I agree with you pretty much 100%, and I actually saw the irony in the whole thing before I posted, but hey, it's slashdot. I decided to go with the flippant option:)
People have been ripping and downloading music for a looooooooong time now without any help from iTunes, thank you. iTunes/iPod is not easy. Easy is showing up as a mass-storage device when plugged in, and playing every format I've already got without any conversion.
I really can't figure out what you were getting at, through the verbal jungle that was your post, but I leave you with two points.
1) I've played really great 80-hour games, and really great 10-hour games. 2) Hardware does not offer "actual gameplay developments". Games do. A creative producer will make a good game idea work on any system, and a crappy idea will be crappy even on the CoolThing 9000.
1) You don't have a clue what the word "repeatable" means despite using it a lot. 2) Just because Christians believe some wacked-out contradictory things about the nature of God doesn't mean I have to. You're the one who decided to start things on a practical note with "suppose the universe is a UT server". Well, I was being practical.
Look, either the god can choose whether or not to interfere in the world, or not. If he can't choose then to call him "omnipotent" or "powerless" is an irrelevant distinction; it's the same one way or another. A god that can't alter the universe once it's been set in motion is irrelevant; a God that is "forced" to intervene in a certain, predictable way, is no God at all, but an automaton, and part of the "system" that makes up the universe. Neither if those are relevant to the original topic of discussion, which is a being vaguely equivalent to the Christian God. If we suppose one like that, who can choose how he interacts with the universe, then he can change his mind at any time (see also: definition of "choice"). If God can change his mind at any time about the laws of physics, what color the sky is, or anything else, then you don't have repeatable experiments, which as far as I remember, you were arguing that you can.
As a corollary, you're contradicting yourself in some other ways. If a God exists, who has unlimited power and total knowledge, and he has the power to choose whether to interfere in any given action, then it does follow directly that everything that happens is with his approval and through his doing, because he knows the result of every possible action and could have changed it, but didn't (or did). Granted, logic breaks down slightly in the vicinity of omnipotence, but... hey, wasn't that what I was arguing in the first place?;)
A god that slavishly follows a certain set of rules isn't omnipotent; he's predestined, and not the least bit interesting. You might say he "is" a physical law. But if the god could do something different the next time, then you don't have any repeatability.
You're misrepresenting my argument. Note that I said "omnipotent God". Like the Christian one. If someone created the universe, but doesn't have any ability to affect it afterwards, then that's cool. But if you've got a being who not only created the universe, but also talks to its inhabitants, rains fire from the sky, and incarnates himself as a man, then no, nothing is falsifiable, repeatable, or any of that. To extend your analogy, it would be like running UT2004 on a hacked server that gives me control over every object. Upon conducting any experiment, you have no way of knowing whether or not I tampered with the results.
The point is this. Suppose you're taking a picture of something that's not not staying static; take three on burst, and it's less likely that they'll all be marred by a shake or a passing shadow or a bird, or... who knows what. If you're taking a picture of something that's going to stay around a while, take 5 or 10 or 20 shots, whatever you've got time for, because your intuition about exposure could be wrong, it might look better from three inches to the left, or your memory card could get eaten by a grue.
The point is that once you've done all that, you should throw away between 75% and 90% of all of the shots you've taken. You have the flexibility to choose the absolute best images of any given subject, and not show the world your subpar crap. It's the last bit that's missing more often than not;)
And science zealots clump all religious people together so that they can just ignore religion. I for one have room for science and religion. Religion tells me where I came from and my purpose for being here. Science explains to me how things, including the things that God created, work.
Sorry, no. Contradiction. End of story. There is no "science" in any universe where God exists. If there is an omnipotent God, nothing is knowable or understandable, and science has no value whatsoever. If you "believe in" both, then you understand neither.
Get a browser with a keyword feature (firefox, konqueror, probably opera). Want google? New tab, gg:something. Movie? imdb:something. Perl module? cpan:something. Repository of All Human Knowledge? wp:something.:)
Yeah, I'm sure the guy making these would like that. Nice thought, but you have to consider the fact that not only are these saws expensive, but every time one of them executes a "save", whether it's protecting someone's hand, or just an innocent piece of lunchmeat, it destroys itself a little bit, and you have to replace big $$$ worth of parts to get it operational again. First reaction is "of course it's worth it", but could every business really afford the setup fees, and does it pay in terms of insturance costs?
The full version is pathetically slow and not very good; the bundled versions are pathetically slow, not very good, and force you to use LPCM audio. ffmpeg + mplex + dvdauthor will do nicely. And there are tools that will wrap them all together for you in some sort of graphical thing, I think:)
If you read my original post on this subject, I asserted that videogames are not the cause of youth violence. The Bible is by far a better influence, however.
Well, the most important thing that the Bible teaches children is that it's not necessary to make moral decisions by thinking about the consequences of their actions; logical thought should be replaced with the supposed will of an invisible, imaginary being in the sky, as interpreted by some incredibly wacked-out people.
Instead of teaching that when you see a contradiction, you should reexamine your premises because one of them is wrong, it teaches (by example) that contradictions are everywhere, and can be resolved by a "search for a higher meaning" (divinely inspired, of course, which means making things up and stopping when it sounds good).
Instead of teaching responsibility by showing that who you are in the world is defined by your actions, it teaches that "works" are worthless, and the only thing that matters in the end is an intangible "faith" -- believe and ye shall be saved. Except when it doesn't, but see the previous point about contradiction.
When Christianity is really working its mojo, it's just as good as any other well-known cult at creating "empty" human beings, who are completely unable to function outside of its confines. But more often, it simply causes a really wicked case of "cognitive dissonance" as its adherents do their best to reconcile their "beliefs" with the reality of the world. This makes itself known as a profound sense of anguish, and the most common response is for people to submerge themselves even deeper into the religion as a response, moving further away from the real world. But a really good Crusade now and then will help, too.
Has Microsoft not learned the meaning of "DPI" yet? A 12pt font is the same size on any monitor, provided that your software isn't stupid. It's just that on that 200dpi monitor, it will have nice crisp edges compared to your old 72dpi thing. Every halfway-modern display sends back information that can be used to scale fonts correctly. Linux even gets it right more often than not. What's the deal?
(yes, I know that it's actually PPI, not DPI. But the "standard term" is DPI nonetheless).
And it's not just as slow. It's about four times what I was ever able to get on dialup, and twice the downstream of the average "good" connection (you're not going to get me to believe that most people who have/had dialup get better than 42-44kbit/s on average).
1. Windows (foo) Professional and Windows (foo) Home are made by the same people awful, irrelevant comparison. 2. If there's going to be One Package Manager, nobody wants it to be RedHat's.
Minor point -- I used to have a prepaid plan, with a really crappy phone, and when I received a text message, it would show me the sender, and give me the option to delete the message without reading it -- and not pay any fee to receive the message.
Submitters: learn to write in decent English. Editors: Edit, dammit. Or reject the crap. Or resign. Or at least change the job title to something less misleading.
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I agree with you pretty much 100%, and I actually saw the irony in the whole thing before I posted, but hey, it's slashdot. I decided to go with the flippant option :)
People have been ripping and downloading music for a looooooooong time now without any help from iTunes, thank you. iTunes/iPod is not easy. Easy is showing up as a mass-storage device when plugged in, and playing every format I've already got without any conversion.
There's nothing hip or cool aboug having some music device from a giant corporation.
Some day we'll teach the Apple folks this lesson.
I really can't figure out what you were getting at, through the verbal jungle that was your post, but I leave you with two points.
1) I've played really great 80-hour games, and really great 10-hour games.
2) Hardware does not offer "actual gameplay developments". Games do. A creative producer will make a good game idea work on any system, and a crappy idea will be crappy even on the CoolThing 9000.
All he has to do is rename it to "V-Dub in da Houze"
1) You don't have a clue what the word "repeatable" means despite using it a lot.
2) Just because Christians believe some wacked-out contradictory things about the nature of God doesn't mean I have to. You're the one who decided to start things on a practical note with "suppose the universe is a UT server". Well, I was being practical.
Look, either the god can choose whether or not to interfere in the world, or not. If he can't choose then to call him "omnipotent" or "powerless" is an irrelevant distinction; it's the same one way or another. A god that can't alter the universe once it's been set in motion is irrelevant; a God that is "forced" to intervene in a certain, predictable way, is no God at all, but an automaton, and part of the "system" that makes up the universe. Neither if those are relevant to the original topic of discussion, which is a being vaguely equivalent to the Christian God. If we suppose one like that, who can choose how he interacts with the universe, then he can change his mind at any time (see also: definition of "choice"). If God can change his mind at any time about the laws of physics, what color the sky is, or anything else, then you don't have repeatable experiments, which as far as I remember, you were arguing that you can.
;)
As a corollary, you're contradicting yourself in some other ways. If a God exists, who has unlimited power and total knowledge, and he has the power to choose whether to interfere in any given action, then it does follow directly that everything that happens is with his approval and through his doing, because he knows the result of every possible action and could have changed it, but didn't (or did). Granted, logic breaks down slightly in the vicinity of omnipotence, but... hey, wasn't that what I was arguing in the first place?
A god that slavishly follows a certain set of rules isn't omnipotent; he's predestined, and not the least bit interesting. You might say he "is" a physical law. But if the god could do something different the next time, then you don't have any repeatability.
So anyway, yeah, that's a really silly argument.
You're misrepresenting my argument. Note that I said "omnipotent God". Like the Christian one. If someone created the universe, but doesn't have any ability to affect it afterwards, then that's cool. But if you've got a being who not only created the universe, but also talks to its inhabitants, rains fire from the sky, and incarnates himself as a man, then no, nothing is falsifiable, repeatable, or any of that. To extend your analogy, it would be like running UT2004 on a hacked server that gives me control over every object. Upon conducting any experiment, you have no way of knowing whether or not I tampered with the results.
The point is this. Suppose you're taking a picture of something that's not not staying static; take three on burst, and it's less likely that they'll all be marred by a shake or a passing shadow or a bird, or... who knows what. If you're taking a picture of something that's going to stay around a while, take 5 or 10 or 20 shots, whatever you've got time for, because your intuition about exposure could be wrong, it might look better from three inches to the left, or your memory card could get eaten by a grue.
;)
The point is that once you've done all that, you should throw away between 75% and 90% of all of the shots you've taken. You have the flexibility to choose the absolute best images of any given subject, and not show the world your subpar crap. It's the last bit that's missing more often than not
And science zealots clump all religious people together so that they can just ignore religion. I for one have room for science and religion. Religion tells me where I came from and my purpose for being here. Science explains to me how things, including the things that God created, work.
Sorry, no. Contradiction. End of story. There is no "science" in any universe where God exists. If there is an omnipotent God, nothing is knowable or understandable, and science has no value whatsoever. If you "believe in" both, then you understand neither.
So your point is that they do it so that they can maintain a market and make more money. That's greed. It's just the good kind of greed ;)
Tonight on slashdot: Hitler only wanted "a corner" of the world, so why couldn't we have just been decent folks and let him have it? ;)
Get a browser with a keyword feature (firefox, konqueror, probably opera). Want google? New tab, gg:something. Movie? imdb:something. Perl module? cpan:something. Repository of All Human Knowledge? wp:something. :)
Yeah, I'm sure the guy making these would like that. Nice thought, but you have to consider the fact that not only are these saws expensive, but every time one of them executes a "save", whether it's protecting someone's hand, or just an innocent piece of lunchmeat, it destroys itself a little bit, and you have to replace big $$$ worth of parts to get it operational again. First reaction is "of course it's worth it", but could every business really afford the setup fees, and does it pay in terms of insturance costs?
The boot on my power adapter is NINE INCHES and RIBBED FOR YOUR PLEASURE. Oh yeah.
The full version is pathetically slow and not very good; the bundled versions are pathetically slow, not very good, and force you to use LPCM audio. ffmpeg + mplex + dvdauthor will do nicely. And there are tools that will wrap them all together for you in some sort of graphical thing, I think :)
I'm really glad that the backslash/slashback is back. Just look at the discussions going on attached to this article right now. That's the point.
If you read my original post on this subject, I asserted that videogames are not the cause of youth violence. The Bible is by far a better influence, however.
Well, the most important thing that the Bible teaches children is that it's not necessary to make moral decisions by thinking about the consequences of their actions; logical thought should be replaced with the supposed will of an invisible, imaginary being in the sky, as interpreted by some incredibly wacked-out people.
Instead of teaching that when you see a contradiction, you should reexamine your premises because one of them is wrong, it teaches (by example) that contradictions are everywhere, and can be resolved by a "search for a higher meaning" (divinely inspired, of course, which means making things up and stopping when it sounds good).
Instead of teaching responsibility by showing that who you are in the world is defined by your actions, it teaches that "works" are worthless, and the only thing that matters in the end is an intangible "faith" -- believe and ye shall be saved. Except when it doesn't, but see the previous point about contradiction.
When Christianity is really working its mojo, it's just as good as any other well-known cult at creating "empty" human beings, who are completely unable to function outside of its confines. But more often, it simply causes a really wicked case of "cognitive dissonance" as its adherents do their best to reconcile their "beliefs" with the reality of the world. This makes itself known as a profound sense of anguish, and the most common response is for people to submerge themselves even deeper into the religion as a response, moving further away from the real world. But a really good Crusade now and then will help, too.
(yes, I know that it's actually PPI, not DPI. But the "standard term" is DPI nonetheless).
And it's not just as slow. It's about four times what I was ever able to get on dialup, and twice the downstream of the average "good" connection (you're not going to get me to believe that most people who have/had dialup get better than 42-44kbit/s on average).
1. Windows (foo) Professional and Windows (foo) Home are made by the same people awful, irrelevant comparison.
2. If there's going to be One Package Manager, nobody wants it to be RedHat's.
Your mistake was expecting Kurzweil's rantings to have anything to do with reality.
Minor point -- I used to have a prepaid plan, with a really crappy phone, and when I received a text message, it would show me the sender, and give me the option to delete the message without reading it -- and not pay any fee to receive the message.
Is the USB EVDO card with PCMCIA.
Submitters: learn to write in decent English.
Editors: Edit, dammit. Or reject the crap. Or resign. Or at least change the job title to something less misleading.