Hey, DM, can my time-traveling iron golem be running Linux?
Do people not understand that traditional RPGs have an open format which allows you to do anything you can think of? Are people so stuck in their box that if it's not in the rulebook/list of buttons/daily powers that the action is impossible? This is the reason I play D&D in an age of ubiquitous computing and limitless processing. No amount of rules can cover the breadth of a human's imagination.
Dwarf Fortress did it first with diabolical machinations dreamt up by fell craftsdwarves whose infernal machines are powered by the blood of kittens. No, literally, THE BLOOD OF KITTENS. I've seen perpetual motion water wheels with blood as the medium and catsplosions are a common method of pest control. The founts of blood splattering into the throne room where the dark emperor sits and laughs are merely a side benefit. Using pressure plates to trigger floodgates leads to all sorts of possibilites. Dark horrible possibilities.
Also, your own link can be used for my citation. It states that 34% of Tea Partiers are white evangelical. The US average is 26% evangelical (which I believe includes all those non-white churches, shrug). Notice the trend there. So, you know, thanks for helping me out there.
Yep, you're a racist.
You're also right about a few things. Yes, on average, the American is more educated, smarter, fitter, more social, and overall better than your average Arab. First world vs. third world. That's one of those hard truths that a lot of bleeding hearts just kind of skim over. Give them a generation or two in a first world nation and they'll be just like us, but their average is simply worse than ours. It really does suck being poor. But yeah, you're totally racist about it. You go beyond noticing the difference and you let it influence your thoughts and views of their entire population. You are applying a statistic about a group to everyone in that group.
I *AM* better
You're an individual. We're talking about populations and averages. Ne'er the two shall mix.
so-called 'Arab Spring'
Angry Arab Jamboree
The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control
I have little sympathy for anybody here
people dumb enough to wait until they're starving... probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
Tea Party has nothing whatsoever to do with any religious fundamentalism
Correct, except for all the religious fundamentalists in the Tea Party and the overall trend that Tea Partiers are religious fundamentalists.
You know, that same sort of trend which makes college professors, an occupation which has nothing to do whatsoever with liberal ideologies, look like they're liberal.
The project will need to process text and formulas meant for human eyes, extract the math problems and convert them into a form meant for computers
Are they going to have it hold a pencil and flip through the pages of the exam as well?
Robotics wise, this is kinda cute, but not that interesting.
AI wise, yeah, this is pretty interesting, but involves no robots.
Maybe this is all a translation issue. Don't the Japanese differentiate robots from AI?
...can do well an [sic]intellignece test and an entrance exam, then I don't think they know what [sic]intellgience is - the robot makers or the test examiners.
I believe that's implying that intelligence is impossible to test. Which is a silly idea.
hence, the stereotype of Asians who can't think and create but can only copy and parrot facts.
In other news, racist ass-hats have a high correlation with idiots and the ignorant.
I find logic and reasoning to be the best way to make someone look like a fool.
The purpose of rhetoric, sophistry, and debate skills is to convince the majority of voters/jurors [/friends/family/slashdotters/forum-users/general populace] that propositions are right. No connection to the real world is needed.
Yeah, came here to say this. A set of hardware which is guaranteed not to have issues with Linux. The "Will it run Linux" joke has actually killed it's robustness. If all the effort that was put into Linux or open source in general were applied to a narrower set of hardware, it'd be so much better. Many eyeballs make shallow bugs and all that jazz. And I think that's a strong point for Apple, it's guaranteed to run on a handful of hardware. The masses stay in their pen, and only the true geeks wander abroad.
In short, pre-install Linux, get it popular, and support will be easier.
(Also, are we at the point where the desktop version is implied to include laptops?)
Winning a debate, on the other hand, is a lot easier. All you have to do is make the other guy look like an idiot.
Arguing with a conspiracy nuts is a waste of time. Debating them, in front of others, is beneficial.
Gee after decades of Darwinists proclaiming junk DNA to be key evidence of Darwinian evolution,
It still is. Also, the impact of non-encoding DNA has been suspected for over a decade. These papers just kind of hammer it home. Furthermore, there is STILL junk DNA. As in non-encoding, non-selected, no-purpose sections of your DNA that are remnants from long ago. It's dead code, commented out code, or simply gibberish. (There's just less of it than we previously thought)
(before really knowing what those non-coding segments of DNA were for)
There are noncoding segments that appear to be selected for which we still don't understand
I wonder what they'll say now.
We're still right. And all of this still helps us prove our case.
There are more robust theories of evolution than the Darwinian model
Well, sure. Darwin laid out the basic premise that species change over time and become separate species. That's still very much true. He got some details wrong, which later models improved upon, so I guess that Darwin's specific model is out of date. I mean, he didn't even know DNA existed. But "Darwinian", "Darwinist", and "Darwiniest" are kinda loaded terms only used by fundie creationists. I'd avoid them if I were you.
but they all suggest design to one extent or another.
Bwahahahahah! sure kiddo, if you say so.
the other theories are honest and don't assert a naturalistic origin for things like DNA.
I'm actually intrigued by this. What would be the origin of DNA be other than nature? Anything that isn't man-made is natural. Kinda by definition.
Did you know there are about seventy trillion cells in a human body -- and each cell seemingly knows which cell it is?
Yes. Although it's not like they're individually addressable. It's more like every cell knows it's role.
And the body and brain _build_ _themselves_?
Yes.
And when you are wounded, the body _heals itself_?
Yep.
All this from a data set of only a few billion base pairs?
Yes, that's true too. And it's mostly crufty code. (There's also a separate code base for mitochondria)
It is implausible, but apparently not impossible, that DNA/RNA is all there is to ontogeny (growth of the organism).
Oh it's almost certainly true that more than DNA/RNA growing things. That's been known for quite a while. There is genetic information that resides outside of the genetic code. Things like it's structure or those bits that exist in the middle when it's all curled up, those are important even though they're not a base pair.
Each neuron, and there are 100 billion, has on average 1000 interconnections with other neurons -- each one perhaps highly designed, unique and specific.
Neat. (haha, "designed" I see what you did there.) But that's getting off topic, the brain and the structure of how everything is interconnected is developed throughout our lifetime and not entirely dictated by DNA. The DNA describes the system that goes on to build other systems.
The idea of no-god is only slightly more absurd than the god-idea.
Now where the hell did this come from? Are you seriously telling me that because something looks complicated to you that it must mean there's a god? (hmmm, I guess that explains why the smart cookies are atheists.)
Well that's adorable but we're not talking about consciousness. I guess it's somewhat nearby the topic at hand, that being understanding how DNA works, because our DNA is pretty important to constructing the brain which is where consciousness resides. But far enough removed that it's still off topic.
But anyway, all sorts of things are "beyond the capabilities of mere mortal minds". Which is why we specialize into narrow fields, approximate, and generally dink around till we get something useful. Even simple things. Yeast for example. All sorts of seriously crazy magical (as in I don't understand it) stuff goes on with yeast. How it's membranes transfer resources in and out of it's cell, and what all it outputs, and how that affects the structure of it's surrounding is all really heady stuff. But even if I'm ignorant of the molecular biology going on, I can still bake bread.
Point is, we do understand how the genome works, enough to be useful, but not completely. We may never fully understand it, but we'll certainly know more than we do now. And it looks like it will happen soon.
Furthermore a long time ago some hackers got in and mucked about committing changes the the trunk. They didn't seem to break anything vital so it was just left alone and we hope it doesn't bite us in the ass before we retire.
Oh yeah, btw, we use a distributed revision control with about 7 Billion branches and no one true trunk (although a lot of people claim otherwise). There's a lot of wanton merging (giggity) and branching, and it seems like every time that happens there's a chance that the revision control just fucks something up and makes a mess of it all.
It's time you wised up (it's RIGHT THERE). Junk DNA is non-encoding. Meaning it doesn't get used to make proteins. This was thought to be the entire purpose of DNA, so junk DNA was like commented out code or dead code. But we learned that this genes have other uses. Like some DNA affects the trans-coding of nearby genes. And it appears some non-encoding DNA is still selected for, so it probably has some unknown function.
But nature most certainly deals in junk. And there is DNA in you right now that's non-encoding, non-functional, and not selected for. IE, it's junk. It just happens to be the random uninitialized value or a previous mismatch of old code that was cut long ago. Deal with it.
Well, sure, there's that study out there that says happiness caps out $75,000/year. But since, in America alone, about 80% of the populace makes less than that $75K it looks like improving the income of people makes them happier. And education is the best way to do that. Duh. Seriously, take your bitter broken heart and try to get it fixed. Or just ditch her and be happy.
Ok, let me step back and point out that this study was about happiness, not depression. They are not testing for depression, nor are they claiming that women without this gene are depressed. Merely, "less happy". Happiness is relative and it is not a binary on/off thing.
...the high-expression form would seem to make one pretty much always depressed...
No. The high-expression form simply means that the happy juices get flushed quicker. The happy, it fades. It fades faster for these women. That doesn't make them depressed nor does it mean they're incapable of feeling happy, but it probably lends itself towards depression and means these women are more likely to become depressed.
Well, off the cuff, unhappy people often strive to be happy. You know, that motivational force thing. If you were content to just sit around all day in a happy haze, you wouldn't get much work done. Unless you're clinically depressed, most people who are unhappy try to fix it.
Considering they're wealthier, healthier, with more upwards social mobility, more respected, and more in charge of their life... I'd have to go with more educated. You know, just at a guess.
The VAST majority of sexually active females are *not* trying to have a baby.
Well, NOW, yeah. But for the vast majority and prior banging, on the evolutionary time scale, the purpose was baby-making.
I mean, we're talking about genetics and the evolutionary forces that push for those genes, right?
It's legacy code that's vastly out of date, but hey, it's what we've got today and we have to live with it. Eventually we'll get around to refactoring it all, cleaning up the code, and steamlining the crufty parts, but it's good to know where we're at now.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux runs on Dungeons & Dragons
Hey, DM, can my time-traveling iron golem be running Linux?
Do people not understand that traditional RPGs have an open format which allows you to do anything you can think of? Are people so stuck in their box that if it's not in the rulebook/list of buttons/daily powers that the action is impossible? This is the reason I play D&D in an age of ubiquitous computing and limitless processing. No amount of rules can cover the breadth of a human's imagination.
Dwarf Fortress did it first with diabolical machinations dreamt up by fell craftsdwarves whose infernal machines are powered by the blood of kittens. No, literally, THE BLOOD OF KITTENS. I've seen perpetual motion water wheels with blood as the medium and catsplosions are a common method of pest control. The founts of blood splattering into the throne room where the dark emperor sits and laughs are merely a side benefit. Using pressure plates to trigger floodgates leads to all sorts of possibilites. Dark horrible possibilities.
Well, here you go.
44% of Tea Partiers reported to be "born again Christians" as opposed to the 33% of non-Tea Partiers.
Also, your own link can be used for my citation. It states that 34% of Tea Partiers are white evangelical. The US average is 26% evangelical (which I believe includes all those non-white churches, shrug). Notice the trend there. So, you know, thanks for helping me out there.
You're also right about a few things. Yes, on average, the American is more educated, smarter, fitter, more social, and overall better than your average Arab. First world vs. third world. That's one of those hard truths that a lot of bleeding hearts just kind of skim over. Give them a generation or two in a first world nation and they'll be just like us, but their average is simply worse than ours. It really does suck being poor.
But yeah, you're totally racist about it. You go beyond noticing the difference and you let it influence your thoughts and views of their entire population. You are applying a statistic about a group to everyone in that group.
I *AM* better
You're an individual. We're talking about populations and averages. Ne'er the two shall mix.
so-called 'Arab Spring'
Angry Arab Jamboree
The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control
I have little sympathy for anybody here
people dumb enough to wait until they're starving... probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
All this really makes you come off as a racist.
Tea Party has nothing whatsoever to do with any religious fundamentalism
Correct, except for all the religious fundamentalists in the Tea Party and the overall trend that Tea Partiers are religious fundamentalists.
You know, that same sort of trend which makes college professors, an occupation which has nothing to do whatsoever with liberal ideologies, look like they're liberal.
So, like most who claim to be conservatives, but are actually the furthest thing from it
Sooo... the majority of the republican leadership for the last 30 years?
The project will need to process text and formulas meant for human eyes, extract the math problems and convert them into a form meant for computers
Are they going to have it hold a pencil and flip through the pages of the exam as well?
Robotics wise, this is kinda cute, but not that interesting.
AI wise, yeah, this is pretty interesting, but involves no robots.
Maybe this is all a translation issue. Don't the Japanese differentiate robots from AI?
Anyway, if these "AI" (more like an expert system than artificial intelligence) robots...
Set, met subset.
...can do well an [sic]intellignece test and an entrance exam, then I don't think they know what [sic]intellgience is - the robot makers or the test examiners.
I believe that's implying that intelligence is impossible to test. Which is a silly idea.
hence, the stereotype of Asians who can't think and create but can only copy and parrot facts.
In other news, racist ass-hats have a high correlation with idiots and the ignorant.
1974 and/or 1987. And now the term has been tainted like cold fusion.
The purpose of rhetoric, sophistry, and debate skills is to convince the majority of voters/jurors [/friends/family/slashdotters/forum-users/general populace] that propositions are right. No connection to the real world is needed.
But it certainly helps. (Except for sophistry).
Yeah, came here to say this. A set of hardware which is guaranteed not to have issues with Linux. The "Will it run Linux" joke has actually killed it's robustness. If all the effort that was put into Linux or open source in general were applied to a narrower set of hardware, it'd be so much better. Many eyeballs make shallow bugs and all that jazz. And I think that's a strong point for Apple, it's guaranteed to run on a handful of hardware. The masses stay in their pen, and only the true geeks wander abroad.
In short, pre-install Linux, get it popular, and support will be easier.
(Also, are we at the point where the desktop version is implied to include laptops?)
Winning a debate, on the other hand, is a lot easier. All you have to do is make the other guy look like an idiot.
Arguing with a conspiracy nuts is a waste of time. Debating them, in front of others, is beneficial.
Gee after decades of Darwinists proclaiming junk DNA to be key evidence of Darwinian evolution,
It still is. Also, the impact of non-encoding DNA has been suspected for over a decade. These papers just kind of hammer it home. Furthermore, there is STILL junk DNA. As in non-encoding, non-selected, no-purpose sections of your DNA that are remnants from long ago. It's dead code, commented out code, or simply gibberish. (There's just less of it than we previously thought)
(before really knowing what those non-coding segments of DNA were for)
There are noncoding segments that appear to be selected for which we still don't understand
I wonder what they'll say now.
We're still right. And all of this still helps us prove our case.
There are more robust theories of evolution than the Darwinian model
Well, sure. Darwin laid out the basic premise that species change over time and become separate species. That's still very much true. He got some details wrong, which later models improved upon, so I guess that Darwin's specific model is out of date. I mean, he didn't even know DNA existed. But "Darwinian", "Darwinist", and "Darwiniest" are kinda loaded terms only used by fundie creationists. I'd avoid them if I were you.
but they all suggest design to one extent or another.
Bwahahahahah! sure kiddo, if you say so.
the other theories are honest and don't assert a naturalistic origin for things like DNA.
I'm actually intrigued by this. What would be the origin of DNA be other than nature? Anything that isn't man-made is natural. Kinda by definition.
This thing with the religious people rallying against the concept of junk DNA seems odd to me. Could someone explain why this is an issue to them?
Did you know there are about seventy trillion cells in a human body -- and each cell seemingly knows which cell it is?
Yes. Although it's not like they're individually addressable. It's more like every cell knows it's role.
And the body and brain _build_ _themselves_?
Yes.
And when you are wounded, the body _heals itself_?
Yep.
All this from a data set of only a few billion base pairs?
Yes, that's true too. And it's mostly crufty code. (There's also a separate code base for mitochondria)
It is implausible, but apparently not impossible, that DNA/RNA is all there is to ontogeny (growth of the organism).
Oh it's almost certainly true that more than DNA/RNA growing things. That's been known for quite a while. There is genetic information that resides outside of the genetic code. Things like it's structure or those bits that exist in the middle when it's all curled up, those are important even though they're not a base pair.
Each neuron, and there are 100 billion, has on average 1000 interconnections with other neurons -- each one perhaps highly designed, unique and specific.
Neat. (haha, "designed" I see what you did there.) But that's getting off topic, the brain and the structure of how everything is interconnected is developed throughout our lifetime and not entirely dictated by DNA. The DNA describes the system that goes on to build other systems.
The idea of no-god is only slightly more absurd than the god-idea.
Now where the hell did this come from? Are you seriously telling me that because something looks complicated to you that it must mean there's a god?
(hmmm, I guess that explains why the smart cookies are atheists.)
Well that's adorable but we're not talking about consciousness. I guess it's somewhat nearby the topic at hand, that being understanding how DNA works, because our DNA is pretty important to constructing the brain which is where consciousness resides. But far enough removed that it's still off topic.
But anyway, all sorts of things are "beyond the capabilities of mere mortal minds". Which is why we specialize into narrow fields, approximate, and generally dink around till we get something useful. Even simple things. Yeast for example. All sorts of seriously crazy magical (as in I don't understand it) stuff goes on with yeast. How it's membranes transfer resources in and out of it's cell, and what all it outputs, and how that affects the structure of it's surrounding is all really heady stuff. But even if I'm ignorant of the molecular biology going on, I can still bake bread.
Point is, we do understand how the genome works, enough to be useful, but not completely. We may never fully understand it, but we'll certainly know more than we do now. And it looks like it will happen soon.
Furthermore a long time ago some hackers got in and mucked about committing changes the the trunk. They didn't seem to break anything vital so it was just left alone and we hope it doesn't bite us in the ass before we retire.
Oh yeah, btw, we use a distributed revision control with about 7 Billion branches and no one true trunk (although a lot of people claim otherwise). There's a lot of wanton merging (giggity) and branching, and it seems like every time that happens there's a chance that the revision control just fucks something up and makes a mess of it all.
It's time you wised up (it's RIGHT THERE). Junk DNA is non-encoding. Meaning it doesn't get used to make proteins. This was thought to be the entire purpose of DNA, so junk DNA was like commented out code or dead code. But we learned that this genes have other uses. Like some DNA affects the trans-coding of nearby genes. And it appears some non-encoding DNA is still selected for, so it probably has some unknown function.
But nature most certainly deals in junk. And there is DNA in you right now that's non-encoding, non-functional, and not selected for. IE, it's junk. It just happens to be the random uninitialized value or a previous mismatch of old code that was cut long ago. Deal with it.
some people will react with fear, suspicion or derision
What about when that's one of the bosses?
Well, sure, there's that study out there that says happiness caps out $75,000/year. But since, in America alone, about 80% of the populace makes less than that $75K it looks like improving the income of people makes them happier. And education is the best way to do that. Duh.
Seriously, take your bitter broken heart and try to get it fixed. Or just ditch her and be happy.
I see what you did there.
...the high-expression form would seem to make one pretty much always depressed...
No. The high-expression form simply means that the happy juices get flushed quicker. The happy, it fades. It fades faster for these women. That doesn't make them depressed nor does it mean they're incapable of feeling happy, but it probably lends itself towards depression and means these women are more likely to become depressed.
Well, off the cuff, unhappy people often strive to be happy. You know, that motivational force thing. If you were content to just sit around all day in a happy haze, you wouldn't get much work done. Unless you're clinically depressed, most people who are unhappy try to fix it.
Are women happier when more or less educated?
Considering they're wealthier, healthier, with more upwards social mobility, more respected, and more in charge of their life... I'd have to go with more educated. You know, just at a guess.
The VAST majority of sexually active females are *not* trying to have a baby.
Well, NOW, yeah. But for the vast majority and prior banging, on the evolutionary time scale, the purpose was baby-making.
I mean, we're talking about genetics and the evolutionary forces that push for those genes, right?
It's legacy code that's vastly out of date, but hey, it's what we've got today and we have to live with it. Eventually we'll get around to refactoring it all, cleaning up the code, and steamlining the crufty parts, but it's good to know where we're at now.