You misunderstand natural selection. Reproductive rates drive natural selection, not the environment per se: i.e., members of a species produce more offspring than can survive (in the local environment, which, it is important to remember, includes other species filling ecological niches that "crowd" the species under investigation). It doesn't matter what the environment is if species produce too few descendants.
Or maybe we are that advanced race, and our future selves are wise enough to only send back fragments of ideas at a time. Maybe our future selves are educating us as fast as can absorb it, i.e., the limit is our own current primitiveness, not the capability of the teacher.
I would be much more inclined to play Vendetta Online (http://vendetta-online.com/). It's not open source, but there is a native Linux client, and they're working on a native Android client. V-O is one of those games like Guild Wars where people keep coming up with new "builds" and ways of dogfighting.
I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift. I can't find the link right now to the information I found truly interesting (correlation of past poles with existing glaciers) but there's a fair amount of info out there about it. (Some people are correlating it with 2012/doomsday, so be forewarned.)
Oh good grief. TFA is about movement of the magnetic north pole. This has nothing whatever to do with the axis of rotation of the Earth, or its axial tilt. A wandering magnetic pole isn't going to cause glaciers, or probably any other climatic effect for that matter. A useless compass is about the maximum inconvenience you're likely to encounter. I suspect this "fair amount of info" about glaciation you're referring to is found on the same web sites as the 2012 apocalyptic garbage you seem to believe.
There are, of course MUD's far older than that which were persistent worlds.
Yes, MUDs are c.1986 or so. However, the patent in question specifies 3D graphics, so MUDs per se are not prior art. They should be...I mean, I am sure I am not the only one reading Slashdot who frittered away thousands of hours on Epic and Bigboy at the end of the 80s, and more than once thinking "I wonder if there's a way for this kind of game to have graphics?" That idea probably occurred to huge numbers of MUD nerds a huge number of times. It can hardly be called an original idea by the time 2000 rolled around.
Whether or not MediaSentry was authorized to download the file is irrelevant...it's still illegal for Jammy Thomas to do the (alleged) uploading.
Correct. Since we are only talking about civil matters, not criminal, there is no burden upon the plaintiff to apply uniformity among whom they choose sue. Put another way, civil suits are about redressing harm, and the plaintiff himself is the sole party in charge of saying who has harmed him and who hasn't. The RIAA can merely say "We see no harm in MediaSentry's filesharing" and that's the end of it.
I've seen them try and do the same thing to sales people, but it doesn't seem to work as well (in my experience).
Most States have laws that prohibit contractual obligations that prevent you from working in your field. I mean, you can't very well tell a medical device sales rep that he is forbidden from approaching physicians for 1 year.
Plus, anyone in sales knows damn well (or ought to know) to keep their own contact list, and not rely exclusively on the company contact database.
Please take a history class, or read a book. There were plenty of heliocentric and round-earth hypotheses put forward during the classical Greek period. Often, the observations and measurement-taking were fantastically good. Furthermore, science doesn't seek to prove anything.
Sadly, your comment will be overlooked or modded down, as will mine. The OP of this thread told one of those phony "case study" stories cooked up by marketing to sow fear about competing products. Aunt Mildred? Are you serious? Unfortunately, a lot of people bought into the fake story.
The FACT is as you point out: virtually any digital camera will work perfectly on Linux without installing anything. Just plug the camera in, and it works. The FACT is also that an HP photo printer/scanner/copier will work instantly, just plug it in.
The FACT is that if you sat down with 20 consumer devices, a Linux box, and a Windows box, and installed no software/drivers/etc., that 15+ of those devices would work just fine on Linux and probably zero of them would work on Windows. And even after installing software and drivers, you will wouldn't get more than 18 out of 20 working perfectly on Windows -- you'd have to hunt on websites for updated drivers or some garbage like that. Whereas additional software installation on Linux will also get you up to 18 out of 20 devices. No different at all in the final analysis, except that for most of the devices it's easier to get up and running on Linux.
So, OP, please take your fabricated "Aunt Mildred" stories back to 1999 where they belong.
Now we finally understand Blizzard's strategy of class balance and all this "e-sport" nonsense! You see, they'll introduce a new class that is so vastly superior to all the others that everyone stops playing the other classes.
Ever since I became aware of AoC a few years back, I have been holding out hope that it will address what feels like the biggest failing of WoW: that content is spread so freakishly thinly across the world. I like the way Tycho on Penny-Arcade put it, that standing in Lakeshire makes you wonder why they don't bother making a game out of all the raw material they have in the world. You show up in a place, do a quest for 6 minutes, and then you leave the area, never to return.
Anyway, I hope that AoC invests more deeply in each location, building richness into what's already there instead of racing to build a hundred empty areas like WoW has.
In fact I would say that the ability to hear could very well be universal (or nearly so) in "advanced" lifeforms
Quite so. I don't understand why people think xenos would have exotic senses that are nothing like our own. If there is a source of information about your environment, it is a survival advantage to be able to detect and process that information. A few great sources of information are vibrations, chemical makeup, and radiation -- all three of which ought to be bountiful on just about any planet. We take advantage of the first through hearing and touch, the second through taste and smell, and the third through sight (and a bit through touch as well). The particular way xenos detect this information is likely to be different, and how they process the sense data is probably wildly different, but it's a fairly safe bet that they have the same fundamental senses we do.
The American people in 1776 would have happily followed the English herders if it were not for a very few well financed and abled revolutionaries.
I had to point out that this is incorrect, in both its substance and conclusion. The common chatter in pubs for nearly a decade leading up to 1776 was that the "sheep" (as you want to call them) -- i.e., the common people -- were ready to take up arms to expel the British presence in the colonies. This was in no small part due to the quartering of British troops in private American homes, and the attendant problems of having a large standing army permanently hanging out in American cities without an enemy to fight.
The lesson here is not that people will do what they're told. Just the opposite. If you push enough people for a long enough time, you build an undercurrent of resentment that will eventually manifest in a dramatic way. Put another way, get off your goddamn elitist high horse about how the unwashed masses are idiotic sheep. People are not as dumb or as docile as you want to believe.
I'm foregoing modding you up to reply. I completely agree with you. Although I really wish some things had been done differently for Phantom Menace, I found the movie quite enjoyable, and it's the film I like best among the three prequels.
Veering off-topic: the things I wish had been different include having Obi-Wan first meet Anakin as a young adult hot-shot pilot during the Clone Wars (c.f. A New Hope, "When I met your father..."), never revealing the origins of C-3PO and R2-D2 nor revealing why they are always together, and an expanded/more intelligent role for Darth Maul (we never needed to see Sidious during that movie, Maul was all the villain we needed, just like we only needed Dooku in the 2nd movie -- actually both Maul and Dooku are FAR more interesting characters than Sidious and should have featured large in all 3 movies).
(At this point you probably wish I had modded you instead. I'm sorry!)
Just because Ubuntu is all kinds of awesome doesn't mean it's exempt from the software release issues that affect every other project that has a deadline (even a self-imposed deadline). The wise upgrader uses a 3-month offset. That way you still get to upgrade every 6 months, it's just that you're 3 months behind the curve. So much more painless.
Why should it matter to some poor kid, just needing a way to afford schoolbooks, what OS his laptop is running?
It matters a lot. As other posters have already pointed out, Microsoft wants to see OLPC dead. Are you too young to remember the NC? This the same game. Probably XP will never actually ship on an OLPC laptop. Microsoft will simply keep OLPC preoccupied with trying to make XP run on the thing. "Oh just hang on a few more months, I'm sure we can get XP to run OK, and then the users will be able to run so much software!" On the other side of the coin, Microsoft will be telling potential recipients of an OLPC laptop, "Oh, hang on! Don't take that icky Linux-based one. There will be an XP-based one coming out in a few months!" Delay, delay, delay.
If (and that's a big if) it does ship, it will only be as a lever for Microsoft to kill the project from within. Sugar will become unstable and will have to be disabled. Lots of things will stop working. "Updates are on the way to solve these crashes and other bugs!" they'll say. Updates that never arrive. Delay, delay, delay.
Do you see now why it's so very, very important to not be dependent on a closed, abusive monopoly for a project such as OLPC? (Point of fact, this should be enough reason why anyone would steer clear of Microsoft, but that's another tale.)
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand natural selection. Reproductive rates drive natural selection, not the environment per se: i.e., members of a species produce more offspring than can survive (in the local environment, which, it is important to remember, includes other species filling ecological niches that "crowd" the species under investigation). It doesn't matter what the environment is if species produce too few descendants.
Or maybe we are that advanced race, and our future selves are wise enough to only send back fragments of ideas at a time. Maybe our future selves are educating us as fast as can absorb it, i.e., the limit is our own current primitiveness, not the capability of the teacher.
I would be much more inclined to play Vendetta Online (http://vendetta-online.com/). It's not open source, but there is a native Linux client, and they're working on a native Android client. V-O is one of those games like Guild Wars where people keep coming up with new "builds" and ways of dogfighting.
So basically people from Minnesota could just move there.
Sorry, posting to remove a wrong mod.
I've also read postulations that glaciers were not caused by 'ice ages' per se, so much as they were the remains of the north pole ice cap after a shift. I can't find the link right now to the information I found truly interesting (correlation of past poles with existing glaciers) but there's a fair amount of info out there about it. (Some people are correlating it with 2012/doomsday, so be forewarned.)
Oh good grief. TFA is about movement of the magnetic north pole. This has nothing whatever to do with the axis of rotation of the Earth, or its axial tilt. A wandering magnetic pole isn't going to cause glaciers, or probably any other climatic effect for that matter. A useless compass is about the maximum inconvenience you're likely to encounter. I suspect this "fair amount of info" about glaciation you're referring to is found on the same web sites as the 2012 apocalyptic garbage you seem to believe.
Quite right. The only thing douche-ier is wearing two Bluetooth headsets at once, one in each ear. I saw a man so clad not long ago.
Yes, MUDs are c.1986 or so. However, the patent in question specifies 3D graphics, so MUDs per se are not prior art. They should be...I mean, I am sure I am not the only one reading Slashdot who frittered away thousands of hours on Epic and Bigboy at the end of the 80s, and more than once thinking "I wonder if there's a way for this kind of game to have graphics?" That idea probably occurred to huge numbers of MUD nerds a huge number of times. It can hardly be called an original idea by the time 2000 rolled around.
While I empathize with your plight, you may want to consider not getting frothing mad about things that haven't yet come to pass.
Correct. Since we are only talking about civil matters, not criminal, there is no burden upon the plaintiff to apply uniformity among whom they choose sue. Put another way, civil suits are about redressing harm, and the plaintiff himself is the sole party in charge of saying who has harmed him and who hasn't. The RIAA can merely say "We see no harm in MediaSentry's filesharing" and that's the end of it.
Most States have laws that prohibit contractual obligations that prevent you from working in your field. I mean, you can't very well tell a medical device sales rep that he is forbidden from approaching physicians for 1 year.
Plus, anyone in sales knows damn well (or ought to know) to keep their own contact list, and not rely exclusively on the company contact database.
Dear HighOrbit,
Please take a history class, or read a book. There were plenty of heliocentric and round-earth hypotheses put forward during the classical Greek period. Often, the observations and measurement-taking were fantastically good. Furthermore, science doesn't seek to prove anything.
Sadly, your comment will be overlooked or modded down, as will mine. The OP of this thread told one of those phony "case study" stories cooked up by marketing to sow fear about competing products. Aunt Mildred? Are you serious? Unfortunately, a lot of people bought into the fake story.
The FACT is as you point out: virtually any digital camera will work perfectly on Linux without installing anything. Just plug the camera in, and it works. The FACT is also that an HP photo printer/scanner/copier will work instantly, just plug it in.
The FACT is that if you sat down with 20 consumer devices, a Linux box, and a Windows box, and installed no software/drivers/etc., that 15+ of those devices would work just fine on Linux and probably zero of them would work on Windows. And even after installing software and drivers, you will wouldn't get more than 18 out of 20 working perfectly on Windows -- you'd have to hunt on websites for updated drivers or some garbage like that. Whereas additional software installation on Linux will also get you up to 18 out of 20 devices. No different at all in the final analysis, except that for most of the devices it's easier to get up and running on Linux.
So, OP, please take your fabricated "Aunt Mildred" stories back to 1999 where they belong.
Now we finally understand Blizzard's strategy of class balance and all this "e-sport" nonsense! You see, they'll introduce a new class that is so vastly superior to all the others that everyone stops playing the other classes.
Balance issues solved!
Ever since I became aware of AoC a few years back, I have been holding out hope that it will address what feels like the biggest failing of WoW: that content is spread so freakishly thinly across the world. I like the way Tycho on Penny-Arcade put it, that standing in Lakeshire makes you wonder why they don't bother making a game out of all the raw material they have in the world. You show up in a place, do a quest for 6 minutes, and then you leave the area, never to return.
Anyway, I hope that AoC invests more deeply in each location, building richness into what's already there instead of racing to build a hundred empty areas like WoW has.
Is this a trick question?
Quite so. I don't understand why people think xenos would have exotic senses that are nothing like our own. If there is a source of information about your environment, it is a survival advantage to be able to detect and process that information. A few great sources of information are vibrations, chemical makeup, and radiation -- all three of which ought to be bountiful on just about any planet. We take advantage of the first through hearing and touch, the second through taste and smell, and the third through sight (and a bit through touch as well). The particular way xenos detect this information is likely to be different, and how they process the sense data is probably wildly different, but it's a fairly safe bet that they have the same fundamental senses we do.
Maybe if companies didn't build applications on brain-dead, proprietary, single-vendor platforms they wouldn't run into these kinds of problems.
3rd-world dictators? Shyeah. Try "all governments everywhere."
I had to point out that this is incorrect, in both its substance and conclusion. The common chatter in pubs for nearly a decade leading up to 1776 was that the "sheep" (as you want to call them) -- i.e., the common people -- were ready to take up arms to expel the British presence in the colonies. This was in no small part due to the quartering of British troops in private American homes, and the attendant problems of having a large standing army permanently hanging out in American cities without an enemy to fight.
The lesson here is not that people will do what they're told. Just the opposite. If you push enough people for a long enough time, you build an undercurrent of resentment that will eventually manifest in a dramatic way. Put another way, get off your goddamn elitist high horse about how the unwashed masses are idiotic sheep. People are not as dumb or as docile as you want to believe.
I'm foregoing modding you up to reply. I completely agree with you. Although I really wish some things had been done differently for Phantom Menace, I found the movie quite enjoyable, and it's the film I like best among the three prequels.
Veering off-topic: the things I wish had been different include having Obi-Wan first meet Anakin as a young adult hot-shot pilot during the Clone Wars (c.f. A New Hope, "When I met your father..."), never revealing the origins of C-3PO and R2-D2 nor revealing why they are always together, and an expanded/more intelligent role for Darth Maul (we never needed to see Sidious during that movie, Maul was all the villain we needed, just like we only needed Dooku in the 2nd movie -- actually both Maul and Dooku are FAR more interesting characters than Sidious and should have featured large in all 3 movies).
(At this point you probably wish I had modded you instead. I'm sorry!)
Now that their DNA has been decoded, we will find out why platypuses are such powerful sorcerers.
Yes.
Just because Ubuntu is all kinds of awesome doesn't mean it's exempt from the software release issues that affect every other project that has a deadline (even a self-imposed deadline). The wise upgrader uses a 3-month offset. That way you still get to upgrade every 6 months, it's just that you're 3 months behind the curve. So much more painless.
It matters a lot. As other posters have already pointed out, Microsoft wants to see OLPC dead. Are you too young to remember the NC? This the same game. Probably XP will never actually ship on an OLPC laptop. Microsoft will simply keep OLPC preoccupied with trying to make XP run on the thing. "Oh just hang on a few more months, I'm sure we can get XP to run OK, and then the users will be able to run so much software!" On the other side of the coin, Microsoft will be telling potential recipients of an OLPC laptop, "Oh, hang on! Don't take that icky Linux-based one. There will be an XP-based one coming out in a few months!" Delay, delay, delay.
If (and that's a big if) it does ship, it will only be as a lever for Microsoft to kill the project from within. Sugar will become unstable and will have to be disabled. Lots of things will stop working. "Updates are on the way to solve these crashes and other bugs!" they'll say. Updates that never arrive. Delay, delay, delay.
Do you see now why it's so very, very important to not be dependent on a closed, abusive monopoly for a project such as OLPC? (Point of fact, this should be enough reason why anyone would steer clear of Microsoft, but that's another tale.)
Except that Christopher Tolkien didn't obliterate his father's work the way Brian Herbert did.