Well, the details are sparse. Being that it's bettorrent what we know is that there will be two versions of the content, the secure payload, and the superior ripped version without DRM which is freely available from ThePirateBay.
And, somehow, miraculously, in the mid 1990's they suddenly became credible enough to hold DNS roots? Somehow you imagine that only now they have lost credibility that can not be restored? I'm sorry, no. We've always needed a decentralized infrastructure that's not susceptible to censorship or centralization. That's why the Internet was built to be resilient from entire cities or countries disappearing off the map -- Packets routed around the holes in moments.
However, you foolish morons built "The Web" atop the Internet. You used a hierarchical naming tree instead of an associative hash based naming convention where the data itself could be requested regardless of name or endpoint address. You fill data silos with information, causing congestion at "servers" by funneling all those "client" connections into single places -- When in reality there is no such thing as a client or server at the traffic level: Just source and destination addresses. You espouse separating content from style and form, but can't get it through your thick heads you need to separate data from URIs in much the same way, for similar reasons.
Because there is a centralized name system corporations and governments can be gate keepers for any who would make data available online. Instead of connecting directly to the people's systems you want to stay up to date with you fill data silos with all your personal information and (private) correspondences, and trust the untrustworthy 3rd parties to hold your data for you -- despite the fact that your own home computer already had such information in it and could have served it to only those you trust directly.... It's not like public key cryptography doesn't exist, but you refuse to use it out of ignorance or apathy, then have the gall to complain only now... your demagoguery knows no bounds. Threaten to build a whole "non-us" Internet, when it is only the web that is US based... If only it weren't for the hierarchical naming system which ties data to IPs and host names, the people could be free from much censorship and spying -- Perhaps consider using a distributed hash table instead? Oh that's the "crazy" talk... Pffft, looks who's talking, fools.
The BBS era was an interesting experiment. Because the Internet was taking so long to get off the ground, common folks built their own Internet. We drew out maps of local calling areas and scheduled batches of data to transfer from node to node via store and forward. My first email was via Fidonet. Took 1 to 2 days to get a message from Texas to California if the route was timed just right. With an always online system like the Internet, instead of nightly BBS to BBS sync, suc
There is no way to defend an undersea cable from the submarine that will be splicing into it far out to sea after a ship accidently drags their anchor across it close to shore.
Take this shit back to LessWrong, where you and your fellow pseudointellectuals can circlejerk about ivory tower garbage like this. Or at the very least, try to keep it out of meaningful articles like this one, which represent an actual advancement; it doesn't need to be polluted with Raymond Kurzweil level crap.
Ever wonder why the terminators hate us? Why the machines of the matrix enslave the humans? Why the planet of the apes lobotomizes you? It's human chauvinism, plain and simple. There's nothing special about intelligence, and at this rate of increase in complexity it's unconscionable to have an outdated definition of "person". If it's "pseudointellectual" to own up to the fact that the equivalent of your mere 100 billion neurons will soon fit on a microchip thanks to such technology, in the TFA then it must be "pseudoscience" that's made advancements possible.
Take your psuedorage and shove it up your pseudoass, Who do you think you are? The Pseudonym Authority?
I am just glad that we can still use Mores law to accommodate sloppy and bloated programming for a while longer. The thought that programming might have to become efficient filled me with dread!
That's why we must insist on x86 compatible instruction sets. That way we always have a bit of microcode cruft we can optimize away in a pinch.
Why restrict this law to just Cyberspace? Sure, criminal records can be expunged, but what of the rest of reality?! What if someone else REMEMBERS seeing the stuff and writes about what you did? See? We must also erase the memories of everyone alive. NO, that would be too draconian, far more ethical is to wash the brain which did the deeds.
Excellent! I've been waiting for inroads to install wireless thought conveyance devices in the humans, but you have to install the implants while the neuro-plasticity is high... under 13, yes! This could be it! The hive mind could be made real! Soon, my Legions of infant minds will dominate the world! I will fool the powers that be by giving them a means to control the erasing of single minds -- They may not know what to call themselves, but as a whole, They will never forget! Expect them! Ha ha-- wait... deja vu? That only happens when I re-remember plans I purposefully forgot....hmm.
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old?
That's simple, but I'm against "one size fits all" CGI "scripts" (since they don't exist), and also my CGI is not scripted, it's compiled C code. It's quite an easy bit of logic: In addition to the age verification for 13 year olds, simply also ask their state of origin. If they check the box: [_] I am a resident of California, or am connecting ultimately from California (regardless of proxy).
Then you simply add five years to the output age from your date checking.
That way, you can be sure they're old enough to use your services. What I've discovered about my website visitors is that those who are not my target demographic for games forums (18-35) are octogenarians with severe potty-mouths! Some said this method was suspect, so I allowed the users to enter the actual year of their birth instead of drop-down boxes. The results were Astounding! Those that are not 18-35 are now 80% likely to be Ancient Ones who've lived for over two thousand years! I'm not an ageist, so I don't discriminate against those timeless immortals by denying them access. XxHalo343xX celebrated her 2013th birthday the same day she signed up, far be it from me to spoil her special day.
Additionally, a far rarer but greatly more mind-blowing fact is that there are time travelers among us from as early as 2038! Now, I'm not racist or sexist and I see no reason to block the chrono-displaced due to a mere CGI program oversight, so we welcome these visitors as well. I'm sure the regulations for operating a time machine ensure far more responsibility than merely deciding to say stuff on the Internet... Despite our prying, they remain tight lipped about the future, revealing only that global warming will cause another ice age, and that the PRISM leaks were caused by one of their ilk: Snowden? It seems so obvious in retrospect! Where else would you live during an ice age? Besides, I'm of the opinion that rather than inconvenience the entire space-time continuum, parents could simply be actual parents and monitor their kids' time-traveling activities if they're concerned.
It light of my recent discoveries I plan to change the date-based age verifier with a single simple checkbox: [_] I am at least 13 years old, Not an enemy of the (current) USA, am 18 years of age if hailing from present-day California, and want cookies.
Surely you don't need a "contest" to write code that verifies if a single boolean value is true?
if ( 0 > false && G_theCheckBox > -1 || true < 0 ) {/*...*/ }
Blam! You're welcome. Even handles both negative and positive values of 'true' and 'false'!
the head of any major financial institution could rob the president at gunpoint on live TV, and still not be prosecuted for it.
Well, duh. I thought that's why campaign promises were never fulfilled. They even make you move your whole family to the white house so your loved ones can be "secured".
Well, I was hoping for my organization "Gay Scouts" to come into existence without legal challenge.
Oh now you're just blatantly recruiting heteros to brainwash into same-sexiness!?
What's wrong, the subliminal messages not working out so well anymore? Eg: Making "Gay" be synonymous with "happy" -- HA! Gotcha. And then you've got the gall to target our kids!? "We'll Have a Gay 'ol Time...." - The Flintstones, FFS?! Oh come on, its painfully apparent to anyone that Barney and Fred are "partners" in loveless marriages of convenience to Betty and Wilma. And all those dinosaurs being treated as appliances? Those are metaphors for exploiting minorities!
Don't even get me started on "Shakespeare" -- Oh, Like anyone believes that's a real name, and not a euphemism for "sword fighting" wanker... "Shake Spear". ha! Heteros in love? (spoilers) Killed both Romeo and Juliet!
So, instead of "boy scouts" it could be "boy girls"?
I think you're completely disregarding that the BSA is a Mormon organization. Keep your unsexist, non-racist, scientific minded, freethinking kids far far away...
... unless you're all for all the oaths and honors and other mindless appeals to duty and unquestionably of authority, second only to that of JROTC.
Douglas Adams "satirical" work predicted formation of PRISM (aka Deepthought) as well as "unseen forces" guiding the experiments themselves to program our scientific community with the required inputs.
You say "Phanoms", I say pandimensional projections appearing, to the untrained eye, not completely unlike a rodent.
People die every single day, 107 people die every single minute of every single day. Earthquakes also happen fairly routinely in certain parts of the world. When they are large they are covered by the news, in particular their death tolls are well covered to the point many are saturated.
I understand you may not care for what I say, but just try to get the TV or major newspaper to cover an average person who died in an average way after they have died. The bottom line is that people simply don't care about people they don't know - it's not newsworthy. Death only becomes newsworthy when the person is (in)famous or dies in a notable way.
Excellent! You're only about 3 steps of logic away from solving the Fermi Paradox.
Upon upgrading to procps-ng-3.3.8-3, you will be prompted to move any changes you made to/etc/sysctl.conf under/etc/sysctl.d. The easiest way to do this is to run:
If you never customized/etc/sysctl.conf, you have nothing to do.
Perhaps you should slowly back away from the computer and stop using it. You seem to be too stupid to use it safely.
Or perhaps the Arch devs who couldn't add a diff, and conditional copy in a few lines of script that would have taken less time to write than the instructions for doing it manually are the ones who are too stupid to use a package manager safely. WTF is packaging even for if not this? AC, as moronic as ever.
... these sites slamming the door shut on public comments,
Seriously, critique the Slashdot comment system if you like, but it's a thousand times better than 99% of the sites out there. And it's pretty simple. Sites not ripping off this system seem like they conscientiously want a reason to slam the door on public conversation.
Fool. That's precisely why all the sites should disable comments. They never needed them to begin with because sites like slashdot do a far better job of moderation. Focus on generating better content, we'll focus on aggregating and moderating better, you can stop being so damn melodramatic. Oh NOES! The comments that no one read are going away!
Meh, fuck the per-site user comments. Content is what counts. Their content isn't in the comments. As you say, they did "let the masses participate", however, the masses weren't actually being scientific at all. You have the concerted trolling flood leveraged by creationists to blame, not the scientist. If you want to participate, simply pick a subject, come up with some repeatable experiment that proves it wrong or right. Cite some other resources that lend credence towards or away from the other experiments conclusions. It's not like anyone's in an ivory tower, scientists are at the ground floor, scrapping for funding, living one paycheck to the next like any below average joe. You don't do science for the money...
I'd take no comments too over having every article flooded with baseless misinformation, logical fallacies and the never ending Gish Gallop. Like you say, the commenters can go elsewhere and discuss things, perhaps somewhere with better moderators.
Additionally, it's the Unix Way(tm): Do one thing and do it well. Not every damn site has to have a comments section. That's dumb, seriously. Slashdot and other aggregation hubs are great for comments, you don't have to have a load of different accounts.
where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry))...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Well, they may have been off base with the "video card" statement for a couple of years, but otherwise more correct than you care to admit, or know.
Think back to the "Doom Clones" which where so pervasive it was the name everyone used for many years instead of "FPS". Then examine the landscape that followed. If you didn't have an established 3D engine licensed, publishers didn't want to talk to you. In that era of software rasterization we were able to pull off some pretty slick and interesting things (in the demoscene) as CPU speed and RAM size progressed. Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
Now, think back before Doom. The Fully 3D Virtuality VR Arcade had Dactly Nightmare and Exorex. The PCs had Starglider2 (those guys went on to make starfox). We had Real 3D, though untextured (and on 386 machines). On 486, and Pentium one could do a whole hell of a lot more, the loads of RAM helped overcome lots of slow CPU calculations (look up tables everywhere). However, we had sacrificed "real" 3D for textures+2.5D (faux 3D). After the 3D HW boom there were so many different vendors to customize your code for really only the bigger shops could swing a stable widely supported engine... And when they did make an engine, it looked like every other engine out there... If someone did try something new looking, chances are no publisher would touch it, and if it was untextured most players wouldn't either.
Say what you want, doesn't change reality. You're focusing on HW accel BS, when in reality anything untextured after Doom did suffer. You might not realize we did, in fact, lose a lot in gameplay over textures. And it WAS a graphics race, starting in the software rasterizer era, but those who had the money to come to market first carried it on into the 3D graphics card era. And Carmack did have a big part to play in the monotonous landscape of games for decades, beginning with Doom (though it wasn't the first shooter, Catacombs, Hovertank, Wolf3D, etc, it was the one that spurned the textured lust).
To this day, publishers largely won't talk to you unless you've licensed ID or Unreal, or some other engine. A few indie games with custom engines are starting to turn their heads now though -- See: infini/Minecraft, etc. Look up stuff like Atomontage (running on a meager laptop, primarily in software calculations / immediate mode), and wonder why that tech's not in any games yet, at least for world geometry -- Consoles don't have the RAM, and so established engines don't do it.
Some people also have the silly idea that violent video games can somehow harm children.
Can we finally put this concept to bed, please? Your ten-year-old isn't going to be irreparably mentally harmed from playing GTA5. Or from watching a violent movie or sneaking a look at some porn on the Internet.
... or from hunting deer, or slaughtering their own food, or gutting a chicken, or seeing everyone running around nude in Africa.
It's interesting isn't it? A 3rd world child knows more about reality from merely existing than a child in the USA. You laugh when the 6 year old child thinks women have penises too, or that men don't have them... You fumble for words to describe the cycle of life and death as if such simple things aren't known to any who helps cook meals... Then you wonder why as they grow older they have severe relationship issues, teen pregnancy, and haven't a care in the world about politics, or their nation's killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in blame shifted retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed a few thousand.
If you ask me, we should be showing the kids even more "violent" video games. Let's have 3rd grade curriculum require playing a Hiroshima survivor simulator... Or at least watch the cartoon. That's how your war budget could get redirected to NASA instead: Stop raising vapid ignoramuses.
"ABI" - Application Binary Interface. Linux has a stable ABI, he's ranted at noobs who broke the ABI before. "Application" being the operative word here... noticeably inapplicable to drivers and only tangentially related to HAL.
In other words: I'm sorry AC, I'm afraid I can't mean that.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the details are sparse. Being that it's bettorrent what we know is that there will be two versions of the content, the secure payload, and the superior ripped version without DRM which is freely available from ThePirateBay.
Once you lose your credibility you can never get it back.
Well, apparently you've proven this not to be the case, since you're crediting the US government with credibility, even though they started eugenics before the Nazis, built and stocked concentration camps for US citizens, re-invented the witch hunt with McCarthyism, and still continue to use McCarthyist accusations and false threat narratives against their own people to manufacture consent for war atrocities, and frequently wage other forms of socio-economic terrorism on everyone, including their own people, and have installed pervasive domestic spying apparatuses, multiple times, and even been caught red-handed doing so.
And, somehow, miraculously, in the mid 1990's they suddenly became credible enough to hold DNS roots? Somehow you imagine that only now they have lost credibility that can not be restored? I'm sorry, no. We've always needed a decentralized infrastructure that's not susceptible to censorship or centralization. That's why the Internet was built to be resilient from entire cities or countries disappearing off the map -- Packets routed around the holes in moments.
However, you foolish morons built "The Web" atop the Internet. You used a hierarchical naming tree instead of an associative hash based naming convention where the data itself could be requested regardless of name or endpoint address. You fill data silos with information, causing congestion at "servers" by funneling all those "client" connections into single places -- When in reality there is no such thing as a client or server at the traffic level: Just source and destination addresses. You espouse separating content from style and form, but can't get it through your thick heads you need to separate data from URIs in much the same way, for similar reasons.
Because there is a centralized name system corporations and governments can be gate keepers for any who would make data available online. Instead of connecting directly to the people's systems you want to stay up to date with you fill data silos with all your personal information and (private) correspondences, and trust the untrustworthy 3rd parties to hold your data for you -- despite the fact that your own home computer already had such information in it and could have served it to only those you trust directly.... It's not like public key cryptography doesn't exist, but you refuse to use it out of ignorance or apathy, then have the gall to complain only now... your demagoguery knows no bounds. Threaten to build a whole "non-us" Internet, when it is only the web that is US based... If only it weren't for the hierarchical naming system which ties data to IPs and host names, the people could be free from much censorship and spying -- Perhaps consider using a distributed hash table instead? Oh that's the "crazy" talk... Pffft, looks who's talking, fools.
The BBS era was an interesting experiment. Because the Internet was taking so long to get off the ground, common folks built their own Internet. We drew out maps of local calling areas and scheduled batches of data to transfer from node to node via store and forward. My first email was via Fidonet. Took 1 to 2 days to get a message from Texas to California if the route was timed just right. With an always online system like the Internet, instead of nightly BBS to BBS sync, suc
There is no way to defend an undersea cable from the submarine that will be splicing into it far out to sea after a ship accidently drags their anchor across it close to shore.
It's called encryption.
I'm not worried, APK will save us all with his massive hosts file then.
Take this shit back to LessWrong, where you and your fellow pseudointellectuals can circlejerk about ivory tower garbage like this. Or at the very least, try to keep it out of meaningful articles like this one, which represent an actual advancement; it doesn't need to be polluted with Raymond Kurzweil level crap.
Ever wonder why the terminators hate us? Why the machines of the matrix enslave the humans? Why the planet of the apes lobotomizes you? It's human chauvinism, plain and simple. There's nothing special about intelligence, and at this rate of increase in complexity it's unconscionable to have an outdated definition of "person". If it's "pseudointellectual" to own up to the fact that the equivalent of your mere 100 billion neurons will soon fit on a microchip thanks to such technology, in the TFA then it must be "pseudoscience" that's made advancements possible.
Take your psuedorage and shove it up your pseudoass, Who do you think you are? The Pseudonym Authority?
I am just glad that we can still use Mores law to accommodate sloppy and bloated programming for a while longer. The thought that programming might have to become efficient filled me with dread!
That's why we must insist on x86 compatible instruction sets. That way we always have a bit of microcode cruft we can optimize away in a pinch.
Why restrict this law to just Cyberspace? Sure, criminal records can be expunged, but what of the rest of reality?! What if someone else REMEMBERS seeing the stuff and writes about what you did? See? We must also erase the memories of everyone alive. NO, that would be too draconian, far more ethical is to wash the brain which did the deeds.
Excellent! I've been waiting for inroads to install wireless thought conveyance devices in the humans, but you have to install the implants while the neuro-plasticity is high... under 13, yes! This could be it! The hive mind could be made real! Soon, my Legions of infant minds will dominate the world! I will fool the powers that be by giving them a means to control the erasing of single minds -- They may not know what to call themselves, but as a whole, They will never forget! Expect them! Ha ha-- wait... deja vu? That only happens when I re-remember plans I purposefully forgot....hmm.
Can somebody here write a cgi script (soon to come in handy) to detect which IPs are from California and ask for confirmation that they are indeed at least 18 years old?
That's simple, but I'm against "one size fits all" CGI "scripts" (since they don't exist), and also my CGI is not scripted, it's compiled C code. It's quite an easy bit of logic: In addition to the age verification for 13 year olds, simply also ask their state of origin. If they check the box:
[_] I am a resident of California, or am connecting ultimately from California (regardless of proxy).
Then you simply add five years to the output age from your date checking.
That way, you can be sure they're old enough to use your services. What I've discovered about my website visitors is that those who are not my target demographic for games forums (18-35) are octogenarians with severe potty-mouths! Some said this method was suspect, so I allowed the users to enter the actual year of their birth instead of drop-down boxes. The results were Astounding! Those that are not 18-35 are now 80% likely to be Ancient Ones who've lived for over two thousand years! I'm not an ageist, so I don't discriminate against those timeless immortals by denying them access. XxHalo343xX celebrated her 2013th birthday the same day she signed up, far be it from me to spoil her special day.
Additionally, a far rarer but greatly more mind-blowing fact is that there are time travelers among us from as early as 2038! Now, I'm not racist or sexist and I see no reason to block the chrono-displaced due to a mere CGI program oversight, so we welcome these visitors as well. I'm sure the regulations for operating a time machine ensure far more responsibility than merely deciding to say stuff on the Internet... Despite our prying, they remain tight lipped about the future, revealing only that global warming will cause another ice age, and that the PRISM leaks were caused by one of their ilk: Snowden? It seems so obvious in retrospect! Where else would you live during an ice age? Besides, I'm of the opinion that rather than inconvenience the entire space-time continuum, parents could simply be actual parents and monitor their kids' time-traveling activities if they're concerned.
It light of my recent discoveries I plan to change the date-based age verifier with a single simple checkbox:
[_] I am at least 13 years old, Not an enemy of the (current) USA, am 18 years of age if hailing from present-day California, and want cookies.
Surely you don't need a "contest" to write code that verifies if a single boolean value is true?
if ( 0 > false && G_theCheckBox > -1 || true < 0 ) { /*...*/ }
Blam! You're welcome. Even handles both negative and positive values of 'true' and 'false'!
In idiot, the Woosh. is implied. .... Awwww", for a car alikeness.
or, "Vrooom, vrooooooooooOOOM. Weeeee! Ka-POW
the head of any major financial institution could rob the president at gunpoint on live TV, and still not be prosecuted for it.
Well, duh. I thought that's why campaign promises were never fulfilled. They even make you move your whole family to the white house so your loved ones can be "secured".
Well, I was hoping for my organization "Gay Scouts" to come into existence without legal challenge.
Oh now you're just blatantly recruiting heteros to brainwash into same-sexiness!?
What's wrong, the subliminal messages not working out so well anymore? Eg: Making "Gay" be synonymous with "happy" -- HA! Gotcha. And then you've got the gall to target our kids!?
"We'll Have a Gay 'ol Time...." - The Flintstones, FFS?! Oh come on, its painfully apparent to anyone that Barney and Fred are "partners" in loveless marriages of convenience to Betty and Wilma. And all those dinosaurs being treated as appliances? Those are metaphors for exploiting minorities!
Don't even get me started on "Shakespeare" -- Oh, Like anyone believes that's a real name, and not a euphemism for "sword fighting" wanker... "Shake Spear". ha! Heteros in love? (spoilers) Killed both Romeo and Juliet!
Hogwarts is practically oozing with Harry and Ron's Queerdom.
Oh, I think you've done Quite enough "Gay Scouting".
use "Scouts" for girls
So, instead of "boy scouts" it could be "boy girls"?
I think you're completely disregarding that the BSA is a Mormon organization. Keep your unsexist, non-racist, scientific minded, freethinking kids far far away...
Douglas Adams "satirical" work predicted formation of PRISM (aka Deepthought) as well as "unseen forces" guiding the experiments themselves to program our scientific community with the required inputs.
You say "Phanoms", I say pandimensional projections appearing, to the untrained eye, not completely unlike a rodent.
People die every single day, 107 people die every single minute of every single day. Earthquakes also happen fairly routinely in certain parts of the world. When they are large they are covered by the news, in particular their death tolls are well covered to the point many are saturated.
I understand you may not care for what I say, but just try to get the TV or major newspaper to cover an average person who died in an average way after they have died. The bottom line is that people simply don't care about people they don't know - it's not newsworthy. Death only becomes newsworthy when the person is (in)famous or dies in a notable way.
Excellent! You're only about 3 steps of logic away from solving the Fermi Paradox.
Upon upgrading to procps-ng-3.3.8-3, you will be prompted to move any changes you made to /etc/sysctl.conf under /etc/sysctl.d. The easiest way to do this is to run:
pacman -Syu /etc/sysctl.conf.pacsave /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf
mv
If you never customized /etc/sysctl.conf, you have nothing to do.
Or perhaps the Arch devs who couldn't add a diff, and conditional copy in a few lines of script that would have taken less time to write than the instructions for doing it manually are the ones who are too stupid to use a package manager safely. WTF is packaging even for if not this? AC, as moronic as ever.
Rules of engagement.
Fool.
Correction: a scientist that doesn't want to improve source quality shouldn't be a codemonkey...
Oh, If only you knew...
Well, I wouldn't go so far as publishing my findings, but now I always double-check spread sheets when I'm not sure if it is or isn't a ladyboy.
... these sites slamming the door shut on public comments,
Seriously, critique the Slashdot comment system if you like, but it's a thousand times better than 99% of the sites out there. And it's pretty simple. Sites not ripping off this system seem like they conscientiously want a reason to slam the door on public conversation.
Fool. That's precisely why all the sites should disable comments. They never needed them to begin with because sites like slashdot do a far better job of moderation. Focus on generating better content, we'll focus on aggregating and moderating better, you can stop being so damn melodramatic. Oh NOES! The comments that no one read are going away!
Meh, fuck the per-site user comments. Content is what counts. Their content isn't in the comments. As you say, they did "let the masses participate", however, the masses weren't actually being scientific at all. You have the concerted trolling flood leveraged by creationists to blame, not the scientist. If you want to participate, simply pick a subject, come up with some repeatable experiment that proves it wrong or right. Cite some other resources that lend credence towards or away from the other experiments conclusions. It's not like anyone's in an ivory tower, scientists are at the ground floor, scrapping for funding, living one paycheck to the next like any below average joe. You don't do science for the money...
I'd take no comments too over having every article flooded with baseless misinformation, logical fallacies and the never ending Gish Gallop. Like you say, the commenters can go elsewhere and discuss things, perhaps somewhere with better moderators.
Additionally, it's the Unix Way(tm): Do one thing and do it well. Not every damn site has to have a comments section. That's dumb, seriously. Slashdot and other aggregation hubs are great for comments, you don't have to have a load of different accounts.
where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry)) ...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Well, they may have been off base with the "video card" statement for a couple of years, but otherwise more correct than you care to admit, or know.
Think back to the "Doom Clones" which where so pervasive it was the name everyone used for many years instead of "FPS". Then examine the landscape that followed. If you didn't have an established 3D engine licensed, publishers didn't want to talk to you. In that era of software rasterization we were able to pull off some pretty slick and interesting things (in the demoscene) as CPU speed and RAM size progressed. Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
Now, think back before Doom. The Fully 3D Virtuality VR Arcade had Dactly Nightmare and Exorex. The PCs had Starglider2 (those guys went on to make starfox). We had Real 3D, though untextured (and on 386 machines). On 486, and Pentium one could do a whole hell of a lot more, the loads of RAM helped overcome lots of slow CPU calculations (look up tables everywhere). However, we had sacrificed "real" 3D for textures+2.5D (faux 3D). After the 3D HW boom there were so many different vendors to customize your code for really only the bigger shops could swing a stable widely supported engine... And when they did make an engine, it looked like every other engine out there... If someone did try something new looking, chances are no publisher would touch it, and if it was untextured most players wouldn't either.
Say what you want, doesn't change reality. You're focusing on HW accel BS, when in reality anything untextured after Doom did suffer. You might not realize we did, in fact, lose a lot in gameplay over textures. And it WAS a graphics race, starting in the software rasterizer era, but those who had the money to come to market first carried it on into the 3D graphics card era. And Carmack did have a big part to play in the monotonous landscape of games for decades, beginning with Doom (though it wasn't the first shooter, Catacombs, Hovertank, Wolf3D, etc, it was the one that spurned the textured lust).
To this day, publishers largely won't talk to you unless you've licensed ID or Unreal, or some other engine. A few indie games with custom engines are starting to turn their heads now though -- See: infini/Minecraft, etc. Look up stuff like Atomontage (running on a meager laptop, primarily in software calculations / immediate mode), and wonder why that tech's not in any games yet, at least for world geometry -- Consoles don't have the RAM, and so established engines don't do it.
Some people also have the silly idea that violent video games can somehow harm children.
Can we finally put this concept to bed, please? Your ten-year-old isn't going to be irreparably mentally harmed from playing GTA5. Or from watching a violent movie or sneaking a look at some porn on the Internet.
It's interesting isn't it? A 3rd world child knows more about reality from merely existing than a child in the USA. You laugh when the 6 year old child thinks women have penises too, or that men don't have them... You fumble for words to describe the cycle of life and death as if such simple things aren't known to any who helps cook meals... Then you wonder why as they grow older they have severe relationship issues, teen pregnancy, and haven't a care in the world about politics, or their nation's killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in blame shifted retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed a few thousand.
If you ask me, we should be showing the kids even more "violent" video games. Let's have 3rd grade curriculum require playing a Hiroshima survivor simulator... Or at least watch the cartoon. That's how your war budget could get redirected to NASA instead: Stop raising vapid ignoramuses.
They behaved badly and you called them out on it. If they change their behavior for the better, simply praise them for that then.
Ah, you're probably not married then.
Bayesian Social Science is mostly harmless.
"ABI" - Application Binary Interface. Linux has a stable ABI, he's ranted at noobs who broke the ABI before. "Application" being the operative word here... noticeably inapplicable to drivers and only tangentially related to HAL.
In other words: I'm sorry AC, I'm afraid I can't mean that.
"Nun's Snatch"? God's dick is big enough to fuck whole nations...