The 4th dimension in this game isn't time, it's a 4th spacial dimension. Like going from a circle to a sphere. In the video we see the the player moving one loop inside another loop, so that they're intertwined, something that is impossible to do in 3-D space. The equivalent in 2-D space would be to move a small circle inside a large circle without the two ever touching. This can be accomplished only by taking the small circle off the page (into the 3-rd dimension) and dropping it back onto the page inside the other circle.
Thank you though, until I thought about how to explain it I don't think I really understood what was going on myself.
Independence Day 2: Aliens show up in a ship that makes the mothership from the first movie look like a civilian pleasure cruise, which, in fact it was. The aliens that attacked had signed up for an exotic "most dangerous game" type hunting vacation, only to be destroyed by said game. The Alien's Coast Guard/FBI shows up to investigate what happened and piece together the attacking aliens illegal activities. Together with humanity, the alien FBI raids the evil cruise line's headquarters for evidence, and eventually successfully bring charges against the executives.
Independence Day 3: All shot from the aliens point of view, as a kind of Ocean's 11 movie, beginning with the escape of the executives from their high security prison and leading up to them being stranded on earth with no resources where they fall to drugs, crime, and prostitution. Eventually rising to the top of the slum cesspool they, become something like the Mafia, only to be brought down in a hail of bullets when they finally piss off the wrong police detective.
Wow... I can see why L. Ron Hubbard wrote so many books that were so thick. Writing crappy pulp sci-fi is easy.
Maybe someone finally showed them how to make an alien 'invasion' movie correctly, so now they think they should give it another go.
What it boils down to is that every alien invasion movie and TV show ever made comes up against at least two fatal flaws. First, there's no logical reason for aliens capable of interstellar travel to attack us. If we're assuming aliens that can live on Earth the assumption must be that Earth-like planets are common, why would the aliens risk starting interstellar war for resources that are apparently quite common unless... Second, aliens capable of interstellar travel would be capable of wiping us out with little to no effort. The idea that we would win a conflict against a species that has had high technology for at least thousands of years longer than us is quite laughable (actually, the first film handled this correctly for the first 95% of the movie, humans had inflicted exactly 1 casualty on the aliens since the attacks began, until the ridiculous 'computer virus' crap came in and suddenly the alien craft were made of Papier-mâché).
If the US passed a law mandating filtered internet to only filter child porn websites, then refused to publish a list of which sites were blocked, then leaked the list by accident and it was found that the list included many sites that had nothing to do with child porn, you can bet your ass I'd be up in arms over that law and I imagine so would Google and a lot of other people.
Even if you grant that he was right (which I absolutely 100% do not) what he did was still horrible. He ruined people's lives out of idle suspicion, with little to no evidence to back it up. He split the country and indeed the world on how to handle communism and communist sympathizers and probably damaged his own goals at least as much as he helped them. Anyone who disagreed with him was immediately investigated and accused, regardless of how flimsy the evidence was. The man who called him out on the senate floor (Joseph Welch) was an American hero who showed real courage and could have just as easily have found himself being accused next.
As for the communists being 'everywhere', research has shown that of the more than 150 people accused by McCarthy evidence against them exists for only 9 of them. A significant minority of the people would have come back clean enough on a background check that they would have been granted security clearances. Finally, your assertion that communists took over one of the major parties I can only assume is idle trolling, I will simply respond by saying that if soviet controlled militant communists controlled 50% of the government for the past 40 years history would have turned out rather differently.
What about censorship of political, religious, and controversial viewpoints? This is about Freedom of expression and Freedom of communication more than it is about any single issue. If the blocking were voluntary so that people could decide individually if their internet should be censored, I could understand. If the black list were publicly available so that people inside and outside the country could audit what is being blocked, I could maybe understand. If the previously leaked block list hadn't included material that they had claimed wasn't going to be blocked, I could maybe, just possibly agree with you.
As it stands, you have a government organization which will have the ability to block any website that they want without warning or explanation. There will be no way for people inside the firewall to know what is and what isn't being blocked. And said government organization has already been shown to be either incompetent or nefarious regarding what is being added to the blacklist. It's a bad situation, and it in fact does trample on human rights.
It took around a decade to discredit McCarthyism, and there's a small but significant group of right wing pundits who still defend him. While waiting for people like this to self destruct, it's important do your part and give them a good shove in that direction whenever possible.
Can anyone think of a single example where throwing the kill switch would be better than not throwing the kill switch? You're talking about shutting down or heavily impacting > 90% of the economy, making communication difficult or impossible for a large number of people, and permanently damaging the trust that people have in a connected society. The damage would be severe and significant and I just can't imagine a situation where it would do more harm than good.
But how many of our theorized particles are actually detectable? It's all well and good to say that gravitons exist, but I don't think we're going to be building a detector the size of Jupiter and waiting around for a few thousands years to prove the idea are we? At some point we'll run out of detectable particles to detect.
What's the cost of doing something about it (in terms of food production, delayed development, reduced energy availability) compared to the cost of not doing something about it (in terms of food production, lost occupied land, ecological diversity). It's those numbers that I've never seen realistically presented, and it's those numbers that should inform the decisions. Why don't we see those numbers? Because it's really really hard to figure them out, probably impossible with our current understanding of climate, geology, ecology, economics, and sociology.
You missed the keyword of his post, even though it was repeated several times for emphasis. American. Apparently it doesn't matter (to him) if people get fed 24 hour propaganda, dissapeared off the street, tortured, executed, and harvested for organs; as long as it doesn't hurt Americans. A sentiment all too common in my country I'm afraid.
Dark matter isn't just matter that isn't lit up (that was one of the original theories, but has since fallen to the wayside), it is matter that is fundamentally different and doesn't appear to interact with regular matter at all, except gravitationally.
I don't think they're saying that kids don't or can't learn math early, it's that kids don't or can't learn math early the way that we try to teach it to them. I think what they're getting at isn't so much "no math in schools" as it is that math should be a small but significant part of every other subject.
It's possible that they're right. We know that responsible decision making is nearly impossible for most prepubescents, which is basically logical thinking, which is the basis of mathematics. Trying over and over again to cram a subject down kids' throat that they can't understand is bound to cause problems with that subject later, and lots of research has shown that math especially is subject to the "I'm bad at math" belief leading directly to the "I'm bad at math" reality.
Turns out that courtesy of an ancestor 6 generations back, I'm an heir to a Welsh castle (no kidding, I am) -- if only I care to pay the back taxes on it!
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like some kind of Welsh 419 scam?
The problem is if sexual orientation, race, or political orientation become a criminal offense. Likely to happen in modern society? No. Possible though... well maybe. There were certain groups (including, I'm not proud to say, members of my own family) who wanted all Arab-American's surveilled or at least investigated in the aftermath 9-11. Sexual orientation can still get you fired from your job if your employer happens to be the US armed forces, though that may be changing soon.
I'm not saying that I don't, in principle, agree with you. Nor am I saying that I didn't fill out my census form accurately. But I can understand why it makes people uncomfortable. Even very recent history has shown that the kind of information that can be gleaned from the census can be misused. Going back just a few decades farther would show that the this kind of information has been misused (locking up Japanese American's during WWII for instance).
German immigrants weren't rounded up during WWII, you would have had to have locked 3/4 people in Wisconsin into camps if you wanted to do that. Incidentally, German POW's were sent to Wisconsin so that they would 'feel at home' during their war time imprisonment and not want to harm the nearby population. And the funny part is that it worked, supposedly the prisoners would sneak out at night and go to barn dances... only to sneak back in the morning because they just didn't have anywhere else to go.
I love this play by Google, China is forced into one of two things: Either A, admit the people of Hong Kong are a significantly different culture than the rest of the country (in that they can handle uncensored access to information but the rest of China cannot). Or B, trying to enforce the mainland censorship laws on a large, prosperous group of Chinese people who are have been without this kind of interference from the mainland for a long, long time.
They'll be reluctant to do B because it's entirely possible that Hong Kong is politically powerful enough to actually do something to change the status quo. Of course, if they do A, then they are saying Hong Kong's success is partially explained by their more open culture, which they absolutely cannot have since it implies that the mainland culture is inferior. And they did it in such a way that they are obeying the letter of the law in China, telling the Chinese people the reason for the move, and just plain rubbing China's face in the duplicity of it all.
Actually, he's not directing how we should eat, he's trying to direct how we should change our concepts of personal property, right and wrong, and personal responsibility such that millions don't starve while other millions throw away food. His message could easily be construed as a modern day religious doctrine.
So then it's official. Google is, officially anyway, pulling out of China. Can we now say "Good on you Google!" or do the cynics in the crowd demand that we wait until google.com.hk is actually blocked by China before we express our support?
I haven't looked at what they have passed (since it still has a way to go, so I'm not going to bother yet). But if it is like some of the proposals I heard then I'll be dropping my health insurance, and putting the $12,000 I pay each year to an insurance company in my pocket and paying the $3-4000 fine. Then if I get leukemia, I'll buy insurance then, since they can't refuse me for that preexisting condition and go back to paying the $12,000 a year when my bills far outweigh that.
Some thoughts:
First, your plan assumes that any major medical costs will occur over a long enough time period that you can get insurance somewhere between you finding out about the problem and the majority of the costs coming in. What if you get hit by an uninsured motorist and end up in the ICU for 2 weeks (~$40,000)? What if you fall and break a leg, have a heart attack, a stroke, or any number of other sudden, expensive problems? I'm not sure what the rules are, or even if there are any, but I could see a 30 day waiting period before insurance takes effect, or even just the insurance underwriters taking their sweet time getting your paperwork through if they now about your condition.
Second, insurance is now subsidized for anyone below 4 times the poverty level. If you're really paying $12,000 a year (the national average is about half that) then you probably won't fall into that group, but for a lot of people that don't currently have insurance it will be cheaper to take the subsidized insurance than it will be to take the penalty. Basically, there will be very few people who will need pay more than 1 or 2% of their income for basic insurance.
Thirdly, if your little plan becomes as common as you seem to think, you can bet that the maximum penalty will be going up in the future. It's already tied to your income rate with a maximum yearly penalty, the first year's maximum is only $90, but it goes up every year up to $2000 in 2016, there's nothing to stop that penalty from continuing to increase. Even without an increase, considering all they're asking for is catastrophic coverage, it will be cheaper by 2016 to pay for the coverage than it will be to opt out and pay the fine.
You're post was about how auto liability insurance is required because it protects other people from the damage you can do to them with your car. My post is about how health insurance should be required because it protects other people from the damage you can do to them with your unpaid medical debt.
So if you get cancer and end up with $2 million in hospital debt and no way to pay it (because in the US hospitals must do life saving procedures regardless of your ability to pay) who do you think pays for that now? Everyone else who uses that hospital system and everyone's taxes already subsidize the uninsured because the uninsured are guaranteed care if they need it (which incidentally is the care that tends to be the most expensive). Nothing has changed except that now maybe the people who would have been uninsured otherwise will go to the doctor for that weird mole on their leg instead of waiting until they're coughing up blood and treatment is two orders of magnitude more expensive than it would have been earlier.
The damage of you not paying your impossible to pay medical bill is done to all of society. Forcing you to pay for some minimum amount of insurance protects society from that damage.
Very true, by the sound of the blog most of their problems stem from how poorly the systems were managed before. Different versions of Windows running different levels of updates; hundreds of authorized apps, many with overlapping or duplicate functionality; unauthorized applications that had made their way into the work-flows without being documented; proprietary software that didn't follow open standards. I wonder how much of their effort has gone into just getting their infrastructure should have been before the transition even started.
Slashdot Mirror
The 4th dimension in this game isn't time, it's a 4th spacial dimension. Like going from a circle to a sphere. In the video we see the the player moving one loop inside another loop, so that they're intertwined, something that is impossible to do in 3-D space. The equivalent in 2-D space would be to move a small circle inside a large circle without the two ever touching. This can be accomplished only by taking the small circle off the page (into the 3-rd dimension) and dropping it back onto the page inside the other circle.
Thank you though, until I thought about how to explain it I don't think I really understood what was going on myself.
In this vein:
Independence Day 2: Aliens show up in a ship that makes the mothership from the first movie look like a civilian pleasure cruise, which, in fact it was. The aliens that attacked had signed up for an exotic "most dangerous game" type hunting vacation, only to be destroyed by said game. The Alien's Coast Guard/FBI shows up to investigate what happened and piece together the attacking aliens illegal activities. Together with humanity, the alien FBI raids the evil cruise line's headquarters for evidence, and eventually successfully bring charges against the executives.
Independence Day 3: All shot from the aliens point of view, as a kind of Ocean's 11 movie, beginning with the escape of the executives from their high security prison and leading up to them being stranded on earth with no resources where they fall to drugs, crime, and prostitution. Eventually rising to the top of the slum cesspool they, become something like the Mafia, only to be brought down in a hail of bullets when they finally piss off the wrong police detective.
Wow... I can see why L. Ron Hubbard wrote so many books that were so thick. Writing crappy pulp sci-fi is easy.
Maybe someone finally showed them how to make an alien 'invasion' movie correctly, so now they think they should give it another go.
What it boils down to is that every alien invasion movie and TV show ever made comes up against at least two fatal flaws. First, there's no logical reason for aliens capable of interstellar travel to attack us. If we're assuming aliens that can live on Earth the assumption must be that Earth-like planets are common, why would the aliens risk starting interstellar war for resources that are apparently quite common unless... Second, aliens capable of interstellar travel would be capable of wiping us out with little to no effort. The idea that we would win a conflict against a species that has had high technology for at least thousands of years longer than us is quite laughable (actually, the first film handled this correctly for the first 95% of the movie, humans had inflicted exactly 1 casualty on the aliens since the attacks began, until the ridiculous 'computer virus' crap came in and suddenly the alien craft were made of Papier-mâché).
If the US passed a law mandating filtered internet to only filter child porn websites, then refused to publish a list of which sites were blocked, then leaked the list by accident and it was found that the list included many sites that had nothing to do with child porn, you can bet your ass I'd be up in arms over that law and I imagine so would Google and a lot of other people.
Even if you grant that he was right (which I absolutely 100% do not) what he did was still horrible. He ruined people's lives out of idle suspicion, with little to no evidence to back it up. He split the country and indeed the world on how to handle communism and communist sympathizers and probably damaged his own goals at least as much as he helped them. Anyone who disagreed with him was immediately investigated and accused, regardless of how flimsy the evidence was. The man who called him out on the senate floor (Joseph Welch) was an American hero who showed real courage and could have just as easily have found himself being accused next.
As for the communists being 'everywhere', research has shown that of the more than 150 people accused by McCarthy evidence against them exists for only 9 of them. A significant minority of the people would have come back clean enough on a background check that they would have been granted security clearances. Finally, your assertion that communists took over one of the major parties I can only assume is idle trolling, I will simply respond by saying that if soviet controlled militant communists controlled 50% of the government for the past 40 years history would have turned out rather differently.
What about censorship of political, religious, and controversial viewpoints? This is about Freedom of expression and Freedom of communication more than it is about any single issue. If the blocking were voluntary so that people could decide individually if their internet should be censored, I could understand. If the black list were publicly available so that people inside and outside the country could audit what is being blocked, I could maybe understand. If the previously leaked block list hadn't included material that they had claimed wasn't going to be blocked, I could maybe, just possibly agree with you.
As it stands, you have a government organization which will have the ability to block any website that they want without warning or explanation. There will be no way for people inside the firewall to know what is and what isn't being blocked. And said government organization has already been shown to be either incompetent or nefarious regarding what is being added to the blacklist. It's a bad situation, and it in fact does trample on human rights.
It took around a decade to discredit McCarthyism, and there's a small but significant group of right wing pundits who still defend him. While waiting for people like this to self destruct, it's important do your part and give them a good shove in that direction whenever possible.
Can anyone think of a single example where throwing the kill switch would be better than not throwing the kill switch? You're talking about shutting down or heavily impacting > 90% of the economy, making communication difficult or impossible for a large number of people, and permanently damaging the trust that people have in a connected society. The damage would be severe and significant and I just can't imagine a situation where it would do more harm than good.
Cyriak is coincidentally the name of a British animator.
But how many of our theorized particles are actually detectable? It's all well and good to say that gravitons exist, but I don't think we're going to be building a detector the size of Jupiter and waiting around for a few thousands years to prove the idea are we? At some point we'll run out of detectable particles to detect.
What's the cost of doing something about it (in terms of food production, delayed development, reduced energy availability) compared to the cost of not doing something about it (in terms of food production, lost occupied land, ecological diversity). It's those numbers that I've never seen realistically presented, and it's those numbers that should inform the decisions. Why don't we see those numbers? Because it's really really hard to figure them out, probably impossible with our current understanding of climate, geology, ecology, economics, and sociology.
You missed the keyword of his post, even though it was repeated several times for emphasis. American. Apparently it doesn't matter (to him) if people get fed 24 hour propaganda, dissapeared off the street, tortured, executed, and harvested for organs; as long as it doesn't hurt Americans. A sentiment all too common in my country I'm afraid.
Dark matter isn't just matter that isn't lit up (that was one of the original theories, but has since fallen to the wayside), it is matter that is fundamentally different and doesn't appear to interact with regular matter at all, except gravitationally.
I don't think they're saying that kids don't or can't learn math early, it's that kids don't or can't learn math early the way that we try to teach it to them. I think what they're getting at isn't so much "no math in schools" as it is that math should be a small but significant part of every other subject.
It's possible that they're right. We know that responsible decision making is nearly impossible for most prepubescents, which is basically logical thinking, which is the basis of mathematics. Trying over and over again to cram a subject down kids' throat that they can't understand is bound to cause problems with that subject later, and lots of research has shown that math especially is subject to the "I'm bad at math" belief leading directly to the "I'm bad at math" reality.
Turns out that courtesy of an ancestor 6 generations back, I'm an heir to a Welsh castle (no kidding, I am) -- if only I care to pay the back taxes on it!
Am I the only one who thinks this sounds like some kind of Welsh 419 scam?
The problem is if sexual orientation, race, or political orientation become a criminal offense. Likely to happen in modern society? No. Possible though... well maybe. There were certain groups (including, I'm not proud to say, members of my own family) who wanted all Arab-American's surveilled or at least investigated in the aftermath 9-11. Sexual orientation can still get you fired from your job if your employer happens to be the US armed forces, though that may be changing soon.
I'm not saying that I don't, in principle, agree with you. Nor am I saying that I didn't fill out my census form accurately. But I can understand why it makes people uncomfortable. Even very recent history has shown that the kind of information that can be gleaned from the census can be misused. Going back just a few decades farther would show that the this kind of information has been misused (locking up Japanese American's during WWII for instance).
German immigrants weren't rounded up during WWII, you would have had to have locked 3/4 people in Wisconsin into camps if you wanted to do that. Incidentally, German POW's were sent to Wisconsin so that they would 'feel at home' during their war time imprisonment and not want to harm the nearby population. And the funny part is that it worked, supposedly the prisoners would sneak out at night and go to barn dances... only to sneak back in the morning because they just didn't have anywhere else to go.
Also, resolution doesn't equal picture quality. I'd rather have a good lens system than a 20 Megapixel sensor.
I love this play by Google, China is forced into one of two things: Either A, admit the people of Hong Kong are a significantly different culture than the rest of the country (in that they can handle uncensored access to information but the rest of China cannot). Or B, trying to enforce the mainland censorship laws on a large, prosperous group of Chinese people who are have been without this kind of interference from the mainland for a long, long time.
They'll be reluctant to do B because it's entirely possible that Hong Kong is politically powerful enough to actually do something to change the status quo. Of course, if they do A, then they are saying Hong Kong's success is partially explained by their more open culture, which they absolutely cannot have since it implies that the mainland culture is inferior. And they did it in such a way that they are obeying the letter of the law in China, telling the Chinese people the reason for the move, and just plain rubbing China's face in the duplicity of it all.
Actually, he's not directing how we should eat, he's trying to direct how we should change our concepts of personal property, right and wrong, and personal responsibility such that millions don't starve while other millions throw away food. His message could easily be construed as a modern day religious doctrine.
So then it's official. Google is, officially anyway, pulling out of China. Can we now say "Good on you Google!" or do the cynics in the crowd demand that we wait until google.com.hk is actually blocked by China before we express our support?
I haven't looked at what they have passed (since it still has a way to go, so I'm not going to bother yet). But if it is like some of the proposals I heard then I'll be dropping my health insurance, and putting the $12,000 I pay each year to an insurance company in my pocket and paying the $3-4000 fine. Then if I get leukemia, I'll buy insurance then, since they can't refuse me for that preexisting condition and go back to paying the $12,000 a year when my bills far outweigh that.
Some thoughts:
First, your plan assumes that any major medical costs will occur over a long enough time period that you can get insurance somewhere between you finding out about the problem and the majority of the costs coming in. What if you get hit by an uninsured motorist and end up in the ICU for 2 weeks (~$40,000)? What if you fall and break a leg, have a heart attack, a stroke, or any number of other sudden, expensive problems? I'm not sure what the rules are, or even if there are any, but I could see a 30 day waiting period before insurance takes effect, or even just the insurance underwriters taking their sweet time getting your paperwork through if they now about your condition.
Second, insurance is now subsidized for anyone below 4 times the poverty level. If you're really paying $12,000 a year (the national average is about half that) then you probably won't fall into that group, but for a lot of people that don't currently have insurance it will be cheaper to take the subsidized insurance than it will be to take the penalty. Basically, there will be very few people who will need pay more than 1 or 2% of their income for basic insurance.
Thirdly, if your little plan becomes as common as you seem to think, you can bet that the maximum penalty will be going up in the future. It's already tied to your income rate with a maximum yearly penalty, the first year's maximum is only $90, but it goes up every year up to $2000 in 2016, there's nothing to stop that penalty from continuing to increase. Even without an increase, considering all they're asking for is catastrophic coverage, it will be cheaper by 2016 to pay for the coverage than it will be to opt out and pay the fine.
You're post was about how auto liability insurance is required because it protects other people from the damage you can do to them with your car. My post is about how health insurance should be required because it protects other people from the damage you can do to them with your unpaid medical debt.
So if you get cancer and end up with $2 million in hospital debt and no way to pay it (because in the US hospitals must do life saving procedures regardless of your ability to pay) who do you think pays for that now? Everyone else who uses that hospital system and everyone's taxes already subsidize the uninsured because the uninsured are guaranteed care if they need it (which incidentally is the care that tends to be the most expensive). Nothing has changed except that now maybe the people who would have been uninsured otherwise will go to the doctor for that weird mole on their leg instead of waiting until they're coughing up blood and treatment is two orders of magnitude more expensive than it would have been earlier.
The damage of you not paying your impossible to pay medical bill is done to all of society. Forcing you to pay for some minimum amount of insurance protects society from that damage.
Very true, by the sound of the blog most of their problems stem from how poorly the systems were managed before. Different versions of Windows running different levels of updates; hundreds of authorized apps, many with overlapping or duplicate functionality; unauthorized applications that had made their way into the work-flows without being documented; proprietary software that didn't follow open standards. I wonder how much of their effort has gone into just getting their infrastructure should have been before the transition even started.