Yeah, and libertarianism is a form of anarchism. But 'Stranger in a Strange Land' does not make Heinlein a hippy left leaning anarchist. Spider is more along the lines of Ursala K. LeGuinn.
Heinlein was a right wing libertarian type. Spider is a lefty hippy anarchist type. Both are great writers, but if you can't stand reading political views that don't agree with your own, I suggest staying away from one or the other.
Just guessing, but you're a libertarian type, aren't you?
Actually that's why I like Zonk, too. Websites and magazines that are part of the gaming industry tend to parrot the party line, giving every suck-ass game at least an 8/10 stars. This isn't primarily a gaming site, and Zonk is no gaming insider, so the things he writes are less biased than I would expect elsewhere. Plus, he's the only editor who actually, you know, writes things.
Actually, I like Zonk. It's just so damn fashionable to make fun of him that I couldn't help myself. It's the peer pressure, the peer pressure made me do it!
Remember what the generator look like inside? Two cone things pointing at each other with an energy field in between. Maybe when the containment field failed, the energy mostly blew out in a ring.
I'll let the other posters comment on the wrongness of your idea that raytracing doesn't scale with scene complexity. There was a nice SciAm article about it, if you need more convincing. Instead, I'll talk about something in the article that the other posters didn't mention. Raster Processing may scale with scene somplexity, but creation doesn't. Raster graphics must be tweaked at creation to make an object look realistic while still rendering quickly. With ray tracing, you just create an object and forget about it. It just looks right without any tweaking.
What costs game designers more: hand tweaking every object, or you buying a better computer so you can ray trace their un-tweaked objects? Now guess which way 3D graphics are gonna go...
Jointly owns the mother's body? What the hell? What contract did the mother and fetus sign giving the fetus possesion of the body? The mother owns her body, and until the fetus can live on its own, it's not a human being, it's a parasite. Any person has the right to remove parasites from their body.
The Libertarian position is logically pro choice. Saying libertarianism is anti-abortion is tantamount to saying that libertarianism is pro-socialism. You would force a person to support a creature that for all intents and purposes is not a full, independent human being but a parasite incapable of living on its own? That, my friend, is socialism. I'm a socialist and I still wouldn't go that far.
As for the rest of your post, spot on. Personally, I would rather keep some of the socialism, but yours is still a position I can endorse. But you had to go and slip the abortion issue in. Sigh...
You have to obey the law whether you like it or not. So you're saying that if you had lived in Nazi Germany, you would have ratted on Anne Frank? Sometimes you have to disobey an unjust law.
Sorry, I just get so sick of people whining about Slashdot groupthink. You probably didn't deserve that. Anyway, Christians and outspoken Republicans do quite well here, if they are intelligent and well spoken. Everyone gets downmodded sometimes. Doesn't mean there is a conspiracy to silence you. Me, I read at -1 with troll, redundant, over-rated and flamebait given a +2, just to watch out for abuse. And I meta mod those same mods pretty harshly.
Maybe it's because I've bene here so long, from before the karma cap, but I've never seen my karma waver from "excellent" even with three or four troll-mods in a row. I've noticed a little bit more uptight, prickish mod behavior from all sides of the spectrum recently, but these things come and go. In the long run, smart, articulate people are rewarded by the mod system, whatever their beliefs. At least that's been my impression.
Mono-culture? Is that International Whine Language for "anyone who doesn't agree with me?" Guess what? Freedom of speech does not guarantee you the right to be respected for what you say. Or even believed. And insulting your target audience is not likely to get them to agree with you.
Saying that everybody who posts on slashdot thinks the same is just a thinly veiled insult. It's basically implying that (unlike the 'free thinking' poster) no one here can think for themselves. It is implying that only easily-led sheeple would hold that particular opinion, that no one could have arrived at that opinion through logic or introspection, only through surrendering to the hive mind.
It's a very hypocritical stand to take. It's trying to get everyone to agree with you by saying that if they don't, they are somehow not individuals, but mere pawns. Face it, you aren't upset that "slashbots" are pawns. You are upset that they're not your pawns. You don't want free thinking individuals, because you aren't one yourself. You project your own inadequecies onto others. You've bought a certain line of thought hook, line and sinker, and when anyone questions that line of thought, it can only be because they aren't a "free thinker" like you.
How droll. It's like the counter culture kids who rebel by all dressing alike.
Our lil' redneck is making insults at a sixth grade level! Makes me proud to be a Repugnican. Yeeee-haw! Now let's go git us some more of that eastern lib'ral tax money for our pork barrel projects. Them Dummycrats is so dumb, they pay more in taxes than they take in gub'mint services, leaving the rest for us real 'merkins. Ah loves me some pork!
I lived on the streets in San Francisco, not my parents basement you condescending fuckwit. I volunteered with Food Not Bombs, Earth First, and the IWW five days a week. You can shove your cookie up your ass. I've made a difference, what have you done you pathetic sack of shit?
You still haven't made a cogent point. You have fuck all for karma here and no friends. We are from roughly the same era, yet I have excellent karma and hundreds of friends. Not that that means anything definite, but it's interesting.
I'm done, debating with you has been a pointless waste of words. Have fun smooching Billy's ass.
I couldn't remember the name. Phase IV was the best ant movie ever! I was just a kid when I saw that movie on TV, I remember it freaked me out way more than "Them!" ever could.
The soul, as a philosophical concept, was not primarily developed as a pacifier of the fear of mortality, I believe. It was developed to address the issue of good, evil, and karma. People got caught up in their mental models and started believing that their mental model of themselves was who they really were. That self-model is cut off from the universe, seperate, so people began to see themselves as seperate.
If everything is one, and nothing is seperate, there is no need to place blame, no need for judgement, no need for the concept of good and evil. If the self is seperate, it raises the paradox of good and evil. In a just universe, why do good deeds go unrewarded and bad deeds unpunished? We have one of three choices: we accept that seperation is an illusion, we accept that the universe is unjust, or we create a kind of clearinghouse of judgement: the soul. As the first option is unacceptable to a person caught in their mental model (it feels like death!), and the second is unacceptable because our genetics cause most of us to desire and expect a just world (it's part of what makes us great cooperators) we are left with the third option.
The soul accumulates judgement so that things may be evened out. If not in this lifetime, then in the next, either through the mechanism of impartial karma or through a divine Judge. Justice prevails. This, to me, is the primary purpose of the concept of the soul.
As for me, I prefer to stare into the void with my eyes wide open.
Grow up. (1) Naturalistic fallacy. Just ebcause something is a certain way does not mean it should or must be that way. (2)I agree. So? (3)Straw Man. I'm not saying anyone is a saint. Some people are better than others. (4) If you were good at debate, you'd be a master debater.
Gates would never have been in a position to do good if he hadn't done evil to get there. If he didn't do that evil, others would have prospered and perhaps contributed more than Gates ever could. We'll never know.
In terms of percentage of income given to charity, I spent over four years of my life working exclusively for charity, 100%. No income, lived on savings. So you can take your straw man, shove him where the sun don't shine and light him on fire for all the good he's doing you in winning points in this debate.
This last bit is just nonsensical, a complete non-sequiter. Was it just an excuse to quote Godel? It barely even qualifies as a straw man. Here's what Godel would say: "Yes, Bill Gates proves my point about how easy it is to become a dictator in America." I'm an anarchist, my friend, and not one of those libertarian types, either. So I speak of the free market and competition not as some end-all, be-all, greatest system in the world, but as the system of rules we all have to fucking play by.
So far, you've done a piss poor job of convincing me that I should be licking Bill Gates twat, and you have exhibited substandard reading comprehension skills. Either that or you are deliberately not understanding my point in order to better convince the feeble minded of your own. So let me try again.
Bill Gates got rich by fucking over the world. Had he not done so, we would likely all be better off. So there would be more money spread amongst more hands, possibly leading to even greater relief of suffering. There would be less poverty, less people in need of his fucking charity. More people, giving more money, to less needy people. So it's not very insightful to just look at Billy's charity and say, "ooh, look at all the good he's done." The question is, does it outweigh the bad? I say no, it doesn't.
Wicked wicked Zoot... she is a bad person and she must pay the penalty. And here in Castle IBM, we have but one punishment... you must tie her down on a bed... and spank her. Come!
You aren't getting my meaning. I'm talking about the opportunity cost of Bill Gates wealth. Because this obscene level of personal wealth was concentrated solely in his hands, it was not available to others. Because his company played dirty, the opportunity to innovate was denied others. The free market doesn't operate efficiently without real competition. Bill Gates dirty tricks have kept the free market from working correctly in the software industry, harming us all. Without him, the world would probably be a better place, and more wealth would have been generated overall. Just because he gave a good percentage of his wealth away does not mean that he didn't screw over the world in accumulating it in the first place.
I'm not a materially oriented person. Bill Gates wealth only interests me in the abstract sense, in that I think I could probably do a better job than he of using it to make the world a better place. But go ahead and worship the man if you like, and impugn the motives of someone you don't even know, if that's what gets you off.
It's not bitterness. It's a desire to live in a just world. There are plenty of people out there who have done something really positive with their lives. I just don't like to see Bill Gates confused for one. I also don't like the illogical line of reasoning that ignores opportunity cost. I'm more upset at the system that created Bill Gates than I am at Bill Gates himself. Sycophantic hero worship is part of that system.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and libertarianism is a form of anarchism. But 'Stranger in a Strange Land' does not make Heinlein a hippy left leaning anarchist. Spider is more along the lines of Ursala K. LeGuinn.
Heinlein was a right wing libertarian type. Spider is a lefty hippy anarchist type. Both are great writers, but if you can't stand reading political views that don't agree with your own, I suggest staying away from one or the other.
Just guessing, but you're a libertarian type, aren't you?
Actually that's why I like Zonk, too. Websites and magazines that are part of the gaming industry tend to parrot the party line, giving every suck-ass game at least an 8/10 stars. This isn't primarily a gaming site, and Zonk is no gaming insider, so the things he writes are less biased than I would expect elsewhere. Plus, he's the only editor who actually, you know, writes things.
Actually, I like Zonk. It's just so damn fashionable to make fun of him that I couldn't help myself. It's the peer pressure, the peer pressure made me do it!
You expect someone to RTFA? This is slashdot, where everyone can be an expert. As long as no one reads TFA. Get with the program!
Remember what the generator look like inside? Two cone things pointing at each other with an energy field in between. Maybe when the containment field failed, the energy mostly blew out in a ring.
God, I'm such a dork.
Add to that the fact that the site hasn't been updated since mid-2005, and I'd say it's dead.
I'm a doctor, not a programmer...
I'll let the other posters comment on the wrongness of your idea that raytracing doesn't scale with scene complexity. There was a nice SciAm article about it, if you need more convincing. Instead, I'll talk about something in the article that the other posters didn't mention. Raster Processing may scale with scene somplexity, but creation doesn't. Raster graphics must be tweaked at creation to make an object look realistic while still rendering quickly. With ray tracing, you just create an object and forget about it. It just looks right without any tweaking.
What costs game designers more: hand tweaking every object, or you buying a better computer so you can ray trace their un-tweaked objects? Now guess which way 3D graphics are gonna go...
Jointly owns the mother's body? What the hell? What contract did the mother and fetus sign giving the fetus possesion of the body? The mother owns her body, and until the fetus can live on its own, it's not a human being, it's a parasite. Any person has the right to remove parasites from their body.
The Libertarian position is logically pro choice. Saying libertarianism is anti-abortion is tantamount to saying that libertarianism is pro-socialism. You would force a person to support a creature that for all intents and purposes is not a full, independent human being but a parasite incapable of living on its own? That, my friend, is socialism. I'm a socialist and I still wouldn't go that far.
As for the rest of your post, spot on. Personally, I would rather keep some of the socialism, but yours is still a position I can endorse. But you had to go and slip the abortion issue in. Sigh...
They had better not be setting up some kind of research base on Phobos. We all know where that leads.
You have to obey the law whether you like it or not.
So you're saying that if you had lived in Nazi Germany, you would have ratted on Anne Frank? Sometimes you have to disobey an unjust law.
Sorry, I just get so sick of people whining about Slashdot groupthink. You probably didn't deserve that. Anyway, Christians and outspoken Republicans do quite well here, if they are intelligent and well spoken. Everyone gets downmodded sometimes. Doesn't mean there is a conspiracy to silence you. Me, I read at -1 with troll, redundant, over-rated and flamebait given a +2, just to watch out for abuse. And I meta mod those same mods pretty harshly.
Maybe it's because I've bene here so long, from before the karma cap, but I've never seen my karma waver from "excellent" even with three or four troll-mods in a row. I've noticed a little bit more uptight, prickish mod behavior from all sides of the spectrum recently, but these things come and go. In the long run, smart, articulate people are rewarded by the mod system, whatever their beliefs. At least that's been my impression.
Vista. Coded in Lisp. Embeded in Emacs, which is running as a Firefox extension.
Ladies and gentleman, that sound you heard was jb's head exploding.
Hail oh powerful and wise Slashdot mono-culture.
Mono-culture? Is that International Whine Language for "anyone who doesn't agree with me?" Guess what? Freedom of speech does not guarantee you the right to be respected for what you say. Or even believed. And insulting your target audience is not likely to get them to agree with you.
Saying that everybody who posts on slashdot thinks the same is just a thinly veiled insult. It's basically implying that (unlike the 'free thinking' poster) no one here can think for themselves. It is implying that only easily-led sheeple would hold that particular opinion, that no one could have arrived at that opinion through logic or introspection, only through surrendering to the hive mind.
It's a very hypocritical stand to take. It's trying to get everyone to agree with you by saying that if they don't, they are somehow not individuals, but mere pawns. Face it, you aren't upset that "slashbots" are pawns. You are upset that they're not your pawns. You don't want free thinking individuals, because you aren't one yourself. You project your own inadequecies onto others. You've bought a certain line of thought hook, line and sinker, and when anyone questions that line of thought, it can only be because they aren't a "free thinker" like you.
How droll. It's like the counter culture kids who rebel by all dressing alike.
Our lil' redneck is making insults at a sixth grade level! Makes me proud to be a Repugnican. Yeeee-haw! Now let's go git us some more of that eastern lib'ral tax money for our pork barrel projects. Them Dummycrats is so dumb, they pay more in taxes than they take in gub'mint services, leaving the rest for us real 'merkins. Ah loves me some pork!
When using high tech Japanese toilets, do NOT accidentally push the "automatic tampon removal" button.
I lived on the streets in San Francisco, not my parents basement you condescending fuckwit. I volunteered with Food Not Bombs, Earth First, and the IWW five days a week. You can shove your cookie up your ass. I've made a difference, what have you done you pathetic sack of shit?
You still haven't made a cogent point. You have fuck all for karma here and no friends. We are from roughly the same era, yet I have excellent karma and hundreds of friends. Not that that means anything definite, but it's interesting.
I'm done, debating with you has been a pointless waste of words. Have fun smooching Billy's ass.
At last someone is thinking of the children.
I thought that was the problem...
I couldn't remember the name. Phase IV was the best ant movie ever! I was just a kid when I saw that movie on TV, I remember it freaked me out way more than "Them!" ever could.
The soul, as a philosophical concept, was not primarily developed as a pacifier of the fear of mortality, I believe. It was developed to address the issue of good, evil, and karma. People got caught up in their mental models and started believing that their mental model of themselves was who they really were. That self-model is cut off from the universe, seperate, so people began to see themselves as seperate.
If everything is one, and nothing is seperate, there is no need to place blame, no need for judgement, no need for the concept of good and evil. If the self is seperate, it raises the paradox of good and evil. In a just universe, why do good deeds go unrewarded and bad deeds unpunished? We have one of three choices: we accept that seperation is an illusion, we accept that the universe is unjust, or we create a kind of clearinghouse of judgement: the soul. As the first option is unacceptable to a person caught in their mental model (it feels like death!), and the second is unacceptable because our genetics cause most of us to desire and expect a just world (it's part of what makes us great cooperators) we are left with the third option.
The soul accumulates judgement so that things may be evened out. If not in this lifetime, then in the next, either through the mechanism of impartial karma or through a divine Judge. Justice prevails. This, to me, is the primary purpose of the concept of the soul.
As for me, I prefer to stare into the void with my eyes wide open.
So Mel Gibson's next movie is a remake of "Them!", only the ants are the heroes?
Grow up. (1) Naturalistic fallacy. Just ebcause something is a certain way does not mean it should or must be that way. (2)I agree. So? (3)Straw Man. I'm not saying anyone is a saint. Some people are better than others. (4) If you were good at debate, you'd be a master debater.
Gates would never have been in a position to do good if he hadn't done evil to get there. If he didn't do that evil, others would have prospered and perhaps contributed more than Gates ever could. We'll never know.
In terms of percentage of income given to charity, I spent over four years of my life working exclusively for charity, 100%. No income, lived on savings. So you can take your straw man, shove him where the sun don't shine and light him on fire for all the good he's doing you in winning points in this debate.
This last bit is just nonsensical, a complete non-sequiter. Was it just an excuse to quote Godel? It barely even qualifies as a straw man. Here's what Godel would say: "Yes, Bill Gates proves my point about how easy it is to become a dictator in America." I'm an anarchist, my friend, and not one of those libertarian types, either. So I speak of the free market and competition not as some end-all, be-all, greatest system in the world, but as the system of rules we all have to fucking play by.
So far, you've done a piss poor job of convincing me that I should be licking Bill Gates twat, and you have exhibited substandard reading comprehension skills. Either that or you are deliberately not understanding my point in order to better convince the feeble minded of your own. So let me try again.
Bill Gates got rich by fucking over the world. Had he not done so, we would likely all be better off. So there would be more money spread amongst more hands, possibly leading to even greater relief of suffering. There would be less poverty, less people in need of his fucking charity. More people, giving more money, to less needy people. So it's not very insightful to just look at Billy's charity and say, "ooh, look at all the good he's done." The question is, does it outweigh the bad? I say no, it doesn't.
Wicked wicked Zoot ... she is a bad person and she must pay the penalty. And here in Castle IBM, we have but one punishment... you must tie her down on a bed ... and spank her. Come!
You aren't getting my meaning. I'm talking about the opportunity cost of Bill Gates wealth. Because this obscene level of personal wealth was concentrated solely in his hands, it was not available to others. Because his company played dirty, the opportunity to innovate was denied others. The free market doesn't operate efficiently without real competition. Bill Gates dirty tricks have kept the free market from working correctly in the software industry, harming us all. Without him, the world would probably be a better place, and more wealth would have been generated overall. Just because he gave a good percentage of his wealth away does not mean that he didn't screw over the world in accumulating it in the first place.
I'm not a materially oriented person. Bill Gates wealth only interests me in the abstract sense, in that I think I could probably do a better job than he of using it to make the world a better place. But go ahead and worship the man if you like, and impugn the motives of someone you don't even know, if that's what gets you off.
It's not bitterness. It's a desire to live in a just world. There are plenty of people out there who have done something really positive with their lives. I just don't like to see Bill Gates confused for one. I also don't like the illogical line of reasoning that ignores opportunity cost. I'm more upset at the system that created Bill Gates than I am at Bill Gates himself. Sycophantic hero worship is part of that system.