>>To be truly Lamarckian, characteristics *not* affecting the genome would have to have some heredity, which they don't.
Well, that's why I didn't call it truly Lamarckian, but Lamarckian-style. Call it Lamarckian-esque, if it makes you feel better. =)
Naive Darwinism says that you have these sorts of competitions for genes, and the conditions the parents go through don't really matter except 1) Mutations (that make it to the gametes) and 2) If they can successfully produce offspring.
On the contrary, there's a lot of interesting phenomena which show the parents' environmental conditions affecting the offspring.
Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.
It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.
I kinda of liked the demo, though it did seem like the game could get really annoying when the difficulty ramped up, due to the fact that it suffers from Dragon's Lair syndrome -- i.e., one mistimed button press and your character dies. Sometimes the timing is rather tricky, which means you just fall into the abyss over and over until you get it right. Dunno if that's really my cup of tea.
I do really like the art direction for the game. The oversaturated-white look is pretty nice to look at. Or maybe it just feels that way after 50 straight hours of uninterrupted brown wasteland and concrete rubble in Fallout 3.
>>The way I understand it is that a large part of evolutionary theory ASSUMES that memory can't be inherited.
Maybe not memory per se, but certain phenomena have demonstrated Lamarckian style inheritance.
Mm, DNA can be methylated, which modifies its behavior. A fat pregnant mother will methylate the genes in the fetus, resulting in a kid much more genetically prone to being fat. Experiments with dutch prisoners of war during WWII showed that even when raised under similar conditions, kids from mothers who ate more when they were pregnant were much more prone to obesity.
>>Production quality storage is expensive, and for good bloody reason.
Sure, they like their profit margins.
It really depends on your concept of "production-quality". I have a couple small businesses, and our servers have been running quite well using a RAID0+1 setup that's been going strong since 2004. It'd have been RAID5, but the mobo support for RAID5 is sketchy.
As someone who writes a check out of his own damn pocket to pay for every piece of equipment his company buys, I can tell you that there's nothing a $10,000+ appliance can do that would make me fork over that much money. I'd rather get a new car, thank you very much.
Actually, yeah. I used to like AVG, but now it's total shit.
The latest version of AVG caused my system to grind to a halt and start crashing randomly. I don't know what it was doing, but if I tried to open many files quickly, my applications would crash. Probably something to do with their hooks which enable the scanning.
I uninstalled it and my system started working perfectly again.
>>I'm guessing they'll all congregate to an island where Nixon will plan to destroy them from an orbital weapon, and at the last moment point their exhausts upwards, pushing the planet a little further out of orbit with the sun, thus preventing global warming.
What was the name of Bender's girlfriend on the moon? Crushmaster 3000? Something like that?
>>Black Death is not a virus. It is a bacterium. Yersinia pestis.
Maybe.
Yersina is actually just our best guess, but the modern version of it doesn't match symptoms of the black death from back in the day, so it could be something else entirely.
>>Every memory is important, regardless the place, incidence, or time. That's why it's such a tragedy to even lose one of those memories. >>And we lose millions of them per day.
>>On this ballot are printed in no particular order the name and party affiliation of the candidates. Next to each name is a circle. You place an x in the circle for the candidate of your choice. Then you go back to the poll clerk who places your ballot in the ballot box.
Here too.
Crap.
I should have realized there was something fishy this year when I voted for "Alan Keyes, Democrat Party".
>>That being said, do you know of any good RPGs or FPSes, or anything with a storyline for that matter, that do manage to transcend adolescence? I would really like to play through a more "serious" game.
Bioshock is an easy answer. If you've ever read Ayn Rand, the game is highly amusing, as it portrays a Randian society after it went sour.
Mass Effect certainly wasn't geared for adolescents, but I found the game to be a bit boring, though it had a decent storyline.
If you're willing to go back in time a decade, Planescape: Torment was a great RPG with a mind-blowing story, set in the best D&D setting of all time.
It's a little disheartening how angry the ultra right-wing is about all this. They couldn't be more pissed about what happened last night, and a lot of them showed their true colors last night when they booed at Senator McCain's gracious speech, where he (along with Obama in his) tried to heal the divide in this country.
Just booing??
I recall two elections in a row of the left being such sore losers they filed lawsuits over the results.
Give me a little booing any day.
I'm still disappointed Bob Barr didn't get any states.;)
The problem is that we don't really know what Obama thinks. He's avoided most of the tough issues and done his best to not take any firm stances on anything. Frontline had a show on the other night about Obama and McCain. They had Obama's own strategist who said that not taking a stance on anything was their actual strategy. That way he would never have to defend it later. It allowed him to enter into a campaign with near zero baggage. They bet right that experience and really knowing where someone stood on an issue wouldn't matter as long as you talked about change and vague promises of giving stuff to people.
I'm glad that someone else in America noticed that Obama didn't make a single concrete statement about anything until the last month of the campaign, when he came up with a vague "tax cuts for 90% of Americans" plan.
My guess is only a democrat could run a Seinfeld campaign (a campaign about nothing)... you need a free pass from the media to get away with a plan like that.
even ordinary people can have extraordinary memories and experiences to share with others. just think about all the old people who lived through World War II, the civil rights movement, the birth of the modern computer, etc. there are a lot of things that we take for granted in our lives that future generations might be interested in but have no way of finding out about
Exactly!
I work a lot with local history programs, where school teachers go out into their communities and interview the elderly... the stories these guys have collected from "ordinary" people in the community is nothing short of amazing. If you think about the changes that a 100 year old Native American lady has seen in California since she was born, she doesn't need to do something "heroic" to have all sorts of interesting stories to tell. I've worked on various projects which archive these stories... it's really amazing stuff.
Of course, people like the GP would probably pooh-pooh the story of one old white guy I know, who was bailed from jail by Martin Luther King, Jr., and probably saved his life, since the racist white guys in the cell were thinking about killing him for participating in the Civil Rights movement... I mean, who knew that story? Isn't it meaningful? Doesn't it tell us something about King, and about the white people that were involved in the Civil Rights movement?
Because misrepresenting (and I'm not saying they did at all, but it's something to be aware of from the perspective of the charity) an endorsement from a charity to solicit donations is what some people might refer to as "fraud".
Right, and GenCon has had a lot of that going around these days. They lost the right to do the Star Wars Celebration conventions after LucasArts donated a bunch of stuff for a charity auction, and then GenCon kept all the money. (The agreement was that they'd donate the "profits", see, and, boy, running those charity auctions sure are expensive.) Yeah, stealing money from kids with cancer... that's GenCon for ya.
Then you also have the back taxes owed to Indianapolis, and then their bungled bankrupcy (Peter A. called it a "Learning Experience) trying to get out of it.
>>I do not care about the people in the examples I listed.
Right, I could tell by the "bloodbath" thing.
>>I'm not a sociopath, because I care about MY society of which the Rwandans and Khmers are not a part
It's sociopathic to not care about 1 to 4 million being killed in cold blood regardless of whose "side" you're on. I'm not Jewish, but I think the Holocaust was a tragedy. You seem to disagree.
>>it is inevitable that they cause operations (like the disaster in Mogadishu) that end badly for those who AssUme it should be the White Man's Burden to intervene.
Only if you equate intervention with a ground war in Asia. The KR couldn't have won without their tanks and heavy equipment supplies from other countries, and the US (as it demonstrated in Vietnam) is really good at blowing up those sorts of things, but not so good at running around in jungles. If we hadn't withdrawn from Vietnam, we could have continued shutting the North Vietnamese supply lines down, as we had for years.
And why would you say it's the White Man's Burden? The government of Cambodia asked us to bomb a 50 mile radius around their own fucking capitol city, in order to destroy the KR's tanks and artillery. That's why I said it was a poster child for intervention, since the country itself asked for the US to help.
Ford refused, of course, since the hippies in the antiwar movement had made such actions politically impossible... and so millions of people died.
I think the Peace movement is rather ironically named, myself.
>>What happened when the USA left Vietnam? Perhaps it wasn't pretty for Vietnam, but within 15 years the Soviet Union was no longer a threat.
Right, because the policy of containment actually worked, and because Communist countries cannot compete economically, we spent them into bankrupcy in the arms race.
>>The Domino Theory never came true (at least not in terms of all of SE Asia becoming communist.
Actually, it did. Soon after the fall of Vietnam, the Cambodian government came to America asking to get about 50 miles around Phnom Penh carpet-bombed. Ford was a coward, and wouldn't intervene after all the hippy anti-war crap, and the communist Khmer Rouge took over and promptly murdered 1 to 4 million of their own citizens. Who trained them? China. Where did their tanks come from? North Vietnam.
Slashdot Mirror
>>To be truly Lamarckian, characteristics *not* affecting the genome would have to have some heredity, which they don't.
Well, that's why I didn't call it truly Lamarckian, but Lamarckian-style. Call it Lamarckian-esque, if it makes you feel better. =)
Naive Darwinism says that you have these sorts of competitions for genes, and the conditions the parents go through don't really matter except 1) Mutations (that make it to the gametes) and 2) If they can successfully produce offspring.
On the contrary, there's a lot of interesting phenomena which show the parents' environmental conditions affecting the offspring.
Supreme Commander was interesting, but had a weird economy that sort of just kept growing exponentially. You get to a point in the game where you can survive just by making the uber-unit of the game. The uber-units also produce energy for the economy, and can assist in producing more uber-units, so you end up with this sort of Fibonacci sequence progression of uber-units in the game. At some point, you decide you've made enough of them, walk them along the bottom of the ocean to your opponent's base, and annihilate them.
It's a very odd game mechanic, and I'm not sure it's one I liked.
I kinda of liked the demo, though it did seem like the game could get really annoying when the difficulty ramped up, due to the fact that it suffers from Dragon's Lair syndrome -- i.e., one mistimed button press and your character dies. Sometimes the timing is rather tricky, which means you just fall into the abyss over and over until you get it right. Dunno if that's really my cup of tea.
I do really like the art direction for the game. The oversaturated-white look is pretty nice to look at. Or maybe it just feels that way after 50 straight hours of uninterrupted brown wasteland and concrete rubble in Fallout 3.
>>The way I understand it is that a large part of evolutionary theory ASSUMES that memory can't be inherited.
Maybe not memory per se, but certain phenomena have demonstrated Lamarckian style inheritance.
Mm, DNA can be methylated, which modifies its behavior. A fat pregnant mother will methylate the genes in the fetus, resulting in a kid much more genetically prone to being fat. Experiments with dutch prisoners of war during WWII showed that even when raised under similar conditions, kids from mothers who ate more when they were pregnant were much more prone to obesity.
There's also effects like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting which modify an offspring's genome on the fly between generation and generation.
>>Production quality storage is expensive, and for good bloody reason.
Sure, they like their profit margins.
It really depends on your concept of "production-quality". I have a couple small businesses, and our servers have been running quite well using a RAID0+1 setup that's been going strong since 2004. It'd have been RAID5, but the mobo support for RAID5 is sketchy.
As someone who writes a check out of his own damn pocket to pay for every piece of equipment his company buys, I can tell you that there's nothing a $10,000+ appliance can do that would make me fork over that much money. I'd rather get a new car, thank you very much.
Actually, yeah. I used to like AVG, but now it's total shit.
The latest version of AVG caused my system to grind to a halt and start crashing randomly. I don't know what it was doing, but if I tried to open many files quickly, my applications would crash. Probably something to do with their hooks which enable the scanning.
I uninstalled it and my system started working perfectly again.
I'd just steer the OP away from Puzzle Quest. It's like bejeweled, but in an RPG setting.
The simulated violence consists of matching three tiles and dealing "damage" to the opponent. =)
>>I'm guessing they'll all congregate to an island where Nixon will plan to destroy them from an orbital weapon, and at the last moment point their exhausts upwards, pushing the planet a little further out of orbit with the sun, thus preventing global warming.
What was the name of Bender's girlfriend on the moon? Crushmaster 3000? Something like that?
I think that'd be a good name for this robot.
>>Black Death is not a virus. It is a bacterium. Yersinia pestis.
Maybe.
Yersina is actually just our best guess, but the modern version of it doesn't match symptoms of the black death from back in the day, so it could be something else entirely.
>>Every memory is important, regardless the place, incidence, or time. That's why it's such a tragedy to even lose one of those memories.
>>And we lose millions of them per day.
That's why I livejournal!
>>On this ballot are printed in no particular order the name and party affiliation of the candidates. Next to each name is a circle. You place an x in the circle for the candidate of your choice. Then you go back to the poll clerk who places your ballot in the ballot box.
Here too.
Crap.
I should have realized there was something fishy this year when I voted for "Alan Keyes, Democrat Party".
If you were a rapist or mugger, would you really bet that you wouldn't get shot?
>>That being said, do you know of any good RPGs or FPSes, or anything with a storyline for that matter, that do manage to transcend adolescence? I would really like to play through a more "serious" game.
Bioshock is an easy answer. If you've ever read Ayn Rand, the game is highly amusing, as it portrays a Randian society after it went sour.
Mass Effect certainly wasn't geared for adolescents, but I found the game to be a bit boring, though it had a decent storyline.
If you're willing to go back in time a decade, Planescape: Torment was a great RPG with a mind-blowing story, set in the best D&D setting of all time.
Plenty of others.
>>I heard dubya was 6 points lower in the approval ratings than Nixon was - after he was indicted.
But did you hear that congress' approval rating was HALF that of Bush's?
Obama was part of congress, but naturally that never got reported.
As Penn and Teller said (well, Penn, at least), if every woman in America was issued a gun, who would be so fucking stupid to try to rape a woman?
>>When you say please don't build any Nuclear missiles they might actually listen.
Damn, really?
If we'd only have given Kim Jong Il a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, then maybe he'd have been willing to listen to us as well oh wait
While on that topic...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibsP6XN2dIo
It's a little disheartening how angry the ultra right-wing is about all this. They couldn't be more pissed about what happened last night, and a lot of them showed their true colors last night when they booed at Senator McCain's gracious speech, where he (along with Obama in his) tried to heal the divide in this country.
Just booing??
I recall two elections in a row of the left being such sore losers they filed lawsuits over the results.
Give me a little booing any day.
I'm still disappointed Bob Barr didn't get any states. ;)
The problem is that we don't really know what Obama thinks. He's avoided most of the tough issues and done his best to not take any firm stances on anything. Frontline had a show on the other night about Obama and McCain. They had Obama's own strategist who said that not taking a stance on anything was their actual strategy. That way he would never have to defend it later. It allowed him to enter into a campaign with near zero baggage. They bet right that experience and really knowing where someone stood on an issue wouldn't matter as long as you talked about change and vague promises of giving stuff to people.
I'm glad that someone else in America noticed that Obama didn't make a single concrete statement about anything until the last month of the campaign, when he came up with a vague "tax cuts for 90% of Americans" plan.
My guess is only a democrat could run a Seinfeld campaign (a campaign about nothing)... you need a free pass from the media to get away with a plan like that.
>>Libraries-of-Congress and football-fields can be made to apply to anything, if you use them right.
In power? I propose the imaginary unit of Work being the energy needed to move a Library of Congress across one football field at a rate of 1 ms/s
even ordinary people can have extraordinary memories and experiences to share with others. just think about all the old people who lived through World War II, the civil rights movement, the birth of the modern computer, etc. there are a lot of things that we take for granted in our lives that future generations might be interested in but have no way of finding out about
Exactly!
I work a lot with local history programs, where school teachers go out into their communities and interview the elderly... the stories these guys have collected from "ordinary" people in the community is nothing short of amazing. If you think about the changes that a 100 year old Native American lady has seen in California since she was born, she doesn't need to do something "heroic" to have all sorts of interesting stories to tell. I've worked on various projects which archive these stories... it's really amazing stuff.
Of course, people like the GP would probably pooh-pooh the story of one old white guy I know, who was bailed from jail by Martin Luther King, Jr., and probably saved his life, since the racist white guys in the cell were thinking about killing him for participating in the Civil Rights movement... I mean, who knew that story? Isn't it meaningful? Doesn't it tell us something about King, and about the white people that were involved in the Civil Rights movement?
>>lifestyle changes like using less plastics, wasting less energy, etc. are just common sense
Uh, you know the carbon in the plastic is sequestered already, right?
Well, obviously you wouldn't want to use biodegradable plastics. That's just common sense.
And "wasting energy" wouldn't produce CO2 if we had a sane energy policy based around nuclear energy.
Because misrepresenting (and I'm not saying they did at all, but it's something to be aware of from the perspective of the charity) an endorsement from a charity to solicit donations is what some people might refer to as "fraud".
Right, and GenCon has had a lot of that going around these days. They lost the right to do the Star Wars Celebration conventions after LucasArts donated a bunch of stuff for a charity auction, and then GenCon kept all the money. (The agreement was that they'd donate the "profits", see, and, boy, running those charity auctions sure are expensive.) Yeah, stealing money from kids with cancer... that's GenCon for ya.
Then you also have the back taxes owed to Indianapolis, and then their bungled bankrupcy (Peter A. called it a "Learning Experience) trying to get out of it.
Skeezy.
>>I do not care about the people in the examples I listed.
Right, I could tell by the "bloodbath" thing.
>>I'm not a sociopath, because I care about MY society of which the Rwandans and Khmers are not a part
It's sociopathic to not care about 1 to 4 million being killed in cold blood regardless of whose "side" you're on. I'm not Jewish, but I think the Holocaust was a tragedy. You seem to disagree.
>>it is inevitable that they cause operations (like the disaster in Mogadishu) that end badly for those who AssUme it should be the White Man's Burden to intervene.
Only if you equate intervention with a ground war in Asia. The KR couldn't have won without their tanks and heavy equipment supplies from other countries, and the US (as it demonstrated in Vietnam) is really good at blowing up those sorts of things, but not so good at running around in jungles. If we hadn't withdrawn from Vietnam, we could have continued shutting the North Vietnamese supply lines down, as we had for years.
And why would you say it's the White Man's Burden? The government of Cambodia asked us to bomb a 50 mile radius around their own fucking capitol city, in order to destroy the KR's tanks and artillery. That's why I said it was a poster child for intervention, since the country itself asked for the US to help.
Ford refused, of course, since the hippies in the antiwar movement had made such actions politically impossible... and so millions of people died.
I think the Peace movement is rather ironically named, myself.
>>What happened when the USA left Vietnam? Perhaps it wasn't pretty for Vietnam, but within 15 years the Soviet Union was no longer a threat.
Right, because the policy of containment actually worked, and because Communist countries cannot compete economically, we spent them into bankrupcy in the arms race.
>>The Domino Theory never came true (at least not in terms of all of SE Asia becoming communist.
Actually, it did. Soon after the fall of Vietnam, the Cambodian government came to America asking to get about 50 miles around Phnom Penh carpet-bombed. Ford was a coward, and wouldn't intervene after all the hippy anti-war crap, and the communist Khmer Rouge took over and promptly murdered 1 to 4 million of their own citizens. Who trained them? China. Where did their tanks come from? North Vietnam.
Domino Theory.