which branch of the armed forces are you serving in?
Unlike you, I don't think in binary terms, and there is more to life than "support/not support". Your argument stands no chance of convincing anyone's mind; it just makes you feel better.
You will, personal experience shows, try even harder to trap me in a "contradiction" generated by your one-dimensional framing. Your one-dimensional ideas are your problem, not mine.
But for what it's worth, funding and homeland support.
While I, and a lot of scientists, would hate to go on record as saying something is flat out impossible, when your planet's heat gets high enough that all complex molecules are impossible, and any putative other type of order that might lead to life is jittered into unrecognizability in mere fractions of a second by heat, it's hard to imagine enough order on the right scale forming.
So, even though I can't say 100% it's impossible, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that life isn't possible on these planets. Real life isn't Star Trek.
(After all, I'm not even willing to say 100% that I'm not a brain in a vat. "Impossibility" is really inherently a relative term, if you want to be rational about it.)
Given the kill rate of Saddam (no, it was not zero), I think we're well into the positive, not that that's saying much compared to Saddam. And on the whole, both we and Iraq are better off with the ones getting killed than the ones Saddam would have killed. And, best of all, his kill rate would have upped if we just backed down; there's this huge untapped Kurdish area he could have drawn from.
But hey, keep thinking in propoganda. It's easier. Gets modded better, too.
Using an IFrame allows me to perform architecture tests on new applications straight from the files on disk.:-)
I think it is a major problem that there is that discontinuity between browser requests like that and XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest is great, but has two major misnomers in it: I don't always want XML (which they added/implemented.responseText for), and I don't always want Http. FTP might be nice, or file:, or other things as appropriate.
You can kind of tell it was an afterthought by a code monkey, and not implemented by an actual MS architect. (I know they have some good ones in there, and there is a definite difference between the things MS prioritizes enough for the architects to work on, and the things left to the monkeys...)
Multithreading in a browser can be a difficult thing to deal with, so it's something I'm trying to avoid for now.
Oi. I hope they address that in Ecmascript 2.0. Hmm... doesn't look good.... all I want is a freakin' semaphore, for Pete's sake....
Why don't you use the.responseXML attribute, which gives you a DOM object, instead of "shunting" it into an IFRAME, thus losing all hope of having more than one request at a time? (Which, granted, shouldn't exactly be a routine occurance, but there are many things that can result in that, even if you're not planning on it.)
The set of all new games; let's say "from 2002 onwards" for concreteness.
The set of all games from before 2002.
Now, consider your standard of "goodness". The questioner uses something he calls "satisfying"; there are many possibilities here. This is a meta-argument, so I really do want you to substitute your personal standards.
Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?
Is this really surprising?
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
That said, there are some ways modern games are legitimately better. Linear RPGs are one strong example, I think (though non-linear RPGs are, for a variety of reasons, effectively dead). I'm not saying all standards will have this result... just the vast majority of them.
There is a middle ground between "less" and "none" that I suggest you take into consideration.
You mean like, for instance, saying "You can quibble about the amounts, and in fact I do, a lot,"?
If humanity as a whole was capable of reading in lieu of so much assuming ("You disagree 5%, you must disagree 100%!!!!1!"), I wonder how much less stuff the Google newsgroup archive would have in it.
The issue I personally have is that the Bush administration proposes spending $310 million to fund Iraq's rail system and $0 to fund the US's rail system.
My point is that while that may be a cute soundbite, it does not a priori prove that is a wrong thing to do. Fixing Iraq's system, which, as you pointed out we had a hand in destroying (though probably only a minor one compared to the previous administration's malign neglect) (reparations anyone?), is justified, rightly or wrongly, as part of rebuilding that country towards independent prosperity, our only hope of ending terrorism from that part of the world.
Amtrak is mostly a government boondoggle. Even if you wanted to allocate money for rails in the US, you'd probably still be better off burning Amtrak down and starting from scratch with just the physical infrastructure and a new organization. That is to say, even if you support the idea of rail spending in the US, 0$ to Amtrak may well be the optimally rational decision.
These kind of stupid comparisions just harm rational thinking. You can't meaningfully boil things down as far as "Why are we spending so much money on the military instead of $PROJECT_X_FOR_THE_FUTURE_AND_THE_CHILDREN?"
My particular examples are beside the point and I actually don't care if Amtrak is the best thing since sliced bread... it's irrelevant to what I'm saying.
(In the light of the mod my original message gets, apparently "it's shade's of grey!" is only a valid point if they "white" in question is right-leaning. Nuance isn't necessary if you're toeing the left party line.)
Are you seriously claiming that if the US just dropped all of its arms, absolutely nobody anywhere would attack it?
It's going to take more than Simpsons quotes to defend yourself. Merely invoking the name of an inapplicable logical fallacy, humorously or otherwise, is not an argument.
(Note: I am aware that there is a grey area between where we are now and zero, and for completeness, we could spend more too, and I mentioned this in my first message.)
OK, I'm imagining the future where we spend no money on the military...
Mmmmm... lower taxes...
Mmmmm... peace and harmon.. oh, wait.
Oh, shit.
Oh, SHIT.
Oh, SHIT.
-------------
You can quibble about the amounts, and in fact I do, a lot, but investing in the military, or many other "pointless" projects is investing in the future. It is not black and white.
Outsourcing is a product of the post-capitalist "welfare" state.
Bullshit. Outsourcing is a product of cheap, high-bandwidth communications, and to a lesser but still real degree, cheap shipping, both of which bring parity in value between a remote and a local worker. While they are still not fully equivalent, they don't have to be since that's not the only concern. We'd have been "outsourcing" in the 1960s, if it were even remotely feasible.
I'm not speaking to the morality or goodness of it here. I'm speaking to where it came from. Misidentify the cause and you've already lost.
If I live in a city, and I'm willing to bet my arms that society will not collapse so far that I can't get my arms fixed, it may be a good tradeoff.
On the other hand, if for some reason I will not or can not depend on a technological society to back me up indefinately, I may choose to keep my conventional arms, which will, most likely, continue working effectively indefinitely, until the rest of me is dead. (There are several caveats in that "most likely".)
A lot of people have criticized the human body in the past, but to date, it's the best known thing for living on planet Earth across the span of technology from effectively none to at least slightly beyond where we are now. We may be able to beat human arms in the case of high technology, but it's an open question IMHO whether we can create a replacement arm that is significantly better and different (i.e., not just a tweaking of what we have) that could still be a pure advantage even in the event of some society-smashing catastrophe.
It probably won't take us long to make an arm that in some ways exceeds the capabilities of real arms. Your first thought is strength, but a strong arm requires a strong body to support it. But you might embed other things in it that Nature hasn't seen fit to provide us, or at least have an arm that is strong without having to be exercised.
But it will likely be a while before we have an arm that is a uniform improvement over our real arms. Healing, for instance, is a really nice feature, it is just loaded with sensors, and it integrates well with the rest of the body without much extra effort.
It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
Despite the fact that I am technically savvy, I have not invested time in AdBlock or anything else.
I have FlashBlock (moderately misnamed, it really makes loading Flash fully voluntary), turned off image animations, and forbid unrequested popups.
By and large, this makes the web perfectly tolerable, and I do not feel that further time invested in crazy blocking schemes would pay off. The only thing on the horizon that might change the balance is further penetration of interstitials (I don't instantly leave the site, but I don't come back), or on-page adds (that aren't Flash since I block that).
If they weren't such dicks, they might not have prompted the formation of such sophisticated tech to counter them.
It may not be Hellraiser, but the term "Fairy Tale" has been pretty whitewashed since the Brothers Grimm chronicled them. If you go expecting stories about Jack jumping over the candlestick, you'll be surprised.
Modern times differs only in our ability to graphically depict gore without actually hurting anybody; the fascination isn't new.
Beware selection bias. I'm as cynical as the next Slashdotter, but I have to admit that rationally, I really don't know what "the way to bet" is for courts, and I rather expect "the way to bet" is actually that they work pretty well, on the grounds that life would be much worse than it is otherwise, and on the grounds that we hear more about the "bad" cases because they are the exception.
A bunch of people have been pestering me about Avalanche recently, so I'll comment on it.
A perfectly reasonable reason to discuss something. It isn't Bram that posted this to Slashdot.
I think he's trying to point out to the "bunch of people" that at the moment, Microsoft isn't exactly shipping the BitTorrent killer that he's somehow "got" to respond to. He might get less dismissive if they ship something that obviously works.... or if people didn't pester him.
(I've seen several people comment that Bram's "arrogant"; it's nothing to the arrogance of assuming they can force him to comment on something, or the arrogance of assuming that his essay was written straight for them, or the arrogance of saying since they don't like it it shouldn't have been written. This is just an addenda so I don't have to post again, not directed at CleverNickedName.)
This isn't a very good idea for a host of practical reasons, mostly centering around the fact it is too simplistic.
IMHO, you are reaching for a capabilities-based model, which works out at least somewhat better in practice, though it is an open question of whether it works well enough to use. (Link leads to a group trying to build an OS on the idea, and I know it hasn't been completely smooth sailing, but I am not intimately familiar with the project.)
That should give you a springboard for further investigation into the topic, if you like. (Way too big to cover in a Slashdot post, and I am only passingly familiar with it anyhow.)
Slashdot Mirror
which branch of the armed forces are you serving in?
Unlike you, I don't think in binary terms, and there is more to life than "support/not support". Your argument stands no chance of convincing anyone's mind; it just makes you feel better.
You will, personal experience shows, try even harder to trap me in a "contradiction" generated by your one-dimensional framing. Your one-dimensional ideas are your problem, not mine.
But for what it's worth, funding and homeland support.
Life is order.... lots of it.
Heat is, broadly speaking, disorder.
While I, and a lot of scientists, would hate to go on record as saying something is flat out impossible, when your planet's heat gets high enough that all complex molecules are impossible, and any putative other type of order that might lead to life is jittered into unrecognizability in mere fractions of a second by heat, it's hard to imagine enough order on the right scale forming.
So, even though I can't say 100% it's impossible, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that life isn't possible on these planets. Real life isn't Star Trek.
(After all, I'm not even willing to say 100% that I'm not a brain in a vat. "Impossibility" is really inherently a relative term, if you want to be rational about it.)
Given the kill rate of Saddam (no, it was not zero), I think we're well into the positive, not that that's saying much compared to Saddam. And on the whole, both we and Iraq are better off with the ones getting killed than the ones Saddam would have killed. And, best of all, his kill rate would have upped if we just backed down; there's this huge untapped Kurdish area he could have drawn from.
But hey, keep thinking in propoganda. It's easier. Gets modded better, too.
Good answers. I'm glad I held the sarcasm :-)
:-)
.responseText for), and I don't always want Http. FTP might be nice, or file:, or other things as appropriate.
Using an IFrame allows me to perform architecture tests on new applications straight from the files on disk.
I think it is a major problem that there is that discontinuity between browser requests like that and XMLHttpRequest. XMLHttpRequest is great, but has two major misnomers in it: I don't always want XML (which they added/implemented
You can kind of tell it was an afterthought by a code monkey, and not implemented by an actual MS architect. (I know they have some good ones in there, and there is a definite difference between the things MS prioritizes enough for the architects to work on, and the things left to the monkeys...)
Multithreading in a browser can be a difficult thing to deal with, so it's something I'm trying to avoid for now.
Oi. I hope they address that in Ecmascript 2.0. Hmm... doesn't look good.... all I want is a freakin' semaphore, for Pete's sake....
Well, no mods as of this writing has thought it was funny, but at least nobody modded it "offtopic". :-)
(Now, this post... but that's why I turned off the karma bonus.)
Why don't you use the .responseXML attribute, which gives you a DOM object, instead of "shunting" it into an IFRAME, thus losing all hope of having more than one request at a time? (Which, granted, shouldn't exactly be a routine occurance, but there are many things that can result in that, even if you're not planning on it.)
My source code is never able to acheive coherency, so it never lased in the first place, making "re"lasing impossible.
(Mod hint: Physics joke.)
- The set of all new games; let's say "from 2002 onwards" for concreteness.
- The set of all games from before 2002.
Now, consider your standard of "goodness". The questioner uses something he calls "satisfying"; there are many possibilities here. This is a meta-argument, so I really do want you to substitute your personal standards.Now, unless your standards truly contain something highly technology based, like "I just can't play a game without reflective glass or incredibly realistic water", which set is going to contain more good games?
Is this really surprising?
Cherry pick from ~20 years of games, and compare that to the cherry-picked games from the last three years, and the former set will typically be larger.
That said, there are some ways modern games are legitimately better. Linear RPGs are one strong example, I think (though non-linear RPGs are, for a variety of reasons, effectively dead). I'm not saying all standards will have this result... just the vast majority of them.
There is a middle ground between "less" and "none" that I suggest you take into consideration.
You mean like, for instance, saying "You can quibble about the amounts, and in fact I do, a lot,"?
If humanity as a whole was capable of reading in lieu of so much assuming ("You disagree 5%, you must disagree 100%!!!!1!"), I wonder how much less stuff the Google newsgroup archive would have in it.
The issue I personally have is that the Bush administration proposes spending $310 million to fund Iraq's rail system and $0 to fund the US's rail system.
My point is that while that may be a cute soundbite, it does not a priori prove that is a wrong thing to do. Fixing Iraq's system, which, as you pointed out we had a hand in destroying (though probably only a minor one compared to the previous administration's malign neglect) (reparations anyone?), is justified, rightly or wrongly, as part of rebuilding that country towards independent prosperity, our only hope of ending terrorism from that part of the world.
Amtrak is mostly a government boondoggle. Even if you wanted to allocate money for rails in the US, you'd probably still be better off burning Amtrak down and starting from scratch with just the physical infrastructure and a new organization. That is to say, even if you support the idea of rail spending in the US, 0$ to Amtrak may well be the optimally rational decision.
These kind of stupid comparisions just harm rational thinking. You can't meaningfully boil things down as far as "Why are we spending so much money on the military instead of $PROJECT_X_FOR_THE_FUTURE_AND_THE_CHILDREN?"
My particular examples are beside the point and I actually don't care if Amtrak is the best thing since sliced bread... it's irrelevant to what I'm saying.
(In the light of the mod my original message gets, apparently "it's shade's of grey!" is only a valid point if they "white" in question is right-leaning. Nuance isn't necessary if you're toeing the left party line.)
Are you seriously claiming that if the US just dropped all of its arms, absolutely nobody anywhere would attack it?
It's going to take more than Simpsons quotes to defend yourself. Merely invoking the name of an inapplicable logical fallacy, humorously or otherwise, is not an argument.
(Note: I am aware that there is a grey area between where we are now and zero, and for completeness, we could spend more too, and I mentioned this in my first message.)
OK, I'm imagining the future where we spend no money on the military...
.
Mmmmm... lower taxes...
Mmmmm... peace and harmon.. oh, wait.
Oh, shit.
Oh, SHIT.
Oh, SHIT
-------------
You can quibble about the amounts, and in fact I do, a lot, but investing in the military, or many other "pointless" projects is investing in the future. It is not black and white.
Outsourcing is a product of the post-capitalist "welfare" state.
Bullshit. Outsourcing is a product of cheap, high-bandwidth communications, and to a lesser but still real degree, cheap shipping, both of which bring parity in value between a remote and a local worker. While they are still not fully equivalent, they don't have to be since that's not the only concern. We'd have been "outsourcing" in the 1960s, if it were even remotely feasible.
I'm not speaking to the morality or goodness of it here. I'm speaking to where it came from. Misidentify the cause and you've already lost.
It depends on the situation.
If I live in a city, and I'm willing to bet my arms that society will not collapse so far that I can't get my arms fixed, it may be a good tradeoff.
On the other hand, if for some reason I will not or can not depend on a technological society to back me up indefinately, I may choose to keep my conventional arms, which will, most likely, continue working effectively indefinitely, until the rest of me is dead. (There are several caveats in that "most likely".)
A lot of people have criticized the human body in the past, but to date, it's the best known thing for living on planet Earth across the span of technology from effectively none to at least slightly beyond where we are now. We may be able to beat human arms in the case of high technology, but it's an open question IMHO whether we can create a replacement arm that is significantly better and different (i.e., not just a tweaking of what we have) that could still be a pure advantage even in the event of some society-smashing catastrophe.
Some people, yes. Some people, no.
It probably won't take us long to make an arm that in some ways exceeds the capabilities of real arms. Your first thought is strength, but a strong arm requires a strong body to support it. But you might embed other things in it that Nature hasn't seen fit to provide us, or at least have an arm that is strong without having to be exercised.
But it will likely be a while before we have an arm that is a uniform improvement over our real arms. Healing, for instance, is a really nice feature, it is just loaded with sensors, and it integrates well with the rest of the body without much extra effort.
It is possible to reach your target audience without annoying everyone else.
Despite the fact that I am technically savvy, I have not invested time in AdBlock or anything else.
I have FlashBlock (moderately misnamed, it really makes loading Flash fully voluntary), turned off image animations, and forbid unrequested popups.
By and large, this makes the web perfectly tolerable, and I do not feel that further time invested in crazy blocking schemes would pay off. The only thing on the horizon that might change the balance is further penetration of interstitials (I don't instantly leave the site, but I don't come back), or on-page adds (that aren't Flash since I block that).
If they weren't such dicks, they might not have prompted the formation of such sophisticated tech to counter them.
Yes.
It may not be Hellraiser, but the term "Fairy Tale" has been pretty whitewashed since the Brothers Grimm chronicled them. If you go expecting stories about Jack jumping over the candlestick, you'll be surprised.
Modern times differs only in our ability to graphically depict gore without actually hurting anybody; the fascination isn't new.
Beware selection bias. I'm as cynical as the next Slashdotter, but I have to admit that rationally, I really don't know what "the way to bet" is for courts, and I rather expect "the way to bet" is actually that they work pretty well, on the grounds that life would be much worse than it is otherwise, and on the grounds that we hear more about the "bad" cases because they are the exception.
Oooo, nice save. I almost fact-checked your ass. :-)
I think he's trying to point out to the "bunch of people" that at the moment, Microsoft isn't exactly shipping the BitTorrent killer that he's somehow "got" to respond to. He might get less dismissive if they ship something that obviously works.... or if people didn't pester him.
(I've seen several people comment that Bram's "arrogant"; it's nothing to the arrogance of assuming they can force him to comment on something, or the arrogance of assuming that his essay was written straight for them, or the arrogance of saying since they don't like it it shouldn't have been written. This is just an addenda so I don't have to post again, not directed at CleverNickedName.)
Whores, man! Whores!
:)
What did you think would happen?
Is that where your nick came from?
Duh... it orders pepperjack to the batcave!
Too bad it's 2005; dot-coms were built on less.
This isn't a very good idea for a host of practical reasons, mostly centering around the fact it is too simplistic.
IMHO, you are reaching for a capabilities-based model, which works out at least somewhat better in practice, though it is an open question of whether it works well enough to use. (Link leads to a group trying to build an OS on the idea, and I know it hasn't been completely smooth sailing, but I am not intimately familiar with the project.)
That should give you a springboard for further investigation into the topic, if you like. (Way too big to cover in a Slashdot post, and I am only passingly familiar with it anyhow.)
Except it's not.
Yes it is.
Targetting doesn't have to be 100% to be effective, you know.
Thank God not every member of the human race bitches when technology merely improves, and fails to attain 100% perfection.
Shades of grey, perhaps you've heard of them?