Doesn't work. You really think that this kickstarter project is endlessly reproducible? There are so many great movies and TV shows and books and songs and video games that would never have seen the light of day if they had to be funded in advance.
By your own admission, you have to do some good, free works first, before you get jack. And one good game ain't gonna cut it. You really think people would dump millions of dollars onto some developer who's only claim to fame was a single, albeit fun, flash game? Of course not. You'd have to make hit after hit, and only then, after years of unpaid hard work, would you even have a chance of getting paid.
Kickstarter, the Humble Bundles, they're all nice supplements. But for the vast majority of content, copyright is necessary. It needs reform, but it is necessary.
You walk a couple meters to use a lightswitch? How fucking lazy are you? Active people like me go down to the breaker in the basement to turn the lights on and off, and then jog two laps around the house for good measure.
Word to the wise: laziness is not doing something potentially beneficial because you prefer to just sit around doing nothing. There is no gain from flipping a light switch, and therefore it's not lazy to find more convenient ways of doing it. You might as well bitch about people being too lazy to use a crank starter for their car.
Bing has always respected search modifiers like quotation marks and +/- signs. Google had stopped for a while, apparently thinking that their algorithms knew better than the user what the user wanted. I checked just now, and apparently they've gone back to obeying the modifiers again, but for a time, Bing was superior if you knew what you were trying to search for and Google insisted on searching for something else. I suspect that that is what the GP was thinking about when he thought the "verbatim feature" was an advantage of Bing.
I did mean FM, though I didn't really express the idea properly. What I meant was that there was a direct transform from the received signal to a sound wave, as compared to digital modulation schemes which would only give us a meaningless string of bits. One can just take the frequency versus time graph, map it to voltage versus time, and plug it into a speaker.
I mentioned FM rather than AM only because I suspect it would arrive in better shape following an interstellar journey.
As long as it's above the noise floor, it would be recognizable. Not necessarily as TV, but as some sort of intentionally created signal. I doubt we'd be able to watch it though.
The real home run, though the odds are miniscule, would be if the timing works out that we pick up extraterrestrial signals right around the time that some other civilization is learning the basics of frequency modulated radio, so that they're just mapping frequencies of sound directly to frequencies of light. That would actually allow us to hear alien speech, which would obviously be amazing.
Of course, that assumes that they use verbal communication, and that their technology progresses similar to ours, and that the window of time that they used this technology (a couple centuries at most if they're similar to us) just so happens to fall in the time that we're listening, instead of millions of years before or after. So I'm not holding my breath, but it sure would be cool.
Sure, with slick professional script writers with ph.ds in public relations to tell him exactly what to say, he looks smooth enough. Without it, he's a stuttering bumbling idiot. I'm the only one who remembers that?
I would love to see you get up and give an extemporaneous speech in front of hundreds of people who are just itching to tear and twist your every word apart. It would be hilarious. I'd wager you couldn't get through a single sentence without at least two "ums", "uhs", or "likes".
Obama, off-script, talks like a regular person. What a shock. If you want to find something trivial and petty to criticize him over, go after his terrible comedic timing. Seriously, that dude can't tell a joke to save his life.
Out of curiosity, are there any programs in the present day United States that you'd consider socialism? What exactly would be changed in your ideal world?
Certainly "Obamacare" doesn't meet your definition of socialism, as it only provides subsidies to low income families who couldn't otherwise afford health care. Maybe Medicare, but it is a very rare person who could afford to pay all their own medical bills into old age. The only one that might make sense to call socialist under your definition would be Social Security, but even there, around 60-70% of America's elderly are reliant on the program to make ends meet, so most of the people receiving it need it.
If you're just calling for means-testing on Social Security and Medicare, I could understand that (not necessarily agree, but at least understand). But since you led off by calling it "stealing", I'm not sure how refusing to let the 1% share in the benefits would make it better in your mind.
So you have no argument, then. You're just gonna stick with the story that yes, you do care just as much about people who died a thousand years ago as you would about your own wife, because "people are different, man!"
The simple truth is we're not that different. People experience the same general feelings everywhere. You just got up on a high horse, and can't figure out a way to get back down without losing face. So go ahead and laugh it off, if that's what you've got to do. But from personal experience, you grow more as a person when you admit (if only to yourself) that you were wrong.
So you care as much about the old guy who just this second passed away (and another this second, and yet another this second) as you would (did?) about your own father passing?
Either your an emotionless psychopath, or you must spend every waking moment in mourning. The rest of us care more about people the closer we are to them. We love our immediate family more than our friends, our friends more than acquaintances, acquaintances more than friends of friends, friends of friends more than a random guy across town, a random guy across town more than a random guy across the country, a random guy across the country more than a random guy across the world, a random guy across the world more than a random guy from a century ago, and a random guy from a century ago more than a random guy from a millennium ago.
If you want to pretend to be a perfectly rational robot, aren't the deaths of the people killed during the sack of Babylon in the 16th century BC just as sad as those of the people killed in the recent midwest tornadoes? Of course, no actual human being would feel that way, but if it makes you feel special, go on pretending.
Sure you can. You just need the threat of a war, which will let you justify designing and building all sorts of new weapons, hiring new advisers, conducting field exercises, etc. You need a war every decade or two so that the threats seem valid, but we've already had plenty, so there's no need for another. All the profiteers need right now is saber-rattling, and they've got that in spades.
People generally care more about their friends and neighbors and spouses and children than they do about nameless, faceless people from the other side of the globe. Americans care more about their troops being killed, and I'd wager that the Iraqi people care a lot more about neighbors killed as "collateral damage" than they do about some American soldiers being killed by a suicide bomber at some check point in another city. There's nothing wrong with that -- it's human nature.
I guess it varies by airport. Whenever I fly out of SJC, they typically have two carry-on screening lines feeding into a single backscatter machine. While any one conveyor line moves slower than the scanner, the net chokepoint always seems to be going through the backscatter machine. Sometimes they'll alleviate it by waving a few people from the backscatter line through a standard metal detector, as otherwise the line would get too backed up.
HL3 will come out regardless of how many hats people buy. But first, they need some new big thing to bundle it with.
The Half-life series has made Valve, because each step of the way, they've bundled the game with something else that they hoped to make money on. In the original HL, they did it unintentionally with the extremely moddable engine. In HL2, it was bundled with Steam, which has become their bread-and-butter. How many people would have gotten started on Steam if HL2 didn't require it?
Ep1 may be an exception, though it did introduce an AI companion that didn't make players want to pull their hair out, but Ep2 helped push the sales of TF2 (which has made bank) and Portal. Portal, as a puzzle platformer, would have likely flown under the radar had it been released alone. By bundling it, it became a surprise hit, and led to a sequel that sold millions of copies at ~$50 a piece.
If they're smart, they're coming up with the next big thing, and will bundle it with HL3 to drive adoption. My guess, expect HL3 to come out at the same time as the rumored Steam Box.
"According to some estimates," we misplaced three times the total national tax revenue in 2002, and no one noticed. You find that to be credible. Really?
Look, I know we live in a post-truth society. Facts don't matter, soundbites do. Smearing those who disagree (perhaps by calling them shills) is much easier that coming up with hard, well-supported evidence. But I still believe in objective truth. I still like to base my opinions on evidence and logic, rather than starting from the conclusion I want to reach and making up numbers to support it. Maybe that makes me a relic, but it doesn't make me a shill.
There is no way that we misplaced three times as much money as we took in in 2002. There is no way that $500 billion dollars is being spent every year on spooky black-ops programs. These numbers are bullshit, meant to sound impressive, but completely unsubstantiated. The mods have spoken, and they like this invented reality that you and others have come up with. Fine. But me, I'll stick with basing my opinions off objective truths, not unsupported assertions by ACs.
Someone who has actually used one of these could probably confirm or deny this...
As someone who has actually used one of these (many times), my answer is a solid "deny". You don't just walk through these scanners the way you do with the metal detectors. You walk in, turn to the side, spread your legs, put your hands in the air, and hold that position for about five seconds. They slow down the lines immensely. If you then had to turn another 90 degrees and hold for another five seconds, it would make things even worse.
Considering that the scanners don't even detect the sort of threat they were rolled out in response to (the underwear bomber), they should just be scrapped entirely, and the government should do everything in its power to find a loophole in the contract to get some of our money back.
$6.6B is about one tenth of one percent of the amount claimed. Now come up with the remaining 99.9%.
Your insinuated "black hole of anti-terror technologies" doesn't account for it, because the money we spend researching such things is documented -- all of the research and development, plus all of the classified programs, come out to under $100B a year. And it would be quite a stretch to claim that all of those programs are designed for fighting terrorists. For example, we spend around $800M a year researching better submarines. I don't think those are intended to fight terrorists.
And lest you try to claim that it's super-secret undocumented research, who's performing it? Certainly not Raytheon or Lockheed or any of the usual suspects, because the amount claimed ($500B/yr) greatly exceeds their combined revenues. Do you think we have some Hollywood-style Men in Black laboratory that's receiving such huge funding? If so, where do they buy their equipment, and why doesn't the money show up on their suppliers' balance sheets?
You can't just dump five trillion dollars into the economy and expect no one to notice.
The OP lied. He pulled a completely unrealistic number directly out of his ass, and Slashdot ate it up, because it aligns with what they wanted to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? How do you see what's going on in the code, if not by running it on a computer or in your head?
Let me guess, if you need to add numbers with a calculator or in your head, then you don't really understand arithmetic?
Doesn't work. You really think that this kickstarter project is endlessly reproducible? There are so many great movies and TV shows and books and songs and video games that would never have seen the light of day if they had to be funded in advance.
By your own admission, you have to do some good, free works first, before you get jack. And one good game ain't gonna cut it. You really think people would dump millions of dollars onto some developer who's only claim to fame was a single, albeit fun, flash game? Of course not. You'd have to make hit after hit, and only then, after years of unpaid hard work, would you even have a chance of getting paid.
Kickstarter, the Humble Bundles, they're all nice supplements. But for the vast majority of content, copyright is necessary. It needs reform, but it is necessary.
You walk a couple meters to use a lightswitch? How fucking lazy are you? Active people like me go down to the breaker in the basement to turn the lights on and off, and then jog two laps around the house for good measure.
Word to the wise: laziness is not doing something potentially beneficial because you prefer to just sit around doing nothing. There is no gain from flipping a light switch, and therefore it's not lazy to find more convenient ways of doing it. You might as well bitch about people being too lazy to use a crank starter for their car.
I just tried six queries of my own. Bing got five of the six, whereas Google didn't get a single one.
Now, I'm not going to make any grandiose claims, but clearly Bing is better.
No, they weren't. But I suppose that by now you've repeated that lie enough times for it to be "true".
Bing has always respected search modifiers like quotation marks and +/- signs. Google had stopped for a while, apparently thinking that their algorithms knew better than the user what the user wanted. I checked just now, and apparently they've gone back to obeying the modifiers again, but for a time, Bing was superior if you knew what you were trying to search for and Google insisted on searching for something else. I suspect that that is what the GP was thinking about when he thought the "verbatim feature" was an advantage of Bing.
I did mean FM, though I didn't really express the idea properly. What I meant was that there was a direct transform from the received signal to a sound wave, as compared to digital modulation schemes which would only give us a meaningless string of bits. One can just take the frequency versus time graph, map it to voltage versus time, and plug it into a speaker.
I mentioned FM rather than AM only because I suspect it would arrive in better shape following an interstellar journey.
As long as it's above the noise floor, it would be recognizable. Not necessarily as TV, but as some sort of intentionally created signal. I doubt we'd be able to watch it though.
The real home run, though the odds are miniscule, would be if the timing works out that we pick up extraterrestrial signals right around the time that some other civilization is learning the basics of frequency modulated radio, so that they're just mapping frequencies of sound directly to frequencies of light. That would actually allow us to hear alien speech, which would obviously be amazing.
Of course, that assumes that they use verbal communication, and that their technology progresses similar to ours, and that the window of time that they used this technology (a couple centuries at most if they're similar to us) just so happens to fall in the time that we're listening, instead of millions of years before or after. So I'm not holding my breath, but it sure would be cool.
Have you seen him without his teleprompter?
Sure, with slick professional script writers with ph.ds in public relations to tell him exactly what to say, he looks smooth enough. Without it, he's a stuttering bumbling idiot. I'm the only one who remembers that?
I would love to see you get up and give an extemporaneous speech in front of hundreds of people who are just itching to tear and twist your every word apart. It would be hilarious. I'd wager you couldn't get through a single sentence without at least two "ums", "uhs", or "likes".
Obama, off-script, talks like a regular person. What a shock. If you want to find something trivial and petty to criticize him over, go after his terrible comedic timing. Seriously, that dude can't tell a joke to save his life.
Out of curiosity, are there any programs in the present day United States that you'd consider socialism? What exactly would be changed in your ideal world?
Certainly "Obamacare" doesn't meet your definition of socialism, as it only provides subsidies to low income families who couldn't otherwise afford health care. Maybe Medicare, but it is a very rare person who could afford to pay all their own medical bills into old age. The only one that might make sense to call socialist under your definition would be Social Security, but even there, around 60-70% of America's elderly are reliant on the program to make ends meet, so most of the people receiving it need it.
If you're just calling for means-testing on Social Security and Medicare, I could understand that (not necessarily agree, but at least understand). But since you led off by calling it "stealing", I'm not sure how refusing to let the 1% share in the benefits would make it better in your mind.
It was done in Flash games long before Angry Birds decided to do it.
I like to call it the iPod Effect -- people assume that whatever company gets rich with an idea must have been the one to invent it.
Looks like someone doesn't know the definition of the word "amateur".
(Hint: it's not the person who wrote the headline)
So you have no argument, then. You're just gonna stick with the story that yes, you do care just as much about people who died a thousand years ago as you would about your own wife, because "people are different, man!"
The simple truth is we're not that different. People experience the same general feelings everywhere. You just got up on a high horse, and can't figure out a way to get back down without losing face. So go ahead and laugh it off, if that's what you've got to do. But from personal experience, you grow more as a person when you admit (if only to yourself) that you were wrong.
So you care as much about the old guy who just this second passed away (and another this second, and yet another this second) as you would (did?) about your own father passing?
Either your an emotionless psychopath, or you must spend every waking moment in mourning. The rest of us care more about people the closer we are to them. We love our immediate family more than our friends, our friends more than acquaintances, acquaintances more than friends of friends, friends of friends more than a random guy across town, a random guy across town more than a random guy across the country, a random guy across the country more than a random guy across the world, a random guy across the world more than a random guy from a century ago, and a random guy from a century ago more than a random guy from a millennium ago.
If you want to pretend to be a perfectly rational robot, aren't the deaths of the people killed during the sack of Babylon in the 16th century BC just as sad as those of the people killed in the recent midwest tornadoes? Of course, no actual human being would feel that way, but if it makes you feel special, go on pretending.
Nah, eventually the car behind the driverless one will ram it forward through the intersection.
Sure you can. You just need the threat of a war, which will let you justify designing and building all sorts of new weapons, hiring new advisers, conducting field exercises, etc. You need a war every decade or two so that the threats seem valid, but we've already had plenty, so there's no need for another. All the profiteers need right now is saber-rattling, and they've got that in spades.
People generally care more about their friends and neighbors and spouses and children than they do about nameless, faceless people from the other side of the globe. Americans care more about their troops being killed, and I'd wager that the Iraqi people care a lot more about neighbors killed as "collateral damage" than they do about some American soldiers being killed by a suicide bomber at some check point in another city. There's nothing wrong with that -- it's human nature.
I guess it varies by airport. Whenever I fly out of SJC, they typically have two carry-on screening lines feeding into a single backscatter machine. While any one conveyor line moves slower than the scanner, the net chokepoint always seems to be going through the backscatter machine. Sometimes they'll alleviate it by waving a few people from the backscatter line through a standard metal detector, as otherwise the line would get too backed up.
HL3 will come out regardless of how many hats people buy. But first, they need some new big thing to bundle it with.
The Half-life series has made Valve, because each step of the way, they've bundled the game with something else that they hoped to make money on. In the original HL, they did it unintentionally with the extremely moddable engine. In HL2, it was bundled with Steam, which has become their bread-and-butter. How many people would have gotten started on Steam if HL2 didn't require it?
Ep1 may be an exception, though it did introduce an AI companion that didn't make players want to pull their hair out, but Ep2 helped push the sales of TF2 (which has made bank) and Portal. Portal, as a puzzle platformer, would have likely flown under the radar had it been released alone. By bundling it, it became a surprise hit, and led to a sequel that sold millions of copies at ~$50 a piece.
If they're smart, they're coming up with the next big thing, and will bundle it with HL3 to drive adoption. My guess, expect HL3 to come out at the same time as the rumored Steam Box.
Obama is president, which means government is bad. As soon as a Republican is in the White House, government will go back to being good.
That is, according to Fox.
But I thought that if we see something, we're supposed to say something?
"According to some estimates," we misplaced three times the total national tax revenue in 2002, and no one noticed. You find that to be credible. Really?
Look, I know we live in a post-truth society. Facts don't matter, soundbites do. Smearing those who disagree (perhaps by calling them shills) is much easier that coming up with hard, well-supported evidence. But I still believe in objective truth. I still like to base my opinions on evidence and logic, rather than starting from the conclusion I want to reach and making up numbers to support it. Maybe that makes me a relic, but it doesn't make me a shill.
There is no way that we misplaced three times as much money as we took in in 2002. There is no way that $500 billion dollars is being spent every year on spooky black-ops programs. These numbers are bullshit, meant to sound impressive, but completely unsubstantiated. The mods have spoken, and they like this invented reality that you and others have come up with. Fine. But me, I'll stick with basing my opinions off objective truths, not unsupported assertions by ACs.
Someone who has actually used one of these could probably confirm or deny this...
As someone who has actually used one of these (many times), my answer is a solid "deny". You don't just walk through these scanners the way you do with the metal detectors. You walk in, turn to the side, spread your legs, put your hands in the air, and hold that position for about five seconds. They slow down the lines immensely. If you then had to turn another 90 degrees and hold for another five seconds, it would make things even worse.
Considering that the scanners don't even detect the sort of threat they were rolled out in response to (the underwear bomber), they should just be scrapped entirely, and the government should do everything in its power to find a loophole in the contract to get some of our money back.
Where did you get 5 Trillion?
From the OP, combined with some extremely basic arithmetic.
Plus, over the past ten years, $500B/year on "black" programs to catch "terrorists".
$500B/yr, over ten years. A child could figure that out.
$6.6B is about one tenth of one percent of the amount claimed. Now come up with the remaining 99.9%.
Your insinuated "black hole of anti-terror technologies" doesn't account for it, because the money we spend researching such things is documented -- all of the research and development, plus all of the classified programs, come out to under $100B a year. And it would be quite a stretch to claim that all of those programs are designed for fighting terrorists. For example, we spend around $800M a year researching better submarines. I don't think those are intended to fight terrorists.
And lest you try to claim that it's super-secret undocumented research, who's performing it? Certainly not Raytheon or Lockheed or any of the usual suspects, because the amount claimed ($500B/yr) greatly exceeds their combined revenues. Do you think we have some Hollywood-style Men in Black laboratory that's receiving such huge funding? If so, where do they buy their equipment, and why doesn't the money show up on their suppliers' balance sheets?
You can't just dump five trillion dollars into the economy and expect no one to notice.
The OP lied. He pulled a completely unrealistic number directly out of his ass, and Slashdot ate it up, because it aligns with what they wanted to believe.