As a PS3 owner, and I surprised that I have not yet seen the following counter-argument to all the MS hating, thus Sony loving. Sony has repeatedly demonstrated a complete and total indifference to the user experience. The PS3 is experience is a constant barrage of being forced to watch a long progress bar (and then another one) before you can do anything else. I know, I know, they've fixed that specific gripe in the 4, but I'm speaking to the culture within Sony. Sony customer support is one of the worst I've ever had to deal with. They care so much more about fighting against people who might try to get content without paying for it than they do about their paying customers, that they are willing to remove core features of the product that they sold you, keep your money. They also completely fail to see the problem with that.
I see all these posts worried that MS will pull a bait and switch over this DRM scheme. I haven't noticed any comments recognizing that Sony is the father of the console bait and switch. I want to be clear that I'm not defending MS; their attitude is clearly not pro-consumer. However, I just want to be the one to point out that nothing I've seen here makes them any worse than Sony, and a consumer-hating product from MS is NOT a valid reason to buy a similar product from Sony.
I for one haven't even turned my PS3 on since I built a gaming PC last Summer. I don't plan on buying any console this gen. Maybe I'm just getting old. Or maybe it's the case that neither company deserves consumer confidence anymore.
Any small party should definitely support:
* Election finance reform.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html
* Alternative Vote
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
Thorium Energy Policy:
I'd like to see the Government focus on developing Thorium as an energy source. Liquid Florine Thorium Reactors have many benefits, and could provide all of our energy needs. Demand for Thorium would also make Rare Earth mining viable in the US (currently all done in China). If you mine Rare Earths here, you'd bring more high tech manufacturing here as well. Policy changes to enable and promote this course of action are fairly minimal. It's just hard to get politicians to give a damn.
A lot of things Google does never take off. The point is that they make cool stuff even if there's little or no business case for it. I like that they are always showing the untapped potential of the ubiquitous tools we already have. I like that they make ways to make things work together, then share the tools for us all to use.
Prohibitive corrosion is a common misconception about this type of reactor. The U.S. built an experimental MSR in the 60's and ran it for 5 years. According to the results section of the wikipedia article about the experiment, the corrosion was negligible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Results
I highly recommend Terry Pratchett's 2011 documentary "Choosing to Die." You may watch the full film on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SY
I found the documentary extremely informative and moving.
I have to admit that the first time I read your description of God, I had no idea what you were talking about. I did not recognize it as a description of God, and for that I apologize. I just googled "existentiating definition" and came up with nothing, so all I can do is try to infer your meaning. It sounds like you are making the argument that existence cannot continue existing without something else causing it to exist. I do not see this as a self-evident truth, nor do I see any justification for it in what you wrote. Quite honestly, it comes across as completely insane to me. I'm getting confused just trying to read it. We can agree that there are things that exist. I do not know why you assert that without God, things that currently exist would instantly degrade to nothingness. That seems like a pretty big leap of logic to me. I just realized that I'm trying to debate religion on the internet, which I already knew to be completely pointless. No matter how far we go with this, you will continue obfuscate and make excuses for the preposterous assertions of religions. You may have the last word if it makes you more comfortable in your insanity. I'm done here.
I find it ironic that your defense against my claims that your god doesn't exist is to call my depiction of your god a "straw man." Of coarse it's a straw man. We're talking about something that doesn't exist. Something that doesn't exist is almost the definition of a straw man.
Technically, a straw man argument is one based on a false representation of the opponent's claims. The straw man in the term "straw man argument" is an analogy of a manufactured image, an illusion, a figment, a lie, a false premise. I find it a bit too easy to apply the claim of "straw man argument" when the original discussion is about an actual straw man, a figment of humanity's collective imagination, in this case God. I get the sense that you have become comfortable using the term "straw man argument" as your default defense against any and all claims that God does not exist. It is easy for you to claim that any representation of god that you do not like is just a "straw man" because God is an amorphous concept open to broad interpretation.
I will also note that in your defense, you made no attempt to provide your own description of God. It would be predictable if your next move were to cop-out and say that God is beyond our feeble human understanding, and as such, you are are excused from providing a plausible description of him.
Allow me to clarify the intent of my original "invisible man in the sky" comment. I did not mean to imply that any religious adult in the modern world would describe their god this way (though as a child, this is exactly the image of god I often had). I used this absurd description to illustrate how absurd the idea of a god is to me as an adult.
Contradictions abound in the descriptions of what God is.
As somebody pointed out above, the Bible does claim that god made us in his own image. It stands to reason then that goes does have an image, and that image is observable from some real place. We are also told that he is everywhere and in everything and invisible.
We are told that Heaven and Hell are real places that people go when they die. As children we believe Heaven to be above the sky and Hell to be below the earth. These images are inescapable because people presumably believed this to be true at some point. Modern man knows there is nowhere left in either the ground nor the sky for such places to hide, so the religious mind has moved them to parallel universes, alternate planes, and other unobservable sanctuaries of the mind.
We are told that he controls every detail of everything and that he is good and just and perfect. However, we observe a very imperfect world full of injustice and imperfections. The religious mind excuses these contradictions as "tests of faith." This concept makes absolutely no sense to me, and the more I think about it, the more contemptuous this conceptual God becomes.
In summary, if you disagree with my deliberately absurd description of your God as an "invisible man in the sky," then by all means, present a physical description of him that is any less absurd. Hold on a moment, let me get my popcorn.... Okay, you may proceed.
If you can contain the mess to your under-garment, then you can salvage the day by making it to the restroom and discarding your under-garments. Otherwise, it's time to leave for the day, but not before grabbing some paper towels to place over the seat of your car. For your sake, I hope you don't use public transportation to get to work.
Better yet, what if Jesus told Romney that God prefers the name Allah?
Better yet, what if Jesus told Romney that God does not exist? Causality problems with that last scenario aside, that might just be a problem for Romney's base.
Jesus would be a bad choice for a Romney running mate. Romney would believe it was his third coming, and that could seriously alienate the conservative Christian vote.
It looks like the base of the buildings in The Jetsons... sounds to me like we will soon be selling real estate at the top of these towers... all the power for the building will be supplied by its own structure...
I can't wait to live at the exhaust port of power plant where I'm continually blasted by hot air in an already scorching hot neighborhood in the middle of nowhere where I also get to add a massive vertical component to my daily commute!
The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.
At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?
-1 parent. The exhaust air at the top of the tower is going to keep rising because it will still be hotter than the ambient air. The cold air that falls to offset the rising mass is called the atmosphere. It's big, it's going to be moving slower than the air you just used to spin a turbine, and it's not cost effective to try to make electricity from it until it enters the greenhouse, gets heated, and funnels into the turbines that are already in the design (the one place where air is moving fast in the whole design.
Uh... should this statistic be shocking? At any given point in time, if you isolate out the top 3% of users, how much of the bandwidth SHOULD they be using? Should it be closer to 3%? That would mean everybody is using the exact same amount of data. All this statistic says is that data usage is not evenly distributed, but we're talking about a packet switched network. At no point in time does a packet switched network EXPECT equal usage of bandwidth. If they expected bandwidth to be used evenly across all users at all times, they would have built a circuit switched network. At any given point in time, most connections are just idling. Why don't they just release a statistic that reads "99% of network bandwidth is consumed by active connections." How about a billing plan where you pay for unlimited data, but if you don't use it, they'll refund your money?
I am so tired of ISP's blaming their customers for the shortcomings of their network. The problem is with the way AT&T designed their network, not with the way customers are using it. Their network was not designed to handle TCP. They break TCP congestion control by not allowing packet loss. As soon a high traffic condition is reached, every affect TCP connection retransmits even more, and the situation quickly spirals out of control to where nobody can get a packet through.
Verizon has the same kinds of customers as AT&T and they manage to handle high traffic conditions without grinding to a halt. I can't wait for my AT&T contract to expire. The breaking point for me was at a football game when my phone failed to complete a call or send a text message for hours. The guy standing next to me had Verizon and it worked fine. He let me use his phone to call a friend. I got that friend's voice mail because he is also on AT&T.
Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.
I choose to believe that this new model will be the basis of the Subspace Communicator from Star Trek. Such is my approach to science. Don't judge me.
Was the Emergency Broadcast System even used on 9/11? It seems like if there was ever a time to trigger that system, it would have been on that day. All I've ever seen it used for was interrupting my Saturday morning cartoons repeatedly through my whole childhood. And we put up with it because we think one day it could do some good.
The whole system is BS. In a real emergency, we all just turn on the news so that we can get the latest update on what they don't know about the situation.
My office uses Websense. All you have to do to get around it is to set a proxy in your web browser. In this case, the proxy just needs to be outside of Yemen. Problem solved.
"DARPA said it as embarked on an ambitious mission to create a new generation of computing systems - cognitive computers - to dramatically reduce military manpower and extend the capabilities of military personnel. DARPA's cognitive computing research is developing technologies that will enable computer systems to learn, reason and apply knowledge gained through experience, and respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events."...These people do watch movies, right?
Slashdot Mirror
As a PS3 owner, and I surprised that I have not yet seen the following counter-argument to all the MS hating, thus Sony loving. Sony has repeatedly demonstrated a complete and total indifference to the user experience. The PS3 is experience is a constant barrage of being forced to watch a long progress bar (and then another one) before you can do anything else. I know, I know, they've fixed that specific gripe in the 4, but I'm speaking to the culture within Sony. Sony customer support is one of the worst I've ever had to deal with. They care so much more about fighting against people who might try to get content without paying for it than they do about their paying customers, that they are willing to remove core features of the product that they sold you, keep your money. They also completely fail to see the problem with that. I see all these posts worried that MS will pull a bait and switch over this DRM scheme. I haven't noticed any comments recognizing that Sony is the father of the console bait and switch. I want to be clear that I'm not defending MS; their attitude is clearly not pro-consumer. However, I just want to be the one to point out that nothing I've seen here makes them any worse than Sony, and a consumer-hating product from MS is NOT a valid reason to buy a similar product from Sony. I for one haven't even turned my PS3 on since I built a gaming PC last Summer. I don't plan on buying any console this gen. Maybe I'm just getting old. Or maybe it's the case that neither company deserves consumer confidence anymore.
Any small party should definitely support: * Election finance reform. http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html * Alternative Vote http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE Thorium Energy Policy: I'd like to see the Government focus on developing Thorium as an energy source. Liquid Florine Thorium Reactors have many benefits, and could provide all of our energy needs. Demand for Thorium would also make Rare Earth mining viable in the US (currently all done in China). If you mine Rare Earths here, you'd bring more high tech manufacturing here as well. Policy changes to enable and promote this course of action are fairly minimal. It's just hard to get politicians to give a damn.
...I can't see such a thing taking off...
A lot of things Google does never take off. The point is that they make cool stuff even if there's little or no business case for it. I like that they are always showing the untapped potential of the ubiquitous tools we already have. I like that they make ways to make things work together, then share the tools for us all to use.
Prohibitive corrosion is a common misconception about this type of reactor. The U.S. built an experimental MSR in the 60's and ran it for 5 years. According to the results section of the wikipedia article about the experiment, the corrosion was negligible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment#Results
I highly recommend Terry Pratchett's 2011 documentary "Choosing to Die." You may watch the full film on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slZnfC-V1SY I found the documentary extremely informative and moving.
I have to admit that the first time I read your description of God, I had no idea what you were talking about. I did not recognize it as a description of God, and for that I apologize. I just googled "existentiating definition" and came up with nothing, so all I can do is try to infer your meaning. It sounds like you are making the argument that existence cannot continue existing without something else causing it to exist. I do not see this as a self-evident truth, nor do I see any justification for it in what you wrote. Quite honestly, it comes across as completely insane to me. I'm getting confused just trying to read it. We can agree that there are things that exist. I do not know why you assert that without God, things that currently exist would instantly degrade to nothingness. That seems like a pretty big leap of logic to me. I just realized that I'm trying to debate religion on the internet, which I already knew to be completely pointless. No matter how far we go with this, you will continue obfuscate and make excuses for the preposterous assertions of religions. You may have the last word if it makes you more comfortable in your insanity. I'm done here.
I find it ironic that your defense against my claims that your god doesn't exist is to call my depiction of your god a "straw man." Of coarse it's a straw man. We're talking about something that doesn't exist. Something that doesn't exist is almost the definition of a straw man.
Technically, a straw man argument is one based on a false representation of the opponent's claims. The straw man in the term "straw man argument" is an analogy of a manufactured image, an illusion, a figment, a lie, a false premise. I find it a bit too easy to apply the claim of "straw man argument" when the original discussion is about an actual straw man, a figment of humanity's collective imagination, in this case God. I get the sense that you have become comfortable using the term "straw man argument" as your default defense against any and all claims that God does not exist. It is easy for you to claim that any representation of god that you do not like is just a "straw man" because God is an amorphous concept open to broad interpretation.
I will also note that in your defense, you made no attempt to provide your own description of God. It would be predictable if your next move were to cop-out and say that God is beyond our feeble human understanding, and as such, you are are excused from providing a plausible description of him.
Allow me to clarify the intent of my original "invisible man in the sky" comment. I did not mean to imply that any religious adult in the modern world would describe their god this way (though as a child, this is exactly the image of god I often had). I used this absurd description to illustrate how absurd the idea of a god is to me as an adult. Contradictions abound in the descriptions of what God is. As somebody pointed out above, the Bible does claim that god made us in his own image. It stands to reason then that goes does have an image, and that image is observable from some real place. We are also told that he is everywhere and in everything and invisible. We are told that Heaven and Hell are real places that people go when they die. As children we believe Heaven to be above the sky and Hell to be below the earth. These images are inescapable because people presumably believed this to be true at some point. Modern man knows there is nowhere left in either the ground nor the sky for such places to hide, so the religious mind has moved them to parallel universes, alternate planes, and other unobservable sanctuaries of the mind. We are told that he controls every detail of everything and that he is good and just and perfect. However, we observe a very imperfect world full of injustice and imperfections. The religious mind excuses these contradictions as "tests of faith." This concept makes absolutely no sense to me, and the more I think about it, the more contemptuous this conceptual God becomes. In summary, if you disagree with my deliberately absurd description of your God as an "invisible man in the sky," then by all means, present a physical description of him that is any less absurd. Hold on a moment, let me get my popcorn.... Okay, you may proceed.
Atheism leads to this.
What does Atheism have to do with any of this? Because I don't believe there's an invisible man in the sky means I don't have any morals?
If you can contain the mess to your under-garment, then you can salvage the day by making it to the restroom and discarding your under-garments. Otherwise, it's time to leave for the day, but not before grabbing some paper towels to place over the seat of your car. For your sake, I hope you don't use public transportation to get to work.
Better yet, what if Jesus told Romney that God prefers the name Allah? Better yet, what if Jesus told Romney that God does not exist? Causality problems with that last scenario aside, that might just be a problem for Romney's base.
Jesus would be a bad choice for a Romney running mate. Romney would believe it was his third coming, and that could seriously alienate the conservative Christian vote.
My Paradigm speakers sound pretty damn good. With the prices they charge, they have plenty of money to put into R&D. Well worth the price, IMO.
"My mother could actually use this" To be fair, his mother is Kevin Mitnick
One does not simply walk into Metaphor.
It looks like the base of the buildings in The Jetsons... sounds to me like we will soon be selling real estate at the top of these towers... all the power for the building will be supplied by its own structure...
I can't wait to live at the exhaust port of power plant where I'm continually blasted by hot air in an already scorching hot neighborhood in the middle of nowhere where I also get to add a massive vertical component to my daily commute!
The idea is interesting, but it seems to me that a substantial portion of the solar energy is going towards gravitational potential energy - that is, lifting tons of air mass hundreds of feet in the air.
At some point, that air mass cools off, the air will want to drop back down towards the earth because of gravity. Seems like, in addition to generating 200MW on the 'exhaust' stack, they could build a second "cool air return" stack that generated power from the force of gravity pulling the cooled air back down to ground level?
-1 parent. The exhaust air at the top of the tower is going to keep rising because it will still be hotter than the ambient air. The cold air that falls to offset the rising mass is called the atmosphere. It's big, it's going to be moving slower than the air you just used to spin a turbine, and it's not cost effective to try to make electricity from it until it enters the greenhouse, gets heated, and funnels into the turbines that are already in the design (the one place where air is moving fast in the whole design.
Claim: 3% of users consume 40% of bandwidth.
Uh... should this statistic be shocking? At any given point in time, if you isolate out the top 3% of users, how much of the bandwidth SHOULD they be using? Should it be closer to 3%? That would mean everybody is using the exact same amount of data. All this statistic says is that data usage is not evenly distributed, but we're talking about a packet switched network. At no point in time does a packet switched network EXPECT equal usage of bandwidth. If they expected bandwidth to be used evenly across all users at all times, they would have built a circuit switched network. At any given point in time, most connections are just idling. Why don't they just release a statistic that reads "99% of network bandwidth is consumed by active connections." How about a billing plan where you pay for unlimited data, but if you don't use it, they'll refund your money?
I am so tired of ISP's blaming their customers for the shortcomings of their network. The problem is with the way AT&T designed their network, not with the way customers are using it. Their network was not designed to handle TCP. They break TCP congestion control by not allowing packet loss. As soon a high traffic condition is reached, every affect TCP connection retransmits even more, and the situation quickly spirals out of control to where nobody can get a packet through.
Verizon has the same kinds of customers as AT&T and they manage to handle high traffic conditions without grinding to a halt. I can't wait for my AT&T contract to expire. The breaking point for me was at a football game when my phone failed to complete a call or send a text message for hours. The guy standing next to me had Verizon and it worked fine. He let me use his phone to call a friend. I got that friend's voice mail because he is also on AT&T.
I choose to believe that this new model will be the basis of the Subspace Communicator from Star Trek. Such is my approach to science. Don't judge me.
Was the Emergency Broadcast System even used on 9/11? It seems like if there was ever a time to trigger that system, it would have been on that day. All I've ever seen it used for was interrupting my Saturday morning cartoons repeatedly through my whole childhood. And we put up with it because we think one day it could do some good. The whole system is BS. In a real emergency, we all just turn on the news so that we can get the latest update on what they don't know about the situation.
Mod parent up. TFA is obviously a stoner rant with no real proposal.
Or they just don't know of my proxy.
My office uses Websense. All you have to do to get around it is to set a proxy in your web browser. In this case, the proxy just needs to be outside of Yemen. Problem solved.
"DARPA said it as embarked on an ambitious mission to create a new generation of computing systems - cognitive computers - to dramatically reduce military manpower and extend the capabilities of military personnel. DARPA's cognitive computing research is developing technologies that will enable computer systems to learn, reason and apply knowledge gained through experience, and respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events." ...These people do watch movies, right?