I think you may have at factually skewed idea about how atheism works.
The majority of atheists that I know have a moral code just as strong as the religious folks I know (which is to say they've all got principles, and they all do an okay job with those principles, but also fail them from time to time). Don't know any atheists who "go around just doing what they want" to any extent greater than religious folks, who, let's face it, mostly just go around doing what they want, too.
Lots of atheists also think there are plenty of things greater than themselves--generally concepts like "humanity" or "peace" or whatnot. Kind of depends on the person, of course, some will have higher ideals, some won't. At the very least an honest, rational atheist ought to concede that every other human being is equally great--something that some religions (or folks within those religions) certainly struggle with.
If you think that because some religious people have stupid reasons for being religious they must all have stupid reasons for being religious then perhaps you should spend a few minutes with a critical thinking primer too.
Out of curiosity, do you have or know of a good reason for being religious? You've cited one argument that you find interesting but lacking, which is closer than most people get to having a discussion better than "because my parents and my holy book says so" and I'd actually like to get to some good arguments. I don't really go out of my way looking for them, but I also never get any feedback from genuinely religious folks that's anything but pure faith and irrationality.
For the reference, my stance is based almost entirely on "lack of compelling evidence". I'm not militant about it, I just don't see the point in thinking I know something when I don't have a reason to think I know it.
Well, the previous discussion had some points about this guy being banned from the game for selling in-game items for real-world money, which is possibly what caused to sue as a sort of revenge. I suspect they don't really want to encourage banned players to keep playing their game. Nor players who are in an adversarial relationship with them.
Really? Older siblings looking out for you is negligent? Hell, my parents split up when I was 7, and by the age of 9 my only babysitter was the television. Having an older sibling around would have been substantially better than that.
If they can get certain parts of the technology right, such as the ability to be able to always open up a map that's centered on the location of the action, particularly if it's a map you can zoom in and out of, that'd probably be worth $10 right there. Particularly for books with sprawling geographies (and especially historical books like this one) my #1 peeve is a lack of useful maps, and my #2 peeve is that even if the map is good in a broad sense, you often can't tell where the characters are in relation to said map.
I think it was here-abouts I read (so make of it what you will) that it's not the alcohol content, but the fact the one of the stages of the beer-making process involves boiling the water.
In modern brewing, yes. In ancient brewing, who knows? Some heating was likely, but a full boil is much less likely, though I know it varied a lot depending on the time and the region. Wine has also traditionally been a "safe" beverage to drink, and I'm not sure that it's boiled at all.
Keep in mind modern brewing methods don't necessarily have a lot to do with primitive methods. Wort wasn't always necessarily boiled, let alone for a full hour, just heated up enough to get the sugar from the grain into the water. Fermentation vats were sometimes open-air, or of questionable sanitation, depending how far back you want to go. Mostly traditional brewers just hoped that the yeast (either wild or from mixing in a bit of a previous batch) would out-compete the other stuff, and often it does, or at least close enough to call it "beer."
One good thing about wort (unfermented beer) is there's nothing that can grow in it that can really hurt you. It may go bad, meaning it looks or tastes really unpleasant, but the kinds of things that feast on room-temperature sugar water are not the kinds of things that infect people.
My guess is the relative sanitation of beer is a combined factor of a lot of things. Enough heating (even without a full boil) to kill some stuff -- possibly effectively pasteurization? I still think the small amounts of alcohol would make the liquid less hospitable to new germs, along with the competition with ferociously effective yeast.
I was recently reading about wine, which was also a safe drink in older times, and which was traditionally mixed with regular water (or even sea water) before drinking. Supposedly the wine had the ability to keep the mixture safe (not sure if it was the alcohol, or other properties) where the water on its own may not have been. I don't know enough about wine making, but I don't think it's boiled at all, is it?
The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.
Valuable truth. Unfortunately most of the people I know use the subject line of "whatever the subject of the last email from you in my inbox was" whether or not it has anything to do with the current topic.
Of course my favorite was an old boss who simply put my name in the subject line of every email he ever sent to me. Just try searching through a year's worth of messages all titled with your name, in search of the one that has the attachment image (also poorly named) that you need now for some strange reason.
You have jumped to a wild conclusion there that's completely off base. That's half of what I was pointing out in the first post, where you took the grandparent's "I get tired" and turned it into "you need to see a doctor."
I still stand by the idea that most people's brains do lose functionality the longer they work. I note that you seem to be refuting a different thesis, "it's impossible to work past 16 hours" which isn't what either the grandparent or I have said--we're only saying you're less sharp after 16 hours.
I definitely understand getting in the zone. I do all of my coding as a hobby which means I'm working in the evenings after a day of work. (And I've stayed up past bedtime on more than a number of occasions.) Having also occasionally coded on a day off, I can tell I'm fresher and better at coding on a day where I haven't worked 8 hours, though I personally do tend to get a great second wind around 9 p.m. It only tends to last a couple of hours, though, not deep into the night.
Everyone's a little different, though. I'll push it when inspired and get by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep the next day, and for one day that's okay. But keep me awake for 24 hours and I'm noticeably not as coherent. That's a simple fact of life for me. It may not be true for you, but it is for most people.
Nope, I'm a below-average programmer, and I know it. Then again, it's not my day job. It's just a freelance thing I do on evenings and weekends because it's fun, and because it (sometimes) earns me a little additional cash. Obviously I love it, or I wouldn't be able to come home after work, all worn out and tired, and start doing more work.
I'm self-taught. I know (or go out and learn) just enough to get done what I need to do. I rarely know if it's the most efficient or expedient method, but I know it works, and that's good enough for me. Once I've done it once, I have a fantastic ability to remember how and where it was used when I need to re-use it later, but that's probably my best quality, other than sheer stubborn persistence and a certain patience when it comes to testing and debugging.
If you "get stupid" after 16 hours of being awake, maybe you need to see your doctor, because you don't sound like you meet the definition of "physically fit" - which is, among other things, being able to do at least moderate exercise after a day of work.
Don't be ridiculous. The average person does sleep about 8 hours and stay up for 16. By the end of the day they're tired and they do, indeed, suffer decreased brain function. Particularly in a case when you're working later than normal, or perhaps so late you've approached or passed your town bedtime, almost anyone is going to be less sharp than they would be during their initial 8 hours of work.
As for "needing to see a doctor" -- that's again silly. Disregarding the fact that having your brain worn down from large amounts of work doesn't correlate at all with being or not being physically fit, people generally aren't doing exercise at bedtime after being awake for 16 hours, they're doing their exercise either before work or after work, which is usually after being awake for 11 -13 hours on average, I'd guess.
You may be perfectly happy working two 20-hour stints. That's great. But it's so far out of the norm that it's basically a freakish ability (not in the pejorative sense; just really unusual). Don't confuse your own ability with thinking someone else who kind of likes to sleep on an average schedule somehow needs a doctor.
Even better, what about a much wider range of resolutions? It'd be like changing your 3-speed bicycle into an 18-speed one. Pick all kinds of resolutions. There's no need to be limited to a couple of weird sets of multiples.
Also, this ought to give us a lot more flexibility in terms of magnification. Right now it seems like the choices for icons/text tend to be either A) super tiny, B) normal, or C) frigging huge! As my co-workers get older I watch one after another of them hit a point where they give up on "normal" and bump things up one step, to the point where about four icons fill their entire desktop. Some middle ground might be nice.
Yeah, I know. It was a common joke back when they'd invented two and three blades, but here it is.
Perhaps even better is the fact that one of those blades is currently being marketed to imply using their razor is like being punched in the face with water. (I swear I see that commercial at least once every half hour, for the past month.) I'm always thinking, "Really? You think I want 'a blast of hydration to the face?'" What's wrong with these people?
Right on! I'm maybe a bit less optimistic than you about the prospects of actual pace of technological developments that come from this, but I think it would provide a tremendous psychological shift if we could point to a specific dot and be able to say, "Yeah, right there. That's another habitable planet. There could be life there. *WE* could go there." Even if it's centuries or more likely millennia away, it'd be a great imaginative boost. If nothing else it could provide a lot of specific details for fiction: the number of planets in the system, the name of the star, the location and distance from Earth, stuff like that.
My money is that it's an increase in the number of gravitons as we're closer to the sun. This will eventually be looked back on as the first indication that those particles actually exist. You heard it here first!
Many who make over 250,000 are small business owners.... Employ 2 or 3 people out of that money, and they are no better off than most of the rest of us.
Your point about insurance and extra taxes on business owners is a valid one. Insurance is ungodly expensive, and the self-employment tax really hurts. The self employed don't get the same benefits their salary might make you think.
That said, your point about additional employees doesn't apply. If that money's going to an employee, it's not personal income, and doesn't compare to what the others are talking about. It's completely true that a 3-person business that brings in $250k per year isn't making any of the three "rich" but the discussion above is about households that actually bring in $250k. Very large difference.
Very true! Compare the old Stratego box cover (no idea what it looks like now, but from 20 years ago), depicting an American civil war battle, to the grid with little blue and red plastic pieces. That's exactly on par with the Atari examples cited here.
The movie plot: not so good. Visually, they did well enough, I think.
The PS3 version of the game was fun enough for me, but all I wanted was realistic-looking robots and the ability to blow up a lot of stuff. Most of the game is just robot battles, with the people reduced to maguffin plot points, for the most part, which was as it should be. Not saying it's a really quality game, but it gave me exactly what I wanted.
The PS2 version of the game was in all ways grossly inferior. Gameplay, plot, even the controls -- everything about it was exactly on par with the PS2 graphics, meaning it was all completely crap in all respects. I really can't emphasize just how bad they made that version. I haven't wanted my money back more since I bought the Nintendo version of Elevator Action back in high school.
Oh man does it ever! To harp on the most disappointing game I've ever purchased: Transformers2 for the PS2 has movie-quality art on the front, and looks like utter crap when you play. (The PS3 version is downright stunning, though. I thought the robots looked nearly as good in the game as in the movie.)
I've always wanted to do a website called "the real sandwich" which would compare the advertised product to what you actually receive. I've been too lazy to do it, though. Recently stumbled across a site called FoodIRL ( http://foodirl.com/ ) that does the same thing, though it's woefully sparse.
I think if you asked a lot of MMO creators, that's not really how they'd see it. I run an MMO (well, a very small one, so that first "M" probably doesn't apply yet.) The things I work on for the game cause me to be very concerned that A) players have fun today and B) want to come back tomorrow.
From a cynical perspective, yeah, that's basically "making the game addictive" but from my viewpoint if I don't manage to do both A and B, I won't have any players at all, and what's the point of that?
Out of that comes things like rare items that require both persistence and luck, or enough in-game cash to buy them from another player. Or rewards for what are essentially mindless grinds over the course of many days (collect X items, consume Y fancy coffee drinks). A psychologist might say this is exploiting an addictive behavior pattern, and maybe it is. But it's also simply something for players to do. Without something to do, players aren't going to play.
If you asked me if I wanted players to "be addicted" I'd say certainly not! I don't want to exploit anyone. I'm not out to turn them into mindless slaves as I leech away their lives. But I am out to create a game people will continue to play, and most of that stuff that provides for long-term entertainment in an MMO tends to boil down to stuff that's borderline addictive, or can be in some people. Unfortunately, I don't know a way around that.
Truth in advertising: I'm conscientious enough to have been concerned when one early player was donating what I thought was far too much, and was relieved when he took time off as a breather. I've counseled a number of (often young) players not to waste their in-game money in speculative/gambling type in-game scenarios. Some learn, some don't, but plenty of other players want those speculative options, and overall it seems best for the game to keep them in, even if it causes problems for a few players. I tend to hope if they can learn a lesson about it in a virtual world, it'll serve them well in later real-world situations, like gambling for real money, though that hope may be in vain.
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The majority of atheists that I know have a moral code just as strong as the religious folks I know (which is to say they've all got principles, and they all do an okay job with those principles, but also fail them from time to time). Don't know any atheists who "go around just doing what they want" to any extent greater than religious folks, who, let's face it, mostly just go around doing what they want, too.
Lots of atheists also think there are plenty of things greater than themselves--generally concepts like "humanity" or "peace" or whatnot. Kind of depends on the person, of course, some will have higher ideals, some won't. At the very least an honest, rational atheist ought to concede that every other human being is equally great--something that some religions (or folks within those religions) certainly struggle with.
If you think that because some religious people have stupid reasons for being religious they must all have stupid reasons for being religious then perhaps you should spend a few minutes with a critical thinking primer too.
Out of curiosity, do you have or know of a good reason for being religious? You've cited one argument that you find interesting but lacking, which is closer than most people get to having a discussion better than "because my parents and my holy book says so" and I'd actually like to get to some good arguments. I don't really go out of my way looking for them, but I also never get any feedback from genuinely religious folks that's anything but pure faith and irrationality.
For the reference, my stance is based almost entirely on "lack of compelling evidence". I'm not militant about it, I just don't see the point in thinking I know something when I don't have a reason to think I know it.
Well, the previous discussion had some points about this guy being banned from the game for selling in-game items for real-world money, which is possibly what caused to sue as a sort of revenge. I suspect they don't really want to encourage banned players to keep playing their game. Nor players who are in an adversarial relationship with them.
Really? Older siblings looking out for you is negligent? Hell, my parents split up when I was 7, and by the age of 9 my only babysitter was the television. Having an older sibling around would have been substantially better than that.
No, meta-questioning doesn't count. Nobody should ever do that. It's just the initial questioning that shouldn't be discouraged.
If they can get certain parts of the technology right, such as the ability to be able to always open up a map that's centered on the location of the action, particularly if it's a map you can zoom in and out of, that'd probably be worth $10 right there. Particularly for books with sprawling geographies (and especially historical books like this one) my #1 peeve is a lack of useful maps, and my #2 peeve is that even if the map is good in a broad sense, you often can't tell where the characters are in relation to said map.
I think it was here-abouts I read (so make of it what you will) that it's not the alcohol content, but the fact the one of the stages of the beer-making process involves boiling the water.
In modern brewing, yes. In ancient brewing, who knows? Some heating was likely, but a full boil is much less likely, though I know it varied a lot depending on the time and the region. Wine has also traditionally been a "safe" beverage to drink, and I'm not sure that it's boiled at all.
One good thing about wort (unfermented beer) is there's nothing that can grow in it that can really hurt you. It may go bad, meaning it looks or tastes really unpleasant, but the kinds of things that feast on room-temperature sugar water are not the kinds of things that infect people.
My guess is the relative sanitation of beer is a combined factor of a lot of things. Enough heating (even without a full boil) to kill some stuff -- possibly effectively pasteurization? I still think the small amounts of alcohol would make the liquid less hospitable to new germs, along with the competition with ferociously effective yeast.
I was recently reading about wine, which was also a safe drink in older times, and which was traditionally mixed with regular water (or even sea water) before drinking. Supposedly the wine had the ability to keep the mixture safe (not sure if it was the alcohol, or other properties) where the water on its own may not have been. I don't know enough about wine making, but I don't think it's boiled at all, is it?
The trick, seriously, is to not make your subject too long or too short.
Valuable truth. Unfortunately most of the people I know use the subject line of "whatever the subject of the last email from you in my inbox was" whether or not it has anything to do with the current topic.
Of course my favorite was an old boss who simply put my name in the subject line of every email he ever sent to me. Just try searching through a year's worth of messages all titled with your name, in search of the one that has the attachment image (also poorly named) that you need now for some strange reason.
Maybe you should cut down on the caffeine...
You have jumped to a wild conclusion there that's completely off base. That's half of what I was pointing out in the first post, where you took the grandparent's "I get tired" and turned it into "you need to see a doctor."
I still stand by the idea that most people's brains do lose functionality the longer they work. I note that you seem to be refuting a different thesis, "it's impossible to work past 16 hours" which isn't what either the grandparent or I have said--we're only saying you're less sharp after 16 hours.
I definitely understand getting in the zone. I do all of my coding as a hobby which means I'm working in the evenings after a day of work. (And I've stayed up past bedtime on more than a number of occasions.) Having also occasionally coded on a day off, I can tell I'm fresher and better at coding on a day where I haven't worked 8 hours, though I personally do tend to get a great second wind around 9 p.m. It only tends to last a couple of hours, though, not deep into the night.
Everyone's a little different, though. I'll push it when inspired and get by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep the next day, and for one day that's okay. But keep me awake for 24 hours and I'm noticeably not as coherent. That's a simple fact of life for me. It may not be true for you, but it is for most people.
I'm self-taught. I know (or go out and learn) just enough to get done what I need to do. I rarely know if it's the most efficient or expedient method, but I know it works, and that's good enough for me. Once I've done it once, I have a fantastic ability to remember how and where it was used when I need to re-use it later, but that's probably my best quality, other than sheer stubborn persistence and a certain patience when it comes to testing and debugging.
If you "get stupid" after 16 hours of being awake, maybe you need to see your doctor, because you don't sound like you meet the definition of "physically fit" - which is, among other things, being able to do at least moderate exercise after a day of work.
Don't be ridiculous. The average person does sleep about 8 hours and stay up for 16. By the end of the day they're tired and they do, indeed, suffer decreased brain function. Particularly in a case when you're working later than normal, or perhaps so late you've approached or passed your town bedtime, almost anyone is going to be less sharp than they would be during their initial 8 hours of work.
As for "needing to see a doctor" -- that's again silly. Disregarding the fact that having your brain worn down from large amounts of work doesn't correlate at all with being or not being physically fit, people generally aren't doing exercise at bedtime after being awake for 16 hours, they're doing their exercise either before work or after work, which is usually after being awake for 11 -13 hours on average, I'd guess.
You may be perfectly happy working two 20-hour stints. That's great. But it's so far out of the norm that it's basically a freakish ability (not in the pejorative sense; just really unusual). Don't confuse your own ability with thinking someone else who kind of likes to sleep on an average schedule somehow needs a doctor.
Autobots! Transform and, uh, fly away?
Also, this ought to give us a lot more flexibility in terms of magnification. Right now it seems like the choices for icons/text tend to be either A) super tiny, B) normal, or C) frigging huge! As my co-workers get older I watch one after another of them hit a point where they give up on "normal" and bump things up one step, to the point where about four icons fill their entire desktop. Some middle ground might be nice.
Perhaps even better is the fact that one of those blades is currently being marketed to imply using their razor is like being punched in the face with water. (I swear I see that commercial at least once every half hour, for the past month.) I'm always thinking, "Really? You think I want 'a blast of hydration to the face?'" What's wrong with these people?
Right on! I'm maybe a bit less optimistic than you about the prospects of actual pace of technological developments that come from this, but I think it would provide a tremendous psychological shift if we could point to a specific dot and be able to say, "Yeah, right there. That's another habitable planet. There could be life there. *WE* could go there." Even if it's centuries or more likely millennia away, it'd be a great imaginative boost. If nothing else it could provide a lot of specific details for fiction: the number of planets in the system, the name of the star, the location and distance from Earth, stuff like that.
My money is that it's an increase in the number of gravitons as we're closer to the sun. This will eventually be looked back on as the first indication that those particles actually exist. You heard it here first!
Many who make over 250,000 are small business owners.... Employ 2 or 3 people out of that money, and they are no better off than most of the rest of us.
Your point about insurance and extra taxes on business owners is a valid one. Insurance is ungodly expensive, and the self-employment tax really hurts. The self employed don't get the same benefits their salary might make you think.
That said, your point about additional employees doesn't apply. If that money's going to an employee, it's not personal income, and doesn't compare to what the others are talking about. It's completely true that a 3-person business that brings in $250k per year isn't making any of the three "rich" but the discussion above is about households that actually bring in $250k. Very large difference.
Ain't rich people grand?
I'm gonna be one of them rich people someday, so I've gotta support everything that's good for them now, just in case it's good for me later.
Very true! Compare the old Stratego box cover (no idea what it looks like now, but from 20 years ago), depicting an American civil war battle, to the grid with little blue and red plastic pieces. That's exactly on par with the Atari examples cited here.
The PS3 version of the game was fun enough for me, but all I wanted was realistic-looking robots and the ability to blow up a lot of stuff. Most of the game is just robot battles, with the people reduced to maguffin plot points, for the most part, which was as it should be. Not saying it's a really quality game, but it gave me exactly what I wanted.
The PS2 version of the game was in all ways grossly inferior. Gameplay, plot, even the controls -- everything about it was exactly on par with the PS2 graphics, meaning it was all completely crap in all respects. I really can't emphasize just how bad they made that version. I haven't wanted my money back more since I bought the Nintendo version of Elevator Action back in high school.
Even today, it still goes on to some extent.
Oh man does it ever! To harp on the most disappointing game I've ever purchased: Transformers2 for the PS2 has movie-quality art on the front, and looks like utter crap when you play. (The PS3 version is downright stunning, though. I thought the robots looked nearly as good in the game as in the movie.)
I've always wanted to do a website called "the real sandwich" which would compare the advertised product to what you actually receive. I've been too lazy to do it, though. Recently stumbled across a site called FoodIRL ( http://foodirl.com/ ) that does the same thing, though it's woefully sparse.
I was in college then, used a Mac, and didn't watch much TV. I don't think I saw the commercials, but I do think I was alive at the time.
MMOs make their games intentionally addictive.
I think if you asked a lot of MMO creators, that's not really how they'd see it. I run an MMO (well, a very small one, so that first "M" probably doesn't apply yet.) The things I work on for the game cause me to be very concerned that A) players have fun today and B) want to come back tomorrow.
From a cynical perspective, yeah, that's basically "making the game addictive" but from my viewpoint if I don't manage to do both A and B, I won't have any players at all, and what's the point of that?
Out of that comes things like rare items that require both persistence and luck, or enough in-game cash to buy them from another player. Or rewards for what are essentially mindless grinds over the course of many days (collect X items, consume Y fancy coffee drinks). A psychologist might say this is exploiting an addictive behavior pattern, and maybe it is. But it's also simply something for players to do. Without something to do, players aren't going to play.
If you asked me if I wanted players to "be addicted" I'd say certainly not! I don't want to exploit anyone. I'm not out to turn them into mindless slaves as I leech away their lives. But I am out to create a game people will continue to play, and most of that stuff that provides for long-term entertainment in an MMO tends to boil down to stuff that's borderline addictive, or can be in some people. Unfortunately, I don't know a way around that.
Truth in advertising: I'm conscientious enough to have been concerned when one early player was donating what I thought was far too much, and was relieved when he took time off as a breather. I've counseled a number of (often young) players not to waste their in-game money in speculative/gambling type in-game scenarios. Some learn, some don't, but plenty of other players want those speculative options, and overall it seems best for the game to keep them in, even if it causes problems for a few players. I tend to hope if they can learn a lesson about it in a virtual world, it'll serve them well in later real-world situations, like gambling for real money, though that hope may be in vain.