..is dumb, as we have nothing to base the speculation on other then nintendo's history.
Uh, just because you don't knwo about it doesn't mean it's not out there. We know its CPUs, its RAM sizes, its screen types and dimensions, its connectivity, its cart type, a fair amount about its graphics hardware, and a variety of miscellany.
Frankly, if nintendo's next handheld doesnt do 3d, its going to get smacked by the PSP.
Luckily, we've known whether it'll be a 3D machine for almost eight months now.
Close, but no cigar. With the exception of the sound hardware, the entire GBC - non-z80, graphics hardware, etc - is on its own die, sitting next to the arm7.
As far as higher power consumption, well, sorry again. The fake z80 runs at 5v, whereas the arm7 runs at 3.3v, which is something you can't actually avoid because of the cart bus allowing direct memory map integration for various novelty hardware in-cart expecting 5v.
As far as translation of things from the GBC to the AGB, none of the GBC's hardware formats are unsupported by the AGB. The graphics are just plopped wholesale into VRAM (many people believe that that's the entire reason Nintendo continues to support 1d sprite maps,) sound is just flopped into the first sound bank and cranked out of the synth, etc. No translation occurs. Besides, none of that is IO; IO would be the SIO port, and the GBC mode on the AGB is directly supported too.
So, um, I'm not sure what to tell you, but in fact each and every thing you said was roughly the right idea but factualy inaccurate. Perhaps you should, y'know, read a FAQ, before announcing things. The original MBOO and XBOO pages have photographs of an AGB torn apart with its various chips noted; you might want to look around for a cached version of that (I think the modern version of the page no longer has that, but XBOO was spread far and wide for a while.)
Well, sure, except that the show is phenomenally shallow, the actors are made of plywood, and the plots are generally of toilet paper quality. Also, really, B5 is just a second-run dungeons and dragons plot, the struggle between chaos and order, where chaos panders to the stupid and order is regularly horrified that people don't fall in line. Frankly, I thought Forgotten Realms did a hell of a lot better job.
Also, B5 made space fighting more realistic? In the immortal words of Brian, "Can I buy some pot from you?" B5's space fighting was clearly the result of a bad video game. Apparently you also don't know a damned thing about inertia. This is not to suggest that I can name a show that's done it well, but really, raising the bar from the bottom of the septic tank to just below the shitter line is nothing to brag about. The thing it one upped was old Battlestar Galactica. That's not something to brag about.
Seriously, names all mean something. So, if you were an alien, wouldn't your name be translated too?
So, wait, when you Scottish friend Sean comes over, do you call him Gift from God, or John? 'Cause when I do that, I get punched. Also, actually, can you think of a group of people other than various North American native peoples whose names do get translated? Is your friend Takeshi Kanno, or Emperor's Hand Of The Wind Way? Do your Chinese, Arabic or Brazilian friends tell you their names translated?
Shit, most of my friends don't even swap name order for me. You must be special.
That said...
You'd have aliens with Indian sounding names like "Son of the stars".
There are a bunch of textually-named alien species in Star Trek, and some with more exotic naming schemes (tonals, timings, smells, ordinals and so on.)
It always bugged me on Star Trek (really any Scifi) show when they just sprinkle alien words
Watch better science fiction, and pay more attention to Star Trek. This just isn't the case. It's relatively easy to find alternate naming schemes in ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9, B5, SG1, and probably other stuff.
throughout the otherwise English dialog.
Much dialog in ST:TNG, SG1 and Farscape isn't in english at all. Moreover, ST:* and Farscape's english dialog is being instantaneously translated for the characters and audience by plot devices. Furthermore, I bet dollars to doughnuts you whined about Jesus Gibson of Not-English.
How exactly does the translator know when to let a word slip through untranslated?
Rough guess: when it can't translate it. Presumably, the translator has the ability to store rudimentary user preferences, too.
The fact that the aliens would then explain the meaning of the alien word was another irritation. How does the alien even know the word isn't being translated?
Because the human looks confused, because the human prompts or asks, or because the writer is using a tired device to push information to the audience.
I'm willing to put up with a little suspension of belief
You're referring to suspension of disbelief, I trust?
but it would be nice for script writers to pay attention once and a while and think about it.
It's funny, nearly every one of the things you gripe about have been the core plot points of at least one episode in each of ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9 and SG1. Why don't they make us read subtitles or learn Klingon? Because we'd rather watch TV than become xenolinguists.
You seem to be confusing the realistic with the enjoyable/practical. Sometimes you let them break light speed because the characters shouldn't age 20 years on the way to the war, and sometimes you let the computer translate on the fly because miring everyone down in translators every episode is extremely boring.
so why don't we get equally uppity about things like obvious language paradoxes?
The best part about this argument is when someone tries to get you to show parallels in shows from one, two, or four decades ago which actually bear this out. Inevitably, the speaker will choose one or two well written modern shows and contrast them with oen or two poorly written older shows. The fact of the matter is that modern television is on the whole significantly better than its counterparts from ages ago; the reason we're decreasingly satisfied is that we have a new alternative, the 'Net, which is significantly more literate and user-targetable still.
So unless you want to compare I Love Lucy to The Upright Citizens Brigade, Leave It to Beaver with Seinfeld, Scooby Doo with Futurama, The Outer Limits with Firefly, Hee Haw with Mr. Show, and so on, then I'll kindly request that you tell me where in the 70s to find Frasier, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Cowboy Bebop, Family Guy, ST:TNG, Wolf's Rain, Oz, Carnivale, The Shield, Smallville, and so on. And I don't even watch TV.
If anything, TV's better than it's ever been. The only problem is that since Teh Intarweb, that's not good enough anymore.
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful) Enterprise gets picked up for another season.
You know, I'll be the first to jump down Berman and Braga's throats for creating a serious sucking force in what used to be a great franchise, but are you serious? Enterprise, the bastard sickly redheaded stepchild of the Star Trek universe, has more plot in an average episode than an Andromeda season. And that's not exactly saying a lot.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the paragon of writing excellence which is Mutahahaha. Wait, I can do this with a straight face. Lemme try again.
The trouble is, everybody wants to be Star Trek these days.
And people seem to forget that Star Trek is solidly rooted in cardboard sets and christmas lights. They kicked ass and continue to take numbers because they spent money on writers.
And surely that's not because Futurama is one of the greatest cartoons ever made, both visually and with respect to its content.
I mean, my mother hates the Simpsons, and even she cries at Jurassic Bark, and The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings, Parasites Lost, The Why of Fry, The Luck of the Fryrish, Roswell that Ends Well, Leela's Homeworld, and The Sting. If you're talking about a show with 72 episodes of whom 8 - one in nine! - can make someone which blindly hates cartoons cry without knowing the underlying plot, then you're talking about something exceptional. I think you'd make your point a lot more successfully by revealing a mediocre show that survives on a syndication of 100 episodes.
Whereas it is the case that some characters really do behave in a mindless and combative fashion, in my experience the phrase "powergaming" has meant people which make choices based purely on their statistical ramifications, as opposed to according to what their character would do. In fact, IIRC, the 1st ed 2nd rev AD&D rule book uses the word in that fashion in admonitions not to do that. White Wolf gamers on the east coast tend to use the word interchangably with "Min-maxing."
This is the transcript of a skit from an old comedy album (which I used to own, but which was stolen and is now out of print) by the Dead Alewives, a Milwaukee improv comedy band who once sent their album to a DJ friend of mine from Newark. The album went under the name "Take Down the Grand Master," if I remember correctly.
The track was adopted and adapted to a video clip of characters from Summoner, and released as a brief movie called Summoner Geeks, but unfortunately too late; by the time that made them popular, the album was already out of print, and the group always resisted making reprints (for reasons I never understood.)
These days, their web page is down, which is a damned shame; there were some tracks not on the album which were on their web page (and vice versa; god, I want to hear Jazz Chat again, because if two-lip bubble lark Hampton can take the paper from Genghis Spider-Monkey, then I can certainly steal the sports section.)
If anyone knows how to reach them, please get on your knees and beg for a reprint. Though, their web page down, I fear the group is broken up and that a reprint isn't gonna happen.
you're free to put my comments in whatever pigeonhole makes you most comfortable
Tu quoque. That said, I've got a pretty good pigeonhole; why not try this on for size?
My beliefs lie in science. I refuse to take any stance on religion, either pro- or anti-; I am as likely to challenge someone that says concretely that there is not a god as I am to challenge one that says there is. I see no reason to believe that if there's an omnipotent creator, that Quantuum Mechanics might be the result of God and his friends getting really baked one night and saying "dude, a universe that worked on probability, that'd be sick, you could make an excellent bong from that, (dennis leary sounds)." Or perhaps that Lovecraft/White Wolf are correct, and that reality is changing with time, according to consensus.
In some ways, science can be compared to a religion. It's a system of rules which define cause and effect, results, ramifications, even penalties sometimes. It most importantly provides answers - reasons why things happen, ways to handle the otherwise terrifying future, chance. In some ways it can't be; there's no deep conscience, no guiding set of principles for good behavior, no admonishment to do the right thing, no reward for being a good person.
Note, though, that I've left out the question of faith. In many ways, science is faith. I just sort of trust in the results of the Large Hadron Collider, and I don't frequently question bioengineering firms. I believe that there is such a thing as a mitochondrion, and that it is the mechanism which uses degenerate sugar to fuel my body. When people say that reproduction is the result of gametes and genetic exchange, not the sharing of fragments of a soul, I nod, smile, and it all makes lots of sense to me, even though I've never seen it, never checked it, never questioned it. It is how I was raised. My father taught me those things and like a dutiful son I assumed him to simply be correct. It's been so long that now, when I see something happen, science is always the rules set by which I try to resolve the event, and I have no alternative rules set on which to fall back.
That said, I was also raised on history, and as such I am familiar with the previous "sciences" we've had; Principles became Mechanics became Engineering became Newtonian Physics became Quantuum Mechanics, and we're on the verge (IMO) of replacing those soon too. Healing became herbalism became alchemy became chemistry. The string for mathematics is hugely long.
The short version is that I am aware that my faith could be wrong. As such, I take pains to understand where it came from. I got it from my parents, from books, from classes, from the media. Knowing where it comes from does not denigrate the faith. But, unless you independantly arrived at the beliefs that happen to also be in the bible, they did come from somewhere.
I believe in physics, and that comes from a book and my parents. It didn't come from my study, work or creativity. Similarly, you did not invent Christianity, unless you're indeed a very old member of SlashDot.
Why is it that the people who are most defensive of their faith see the worst in what they're asked? All he asked you is if you learned it straight from the bible, from a priest, from your parents, from friends or a youth group, a teacher, or a sign-waving zealot on the highway median.
and continue a happy life of ignorance.
Don't presume you're correct. Your faith is faith, not fact. This is inflammatory, and representative of the charicatures you so loudly complain about being pigeonholed into. For being a religion that misses two out of three people on Earth, the zealots still sure do act like they saw it themselves.
No. In fact, that's sort of his point. It's that he used one particular religion, rather than religions in general. Swapping which particular religion doesn't make any difference, with the notable exceptions of discordianism, the lamp of the eternal light, or skepticism.
What he's doing is not to condemn the guy as a nutjob. What he's doing is explaining to the guy how to sound less like a nutjob while making a particularly salient and germane point. Similarly, if someone was making careful and considered criticism of the state of power generation, but referring to them as nucyular reactors and them gas burnin' turbine thingies, I might mention to him that learning the correct names of the devices would do wonders for his credibility.
The idea that someone is Jesusphobic for pointing out a more careful way to apply criticism to a topic, by doing the appropriate general presentation rather than using a specific example, seems anathema to me. Just like I would do well to make criticism about the state of the music industry in general, and how people would jump all over me if I just said Rap or Country, he's pointing out a way to make more clear and appropriate criticism. Nothing more.
You, on the other hand, sound like a bible thumper. Jesusphobic? Someone marked that insightful? What is this, ChristDot?
Please drop the stereotype, man, you clearly don't have a clue about Italians.
If it happened in small town in rural America, people would be acting the same.
To be fair, American newspapers generally carry quotes from Roman newspapers when we take Italian newspaper quotes, and they usually tip their hat to the Church. We have a severely distorted view of Italy, just like everywhere else, because our media lies to us even more than yours lies to you. I had the chance to tour your country, and am now embarrassed to admit that when I was fourteen, I really expected it to be a strongly devout country, too. Do remember that some countries really are heavily devout.
Also, no, if it happened in a small town in rural America, people would not be acting the same way. Our small town priests generally don't have the dignity to call for a scientific answer first. We'd probably be blaming it on abortion or gay marriage or blacks on the senate or something.
I would really like to believe that secret military weapons programs are run by people smart enough to go 30 miles further out to where it won't be seen. Or did you think that the Manhattan Project was done out in the barrens of New Mexico for convenience? Or by chance, by coincedence?
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
Would it not be more fair to cast magic, myth and religion as early attempts to understand the actual truth? Maybe you forget that those people really believed in the myth, and that much of it was constructed by logical extrapolation from other myth. Much of it held kernels of truth, and some of it even led directly to truth.
Please tell me how this algorithm, given enough time, will not succeed in explaining "everything"?
There's a Frederik Pohl novella called "Iron," written in the Known Space universe during the Man-Kzin wars (it's in the series - maybe 4 or 5?) which does exactly this. There's a chunk of the novella during which the protagonist stumbles on the remnants of an unfortunate civilization, born on a planet without surface metals of any sort. Pohl makes the case that as a result they were hard-limited; there was simply a point beyond which they didn't have the tools to progress.
Whereas I'm not sure a simple lack of metals is enough to do this, consider a more extreme case if you will. Posit a human civilization on the inside of an artificial glass sphere, provided food through a mysterious (technological) doorway. Presume that they have some material which is electrostatically rigid, and that they're careful enough not to let any human vermin up the feeding tube, and wham, there's your example. If you inject a bunch of savages - say, they're five when you put them in there, and they lose language skills over a few generations, or maybe they're seventeen and already lost them - and give them nothing more complex than a whole bunch of peat moss and some trees and whatever, then they're not going to get a whole lot further than the ancient world. Sure, maybe they'll cook up an Archimedes and get down to calculus. They're not getting electrifaction, they're not getting heavy computing machines, they're not really beating the abacus.
This isn't as mentally masterbatory as it sounds. Who are we to say that we've got all the tools we need to progress? If we had no metals, wouldn't it seem absurd that lightning could move *through* materials, not just be insulated by them, like pretty much all biological materials in the human common experience do?
Science Fiction provides dozens of examples for this, so of course, I'm falling back on Star Trek. Consider that a number of its technologies weren't "possible" until the discovery of new materials, probably the easiest example of which is the second (and later) phase of the periodic table, on which you find dilithium, trilithium, and so on. Finding another such example is really just a question of knowing sci-fi well.
Thing is, there are lots of good real world examples, too. We're not even really sure how many dimensions there are right now, or what their natures are, how many of them we exist in (time, spin, charge potential, etc,) and so on. There are good arguments for the numbers 10 and 14, judging by the way they simplify certain deep equations, but that might just reflect that because we have no access to dimension 15 we're missing a situation that makes those laws oversimple. I mean, hell, we didn't realize there might be more than four until the 1950s; who's to say we haven't missed others?
What is reality but what you perceive? If something is completely imperceptible (i.e. makes no observable change in the universe whatsoever) then whether it exists or not is irrelevant - it makes no difference to my life or yours. If it can be perceived, it can be observed. If it can be observed it is amenable to study via the scientific method.
Nah. Just because something cannot be percieved doesn't mean it's outside our existence entirely. All that means is that we don't yet have the tools or wisdom to identify it. The Sahara aquifer made no observable change in the medeival universem but whether it existed was quite relevant; it caused one of the earth's largest deserts (shut up, antarctica is a desert and it's bigger,) it made an impassable military terrain, it prevented a particular direction of human expansion, et cetera.
"But clearly it was percieved in that the desert was known to be growing!" you cry, or maybe "but that's just because we were primitive, I'm talking about people with future science" or perhaps "the faulty beliefs of the day hindered correct observations." Yes, those are thr
Apparently you've never been an oppressed minority. Or do you honestly believe that realizations regarding language use are somehow keyed to skin color?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, just because you don't knwo about it doesn't mean it's not out there. We know its CPUs, its RAM sizes, its screen types and dimensions, its connectivity, its cart type, a fair amount about its graphics hardware, and a variety of miscellany.
Frankly, if nintendo's next handheld doesnt do 3d, its going to get smacked by the PSP.
Luckily, we've known whether it'll be a 3D machine for almost eight months now.
Close, but no cigar. With the exception of the sound hardware, the entire GBC - non-z80, graphics hardware, etc - is on its own die, sitting next to the arm7.
As far as higher power consumption, well, sorry again. The fake z80 runs at 5v, whereas the arm7 runs at 3.3v, which is something you can't actually avoid because of the cart bus allowing direct memory map integration for various novelty hardware in-cart expecting 5v.
As far as translation of things from the GBC to the AGB, none of the GBC's hardware formats are unsupported by the AGB. The graphics are just plopped wholesale into VRAM (many people believe that that's the entire reason Nintendo continues to support 1d sprite maps,) sound is just flopped into the first sound bank and cranked out of the synth, etc. No translation occurs. Besides, none of that is IO; IO would be the SIO port, and the GBC mode on the AGB is directly supported too.
So, um, I'm not sure what to tell you, but in fact each and every thing you said was roughly the right idea but factualy inaccurate. Perhaps you should, y'know, read a FAQ, before announcing things. The original MBOO and XBOO pages have photographs of an AGB torn apart with its various chips noted; you might want to look around for a cached version of that (I think the modern version of the page no longer has that, but XBOO was spread far and wide for a while.)
Well, sure, except that the show is phenomenally shallow, the actors are made of plywood, and the plots are generally of toilet paper quality. Also, really, B5 is just a second-run dungeons and dragons plot, the struggle between chaos and order, where chaos panders to the stupid and order is regularly horrified that people don't fall in line. Frankly, I thought Forgotten Realms did a hell of a lot better job.
Also, B5 made space fighting more realistic? In the immortal words of Brian, "Can I buy some pot from you?" B5's space fighting was clearly the result of a bad video game. Apparently you also don't know a damned thing about inertia. This is not to suggest that I can name a show that's done it well, but really, raising the bar from the bottom of the septic tank to just below the shitter line is nothing to brag about. The thing it one upped was old Battlestar Galactica. That's not something to brag about.
Seriously, names all mean something. So, if you were an alien, wouldn't your name be translated too?
So, wait, when you Scottish friend Sean comes over, do you call him Gift from God, or John? 'Cause when I do that, I get punched. Also, actually, can you think of a group of people other than various North American native peoples whose names do get translated? Is your friend Takeshi Kanno, or Emperor's Hand Of The Wind Way? Do your Chinese, Arabic or Brazilian friends tell you their names translated?
Shit, most of my friends don't even swap name order for me. You must be special.
That said...
You'd have aliens with Indian sounding names like "Son of the stars".
There are a bunch of textually-named alien species in Star Trek, and some with more exotic naming schemes (tonals, timings, smells, ordinals and so on.)
It always bugged me on Star Trek (really any Scifi) show when they just sprinkle alien words
Watch better science fiction, and pay more attention to Star Trek. This just isn't the case. It's relatively easy to find alternate naming schemes in ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9, B5, SG1, and probably other stuff.
throughout the otherwise English dialog.
Much dialog in ST:TNG, SG1 and Farscape isn't in english at all. Moreover, ST:* and Farscape's english dialog is being instantaneously translated for the characters and audience by plot devices. Furthermore, I bet dollars to doughnuts you whined about Jesus Gibson of Not-English.
How exactly does the translator know when to let a word slip through untranslated?
Rough guess: when it can't translate it. Presumably, the translator has the ability to store rudimentary user preferences, too.
The fact that the aliens would then explain the meaning of the alien word was another irritation. How does the alien even know the word isn't being translated?
Because the human looks confused, because the human prompts or asks, or because the writer is using a tired device to push information to the audience.
I'm willing to put up with a little suspension of belief
You're referring to suspension of disbelief, I trust?
but it would be nice for script writers to pay attention once and a while and think about it.
It's funny, nearly every one of the things you gripe about have been the core plot points of at least one episode in each of ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9 and SG1. Why don't they make us read subtitles or learn Klingon? Because we'd rather watch TV than become xenolinguists.
You seem to be confusing the realistic with the enjoyable/practical. Sometimes you let them break light speed because the characters shouldn't age 20 years on the way to the war, and sometimes you let the computer translate on the fly because miring everyone down in translators every episode is extremely boring.
so why don't we get equally uppity about things like obvious language paradoxes?
Because we'd rather enjoy the fucking story.
decided that Wolfe was asking viewers to think too much ... and the show just veered right off into the twilight zone
Aw, don't say that. The twilight zone makes me think, right up to this day.
*88* episodes? ... there were only about 4, and they got repeated a lot.
As anyone who's watched Andromeda or Babylon 5 knows, these two observations are not mutually excusive.
The best part about this argument is when someone tries to get you to show parallels in shows from one, two, or four decades ago which actually bear this out. Inevitably, the speaker will choose one or two well written modern shows and contrast them with oen or two poorly written older shows. The fact of the matter is that modern television is on the whole significantly better than its counterparts from ages ago; the reason we're decreasingly satisfied is that we have a new alternative, the 'Net, which is significantly more literate and user-targetable still.
So unless you want to compare I Love Lucy to The Upright Citizens Brigade, Leave It to Beaver with Seinfeld, Scooby Doo with Futurama, The Outer Limits with Firefly, Hee Haw with Mr. Show, and so on, then I'll kindly request that you tell me where in the 70s to find Frasier, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Cowboy Bebop, Family Guy, ST:TNG, Wolf's Rain, Oz, Carnivale, The Shield, Smallville, and so on. And I don't even watch TV.
If anything, TV's better than it's ever been. The only problem is that since Teh Intarweb, that's not good enough anymore.
that would be me. I was smoking drugs at the time...
:D
As a drug user, I point out that one thing Marijuana fails to do is give you bad taste. You had better have been in a K-Hole or unconscious.
And yet... (Score:5, Insightful) Enterprise gets picked up for another season.
You know, I'll be the first to jump down Berman and Braga's throats for creating a serious sucking force in what used to be a great franchise, but are you serious? Enterprise, the bastard sickly redheaded stepchild of the Star Trek universe, has more plot in an average episode than an Andromeda season. And that's not exactly saying a lot.
Unless, of course, you're talking about the paragon of writing excellence which is Mutahahaha. Wait, I can do this with a straight face. Lemme try again.
The trouble is, everybody wants to be Star Trek these days.
And people seem to forget that Star Trek is solidly rooted in cardboard sets and christmas lights. They kicked ass and continue to take numbers because they spent money on writers.
And surely that's not because Futurama is one of the greatest cartoons ever made, both visually and with respect to its content.
I mean, my mother hates the Simpsons, and even she cries at Jurassic Bark, and The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings, Parasites Lost, The Why of Fry, The Luck of the Fryrish, Roswell that Ends Well, Leela's Homeworld, and The Sting. If you're talking about a show with 72 episodes of whom 8 - one in nine! - can make someone which blindly hates cartoons cry without knowing the underlying plot, then you're talking about something exceptional. I think you'd make your point a lot more successfully by revealing a mediocre show that survives on a syndication of 100 episodes.
Johnny Pneumonic
What is that, a hacker who stores courier information in the phlegm lining his lungs?
Try again.
Powergaming is roleplaying.
Whereas it is the case that some characters really do behave in a mindless and combative fashion, in my experience the phrase "powergaming" has meant people which make choices based purely on their statistical ramifications, as opposed to according to what their character would do. In fact, IIRC, the 1st ed 2nd rev AD&D rule book uses the word in that fashion in admonitions not to do that. White Wolf gamers on the east coast tend to use the word interchangably with "Min-maxing."
So, no, power gaming is not roleplaying.
This is the transcript of a skit from an old comedy album (which I used to own, but which was stolen and is now out of print) by the Dead Alewives, a Milwaukee improv comedy band who once sent their album to a DJ friend of mine from Newark. The album went under the name "Take Down the Grand Master," if I remember correctly.
The track was adopted and adapted to a video clip of characters from Summoner, and released as a brief movie called Summoner Geeks, but unfortunately too late; by the time that made them popular, the album was already out of print, and the group always resisted making reprints (for reasons I never understood.)
These days, their web page is down, which is a damned shame; there were some tracks not on the album which were on their web page (and vice versa; god, I want to hear Jazz Chat again, because if two-lip bubble lark Hampton can take the paper from Genghis Spider-Monkey, then I can certainly steal the sports section.)
If anyone knows how to reach them, please get on your knees and beg for a reprint. Though, their web page down, I fear the group is broken up and that a reprint isn't gonna happen.
If you can get to 20th level in 8 hours, your dungeon master is running a fantastically out of control Monty Haul game.
you're free to put my comments in whatever pigeonhole makes you most comfortable
Tu quoque. That said, I've got a pretty good pigeonhole; why not try this on for size?
My beliefs lie in science. I refuse to take any stance on religion, either pro- or anti-; I am as likely to challenge someone that says concretely that there is not a god as I am to challenge one that says there is. I see no reason to believe that if there's an omnipotent creator, that Quantuum Mechanics might be the result of God and his friends getting really baked one night and saying "dude, a universe that worked on probability, that'd be sick, you could make an excellent bong from that, (dennis leary sounds)." Or perhaps that Lovecraft/White Wolf are correct, and that reality is changing with time, according to consensus.
In some ways, science can be compared to a religion. It's a system of rules which define cause and effect, results, ramifications, even penalties sometimes. It most importantly provides answers - reasons why things happen, ways to handle the otherwise terrifying future, chance. In some ways it can't be; there's no deep conscience, no guiding set of principles for good behavior, no admonishment to do the right thing, no reward for being a good person.
Note, though, that I've left out the question of faith. In many ways, science is faith. I just sort of trust in the results of the Large Hadron Collider, and I don't frequently question bioengineering firms. I believe that there is such a thing as a mitochondrion, and that it is the mechanism which uses degenerate sugar to fuel my body. When people say that reproduction is the result of gametes and genetic exchange, not the sharing of fragments of a soul, I nod, smile, and it all makes lots of sense to me, even though I've never seen it, never checked it, never questioned it. It is how I was raised. My father taught me those things and like a dutiful son I assumed him to simply be correct. It's been so long that now, when I see something happen, science is always the rules set by which I try to resolve the event, and I have no alternative rules set on which to fall back.
That said, I was also raised on history, and as such I am familiar with the previous "sciences" we've had; Principles became Mechanics became Engineering became Newtonian Physics became Quantuum Mechanics, and we're on the verge (IMO) of replacing those soon too. Healing became herbalism became alchemy became chemistry. The string for mathematics is hugely long.
The short version is that I am aware that my faith could be wrong. As such, I take pains to understand where it came from. I got it from my parents, from books, from classes, from the media. Knowing where it comes from does not denigrate the faith. But, unless you independantly arrived at the beliefs that happen to also be in the bible, they did come from somewhere.
I believe in physics, and that comes from a book and my parents. It didn't come from my study, work or creativity. Similarly, you did not invent Christianity, unless you're indeed a very old member of SlashDot.
Why is it that the people who are most defensive of their faith see the worst in what they're asked? All he asked you is if you learned it straight from the bible, from a priest, from your parents, from friends or a youth group, a teacher, or a sign-waving zealot on the highway median.
and continue a happy life of ignorance.
Don't presume you're correct. Your faith is faith, not fact. This is inflammatory, and representative of the charicatures you so loudly complain about being pigeonholed into. For being a religion that misses two out of three people on Earth, the zealots still sure do act like they saw it themselves.
No. In fact, that's sort of his point. It's that he used one particular religion, rather than religions in general. Swapping which particular religion doesn't make any difference, with the notable exceptions of discordianism, the lamp of the eternal light, or skepticism.
What he's doing is not to condemn the guy as a nutjob. What he's doing is explaining to the guy how to sound less like a nutjob while making a particularly salient and germane point. Similarly, if someone was making careful and considered criticism of the state of power generation, but referring to them as nucyular reactors and them gas burnin' turbine thingies, I might mention to him that learning the correct names of the devices would do wonders for his credibility.
The idea that someone is Jesusphobic for pointing out a more careful way to apply criticism to a topic, by doing the appropriate general presentation rather than using a specific example, seems anathema to me. Just like I would do well to make criticism about the state of the music industry in general, and how people would jump all over me if I just said Rap or Country, he's pointing out a way to make more clear and appropriate criticism. Nothing more.
You, on the other hand, sound like a bible thumper. Jesusphobic? Someone marked that insightful? What is this, ChristDot?
What do you mean "...especially in Italy..."?
Please drop the stereotype, man, you clearly don't have a clue about Italians.
If it happened in small town in rural America, people would be acting the same.
To be fair, American newspapers generally carry quotes from Roman newspapers when we take Italian newspaper quotes, and they usually tip their hat to the Church. We have a severely distorted view of Italy, just like everywhere else, because our media lies to us even more than yours lies to you. I had the chance to tour your country, and am now embarrassed to admit that when I was fourteen, I really expected it to be a strongly devout country, too. Do remember that some countries really are heavily devout.
Also, no, if it happened in a small town in rural America, people would not be acting the same way. Our small town priests generally don't have the dignity to call for a scientific answer first. We'd probably be blaming it on abortion or gay marriage or blacks on the senate or something.
I don't understand how international currency exchange rates work
I find it amusing that you chose the one and only thing on this Earth which still really does run on magic as your example.
I would really like to believe that secret military weapons programs are run by people smart enough to go 30 miles further out to where it won't be seen. Or did you think that the Manhattan Project was done out in the barrens of New Mexico for convenience? Or by chance, by coincedence?
is the way it really brings out the bigots ... (and then the authors wonder why they can't get a girlfriend)
/.
With apologies to Kang and Kahless, Humor is a dish best served unintentionally self referentially.
I know lots of bigots that get laid, even on
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
Would it not be more fair to cast magic, myth and religion as early attempts to understand the actual truth? Maybe you forget that those people really believed in the myth, and that much of it was constructed by logical extrapolation from other myth. Much of it held kernels of truth, and some of it even led directly to truth.
Please tell me how this algorithm, given enough time, will not succeed in explaining "everything"?
There's a Frederik Pohl novella called "Iron," written in the Known Space universe during the Man-Kzin wars (it's in the series - maybe 4 or 5?) which does exactly this. There's a chunk of the novella during which the protagonist stumbles on the remnants of an unfortunate civilization, born on a planet without surface metals of any sort. Pohl makes the case that as a result they were hard-limited; there was simply a point beyond which they didn't have the tools to progress.
Whereas I'm not sure a simple lack of metals is enough to do this, consider a more extreme case if you will. Posit a human civilization on the inside of an artificial glass sphere, provided food through a mysterious (technological) doorway. Presume that they have some material which is electrostatically rigid, and that they're careful enough not to let any human vermin up the feeding tube, and wham, there's your example. If you inject a bunch of savages - say, they're five when you put them in there, and they lose language skills over a few generations, or maybe they're seventeen and already lost them - and give them nothing more complex than a whole bunch of peat moss and some trees and whatever, then they're not going to get a whole lot further than the ancient world. Sure, maybe they'll cook up an Archimedes and get down to calculus. They're not getting electrifaction, they're not getting heavy computing machines, they're not really beating the abacus.
This isn't as mentally masterbatory as it sounds. Who are we to say that we've got all the tools we need to progress? If we had no metals, wouldn't it seem absurd that lightning could move *through* materials, not just be insulated by them, like pretty much all biological materials in the human common experience do?
Science Fiction provides dozens of examples for this, so of course, I'm falling back on Star Trek. Consider that a number of its technologies weren't "possible" until the discovery of new materials, probably the easiest example of which is the second (and later) phase of the periodic table, on which you find dilithium, trilithium, and so on. Finding another such example is really just a question of knowing sci-fi well.
Thing is, there are lots of good real world examples, too. We're not even really sure how many dimensions there are right now, or what their natures are, how many of them we exist in (time, spin, charge potential, etc,) and so on. There are good arguments for the numbers 10 and 14, judging by the way they simplify certain deep equations, but that might just reflect that because we have no access to dimension 15 we're missing a situation that makes those laws oversimple. I mean, hell, we didn't realize there might be more than four until the 1950s; who's to say we haven't missed others?
What is reality but what you perceive? If something is completely imperceptible (i.e. makes no observable change in the universe whatsoever) then whether it exists or not is irrelevant - it makes no difference to my life or yours. If it can be perceived, it can be observed. If it can be observed it is amenable to study via the scientific method.
Nah. Just because something cannot be percieved doesn't mean it's outside our existence entirely. All that means is that we don't yet have the tools or wisdom to identify it. The Sahara aquifer made no observable change in the medeival universem but whether it existed was quite relevant; it caused one of the earth's largest deserts (shut up, antarctica is a desert and it's bigger,) it made an impassable military terrain, it prevented a particular direction of human expansion, et cetera.
"But clearly it was percieved in that the desert was known to be growing!" you cry, or maybe "but that's just because we were primitive, I'm talking about people with future science" or perhaps "the faulty beliefs of the day hindered correct observations." Yes, those are thr
Yes, because as we all know, a human cannot be compromised.
Apparently you've never been an oppressed minority. Or do you honestly believe that realizations regarding language use are somehow keyed to skin color?