Personally... I am in favor of the sniper option as it sends a clear message that looters will be shot (oh the good old days when it was more common place).
...as long as your snipers don't carry copper-jacketed rounds...
Well if it's a remnant from British rule then there's a fair chance Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and half of Africa use that terminology too.
But out of interest, what is the reasoning behind the American interpretation of tabling? The British interpretation stems from the idea that tabling a bill, means you're putting it on the table for discussion.
They're using a different table?:)
Maybe Americans can only discuss bills if they're waving them around wildly and yelling at one another? Which, to be fair, sounds a lot like Canadian parliamentary 'discussions' as well...dignity and politics (in these two countries, anyway) seem to be on divergent courses in the last 50 years...
There are enough potentially cool games that we can afford to be picky. I'm not missing out on anything by not buying Diablo 3. Any time I would have spent with Diablo 3 will be spent with another potentially cool game, and I'll have just as much fun.
That's a fine stance to take, although I hope I never work for someone who feels that way about his employees.... You've dismissed a game whismically, confident that another game will suit your fancy...
Wait, what?? In what way is a gamer/producer relationship like an employer/employee relationship? Even if it were, why in hell would you put up with an 'employee' that basically dictated where and when they would work, and who may decide to go drop everything and go home for arbitrary reasons unrelated to their 'job'? (Yeah, I gotta go now, there's a transit strike going on. No, I don't take the bus, but I'm going home anyway. Bye!) In any workplace I know of, that would be grounds for dismissal.
This is a sales relationship, and what Blizzard/Activision (and yourself, apparently) don't seem to realize is that there are plenty of other, much tastier fish in the sea, ones that won't leave you with a bad taste in your mouth if your DSL goes down or you want to play them at the cabin with friends. Yes, I played Diablo (1 and 2) and Starcraft, and yes, I enjoyed them immensely. Past enjoyment of their products will not make me knuckle under for their bullying tactics in SC2 or Diablo 3. It is a betrayal of their core userbase, and it steps waay over the line, IMHO.
It's too bad, because in other ways they do make a great product. Buying SC2 or Diab3 would be like buying a brand new set of Calvin Klein underwear with a great big shitstain in them. Nice product, other than that one little flaw...
I have always found Tolkien's books hard to read. (Not enjoyable reading)
The only one I have actually finished was The Hobbit, as it was a relatively short one and seemed a bit lighter than the others. Others I have started but never completed.
That's when I was younger though, maybe I should try those books again now that I'm a middle aged geezer.
Thank you for that...I thought I was all alone!
Maybe we should start a support group: "Middle-aged nerds who have never read LOTR"?
I'm told it gets better about halfway through the Two Towers, but I have never been able to make myself get that far. I really don't know why, I am a rather voracious consumer of sci-fi and fantasy from many, many other authors...and I simply adored The Hobbit, first read it in fourth grade and I re-read it about every five years or so. It's odd, and I always feel a little bit ashamed when it comes up in conversation. It's feels a bit like admitting you're a sci-fi fan who has never seen Star Trek...the original, of course.
Li'l Suzie and Freddie might miss the latest round of OMGLULZ text/twitter/fb storms, and do you know how long it takes to get caught up again??? Not to mention the accusations of snobbery, or cascades of UMAD?!?s from their hyperactive compatriots? The horror...
I am an equity investor and I have blacklisted myself from investing or holding any interest in companies that appear to support SOPA. I have also been motivating my colleagues to do the same and while some don't care, some do.
Hmm...good idea, I like it!
Thinking along those lines for the everyday shopper, I wonder if there is one of those ubiquitous barcode-scanner apps that can be used to check if that item you are considering purchasing is provided by a SOPA-supporting company? If not...maybe there should be? (IANAProgrammer, or I would design one myself, hint hint to all you creative brains out there...:o)
Heck, this theoretical app could even send a quick email (or tweet or IM or whatever) to the company, stating that congratulations, they lost this particular sale due to their affiliation with SOPA, have a nice fucking day! Boycotting something is not very effective unless the company knows it, and knows why.
Hardcore pirates will use workarounds such as VPNs. The average Joe won't and will see people being thrown in jail and stop.
Oh, I don't know. Five years ago, 'Average Joe' still thought a torrent was something you found at a waterfall, yet look at today. I look at the ever-expanding range of 'Average Joe' friendly clients, and wonder how those clients will evolve in reaction to this latest scare tactic.
In five years, VPN (or something similar) might even become the norm, and unencrypted systems will probably be something only your granny would use, because she doesn't know any better. Speed might take a bit of a hit if that comes to pass, but looking at the steady increases in processing power over the last 30 years, probably not.
Interesting...so what about those other mascara ads that use pre-production 'tricks' to make their product look better? (i.e., decking the model out in falsies, or otherwise adding to 'lash count', then applying their product?) Would they be exempt, I wonder?
I suppose in that case, real women could make their own eyelashes look the same as the ad, only it would have little if anything to do with the mascara...
Instead of trashing all post-production work, which could put a lot of people out of a job, why not just change the mandatory notification size? Kinda like they did for cigarette packages: a minimum of 50% of the front and back packaging must be a health warning advert (at least, that's how it is here in Canada).
Make it so they have to describe exactly what they did (e.g., altered skin tone, corrected blemishes and enhanced eyelashes, lips, nose and bust size) and legislate that they must make the size of the description a minimum percentage of the total advertisement size (maybe 30%?) and use font size scaled to the advert size instead of using text so small one has to pull out the magnifying glass to read it on a 55" HD plasma. That way people can see clearly for themselves which ones are the incredible lying fuckwads, and which ones aren't. Wouldn't that be nice?
Well...we made the tobacco companies comply with this, I don't see why we can't do so with beauty product advertisements...
For that matter, what about kids in the back seat? Nobody's seriously ready to recommend parents not take their kids anywhere in motor vehicles, right? Yet with the crying and screaming fits they're known to throw randomly, as well as possibly even throwing toys or other objects while in the car -- clearly they're more dangerous than a hands-free phone call!
Yep. Next step: mandatory sound-and-juicebox-proof opaque barriers between the front and back seat for those who want to travel with kids. Heck, let's make it more of a driver cocoon, with video feeds to bring in rear and side views in lieu of mirrors (which people don't use anyways), and lets make it mandatory for anyone who wants to travel with a passenger at all, regardless of age...
Welcome to the nanny state, please check your intelligence and autonomy at the door.
Hmmm...I wonder if this will apply to OnStar as well? No more "where's the nearest flower shop? or "call 555-555-5555"?
Or...is this a clever maneuver to restrict all in-vehicle communication to OnStar (or other OnStar-esque services)? Separate cell-phone and vehicle-phone calling accounts, anybody? One-stop-shopping for law enforcement for your phone records (at least for calls while driving...)?
Whoops, gotta go, my next conspiracy theory is about to hatch and I hate missing the look on their little faces as they see the world for the first time...:)
The real problem is averaging reviews based on assumed identical weighting. There has been some attempt to alleviate that with various 'helpfulness' systems (most helpful good review, most helpful bad review, was this review helpful to you? etc.) but like any open system, that can also be be gamed.
The only sure fire method to beat the -turfers is through a healthy dose of skepticism and doing your homework. Don't base buying decisions on the reviews from one or two sites, seek out more detailed reviews that discuss actual features and measurable performance criteria, and pay slightly more attention to the negative reviews than the positive (but again, seek correlation from other, non-associated sites wherever possible to fight the negative -turfers). And try to buy from sites/stores with a healthy return policy, in case you do get suckered even after all your research.
Oh yeah, last but most important of all, POST DETAILED REVIEWS YOURSELF! I know I'm guilty of skipping the reviews after my shiny new widget shows up, (both because they take a while to do if you do them right, and because I'm just too busy playing with my new toy) but I've been trying to be more proactive in this area lately. It's like OSS: if everybody takes and nobody contributes (except the -turfers, of course), pretty soon it's useless to everybody...
I personally like clicking on a vague icon and not knowing what will happen. It's thrilling.
Yeah. It's kinda like finding out what fun things your new car can do by poking all the buttons and flipping all the switches..."c'mon, I paid for an ejector seat, now which button is it?"
Not, however, advisable to try while actually using the car for its intended purpose. (Er, that would be driving, for the gutter-minded amongst us...although I suppose that other might be an even worse time to find the ejector seat button...)
In the presence of a static magnetic field (as around a conductor carrying a constant current), electrons in the clamp circuit, which also carries a DC current, will be pushed to one side of the clamp conductor, inducing a voltage relative to the other side. Measure the voltage and you know the current in the wire it's clamped around.
Oh, that's clever! Thanks, I knew there must be a way, I'm just used to working with AC...;)
Hmmm...I am only familiar with AC power monitoring. How would current monitoring work for a DC system? DC current can't induce, so you couldn't use simple current transformers like you do for AC systems...I suppose some sort of inline resistive/voltage monitoring would work, but it makes a retrofit a bit of a biatch, and you'd see additional losses over the monitoring resistor.
You could use voltage*current to calculate the thermal losses in a conductor but what you've done incorrectly is assume that "voltage" in this equation is the voltage between the conductor and ground.
The correct way to calculate losses in a conductor is current * end-to-end voltage difference
The end-to-end voltage difference is directly proportional to the current so the most efficient way to calculate the losses is current squared times resistance.
Since the surface area of a wire is proportional to the square of the wire diameter and the conductivity required is proportional to the square of the current carried it ends up that wire diameter is directly proportional to the current.
A concise explanation of the principles of voltage drop, thank you! I was looking for someone who had posted that!
As much as I don't like Zynga at all, I'm going to have to ask you to explain how what they're doing is writing human Skinner boxes. Please do so in a way that does not include the output of the video game industry as a whole, or, in fact, the very concept of risk and reward, as an abstract Skinner box.
Constant, 24/7 monitoring of the subject by external observers, so as to allow the observer to continually adjust the box to encourage more 'rewarding' (for the observer) conditioned responses by the subject. Even when the rats go back to their 'home' cages, the observers are watching and adding to their data sets, trying to tweak the box to get even more button pushes from more rats than last time...or selling the data to others in order to make more attractive buttons outside the box.
To be fair, they aren't the only ones to do this (XBoX Live, much?), but they are certainly getting it down to a science, and at least XBox Live can't follow me around using GPS technology...yet.:o)
I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that anyone who believes that the universe is all there is is able to come up with any real meaning. By definition, if you believe that the universe is all there is, you believe that it has no meaning.
Ahhh, I get it now. You believe that 'real' (or indeed, any) meaning comes from outside of yourself. Sorry, wrong.
Even language, symbols, things that are tangible and have been ascribed a collective 'meaning' by consensus are only meaningful if we internally ascribe meaning to them. We as a group of individuals say that 'this' means 'that', and if enough people accept that meaning, we can use it to communicate further. What does Shakespeare's Sonnet #6 mean to you? Do you think it means the same to me? Why not, if all 'real' meaning must come from outside oneself?
Consider aphasia, where people believe they are communicating certain words, but biological short-circuits alter the intended output. How do they manage to communicate at all, if they can't use this externally-imposed language structure? Because they learn to re-associate meanings within themselves until they find ones that allow them to communicate with others, or develop some alternate way to express themselves if they desire to strongly enough. They are coherent in their own mind. If they choose not to seek communication with others, they can still live and thrive within themselves, albeit it could get a bit lonely.
Trust yourself. You are, after all, the only one who knows for certain what means what to you. Thou art certainly god.
My 'immortality' will come from the positive (and unfortunately, sometimes negative) changes I bring to others,
And when the universe ends in heat death, what will that mean?
Don't know. Won't be around to see it;)
It means everything to me right here, right now. That's all it has to mean, for me.
You seem hung up on some final, everlasting effect that absolutely must be attained (?) whereas I am happy to satisfy the conditions that provide immediate meaning to my life while I am here to live it, and let the universe take care of things after I am not.
It seems to me a measure of hubris to demand that the universe has to take note of your existence forever and ever, just to give you a reason to keep existing...
And when you die, you believe that it will all cease. In the long run, what difference does it make?
Not quite accurate, there. Nobody's claiming that the universe and all that's in it ceases to exist when I die, just that I cease to be a part of it.
The difference can be summed up as a version of 'pay it forward'. My 'immortality' will come from the positive (and unfortunately, sometimes negative) changes I bring to others, some of whom will outlive me and perhaps pass those changes onward to others, etc. I may not be there to see it, but I really don't have to in order to be happy with the results now. I simply strive to keep my net balance positive because that makes me a better person in my own eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally... I am in favor of the sniper option as it sends a clear message that looters will be shot (oh the good old days when it was more common place).
...as long as your snipers don't carry copper-jacketed rounds...
FWIW, I found this post useful as a layman's summary of the differences between PIPA and SOPA.
Of course, now that they're 'massaging' both of them to make them more digestible, this may no longer apply...
Well if it's a remnant from British rule then there's a fair chance Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and half of Africa use that terminology too.
But out of interest, what is the reasoning behind the American interpretation of tabling? The British interpretation stems from the idea that tabling a bill, means you're putting it on the table for discussion.
They're using a different table? :)
Maybe Americans can only discuss bills if they're waving them around wildly and yelling at one another? Which, to be fair, sounds a lot like Canadian parliamentary 'discussions' as well...dignity and politics (in these two countries, anyway) seem to be on divergent courses in the last 50 years...
You DO know how the TSA recruits people, right...? They put adverts on pizza delivery boxes
You couldn't make this shit up it you if you hired a whole team of comedy writers...
And yet, the best part of all is the come-on at the top
Really illustrates their target demographic: immature dropouts who fall for those 'x-ray vision' glasses ads...and who love pizza, of course!
There are enough potentially cool games that we can afford to be picky. I'm not missing out on anything by not buying Diablo 3. Any time I would have spent with Diablo 3 will be spent with another potentially cool game, and I'll have just as much fun.
That's a fine stance to take, although I hope I never work for someone who feels that way about his employees. ... You've dismissed a game whismically, confident that another game will suit your fancy...
Wait, what?? In what way is a gamer/producer relationship like an employer/employee relationship? Even if it were, why in hell would you put up with an 'employee' that basically dictated where and when they would work, and who may decide to go drop everything and go home for arbitrary reasons unrelated to their 'job'? (Yeah, I gotta go now, there's a transit strike going on. No, I don't take the bus, but I'm going home anyway. Bye!) In any workplace I know of, that would be grounds for dismissal.
This is a sales relationship, and what Blizzard/Activision (and yourself, apparently) don't seem to realize is that there are plenty of other, much tastier fish in the sea, ones that won't leave you with a bad taste in your mouth if your DSL goes down or you want to play them at the cabin with friends. Yes, I played Diablo (1 and 2) and Starcraft, and yes, I enjoyed them immensely. Past enjoyment of their products will not make me knuckle under for their bullying tactics in SC2 or Diablo 3. It is a betrayal of their core userbase, and it steps waay over the line, IMHO.
It's too bad, because in other ways they do make a great product. Buying SC2 or Diab3 would be like buying a brand new set of Calvin Klein underwear with a great big shitstain in them. Nice product, other than that one little flaw...
I have always found Tolkien's books hard to read. (Not enjoyable reading)
The only one I have actually finished was The Hobbit, as it was a relatively short one and seemed a bit lighter than the others. Others I have started but never completed.
That's when I was younger though, maybe I should try those books again now that I'm a middle aged geezer.
Thank you for that...I thought I was all alone!
Maybe we should start a support group: "Middle-aged nerds who have never read LOTR"?
I'm told it gets better about halfway through the Two Towers, but I have never been able to make myself get that far. I really don't know why, I am a rather voracious consumer of sci-fi and fantasy from many, many other authors...and I simply adored The Hobbit, first read it in fourth grade and I re-read it about every five years or so. It's odd, and I always feel a little bit ashamed when it comes up in conversation. It's feels a bit like admitting you're a sci-fi fan who has never seen Star Trek...the original, of course.
Phone calls can wait until they get home.
Who uses their phones to call people anymore?
Li'l Suzie and Freddie might miss the latest round of OMGLULZ text/twitter/fb storms, and do you know how long it takes to get caught up again??? Not to mention the accusations of snobbery, or cascades of UMAD?!?s from their hyperactive compatriots? The horror...
Only a fool lets technology rule their life rather than just being a tool.
Ahhh, sweet English, where communication can so often be both grammatically correct and contextually ambiguous.
So, in you opinion it's better to be a tool than a fool? :o)
I am an equity investor and I have blacklisted myself from investing or holding any interest in companies that appear to support SOPA. I have also been motivating my colleagues to do the same and while some don't care, some do.
Hmm...good idea, I like it!
Thinking along those lines for the everyday shopper, I wonder if there is one of those ubiquitous barcode-scanner apps that can be used to check if that item you are considering purchasing is provided by a SOPA-supporting company? If not...maybe there should be? (IANAProgrammer, or I would design one myself, hint hint to all you creative brains out there... :o)
Heck, this theoretical app could even send a quick email (or tweet or IM or whatever) to the company, stating that congratulations, they lost this particular sale due to their affiliation with SOPA, have a nice fucking day! Boycotting something is not very effective unless the company knows it, and knows why.
Just a thought :)
Fuck off!
I think you meant: "Que te jodan!", or perhaps "Ándate a la chucha!" :o)
Hardcore pirates will use workarounds such as VPNs. The average Joe won't and will see people being thrown in jail and stop.
Oh, I don't know. Five years ago, 'Average Joe' still thought a torrent was something you found at a waterfall, yet look at today. I look at the ever-expanding range of 'Average Joe' friendly clients, and wonder how those clients will evolve in reaction to this latest scare tactic.
In five years, VPN (or something similar) might even become the norm, and unencrypted systems will probably be something only your granny would use, because she doesn't know any better. Speed might take a bit of a hit if that comes to pass, but looking at the steady increases in processing power over the last 30 years, probably not.
Interesting...so what about those other mascara ads that use pre-production 'tricks' to make their product look better? (i.e., decking the model out in falsies, or otherwise adding to 'lash count', then applying their product?) Would they be exempt, I wonder?
I suppose in that case, real women could make their own eyelashes look the same as the ad, only it would have little if anything to do with the mascara...
'cause, you know, men like huge honkers on their wimmen...
Instead of trashing all post-production work, which could put a lot of people out of a job, why not just change the mandatory notification size? Kinda like they did for cigarette packages: a minimum of 50% of the front and back packaging must be a health warning advert (at least, that's how it is here in Canada).
Make it so they have to describe exactly what they did (e.g., altered skin tone, corrected blemishes and enhanced eyelashes, lips, nose and bust size) and legislate that they must make the size of the description a minimum percentage of the total advertisement size (maybe 30%?) and use font size scaled to the advert size instead of using text so small one has to pull out the magnifying glass to read it on a 55" HD plasma. That way people can see clearly for themselves which ones are the incredible lying fuckwads, and which ones aren't. Wouldn't that be nice?
Well...we made the tobacco companies comply with this, I don't see why we can't do so with beauty product advertisements...
For that matter, what about kids in the back seat? Nobody's seriously ready to recommend parents not take their kids anywhere in motor vehicles, right? Yet with the crying and screaming fits they're known to throw randomly, as well as possibly even throwing toys or other objects while in the car -- clearly they're more dangerous than a hands-free phone call!
Yep. Next step: mandatory sound-and-juicebox-proof opaque barriers between the front and back seat for those who want to travel with kids. Heck, let's make it more of a driver cocoon, with video feeds to bring in rear and side views in lieu of mirrors (which people don't use anyways), and lets make it mandatory for anyone who wants to travel with a passenger at all, regardless of age...
Welcome to the nanny state, please check your intelligence and autonomy at the door.
Hmmm...I wonder if this will apply to OnStar as well? No more "where's the nearest flower shop? or "call 555-555-5555"?
Or...is this a clever maneuver to restrict all in-vehicle communication to OnStar (or other OnStar-esque services)? Separate cell-phone and vehicle-phone calling accounts, anybody? One-stop-shopping for law enforcement for your phone records (at least for calls while driving...)?
Whoops, gotta go, my next conspiracy theory is about to hatch and I hate missing the look on their little faces as they see the world for the first time...:)
The real problem is numbers
Oblig XKCD reference.
The real problem is averaging reviews based on assumed identical weighting. There has been some attempt to alleviate that with various 'helpfulness' systems (most helpful good review, most helpful bad review, was this review helpful to you? etc.) but like any open system, that can also be be gamed.
The only sure fire method to beat the -turfers is through a healthy dose of skepticism and doing your homework. Don't base buying decisions on the reviews from one or two sites, seek out more detailed reviews that discuss actual features and measurable performance criteria, and pay slightly more attention to the negative reviews than the positive (but again, seek correlation from other, non-associated sites wherever possible to fight the negative -turfers). And try to buy from sites/stores with a healthy return policy, in case you do get suckered even after all your research.
Oh yeah, last but most important of all, POST DETAILED REVIEWS YOURSELF! I know I'm guilty of skipping the reviews after my shiny new widget shows up, (both because they take a while to do if you do them right, and because I'm just too busy playing with my new toy) but I've been trying to be more proactive in this area lately. It's like OSS: if everybody takes and nobody contributes (except the -turfers, of course), pretty soon it's useless to everybody...
I personally like clicking on a vague icon and not knowing what will happen. It's thrilling.
Yeah. It's kinda like finding out what fun things your new car can do by poking all the buttons and flipping all the switches..."c'mon, I paid for an ejector seat, now which button is it?"
Not, however, advisable to try while actually using the car for its intended purpose. (Er, that would be driving, for the gutter-minded amongst us...although I suppose that other might be an even worse time to find the ejector seat button...)
Hall effect.
In the presence of a static magnetic field (as around a conductor carrying a constant current), electrons in the clamp circuit, which also carries a DC current, will be pushed to one side of the clamp conductor, inducing a voltage relative to the other side. Measure the voltage and you know the current in the wire it's clamped around.
Oh, that's clever! Thanks, I knew there must be a way, I'm just used to working with AC...;)
Hmmm...I am only familiar with AC power monitoring. How would current monitoring work for a DC system? DC current can't induce, so you couldn't use simple current transformers like you do for AC systems...I suppose some sort of inline resistive/voltage monitoring would work, but it makes a retrofit a bit of a biatch, and you'd see additional losses over the monitoring resistor.
Thoughts?
You could use voltage*current to calculate the thermal losses in a conductor but what you've done incorrectly is assume that "voltage" in this equation is the voltage between the conductor and ground.
The correct way to calculate losses in a conductor is current * end-to-end voltage difference
The end-to-end voltage difference is directly proportional to the current so the most efficient way to calculate the losses is current squared times resistance.
Since the surface area of a wire is proportional to the square of the wire diameter and the conductivity required is proportional to the square of the current carried it ends up that wire diameter is directly proportional to the current.
A concise explanation of the principles of voltage drop, thank you! I was looking for someone who had posted that!
As much as I don't like Zynga at all, I'm going to have to ask you to explain how what they're doing is writing human Skinner boxes. Please do so in a way that does not include the output of the video game industry as a whole, or, in fact, the very concept of risk and reward, as an abstract Skinner box.
Constant, 24/7 monitoring of the subject by external observers, so as to allow the observer to continually adjust the box to encourage more 'rewarding' (for the observer) conditioned responses by the subject. Even when the rats go back to their 'home' cages, the observers are watching and adding to their data sets, trying to tweak the box to get even more button pushes from more rats than last time...or selling the data to others in order to make more attractive buttons outside the box.
To be fair, they aren't the only ones to do this (XBoX Live, much?), but they are certainly getting it down to a science, and at least XBox Live can't follow me around using GPS technology...yet. :o)
I'm sorry, but I cannot accept that anyone who believes that the universe is all there is is able to come up with any real meaning. By definition, if you believe that the universe is all there is, you believe that it has no meaning.
Ahhh, I get it now. You believe that 'real' (or indeed, any) meaning comes from outside of yourself. Sorry, wrong.
Even language, symbols, things that are tangible and have been ascribed a collective 'meaning' by consensus are only meaningful if we internally ascribe meaning to them. We as a group of individuals say that 'this' means 'that', and if enough people accept that meaning, we can use it to communicate further. What does Shakespeare's Sonnet #6 mean to you? Do you think it means the same to me? Why not, if all 'real' meaning must come from outside oneself?
Consider aphasia, where people believe they are communicating certain words, but biological short-circuits alter the intended output. How do they manage to communicate at all, if they can't use this externally-imposed language structure? Because they learn to re-associate meanings within themselves until they find ones that allow them to communicate with others, or develop some alternate way to express themselves if they desire to strongly enough. They are coherent in their own mind. If they choose not to seek communication with others, they can still live and thrive within themselves, albeit it could get a bit lonely.
Trust yourself. You are, after all, the only one who knows for certain what means what to you. Thou art certainly god.
My 'immortality' will come from the positive (and unfortunately, sometimes negative) changes I bring to others,
And when the universe ends in heat death, what will that mean?
Don't know. Won't be around to see it ;)
It means everything to me right here, right now. That's all it has to mean, for me.
You seem hung up on some final, everlasting effect that absolutely must be attained (?) whereas I am happy to satisfy the conditions that provide immediate meaning to my life while I am here to live it, and let the universe take care of things after I am not.
It seems to me a measure of hubris to demand that the universe has to take note of your existence forever and ever, just to give you a reason to keep existing...
And when you die, you believe that it will all cease. In the long run, what difference does it make?
Not quite accurate, there. Nobody's claiming that the universe and all that's in it ceases to exist when I die, just that I cease to be a part of it.
The difference can be summed up as a version of 'pay it forward'. My 'immortality' will come from the positive (and unfortunately, sometimes negative) changes I bring to others, some of whom will outlive me and perhaps pass those changes onward to others, etc. I may not be there to see it, but I really don't have to in order to be happy with the results now. I simply strive to keep my net balance positive because that makes me a better person in my own eyes.
How is that difficult to comprehend?