Couldn't almost all of the planets in fact be moons, which would therefore be in essentially the same solar orbit?
Hypothetically, couldn't they also be around a series of planets with, cosmically speaking, relatively close orbits to one another around a star with a relatively wide habitable belt? It seems that even in our Solar system, Venus, Earth, Earth's moon, Mars, and maybe some Jovian moons might all be terraformable so at least some of the planet is habitable, by sufficiently advanced aliens with sufficient time and a shitload of resources, which seems to be a precondition anyway. Venus is far too hot but that's atmospheric to a large extent. Mars is too cold (to a less severe degree), but that's also atmospheric. There are other issues with both planets, and all the other moons, obviously. It seems unlikely to me that the Sol system is the most suitable system for humanity, other than Earth itself of course by virtue of us having evolved there, so they could go to a system with planets where terraforming is a little less difficult, too.
Might be an unlikely solar system, but if I were evacuating an overpopulated Earth on generation ships, that's the sort of solar system I'd head to.
Also, why is it that Pax-created reavers can't make more reavers through torture (I admit, this bothers me too).
In principle a model could comply with an objective reality with 100% convergence, but we would be forever unable to prove it 100% because there is no direct access to objective reality's fundamentals, only experimentation & prediction. That doesn't mean the model isn't 100% accurate, it just means we can't say (with 100% confidence) that it is.
You're on an airplane. You can't take a crying baby outside, not without it splattering disgustingly onto the ground a moment later and a lot of legal inquiry.
I'm right with you on a baby in a restaurant, or idiots making tonnes of noise early/late in the day. I had a neighbour who played WWII movies on loop, high volume, right next to the wall, all night, every night, and who told me I should wear earphones to sleep if it bothered me because he could barely hear it.
It's an airplane. Nobody can control their baby 24/7 and they're in an airplane. There's no option. You really do have to deal with it.
The iPhone was in 2007 which was 6 years instead of 5 -- not really that far off.
I'd also take issue with saying that the iPhone is not a PC. The difference between a 2001 PC and an iPhone other than size and input methods (which also apply to tablets) is mostly academic (aside from the artificial restriction on multitasking).
But I agree, it's not the most popular form of electronic device (by a longshot, yet). Still, it and similar competing phones have become quite a bit more popular.
That's not fair. Dragon Age had a frustrating camera that you occasionally had to fight with (I found), particularly when trying to use magic or otherwise plan around enemies not in your immediate vicinity. This is quite unlike a fixed-perspective game which will generally not have camera issues because they are trivially solved.
The keywords for a search are "primate culture", in quotes. Here's one such example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090112110058.htm with stone-throwers. This one http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2001-06-05-animal-usat.htm mentions different chimpanzees using different methods for termite-fishing, and various grooming methods, and a Japanese primate who learned to wash sandy human-cut potatoes, without humans teaching her about washing them, and then her tribe picked up the trick and her descendents do that to this day, which I think meets the "building on knowledge of previous generations" criteria.
Let me tell you, until you've watched the Imagination-land part 1 episode in descriptive video, you have NEVER truly seen South Park.
Sadly, parts 2 and 3 were done with a different voice actor who seems to be a moron whose writer wasn't paying attention. But the first one is fan-bloody-tastic.
Well, you could make the argument that overpopulation is part of the problem, and thus per capita measures also fail to capture the full cost. Not that the US is doing more about it than China, these days.
1. We need to HAVE a continent-wide superconducting power grid before this can work. 2. A superconducting power grid is far from lossless unless we get materials that superconduct at the highest temperatures that will ever be encountered during transmission. Right now it would take a lot of refridgeration, which requires energy to maintain. The tech today allows, at best, an incremental improvement in transmission waste. The tech required for truly lossless (or near-lossless) transmission is a bit out there, perhaps moreso than fusion. 3. At least the Americas are fairly narrow and long with respect to the sunrise/sunset terminators. There are many hours where it's nighttime throughout the continent. This has obvious consequences for solar, but it also affects wind power and oceanic somewhat (AFAIK not geothermal). You can't load-balance power if you aren't generating it *anywhere*.
Until then -- yes, those are marginal and intermittent power sources, and no, I don't have a "vested interest in the status quo" (what a way to shut down opposition).
Another approach is to improve battery technologies so that you can load-balance over time, instead of over space (with the superconducting grid), but again that's relying on technological advances that don't exist yet.
You can't ever have 100% accuracy, ever. Nothing you do can ever change that.
This isn't talking about " 2+2 = 3.9999999999882 on average after 100 runs". The given algorithm is 2+2 = 4, with 99.99999999% confidence, determined after 100 runs. Which is what you ALREADY get with non-quantum computers, because nothing is 100%.
Quantum computing is not like floating-point computing. It gets an exact answer, with any individual run having potentially shitty accuracy, but accuracy can be fixed. The errors and tolerances don't accumulate; it's confidence that accumulates with this sort of algorithm.
You misread him. His argument was that after that effort, the ones that deserve 6 and below are cut and don't reach reviewers, and therefore don't exist.
My personal opinion is that this means that he should rescale 6 down to 1, and leave 0 for what he now calls 0-5. If something is that incredibly rare, it doesn't deserve half the namespace to be allocated to differentiating between just how exceptionally bad it is.
But he didn't say anything about sympathies to the devs.
If he's cured of being a dickbag, problem solved. Revenge goes from being insufficient in my opinion, to just plain inappropriate. It's like punishing the unwilling back-seat passenger of a car for speeding. Even if the speeding causes an accident in which busloads of children are killed.
Not so. You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future. Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question, and therefore reproducing the results doesn't help, for it does not mean you'll reproduce the results *again*.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
With that said, such "faith" is, I would argue, essentially to daily living and doesn't really deserve to be categorized as "faith" except in the most pedantic of senses. Without acting under this presupposition, you cannot learn. Anything. I suspect that biologically this presupposition cannot be unlearned since it appears to be intrinsic to learning even in some of the stupider members of the animal kingdom.
I'm not sure that giving knowledge away for free was really promoted there. The humans did give away knowledge, and in the end it worked out but for a time it started a lot of shit.
And then at the end of Dragon's Egg, the now-vastly-more-advanced aliens don't actually return the favour to the humans. Not directly, anyway: they leave the secrets in places that can only be accessed once the secret has already been discovered, basically so humans can check their work when they catch up.
You don't get thrown back because even though the bowling ball exerts a force back on you, you ALSO exert a force on another object, which is to say, the ground, through your feet, which puts forward another opposite reaction counteracting the bowling ball. Since the angles don't match, you also get a net upward force out of the deal, but gravity counteracts that. If this weren't so, you would slowly topple backward (slowly, because you weigh much more than a bowling ball) unless you shot another bowling ball in the opposite direction with the same impulse.
In the same way, Sylar just has to push in the other direction. Be it a fixed object, or even just a light wind across a broad swathe of air. Or, alternatively, he might not even be the anchor for the force at all. He could be influencing some other object (again, likely air) to exert a force against his victims, in the same sense that my garage remote doesn't actually exert a force to open my garage door, but simply influences the internal mechanisms to pull the garage door upward (all without being thrown to the ground!).
I'm not the first in the thread to suggest this, but you haven't been reading, apparently. I don't mean that to be snarky, I certainly don't read all the slashdot comments, I prefer my own self-righteous writing too:).
Heroes is definitely magic and fantastic rather than scientific, and the solar eclipse was not life-accurate, and I hate the pseudoscientific bullshit that spews from Mohinder's mouth. And hyperbole is all well and good, but don't say "there's not an ounce of science in it" and follow up with an anecdote as "proof". The logical flaw is kind of ironic.
Smoking is a choice. It's not coerced. It's not even a choice in the sense that having sex is a choice -- there isn't some biological instinct built into you over the course of untold eons demanding that you smoke. There is, at best, peer pressure, and that's been on a long decline. And yes, there is also addiction, but you rarely get addicted to smoking without initially choosing in the first place (some people got military-issue cigarettes in wartime, which is somewhat coerced, and I think that does messy up the situation a bit, but going forward that isn't happening anymore).
It's also an inherently relevant choice, since it actually damages the electronics involved. You choose to place yourself in a category that damages electronics, and your electronics are damaged. It's absolutely okay to discriminate against a minority who willfully chooses to engage in actions which damage electronics, and by definition 100% of this minority do, when you're considering repairing said electronics. In the same way that it's okay to discriminate against people who use more electricity by charging them more with their electricity bill.
That said, I think Apple's contract should have had something in there about this more explicitly.
If you ever visit a site with a flash ad and just leave it in the background, it's game over for Chrome on some systems. I hit this problem all the time on my laptop (never on my desktop), and haven't seen its like on any other browser.
Just to add to the parent post's claims, even if he was completely wrong about them, it's *verifiably true* that local monopolies advertise. I've seen them. Maybe you haven't, but they're there. Presumably they have a reason, and I think the parent post got the reason right, but even if they have no reason and they're just lunatics, it's completely irrelevant because the fact is that they advertise.
Maybe not all local monopolies, or most of them, or it might even just be a small fraction of local non-monopoly advertising; I don't have any numbers, but it happens and it's definitely not an incredibly rare circumstance.
I agree with everything you say here, and would like to add that the finely tuned play balance of human vs. campaign is often compromised by the human vs. human balance.
In the case of dragon age, tactics slots make it even worse than in most such games, because part of the game's balance and an entire skill line is dedicated to the fact that you control the AI of your companions, and you get more detailed control the more you invest in that line.
There are *very* few games that don't make design tradeoffs on the decision to be single-player or multi-player or both (and what sorts of multi-player to support).
I'm a Canadian, and I've lived throughout Canada. I have NEVER met anybody outside the Internet who thinks American, in spoken English, means anything other than somebody from the United States of America (North American, maybe, but never "American"). There are a significant portion of them that would be insulted to be themselves referred to as Americans; the rest (aslo a significant portion) would simply be amused.
It's not about not being the whole world. It's about how the language is used. What the hell does your crowd call Canadians, anyway? Can't be "United Statesians", since there's more than one United States in the world.
I assert (based on admittedly anecdotal evidence) that if you ask a random sampling of 100 native born English-speaking Canadians, probably less than 1 and certainly less than 5 would think "American" would refer to anything else but people from the USA.
And I think you know that too, if you're truly Canadian. Although it's a big country, maybe you live in some small enclave where that flies among your friends. I've spent most of my time in the most populous parts of the country. But certainly national television *always* uses American to refer to people from the USA.
I'm suddenly curious at whether, statistically, this use of the word steal garners as much commentary as the copyright infringement use of the word steal does, on slashdot.
Which then leads to the question: are commercials significantly less effective as background noise?
They might even be more effective (they also might not). If they are, then the advertisers still lose the direct foreground benefit, but maintain the important piece.
Myself, I rarely bother fast forwarding commercials. FF means I still need to pay attention to them, just for a shorter time which is even more boring. I tend to context-switch to reading blogs (or even slahsdot) on my laptop until I hear the show come on again. If I'm watching *with* anybody, then I kill the commercials.
Slashdot Mirror
Devil's advocate:
Couldn't almost all of the planets in fact be moons, which would therefore be in essentially the same solar orbit?
Hypothetically, couldn't they also be around a series of planets with, cosmically speaking, relatively close orbits to one another around a star with a relatively wide habitable belt? It seems that even in our Solar system, Venus, Earth, Earth's moon, Mars, and maybe some Jovian moons might all be terraformable so at least some of the planet is habitable, by sufficiently advanced aliens with sufficient time and a shitload of resources, which seems to be a precondition anyway. Venus is far too hot but that's atmospheric to a large extent. Mars is too cold (to a less severe degree), but that's also atmospheric. There are other issues with both planets, and all the other moons, obviously. It seems unlikely to me that the Sol system is the most suitable system for humanity, other than Earth itself of course by virtue of us having evolved there, so they could go to a system with planets where terraforming is a little less difficult, too.
Might be an unlikely solar system, but if I were evacuating an overpopulated Earth on generation ships, that's the sort of solar system I'd head to.
Also, why is it that Pax-created reavers can't make more reavers through torture (I admit, this bothers me too).
In principle a model could comply with an objective reality with 100% convergence, but we would be forever unable to prove it 100% because there is no direct access to objective reality's fundamentals, only experimentation & prediction. That doesn't mean the model isn't 100% accurate, it just means we can't say (with 100% confidence) that it is.
You're on an airplane. You can't take a crying baby outside, not without it splattering disgustingly onto the ground a moment later and a lot of legal inquiry.
I'm right with you on a baby in a restaurant, or idiots making tonnes of noise early/late in the day. I had a neighbour who played WWII movies on loop, high volume, right next to the wall, all night, every night, and who told me I should wear earphones to sleep if it bothered me because he could barely hear it.
It's an airplane. Nobody can control their baby 24/7 and they're in an airplane. There's no option. You really do have to deal with it.
The iPhone was in 2007 which was 6 years instead of 5 -- not really that far off.
I'd also take issue with saying that the iPhone is not a PC. The difference between a 2001 PC and an iPhone other than size and input methods (which also apply to tablets) is mostly academic (aside from the artificial restriction on multitasking).
But I agree, it's not the most popular form of electronic device (by a longshot, yet). Still, it and similar competing phones have become quite a bit more popular.
That's not fair. Dragon Age had a frustrating camera that you occasionally had to fight with (I found), particularly when trying to use magic or otherwise plan around enemies not in your immediate vicinity. This is quite unlike a fixed-perspective game which will generally not have camera issues because they are trivially solved.
Are you saying that you can't laugh at others' stupidity just because you yourself have been stupid?
Even if she were alive, she almost certainly would not come around to a random message board and defend herself.
The keywords for a search are "primate culture", in quotes. Here's one such example: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090112110058.htm with stone-throwers. This one http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2001-06-05-animal-usat.htm mentions different chimpanzees using different methods for termite-fishing, and various grooming methods, and a Japanese primate who learned to wash sandy human-cut potatoes, without humans teaching her about washing them, and then her tribe picked up the trick and her descendents do that to this day, which I think meets the "building on knowledge of previous generations" criteria.
Could still be a problem if it's booting everything out of cache.
Let me tell you, until you've watched the Imagination-land part 1 episode in descriptive video, you have NEVER truly seen South Park.
Sadly, parts 2 and 3 were done with a different voice actor who seems to be a moron whose writer wasn't paying attention. But the first one is fan-bloody-tastic.
Well, you could make the argument that overpopulation is part of the problem, and thus per capita measures also fail to capture the full cost. Not that the US is doing more about it than China, these days.
1. We need to HAVE a continent-wide superconducting power grid before this can work.
2. A superconducting power grid is far from lossless unless we get materials that superconduct at the highest temperatures that will ever be encountered during transmission. Right now it would take a lot of refridgeration, which requires energy to maintain. The tech today allows, at best, an incremental improvement in transmission waste. The tech required for truly lossless (or near-lossless) transmission is a bit out there, perhaps moreso than fusion.
3. At least the Americas are fairly narrow and long with respect to the sunrise/sunset terminators. There are many hours where it's nighttime throughout the continent. This has obvious consequences for solar, but it also affects wind power and oceanic somewhat (AFAIK not geothermal). You can't load-balance power if you aren't generating it *anywhere*.
Until then -- yes, those are marginal and intermittent power sources, and no, I don't have a "vested interest in the status quo" (what a way to shut down opposition).
Another approach is to improve battery technologies so that you can load-balance over time, instead of over space (with the superconducting grid), but again that's relying on technological advances that don't exist yet.
You can't ever have 100% accuracy, ever. Nothing you do can ever change that.
This isn't talking about " 2+2 = 3.9999999999882 on average after 100 runs". The given algorithm is 2+2 = 4, with 99.99999999% confidence, determined after 100 runs. Which is what you ALREADY get with non-quantum computers, because nothing is 100%.
Quantum computing is not like floating-point computing. It gets an exact answer, with any individual run having potentially shitty accuracy, but accuracy can be fixed. The errors and tolerances don't accumulate; it's confidence that accumulates with this sort of algorithm.
You misread him. His argument was that after that effort, the ones that deserve 6 and below are cut and don't reach reviewers, and therefore don't exist.
My personal opinion is that this means that he should rescale 6 down to 1, and leave 0 for what he now calls 0-5. If something is that incredibly rare, it doesn't deserve half the namespace to be allocated to differentiating between just how exceptionally bad it is.
But he didn't say anything about sympathies to the devs.
Neither universal or emphatic.
If he's cured of being a dickbag, problem solved. Revenge goes from being insufficient in my opinion, to just plain inappropriate. It's like punishing the unwilling back-seat passenger of a car for speeding. Even if the speeding causes an accident in which busloads of children are killed.
Not so. You cannot prove that repeatedly making a measurement in the past is any indication that it will hold in the future. Pointing out that it's worked before is just begging the question, and therefore reproducing the results doesn't help, for it does not mean you'll reproduce the results *again*.
You *must* presuppose that the future is relevantly like the past for empiricism to have any meaning in any context; it's pretty much an irreducible problem.
With that said, such "faith" is, I would argue, essentially to daily living and doesn't really deserve to be categorized as "faith" except in the most pedantic of senses. Without acting under this presupposition, you cannot learn. Anything. I suspect that biologically this presupposition cannot be unlearned since it appears to be intrinsic to learning even in some of the stupider members of the animal kingdom.
I'm not sure that giving knowledge away for free was really promoted there. The humans did give away knowledge, and in the end it worked out but for a time it started a lot of shit.
And then at the end of Dragon's Egg, the now-vastly-more-advanced aliens don't actually return the favour to the humans. Not directly, anyway: they leave the secrets in places that can only be accessed once the secret has already been discovered, basically so humans can check their work when they catch up.
You missed the parent's point.
You don't get thrown back because even though the bowling ball exerts a force back on you, you ALSO exert a force on another object, which is to say, the ground, through your feet, which puts forward another opposite reaction counteracting the bowling ball. Since the angles don't match, you also get a net upward force out of the deal, but gravity counteracts that. If this weren't so, you would slowly topple backward (slowly, because you weigh much more than a bowling ball) unless you shot another bowling ball in the opposite direction with the same impulse.
In the same way, Sylar just has to push in the other direction. Be it a fixed object, or even just a light wind across a broad swathe of air. Or, alternatively, he might not even be the anchor for the force at all. He could be influencing some other object (again, likely air) to exert a force against his victims, in the same sense that my garage remote doesn't actually exert a force to open my garage door, but simply influences the internal mechanisms to pull the garage door upward (all without being thrown to the ground!).
I'm not the first in the thread to suggest this, but you haven't been reading, apparently. I don't mean that to be snarky, I certainly don't read all the slashdot comments, I prefer my own self-righteous writing too :).
Heroes is definitely magic and fantastic rather than scientific, and the solar eclipse was not life-accurate, and I hate the pseudoscientific bullshit that spews from Mohinder's mouth. And hyperbole is all well and good, but don't say "there's not an ounce of science in it" and follow up with an anecdote as "proof". The logical flaw is kind of ironic.
Smoking is a choice. It's not coerced. It's not even a choice in the sense that having sex is a choice -- there isn't some biological instinct built into you over the course of untold eons demanding that you smoke. There is, at best, peer pressure, and that's been on a long decline. And yes, there is also addiction, but you rarely get addicted to smoking without initially choosing in the first place (some people got military-issue cigarettes in wartime, which is somewhat coerced, and I think that does messy up the situation a bit, but going forward that isn't happening anymore).
It's also an inherently relevant choice, since it actually damages the electronics involved. You choose to place yourself in a category that damages electronics, and your electronics are damaged. It's absolutely okay to discriminate against a minority who willfully chooses to engage in actions which damage electronics, and by definition 100% of this minority do, when you're considering repairing said electronics. In the same way that it's okay to discriminate against people who use more electricity by charging them more with their electricity bill.
That said, I think Apple's contract should have had something in there about this more explicitly.
If you ever visit a site with a flash ad and just leave it in the background, it's game over for Chrome on some systems. I hit this problem all the time on my laptop (never on my desktop), and haven't seen its like on any other browser.
Just to add to the parent post's claims, even if he was completely wrong about them, it's *verifiably true* that local monopolies advertise. I've seen them. Maybe you haven't, but they're there. Presumably they have a reason, and I think the parent post got the reason right, but even if they have no reason and they're just lunatics, it's completely irrelevant because the fact is that they advertise.
Maybe not all local monopolies, or most of them, or it might even just be a small fraction of local non-monopoly advertising; I don't have any numbers, but it happens and it's definitely not an incredibly rare circumstance.
I agree with everything you say here, and would like to add that the finely tuned play balance of human vs. campaign is often compromised by the human vs. human balance.
In the case of dragon age, tactics slots make it even worse than in most such games, because part of the game's balance and an entire skill line is dedicated to the fact that you control the AI of your companions, and you get more detailed control the more you invest in that line.
There are *very* few games that don't make design tradeoffs on the decision to be single-player or multi-player or both (and what sorts of multi-player to support).
I'm a Canadian, and I've lived throughout Canada. I have NEVER met anybody outside the Internet who thinks American, in spoken English, means anything other than somebody from the United States of America (North American, maybe, but never "American"). There are a significant portion of them that would be insulted to be themselves referred to as Americans; the rest (aslo a significant portion) would simply be amused.
It's not about not being the whole world. It's about how the language is used. What the hell does your crowd call Canadians, anyway? Can't be "United Statesians", since there's more than one United States in the world.
I assert (based on admittedly anecdotal evidence) that if you ask a random sampling of 100 native born English-speaking Canadians, probably less than 1 and certainly less than 5 would think "American" would refer to anything else but people from the USA.
And I think you know that too, if you're truly Canadian. Although it's a big country, maybe you live in some small enclave where that flies among your friends. I've spent most of my time in the most populous parts of the country. But certainly national television *always* uses American to refer to people from the USA.
I'm suddenly curious at whether, statistically, this use of the word steal garners as much commentary as the copyright infringement use of the word steal does, on slashdot.
Which then leads to the question: are commercials significantly less effective as background noise?
They might even be more effective (they also might not). If they are, then the advertisers still lose the direct foreground benefit, but maintain the important piece.
Myself, I rarely bother fast forwarding commercials. FF means I still need to pay attention to them, just for a shorter time which is even more boring. I tend to context-switch to reading blogs (or even slahsdot) on my laptop until I hear the show come on again. If I'm watching *with* anybody, then I kill the commercials.
I swear that at least three different people used method #6 in my classes.