The problem with evolution is that it's not the kind of system a God that cared and loved us would design.
Does survival of the fittest seem righteous to you? Why should the most well adapted survive? Surely a better system would be one where people with kindness, co-operation and charity thrive and the selfish, brutish and dishonest perish? Yet we do not live in this world.
Actually it turns out that kindness, cooperation and charity are very good herd survival strategies. Which is why humans (and other successful species) evolved to exhibit those traits so much.
I don't think you caught him out as much as you think you did.
Before anyone can say whether they believe in God, you need to agree on what you mean by "God".
If you give a sufficiently broad definition - "God is physics", then of course, anyone who believes in physics believes in God.
If you add in many of the other attributes that most people would associate with God -- is conscious (whatever that means), takes a personal interest in humans, takes a personal interest in individual humans, responds to worship and prayer -- then more of us are going to find that an impossible thing to believe in.
Getting pretty old now, but two wonderful free games you could try are:
- Curses - huge in scale, brilliant in concept and execution - Christminster - don't be tempted to believe that the opening puzzle is an unsolveable hoax
These come as files for an interpreter, which you download separately. Those links have all the info.
But isn't that just because you're used to Visual Studio.
I know Eclipse. My brother in law is steeped in MS development, and says that using Eclipse is like "going back in time". But he also said that IntelliJ IDEA was better.
Well, I tried IntelliJ IDEA, and none of it made any sense. The keyboard shortcuts were completely unintuitive to me (apparently they're familiar if you've background in some DOS file manager or other).
I think I like Eclipse because I'm used to it, and you like Visual Studio because you're used to it. From what I can tell, the features I would actually use (and it's worth noting, I don't write GUIs) are pretty much equivalent on both.
Not only is it not theoretical, but it's been tested on public roads.
One initiative that doesn't go the whole way towards fully autonomous vehicles is the road train. A human-driven lead car shuttles back and forth the length of a multi-lane highway. As a driver of a suitably equipped car, you can drive up behind it, press a button, and become part of the convoy. The lead car now controls your car - brakes, steering, acceleration. When you're approaching your destination, press the button again, the controller will adjust the distances between you and the cars in front and behind, allowing you space to resume control and leave the convoy. Then the cars that were behind you will move in to fill your space.
The neat thing about this is that because the cars behind don't need to anticipate the movements of the lead car, they can be *much* closer together. Close enough to benefit from slipstream, which has a significant effect on fuel economy.
Yes, there's a stickiness to pirating. Once you've got a Bittorrent-to-TV workflow set up, it's so convenient that doing anything else is a bit of a wrench.
I took to watching Lost on Bittorrent, so I could engage in the US forums in a timely manner. It was on FTA terrestrial TV in the UK a couple of days later, so it didn't seem like stealing. Once I discovered the right Torrent site, with predictable torrent names and an RSS feed, it was really easy to set it up so that it would download every episode, unattended, as soon as it became available. I could stream it to XBMC on my chipped Xbox. No ads. No hassle. Just switch on, browse to the programme, and watch. Or if I wanted to copy it onto an iPad to watch on the bus, or a Linux tablet, or whatever, I could.... and once that was set up, adding a new RSS feed for a new series was trivial. So it was not only cheaper, but much more convenient.
I've stopped doing this now (moved house; retired Xbox; nothing motivated me to set it up again) but lots of people must be in a situation where they have it set up. Setting up Netflix instead, just for the sake of being legal -- well, why would you?
I haven't read the book, but I wonder whether the reviewer has got this right.
Unit testing is a very specific thing -- testing contained components individually. Checking that class X does what it's meant to do.
But it's separate from integration testing where you plug a bunch of your components together and check that they collaborate correctly.... and you can automate both. I'd hope the book covers both.
I know the Ouya doesn't come with Google Play Store by default.
Genuine question: can you get it by rooting?
I'm on the lookout for a cheap device that'll let me watch Google Play Movies on a TV, without tying up a PC or my phone. An mk808/similar might be it. An Ouya might be it too.
Yeah, openness is a double-edged sword. There are 180 games at launch - a tenth of that would be a respectable console launch. But when you look at a list of them, the bulk of them look embarrassingly amateurish. http://www.ouya.tv/games/
If they've any sense, they're going to have to start curating and categorising the game list. I absolutely think the platform should be open for anyone to develop on. But the mainstream isn't going to take seriously a platform where games in the main menu have Comic Sans loading screen text.
- You're a natural at (interpersonal) networking.
- or you took on board the importance of (interpersonal) networking when you were young, and made a special effort to do it.
If you put your head down and did a job, instead of schmoozing, you might not be so lucky.
I'm with you. I hate/. pandering to the "geeks are overweight slobs who spend all day in darkened basement and eat nothing but Twinkies, pizza and Cheetos" stereotype.
Any real geek knows that in order to do your best thinking, you need to eat reasonably healthily, and do a certain amount of exercise.
Programmers are getting higher salaries than we'd like, let's flood the market with cheap labour and drive their income way way down.
I don't think that's the case; if it was, then powerful companies would be lobbying the government, and coding would be in the government-mandated national curriculum. As opposed to this effort, which is a grassroots one coming from people who realise that even if coding isn't your job, it's empowering to know how.
Just like English teachers teach you to read because they love literature, and they want as many people people as possible to grow up loving it too.
There are loads of intelligent people who could code if only they'd started young, when their minds were malleable and they had free time. They probably wouldn't want jobs as developers. But they'd benefit from being able to knock together a dynamic web page, or a scripted animation, or short programs to fill in spreadsheet cells instead of the baroque arrangements of cell formulas so many people cobble together.
... and if you don't fix it, then in 7 years' time, when today's 13 year olds are thinking of entering the teaching profession, there *still* won't be any programming-literate teachers. So you have to bootstrap things somehow.
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The problem with evolution is that it's not the kind of system a God that cared and loved us would design.
Does survival of the fittest seem righteous to you? Why should the most well adapted survive? Surely a better system would be one where people with kindness, co-operation and charity thrive and the selfish, brutish and dishonest perish? Yet we do not live in this world.
Actually it turns out that kindness, cooperation and charity are very good herd survival strategies. Which is why humans (and other successful species) evolved to exhibit those traits so much.
It's a definite belief that nowhere in the universe is there an alien species that corresponds to the characteristics of a 'god'.
If it's in the universe, it ain't a god, in my book.
Since space and time is all I can observe, even indirectly, "exists outside of space and time" is equivalent to "invisible".
I am not the OP, but I would agree that all religion is false and a placebo.
In fact it's a pretty good definition of religion -- "Believing in stuff that isn't real, because it feels good".
I don't think you caught him out as much as you think you did.
Before anyone can say whether they believe in God, you need to agree on what you mean by "God".
If you give a sufficiently broad definition - "God is physics", then of course, anyone who believes in physics believes in God.
If you add in many of the other attributes that most people would associate with God -- is conscious (whatever that means), takes a personal interest in humans, takes a personal interest in individual humans, responds to worship and prayer -- then more of us are going to find that an impossible thing to believe in.
As the AC above says:
http://xyzzyawards.org/
http://www.ifarchive.org/
Getting pretty old now, but two wonderful free games you could try are:
- Curses - huge in scale, brilliant in concept and execution
- Christminster - don't be tempted to believe that the opening puzzle is an unsolveable hoax
These come as files for an interpreter, which you download separately. Those links have all the info.
But isn't that just because you're used to Visual Studio.
I know Eclipse. My brother in law is steeped in MS development, and says that using Eclipse is like "going back in time". But he also said that IntelliJ IDEA was better.
Well, I tried IntelliJ IDEA, and none of it made any sense. The keyboard shortcuts were completely unintuitive to me (apparently they're familiar if you've background in some DOS file manager or other).
I think I like Eclipse because I'm used to it, and you like Visual Studio because you're used to it. From what I can tell, the features I would actually use (and it's worth noting, I don't write GUIs) are pretty much equivalent on both.
Not only is it not theoretical, but it's been tested on public roads.
One initiative that doesn't go the whole way towards fully autonomous vehicles is the road train. A human-driven lead car shuttles back and forth the length of a multi-lane highway. As a driver of a suitably equipped car, you can drive up behind it, press a button, and become part of the convoy. The lead car now controls your car - brakes, steering, acceleration. When you're approaching your destination, press the button again, the controller will adjust the distances between you and the cars in front and behind, allowing you space to resume control and leave the convoy. Then the cars that were behind you will move in to fill your space.
The neat thing about this is that because the cars behind don't need to anticipate the movements of the lead car, they can be *much* closer together. Close enough to benefit from slipstream, which has a significant effect on fuel economy.
Normal money works for you. Bitcoin works for some people.
What's wrong with that?
Yes, there's a stickiness to pirating. Once you've got a Bittorrent-to-TV workflow set up, it's so convenient that doing anything else is a bit of a wrench.
I took to watching Lost on Bittorrent, so I could engage in the US forums in a timely manner. It was on FTA terrestrial TV in the UK a couple of days later, so it didn't seem like stealing. Once I discovered the right Torrent site, with predictable torrent names and an RSS feed, it was really easy to set it up so that it would download every episode, unattended, as soon as it became available. I could stream it to XBMC on my chipped Xbox. No ads. No hassle. Just switch on, browse to the programme, and watch. Or if I wanted to copy it onto an iPad to watch on the bus, or a Linux tablet, or whatever, I could. ... and once that was set up, adding a new RSS feed for a new series was trivial. So it was not only cheaper, but much more convenient.
I've stopped doing this now (moved house; retired Xbox; nothing motivated me to set it up again) but lots of people must be in a situation where they have it set up. Setting up Netflix instead, just for the sake of being legal -- well, why would you?
OSX isn't the competitor to Surface though.
(nothing short of a brain that _understands_ the content, and also has a taste in art).
... and not even that.
I daresay that for any pair of human beings, you could find a work which one classified as porn, and the other did not.
It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
It might have done. You hear apocryphal stories of people who can't get aroused by partners who won't do the things porn actresses do.
I haven't read the book, but I wonder whether the reviewer has got this right.
Unit testing is a very specific thing -- testing contained components individually. Checking that class X does what it's meant to do.
But it's separate from integration testing where you plug a bunch of your components together and check that they collaborate correctly. ... and you can automate both. I'd hope the book covers both.
"REAL web JS" abstracts the work-arounds and goofy tweaks into a library, so the application programmers can write clean code.
Maybe these were not "the average RC plane". The suspects are aeronautics students - so likely to be capable of building RC planes of arbitrary size.
I find it hard to believe that anyone thought this $99 console would outperform vastly more expensive consoles.
What is true though, is that you can fit surprisingly pretty 3D games into a smartphone's capabilities.
I know the Ouya doesn't come with Google Play Store by default.
Genuine question: can you get it by rooting?
I'm on the lookout for a cheap device that'll let me watch Google Play Movies on a TV, without tying up a PC or my phone. An mk808/similar might be it. An Ouya might be it too.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK the Ouya is on display in actual high street shops.
So it won't be unknown. It may well still fail though.
Yeah, openness is a double-edged sword. There are 180 games at launch - a tenth of that would be a respectable console launch. But when you look at a list of them, the bulk of them look embarrassingly amateurish. http://www.ouya.tv/games/
If they've any sense, they're going to have to start curating and categorising the game list. I absolutely think the platform should be open for anyone to develop on. But the mainstream isn't going to take seriously a platform where games in the main menu have Comic Sans loading screen text.
That is if either:
- You're a natural at (interpersonal) networking.
- or you took on board the importance of (interpersonal) networking when you were young, and made a special effort to do it.
If you put your head down and did a job, instead of schmoozing, you might not be so lucky.
You say "cream". It's a non-dairy "creamy filling" made of sugar, water, oil and vanilla flavouring.
You say "pastry". It's sponge cake.
I'm with you. I hate /. pandering to the "geeks are overweight slobs who spend all day in darkened basement and eat nothing but Twinkies, pizza and Cheetos" stereotype.
Any real geek knows that in order to do your best thinking, you need to eat reasonably healthily, and do a certain amount of exercise.
"Geek food staple"? Bollocks.
Programmers are getting higher salaries than we'd like, let's flood the market with cheap labour and drive their income way way down.
I don't think that's the case; if it was, then powerful companies would be lobbying the government, and coding would be in the government-mandated national curriculum. As opposed to this effort, which is a grassroots one coming from people who realise that even if coding isn't your job, it's empowering to know how.
Just like English teachers teach you to read because they love literature, and they want as many people people as possible to grow up loving it too.
There are loads of intelligent people who could code if only they'd started young, when their minds were malleable and they had free time. They probably wouldn't want jobs as developers. But they'd benefit from being able to knock together a dynamic web page, or a scripted animation, or short programs to fill in spreadsheet cells instead of the baroque arrangements of cell formulas so many people cobble together.
... and if you don't fix it, then in 7 years' time, when today's 13 year olds are thinking of entering the teaching profession, there *still* won't be any programming-literate teachers. So you have to bootstrap things somehow.