This"just write it" is foolishness of the highest order. For many of us non-programers "just write it" is like telling some one living in Florida to "just build a plane and fly to that concert in Vienna after work tomorrow".
Computer literacy used to involve typing a terminal command. All the PC folks in the 80's and 90's did it. I can't be fucked to care if folks are too stupid to learn how to use their computers. If you can't "write it yourself" in this instance, which amounts to running an operation across a set of files, then sorting the result, then you do not know how to use a computer. You know how to use some applications and input devices. It's a big difference.
This is part of the reason Windows is successful: think of a problem, there is likely program out there that solves it already, and if there isn't one someone will soon write one
Which is why it's a nightmare to administer windows. MS had to create a fucking scripting terminal "powershell" because they ditched DOS and didn't expose OS features to a terminal... Now go press the Towel key to open Window8's start screen. Start typing... AT A NEUTERED TERMINAL... ugh. Sometimes, its better to not have to wait for someone to create something for you, especially when it's something very easy to do. You would FIRE a secretary that could not sort a set of physical files by customer ID and remove duplicates, or add up totals with a calculator, etc. Your standard for computer "operator" is so low it's pitiable.
If you paid attention to the thread, you'd have noticed that nothing you said about Windows is exclusive to windows. Indeed, a Google search for any OS would have turned up solutions for it. Some would be a few lines of BASH or Perl, Powershell, BATCH scripts, etc. Some would be 'free' programs, some of those would have adware, some would have malware. At least the ones in the FLOSS repositories wouldn't.
The OS exposes your computer's features to you. If you do not know how to write a simple set of instructions for it to follow, then you do not know how to use a computer.
Now, consider that the citizens can withdraw the government's right to imprison them.
Once you've done that enough times you'll soon see that freedom does exist in the absence of punishment or laws or 'rights', but laws do not exist without punishment -- application of force against another's will.
In the natural lawless state we have the freedom to do whatever our moral compass allows. Not all laws are immoral, but history is full of examples. It's better to err on the side of caution and have as few laws as possible, and thus the most freedom.
In the age of information Copyright is artificial scarcity of infinitely reproducible information -- It's propping up a business model akin to selling ice to Eskimos. There is no evidence that Copyrights are beneficial for society. It's terribly dangerous to run the world on untested hypotheses. We should do the experiment and see if the laws that grant 'rights holders' monopoly of information should exist. There is only evidence to support the null hypothesis: That copyrights and patents are not required for innovation or social benefit. The fashion and automotive industries sell primarily on design, are very profitable, and have no copyrights or design patents.
Information is not scarce. Market that which is scarce: The ability to create new information. Sell the labour to create new information instead, and you'll get more art. If you get paid once for your work to build a home, fix a car, make a song, etc. then you have to do more work to make more money.
I find the work on how the universe was in the past or will be in the future fascinating, but would laugh at anybody trying to stake a serious claim on it being ultimately true.
Well, it's a good thing that no scientists resemble your straw man. The scientists come up with an educated guess and test it, refining it as they go. Newton's laws still work great for lots of things, despite Einsteins curved space-time being a more accurate (but still wrong) formulation of reality. The very foundation of science itself is the notion that everything we know is not the ultimate truth.
Irritated? Dungeon Master, heh, yeah. What a bore. A Game Master would be Overjoyed. Halflings and Wizards can work with Spock, (hell, he'd be mistaken for an Elf in Shadowrun), and in games like Rifts, or super-rule-sets like GURPS, the more worlds collide the better!
You'd actually be irritated instead of imagining a Star Trek 'away team' going off course on The Voyage Home and winding up amidst There and Back Again? You can't fathom the fun of Starfleet's finest crash landing on Bag End, and being guilt tripped into helping Gandalf take back the Lonely Mountain from a dragon that's been conspiring with dimensional shamblers to bring an evil cyBorg race to Middle Earth?
Closed minds are the biggest reason the medium is in such a state.
Clear rules are what makes a good game. It's really frustrating to play a game where "you make it up as you go along":-)
This is an anecdotal statement, and I disagree vehemently. The rules only help the GM make a game good. I shall counter with my own anecdote: In my youth I played a wide variety of RPGs in a nearly daily group of about 10 friends, we'd hit up someone's house after school, and summer time was 3 months of non stop RPG building, story crafting, and playing. We had some games that lasted for years, and developed a set of "house rules" for running games. In our experience Role Playing games are far more fun when the Game Master (read: DM) is used as a story teller and the rules are largely set aside to let us focus on the game play, i.e. let us use the available skills and world crafting and thinking in-character on the fly instead of hampering creativity and bogging down battles. If a plausible explanation could be made, we rolled with it -- or rather didn't roll for anything at all. Rules of the game were used to settle disputes between the players and GM, and the GM applied the player's actions to the world according to a general understanding of the character. Anyone could challenge an event to trial by dice, and that's really the only role the strict rules played well. In fact, when the new editions of AD&D came out we just used the settings and monsters, etc., screw all those bullshit rules. GURPS was better for combating power creep anyway (and let us throw in time traveling cyborgs, or characters from other campaigns etc. from time to time).
In fact, some games like In Nomine, embraced this type of game-play where rules take a back seat explicitly. It had a simplistic dice mechanic that called for a degree of interpretation and yielded far more frequent spectacular successes and failures. [2D6 to beat a target number for a skill / ability, blow karma points to lower the target, 1D6 is severity of success or failure, 1,1,1 = Divine intervention. 6,6,6 = Satan smiles upon you -- Either is good or bad depending on who you're working for.] The dice in this use were like an aide to the story teller and players -- To smooth disputes, and let chaos nudge the course while allowing a player's desire to win a dice roll actually influence its outcome somewhat. E.g., A player spends two karma points to really end his foe, and insists on rolling to ensure the GM doesn't tamper with fate:
You rare back and throw every fiber of your angelic form into the punch, nearly tearing the tendons of your corporeal vessel. The blow destroys the treacherous demon's skull will a loud crunch. As the vermin's soul escapes back to hell you catch a fleeting whiff of brimstone and realize that in the scuffle your own flaming sword of valor has set your hair afire. The voice of the Dark Prince himself booms from everywhere and nowhere, "Consider the hair cut a gift for saving me the trouble of finding that fiendish failure. Yes, the diabolical look does suit you..." The 666 roll doesn't have to be terribly bad for the good guys, it can just add character and mood, or it can enhance the plot -- for instance, if the angel falls. The flexible rules allow success and failure to be far more nuanced and malleable to both players and story tellers. A good Game Master uses the rules to make the game more fun, and a good rule set lets them do so. It's why we play after all.
D&D was awesome as a 20-year-old and its far more fun having people rather then computers to interact with.
Then why the hell would you apply strict rules to make humans emulate computers? All the speed and determinism of a human calculator trying to apply complex rule based programs with all the frustration of interfacing with a dumb computer running glitchy logic and neither knows nor cares about what 'fun' is. You picked the worst spot in the venn diagram ever. Creative people make the classic RPGs fun, not the boring rules.
Well, to do that, you're going to need to draft up a Constitutional Amendment that voids the First Amendment, then get 2/3 of state legislatures to ratify it.
Even if your cultural narrative came from Fox News you should have found the FBI's Occupy Wall-street involvement odd. I mean, here you are spouting off about activism and you don't know the first thing about your government policy about it. What the actual fuck? Have you had your head up your ass concerning the past 100 years of your country's history such that you missed that whole 'secret' police state doing heinous illegal shit and especially their anti-activism policy AKA "national security"? For fuck's sake, you morons would make me sick if your politics hadn't heaved me dry.
Can someone give me one good reason to not have water on Ceres, so that I may marvel at the fact that there is?
Oh. For Fuc-- Are you kidding me, mate? I mean really: A big clear sky with a HUGE easy to spot moon made of the VERY SAME elements as your planet and a neighbor a bit further out with no EM field but some CO2 and an iron-Oxide rich crust you can dig -- PERFECT for baby steps learning survival without your cradle of life and its magnetic field. Then there's a rich asteroid field conveniently broken up into manageable chunks smaller than planets, a gas giant that's nearly a brown dwarf to study gravimetrics and there's moons full of methane and oceans, gorgeous ringed worlds that rain diamonds further out just begging to be seen with ever clearer optics...
The stars laid out a damn red carpet for you. You're 500,000 years overdue for a mag-pole tear-down and rebuild, by the by -- Oh, and the regular flip cycle stopped just as soon as life started showing signs of intelligence too (that's quite the tab you've run up). And you're not even the SLIGHTEST bit impressed with all the good fortune? I mean, Really?! You just EXPECT to hit the jackpot EVERY damn time? Wow. Just wow. It's no wonder you think you can just sit there, even after having set foot off-world, not sending a single soul out of magnetosphere for FORTY FRIGGIN' Years?! Oh, man, I'm getting this on perma-record -- Only from the "mind" of an Earth ape would you get such an entitled outlook on everything. Well, in all but that Quantum Politics thing (superposition of Useless and Pointless) making you the laughing stock of the whole Galax-- er, uhm. What I mean is that with all that good luck you've apparently used up you should be BLOODY FLOORED that Ceres isn't on a -- wait, let me check... That it's not the thing on a collision course with Earth!
Seriously, no other sentient life could STAND to just layabout in the gravity well like some ignorant primordial sludge -- What are you thinking? That someone's just going to come along and HAND YOU a space transport?! [Oh oh oh! Get a load of this, some of 'em actually ARE! Have you seen this Fermi Paradox? Classic Earth Logic!]
Protip: The dinosaurs did have a "space program" -- Chicken Little organized the aeronautics program and survived.
Testosterone is not a bacteria. There is no rational or bacterial reason for me to jerk off. Genetic preference for youth, beauty, symmetry, etc. are indicators of health and fertility for humans, not bacteria.
What is interesting is that men are less choosy than women. The breeding strategy of the ape female is to select the highest quality mate, due to gestation duration and childcare costs on her existence. Meanwhile the male reproductive strategy is to sire as many offspring as possible. So, just randomly assigning the guy a date most often will work fine so long as the gal is into him.
However, boredom is becoming a significant risk to long term relationships. Primitive mating drives have fuck-all to do with divorce rates.
Textbooks in Academia are very often subject to the now normalized purposeful practice of being embiggened with useless redundancy and other such non essential and pointless filler to give them a high "thud factor", id est, a physical quality exhibited by a bound set of printed manuscript as its conversion of potential to kinetic energy -- most commonly expressed as free-fall -- ends abruptly upon colliding with the approximately parallel planar surface of a coffee table, desk or other such platform, such that the humanoid observer will cromulently valuate the manuscript as having a higher value due to this property being associated with other well respected volumes of physical information conveyance.
Yes, this from your 'best and brightest'. Your race is doomed.
Chemistry, Material Sciences, Quantum Physics, and all other Science is essentially the same thing. The only thing (and really the most important thing) they have over Alchemy is that the procedures are openly presented for testing (thus requiring sharing and propagation). Their ideas become immortal. Life itself follows the same pattern of self improvement. DNA is a recipe for an organism. Mutations to it cause different trial and errors and through this experimentation the better solutions are naturally kept and adapted as better information about how to survive forever is encoded into the DNA. The Philosopher's Stone is now called "the singularity".
I get what you're saying, that there are similarities, but such over broad definitions are utterly pointless. A submarine takes on fluid to dive, and is more buoyant than the fluid it traverses. Airships have ballasts too, however, a submarine doesn't have nacelles (sacks, bladders) of air within its frame to provide the buoyancy and the pressures it must operate in are at MOST 1 to 0 atmospheres, whereas a submarine must withstand hundreds of times this. The atmosphere is far more unstable than the seas -- wind moves MUCH faster than water currents. So we have two vastly different problems, light weight frame capable of floating in air AND navigating despite very strong air currents, versus a dense vessel with a single "bladder" (the breathable air) with heavyweight construction for withstanding huge pressures which suffering a rupture is a far more serious affair, requiring immediate attention -- unlike the air boat, which will just drift back to the ground if you pop one of its many nacelles and don't do a damn thing about it.
Now let's consider a hovercraft. It's a boat too eh? It traverses water, has all the trappings of a sea-faring vessel including propellers. Ah, but a sail boat doesn't use a fluid-screw to drive its motion, and it's a boat. So, what else has internal air and buoyancy and travels fluids, why people do! People are boats. They're submarines! So are whales, and dolphins, and bears, and lions, and -- and -- You've made the word fucking useless. That's why an airplane is not a jet ski. That's why an airship is not a boat.
Sure am proud of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. It's so awesome that Marathon Runners don't get injured by terrorists while dickwads at the FBI are allocating the majority of their budget to copyright infractions and seeding the web with child porn just in case anyone accidentally clicks it (or an innocuous looking page with a hidden iframe pulls it in) -- Oh wait, this is Bizaro America, nevermind.
Wow, Obama, if you're going to let the FBI drop the Law Enforcement from their charter and add National Security.... Either you're just letting them hide their existing practices behind the veil of state secrets, or National Security just means ensuring that corporate interests are maintained, and that anyone can be arrested at any time for anything (even shit that should be a civil breech of contract). IMO, it's both. There's zero verifiable evidence that the FBI and NSA have fuck-all to do with protecting any people.
The latter may be responsible for the stories of the former basing fantasy on bits of unexplained fact, as is often the case with ancient legends, e.g., the Christian's god was probably a volcano.
What about a Foo Fighter or Saint Elmo's Fire? One thing I find interesting is how many events can have a common cause. As is often the case in science, it's not a stretch to think such disparate things could someday be understood as a variation of "the same thing": A change in static electric charge.
there's very little to stop the race to the bottom as suddenly off-topic discussions, especially politics, come to pollute the original purpose with garbage that has nothing to do with cars.
Galactic News Network reports that more than 7 billions hairless apes remain quarantined in a solar system by the Virgo Galactic Cluster sustenance maintainers, many of them stressed and bloodied from their attempts to survive with only primitive technology before the great harvest. Until now, the sustenanceers have focused on selecting creatures to be experimented on sexually for educational entertainment as twenty-five earthlings, including rare cattle genitalia, were taken on Pulseday 'to a lifetime of expermentation,' and another 12 on Synchday. 'Many of the 7 billion+ Hairless apes who are still trapped in their gravity well are visibly bloody and distressed from their primitive plight in ignorance of their ultimate demise,' one overseer says. Although the consumption of sentient forms is widely condemned among the Machine-hive systems, Sustananceers defend the practice as an organic imperative and right of the technologically advanced -- and say it is no different to the harvest of lower complexity photosynthesizing life. Harvesters of the Milky Way Suburbs, where Earth is located, condemns the criticism as biased and unfair to the organics who, unlike their circuit bound comrades, crave the visceral slaughter. 'The Earth ape harvest is a continuation of legitimate feeding practice in accordance with the technical dominance hierarchy under the jurisdiction of both Virgonian Super Cluster and its suburbs. Therefore, we believe there are no reasons to criticize the upcoming Thrice Fried Earther Feast.' Meanwhile the Society for Diverse Sentience describes how 40 to 60 suburbian slaughterers use Quantum Politics to divide up the planet, whose initial inhabitants peacefully coexisted. 'They tighten up the budgets to bring each sub-group together then the vote will push them toward the booth. Inside the booth in the shadows is where trainers work with harvesters to select the "tastiest" gray matter which have the most nuanced flavor and crisp texture,' the sustenanceer says. The harvester fleet will 'vaporize the most "undesirable" apes (those with partisan tendencies) within the booths to hide from the others what terror awaits when the time comes.
Slashdot Mirror
This"just write it" is foolishness of the highest order. For many of us non-programers "just write it" is like telling some one living in Florida to "just build a plane and fly to that concert in Vienna after work tomorrow".
Computer literacy used to involve typing a terminal command. All the PC folks in the 80's and 90's did it. I can't be fucked to care if folks are too stupid to learn how to use their computers. If you can't "write it yourself" in this instance, which amounts to running an operation across a set of files, then sorting the result, then you do not know how to use a computer. You know how to use some applications and input devices. It's a big difference.
This is part of the reason Windows is successful: think of a problem, there is likely program out there that solves it already, and if there isn't one someone will soon write one
Which is why it's a nightmare to administer windows. MS had to create a fucking scripting terminal "powershell" because they ditched DOS and didn't expose OS features to a terminal... Now go press the Towel key to open Window8's start screen. Start typing... AT A NEUTERED TERMINAL... ugh. Sometimes, its better to not have to wait for someone to create something for you, especially when it's something very easy to do. You would FIRE a secretary that could not sort a set of physical files by customer ID and remove duplicates, or add up totals with a calculator, etc. Your standard for computer "operator" is so low it's pitiable.
If you paid attention to the thread, you'd have noticed that nothing you said about Windows is exclusive to windows. Indeed, a Google search for any OS would have turned up solutions for it. Some would be a few lines of BASH or Perl, Powershell, BATCH scripts, etc. Some would be 'free' programs, some of those would have adware, some would have malware. At least the ones in the FLOSS repositories wouldn't.
The OS exposes your computer's features to you. If you do not know how to write a simple set of instructions for it to follow, then you do not know how to use a computer.
Now, consider that the citizens can withdraw the government's right to imprison them.
Once you've done that enough times you'll soon see that freedom does exist in the absence of punishment or laws or 'rights', but laws do not exist without punishment -- application of force against another's will.
In the natural lawless state we have the freedom to do whatever our moral compass allows. Not all laws are immoral, but history is full of examples. It's better to err on the side of caution and have as few laws as possible, and thus the most freedom.
In the age of information Copyright is artificial scarcity of infinitely reproducible information -- It's propping up a business model akin to selling ice to Eskimos. There is no evidence that Copyrights are beneficial for society. It's terribly dangerous to run the world on untested hypotheses. We should do the experiment and see if the laws that grant 'rights holders' monopoly of information should exist. There is only evidence to support the null hypothesis: That copyrights and patents are not required for innovation or social benefit. The fashion and automotive industries sell primarily on design, are very profitable, and have no copyrights or design patents.
Information is not scarce. Market that which is scarce: The ability to create new information. Sell the labour to create new information instead, and you'll get more art. If you get paid once for your work to build a home, fix a car, make a song, etc. then you have to do more work to make more money.
Here's Eisenhower's farewell address to America. Note that he tried to warn us about everything that has come to pass.
I find the work on how the universe was in the past or will be in the future fascinating, but would laugh at anybody trying to stake a serious claim on it being ultimately true.
Well, it's a good thing that no scientists resemble your straw man. The scientists come up with an educated guess and test it, refining it as they go. Newton's laws still work great for lots of things, despite Einsteins curved space-time being a more accurate (but still wrong) formulation of reality. The very foundation of science itself is the notion that everything we know is not the ultimate truth.
Get over yourself,
I tried that once. Turns out it's quite painful to apply the Many Worlds interpretation locally.
DM: What class is your character?
Noob: Vulcan! Spock is wicked cool.
Irritated? Dungeon Master, heh, yeah. What a bore. A Game Master would be Overjoyed. Halflings and Wizards can work with Spock, (hell, he'd be mistaken for an Elf in Shadowrun), and in games like Rifts, or super-rule-sets like GURPS, the more worlds collide the better!
You'd actually be irritated instead of imagining a Star Trek 'away team' going off course on The Voyage Home and winding up amidst There and Back Again? You can't fathom the fun of Starfleet's finest crash landing on Bag End, and being guilt tripped into helping Gandalf take back the Lonely Mountain from a dragon that's been conspiring with dimensional shamblers to bring an evil cyBorg race to Middle Earth?
Closed minds are the biggest reason the medium is in such a state.
Clear rules are what makes a good game. It's really frustrating to play a game where "you make it up as you go along" :-)
This is an anecdotal statement, and I disagree vehemently. The rules only help the GM make a game good. I shall counter with my own anecdote: In my youth I played a wide variety of RPGs in a nearly daily group of about 10 friends, we'd hit up someone's house after school, and summer time was 3 months of non stop RPG building, story crafting, and playing. We had some games that lasted for years, and developed a set of "house rules" for running games. In our experience Role Playing games are far more fun when the Game Master (read: DM) is used as a story teller and the rules are largely set aside to let us focus on the game play, i.e. let us use the available skills and world crafting and thinking in-character on the fly instead of hampering creativity and bogging down battles. If a plausible explanation could be made, we rolled with it -- or rather didn't roll for anything at all. Rules of the game were used to settle disputes between the players and GM, and the GM applied the player's actions to the world according to a general understanding of the character. Anyone could challenge an event to trial by dice, and that's really the only role the strict rules played well. In fact, when the new editions of AD&D came out we just used the settings and monsters, etc., screw all those bullshit rules. GURPS was better for combating power creep anyway (and let us throw in time traveling cyborgs, or characters from other campaigns etc. from time to time).
In fact, some games like In Nomine, embraced this type of game-play where rules take a back seat explicitly. It had a simplistic dice mechanic that called for a degree of interpretation and yielded far more frequent spectacular successes and failures. [2D6 to beat a target number for a skill / ability, blow karma points to lower the target, 1D6 is severity of success or failure, 1,1,1 = Divine intervention. 6,6,6 = Satan smiles upon you -- Either is good or bad depending on who you're working for.] The dice in this use were like an aide to the story teller and players -- To smooth disputes, and let chaos nudge the course while allowing a player's desire to win a dice roll actually influence its outcome somewhat. E.g., A player spends two karma points to really end his foe, and insists on rolling to ensure the GM doesn't tamper with fate:
You rare back and throw every fiber of your angelic form into the punch, nearly tearing the tendons of your corporeal vessel. The blow destroys the treacherous demon's skull will a loud crunch. As the vermin's soul escapes back to hell you catch a fleeting whiff of brimstone and realize that in the scuffle your own flaming sword of valor has set your hair afire. The voice of the Dark Prince himself booms from everywhere and nowhere, "Consider the hair cut a gift for saving me the trouble of finding that fiendish failure. Yes, the diabolical look does suit you..." The 666 roll doesn't have to be terribly bad for the good guys, it can just add character and mood, or it can enhance the plot -- for instance, if the angel falls. The flexible rules allow success and failure to be far more nuanced and malleable to both players and story tellers. A good Game Master uses the rules to make the game more fun, and a good rule set lets them do so. It's why we play after all.
D&D was awesome as a 20-year-old and its far more fun having people rather then computers to interact with.
Then why the hell would you apply strict rules to make humans emulate computers? All the speed and determinism of a human calculator trying to apply complex rule based programs with all the frustration of interfacing with a dumb computer running glitchy logic and neither knows nor cares about what 'fun' is. You picked the worst spot in the venn diagram ever. Creative people make the classic RPGs fun, not the boring rules.
This fanatical "activism" needs to be stopped.
Well, to do that, you're going to need to draft up a Constitutional Amendment that voids the First Amendment, then get 2/3 of state legislatures to ratify it.
Good luck with that, chief.
Perhaps you failed to realize that is exactly what the FBI and NSA are for, doofus.
Even if your cultural narrative came from Fox News you should have found the FBI's Occupy Wall-street involvement odd. I mean, here you are spouting off about activism and you don't know the first thing about your government policy about it. What the actual fuck? Have you had your head up your ass concerning the past 100 years of your country's history such that you missed that whole 'secret' police state doing heinous illegal shit and especially their anti-activism policy AKA "national security"? For fuck's sake, you morons would make me sick if your politics hadn't heaved me dry.
Can someone give me one good reason to not have water on Ceres, so that I may marvel at the fact that there is?
Oh. For Fuc-- Are you kidding me, mate? I mean really: A big clear sky with a HUGE easy to spot moon made of the VERY SAME elements as your planet and a neighbor a bit further out with no EM field but some CO2 and an iron-Oxide rich crust you can dig -- PERFECT for baby steps learning survival without your cradle of life and its magnetic field. Then there's a rich asteroid field conveniently broken up into manageable chunks smaller than planets, a gas giant that's nearly a brown dwarf to study gravimetrics and there's moons full of methane and oceans, gorgeous ringed worlds that rain diamonds further out just begging to be seen with ever clearer optics...
The stars laid out a damn red carpet for you. You're 500,000 years overdue for a mag-pole tear-down and rebuild, by the by -- Oh, and the regular flip cycle stopped just as soon as life started showing signs of intelligence too (that's quite the tab you've run up). And you're not even the SLIGHTEST bit impressed with all the good fortune? I mean, Really?! You just EXPECT to hit the jackpot EVERY damn time? Wow. Just wow. It's no wonder you think you can just sit there, even after having set foot off-world, not sending a single soul out of magnetosphere for FORTY FRIGGIN' Years?! Oh, man, I'm getting this on perma-record -- Only from the "mind" of an Earth ape would you get such an entitled outlook on everything. Well, in all but that Quantum Politics thing (superposition of Useless and Pointless) making you the laughing stock of the whole Galax-- er, uhm. What I mean is that with all that good luck you've apparently used up you should be BLOODY FLOORED that Ceres isn't on a -- wait, let me check... That it's not the thing on a collision course with Earth!
Seriously, no other sentient life could STAND to just layabout in the gravity well like some ignorant primordial sludge -- What are you thinking? That someone's just going to come along and HAND YOU a space transport?! [Oh oh oh! Get a load of this, some of 'em actually ARE! Have you seen this Fermi Paradox? Classic Earth Logic!]
Protip: The dinosaurs did have a "space program" -- Chicken Little organized the aeronautics program and survived.
Douglas Adams would have enjoyed this. See: Richard MacDuff
Testosterone is not a bacteria. There is no rational or bacterial reason for me to jerk off. Genetic preference for youth, beauty, symmetry, etc. are indicators of health and fertility for humans, not bacteria.
What is interesting is that men are less choosy than women. The breeding strategy of the ape female is to select the highest quality mate, due to gestation duration and childcare costs on her existence. Meanwhile the male reproductive strategy is to sire as many offspring as possible. So, just randomly assigning the guy a date most often will work fine so long as the gal is into him.
However, boredom is becoming a significant risk to long term relationships. Primitive mating drives have fuck-all to do with divorce rates.
It already got funded. That's what World of Warcraft is.
Not that there aren't women in WoW, they just pretend to be guys...
Eee-- eeEk eeiiiik e-eek kee!
TED is now basically full of pseudoscientific bullshit and ego-fueled self-promoters.
You should do a TEDx talk about it.
whose only knowledge of C is that it's the third letter of the alphabet.
Actually, 'C', is the second letter of the alphabet's char array. 'A' is zeroth.
Textbooks in Academia are very often subject to the now normalized purposeful practice of being embiggened with useless redundancy and other such non essential and pointless filler to give them a high "thud factor", id est, a physical quality exhibited by a bound set of printed manuscript as its conversion of potential to kinetic energy -- most commonly expressed as free-fall -- ends abruptly upon colliding with the approximately parallel planar surface of a coffee table, desk or other such platform, such that the humanoid observer will cromulently valuate the manuscript as having a higher value due to this property being associated with other well respected volumes of physical information conveyance.
Yes, this from your 'best and brightest'. Your race is doomed.
Chemistry, Material Sciences, Quantum Physics, and all other Science is essentially the same thing. The only thing (and really the most important thing) they have over Alchemy is that the procedures are openly presented for testing (thus requiring sharing and propagation). Their ideas become immortal. Life itself follows the same pattern of self improvement. DNA is a recipe for an organism. Mutations to it cause different trial and errors and through this experimentation the better solutions are naturally kept and adapted as better information about how to survive forever is encoded into the DNA. The Philosopher's Stone is now called "the singularity".
So, Airplanes are just jet skis in the sky.
I get what you're saying, that there are similarities, but such over broad definitions are utterly pointless. A submarine takes on fluid to dive, and is more buoyant than the fluid it traverses. Airships have ballasts too, however, a submarine doesn't have nacelles (sacks, bladders) of air within its frame to provide the buoyancy and the pressures it must operate in are at MOST 1 to 0 atmospheres, whereas a submarine must withstand hundreds of times this. The atmosphere is far more unstable than the seas -- wind moves MUCH faster than water currents. So we have two vastly different problems, light weight frame capable of floating in air AND navigating despite very strong air currents, versus a dense vessel with a single "bladder" (the breathable air) with heavyweight construction for withstanding huge pressures which suffering a rupture is a far more serious affair, requiring immediate attention -- unlike the air boat, which will just drift back to the ground if you pop one of its many nacelles and don't do a damn thing about it.
Now let's consider a hovercraft. It's a boat too eh? It traverses water, has all the trappings of a sea-faring vessel including propellers. Ah, but a sail boat doesn't use a fluid-screw to drive its motion, and it's a boat. So, what else has internal air and buoyancy and travels fluids, why people do! People are boats. They're submarines! So are whales, and dolphins, and bears, and lions, and -- and -- You've made the word fucking useless. That's why an airplane is not a jet ski. That's why an airship is not a boat.
its legality is irrelevant
Existence is futile. Your non-features will enhance our own. You will be illegitimated.
Sure am proud of the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. It's so awesome that Marathon Runners don't get injured by terrorists while dickwads at the FBI are allocating the majority of their budget to copyright infractions and seeding the web with child porn just in case anyone accidentally clicks it (or an innocuous looking page with a hidden iframe pulls it in) -- Oh wait, this is Bizaro America, nevermind.
Wow, Obama, if you're going to let the FBI drop the Law Enforcement from their charter and add National Security.... Either you're just letting them hide their existing practices behind the veil of state secrets, or National Security just means ensuring that corporate interests are maintained, and that anyone can be arrested at any time for anything (even shit that should be a civil breech of contract). IMO, it's both. There's zero verifiable evidence that the FBI and NSA have fuck-all to do with protecting any people.
If only we could stop Eisenhower from spinning in his grave long enough to hear him scream: "You're Doing Everything I Warned You Not To Do!?"
The latter may be responsible for the stories of the former basing fantasy on bits of unexplained fact, as is often the case with ancient legends, e.g., the Christian's god was probably a volcano.
What about a Foo Fighter or Saint Elmo's Fire? One thing I find interesting is how many events can have a common cause. As is often the case in science, it's not a stretch to think such disparate things could someday be understood as a variation of "the same thing": A change in static electric charge.
Yeah, they could do that, or just sell white Steam Boxes and say they did.
So, pull a Sega.
Hmm. That didn't work out so well for Sega.
there's very little to stop the race to the bottom as suddenly off-topic discussions, especially politics, come to pollute the original purpose with garbage that has nothing to do with cars.
Yeah, just like your horrible car analogy.
Galactic News Network reports that more than 7 billions hairless apes remain quarantined in a solar system by the Virgo Galactic Cluster sustenance maintainers, many of them stressed and bloodied from their attempts to survive with only primitive technology before the great harvest. Until now, the sustenanceers have focused on selecting creatures to be experimented on sexually for educational entertainment as twenty-five earthlings, including rare cattle genitalia, were taken on Pulseday 'to a lifetime of expermentation,' and another 12 on Synchday. 'Many of the 7 billion+ Hairless apes who are still trapped in their gravity well are visibly bloody and distressed from their primitive plight in ignorance of their ultimate demise,' one overseer says. Although the consumption of sentient forms is widely condemned among the Machine-hive systems, Sustananceers defend the practice as an organic imperative and right of the technologically advanced -- and say it is no different to the harvest of lower complexity photosynthesizing life. Harvesters of the Milky Way Suburbs, where Earth is located, condemns the criticism as biased and unfair to the organics who, unlike their circuit bound comrades, crave the visceral slaughter. 'The Earth ape harvest is a continuation of legitimate feeding practice in accordance with the technical dominance hierarchy under the jurisdiction of both Virgonian Super Cluster and its suburbs. Therefore, we believe there are no reasons to criticize the upcoming Thrice Fried Earther Feast.' Meanwhile the Society for Diverse Sentience describes how 40 to 60 suburbian slaughterers use Quantum Politics to divide up the planet, whose initial inhabitants peacefully coexisted. 'They tighten up the budgets to bring each sub-group together then the vote will push them toward the booth. Inside the booth in the shadows is where trainers work with harvesters to select the "tastiest" gray matter which have the most nuanced flavor and crisp texture,' the sustenanceer says. The harvester fleet will 'vaporize the most "undesirable" apes (those with partisan tendencies) within the booths to hide from the others what terror awaits when the time comes.