Yeah...that, or like the GP said you should just eat less. It really is pretty much that simple. Eat about how much food your body needs (or even a hundred calories less) and you can maintain your weight or slowly reduce it. It may not be easy to do, but it is definitely simple and reliable.
How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
The main difference is the direction of monetization. In the past, the idea was that I'd give you a sample, and you'll find it so fun you'll trip over yourself to give me some money to play more. Too much of the fremium model looks more like me getting you hooked on little rewards, which gradually slow in their frequency, but if you hand me a wad of cash I will temporarily inflate the rate at which you are rewarded (by harvesting tomatoes or something).
The secondary difference is that games in the past ended. In fact, as a seller you wanted me to complete your game as fast as possible, while still being satisfied with it. That combination meant you were ready to buy the next game I released. Those games were literally designed to be an experience, much like going to a movie, reading a book, attending a magic show, or taking a vacation. This new breed of game, which includes freemium and MMORPGs is instead designed to keep you paying for as long as possible...a lot like cocaine.
The makers of these games have every right to sell their product, and to make a profit. But, I can't see why we'd have anyone on here defending them. Their business model is to abuse human behavior so they can suction as much money out of people while producing as little reciprocal benefit as possible. That's not noble. That's not beneficial. That's not laudable. And, it's not defendable.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general.
That's easy to answer. An economy can only produce so much total output. This is a classic butter or guns scenario. Should we spend money settling the stars, or should we spend it on reality television. When you consider that the average TV entertainment gained per dollar spent is stratospherically higher with reality TV, it becomes clear why money is allocated where it is.
The arcade comparison is very smart. Yet, most people definitely feel differently about arcade games than Zynga games. I think there's a few differences, which get directly to what's wrong with "social" games without resorting to "greedy accountants" type statements.
1) Challenge - all true games involve some level of challenge. In a population of healthy adults, everyone can successfully put a stack of papers on a table, so that would never be a game. Add a time limit though, and some competition (who can stack the papers fastest) and even if it's a dumb game you now have a game. 2) Optionality - you've got to be able to choose to join a game, otherwise it's not a game it's a job. In the arcade, you could walk down the isle and the only lever a manufacturer had for convincing you to play their game was to make it look fun. If it doesn't look fun, just walk by. In contrast, freemium games incentivize people to harass me to play their games. 3) Dishonesty - arcade games advertise exactly what you get. Put in a quarter, and play until you die one time. Most freemium games do not. And, full games where you have to pay to unlock features are even trickier. When a parent buys a $60 game, they expect it to all be there, not to have to pay to unlock levels in two weeks.
Not all freemium games violate all (or even any) of these criterion, but so many do that it casts a pall over the entire genre. If just half of freemium games were good honest games, it would look the genre look terrible, but in reality it's gotta be nearly 100%.
Nonsense. Evolution excels at finding local optima, but there is nothing in evolution that suggests it will find global optima. With regards to energy requirements, consider for a moment that plants are green and not black. That means, they are not converting the green spectrum into energy at all. Which means, that an artificial plant, which absorbed all natural solar produced light spectrums (sp) would have more energy to work with than a natural plant does, which means it could definitely out compete the natural specimen.
Grey Goo may be an exaggerated scenario, but I find it far more compelling of an argument than the supervirus or nuclear winter types of fears that prevail in the mainstream.
How many comments on this topic are "run for the hills and ask better questions in the future". Everyone here seems to assume that just because a company doesn't have X or Y, which they think makes their lives easier that the company is doomed or terrible to work for. That can't be further from the truth. Regression tests are nice, but maybe this company doesn't require regular overtime. VCS are important, but maybe these guys keep a manual version repository (lots and lots of copies of old files) and work in a way that almost nobody is ever touching the same file during the same month, let alone at the same time.
That an organization uses a development environment you are familiar with should only be one of many aspects that inform how you think about that organization or whether you wish to work with them. They are clearly successful (using 7 year old environments suggests they've been around at least that long). So, figure out how they are doing it, what they are doing right, and what improvements they may be ameniable to, given the group dynamics at work.
Which is somewhat sad. The only reason data mining like this is useful is if you intend to modify your political basis towards what is popular. In other words, you aren't electing someone based on what their views are, you elect them based on what they think your views are. Frankly, I would rather politicians actually just came out and said what their views are... but apparently, that can't happen anymore. No, politicians will now be elected based on how well they can adapt themselves to what Internet commentators say. That seems to me to be the point of Obama's campaign tools, anyways. Unfortunately, this does not make for good presidential candidates. Good presidents tend to know themselves what needs to be done and do what they think is right, not what the masses think. Because honestly? The masses are idiots, no matter how intelligent they may be individually.
What if what needs doing is convincing the idiot masses that you agree with them? Then, a good president would use social networking tools to learn what the idiots want, and pretend to be giving it to them.
Besides, I think you'll find yourself far more accepting of our political hades if you take a more pragmatic view. I frequently hear people lamenting that politicians sometimes adjust their positions based on polls. Well, what if their positions are truly bad? What if polls told Perry that he should support science instead of being a backwards hick? I would rather have an elected official support good positions, even if for bad reasons, than support bad positions but remain true to themselves.
Now how about you tell us how successful embryonic cells are versus adult stem cells? I'll save the arguments - the adult cells tend to work far better for the intended purpose. Turning those same cells into 'embryonic' ones may lead somewhere, they may not.
Except, that's exactly not doing science. Your argument is that, you understand how one thing works a little, and you don't see proof yet that something else may be better, ergo you assume it's not worth pursuing. What if, embryonic stem cell research (and only embryonic) required the sacrifice of 1 million IVF embryos (all of which were in the process of being discarded), but the resulting research would cure 100 million people a year of disease? What if it's 1 billion people a year, or 1000 people a year? The ethics, in light of our limited foreknowledge is not nearly as cut and dried as you seem think.
OTOH, it still means the source wasn't a separate and distinct human being that had to be destroyed in order to produce them (which is the whole kick against the embryonic ones in the first place), so I don't foresee any major (or credible) theological or moral opposition to the idea.
This is absurd. If you clone someone to produce embryonic stem cells, you have an embryo. It just happens to be a cloned embryo, but it's still an embryo. You are splitting metaphorical hairs because your position is inherently inconsistent.
Also, the people who consistently oppose all embryonic research based on their own interpretation of what is moral will continue to do so. That cloning is introduced is more likely to increase their opposition than decrease it.
What percentage of a persons income, no matter how rich, no matter if earned or trust fund baby, OR total wealth, do you think YOU are entitled to have redistributed away from them. Or even more bluntly, what percentage of a person's labor is their own and to what extent are they your slave?
If you really want a fair number, I guess it would be appropriate to divvy up a person's wealth between how much of it they earned themselves through hard work and how much of it was earned by leveraging societal constructs, no? Assuming nobody (including society at large) has ownership a patch of a land, or the resources on that land, and I go there and kill an elk with my bare hands, I can argue that nobody else should be able to take any of it from me.
But, that's not really the world we live in, is it? If your business ships products, you use the roads, rail, harbors, or air terminals that we all share. If you became wealthy by hiring good employees who were educated by a public school system, you really benefit from societies' hard work. If you were able to build appropriate plants/office space due to the fact that you live in a stable society, then you are getting rich on the backs of millions of people's hard work. So, I guess if you are wealth because you are a captain of industry, or a banker, or an entertainer, or a politician it wouldn't be out of line to tax you at near 100%, because everything you've earned is predicated on the business environment you are working within.
Put another way, if you removed 1975 Bill Gates from this earth and dropped him onto another habitable planet with no intelligence species but animals similar to those on earth, who will lose out most? I kind of think if he weren't around someone else would have built a comparably successful company (maybe better for all than MS, maybe worse). But Bill G on the other hand would be decimated.
FWIW, I don't really believe in 100% taxation. My gut tells me that somewhere around 50% is where you cross the line from potentially reasonable to exploitation. But, that's informed by my own societal pressures, so there's no really definitive way to say that's right. I guess what you'd like to see is proof about what levels of taxation make society at large wealthier. E.g. if 0% tax produces -1% GDP gains, 5% tax 1% gains, 15% tax 3% gains, 25% tax 4% gains, 35% tax 3% gains, 45% tax 2% gains, etc...then you could just look at that chart and say we should probably pick the 25% rate because that creates the most wealth. I haven't seen research for that though, but would love to if it exists.
I'm in the same boat, but sometimes I wonder if it's more of just an age thing. Back when I was in high school/college (ironically, when I had the least amount of disposable income), I had to have faster and faster stuff. It didn't matter if I was only getting another 100Mhz on a CPU upgrade - I had to have it.
Not ironic at all. It's a known phenomenon that people compete with their peers to demonstrate their wealth. The field of competition is selected based on what is within reach for some, and out of reach for others. If you go to a poor enough neighborhood, people might find it tough to come up with $100 for a pair of shoes, so those who can are the haves and those who cannot are the have nots. As your wealth increases, you stop competing on goods that everyone can afford. A $100 pair of shoes is too cheap, but maybe a nice car is not. Eventually, most middle class people compete on homes and second homes and maybe boats.
The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.
The actual articles do not argue that robots will replace humans in every job. They do argue, that for high priced specialized jobs (pharmacists, medical doctors with narrow specialties, etc) there is financial incentive to automate, and that because the jobs are specialized they are ideal domains for robots or AI to intervene. I think if you read the following articles, the author isn't really claiming that we'll go from having 10,000 people employed in a certain job to 0, but rather that we'll go from 10,000 to 100, and that we'll find fewer people doing the job better than more ever did. This is almost certainly true, and consistent with all standard trends.
The only part that may be objectionable is whether or not the 9900 hypothetical people from above will be able to find other work to do. In short, is the innovation that causes new demand (new products people want) going to be able to keep ahead of the innovation that improves productivity (reducing employment necessary to meet supply). For hundreds of years, demand increased at pace with productivity. For the last decade, it hasn't. The question is, which of those trends will dominate over the coming century.
There are some disadvantages - the vendor has access to the document, which means that they can also sell the document to spammers (designs to China, for example). This can be dealt with by using a trust model; ie - the company will have an online reputation which will get quickly tarnished once this happens.
Um, no it can't. If you are working on anything proprietary, you can't upload it to servers owned by another company without having a up-to-date non-disclosure agreement in place with that organization at all times. Saving documents on a server is worth balls unless you are a student, hobbyist, intend it to be free (as in speech), or your are working on something where the intellectual rights laws protected it upon creation (you own the copyright to each sentence of your novel the moment you write them down).
Since when is it unreasonable to complain about an arbitrary limitation put on a product for the sole purpose of making the user's experience worse? DIII may be great, but if people don't like being tracked, or knowing the game will go "offline" at some point, and they decide the only way to make their voice heard is by not purchasing the product, who are you to tell them they are in the wrong? Different kinds of evil set off different kinds of folks. Get used to it.
Re:Blizzard is evil, boycott if you have integrity
on
Diablo III Beta Begins
·
· Score: 1
You're right. This new way is much better. Instead of deciding that 20,000 Baal runs is enough, Blizzard will just shut the service down and you won't even have the option to make another Baal run.
I absolutely used to love Blizzard. I had been looking forward to both Starcraft 2 and Diablo III for something like 10 years. I don't plan on buying either of them now.
I see this comment all over this page, and while it is right for some people, it's flat out wrong for the most ardent science deniers. In my comings and goings, I usually hear the politics (or policy) line for disagreeing with climate science from my more libertarian friends. They are wired to dislike it when people tell them what they should or should not do, so they figure climate scientists are in it to change their behavior. But, these people are largely not anti-science, they are just anti-climate science. Give them an evolution textbook and they generally don't have any complaints.
The other group who is most opposed to climate science seems to be the people who believe that the earth was set up by God for us to live on, and there is essentially nothing we can do to irreparably screw it up. You don't have to be a 6000 year old earth believing creationist to hold this opinion either. For these people, the problem isn't politics, but rather that you are in essence taking some sense of the divine from them.
Officially, he'll have none. It's a losing proposition. He's made it clear to the people who want to hear it that he doesn't need facts from any experts. Once that's clear enough, he doesn't need to talk about it anymore. The fundies know he's one of them, and bringing it up just makes him look nutso to more moderate voters.
In general, it's highly unlikely we'll find any fossils of great great great great etc grandpa Homo Sapiens. There is just too much time and too little likelihood of a given specimen being fossilized. But, we will find a lot of great great great etc cousin Homo Sapiens. That's what this fossil sounds like, and just because it's not quite in the direct line doesn't mean that it can't teach us a lot about ourselves and how we evolved.
I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels.
Can I get in on that?
Sometimes, the sun isn't out. Or there are clouds. Ergo, the only solution to our energy needs is that we need to start burning old people.
That's absurd. There are bazillions of technological advancements that happen every year. If someone supports all but one of them, suddenly they become neoludites? Get real.h
People don't like HFT for essentially two reasons. First, it makes it clear just how much of an advantage the Street has over regular Joes. Thirty years ago, I would have known the wall street investor was more informed than me, but at least he was still human. Second, despite claims that HFT does not increase risk, we've witnessed market irregularities in the past which have been blamed on HFT. We have even seen trades get revoked due to algorithm errors.
Mostly, though, what is the benefit to society of HFT? How much wealthier am I because of it? And at what price (or risk)?
How about a really weird thought experiment. The interest in stem cells is that they can become any cell in the body. In an embryo, that's expected, but in an adult it's not. However, when you remove the cell and begin reprogramming it, you've essentially turned it into something that is functionally closer to an embriotic cell than an adult cell.
If that reprogrammed adult stem cell is only a couple steps a way from being reprogrammed into actual embryotic cells, which could be implanted and result in pregnancy, what's the real difference? It seems to me that the "right" is using technological limitations and their own ignorance to split hairs so they can reach the desired conclusion that - embryos are special clumps of cells because they have a soul whereas individual adult cells do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah...that, or like the GP said you should just eat less. It really is pretty much that simple. Eat about how much food your body needs (or even a hundred calories less) and you can maintain your weight or slowly reduce it. It may not be easy to do, but it is definitely simple and reliable.
How is this fundamentally ANY different from what video games have been doing since the dawn of time?
The main difference is the direction of monetization. In the past, the idea was that I'd give you a sample, and you'll find it so fun you'll trip over yourself to give me some money to play more. Too much of the fremium model looks more like me getting you hooked on little rewards, which gradually slow in their frequency, but if you hand me a wad of cash I will temporarily inflate the rate at which you are rewarded (by harvesting tomatoes or something).
The secondary difference is that games in the past ended. In fact, as a seller you wanted me to complete your game as fast as possible, while still being satisfied with it. That combination meant you were ready to buy the next game I released. Those games were literally designed to be an experience, much like going to a movie, reading a book, attending a magic show, or taking a vacation. This new breed of game, which includes freemium and MMORPGs is instead designed to keep you paying for as long as possible...a lot like cocaine.
The makers of these games have every right to sell their product, and to make a profit. But, I can't see why we'd have anyone on here defending them. Their business model is to abuse human behavior so they can suction as much money out of people while producing as little reciprocal benefit as possible. That's not noble. That's not beneficial. That's not laudable. And, it's not defendable.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general.
That's easy to answer. An economy can only produce so much total output. This is a classic butter or guns scenario. Should we spend money settling the stars, or should we spend it on reality television. When you consider that the average TV entertainment gained per dollar spent is stratospherically higher with reality TV, it becomes clear why money is allocated where it is.
The arcade comparison is very smart. Yet, most people definitely feel differently about arcade games than Zynga games. I think there's a few differences, which get directly to what's wrong with "social" games without resorting to "greedy accountants" type statements.
1) Challenge - all true games involve some level of challenge. In a population of healthy adults, everyone can successfully put a stack of papers on a table, so that would never be a game. Add a time limit though, and some competition (who can stack the papers fastest) and even if it's a dumb game you now have a game.
2) Optionality - you've got to be able to choose to join a game, otherwise it's not a game it's a job. In the arcade, you could walk down the isle and the only lever a manufacturer had for convincing you to play their game was to make it look fun. If it doesn't look fun, just walk by. In contrast, freemium games incentivize people to harass me to play their games.
3) Dishonesty - arcade games advertise exactly what you get. Put in a quarter, and play until you die one time. Most freemium games do not. And, full games where you have to pay to unlock features are even trickier. When a parent buys a $60 game, they expect it to all be there, not to have to pay to unlock levels in two weeks.
Not all freemium games violate all (or even any) of these criterion, but so many do that it casts a pall over the entire genre. If just half of freemium games were good honest games, it would look the genre look terrible, but in reality it's gotta be nearly 100%.
Nonsense. Evolution excels at finding local optima, but there is nothing in evolution that suggests it will find global optima. With regards to energy requirements, consider for a moment that plants are green and not black. That means, they are not converting the green spectrum into energy at all. Which means, that an artificial plant, which absorbed all natural solar produced light spectrums (sp) would have more energy to work with than a natural plant does, which means it could definitely out compete the natural specimen.
Grey Goo may be an exaggerated scenario, but I find it far more compelling of an argument than the supervirus or nuclear winter types of fears that prevail in the mainstream.
How many comments on this topic are "run for the hills and ask better questions in the future". Everyone here seems to assume that just because a company doesn't have X or Y, which they think makes their lives easier that the company is doomed or terrible to work for. That can't be further from the truth. Regression tests are nice, but maybe this company doesn't require regular overtime. VCS are important, but maybe these guys keep a manual version repository (lots and lots of copies of old files) and work in a way that almost nobody is ever touching the same file during the same month, let alone at the same time.
That an organization uses a development environment you are familiar with should only be one of many aspects that inform how you think about that organization or whether you wish to work with them. They are clearly successful (using 7 year old environments suggests they've been around at least that long). So, figure out how they are doing it, what they are doing right, and what improvements they may be ameniable to, given the group dynamics at work.
Which is somewhat sad. The only reason data mining like this is useful is if you intend to modify your political basis towards what is popular. In other words, you aren't electing someone based on what their views are, you elect them based on what they think your views are. Frankly, I would rather politicians actually just came out and said what their views are... but apparently, that can't happen anymore. No, politicians will now be elected based on how well they can adapt themselves to what Internet commentators say. That seems to me to be the point of Obama's campaign tools, anyways. Unfortunately, this does not make for good presidential candidates. Good presidents tend to know themselves what needs to be done and do what they think is right, not what the masses think. Because honestly? The masses are idiots, no matter how intelligent they may be individually.
What if what needs doing is convincing the idiot masses that you agree with them? Then, a good president would use social networking tools to learn what the idiots want, and pretend to be giving it to them.
Besides, I think you'll find yourself far more accepting of our political hades if you take a more pragmatic view. I frequently hear people lamenting that politicians sometimes adjust their positions based on polls. Well, what if their positions are truly bad? What if polls told Perry that he should support science instead of being a backwards hick? I would rather have an elected official support good positions, even if for bad reasons, than support bad positions but remain true to themselves.
Now how about you tell us how successful embryonic cells are versus adult stem cells? I'll save the arguments - the adult cells tend to work far better for the intended purpose. Turning those same cells into 'embryonic' ones may lead somewhere, they may not.
Except, that's exactly not doing science. Your argument is that, you understand how one thing works a little, and you don't see proof yet that something else may be better, ergo you assume it's not worth pursuing. What if, embryonic stem cell research (and only embryonic) required the sacrifice of 1 million IVF embryos (all of which were in the process of being discarded), but the resulting research would cure 100 million people a year of disease? What if it's 1 billion people a year, or 1000 people a year? The ethics, in light of our limited foreknowledge is not nearly as cut and dried as you seem think.
OTOH, it still means the source wasn't a separate and distinct human being that had to be destroyed in order to produce them (which is the whole kick against the embryonic ones in the first place), so I don't foresee any major (or credible) theological or moral opposition to the idea.
This is absurd. If you clone someone to produce embryonic stem cells, you have an embryo. It just happens to be a cloned embryo, but it's still an embryo. You are splitting metaphorical hairs because your position is inherently inconsistent.
Also, the people who consistently oppose all embryonic research based on their own interpretation of what is moral will continue to do so. That cloning is introduced is more likely to increase their opposition than decrease it.
can I get a 97%?
What percentage of a persons income, no matter how rich, no matter if earned or trust fund baby, OR total wealth, do you think YOU are entitled to have redistributed away from them. Or even more bluntly, what percentage of a person's labor is their own and to what extent are they your slave?
If you really want a fair number, I guess it would be appropriate to divvy up a person's wealth between how much of it they earned themselves through hard work and how much of it was earned by leveraging societal constructs, no? Assuming nobody (including society at large) has ownership a patch of a land, or the resources on that land, and I go there and kill an elk with my bare hands, I can argue that nobody else should be able to take any of it from me.
But, that's not really the world we live in, is it? If your business ships products, you use the roads, rail, harbors, or air terminals that we all share. If you became wealthy by hiring good employees who were educated by a public school system, you really benefit from societies' hard work. If you were able to build appropriate plants/office space due to the fact that you live in a stable society, then you are getting rich on the backs of millions of people's hard work. So, I guess if you are wealth because you are a captain of industry, or a banker, or an entertainer, or a politician it wouldn't be out of line to tax you at near 100%, because everything you've earned is predicated on the business environment you are working within.
Put another way, if you removed 1975 Bill Gates from this earth and dropped him onto another habitable planet with no intelligence species but animals similar to those on earth, who will lose out most? I kind of think if he weren't around someone else would have built a comparably successful company (maybe better for all than MS, maybe worse). But Bill G on the other hand would be decimated.
FWIW, I don't really believe in 100% taxation. My gut tells me that somewhere around 50% is where you cross the line from potentially reasonable to exploitation. But, that's informed by my own societal pressures, so there's no really definitive way to say that's right. I guess what you'd like to see is proof about what levels of taxation make society at large wealthier. E.g. if 0% tax produces -1% GDP gains, 5% tax 1% gains, 15% tax 3% gains, 25% tax 4% gains, 35% tax 3% gains, 45% tax 2% gains, etc...then you could just look at that chart and say we should probably pick the 25% rate because that creates the most wealth. I haven't seen research for that though, but would love to if it exists.
Then perhaps you should read the wikipedia article describing what a ponzi scheme is.
Social Security is, instead, a generally sustainable inter-generational wealth transfer system.
I'm in the same boat, but sometimes I wonder if it's more of just an age thing. Back when I was in high school/college (ironically, when I had the least amount of disposable income), I had to have faster and faster stuff. It didn't matter if I was only getting another 100Mhz on a CPU upgrade - I had to have it.
Not ironic at all. It's a known phenomenon that people compete with their peers to demonstrate their wealth. The field of competition is selected based on what is within reach for some, and out of reach for others. If you go to a poor enough neighborhood, people might find it tough to come up with $100 for a pair of shoes, so those who can are the haves and those who cannot are the have nots. As your wealth increases, you stop competing on goods that everyone can afford. A $100 pair of shoes is too cheap, but maybe a nice car is not. Eventually, most middle class people compete on homes and second homes and maybe boats.
The article claims that within about 20 years (i.e., soon enough to "steal your job"), a whole bunch of intellectually demanding professions (including writing magazine articles and doing scientific research) will be automated. It offers no evidence for that claim. Maybe he believes that strong AI is coming within 20 years. Maybe he believes that computers can do these jobs without strong AI. Neither of those predictions seems plausible to me, and since he doesn't give the slightest hint of what he has in mind, there's not much to discuss.
The actual articles do not argue that robots will replace humans in every job. They do argue, that for high priced specialized jobs (pharmacists, medical doctors with narrow specialties, etc) there is financial incentive to automate, and that because the jobs are specialized they are ideal domains for robots or AI to intervene. I think if you read the following articles, the author isn't really claiming that we'll go from having 10,000 people employed in a certain job to 0, but rather that we'll go from 10,000 to 100, and that we'll find fewer people doing the job better than more ever did. This is almost certainly true, and consistent with all standard trends.
The only part that may be objectionable is whether or not the 9900 hypothetical people from above will be able to find other work to do. In short, is the innovation that causes new demand (new products people want) going to be able to keep ahead of the innovation that improves productivity (reducing employment necessary to meet supply). For hundreds of years, demand increased at pace with productivity. For the last decade, it hasn't. The question is, which of those trends will dominate over the coming century.
There are some disadvantages - the vendor has access to the document, which means that they can also sell the document to spammers (designs to China, for example). This can be dealt with by using a trust model; ie - the company will have an online reputation which will get quickly tarnished once this happens.
Um, no it can't. If you are working on anything proprietary, you can't upload it to servers owned by another company without having a up-to-date non-disclosure agreement in place with that organization at all times. Saving documents on a server is worth balls unless you are a student, hobbyist, intend it to be free (as in speech), or your are working on something where the intellectual rights laws protected it upon creation (you own the copyright to each sentence of your novel the moment you write them down).
Since when is it unreasonable to complain about an arbitrary limitation put on a product for the sole purpose of making the user's experience worse? DIII may be great, but if people don't like being tracked, or knowing the game will go "offline" at some point, and they decide the only way to make their voice heard is by not purchasing the product, who are you to tell them they are in the wrong? Different kinds of evil set off different kinds of folks. Get used to it.
You're right. This new way is much better. Instead of deciding that 20,000 Baal runs is enough, Blizzard will just shut the service down and you won't even have the option to make another Baal run.
I absolutely used to love Blizzard. I had been looking forward to both Starcraft 2 and Diablo III for something like 10 years. I don't plan on buying either of them now.
I see this comment all over this page, and while it is right for some people, it's flat out wrong for the most ardent science deniers. In my comings and goings, I usually hear the politics (or policy) line for disagreeing with climate science from my more libertarian friends. They are wired to dislike it when people tell them what they should or should not do, so they figure climate scientists are in it to change their behavior. But, these people are largely not anti-science, they are just anti-climate science. Give them an evolution textbook and they generally don't have any complaints.
The other group who is most opposed to climate science seems to be the people who believe that the earth was set up by God for us to live on, and there is essentially nothing we can do to irreparably screw it up. You don't have to be a 6000 year old earth believing creationist to hold this opinion either. For these people, the problem isn't politics, but rather that you are in essence taking some sense of the divine from them.
Officially, he'll have none. It's a losing proposition. He's made it clear to the people who want to hear it that he doesn't need facts from any experts. Once that's clear enough, he doesn't need to talk about it anymore. The fundies know he's one of them, and bringing it up just makes him look nutso to more moderate voters.
In general, it's highly unlikely we'll find any fossils of great great great great etc grandpa Homo Sapiens. There is just too much time and too little likelihood of a given specimen being fossilized. But, we will find a lot of great great great etc cousin Homo Sapiens. That's what this fossil sounds like, and just because it's not quite in the direct line doesn't mean that it can't teach us a lot about ourselves and how we evolved.
I just don't understand why people like you bring up a couple weaknesses of renewable energy then walk away like the only answer is non renewable fossil fuels.
Can I get in on that?
Sometimes, the sun isn't out. Or there are clouds. Ergo, the only solution to our energy needs is that we need to start burning old people.
And, conveniently you can do any mirror maintenance you like at night without even impacting production.
That's absurd. There are bazillions of technological advancements that happen every year. If someone supports all but one of them, suddenly they become neoludites? Get real.h
People don't like HFT for essentially two reasons. First, it makes it clear just how much of an advantage the Street has over regular Joes. Thirty years ago, I would have known the wall street investor was more informed than me, but at least he was still human. Second, despite claims that HFT does not increase risk, we've witnessed market irregularities in the past which have been blamed on HFT. We have even seen trades get revoked due to algorithm errors.
Mostly, though, what is the benefit to society of HFT? How much wealthier am I because of it? And at what price (or risk)?
People seem to think that a signature on a document represents a legal agreement. Solid reasoning?
How about a really weird thought experiment. The interest in stem cells is that they can become any cell in the body. In an embryo, that's expected, but in an adult it's not. However, when you remove the cell and begin reprogramming it, you've essentially turned it into something that is functionally closer to an embriotic cell than an adult cell.
If that reprogrammed adult stem cell is only a couple steps a way from being reprogrammed into actual embryotic cells, which could be implanted and result in pregnancy, what's the real difference? It seems to me that the "right" is using technological limitations and their own ignorance to split hairs so they can reach the desired conclusion that - embryos are special clumps of cells because they have a soul whereas individual adult cells do not.
oh for a mod point.