In theory it could be possible to continue shipping food and water to you, very expensive, but possible.
My guess is it will be much harder (and much more expensive) to send a spaceship that could land, pick you up, take off and make it back.
You'd probably still die earlier than you would on Earth.
I wouldn't do it, but I don't think it would be that hard to find people who would be willing to do it.
I don't see the point though - might as well stick to robots for exploration. For human stuff, should work on building better space stations. I'm not sure if that space elevator thing will ever work or get built, but I suppose that's worth a shot too.
As I've mentioned before, what would help would be sandbox templates.
Basically a program requests the template sandbox it'd like to run in, and it runs in that sort of sandbox if the user has approved that before (or approves it now), or the program is signed by User Trusted Vendor X to run in that template.
Then even if the program is inherently evil or is exploited by some "save game" or other stuff, the program still can't break out of its sandbox.
In contrast, the problem with plain whitelisting methods, is if whitelisted programs like Mozilla/IE get exploited, they get to access the users files, eavesdrop/keylog etc. Cynically, whitelisting of programs is just good for extending monopolies/oligopolies and control, and doesn't do that much for security.
And even worse are Vista UAC or other "Are you sure you want to allow this" schemes which effectively require the user to solve the "halting problem", except that instead of "will this program halt?", it's "will this program do something evil?". AFAIK the halting problem isn't solved, and so it's not reasonable to expect "Aunt May" to solve it.
It is more reasonable to train "Aunt May" to not click "Yes" when she sees "'Cute Frog Game' requests Full System Install Privileges allow Y/N" with the usual exclamation marks and red/striped backgrounds and scary warnings. And to only click "Yes" for "'Cute Frog Game' requests Guest Game privileges". In which case "Cute Frog Game" does not have access to the microphone, no network, and can only read stuff from a few places and write to even fewer places.
All this is not easy to do - because programs need read access to libs/DLLs etc, and you need to standardize file layouts, device, network access etc, and create a reasonable and manageable set of templates (custom templates should be allowed - esp templates signed by a trusted party, but if everything is custom it breaks down).
But the technology is already there - e.g. SELinux, AppArmor, but it needs more user friendly wrapping, cooperation from GUI/desktop, standards etc.
And it is possible - Microsoft could do it - they already have stuff like Local Settings and so on. Apple could too - they moved people from PPC to x86 etc.
I'm too lazy to go to the details on how it could work so please fill in the rest of the blanks intelligently yourselves;).
It's actually kinda sad for AMD. In other markets they'd be making money.
After all their stuff: 1) Actually works (and is reliable compared to other computer stuff - RAM, HDD, motherboards, etc) 2) Is cheap 3) Is available in sufficient quantities 4) Performs ok
Only prob is Intel is now significantly ahead of them in many areas.
That's what you get for being in a high tech commodity market where lots of buyers actually go by specs and price and not by covenience or brandname.
If AMD was number two in the orange juice, soda pop or cooking oil market with just 15% share they'd still be making money. And they could sell the same standard juice/soda/oil for years without investing billions in fabs and processes.
AMD has lots of smart people working for them.
It's better to be number 9 in good industry than number 2 in a crappy industry.
Kids, learn from this. That's why smart parents discourage you from trying to earn a living as a movie star or singer, the number #10000 star/singer in the world doesn't make as much as the number #10000 lawyer/doctor.
It depends a lot on what sort of power he has been given.
Was it a clear/obvious breach of Gamestop's corporate-wide policy? Is it clear that he has to go through with upper management for this? If it isn't, then maybe they should just look at sales figures after his policy. If it doesn't actually reduce sales and increases PR stuff, then it could be a good thing.
Otherwise, you tell him off, and retract (or get him to retract).
Suspension should be for cases like the UK pc world manager still refusing to fix the broken hinge because of Linux when the official announced stance was "Sorry, we were wrong, we'll fix it now".
Well, it's too hard to make a turing complete AI:). I suggest that most people would be happy with clever tricks which game makers can think of and code in.
It's probably too little gain to do it in specialized hardware unless people can think of a good way of making a game AI that works well on specialized stuff but not general CPUs, that is much better than doing AI on general CPUs.
If people want intelligent nonhuman entities, I suggest they get one from their local pet store;).
Maybe game makers could make computer games for dogs vs humans/dogs.
Sure an AI that always knows where the player is would be cheating.
But if you're not looking for "hard", or "pass the turing test" and just looking for "fun", then you don't have to do much, just need a few clever tricks and that's it. Not much CPU needed.
In Guild Wars, there are already enemy AIs in certain PvP arenas which are not that easy to beat, and I'm sure they could make them harder - but what's the benefit to the game maker? Those AI opponents even say GG when they win, I'm sure they could code them to do more trash talking and all that, but customers would complain;).
And even if a fair bit of CPU processing is required, I suspect in most games you don't need that much "live" CPU to do a good AI. Because for most games the maps are static, and players start at a few known points, so you can precalculate a lot of things. Get a whole bunch of CPUs, and like chess - precalculate the opening moves, and then precalculate the "end games". Leaving the player's computer to do "midgame" calculations, reflexes and all that. I believe the results will be hard enough for most players;).
Sure that's easier said than done, but I don't see it being that hard to do.
I think the main difficulty is finding programmers interested in making AIs that are crappier than they could be, for the money that game companies are willing to pay, for the working conditions that game companies are willing to provide;). Such programmers would probably already be making big bucks working in areas like stock trading - where they'd want to beat humans and other AIs, no holds barred. Or maybe in the military.
(in theory an internal finance arm of Google would be well positioned to make a lot of money investing based on the search terms and other info they get).
p.s. how about computer games where you could play against/with an animal. I wonder whether chimps would be good at first person shooters...
The only people who really would enjoy games with smart AI are a subset of people who play chess and similar games.
The rest would grumble that the game is too hard. Most humans can't beat a single really really good AI, or thousands of weak AIs. So why bother accelerating AI.
Most people want games that are fun. Just some clever heuristics will be good enough.
I play guild wars and the "heroes" (computer controller teammates) are better than most random humans (in fact they do a lot of things better than I do - I can't multitask well, have slower reflexes etc), and they could be made much smarter (they tend to cluster together and get nuked), but that would take the challenge out of the game, unless the opponents are made equally intelligent, in which case it would be battle of the AIs with the humans being insignificant, and thus not much fun for the humans.
'Nurse, I have been hit by a taxi, it is most logical to assume that I am seriously damaged, for example my left anterior cruciate ligaments appear to be FUBARed, to use the popular technical term'.
Seriously though, it's interesting to hear that he apparently does ok - I'd thought pain would be useful in helping people learn from their mistakes.
"Java has a certain amount of dynamism; you can, if you really have to, create Java code from within a program, compile it, and load it"
I don't believe that's commonly done, instead many Java programs that require "dynamic" stuff reimplement Lisp in XML (with various degrees of completeness/bugginess).;)
AFAIK python is faster than perl. I don't know what the perl6/parrot people are doing, but I'd rather a faster perl5 first than a perl6 with lots of stuff thrown in.
I suppose doing stuff like that is hard and boring for most people. So they'd rather do stuff like come out with python3k or perl6 instead of a fast python2.x/perl5.
I personally found the perlfaq(s) and the various other perl manpages (e.g. perlipc) a lot more useful than docs for practically any other programming language I've encountered.
The syntax and "Computer Science/Academic style description" of a language are not usually the most difficult bits (there are some exceptions of course;) ). It's the nitty gritty details in the perlfaqs and similar that I find more useful.
I mean, after reading "formal/academic" docs I'd know how to do "Hello World", "fibonacci", etc in the language but how about stuff that doesn't look like someone's CS homework;)?
e.g. Signal handling: "Handling the SIGHUP Signal in Daemons", "How do I avoid zombies on a Unix system?" Or making diagnostics easier (esp for others): "How do I tell the difference between errors from the shell and perl?" Or: "How do I do fancy stuff with the keyboard/screen/mouse" "How do I use an SQL database?"
man perltoc for more. A lot of stuff covered and probably already included on the system if you're running a typical Linux distro or FreeBSD.
Some of the stuff covered is not so easy to find/figure out for other languages.
I do things the other way round - Linux at work for work. Win2K at home for games and stuff:).
Only thing I don't like about Win2K is it takes a long time to boot and login.
I'll try to avoid Vista if I can - it's an OS written not for the users but for Microsoft and the *AA. Why pay/choose to make your life difficult?
I've had no big problems with XP when I use it - I run it in classic mode and it's ok - the prob is the Windows Genuine Advantage crap.
As for the article, Apple will never do it, and even if they do Apple is just as fascist as Microsoft if not more so.
If someone came up with a decent Win XP + DirectX10 compatible things could get interesting, but otherwise Microsoft will just endure some stormy weather for a while, and the boiling of the frogs will resume...
From the link: "First, U.S. officials requested that Singapore express support for U.S. invasion of Iraq, this was readily agreed without fanfare. Second, they demanded that Singapore lift the ban on chewing gum."
AFAIK Ennis does not sound like a paranoid lunatic to me (and call me cold hearted but even if that homeless guy is right it isn't as big a deal).
It's not always that easy to replicate results of experiments, even ones that are known already.
For stuff that is new, people might miss something important. After all traces of the wrong stuff can "poison" catalysts. Similarly there could be traces of other stuff in the materials used that make it behave differently for cold fusion experiments. Some might make it work some might make it not work.
If someone's not an obvious quack or trickster and seems to be able to reproduce stuff on demand, if possible it might be useful to observe AND video/record _everything_ while they are doing their experiment to see what they might be doing wrong or right. And if they appear to be doing something wrong, ask them to change it and do it again - and if it stops working we can tell everyone not to do that then. But if it still works, then it gets interesting.
Even cooking is not so straightforward - for example some cooks/chefs don't state that they soak certain ingredients overnight - because they think it's obvious and the norm. So the steps and recipe may be incomplete.
"where players can add to the rules making it more of an experience than a game. For example, a player might be required to begin playing while standing on one foot, and another player might not be allowed to say the word "card" anymore. Meanwhile everyone has to tap the table with their elbow whenever the word "turn" is said, and so on..."
Are you sure those are the rules of the game? Maybe someone was reading the game's EULA instead;).
Being the devil's advocate here - in this case I'm more likely to believe Ennis than Randi since:
0) He already assumes it's wrong 1) He stands to lose lots of "face" if proven wrong. 2) He stands to lose 1 million dollars (ok it might be insured).
Whereas where's the proof that Ennis is incompetent? So far I don't see any evidence that she's incompetent. I don't think it's all that clear cut if you see what Ennis says about that BBC show trying to "reproduce" her experiment:
I'd be more likely to believe that Ennis was a disinterested scientist honestly trying to investigate whether there is a phenomena or not, than believe James Randi would be doing something similar.
Ennis still could be wrong and could have made a mistake, but if her objections to the "failed replication" are true and relevant, then I think we shouldn't dismiss her (or the entire field of homeopathy) just because of that experiment. And it's a bad experiment since the homepathy bunch are going to cite the objections, and the mainstream scientists are going to glance at the "results" (if at all), and we don't really _learn_ anything new.
I don't have any hard opinions on whether homeopathy works or not, but what I dislike is bad debunking. This sort of thing is very harmful to science.
For example: I personally believe there was some phenomena in that "cold fusion" stuff, I don't know whether there really or not was fusion, but to me it seemed that there's something interesting going on worth investigating. Even if that cold fusion thing turns out to be nothing more than a "battery" it may be a new and interesting type of battery that's useful in some scenarios. Govs and scientists have spent billions and years on hot fusion with not much net benefit, so what's a few million bucks for a new class of batteries?
But because of the circumstances, I doubt most scientists would risk their careers investigating "cold fusion" or homeopathy, or even be able to get funding to do so in the first place.
Most of the homeopathic quacks won't be interested in funding it if they were interested in continuing to make money. If it's totally disproven they lose, if it's proven they lose too as most of them will be sidelined as the field rapidly moves from "alchemy to chemistry".
There was a sci fi short story where people dropped an experimental drug because a few postmenopausal women taking it were getting pregnant as a "side effect". It actually reversed aging, but that wasn't the result they were looking for;).
I've seen a survival book say you should drink much of your water and keep it in you, but it doesn't make much sense to me - AFAIK a healthy body tries to keep its electrolytic balance so it'll excrete the excess water ASAP into your bladders (and you get fairly colourless urine) and if it's not able to excrete the excess water in time you end up like that poor woman who died trying to win a Wii (I believe the DJs actually were aware of the dangers and the radio station let her go home by herself and die when she was visibly sick).
Many people/survival guides say: "When you become thirsty is too late to start drinking", but unless I see any scientific studies I'm going to assume that's bullshit. Your thirst mechanisms should be good enough to keep you alive unless you're old or have something wrong with you. Otherwise humans would have died out a long time ago.
I believe you would be healthier in the long term if you drank enough water so your pee is fairly clear (less chance of kidney stones etc).
BUT for survival stuff, I'd rather not drink pee if possible, so I'd keep the water in the bottle and drink just enough to keep a tolerable electrolytic balance, and I'm going to assume that "thirst" is going to be a good enough guide. I hope I'd have a solar still somewhere to help make pee drinkable if I get desperate.
I don't think the lifesaver bottle filters out salts same goes for other portable filters, so they're not going to be that useful for filtering urine from dehydrated people.
I RTFA'ed and the interview, and looked at the graphs etc.
Can anyone tell me whether he really said anything? I couldn't spot it.
"Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology"
I could get a program to pump out that stuff based on the stats. In fact I've seen such auto-generated drivel in some investment sites for stocks that no human is monitoring -profits have gone up due to management actions leading to increase in revenues and reduction in costs blahblahblah.
Did I miss some insight or analysis of his somewhere?
Yeah, given how sucky ATI has been in recent years - problems in both windows and linux, I can imagine some ATI boss telling the ATI developers, "OK, in 3 months time we'll find out whether you'll keep your jobs".
So the closed source drivers might just start improving dramatically or be discontinued;).
It's a risk though - it may turn out that the ATI hardware actually really sucks, and the software guys just can't manage to reliably workaround all the bugs in the hardware.
In which case ATI/AMD better be ready - with OSS software the source code is visible and that means the swearing and insults are too;).
"A study has shown we produce as much carbon dioxide walking the same distance as driving a car. I hope that's not the pollutant you meant."
I bet that study is flawed.
1) A lot of that depends on what you eat and drink. 2) If you look as "deep" into the costs of the car as they did for the cost of the additional food required, then I bet the car will cost more.
I'll still drive a car though. I wouldn't mind taking public transportation to/fro work, but it's going _elsewhere_ after work that's a problem.
As for billionaires spending their money like this, hey it's better than them hoarding it, or using it in dubious ways just to make even more.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory it could be possible to continue shipping food and water to you, very expensive, but possible.
My guess is it will be much harder (and much more expensive) to send a spaceship that could land, pick you up, take off and make it back.
You'd probably still die earlier than you would on Earth.
I wouldn't do it, but I don't think it would be that hard to find people who would be willing to do it.
I don't see the point though - might as well stick to robots for exploration. For human stuff, should work on building better space stations. I'm not sure if that space elevator thing will ever work or get built, but I suppose that's worth a shot too.
As I've mentioned before, what would help would be sandbox templates.
;).
Basically a program requests the template sandbox it'd like to run in, and it runs in that sort of sandbox if the user has approved that before (or approves it now), or the program is signed by User Trusted Vendor X to run in that template.
Then even if the program is inherently evil or is exploited by some "save game" or other stuff, the program still can't break out of its sandbox.
In contrast, the problem with plain whitelisting methods, is if whitelisted programs like Mozilla/IE get exploited, they get to access the users files, eavesdrop/keylog etc. Cynically, whitelisting of programs is just good for extending monopolies/oligopolies and control, and doesn't do that much for security.
And even worse are Vista UAC or other "Are you sure you want to allow this" schemes which effectively require the user to solve the "halting problem", except that instead of "will this program halt?", it's "will this program do something evil?". AFAIK the halting problem isn't solved, and so it's not reasonable to expect "Aunt May" to solve it.
It is more reasonable to train "Aunt May" to not click "Yes" when she sees "'Cute Frog Game' requests Full System Install Privileges allow Y/N" with the usual exclamation marks and red/striped backgrounds and scary warnings. And to only click "Yes" for "'Cute Frog Game' requests Guest Game privileges". In which case "Cute Frog Game" does not have access to the microphone, no network, and can only read stuff from a few places and write to even fewer places.
All this is not easy to do - because programs need read access to libs/DLLs etc, and you need to standardize file layouts, device, network access etc, and create a reasonable and manageable set of templates (custom templates should be allowed - esp templates signed by a trusted party, but if everything is custom it breaks down).
But the technology is already there - e.g. SELinux, AppArmor, but it needs more user friendly wrapping, cooperation from GUI/desktop, standards etc.
And it is possible - Microsoft could do it - they already have stuff like Local Settings and so on. Apple could too - they moved people from PPC to x86 etc.
I'm too lazy to go to the details on how it could work so please fill in the rest of the blanks intelligently yourselves
It's actually kinda sad for AMD. In other markets they'd be making money.
After all their stuff:
1) Actually works (and is reliable compared to other computer stuff - RAM, HDD, motherboards, etc)
2) Is cheap
3) Is available in sufficient quantities
4) Performs ok
Only prob is Intel is now significantly ahead of them in many areas.
That's what you get for being in a high tech commodity market where lots of buyers actually go by specs and price and not by covenience or brandname.
If AMD was number two in the orange juice, soda pop or cooking oil market with just 15% share they'd still be making money. And they could sell the same standard juice/soda/oil for years without investing billions in fabs and processes.
AMD has lots of smart people working for them.
It's better to be number 9 in good industry than number 2 in a crappy industry.
Kids, learn from this. That's why smart parents discourage you from trying to earn a living as a movie star or singer, the number #10000 star/singer in the world doesn't make as much as the number #10000 lawyer/doctor.
Just curious: do they make some core 2 duos by sticking the two working halves of failed core 2 duos together?
Typically when CPU makers can't figure out what to do, they add cache.
But they could put a GPU or PPU in there.
It depends a lot on what sort of power he has been given.
Was it a clear/obvious breach of Gamestop's corporate-wide policy? Is it clear that he has to go through with upper management for this? If it isn't, then maybe they should just look at sales figures after his policy. If it doesn't actually reduce sales and increases PR stuff, then it could be a good thing.
Otherwise, you tell him off, and retract (or get him to retract).
Suspension should be for cases like the UK pc world manager still refusing to fix the broken hinge because of Linux when the official announced stance was "Sorry, we were wrong, we'll fix it now".
Well, it's too hard to make a turing complete AI :). I suggest that most people would be happy with clever tricks which game makers can think of and code in.
;).
;).
It's probably too little gain to do it in specialized hardware unless people can think of a good way of making a game AI that works well on specialized stuff but not general CPUs, that is much better than doing AI on general CPUs.
If people want intelligent nonhuman entities, I suggest they get one from their local pet store
Maybe game makers could make computer games for dogs vs humans/dogs.
Hope the bans on dog fighting don't cover that
Sure an AI that always knows where the player is would be cheating.
;).
;).
;). Such programmers would probably already be making big bucks working in areas like stock trading - where they'd want to beat humans and other AIs, no holds barred. Or maybe in the military.
But if you're not looking for "hard", or "pass the turing test" and just looking for "fun", then you don't have to do much, just need a few clever tricks and that's it. Not much CPU needed.
In Guild Wars, there are already enemy AIs in certain PvP arenas which are not that easy to beat, and I'm sure they could make them harder - but what's the benefit to the game maker? Those AI opponents even say GG when they win, I'm sure they could code them to do more trash talking and all that, but customers would complain
And even if a fair bit of CPU processing is required, I suspect in most games you don't need that much "live" CPU to do a good AI. Because for most games the maps are static, and players start at a few known points, so you can precalculate a lot of things. Get a whole bunch of CPUs, and like chess - precalculate the opening moves, and then precalculate the "end games". Leaving the player's computer to do "midgame" calculations, reflexes and all that. I believe the results will be hard enough for most players
Sure that's easier said than done, but I don't see it being that hard to do.
I think the main difficulty is finding programmers interested in making AIs that are crappier than they could be, for the money that game companies are willing to pay, for the working conditions that game companies are willing to provide
(in theory an internal finance arm of Google would be well positioned to make a lot of money investing based on the search terms and other info they get).
p.s. how about computer games where you could play against/with an animal. I wonder whether chimps would be good at first person shooters...
The only people who really would enjoy games with smart AI are a subset of people who play chess and similar games.
The rest would grumble that the game is too hard. Most humans can't beat a single really really good AI, or thousands of weak AIs. So why bother accelerating AI.
Most people want games that are fun. Just some clever heuristics will be good enough.
I play guild wars and the "heroes" (computer controller teammates) are better than most random humans (in fact they do a lot of things better than I do - I can't multitask well, have slower reflexes etc), and they could be made much smarter (they tend to cluster together and get nuked), but that would take the challenge out of the game, unless the opponents are made equally intelligent, in which case it would be battle of the AIs with the humans being insignificant, and thus not much fun for the humans.
Spock is that you?
'Nurse, I have been hit by a taxi, it is most logical to assume that I am seriously damaged, for example my left anterior cruciate ligaments appear to be FUBARed, to use the popular technical term'.
Seriously though, it's interesting to hear that he apparently does ok - I'd thought pain would be useful in helping people learn from their mistakes.
"Java has a certain amount of dynamism; you can, if you really have to, create Java code from within a program, compile it, and load it"
;)
I don't believe that's commonly done, instead many Java programs that require "dynamic" stuff reimplement Lisp in XML (with various degrees of completeness/bugginess).
AFAIK python is faster than perl. I don't know what the perl6/parrot people are doing, but I'd rather a faster perl5 first than a perl6 with lots of stuff thrown in.
I suppose doing stuff like that is hard and boring for most people. So they'd rather do stuff like come out with python3k or perl6 instead of a fast python2.x/perl5.
I personally found the perlfaq(s) and the various other perl manpages (e.g. perlipc) a lot more useful than docs for practically any other programming language I've encountered.
;) ). It's the nitty gritty details in the perlfaqs and similar that I find more useful.
;)?
The syntax and "Computer Science/Academic style description" of a language are not usually the most difficult bits (there are some exceptions of course
I mean, after reading "formal/academic" docs I'd know how to do "Hello World", "fibonacci", etc in the language but how about stuff that doesn't look like someone's CS homework
e.g.
Signal handling: "Handling the SIGHUP Signal in Daemons", "How do I avoid zombies on a Unix system?"
Or making diagnostics easier (esp for others):
"How do I tell the difference between errors from the shell and perl?"
Or:
"How do I do fancy stuff with the keyboard/screen/mouse"
"How do I use an SQL database?"
man perltoc for more. A lot of stuff covered and probably already included on the system if you're running a typical Linux distro or FreeBSD.
Some of the stuff covered is not so easy to find/figure out for other languages.
I do things the other way round - Linux at work for work. Win2K at home for games and stuff :).
Only thing I don't like about Win2K is it takes a long time to boot and login.
I'll try to avoid Vista if I can - it's an OS written not for the users but for Microsoft and the *AA. Why pay/choose to make your life difficult?
I've had no big problems with XP when I use it - I run it in classic mode and it's ok - the prob is the Windows Genuine Advantage crap.
As for the article, Apple will never do it, and even if they do Apple is just as fascist as Microsoft if not more so.
If someone came up with a decent Win XP + DirectX10 compatible things could get interesting, but otherwise Microsoft will just endure some stormy weather for a while, and the boiling of the frogs will resume...
Choking on it is probably bad for you.
Is it more likely to choke on gum when trying to swallow it than other normal foodstuff?
And would it be safer or more dangerous in such a situation?
From the link: "First, U.S. officials requested that Singapore express support for U.S. invasion of Iraq, this was readily agreed without fanfare. Second, they demanded that Singapore lift the ban on chewing gum."
I dunno why, but I found that rather amusing.
AFAIK Ennis does not sound like a paranoid lunatic to me (and call me cold hearted but even if that homeless guy is right it isn't as big a deal).
It's not always that easy to replicate results of experiments, even ones that are known already.
For stuff that is new, people might miss something important. After all traces of the wrong stuff can "poison" catalysts. Similarly there could be traces of other stuff in the materials used that make it behave differently for cold fusion experiments. Some might make it work some might make it not work.
If someone's not an obvious quack or trickster and seems to be able to reproduce stuff on demand, if possible it might be useful to observe AND video/record _everything_ while they are doing their experiment to see what they might be doing wrong or right. And if they appear to be doing something wrong, ask them to change it and do it again - and if it stops working we can tell everyone not to do that then. But if it still works, then it gets interesting.
Even cooking is not so straightforward - for example some cooks/chefs don't state that they soak certain ingredients overnight - because they think it's obvious and the norm. So the steps and recipe may be incomplete.
"where players can add to the rules making it more of an experience than a game. For example, a player might be required to begin playing while standing on one foot, and another player might not be allowed to say the word "card" anymore. Meanwhile everyone has to tap the table with their elbow whenever the word "turn" is said, and so on..."
;).
Are you sure those are the rules of the game? Maybe someone was reading the game's EULA instead
Being the devil's advocate here - in this case I'm more likely to believe Ennis than Randi since:
;).
0) He already assumes it's wrong
1) He stands to lose lots of "face" if proven wrong.
2) He stands to lose 1 million dollars (ok it might be insured).
Whereas where's the proof that Ennis is incompetent? So far I don't see any evidence that she's incompetent. I don't think it's all that clear cut if you see what Ennis says about that BBC show trying to "reproduce" her experiment:
http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/view,55
I'd be more likely to believe that Ennis was a disinterested scientist honestly trying to investigate whether there is a phenomena or not, than believe James Randi would be doing something similar.
Ennis still could be wrong and could have made a mistake, but if her objections to the "failed replication" are true and relevant, then I think we shouldn't dismiss her (or the entire field of homeopathy) just because of that experiment. And it's a bad experiment since the homepathy bunch are going to cite the objections, and the mainstream scientists are going to glance at the "results" (if at all), and we don't really _learn_ anything new.
I don't have any hard opinions on whether homeopathy works or not, but what I dislike is bad debunking. This sort of thing is very harmful to science.
For example: I personally believe there was some phenomena in that "cold fusion" stuff, I don't know whether there really or not was fusion, but to me it seemed that there's something interesting going on worth investigating. Even if that cold fusion thing turns out to be nothing more than a "battery" it may be a new and interesting type of battery that's useful in some scenarios. Govs and scientists have spent billions and years on hot fusion with not much net benefit, so what's a few million bucks for a new class of batteries?
But because of the circumstances, I doubt most scientists would risk their careers investigating "cold fusion" or homeopathy, or even be able to get funding to do so in the first place.
Most of the homeopathic quacks won't be interested in funding it if they were interested in continuing to make money. If it's totally disproven they lose, if it's proven they lose too as most of them will be sidelined as the field rapidly moves from "alchemy to chemistry".
There was a sci fi short story where people dropped an experimental drug because a few postmenopausal women taking it were getting pregnant as a "side effect". It actually reversed aging, but that wasn't the result they were looking for
When Alan Greenspan makes a speech as Fed Reserve chairman he's not being an economist.
He's being like someone trying to move an entire herd 6 inches (and not much more) without causing a stampede.
I've seen a survival book say you should drink much of your water and keep it in you, but it doesn't make much sense to me - AFAIK a healthy body tries to keep its electrolytic balance so it'll excrete the excess water ASAP into your bladders (and you get fairly colourless urine) and if it's not able to excrete the excess water in time you end up like that poor woman who died trying to win a Wii (I believe the DJs actually were aware of the dangers and the radio station let her go home by herself and die when she was visibly sick).
Many people/survival guides say: "When you become thirsty is too late to start drinking", but unless I see any scientific studies I'm going to assume that's bullshit. Your thirst mechanisms should be good enough to keep you alive unless you're old or have something wrong with you. Otherwise humans would have died out a long time ago.
I believe you would be healthier in the long term if you drank enough water so your pee is fairly clear (less chance of kidney stones etc).
BUT for survival stuff, I'd rather not drink pee if possible, so I'd keep the water in the bottle and drink just enough to keep a tolerable electrolytic balance, and I'm going to assume that "thirst" is going to be a good enough guide. I hope I'd have a solar still somewhere to help make pee drinkable if I get desperate.
I don't think the lifesaver bottle filters out salts same goes for other portable filters, so they're not going to be that useful for filtering urine from dehydrated people.
I RTFA'ed and the interview, and looked at the graphs etc.
Can anyone tell me whether he really said anything? I couldn't spot it.
"Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology"
I could get a program to pump out that stuff based on the stats. In fact I've seen such auto-generated drivel in some investment sites for stocks that no human is monitoring -profits have gone up due to management actions leading to increase in revenues and reduction in costs blahblahblah.
Did I miss some insight or analysis of his somewhere?
Heh and who got Miss Congeniality?
Too lazy to read "info"world.
Yeah, given how sucky ATI has been in recent years - problems in both windows and linux, I can imagine some ATI boss telling the ATI developers, "OK, in 3 months time we'll find out whether you'll keep your jobs".
;).
;).
So the closed source drivers might just start improving dramatically or be discontinued
It's a risk though - it may turn out that the ATI hardware actually really sucks, and the software guys just can't manage to reliably workaround all the bugs in the hardware.
In which case ATI/AMD better be ready - with OSS software the source code is visible and that means the swearing and insults are too
"A study has shown we produce as much carbon dioxide walking the same distance as driving a car. I hope that's not the pollutant you meant."
I bet that study is flawed.
1) A lot of that depends on what you eat and drink.
2) If you look as "deep" into the costs of the car as they did for the cost of the additional food required, then I bet the car will cost more.
I'll still drive a car though. I wouldn't mind taking public transportation to/fro work, but it's going _elsewhere_ after work that's a problem.
As for billionaires spending their money like this, hey it's better than them hoarding it, or using it in dubious ways just to make even more.
Does his signature really invalidate what he said?
Any better suggestions for people to vote for?