It's currently in its second season here in Sweden. But I don't have a TV, nor do I have the time to watch it when it's on the telly. Oh, and it's in regular TV-quality. The iTunes store sell the TV-show though. But not in the Swedish store. They don't sell ANY movies or TV-shows in the Swedish store.
I can buy the first two seasons on DVDs (and maybe blu-ray, not sure), but since most of the people I talk with on a daily basis are from the US, I can't really talk about the TV-shows - it's like being more than a year behind with the news. Current events aren't really all that current.
I've seen the first season on DVDs. It's a cool show. I'd like to keep up with it. I'm more than willing to pay the I think 35$ an HD quality season costs on iTunes, but aparently my money aren't good enough for these people (I doubt it's Apple's decision).
Browsing through the US store I see lots of shows I'd like to watch and buy. Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog being one of them, but again, that's only available in the US store. That makes no sense though, as I can buy it on Amazon, and it's not like that show will ever be syndicated - what TV-network would buy a 3 episode show with a total runtime of 45 minutes?
Hell, I'm willing to pay two dollars to watch an episode of something, just to see if it's any good.
Essentially my dilemma is as follows: I can break the law by making a fraudulent claim that I'm in the US and buy the stuff I want. I'm sure this is illegal in other ways than the fraud bit. I can break the law by downloading the shows I want to watch and sample new stuff I can buy a TV, wait a few years for my local networks to hopefully pick up shows that I'll find interesting and then watch it.
I don't really want a TV - partly because I am then forced to pay a yearly tax on it, partly because I don't really watch it. I had a 42" plasma from janurary 2008 to august 2008, and I think I watched a combined total of 4 hours of TV on it, the rest was gaming and watching movies.
I don't really want to break the law. I don't mind paying to support the production costs of the stuff I like, I don't mind paying to support a distribution system I like. But aparently I'm not the kind of person, "they" want to cater to.
"They" could learn a LOT from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I can watch their shows within a day of them being aired with no restrictions. They used to have embedded ads in their commercial breaks (not a problem), but they stopped that a while back, probably because the ads were aimed at a US audience. The Daily Show is even syndicated in Denmark - the broadcaster manages to put subtitles on it and show it with a two day delay, so it's not like there isn't a foreign market for it either.
My point is this: "They" have no aparent interest in selling their stuff to me. My money obviously isn't good enough for them. If that's the case, why the fuck do they care if I download their stuff? It's not like it's a lost sale - they obviously do not want to sell it to me!
When child pornography is outlawed, only outlaws will use/have child pornography. When murder is outlawed, only outlaws will murder. When robbery is outlawed, only outlaws will rob people. When rape is outlawed, only outlaws will have rape. When THC is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Are you sure? I was under the impression that this was the point of Microsoft Photosynth.
And considering how effective that is at pulling in pictures you didn't expect it would, I wouldn't be overly surprised if it was able to move to the inside of your house as well.
I'm not sure they are. They aren't right, but I'm not sure they're wrong. To be wrong you have to be able to show that it's incorrect. If what they're saying isn't falsifiable (i.e. proving the non-existance of God) they aren't wrong either.
If you want to do proper science, it has to be falsifiable - i.e. it has to be possible for it to be wrong. If your work cannot be wrong it's not science
Look at pretty much every US show involving 15-18 year old kids. The kids are played by adults. As such the adults must nescesarily look to be under 18.
I.e. Megan Fox from Transformers. How is this not a sexual image? Granted, she's not naked, so this IS a 'safe for work' image.
Personally I run Windows. At home and at work. I've used a Mac maybe a grand total of 48 hours in my life. That should tell you where I'm at with bias.
I also do tech support for printers. I suspect maybe half a percent of our calls the user is running OS X. Solving issues there is very simple (again I've not really used a Mac): *Unplug the printer *Go to system, printers, control/right click, reset printer system *Reconnect the printer (or add it if it's a network printer) This works in 95% of all cases
Windows: *Unplug the printer *Empty the printer queue *Delete the printer *Disable firewall programs (even for USB printers, and don't ask my why that works) *Reconnect the printer (or add it if it's a network printer) This works in 50% of all cases
Fewer steps, huge difference in effectiveness.
If it doesn't work... Mac: *Unplug printer *Reset print system again *Create a new user account *Run a file system fix *Add printer
Windows: *Unplug printer *Delete printer *Get customer to run a batch file from a special folder on the CD ***This is an issue in an of itself, as quite a lot of customers think you're telling them to open either the C or D drive ("well, which one" is a classic. DVD doesn't help: "I don't have a V drive") *Hand holding them through this uninstall ("Yes, now you click next") *Run MSconfig to disable all startup items and non-microsoft services and reboot *Doublecheck that their AV and firewall is disabled (Norton's older programs are notorious about running anyway) *(Realise that the customer is using a wireless network and a special service/startup item is used to activate their wireless NIC - applies only to network printers) *Add the printer again *Reboot to normal mode again
Then of course there are issues with routers that don't function well with IPv6 (or Vista's implementation of it). While it's cool that Windows finally has an IPv6 stack for those that need it, it's not cool that it'll break the network. I only know this because of the issues we have with it. Disabling the IPv6 stack on Vista computers on the network probably solves about half of the issues we cannot solve otherwise. Again, nothing I've seen happen on Mac OS X, but we don't have nearly as big a pool of cases to pick from.
Sure, we don't get as many calls about OS X as we do Windows. But the market share for Mac is much higher than the number of issues we have compared to Windows. Either Windows has dumber users, or Windows does something much worse than the Mac does with regards to printers. My guess is mostly the latter.
Even if we extend my scenario to yours (Ed's managed to build the entire thing, on his own, in 7 days [aside, Ed seems to work on a slightly slower schedule than God]), how are you supposed to get Ed to explain this to you, when he's obviously too occupied in his work to answer any questions? After all, if he's building it in 7 days (I think a low estimate on the channel tunnel was about a decade, just to put things into perspective)?
No matter how you cut it, if Ed doesn't document what he's doing (too busy), I'd like to know how you're supposed to have managed to find these engineers capable of understanding Ed's design - in those seven days.
My point still stands - our field cannot be considered science nor engineering, if what we're doing isn't repeatable nor documented. It is, at best, akin to just whipping together some timber to make an outhouse.
I'd place myself as slightly behind the bell curve (out of practice) at the moment (slightly ahead when up to speed). I'm quite capable of recognizing brilliant code. I'm also able to recognize code that makes absolutely no sense to me. At times those two are the same thing (meaning that the code is doing things way above my comprehension, not that the code doesn't work).
The thing is - if that brilliant code turns out to have a subtle flaw or needs to be redesigned, how can you be certain that the originator is still with the company or the project? Sure, that brilliant code may have saved your company millions, but when the flaw allows people to siphon money directly from your bank account, how would you rather go about fixing it? Stepping through convoluted code or reading the documentation? Sure, "my code just works" is a nice reponse. I'm also certain that Einstein was a lot smarter than most of the Josh' out there, and if he'd just said "E=MC^2 - trust me" people would have told him to fuck off and come back when he'd shown the math that proved it.
I've worked with people quite a few rungs above me. All of them are capable of writing documentation that I can understand. Documentation that cuts the time spent on my comprehension of how their code works by 90+%.
Their job isn't just whipping out code. It's also showing that it works. How it works. The upside is I don't ask them nearly as many "stupid" questions, because while their code still in Klingon - but it comes with subtitles. It also means that once I've looked through this Klingon enough times, it'll start making sense. I might actually learn how to write some stuff in Klingon by reading what they've written (with subtitles). But in the software industry that's just a waste of time - who needs people actually learning stuff at work?
Imagine the following scenario: Ed is a brilliant engineer and architect. He comes up with a way for us to build a trans atlantic maglev train route that runs under water in essentially vacuum tubes. He's even figured out how to make it cheap enough that trip from London to New York city will cost you 200$ and will take about two hours. His brilliance even allows the project to scale, so that if we swing the tubes upwards and really punch it, we can send stuff into orbit for a price of 1000$/ton.
Now, instead of writing up the designs, specs for the materials, how to build the materials and so on, Ed's just going to tell the people involved how to do it by phone. Because of Ed's absurd brilliance and genius, this actually works for a full week, and his super human skills in JIT means we're now 12 miles into this tunnel.
The 8th day however, Ed's rather unfortunate. Seems he decided to drop by the post office the same day that Dan the mail man went postal and killed everyone in the office. Including Ed.
Since noone else knows how any of this stuff is supposed to work, we now have to give up on the tunnel project while we siphon through the few things Ed actually left behind.
Now, in the real world Ed's demise would be somewhat of a setback, as we've now lost the lead engineer on the project. However, since Ed was a good engineer and architect, he knew he was supposed to put all these things down on paper before we started the project and put billions or trillions of dollars on the line.
Now, in the software industry, we're very fond of calling ourselves engineers and architects. Unfortunately most of us (even in companies) really don't reach that level of excellence - we don't document what we do, either because we're too lazy or because the companies don't want to spend money doing that. That's fine - just don't consider yourself or what you're doing software engineering.
I've actually had the pleasure of working for an engineering company as the only software developer/programmer. Imagine how flabbergasted I was when my boss asked me for documentation as well as actual schematics for the software I was making. Schematics as in fl
Tom's Hardware have been swooning over SSDs, partly Intel's SLC editions, partly IoFusion's PCI express monster, showing several times that one of Intel's SSDs can easily keep up with a pair of harddrives in RAID0 - and yet when they go all out on a system like this, they don't even choose one as the system drive?
If you're a great player and win against a crappy player, you'll gain very little and he'll lose very little, as that is the expected outcome. If you lose you lose quite a bit and he'll gain quite a bit as this is unexpected. A bit like a random 8th grader KO'ing Mike Tyson in the ring.
If you're playing against people on your own rung (i.e. 1615 vs 1630), the expectation is that the higher rated player will win a few more games. As such he might win 10 points and lose 12, whereas the lower rated player will win 12 and lose 10 points.
It's not a system that I designed. It's been designed by a professor of physics (I suspect his math and statistics skills are a lot better than either of us) and is currently used by not only the chess society, but Major League Baseball, American college football and basketball, The North American National Scrabble Association, The European Go Federation, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, Yahoo Games and a lot of other places.
Now, obviously, the people behind these groups had completely forgotten about griefers. I'm sure if you write them and explains this to them, they'll bow their heads in shame and quickly remove this scoring system.
I mean - you're DrikyProo - you have a Slashdot ID that's below 160k. Obviously you're geek creed and math mojo is better than theirs.
Making it 'fair and balanced' can be fun (handicapping in golf or go), but in most cases it just makes a video game crappy.
Back in the days of Rainbow Six (yes, and now you can get off my lawn) I created an online ranking system based off of chess' scoring system. This worked great for the players and teams, as you didn't really have to find people on your own skill level to have something to gain.
If I (a mediocre chess player) were to play the reigning world champion of chess, he'd stand to gain maybe 1 point in his ranking by winning (I'd lose 1 I think), but if I were to win, I'd gain upwards of 24 or 32 points (and he'd lose a lot of points). This scoring system makes it worthwile for the best player to avoid drawing or losing to a less skilled player.
We did get a few complaints about the scoring, because the "best" players were used to them being unable to lose their top spot without losing to #2, where as with this system, someone could overtake them simply by winning lots and lots of games against less skilled players/teams. This has the upside of enticing people to play more, and not just by cherry picking from the top 10. Any adversary is okay, as it gives you a chance to win more points.
And yes, I know what I just said opens up a lot of retorts about religious people not having/using logic/real proof to prove anything
Actually, you missed a much more obvious, and much less inflammatory reason this doesn't work: The existance of (a) God would defy logic, as our interpretation of deities tend to be able to defy the rules of physics - especially the omnipotent ones.
Since our logical way of proving the existance of something is observation and ability to reproduce it. An omnipotent god would be able to stay hidden (wouldn't need to be in our universe), and since they're omnipotent, they'd be able to do anything even if it breaks the laws of physics.
In other words, the logical answer to "how did the god do it" would be "God can do anything".
The problem with having Pluto being a regular planet not that you have nine planets, it's that you end up with a much larger number of planets as a lot of kuiper belt objects are better matches for planet status than Pluto.
Pluto doesn't look like any of the other planets in other ways, such as having a 'moon' so big that its center of mass isn't inside itself. In fact Charon is 11% of Pluto's mass, and while the Moon (Luna) looks huge, its mass is only 1% of the Earth's.
Just as interesting, Charon doesn't orbit Pluto, making it the only 'planet' with a non-orbiting satellite. Aditionally this satelitte has a mean distance that is less than 20 times Pluto's radius. To put that in perspective, that'd make the Moon orbit at 120,000 km - about a third that of its current orbit. And if we wanted to put it even more into perspective, the Moon would also have to grow significantly to something like 3 times its current size (haven't done the math). While that would be interesting from an astronomical point of view, I'm fairly certain we wouldn't enjoy the increased gravitational pull. If you think high tide is bad now, imagine what it'd be like if the ground itself moved up and down with the tides.
We use definitions, like the word planet, to make things easier. If we can use one definition to describe the planets, and then have to go "oh, and it's okay if they don't lie in the same plane as everything else, as long as they're no more than 50 AU away from the Sun, and have a huge eccentric orbit compared to every other planet", then it doesn't really fit the same definition.
In fact, just looking at orbital eccentricity it'd difficult to argue that Pluto (and Mercury) is in the same class as the other 7 planets. Mercury has a slight excuse since it's 100 times closer to the sun.
But, to jump on your main point: "declaring that what everyone had said was a planet for the last 80 years is now not one"
That's the thing about science. Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop.
What have we discovered/come to realise in the last 80 years, that we took for granted back then? How about asbestos not being good for you? Smoking not being good for you? That you could in fact go faster than the speed of sound? That DDT isn't the safest way to get rid of bugs?
How about something a bit more down to earth? Like plate tectonics. I mean, if you were to go back in time to the 1930s, when Pluto was discovered, and told people that the earth's surface was made up of large slabs of rock, floating on an inner sea of molten rock, and that these massive plates moved, shifting continents around and that the Earth of today looks nothing like the earth of 100 million years ago, you'd either be comitted to mental 'care', or just outright laughed at.
But, if you prefer sticking to your guns, defending something that we thought was correct 80 years ago, then why not do one better and defend astrology. That's even older.
The solution isn't "more cameras" as the cameras doesn't prevent crime. They might sort of help catch the people, but they're not going to stop crime.
No, the solution is to get rid of violent drunk people. Not by throwing them in jail forever. Just outlaw alcohol.
Then you'll complain about prohibition, but outlawing alcohol is only the first step. Alcohol brings out the worst in people - that's why we'll outlaw it. But to give people a chance to wind down with a nice relaxing substance, we'll legalise cannabis.
Think about it - who'd you rather get run over by? Someone who's had too much to drink or someone who's smoked too much cannabis? Hint, the guy on cannabis is likely to be sitting in the passenger seat, and if he somehow manages to find the driver's seat, he'll be likely to drive at 3 miles an hour.
Secondly - who'd you rather get into a fight with? A drunkard or someone who's high on cannabis? The former is likely to smash you over the head with a beer bottle, the latter is likely to just start laughing and pointing at the pretty rainbows.
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I like certain TV-shows. "Heroes" is one of them.
It's currently in its second season here in Sweden. But I don't have a TV, nor do I have the time to watch it when it's on the telly. Oh, and it's in regular TV-quality. The iTunes store sell the TV-show though. But not in the Swedish store. They don't sell ANY movies or TV-shows in the Swedish store.
I can buy the first two seasons on DVDs (and maybe blu-ray, not sure), but since most of the people I talk with on a daily basis are from the US, I can't really talk about the TV-shows - it's like being more than a year behind with the news. Current events aren't really all that current.
I've seen the first season on DVDs. It's a cool show. I'd like to keep up with it. I'm more than willing to pay the I think 35$ an HD quality season costs on iTunes, but aparently my money aren't good enough for these people (I doubt it's Apple's decision).
Browsing through the US store I see lots of shows I'd like to watch and buy. Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog being one of them, but again, that's only available in the US store. That makes no sense though, as I can buy it on Amazon, and it's not like that show will ever be syndicated - what TV-network would buy a 3 episode show with a total runtime of 45 minutes?
Hell, I'm willing to pay two dollars to watch an episode of something, just to see if it's any good.
Essentially my dilemma is as follows:
I can break the law by making a fraudulent claim that I'm in the US and buy the stuff I want. I'm sure this is illegal in other ways than the fraud bit.
I can break the law by downloading the shows I want to watch and sample new stuff
I can buy a TV, wait a few years for my local networks to hopefully pick up shows that I'll find interesting and then watch it.
I don't really want a TV - partly because I am then forced to pay a yearly tax on it, partly because I don't really watch it. I had a 42" plasma from janurary 2008 to august 2008, and I think I watched a combined total of 4 hours of TV on it, the rest was gaming and watching movies.
I don't really want to break the law. I don't mind paying to support the production costs of the stuff I like, I don't mind paying to support a distribution system I like. But aparently I'm not the kind of person, "they" want to cater to.
"They" could learn a LOT from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I can watch their shows within a day of them being aired with no restrictions. They used to have embedded ads in their commercial breaks (not a problem), but they stopped that a while back, probably because the ads were aimed at a US audience. The Daily Show is even syndicated in Denmark - the broadcaster manages to put subtitles on it and show it with a two day delay, so it's not like there isn't a foreign market for it either.
My point is this:
"They" have no aparent interest in selling their stuff to me. My money obviously isn't good enough for them. If that's the case, why the fuck do they care if I download their stuff? It's not like it's a lost sale - they obviously do not want to sell it to me!
That's such a silly argument.
When child pornography is outlawed, only outlaws will use/have child pornography.
When murder is outlawed, only outlaws will murder.
When robbery is outlawed, only outlaws will rob people.
When rape is outlawed, only outlaws will have rape.
When THC is outlawed, only outlaws will have fun.
Are you sure? I was under the impression that this was the point of Microsoft Photosynth.
And considering how effective that is at pulling in pictures you didn't expect it would, I wouldn't be overly surprised if it was able to move to the inside of your house as well.
I'm not sure they are. They aren't right, but I'm not sure they're wrong. To be wrong you have to be able to show that it's incorrect. If what they're saying isn't falsifiable (i.e. proving the non-existance of God) they aren't wrong either.
If you want to do proper science, it has to be falsifiable - i.e. it has to be possible for it to be wrong. If your work cannot be wrong it's not science
It gets better.
Look at pretty much every US show involving 15-18 year old kids. The kids are played by adults. As such the adults must nescesarily look to be under 18.
I.e. Megan Fox from Transformers. How is this not a sexual image? Granted, she's not naked, so this IS a 'safe for work' image.
If you have a point particle that is one planck unit in diameter and made it that much bigger (diameter), it'd be 1.6 x 10^7 meters in diameter.
The Earth is 1.2 x 10^7 meters in diameter just to give you an idea.
Volume wise I think (can't quite remember the math) it would be about 16 km in diameter.
It's the ease of use.
Personally I run Windows. At home and at work. I've used a Mac maybe a grand total of 48 hours in my life. That should tell you where I'm at with bias.
I also do tech support for printers. I suspect maybe half a percent of our calls the user is running OS X. Solving issues there is very simple (again I've not really used a Mac):
*Unplug the printer
*Go to system, printers, control/right click, reset printer system
*Reconnect the printer (or add it if it's a network printer)
This works in 95% of all cases
Windows:
*Unplug the printer
*Empty the printer queue
*Delete the printer
*Disable firewall programs (even for USB printers, and don't ask my why that works)
*Reconnect the printer (or add it if it's a network printer)
This works in 50% of all cases
Fewer steps, huge difference in effectiveness.
If it doesn't work ...
Mac:
*Unplug printer
*Reset print system again
*Create a new user account
*Run a file system fix
*Add printer
Windows:
*Unplug printer
*Delete printer
*Get customer to run a batch file from a special folder on the CD
***This is an issue in an of itself, as quite a lot of customers think you're telling them to open either the C or D drive ("well, which one" is a classic. DVD doesn't help: "I don't have a V drive")
*Hand holding them through this uninstall ("Yes, now you click next")
*Run MSconfig to disable all startup items and non-microsoft services and reboot
*Doublecheck that their AV and firewall is disabled (Norton's older programs are notorious about running anyway)
*(Realise that the customer is using a wireless network and a special service/startup item is used to activate their wireless NIC - applies only to network printers)
*Add the printer again
*Reboot to normal mode again
Then of course there are issues with routers that don't function well with IPv6 (or Vista's implementation of it). While it's cool that Windows finally has an IPv6 stack for those that need it, it's not cool that it'll break the network. I only know this because of the issues we have with it. Disabling the IPv6 stack on Vista computers on the network probably solves about half of the issues we cannot solve otherwise. Again, nothing I've seen happen on Mac OS X, but we don't have nearly as big a pool of cases to pick from.
Sure, we don't get as many calls about OS X as we do Windows. But the market share for Mac is much higher than the number of issues we have compared to Windows. Either Windows has dumber users, or Windows does something much worse than the Mac does with regards to printers. My guess is mostly the latter.
Which part of "making this content publicly available" makes you think it doesn't apply to a public noticeboard?
Even if we extend my scenario to yours (Ed's managed to build the entire thing, on his own, in 7 days [aside, Ed seems to work on a slightly slower schedule than God]), how are you supposed to get Ed to explain this to you, when he's obviously too occupied in his work to answer any questions? After all, if he's building it in 7 days (I think a low estimate on the channel tunnel was about a decade, just to put things into perspective)?
No matter how you cut it, if Ed doesn't document what he's doing (too busy), I'd like to know how you're supposed to have managed to find these engineers capable of understanding Ed's design - in those seven days.
My point still stands - our field cannot be considered science nor engineering, if what we're doing isn't repeatable nor documented. It is, at best, akin to just whipping together some timber to make an outhouse.
Pet peeve, but technically 1/1 is a fraction. I.e. killing a fraction of all mosquitoes would kill them all where $fraction = 1/1.
A small or tiny fraction - now that's different :)
Sorry - buried in math at the moment
I'd place myself as slightly behind the bell curve (out of practice) at the moment (slightly ahead when up to speed). I'm quite capable of recognizing brilliant code. I'm also able to recognize code that makes absolutely no sense to me. At times those two are the same thing (meaning that the code is doing things way above my comprehension, not that the code doesn't work).
The thing is - if that brilliant code turns out to have a subtle flaw or needs to be redesigned, how can you be certain that the originator is still with the company or the project? Sure, that brilliant code may have saved your company millions, but when the flaw allows people to siphon money directly from your bank account, how would you rather go about fixing it? Stepping through convoluted code or reading the documentation? Sure, "my code just works" is a nice reponse. I'm also certain that Einstein was a lot smarter than most of the Josh' out there, and if he'd just said "E=MC^2 - trust me" people would have told him to fuck off and come back when he'd shown the math that proved it.
I've worked with people quite a few rungs above me. All of them are capable of writing documentation that I can understand. Documentation that cuts the time spent on my comprehension of how their code works by 90+%.
Their job isn't just whipping out code. It's also showing that it works. How it works. The upside is I don't ask them nearly as many "stupid" questions, because while their code still in Klingon - but it comes with subtitles. It also means that once I've looked through this Klingon enough times, it'll start making sense. I might actually learn how to write some stuff in Klingon by reading what they've written (with subtitles). But in the software industry that's just a waste of time - who needs people actually learning stuff at work?
Imagine the following scenario:
Ed is a brilliant engineer and architect. He comes up with a way for us to build a trans atlantic maglev train route that runs under water in essentially vacuum tubes. He's even figured out how to make it cheap enough that trip from London to New York city will cost you 200$ and will take about two hours. His brilliance even allows the project to scale, so that if we swing the tubes upwards and really punch it, we can send stuff into orbit for a price of 1000$/ton.
Now, instead of writing up the designs, specs for the materials, how to build the materials and so on, Ed's just going to tell the people involved how to do it by phone. Because of Ed's absurd brilliance and genius, this actually works for a full week, and his super human skills in JIT means we're now 12 miles into this tunnel.
The 8th day however, Ed's rather unfortunate. Seems he decided to drop by the post office the same day that Dan the mail man went postal and killed everyone in the office. Including Ed.
Since noone else knows how any of this stuff is supposed to work, we now have to give up on the tunnel project while we siphon through the few things Ed actually left behind.
Now, in the real world Ed's demise would be somewhat of a setback, as we've now lost the lead engineer on the project. However, since Ed was a good engineer and architect, he knew he was supposed to put all these things down on paper before we started the project and put billions or trillions of dollars on the line.
Now, in the software industry, we're very fond of calling ourselves engineers and architects. Unfortunately most of us (even in companies) really don't reach that level of excellence - we don't document what we do, either because we're too lazy or because the companies don't want to spend money doing that. That's fine - just don't consider yourself or what you're doing software engineering.
I've actually had the pleasure of working for an engineering company as the only software developer/programmer. Imagine how flabbergasted I was when my boss asked me for documentation as well as actual schematics for the software I was making. Schematics as in fl
No, he's the guy who came up with the idea of shaking your [cencored] in front of a woman's face in porno movies.
Have you remembered to give him that special kind of "thank you" that we all know he deserves?
Well, who has time to read the summaries anyway?
Tom's Hardware have been swooning over SSDs, partly Intel's SLC editions, partly IoFusion's PCI express monster, showing several times that one of Intel's SSDs can easily keep up with a pair of harddrives in RAID0 - and yet when they go all out on a system like this, they don't even choose one as the system drive?
How very inconsistent.
How does it reward griefing?
If you're a great player and win against a crappy player, you'll gain very little and he'll lose very little, as that is the expected outcome. If you lose you lose quite a bit and he'll gain quite a bit as this is unexpected. A bit like a random 8th grader KO'ing Mike Tyson in the ring.
If you're playing against people on your own rung (i.e. 1615 vs 1630), the expectation is that the higher rated player will win a few more games. As such he might win 10 points and lose 12, whereas the lower rated player will win 12 and lose 10 points.
It's not a system that I designed. It's been designed by a professor of physics (I suspect his math and statistics skills are a lot better than either of us) and is currently used by not only the chess society, but Major League Baseball, American college football and basketball, The North American National Scrabble Association, The European Go Federation, Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, Yahoo Games and a lot of other places.
Now, obviously, the people behind these groups had completely forgotten about griefers. I'm sure if you write them and explains this to them, they'll bow their heads in shame and quickly remove this scoring system.
I mean - you're DrikyProo - you have a Slashdot ID that's below 160k. Obviously you're geek creed and math mojo is better than theirs.
Making it 'fair and balanced' can be fun (handicapping in golf or go), but in most cases it just makes a video game crappy.
Back in the days of Rainbow Six (yes, and now you can get off my lawn) I created an online ranking system based off of chess' scoring system. This worked great for the players and teams, as you didn't really have to find people on your own skill level to have something to gain.
If I (a mediocre chess player) were to play the reigning world champion of chess, he'd stand to gain maybe 1 point in his ranking by winning (I'd lose 1 I think), but if I were to win, I'd gain upwards of 24 or 32 points (and he'd lose a lot of points). This scoring system makes it worthwile for the best player to avoid drawing or losing to a less skilled player.
We did get a few complaints about the scoring, because the "best" players were used to them being unable to lose their top spot without losing to #2, where as with this system, someone could overtake them simply by winning lots and lots of games against less skilled players/teams. This has the upside of enticing people to play more, and not just by cherry picking from the top 10. Any adversary is okay, as it gives you a chance to win more points.
See more on the Wiki page
Hmm ...
Taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch, balance, temperature, spatial.
I suspect I'm leaving several more out, but which ones am I supposed to ditch?
Never underestimate the average speed of a scooter for short trips?
Never overestimate the average speed of a motorcycle for short trips?
Why not? How else will you know if it blends?
Actually, you missed a much more obvious, and much less inflammatory reason this doesn't work: The existance of (a) God would defy logic, as our interpretation of deities tend to be able to defy the rules of physics - especially the omnipotent ones.
Since our logical way of proving the existance of something is observation and ability to reproduce it. An omnipotent god would be able to stay hidden (wouldn't need to be in our universe), and since they're omnipotent, they'd be able to do anything even if it breaks the laws of physics.
In other words, the logical answer to "how did the god do it" would be "God can do anything".
The problem with having Pluto being a regular planet not that you have nine planets, it's that you end up with a much larger number of planets as a lot of kuiper belt objects are better matches for planet status than Pluto.
Pluto doesn't look like any of the other planets in other ways, such as having a 'moon' so big that its center of mass isn't inside itself. In fact Charon is 11% of Pluto's mass, and while the Moon (Luna) looks huge, its mass is only 1% of the Earth's.
Just as interesting, Charon doesn't orbit Pluto, making it the only 'planet' with a non-orbiting satellite. Aditionally this satelitte has a mean distance that is less than 20 times Pluto's radius. To put that in perspective, that'd make the Moon orbit at 120,000 km - about a third that of its current orbit. And if we wanted to put it even more into perspective, the Moon would also have to grow significantly to something like 3 times its current size (haven't done the math). While that would be interesting from an astronomical point of view, I'm fairly certain we wouldn't enjoy the increased gravitational pull. If you think high tide is bad now, imagine what it'd be like if the ground itself moved up and down with the tides.
We use definitions, like the word planet, to make things easier. If we can use one definition to describe the planets, and then have to go "oh, and it's okay if they don't lie in the same plane as everything else, as long as they're no more than 50 AU away from the Sun, and have a huge eccentric orbit compared to every other planet", then it doesn't really fit the same definition.
In fact, just looking at orbital eccentricity it'd difficult to argue that Pluto (and Mercury) is in the same class as the other 7 planets. Mercury has a slight excuse since it's 100 times closer to the sun.
But, to jump on your main point:
"declaring that what everyone had said was a planet for the last 80 years is now not one"
That's the thing about science. Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop.
What have we discovered/come to realise in the last 80 years, that we took for granted back then? How about asbestos not being good for you? Smoking not being good for you? That you could in fact go faster than the speed of sound? That DDT isn't the safest way to get rid of bugs?
How about something a bit more down to earth? Like plate tectonics. I mean, if you were to go back in time to the 1930s, when Pluto was discovered, and told people that the earth's surface was made up of large slabs of rock, floating on an inner sea of molten rock, and that these massive plates moved, shifting continents around and that the Earth of today looks nothing like the earth of 100 million years ago, you'd either be comitted to mental 'care', or just outright laughed at.
But, if you prefer sticking to your guns, defending something that we thought was correct 80 years ago, then why not do one better and defend astrology. That's even older.
5th, actually
Known satelittes and quasi-satellites wrt Earth
Moon
Cruithne (Earth's first known quasi-satellites)
2003 YN107
(164207) 2004 GU9
1 km/s is EXACTLY 3,600 km/h. Not roughly 30,000 km/h as you suggest.
The solution isn't "more cameras" as the cameras doesn't prevent crime. They might sort of help catch the people, but they're not going to stop crime.
No, the solution is to get rid of violent drunk people. Not by throwing them in jail forever. Just outlaw alcohol.
Then you'll complain about prohibition, but outlawing alcohol is only the first step. Alcohol brings out the worst in people - that's why we'll outlaw it. But to give people a chance to wind down with a nice relaxing substance, we'll legalise cannabis.
Think about it - who'd you rather get run over by? Someone who's had too much to drink or someone who's smoked too much cannabis? Hint, the guy on cannabis is likely to be sitting in the passenger seat, and if he somehow manages to find the driver's seat, he'll be likely to drive at 3 miles an hour.
Secondly - who'd you rather get into a fight with? A drunkard or someone who's high on cannabis? The former is likely to smash you over the head with a beer bottle, the latter is likely to just start laughing and pointing at the pretty rainbows.