So wait... 120MB is considered a reasonable amount of memory for Firefox to take up, an improvement even? Do any other "commonly used" programs soak up that much... because going by what I'm running, that is way out ahead of the field.
I love me some Firefox, wouldn't want to switch to anything else, but memory usage is still something I'd file under "to be resolved". Not that it matters that much - I have plenty of RAM to throw at it, but it'd be nice for it to not eat up a large chunk like that.
I suppose there's always the point at which pure brute computing power is able to simulate down to the atomic level and build up from there.
Intelligence has come about that way once already, don't see why it shouldn't happen again (although it would be a lot quicker to have some abstraction and algorithms instead of waiting for intelligent life to evolve within a simulated universe).
Interesting. But not convincing. All this says to me is that when you know what it is you're aiming for, you can read in a sympathetic way to make it match. A lot of the theories seem to rely on interpreting the text in a non-obvious way to paper over the parts where it appears to contradict the scientific account.
My thinking is that if the book of Genesis were the divinely inspired word of God, and a literal account of the world's creation, then he would foresee the troubles in interpretation we would have thousands of years later and write it a little less ambiguously. Not leave large gaps without mentioning it, or use words for time spans that can become confused... if we take the Bible at it's promise of being a more or less timeless, infallible book from God, surely he would make sure we know what it's saying?
If on the other hand it was written from a perspective of little knowledge to make sense of the world then you would expect what we see - confusion and uncertainty and ultimately inaccuracy.
As for lengthened human lifespans. Yes, I suppose it is possible that God interfered on a fundamental level with our biology in order to keep people alive for centuries, but if you accept that level of intervention there's really very little that can't be explained by divine intervention, and the whole idea of using the Bible to explain the world falls down at the point where God stopped doing these things for us. Vegetarianism, pretty unlikely to get you as far as 900 years... let alone fertile at that age.
And the flood. Even to cover the area where humans were would take a rather large flood. To cover the mountain tops (which I believe was explicitly stated) you would need a volume of water great enough to fill in the entire valley up to the mountain level. Since it would spill over into the rest of the world, you'd still need a more or less global covering to a depth equal to the height of the local mountain ranges. Unless "the Great Flood that wiped out all life that wasn't on the Ark" was actually a metaphor for "an unusually rainy afternoon" of course.
As it says on the Wikipedia article you linked to, the existence of one woman that we can all trace ancestry to doesn't imply a first couple or even a population bottleneck - she's simply our most recent common ancestor through mitochondrial DNA.
Other women would have been around at the time, but her bloodline happens to intersect with all the others around, her contemporaries would be common ancestors of segments of the population but not all of the population.
It's the same with "Y-Chromosomal Adam" - all currently living men can trace their Y chromosome to him, but that doesn't make him the first man alive. Just the most recent one out of the many that we all relate to in some way or another because they lived so far back in time.
(NB Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam lived many thousands of years separate from each other, so no... they still aren't the first couple)
I tried to pirate TF2 and it didn't work out so well... everything was in Russian and I couldn't connect to any servers without a Steam account.
Legit product was superior (being in the right language and being playable and all) so I paid for it. The problem is when there's no advantage to the legit copy (be it in the form of added value, or the warm and fuzzies from supporting some people who made a cool game) but it still costs more and makes things harder for you via DRM.
I was almost convinced you were halfway rational until the last paragraph
"The world needs scientists. The world needs Christianity. Everyone needs Christianity. Everyone doesn't need to be a scientist. It is much better to be a Christian that doesn't understand science than to be a scientist that doesn't understand Christianity."
Sounds to me like the current state of things... lot's of ignorant Christians and lots of scientists who don't understand how so many people could be so stupid.
I have the beginning of the book of Genesis open in another tab (via biblegateway.com) and even taking the days as long periods of time it still doesn't square with the scientific account.
According to what I'm reading here: Day 1 - Light and day/night created, "water above" separated from "water below" by an expanse of sky. Day 2 - Land and sea separated, plants and vegetation placed on the land Day 3 - The sun and moon placed in the sky to govern the seasons, and provide light Day 4 - Sea creatures and birds created Day 5 - Land animals and humans created Day 6 - nothing specified, until the 7th day when he rested.
Few things there...
I'm not sure what the waters above are; we have yet to find an expanse of water sat on top of the sky, although that would perhaps explain the blue colour if you didn't know about the atmosphere scattering the sunlight.
The Earth very clearly exists before the Sun in this account, and the Sun and Moon are created at the same time. Both not true. Even more noticeable is that plants were on the face of the Earth before the Sun was there to allow them to grow. The original light could be explained as stars from before the Sun, but starlight sure isn't enough to grow plants by.
When it comes to the genealogies, I'm not so bothered by the sum total of their ages implying a 6000 year old Earth as I am by the fact that each man between Adam and Noah apparently lives for centuries. Noah had 3 sons at age 500 (note Abraham's disbelief at the idea of a son at the age of 100 in Genesis 17, they knew this stuff was impossible) then he went on to live to 950 years old for crap's sake... did they misplace a decimal point here? Perhaps there's further dilation of time here and "year" actually means 1 tenth of a year.
That, and the fact that the story has the entire human race originating with a single couple. Basic genetics pretty much rules that out, unless there was some incredibly rapid mutation/evolution immediately after the fall. But of course evolution doesn't exist, does it? Round it all off with an impossible flood of the world and the Tower of Babel and the crazy whirlwind ride that is the start of Genesis is more or less complete.
Depends what kind of life you prefer. There are species able to fill most niches, from polar bears and penguins at the cold end to extremophiles in the boiling hot ocean vents. The perceived problem with warming is that it removes some of the diversity of available niches (i.e. if all the ice melts the ice-living stuff has a problem). If it got significantly colder then things in the tropics might have a problem.
For the life that has been around for the relatively recent past, the temperatures of the relatively recent past are preferred... that's how evolution works, things adapt to the conditions that are available, or they die out. There is no real optimum, any sudden change from the prevailing norm means some species or other is fucked.
Although, if you just want to maximise the total mass of alive stuff on the face of the Earth, tropical temperatures seem to work well (lot of biomass in the rainforests), so a planet that's mostly fairly warm, with some deserts at the equator where it gets hotter and some temperate regions further north is probably your best bet. Shame about the polar bears though.
I remember hearing that in one of the Settlers games, if your copy was pirated (and it managed to detect this) your weapon-smith would produce pigs instead of weapons, hence making it impossible to win the game.
I've become convinced that the best protection against piracy is to get your customers to like you.
Via Steam I've bought legit copies of Half Life 2 and the 2 episodes after having started playing a pirated copy because I decided I actually wanted to throw them some money for a quality game. I know Steam has some kind of protection, but it completely stays out of my face. I don't have to type anything in or remember to not lose a CD key... it just downloads and there it is.
Other companies that make you jump through more hoops in order to access games that interest me less, and don't respond to criticism - instead doing the whole "faceless corporation" thing... they can go take a long walk off a short pier. Fuck them. If I can bypass their protection then I will, because I god honestly do not care about them.
So yeah, if you want people to not pirate your games, make it so they want to pay you (There was another article I saw before about ways to add value beyond the media/content itself so that you're actually offering a better product than the free pirated copy, doing things that way works too). If you try and make it so they *have* to pay you, it won't work and they'll hate you and pirate your stuff just to spite you. The End.
If the planet becomes unable to support 6 billion (or are we up to 7 now?) then people will die. No question of whether they volunteer for it, or whether it's deserved - just the same as how animals in the wild that overpopulate their habitat end up starving off until the population reaches a sustainable level.
The distinction is between "theft" and "copyright infringement". Both involve obtaining something without the permission of the owner, but theft would be actually taking their stuff whereas copyright infringement is making an unauthorised copy for yourself. It's not mental gymnastics, it's what the law is.
Yes both are illegal, but they're different crimes. You can therefore decide that you want copyright infringement to no longer be a crime (by abolishing copyright or legalising filesharing or whatever) without also deciding you want to legalise "proper" theft.
Calling it theft is a tactic used by the copyright holders to make copyright infringement sound like a more serious crime than it is. Unfortunately for them they also called it piracy and hence made it cool.
If you extract energy from cars, they'll just burn more fuel to compensate for the energy lost. Net effect is more fossil fuel usage.
Take it from people and we can just adjust our metabolism, eat a tiny bit more, no big deal - most of us have plenty of spare energy available that we're not using.
My POS router (at home, not a "serious" piece of hardware) seems to need to be rebooted at regular intervals.
After x amount of time it just stops working properly... seems to either stop responding to, or stop carrying out DNS lookups, since stuff that's already connected (like IM or torrents) will carry on for a while, but websites fail to load, and the IM goes down too if I disconnect and try to reconnect.
Cycle the power and it comes straight back up, 'tis quite annoying.
Most ideas sound terrible if you take them to the absolute extreme. Fortunately we don't have to do that every time we change something, we have this thing called subtlety you see...
They deduce the age of the Earth by the fact that the lineage of men from Adam all have the length of their lives given in numbers of years, including how old they were when they produced the next one in line. It eventually leads down to someone historical that they can then count back from (or possibly to Jesus, I don't remember precisely)
Either way, that works out to Adam being created in ~4000BC, so obviously any kind of archaeological evidence from assorted ancient civilisations is alternately falsified by the evil archaeologists who hate God or mis-dated by the evil carbon daters who hate God.
I'm still waiting for all the other possible combinations of the words "dark", "matter", "quantum", "energy" and "gravity" to become recognised theories.
When I hear about the effect of dark gravity on quantum energy, and how the resulting exotic matter is possibly able to annihilate the Earth but probably won't, so we don't need to worry about them making some in the Even Larger Hadron Collider... *then* I'll believe the physicists are getting somewhere.
Like strawberries - the type you see most commonly in supermarkets was selected because it's consistent in size, fairly big and bright red. Taste doesn't come in to it. Actually the smaller strawberries tend to be sweeter and nicer, but they wouldn't look so good on a shelf, so we don't see them on shelves.
All the "ugly" candidates in a box of food get the toss as well - lumpy potatoes, mis-shapen apples and etc. Although there was a thing at Tesco a while back where they sold the ugly ones off cheap, making a point out of them being ugly but it not really mattering...
I think I'd prefer to see the full variety in shops. It'd be kinda cool to see all the different shapes and sizes and colours of banana you can get.
Slashdot Mirror
So wait... 120MB is considered a reasonable amount of memory for Firefox to take up, an improvement even? Do any other "commonly used" programs soak up that much... because going by what I'm running, that is way out ahead of the field.
I love me some Firefox, wouldn't want to switch to anything else, but memory usage is still something I'd file under "to be resolved". Not that it matters that much - I have plenty of RAM to throw at it, but it'd be nice for it to not eat up a large chunk like that.
Surely if it's on the web, it's downloadable... if you can view it then a copy has to be on your computer somewhere.
What kind of website would they accept exactly? Only a near-inaccessible government archive, with no way to find what you're looking for?
That defragger was hypnotic... all the little broken files being made whole and blue and cool-looking.
XP's defrag is just a let-down after that.
So when does the work start on building this thing?
Fuck the touristy stuff around the waterfall, I want an AI damnit!
I suppose there's always the point at which pure brute computing power is able to simulate down to the atomic level and build up from there.
Intelligence has come about that way once already, don't see why it shouldn't happen again (although it would be a lot quicker to have some abstraction and algorithms instead of waiting for intelligent life to evolve within a simulated universe).
Interesting. But not convincing. All this says to me is that when you know what it is you're aiming for, you can read in a sympathetic way to make it match. A lot of the theories seem to rely on interpreting the text in a non-obvious way to paper over the parts where it appears to contradict the scientific account.
My thinking is that if the book of Genesis were the divinely inspired word of God, and a literal account of the world's creation, then he would foresee the troubles in interpretation we would have thousands of years later and write it a little less ambiguously. Not leave large gaps without mentioning it, or use words for time spans that can become confused... if we take the Bible at it's promise of being a more or less timeless, infallible book from God, surely he would make sure we know what it's saying?
If on the other hand it was written from a perspective of little knowledge to make sense of the world then you would expect what we see - confusion and uncertainty and ultimately inaccuracy.
As for lengthened human lifespans. Yes, I suppose it is possible that God interfered on a fundamental level with our biology in order to keep people alive for centuries, but if you accept that level of intervention there's really very little that can't be explained by divine intervention, and the whole idea of using the Bible to explain the world falls down at the point where God stopped doing these things for us. Vegetarianism, pretty unlikely to get you as far as 900 years... let alone fertile at that age.
And the flood. Even to cover the area where humans were would take a rather large flood. To cover the mountain tops (which I believe was explicitly stated) you would need a volume of water great enough to fill in the entire valley up to the mountain level. Since it would spill over into the rest of the world, you'd still need a more or less global covering to a depth equal to the height of the local mountain ranges. Unless "the Great Flood that wiped out all life that wasn't on the Ark" was actually a metaphor for "an unusually rainy afternoon" of course.
As it says on the Wikipedia article you linked to, the existence of one woman that we can all trace ancestry to doesn't imply a first couple or even a population bottleneck - she's simply our most recent common ancestor through mitochondrial DNA.
Other women would have been around at the time, but her bloodline happens to intersect with all the others around, her contemporaries would be common ancestors of segments of the population but not all of the population.
It's the same with "Y-Chromosomal Adam" - all currently living men can trace their Y chromosome to him, but that doesn't make him the first man alive. Just the most recent one out of the many that we all relate to in some way or another because they lived so far back in time.
(NB Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam lived many thousands of years separate from each other, so no... they still aren't the first couple)
I tried to pirate TF2 and it didn't work out so well... everything was in Russian and I couldn't connect to any servers without a Steam account.
Legit product was superior (being in the right language and being playable and all) so I paid for it. The problem is when there's no advantage to the legit copy (be it in the form of added value, or the warm and fuzzies from supporting some people who made a cool game) but it still costs more and makes things harder for you via DRM.
I was almost convinced you were halfway rational until the last paragraph
"The world needs scientists. The world needs Christianity. Everyone needs Christianity. Everyone doesn't need to be a scientist. It is much better to be a Christian that doesn't understand science than to be a scientist that doesn't understand Christianity."
Sounds to me like the current state of things... lot's of ignorant Christians and lots of scientists who don't understand how so many people could be so stupid.
I have the beginning of the book of Genesis open in another tab (via biblegateway.com) and even taking the days as long periods of time it still doesn't square with the scientific account.
According to what I'm reading here:
Day 1 - Light and day/night created, "water above" separated from "water below" by an expanse of sky.
Day 2 - Land and sea separated, plants and vegetation placed on the land
Day 3 - The sun and moon placed in the sky to govern the seasons, and provide light
Day 4 - Sea creatures and birds created
Day 5 - Land animals and humans created
Day 6 - nothing specified, until the 7th day when he rested.
Few things there...
I'm not sure what the waters above are; we have yet to find an expanse of water sat on top of the sky, although that would perhaps explain the blue colour if you didn't know about the atmosphere scattering the sunlight.
The Earth very clearly exists before the Sun in this account, and the Sun and Moon are created at the same time. Both not true. Even more noticeable is that plants were on the face of the Earth before the Sun was there to allow them to grow. The original light could be explained as stars from before the Sun, but starlight sure isn't enough to grow plants by.
When it comes to the genealogies, I'm not so bothered by the sum total of their ages implying a 6000 year old Earth as I am by the fact that each man between Adam and Noah apparently lives for centuries. Noah had 3 sons at age 500 (note Abraham's disbelief at the idea of a son at the age of 100 in Genesis 17, they knew this stuff was impossible) then he went on to live to 950 years old for crap's sake... did they misplace a decimal point here? Perhaps there's further dilation of time here and "year" actually means 1 tenth of a year.
That, and the fact that the story has the entire human race originating with a single couple. Basic genetics pretty much rules that out, unless there was some incredibly rapid mutation/evolution immediately after the fall. But of course evolution doesn't exist, does it? Round it all off with an impossible flood of the world and the Tower of Babel and the crazy whirlwind ride that is the start of Genesis is more or less complete.
I'm not buying it.
Depends what kind of life you prefer. There are species able to fill most niches, from polar bears and penguins at the cold end to extremophiles in the boiling hot ocean vents. The perceived problem with warming is that it removes some of the diversity of available niches (i.e. if all the ice melts the ice-living stuff has a problem). If it got significantly colder then things in the tropics might have a problem.
For the life that has been around for the relatively recent past, the temperatures of the relatively recent past are preferred... that's how evolution works, things adapt to the conditions that are available, or they die out. There is no real optimum, any sudden change from the prevailing norm means some species or other is fucked.
Although, if you just want to maximise the total mass of alive stuff on the face of the Earth, tropical temperatures seem to work well (lot of biomass in the rainforests), so a planet that's mostly fairly warm, with some deserts at the equator where it gets hotter and some temperate regions further north is probably your best bet. Shame about the polar bears though.
I remember hearing that in one of the Settlers games, if your copy was pirated (and it managed to detect this) your weapon-smith would produce pigs instead of weapons, hence making it impossible to win the game.
I've become convinced that the best protection against piracy is to get your customers to like you.
Via Steam I've bought legit copies of Half Life 2 and the 2 episodes after having started playing a pirated copy because I decided I actually wanted to throw them some money for a quality game. I know Steam has some kind of protection, but it completely stays out of my face. I don't have to type anything in or remember to not lose a CD key... it just downloads and there it is.
Other companies that make you jump through more hoops in order to access games that interest me less, and don't respond to criticism - instead doing the whole "faceless corporation" thing... they can go take a long walk off a short pier. Fuck them. If I can bypass their protection then I will, because I god honestly do not care about them.
So yeah, if you want people to not pirate your games, make it so they want to pay you (There was another article I saw before about ways to add value beyond the media/content itself so that you're actually offering a better product than the free pirated copy, doing things that way works too). If you try and make it so they *have* to pay you, it won't work and they'll hate you and pirate your stuff just to spite you. The End.
If the planet becomes unable to support 6 billion (or are we up to 7 now?) then people will die. No question of whether they volunteer for it, or whether it's deserved - just the same as how animals in the wild that overpopulate their habitat end up starving off until the population reaches a sustainable level.
The distinction is between "theft" and "copyright infringement". Both involve obtaining something without the permission of the owner, but theft would be actually taking their stuff whereas copyright infringement is making an unauthorised copy for yourself. It's not mental gymnastics, it's what the law is.
Yes both are illegal, but they're different crimes. You can therefore decide that you want copyright infringement to no longer be a crime (by abolishing copyright or legalising filesharing or whatever) without also deciding you want to legalise "proper" theft.
Calling it theft is a tactic used by the copyright holders to make copyright infringement sound like a more serious crime than it is. Unfortunately for them they also called it piracy and hence made it cool.
If you extract energy from cars, they'll just burn more fuel to compensate for the energy lost. Net effect is more fossil fuel usage.
Take it from people and we can just adjust our metabolism, eat a tiny bit more, no big deal - most of us have plenty of spare energy available that we're not using.
My POS router (at home, not a "serious" piece of hardware) seems to need to be rebooted at regular intervals.
After x amount of time it just stops working properly... seems to either stop responding to, or stop carrying out DNS lookups, since stuff that's already connected (like IM or torrents) will carry on for a while, but websites fail to load, and the IM goes down too if I disconnect and try to reconnect.
Cycle the power and it comes straight back up, 'tis quite annoying.
So after we deal with the ISPs, the airlines are next... I see nothing new about this.
Most ideas sound terrible if you take them to the absolute extreme. Fortunately we don't have to do that every time we change something, we have this thing called subtlety you see...
They deduce the age of the Earth by the fact that the lineage of men from Adam all have the length of their lives given in numbers of years, including how old they were when they produced the next one in line. It eventually leads down to someone historical that they can then count back from (or possibly to Jesus, I don't remember precisely)
Either way, that works out to Adam being created in ~4000BC, so obviously any kind of archaeological evidence from assorted ancient civilisations is alternately falsified by the evil archaeologists who hate God or mis-dated by the evil carbon daters who hate God.
Christianity is the biggest, Islam comes close, Buddhism is pretty small compared to the others.
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html
Link is just the first result I got for "graph of religion membership", it lists Christianity at 33%, Islam at 21% and Buddhism at 6%.
My computer runs on Microsofts too! But sometimes my Google breaks and I have to close Windows or turn off the TV box.
I'm still waiting for all the other possible combinations of the words "dark", "matter", "quantum", "energy" and "gravity" to become recognised theories.
When I hear about the effect of dark gravity on quantum energy, and how the resulting exotic matter is possibly able to annihilate the Earth but probably won't, so we don't need to worry about them making some in the Even Larger Hadron Collider... *then* I'll believe the physicists are getting somewhere.
But how do you download the portable version without using a browser?
I guess you could just keep it on a thumb drive...
Its the same with all the fruit and veg.
Like strawberries - the type you see most commonly in supermarkets was selected because it's consistent in size, fairly big and bright red. Taste doesn't come in to it. Actually the smaller strawberries tend to be sweeter and nicer, but they wouldn't look so good on a shelf, so we don't see them on shelves.
All the "ugly" candidates in a box of food get the toss as well - lumpy potatoes, mis-shapen apples and etc. Although there was a thing at Tesco a while back where they sold the ugly ones off cheap, making a point out of them being ugly but it not really mattering...
I think I'd prefer to see the full variety in shops. It'd be kinda cool to see all the different shapes and sizes and colours of banana you can get.