My feeling is that part of the problem lies with the fact that almost from the beginning you have access to the whole map. There is no "new area" to uncover (after the gates are open).
Also, the authomatic leveling of the monsters with the leveling of the player means there are no zones packed with monsters "beyond your level" and you cannot set yourself as an objective being high level enough to get in there.
Also there is not enough variety in weapons and armor - there comes a point when your rewards for defeating a bucketload of monsters is weapons and pieces of armor of the same types you've been getting for the last two weeks (real time).
I other words the quality of the rewards (be it new areas to explore, new weapons or new armor) for achieving something, stops increasing too early in the game.
Which leaves the missions (and especially the main ones) as the only way to actually feel challenged and achieve something. This pretty much removes the fun of going out and exploring outside the missions.
A MOSFET is a type of transistor which is very common in integrated circuits because it's very easy to make using the most common IC fabrication techniques (which basically boil down to making holes in a silicon base, filling those holes with stuff and depositing lines of other stuff on top of it).
One of the physical features of a MOSFET is that there are places where silicon dopped to be of the type P (ie, a substance was added to it so that it is missing electrons in it's crystaline structure by comparisson with pure silicon) is in direct contact with silicon dopped to be of type N (ie, a substance was added to it so that it has extra electrons in it's crystaline structure by comparisson with pure silicon).
Now, as many of us know, solids are just very slow liquids... stuff embedded in a solid tends to move around, though slowly. The higher the temperature, the faster the moving.
In the specific case of a MOSFET, we have junctions between the silicon dopped with a specific material to make it type-N (ie more electrons) and silicon dopped with a different material to make it type-P (ie fewer electrons). In this situation, some of the dopping atoms in the type-N silicon will move to the type-P side and vice versa, thus making the junction less "sharp" (in terms of the difference between both sides).
Some very complicated formulas (which i forgot all about) can be used to show that the "sharper" the junction, the more efficient it is.
This is what the GGP is going about.
Consider that maybe there are enough people in/. with an EE degree or a deep interest in electronics to actually understand the issue at hand, and maybe, just maybe, they're extra attracted to articles about new kinds of transistors !!???
If your company's goal is to create a solid, stable, efficient, maintainable, scalable infrastructure which improves the business processes of the company and/or satisfies the needs of the customers (and thus helps the company make more money)...
A technically perfect system which does not help (either directly or indirectly) a company make more money is totally worthless from the point of view of a company (even if it's very interesting from a technical point of view).
Good technical skills together with some business skills are needed to actually do good stuff which gets used in the real world - the business skills being used to actually figure out what is needed instead of what would be cool to do
The pinacle of technical achievement IMHO is making a technical perfect system which people use and are happy about it.
I do agree that the more Machiavelian business skills are not required, though...;)
HUH????? Truth is a fundamental concept in science and math. For example all the algebraic manipulation you ever do with equations and inequalities rests on the fact that you've proven a fundamental concept is true and can be applied to transform that expression such that the expression still holds true.
There is subjectivity in the world of science. Emotions do come into play. The latest theories are too often presented as fact. These are all human failings and failings of the scientific institutions we create. However trying to separate "fact" and "truth" is a strange notion. In the end a "fact" must be proven to be true. I suspect that you have no understanding of either concept.
I believe the parent post was refering to the pursuit of the Greater Truths (say, the Meaning of Life) which is a phylosophical and religious quest, not a scientific one.
Greater Truths can be pretty much orthogonal to scientific truths (small t purposelly used). For example, one can believe that the world we live in is but a mere shadow of the real world (Socrates) or that all that we percieve is false and we are all connected to special machines which feed us all those sensations (The Matrix).
Such Greater Truths do not in any way invalidate the truths which sience uncovers (knowing how this world works does not suddenly becomes invalid if the world turns out to be a shadow of a greater world).
This is why the pursuit of science is not incompatible with religion.
The problem lies with those which both are believers in a religion and lack the wisdom and/or inteligence to really understand it's grand principles (for example, the existence of a Creator which watches over us) and instead concentrate on miniscule details of interpretation of sacred texts which were written milenia ago and have been highly revised ever since (was the world really created in 6 days - plus one for resting - or is that a metaphor?)
<RANT> Specifically in this area of creationist vs evolution, i suspect all the true believers with more than half a brain have long ago moved on because "the tools which the Almighty used to bring about the world as it is now are not really that important" and all we're left with are the self-agrandazing asses (politicians), the populists (politicians) and the ignorant masses. </RANT>
The issues with the production and distribution of drugs have to do with it being illegal.
If large scale production/distribution of drugs is illegal, then only criminals will do it. For those people, the quality of the product is of little concern beyond it having a significant amount of the active substance. Those same people, when faced with possibility of ending up in jail, will hardly think twice if comitting a "minor" crime will minimize the chance of them being caught for the bigger crime.
In technical terms, hashish, for example, is a weed and it will easilly grow anywhere - producing it in large quantities using the same means as use today to raise wheat would hardly be a problem... except if that it's forbidden.
I live in Holland, and i can tell you i see a lot less poverty and drug-related drudgery around here than i did in most other cities i've visited (or lived in).
Still, soft drugs are not actually legal around here - instead they are tolerated (meaning the law is not enforced). In practice, the current conservative-moralistic government (expected to fall on the next elections) has taken to enforce the law on large scale production of hashish and on some coffeeshops (a bit like bars but you can buy and smoke pot in there - very common in the turistic area of Amsterdam) close to the Belgian border, but not in other areas... in other words, an attempt at prohibition but without being overt about it.
Yeah, I prefer the old, "amoralistic" laws myself, like prohibition of theft, murder, that kind of thing.
Clue: most laws are "moralistic."
Most laws are designed to make it possible for people to live together in the most productive way possible (thus NOT an anarchy and NOT the law of the strongest). These laws thus concern themselfs with avoiding that one person knowingly or purposelly causes harm to another person (such as murder, theft, etc), secure trading (contracts, sales laws, etc) and avoiding "tragedy of the commons" situations with shared resources (environmental laws, zoneing laws, etc)
Any laws dictating what a person cannot do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own house and without causing any harm to others is a moralistic law in that it tries to forcifully deny to others the (lawfull) possibility of acting in certain ways, even though those actions would have no negative impact for third parties.
Soft drugs prohibition is thus a moralistic law since smoking pot in the privacy of one's home causes no harm to others, while for example a law prohibiting driving while under the influence of drugs would NOT be a moralistic law since driving under influence strongly increases the chances of an accident which could harm to others.
People are spending (in average) less and time watching television and more and more time surfing the Net
Amateur produced content distributed via the Internet is proving itself unexpectedly popular *cough*YouTube*cough*
Basically people are moving away from the traditional distribution channels for media into newer channels and in the process discovering there's more to motion pictures entertainment than the fare produced by the big media companies.
More in general they're moving away from non-interactive entertainment and into new forms of entertainment (gaming, reading blogs, socializing via IM, etc) made popular by the new channel. Keep in mind that the real market of movie companies is not movies, it's entertainment.
It's no wonder then, that the media companies want to be buddies with the (current) big boy of the Net.
After all these years of the US government exporting moralistic and lobby-built laws (soft drug prohibition, "ethernal" copyright, etc), it's nice to see somebody trying to export their society's (swedish) values of respect for freedom and privacy, even if their current crop of mainstream politicians seems to be in the pockets of the US admistration.
On the other hand, i expect that if the Relakks service becomes popular expect laws to be passed soon in other countries to curtail access to it.
It's been non-casual friendly for a long time now.
About a year and a half ago, even before Blizzard introduced Battlegrounds, they started by creating the PvP Ladder.
The PvP ladder was done in such a way as to reward hard-core players. It was even admited by the WoW design team lead, in the WoW site itself, that they designed it with the expectation that casual players would never go beyong Luitenant. Interestingly enough, the article were the design team lead said this, was removed from the WoW site within a week of it being posted.
I actually left in part because of this and because i saw in practice how things started to go when the PvP ladder was introduced (think "Player farming").
It's interesting (if not that surprising) to see that even after Battlegrounds Blizzard as kept gearing WoW to the casual player crowd.
Still, the early levels in WoW are reasonably casual-player friendly as long as you keep away of PvP servers - although the parent has a point about the quests being repetitive and based in a small set of templates.
Also, ever notice the "females" in guilds tend to get free loot even when they don't even have a microphone. I was halfway tempted to create a female character with no voice communication to get loot, then seduce all of the men in the guild with a fake picture I picked up from Google. But fortunatly, I quit before attempting that.
There, i've corrected it for you.
Trust me, you don't want to be long to the "I cross-dress for WoW" croud
Direct X10.1, the sucessor to DirectX 10 will have exciting new features, bla, bla, bla...
As in the Vista only sucessor to the Vista only DirectX 10, that grand piece of thecnology which on it's own will make me - and possible many others - a long term user of the PC as gaming platform move to consoles...
With the current widspread practice in the industry of making "me too" games, putting graphics above playability and in general producing (at least in the PC) the most boring crop of games in the last 10 years (50% of which based on movies), i personally feel that DirectX 10 being Vista only was the one before last nail in the coffin of gaming on the PC, the last nail being when the gaming industry embraces it.
Having been a long time fan of playing in the PC due to it being by nature the platform where the more complex and innovative games first appear, i'm now a fan of the budget games bin (trying to find those oldies but goodies which i missed when they first came out) and am aiming at getting a Whi to satisfy my future gaming needs.
Once again the pirates provide superior service for a superior price.
It makes one wonder if IP in it's current form (state enforced, long term monopolies) and the business models that were born from it, are actually harmfull for society as whole.
Some kind of very time-limited copyright (say 5 years) would probably force faster innovation cycles in IT products and force competition based on selling quality products to customers and providing good related services instead of of the current competition based on artificial barriers to entry (of other competitors into the same market) and networking-effects (eg most applications are made for the most common OS, which means that said OS is more likelly to be bougth since it is required for most applications).
Imagine a generics market for old applications/OSes...
To illustrate just how illogical the rule of extending to just fertilized eggs the protections offered to human adults, consider that people which knowingly have sex at the wrong part of a woman's cycle could be accused of murder (since they concieved a human knowing that said human would die).
??? At no point does having sex create a blastocyst that is sure to die. Even in such a non-existent scenario, it could only be considered murder if the parent's DELIBERATELY caused the blastocyst not to implant (ie, various forms of abortion). It is not murder if someone dies naturally. cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
If you knowingly act in a way that causes a person to die it's murder. For example, denying medical help to someone which you could save is murder. Intentional murder is called manslaughter. Natural causes or not is not relevant - if a person starts a chain of events with the expectation that it is likelly to kill someone (say, deceiving someone with a shelfish alergy into eating something that has shelfish) it doesn't mater that the cause of death was natural (anabolic shock due to the shelfish), what maters is the intention (for man slaughter) or the knowledge that the action might cause someone to die.
Since in your definition a fertilized human egg has the same rights as a grown human, by creating a human (fertilizing the egg) knowing that said human is going to die in a mater of hours could be construed as murder (though not manslaughter), especially if the couple having sex had no intention of having a baby.
Although i have to admit that the potential of becoming a sencient entity should be a consideration when deciding whether or not to extend to a being the same protections that adult humans have, placing the border of being protected in that way at the point of conception is an arbitrary choice
And wherever you draw the line is even more arbitrary. The only two bright lines in the whole business are conception and birth, and waiting to grant basic rights birth is even more of a ridiculous choice than conception. Five minutes before birth, it is "choice", five minutes after, murder? Even though nothing has changed concerning the fetus except its position and its connection to the mother, neither of which is relevant to rights.
A couple of points: - Choosing so called bright lines is just as arbitrary as saying day 13, - You are defining your own bright lines. The moment an embrion gets its first nervous cell could just as easilly be seen as a bright line. Similarly the moment the blastocyt's cells start to speciallized could be seen as a bright line. Personally (and to illustrate how arbitrary "bright lines" are) i find that the moment of ejaculation is a bright line. - Quote: "ridiculous choice" - ridicule is a personal definition. My grandmother would consider that for a young woman to wear a short skirt would be ridiculous, i don't. I hardly consider someone's definition of ridiculous to be a good way to make law. - "Five minutes before [conception], it is "choice", five minutes after, murder?" - just as arbitrary
My point being that law should not be made as if any event exists in a vacuum and based on arbitrary choices of one specific person.
Following pure logic, the rule of "potential to become a sencient being" can just as easilly aplly to sperm or unfertilized eggs as it can to a fertilized egg
I note you dropped my qualifiers. I usually use either "significant" or "high". The chance of an individual sperm or egg becoming a human are sufficiently small as to disregard them. It is the same principle that says I cannot shoot a gun at my neighbor's house (which has a significant chance of hurting him) but I can drive to w
I like programming video games and I like working on games for PC's and Consoles which is what I'm paid to do. I also said I think Macs are nice sexy stable platforms. Heck I even aggressively recycle and drive a fuel-efficient car too which you seem to think makes you special. However, I honestly believe that Macs are not a big enough market for $20 million dollar games to be developed specifically for them and for those games to be profitable. Game development is not the same as solving the world's hunger problems. If Mac owners are hungry for games but their market isn't profitable, it's not a crime against humanity to let them "starve" for new games. We develop games to make money, not as charity.
I have no personal desire to throw away my career or my company's money on developing a project projected to lose millions of dollars regardless of how sexy it is. It's hard enough to make money on PC's and Consoles as it is without targeting a niche market without a distribution channel. And equating my reluctance to push for more game development on an inexistant market to the "worst atrocities, of all kinds... in history" just shows how out of touch with reality you are. I'm perfectly happy where I am and I see no justification to risk my company's financial health with an issue that no one I work with believes in including myself. I want my games to be played by millions of people everywhere (the last one I worked on had 2+ million copies sold).
There's no reason to throw away a happy life, a career, and millions of dollars on some eco-freak hippie whiners like you who think I should "grow a pair" and service them.
How about FreeBSD gamers?
Doesn't anybody think of those poor FreeBSD gamers starving for high-quality games!!!?
You people are cruel, it tell you, plain ol cruel!!!!
Using the threshold of "being a living human" as the frontier between what needs to be protected or not would entitle any fertilized egg, even one which does not take hold in the wall of the uterus (and thus never turns into a pregnancy) to protection.
Yes. Implantation is irrelvant; just one arbitrary point on a path that signifies no important change in the fetus or its status.
Actually and following this logic, every day hundreds of thousands of human beings die of natural causes since (in the 100% natural process) often a fertilized egg will not take hold in the wall of the uterus. Amongst other things, the likellyhood that a fertilized egg will or not take hold in the uterus wall of a woman is very dependant on the moment of conception with relation to the period of a woman.
To illustrate just how illogical the rule of extending to just fertilized eggs the protections offered to human adults, consider that people which knowingly have sex at the wrong part of a woman's cycle could be accused of murder (since they concieved a human knowing that said human would die).
I don't quite see the moral imperative of protecting a brainless unicelular organism that happens to have the right set of chromossomes to turn into a human... unless of course you believe that the human soul is create on conception, but then you have to believe in souls, which brings us back to religion (again).
It has nothing to do with souls. As I pointed out above, CURRENT abilities cannot be the only ones that matter. In addition to the animal-or-infantacide problem, one could also argue that if only CURRENT abilities matter, you have no rights when you are sleeping, unconcious, or otherwise temporarily impaired. Again, this conclusion is silly - the fact that you WILL be a sentient concious being in the future matters, even if you are not one at the moment.
Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that potential matters. I believe that all unique entities with a reasonable opportunity to be sentient in the future should have basic rights and be protected from destruction. This applies not only to abortion and stem cells, but AIs, space aliens, animals, euthanasia, and any other situation where this question has or could occur.
Although i have to admit that the potential of becoming a sencient entity should be a consideration when deciding whether or not to extend to a being the same protections that adult humans have, placing the border of being protected in that way at the point of conception is an arbitrary choice which has absolutelly no consideration to the rights of everybody else (especially the parents) nor to the amount of harm done by having the border there.
Following pure logic, the rule of "potential to become a sencient being" can just as easilly aplly to sperm or unfertilized eggs as it can to a fertilized egg, to quote you own words: "It is fair to assume that most would rather have a 1/10 shot at life than a zero percent chance". Why not put the border there?
If the only criteria of protection is "potential to become a sencient being", then my PC should be protected since it has the potential of becoming an AI (with the right sort of programming).
Let me correct my statement in my second response: Using [only]"potential for...[to become a sencient being]" is an enormous slippery slope since it can be indefinitely extended up to whatever point you want without any rational justification at all.
My point all along has not been about rule 1 [which sorts of beings should be considered for protection] but about rule 2 [when does an assembly of molecules/microchips becomes a being of that sort] and rule 3 [when does a being of that sort become worthy of protection].
I still don't see why a unicelular organism that happens to have the right 23 chromossome pairs (or in the case of mongo
How about a woman that has a high chance of miscarriage (say 1 in 10), should she not be allowed to become pregnant in the first place since she is likelly to kill at least 4 living human beings before giving birth to a baby?
How about women that go horseback-riding when pregnant (an activity which apparently increases the risk of a misscarriage and thus qualifies as killing a living human) - should it be forbidden?
Should pregnant women be mandated by law to stay at the hospital for the whole length of the pregnancy so as to avoid that they do activities or consume products which might increase the risk of a misscarriage (and thus the death of a living human)?
Using the threshold of "being a living human" as the frontier between what needs to be protected or not would entitle any fertilized egg, even one which does not take hold in the wall of the uterus (and thus never turns into a pregnancy) to protection.
To me, giving protection to a living cell containing 23 pairs of chromossomes which can develop into a baby (even if the chromossomes are damaged in such a way that the resulting human has no higher brain functions) but not to a primate (chimp) which has the inteligence of a 7 year-old human, is a very partial and arbitrary choice.
I don't quite see the moral imperative of protecting a brainless unicelular organism that happens to have the right set of chromossomes to turn into a human... unless of course you believe that the human soul is create on conception, but then you have to believe in souls, which brings us back to religion (again).
It is a question of whether their high potential to do so if not deliberately prevented is sufficient cause for granting them protected status.
Using "potential for..." is an enormous slippery slope since it can be indefinitly extended up to whatever point you want without any rational justification at all (either for or against that extension). For example, should men be allowed to do a vasectomy since they are thus not letting all those potential people come to life? How about condoms, are they not killing potential babies?
The whole thing just reminds me of the Monty Phytons' song that goes like "Every sperm is sacred...".
Those that just come out and admit that they believe that human life is sacred have my respect, even if i don't agree with them. All others should just stop wrapping their moral beliefs in pseudo-science or shallow semi-philosophical coats.
There is absolutely nothing "religious" about the belief that personhood begins at conception (rather than any other point you want to put it). Indeed, the Bible says essentially nothing on the matter.
Do your homework and quit assuming. This is a battle between people who belief personhood begins at conception vs people who believe it begins at first brain wave, birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord, etc. None of these positions is necessarily any more "religious" than the other, and more importantly, none is any more "scientific" as well. "Personhood" is a moral concept and outside of the scope of science. Science can tell us that a blastocyst is alive and a human (according to the accepted definitions), but it cannot tell us if this is sufficient for the granting of rights.
This debate has nothing to do with science OR religion, let alone a conflict between them.
Well, it all boils down to what do you define as "personhood".
Amongst those that define "personhood" as the ability to think, you'll be hard pressed to find people that believe that "personhood" begins at the moment of conception (or in fact at any moment before a basic nervous system has developed).
On the other hand, many of those that define "personhood" as having a soul believe that personhood begins at the moment of conception.
Your argument about "personhood" is very much a smoke screen - in the end the discussion pretty much boils down to believing that people have a soul or not - very much a religious discussion.
I do agree, however, that the debate about allowing or not stem cell research has nothing to do with science.
I just hit level 40 and wanted to get a mount. That would take about 90 gold, and I figured it would take me about a month to save that much. (I'm a casual player, maybe 5 hours a week). For $12 I got all the money I needed, in an hour.
New the game is fun again, and I travel / level faster.
Why is this wrong?
Which brings us full-circle to the point made by the GP - the game is setup in such a way that players are forced into long hours of tedious tasks in order to get enough goods/gold/equipment/levels be able to continue having fun.
Personally i reckon it's a way of reinforcing a players emotional binding to the stuff that the player aquires in-game: if you invest a lot of time in getting something it's much harder to let go of it and, by extension, to let go of the game - it certainly worked that way on me for a while.
It's thus hardly unexpected that people which are short on time will short-circuit the whole grinding component of the game and just buy the gold in real life to "unlock" the rest of the fun.
Personally i blame the greediness of game publishers, not the gamers that buy gold from e-bay.
Actually the attitude in EVE is more like: - Hunt down anybody in our turf if they ain't in our gang (aka 0.0 space alliances)
Since most of the stuff worth "farming" is actually in 0.0, this has the side effect of disturbing professional farmers (and everybody else which is not a member of the alliance which controls that area of space).
For the non-EVE-players some background info: - EVE is a MMORPG that takes place in space. - EVE has many solar systems, each having a security level from 1.0 (safest) to 0.0 (less safe). - If a player attacks another player in any system from 1.0 to 0.1 they get a penalty to their security rating. - In 0.0 it's free for all. - Systems from 1.0 to 0.5 have an active NPC defense force which will engage any player attacking another player (stronger in 1.0, weaker in 0.5). - Players with a security rating below a certain level will authomatically get attacked by any system's NPC defense force as soon as they enter a system having such a force. - Eve has asteroids for mining - this is one of the easiest ways (if incredibly boring) of making money (known as ISK in the EVE-universe). The rule of thumb is that, the lowest the security level of a system, the more valuable the ore that can be mined from the asteroids in that system.
For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less immediatly obvious the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.
Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines (via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a longer tail of bugfixing before the software is accepted for production).
The same theory would also help explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all our problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).
For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less self-explanatory/measurable the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.
Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines, when, via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a long tail of bugfixing after release but before the software is accepted for production.
The same theory could also explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all their problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).
Actually as you go deeper underground the temperature of the soil gets closer and closer to the average yearly temperature in that area as shown here
How fast the temperature approaches the yearly average as depth increases depends on the type (and moisture content) of the soil, but as a rough guide, at 8m depth the temperature is very close to the yearly average.
Note that this is not valid for extreme depth (or vulcanic areas) for the obvious reason;)
BTW, the graphic was taken from here - if you want to know the depth at which the yearly variation of temperature has 1% of the amplitude of the variation outside, look for "Table I. Depth of Penetration of Diurnal and Annual Temperature Cycles" (sorry, no anchor in doc) and check the column "Depth Year (m)"
Slashdot Mirror
My feeling is that part of the problem lies with the fact that almost from the beginning you have access to the whole map. There is no "new area" to uncover (after the gates are open).
Also, the authomatic leveling of the monsters with the leveling of the player means there are no zones packed with monsters "beyond your level" and you cannot set yourself as an objective being high level enough to get in there.
Also there is not enough variety in weapons and armor - there comes a point when your rewards for defeating a bucketload of monsters is weapons and pieces of armor of the same types you've been getting for the last two weeks (real time).
I other words the quality of the rewards (be it new areas to explore, new weapons or new armor) for achieving something, stops increasing too early in the game.
Which leaves the missions (and especially the main ones) as the only way to actually feel challenged and achieve something. This pretty much removes the fun of going out and exploring outside the missions.
A MOSFET is a type of transistor which is very common in integrated circuits because it's very easy to make using the most common IC fabrication techniques (which basically boil down to making holes in a silicon base, filling those holes with stuff and depositing lines of other stuff on top of it).
... stuff embedded in a solid tends to move around, though slowly. The higher the temperature, the faster the moving.
/. with an EE degree or a deep interest in electronics to actually understand the issue at hand, and maybe, just maybe, they're extra attracted to articles about new kinds of transistors !!???
One of the physical features of a MOSFET is that there are places where silicon dopped to be of the type P (ie, a substance was added to it so that it is missing electrons in it's crystaline structure by comparisson with pure silicon) is in direct contact with silicon dopped to be of type N (ie, a substance was added to it so that it has extra electrons in it's crystaline structure by comparisson with pure silicon).
Now, as many of us know, solids are just very slow liquids
In the specific case of a MOSFET, we have junctions between the silicon dopped with a specific material to make it type-N (ie more electrons) and silicon dopped with a different material to make it type-P (ie fewer electrons). In this situation, some of the dopping atoms in the type-N silicon will move to the type-P side and vice versa, thus making the junction less "sharp" (in terms of the difference between both sides).
Some very complicated formulas (which i forgot all about) can be used to show that the "sharper" the junction, the more efficient it is.
This is what the GGP is going about.
Consider that maybe there are enough people in
There is more to business skills than the stuff you find in The Prince
...
Too bad that the current crop of high-flying CEOs seems heavy on machiavellian tactics
If your company's goal is to create a solid, stable, efficient, maintainable, scalable infrastructure which improves the business processes of the company and/or satisfies the needs of the customers (and thus helps the company make more money) ...
... ;)
A technically perfect system which does not help (either directly or indirectly) a company make more money is totally worthless from the point of view of a company (even if it's very interesting from a technical point of view).
Good technical skills together with some business skills are needed to actually do good stuff which gets used in the real world - the business skills being used to actually figure out what is needed instead of what would be cool to do
The pinacle of technical achievement IMHO is making a technical perfect system which people use and are happy about it.
I do agree that the more Machiavelian business skills are not required, though
I believe the parent post was refering to the pursuit of the Greater Truths (say, the Meaning of Life) which is a phylosophical and religious quest, not a scientific one.
Greater Truths can be pretty much orthogonal to scientific truths (small t purposelly used). For example, one can believe that the world we live in is but a mere shadow of the real world (Socrates) or that all that we percieve is false and we are all connected to special machines which feed us all those sensations (The Matrix).
Such Greater Truths do not in any way invalidate the truths which sience uncovers (knowing how this world works does not suddenly becomes invalid if the world turns out to be a shadow of a greater world).
This is why the pursuit of science is not incompatible with religion.
The problem lies with those which both are believers in a religion and lack the wisdom and/or inteligence to really understand it's grand principles (for example, the existence of a Creator which watches over us) and instead concentrate on miniscule details of interpretation of sacred texts which were written milenia ago and have been highly revised ever since (was the world really created in 6 days - plus one for resting - or is that a metaphor?)
<RANT>
Specifically in this area of creationist vs evolution, i suspect all the true believers with more than half a brain have long ago moved on because "the tools which the Almighty used to bring about the world as it is now are not really that important" and all we're left with are the self-agrandazing asses (politicians), the populists (politicians) and the ignorant masses.
</RANT>
The issues with the production and distribution of drugs have to do with it being illegal.
... except if that it's forbidden.
... in other words, an attempt at prohibition but without being overt about it.
If large scale production/distribution of drugs is illegal, then only criminals will do it. For those people, the quality of the product is of little concern beyond it having a significant amount of the active substance. Those same people, when faced with possibility of ending up in jail, will hardly think twice if comitting a "minor" crime will minimize the chance of them being caught for the bigger crime.
In technical terms, hashish, for example, is a weed and it will easilly grow anywhere - producing it in large quantities using the same means as use today to raise wheat would hardly be a problem
I live in Holland, and i can tell you i see a lot less poverty and drug-related drudgery around here than i did in most other cities i've visited (or lived in).
Still, soft drugs are not actually legal around here - instead they are tolerated (meaning the law is not enforced). In practice, the current conservative-moralistic government (expected to fall on the next elections) has taken to enforce the law on large scale production of hashish and on some coffeeshops (a bit like bars but you can buy and smoke pot in there - very common in the turistic area of Amsterdam) close to the Belgian border, but not in other areas
Most laws are designed to make it possible for people to live together in the most productive way possible (thus NOT an anarchy and NOT the law of the strongest). These laws thus concern themselfs with avoiding that one person knowingly or purposelly causes harm to another person (such as murder, theft, etc), secure trading (contracts, sales laws, etc) and avoiding "tragedy of the commons" situations with shared resources (environmental laws, zoneing laws, etc)
Any laws dictating what a person cannot do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own house and without causing any harm to others is a moralistic law in that it tries to forcifully deny to others the (lawfull) possibility of acting in certain ways, even though those actions would have no negative impact for third parties.
Soft drugs prohibition is thus a moralistic law since smoking pot in the privacy of one's home causes no harm to others, while for example a law prohibiting driving while under the influence of drugs would NOT be a moralistic law since driving under influence strongly increases the chances of an accident which could harm to others.
Basically people are moving away from the traditional distribution channels for media into newer channels and in the process discovering there's more to motion pictures entertainment than the fare produced by the big media companies.
More in general they're moving away from non-interactive entertainment and into new forms of entertainment (gaming, reading blogs, socializing via IM, etc) made popular by the new channel. Keep in mind that the real market of movie companies is not movies, it's entertainment.
It's no wonder then, that the media companies want to be buddies with the (current) big boy of the Net.
After all these years of the US government exporting moralistic and lobby-built laws (soft drug prohibition, "ethernal" copyright, etc), it's nice to see somebody trying to export their society's (swedish) values of respect for freedom and privacy, even if their current crop of mainstream politicians seems to be in the pockets of the US admistration.
On the other hand, i expect that if the Relakks service becomes popular expect laws to be passed soon in other countries to curtail access to it.
It's been non-casual friendly for a long time now.
About a year and a half ago, even before Blizzard introduced Battlegrounds, they started by creating the PvP Ladder.
The PvP ladder was done in such a way as to reward hard-core players. It was even admited by the WoW design team lead, in the WoW site itself, that they designed it with the expectation that casual players would never go beyong Luitenant.
Interestingly enough, the article were the design team lead said this, was removed from the WoW site within a week of it being posted.
I actually left in part because of this and because i saw in practice how things started to go when the PvP ladder was introduced (think "Player farming").
It's interesting (if not that surprising) to see that even after Battlegrounds Blizzard as kept gearing WoW to the casual player crowd.
Still, the early levels in WoW are reasonably casual-player friendly as long as you keep away of PvP servers - although the parent has a point about the quests being repetitive and based in a small set of templates.
There, i've corrected it for you.
Trust me, you don't want to be long to the "I cross-dress for WoW" croud
Direct X10.1, the sucessor to DirectX 10 will have exciting new features, bla, bla, bla ...
...
As in the Vista only sucessor to the Vista only DirectX 10, that grand piece of thecnology which on it's own will make me - and possible many others - a long term user of the PC as gaming platform move to consoles
With the current widspread practice in the industry of making "me too" games, putting graphics above playability and in general producing (at least in the PC) the most boring crop of games in the last 10 years (50% of which based on movies), i personally feel that DirectX 10 being Vista only was the one before last nail in the coffin of gaming on the PC, the last nail being when the gaming industry embraces it.
Having been a long time fan of playing in the PC due to it being by nature the platform where the more complex and innovative games first appear, i'm now a fan of the budget games bin (trying to find those oldies but goodies which i missed when they first came out) and am aiming at getting a Whi to satisfy my future gaming needs.
I suspect i'm not the only one doing this...
Once again the pirates provide superior service for a superior price.
It makes one wonder if IP in it's current form (state enforced, long term monopolies) and the business models that were born from it, are actually harmfull for society as whole.
Some kind of very time-limited copyright (say 5 years) would probably force faster innovation cycles in IT products and force competition based on selling quality products to customers and providing good related services instead of of the current competition based on artificial barriers to entry (of other competitors into the same market) and networking-effects (eg most applications are made for the most common OS, which means that said OS is more likelly to be bougth since it is required for most applications).
Imagine a generics market for old applications/OSes...
Solution: tinfoil.
Wrapped around the passport, no need to make a hat of it
If you knowingly act in a way that causes a person to die it's murder. For example, denying medical help to someone which you could save is murder.
Intentional murder is called manslaughter.
Natural causes or not is not relevant - if a person starts a chain of events with the expectation that it is likelly to kill someone (say, deceiving someone with a shelfish alergy into eating something that has shelfish) it doesn't mater that the cause of death was natural (anabolic shock due to the shelfish), what maters is the intention (for man slaughter) or the knowledge that the action might cause someone to die.
Since in your definition a fertilized human egg has the same rights as a grown human, by creating a human (fertilizing the egg) knowing that said human is going to die in a mater of hours could be construed as murder (though not manslaughter), especially if the couple having sex had no intention of having a baby.
A couple of points:
- Choosing so called bright lines is just as arbitrary as saying day 13,
- You are defining your own bright lines. The moment an embrion gets its first nervous cell could just as easilly be seen as a bright line. Similarly the moment the blastocyt's cells start to speciallized could be seen as a bright line. Personally (and to illustrate how arbitrary "bright lines" are) i find that the moment of ejaculation is a bright line.
- Quote: "ridiculous choice" - ridicule is a personal definition. My grandmother would consider that for a young woman to wear a short skirt would be ridiculous, i don't. I hardly consider someone's definition of ridiculous to be a good way to make law.
- "Five minutes before [conception], it is "choice", five minutes after, murder?" - just as arbitrary
My point being that law should not be made as if any event exists in a vacuum and based on arbitrary choices of one specific person.
How about FreeBSD gamers?
Doesn't anybody think of those poor FreeBSD gamers starving for high-quality games!!!?
You people are cruel, it tell you, plain ol cruel!!!!
Actually and following this logic, every day hundreds of thousands of human beings die of natural causes since (in the 100% natural process) often a fertilized egg will not take hold in the wall of the uterus. Amongst other things, the likellyhood that a fertilized egg will or not take hold in the uterus wall of a woman is very dependant on the moment of conception with relation to the period of a woman.
To illustrate just how illogical the rule of extending to just fertilized eggs the protections offered to human adults, consider that people which knowingly have sex at the wrong part of a woman's cycle could be accused of murder (since they concieved a human knowing that said human would die).
Although i have to admit that the potential of becoming a sencient entity should be a consideration when deciding whether or not to extend to a being the same protections that adult humans have, placing the border of being protected in that way at the point of conception is an arbitrary choice which has absolutelly no consideration to the rights of everybody else (especially the parents) nor to the amount of harm done by having the border there.
Following pure logic, the rule of "potential to become a sencient being" can just as easilly aplly to sperm or unfertilized eggs as it can to a fertilized egg, to quote you own words: "It is fair to assume that most would rather have a 1/10 shot at life than a zero percent chance". Why not put the border there?
If the only criteria of protection is "potential to become a sencient being", then my PC should be protected since it has the potential of becoming an AI (with the right sort of programming).
Let me correct my statement in my second response:
Using [only]"potential for...[to become a sencient being]" is an enormous slippery slope since it can be indefinitely extended up to whatever point you want without any rational justification at all.
My point all along has not been about rule 1 [which sorts of beings should be considered for protection] but about rule 2 [when does an assembly of molecules/microchips becomes a being of that sort] and rule 3 [when does a being of that sort become worthy of protection].
I still don't see why a unicelular organism that happens to have the right 23 chromossome pairs (or in the case of mongo
How about a woman that has a high chance of miscarriage (say 1 in 10), should she not be allowed to become pregnant in the first place since she is likelly to kill at least 4 living human beings before giving birth to a baby?
... unless of course you believe that the human soul is create on conception, but then you have to believe in souls, which brings us back to religion (again).
How about women that go horseback-riding when pregnant (an activity which apparently increases the risk of a misscarriage and thus qualifies as killing a living human) - should it be forbidden?
Should pregnant women be mandated by law to stay at the hospital for the whole length of the pregnancy so as to avoid that they do activities or consume products which might increase the risk of a misscarriage (and thus the death of a living human)?
Using the threshold of "being a living human" as the frontier between what needs to be protected or not would entitle any fertilized egg, even one which does not take hold in the wall of the uterus (and thus never turns into a pregnancy) to protection.
To me, giving protection to a living cell containing 23 pairs of chromossomes which can develop into a baby (even if the chromossomes are damaged in such a way that the resulting human has no higher brain functions) but not to a primate (chimp) which has the inteligence of a 7 year-old human, is a very partial and arbitrary choice.
I don't quite see the moral imperative of protecting a brainless unicelular organism that happens to have the right set of chromossomes to turn into a human
Using "potential for..." is an enormous slippery slope since it can be indefinitly extended up to whatever point you want without any rational justification at all (either for or against that extension). For example, should men be allowed to do a vasectomy since they are thus not letting all those potential people come to life? How about condoms, are they not killing potential babies?
The whole thing just reminds me of the Monty Phytons' song that goes like "Every sperm is sacred
Those that just come out and admit that they believe that human life is sacred have my respect, even if i don't agree with them. All others should just stop wrapping their moral beliefs in pseudo-science or shallow semi-philosophical coats.
Well, it all boils down to what do you define as "personhood".
Amongst those that define "personhood" as the ability to think, you'll be hard pressed to find people that believe that "personhood" begins at the moment of conception (or in fact at any moment before a basic nervous system has developed).
On the other hand, many of those that define "personhood" as having a soul believe that personhood begins at the moment of conception.
Your argument about "personhood" is very much a smoke screen - in the end the discussion pretty much boils down to believing that people have a soul or not - very much a religious discussion.
I do agree, however, that the debate about allowing or not stem cell research has nothing to do with science.
Which brings us full-circle to the point made by the GP - the game is setup in such a way that players are forced into long hours of tedious tasks in order to get enough goods/gold/equipment/levels be able to continue having fun.
Personally i reckon it's a way of reinforcing a players emotional binding to the stuff that the player aquires in-game: if you invest a lot of time in getting something it's much harder to let go of it and, by extension, to let go of the game - it certainly worked that way on me for a while.
It's thus hardly unexpected that people which are short on time will short-circuit the whole grinding component of the game and just buy the gold in real life to "unlock" the rest of the fun.
Personally i blame the greediness of game publishers, not the gamers that buy gold from e-bay.
Actually the attitude in EVE is more like:
- Hunt down anybody in our turf if they ain't in our gang (aka 0.0 space alliances)
Since most of the stuff worth "farming" is actually in 0.0, this has the side effect of disturbing professional farmers (and everybody else which is not a member of the alliance which controls that area of space).
For the non-EVE-players some background info:
- EVE is a MMORPG that takes place in space.
- EVE has many solar systems, each having a security level from 1.0 (safest) to 0.0 (less safe).
- If a player attacks another player in any system from 1.0 to 0.1 they get a penalty to their security rating.
- In 0.0 it's free for all.
- Systems from 1.0 to 0.5 have an active NPC defense force which will engage any player attacking another player (stronger in 1.0, weaker in 0.5).
- Players with a security rating below a certain level will authomatically get attacked by any system's NPC defense force as soon as they enter a system having such a force.
- Eve has asteroids for mining - this is one of the easiest ways (if incredibly boring) of making money (known as ISK in the EVE-universe). The rule of thumb is that, the lowest the security level of a system, the more valuable the ore that can be mined from the asteroids in that system.
For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less immediatly obvious the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.
Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines (via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a longer tail of bugfixing before the software is accepted for production).
The same theory would also help explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all our problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).
For a couple of years now, i've been entertaining the theory that a great many people in IT (especially managers) have trouble dealing with tradeoffs, side-effects and feedback loops whenever a choice has to be made on how the development process is to be setup/changed. The longer the chain of side-effects, the more complicated the feedback-loops or the less self-explanatory/measurable the tradeoffs, side-effects or feedback-loops are, the more likelly they will be ignored or not understood.
Hence the common practice (in some countries) of selling impossible deadlines to customers and then using overwork to (try and) achieve those deadlines, when, via the "tired developers make more bugs" and the "low morale" negative feedback loops, overwork usually leads to LONGER development times and a long tail of bugfixing after release but before the software is accepted for production.
The same theory could also explain the recurring reliance by some managers on the next "silver bullet" to solve all their problems - silver bullets are always sold as solving everything and having no downsides (thus no tradeoffs) and no side-effects (and thus no negative feedback loops).
Actually as you go deeper underground the temperature of the soil gets closer and closer to the average yearly temperature in that area as shown here
;)
How fast the temperature approaches the yearly average as depth increases depends on the type (and moisture content) of the soil, but as a rough guide, at 8m depth the temperature is very close to the yearly average.
Note that this is not valid for extreme depth (or vulcanic areas) for the obvious reason
BTW, the graphic was taken from here - if you want to know the depth at which the yearly variation of temperature has 1% of the amplitude of the variation outside, look for "Table I. Depth of Penetration of Diurnal and Annual Temperature Cycles" (sorry, no anchor in doc) and check the column "Depth Year (m)"