that in modern usage, "its" should be used for the possessive. Yes, it breaks the "rule" that you put an apostrophe for the possessive. It's a standard and useful convention that resolves ambiguity, and I can see essentially no benefit to allowing "it's" for the possessive other than shutting up pretentious douches on forums - which, don't get me wrong, is a noble pursuit.
I don't see why the rule of "its vs. it's" is any more baseless than the rule I'm inferring from your argument, "an s added to indicate the possessive is always [either allowed to or required] to have an apostrophe prepended". I have, at least, the OED backing me up on this.
If you go back far enough, you can find very strange spelling, grammar, words, and even letters in the English language, but that doesn't have much bearing on what's easy to understand today.
Also, insisting that flammable is not a word is a little odd. It's in lots of dictionaries, has latin roots semi-independent of the roots of inflammable, and came into English in the 19th century. Thus, it fits the prescriptivist view as well as the descriptivist one. Yes, inflammable is slightly older.
I would enjoy a world very much where people stopped getting pissy about starting a sentence with "and" or "because", or splitting infinitives, or other things that are perfectly valid, commonly used, and don't hurt much of anything.
"Sure, if by 'self sufficient' you mean 'living in stone age conditions'."
I don't.
"Sure a rural region can provide all three 'for themselves' so long as they have an industrial base to provide the tools and implements, otherwise it's back to the stone age."
Are you under the impression that "rural area" means "only farms"? You know more electricity is generated in rural areas than urban and suburban, and that there are factories in rural areas?
We're talking about the rural United States. We're not talking about Somalia.
Roads between cities and rural areas are primarily for the benefit of cities. Rural communities are often fairly self-sufficient, but sufficiently large cities are not.
People who produce goods in rural areas are generally either producing them for the local communities, or they are producing them because you cannot produce them en masse in a city (eg. food, certain sources of electricity); otherwise, they would produce much closer to where they sell.
But that's all beside the point. Instead of saying "tough shit" and avoiding the question, the GGP could have given an actual answer, such as: keep using cars in those areas, or it might be more economically viable to use . Instead, he went on a rant about subsidization.
Aside from local search engines that serve one nationality, like Yandex, really the only reasonable alternative is Bing (whether directly from Microsoft or via Yahoo, whose search engine is Bing, as of this week http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1906048/yahoo_and_bing_partner_up_to_combat_google/index.html?source=r_technology).
What makes you so confident that Mozilla could easily receive the same income from Yahoo or Microsoft? I mean, maybe. But I didn't think either company made as much profit per ad as Google does, which would mean that even with the same revenue sharing agreement, you would predict a drop in Mozilla income.
(And if you're alluding to a source outside of search, then why aren't they tapping it today?)
I expect it's because during peak usage, you get less bandwidth. But also more users are using it during peak hours (by definition). So the bulk of people are using it primarily at peak hours and getting <= 3 Mbps, and the remainder get >> 4Mbps on average (possibly pretty close to 6.7 on off-peak hours).
Stalking is a form of sexual harassment. Robbing a bank is not a form of wearing jeans.
Well no, the magic of creationism is that it can fit any evidence it wants to (this is also why it has no predictive power). Everything could be created to seem as though it were arrived at by non-creationistic processes.
Creationism fits the evidence as well as anything else because it fits any evidence, but it introduces something wacky and complicated that doesn't need to be there to explain all the evidence (that is, maybe instead of being created to look as though lifeforms evolved over time, lifeforms actually evolved over time).
The Islamic world wasn't the whole of his examples, just an afterthought thrown in there.
Look at any Digg story about rape. Or any article that drifts into whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape.
Then there are stories like this http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10211/1076338-455.stm where every mention of rape is assumed to actually be consensual sex (in other words, she asked for it).
Or these pamphlets that aim to spread the message everywhere http://jezebel.com/5482688/you-make-men-want-to-be-sinful-blaming-the-victim-religious-pamphlet-edition
Or http://jezebel.com/5478360/she-knew-what-would-happen-if-she-started-drinking-blaming-the-victim-princeton-edition
This shows that it isn't just a small nutball collective: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251040/Rape-Its-fault-victims-say-50-women.html?ITO=1490&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+dailymail/home+(Home+|+Mail+Online)
The boys aren't to blame because she drank a bit: http://current.com/1db6i4c
Here's what rapists think about it: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/15/why-dont-we-accept-victim-blaming-from-rapists/
There are a whole host of weirder cases, too, that imply that rape victims actually gave consent. Remember how Whoopi Goldberg ranting about how Roman Polanski's drugging and raping an unconscious child wasn't really rape? I'm not sure what she was getting at, but if it wasn't rape then it stands to reason that Whoopi thought something about the unconscious, drugged girl gave consent to Polanski.
But if you can produce mainstream commentators...
You are moving goalposts and putting them someplace strange and unnecessary. This isn't about political commentators blaming the victim, it's about members of the public blaming the victim, all the time. Fair enough that you can find a lone person with an insane definition of anything, but this is hardly a rare viewpoint.
If you read the article, neither Microsoft nor Intel are getting a free pass on anything. There's no free pass. The proportion of H1Bs at these companies isn't even close to the threshold beyond which it costs extra.
What if I flood the job market with an infinite number of clones of you?
Thin air? Stuffed ballots? These claims come out of a census of first-year students who live in residence. Use real arguments next time.
I'm confused. In what sense is Apple less experienced that Microsoft? They were founded within a year of one another...
What consensus is this?
I really didn't like Civ III. I found myself playing Civ II after getting bored with Civ III. Civ IV, though, was great. It was different from Civ II and II had some advantages, but Civ IV is the one I'd keep loading up.
The one problem with Civ IV is that it seems unnecessarily perf-intensive for a turn based strategy game.
I don't know about other highways, but all those things are untrue of the highway 407 in Ontario.
There's a complicated pay structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Highway_407#Tolls), which includes per-trip fees, distance fees that vary depending on which section of highway you're driving on and when you're driving on it (which is used as a surrogate for depending on traffic) and your vehicle weight and size (which is as close to bandwidth as you get on a highway), and whether you have a transponder or they had to go to the difficulty of reading your license plate from a camera snapshot.
So "you only pay once" is false, and you do pay a different amount depending on where you're travelling and with what and how much, and while the cities themselves aren't directly paying for extra vehicles, their residents are being charged more because their section of highway is considered higher traffic.
Pedestrians should look both ways before they cross the road and observe the local traffic laws and customs. That's taking an active interest in your own personal security. But also, vehicle operators should be wary of pedestrians and certainly try not to run them over, even if they don't look both ways.
The problem here isn't that we shouldn't strive to educate users. The problem is that the user being poorly educated in these matters isn't an excuse for running somebody over.
He's not looking at it backwards at all. Games ARE artificial limitations. That's the point of them. You're looking at things sideways.
You could make a peripheral with a button, "win the game". Not implementing the "win the game" capability would make it more fair when playing against people with a mouse and keyboard. The solution is not to assign a "win the game" feature to a mouse button and gamepad to even things up. The solution is to not implement a "win the game" button. It's more fun that way. You'll note that games with cheat codes to win the game in single player usually disable them in multiplayer...
Your walking speed is capped, your ammo is often capped, this that and the other thing is capped, and ultimately if you get down to it your mouse speed *is* actually capped, you just don't notice it and the cap is higher than a stick.
In any case, the point isn't "let's make it a fair field for competing with different control schemes", the point is "just because users of one control scheme consistently beat users of another control scheme doesn't make the control scheme 'better'". The measure of a control scheme, when it comes to games, is not how easy it is to win, but how fun and ergonomic it is. And that gets a bit subjective at this point. I'd say that for many games, the gamepad really is superior just because it's easy to hold it for a long time. But at the same time I wouldn't want to play Starcraft II on a gamepad.
This is true only in the same sense that the surest way to world peace is to kill everyone that threatens world piece.
I agree, Kurzweil is really jumping the gun here, but making predictions about 1000 years is a bit ridiculous too -- it's far too long a timeframe to be making predictions like that. A millennium is nearly incomprehensibly long. We just don't have any clue where we'll be in 1000 years.
If nothing else, given 1000 years we might brute-force simulate the input/output responses of individual neurons and hook them up with the same connections and feedbacks to get an artificial human-level intelligence without truly understanding why it makes intelligence, then fiddle with it until it's smarter than humans and the singularity kicks off. I recall IBM was doing something like that with a mouse brain recently.
So publically disclose after 60 days like you said you would. Not after 5 days, like you said you wouldn't.
"Yeah man, I knocked him out and stole his wallet. In my defense, he frequently undertips."