I'm not calling you irrational because you're not agreeing with me. I'm calling you irrational because as long as you continue to use words without knowing the meaning of those words you can't even join in the discussion.
That's truly hilarious.
The only reason we ended up in this conversation (instead of me not responding to your second comment) is because you presnted your argument using words that mean something completely different. You, of course, justified your incorrect terminology by saying that you are using the "technical" definition, which is utter bullshit. Alternatively, you use a word (chaos), and then later say you were refering to chaos theory which is something completely different.
You are now number three on my list of idiots who have claimed the OED definition of an english word is incorrect. I would like to continue the philosophical portion of our discussion, but I cannot because we don't speak the same language. I don't have time to argue simply because what was written isn't what was meant.
Yeah, that sounds right. Sony isn't going to make and sell any more PS3s until February.
Wait, no, that doesn't sound right at all. A very slow flow I'll believe, but none for months just isn't plausible. Unless their manufacturing facilities blew up it can't possibly be true.
While GameStop and its EB Games brand collectively account for about 25 percent of the US gaming market, the company believes it didn't receive that much of either system's day-one shipments.
They won't get more than 25% of the ongoing shipments either. They used to be a specialty retailer that added excellent customer service to the product you could get elsewhere. Recently, the bent over backwards to please the game publishers under the mistaken impression that if they didn't give in to their demands the publishers would give preferential treatment to the big guys (Wal-Mart, Target, etc...). Now that they don't offer any additional value, the publishers not only don't need them, but they actually have incentive to push them out of the market to reduce used game sales. Now, they get crappy allotments, they have to take pre-orders on everything because they can't return unsold merchandise to the distributor, they can't take returns from their customers for the same reason, and instead of being helpful the employees are reduced to bullying their customers in order to meet the quotas that keep the company in the black. It's only a matter of time. In the meantime, you may as well shop for your gaming gear at Wal-Mart, because you'll get equivalent service, and Wal-Mart has better stock levels.
When I have two systems, I'd like to be able to use my content on either one like I can with every previous generation console. They need to figure out how to make downloaded content do *everything* that physical media can do if they want my money (including allowing resale). Either that, or they have to offer the downloaded content at a steep discount.
The call just came in from marketing. Apparently they would prefer you to refer to it as 'Boat Anchor Mode'. Apparently that evokes a higher valued mental image.
Most embedded systems with updateable firmware have two copies of firmware around at any given time, or a socketed memory chip.
Regardless, if there's a manufacturing defect with with the memory hardware for the firmware, no update architecture is going to save you from failure.
I don't watch any of the channels that broadcast in 1080. There's only one channel in 1080 I'm interested in, and I'm not interested enough to pay the $10/month extra the satellite company wants to charge me
I'm talking OTA. It's hard for me to even find 720p OTA broadcast content. It's all either SD or 1080i. Perhaps it's different where you live...
As to almost every PC monitor supporting 1080p... Again, I think not. None of the computer displays in our house (4 of them) can show 1080p without downscaling.
And your point is? That you buy crappy monitors? 17" LCDs with 1024 lines of resolution are less than $200, and come for free with most entry level Dell setups. You have to go out of your way to get a 1024x768 native resolution monitor these days, and you'll only be saving $15-20. Most PC monitors are still CRTs that easily support 1280x1024. You can display 1080p on such a display with only an unnoticeable bit of cropping. No downscaling required. These are entry level displays we're talking about. There are *very few* gamers out there using a low-end LCD as their display because they can't stand the ghosting. Low-end displays usually end up on the desk of an office worker.
I think you have a strange idea of what most people's equipment is like. 20" LCD computer monitors and 50" TVs are not the norm.
The cheapest 17" display that Dell sells has 1024 lines of resolution. I don't know where you pulled the 20" and 50" numbers out of.
Regardless of what people have for displays, it doesn't change the fact that 720p clearly looks better than 480p.
The anamorphic DVD is 720x480. That's a 16:9 image with (almost) square pixels. The image is sent down the HDMI cable to the TV, which displays it on the 1280x720 screen by scaling to 1.5x original size. Where is this "horizontal and vertical resolution loss" supposed to be coming from?
720x480 isn't even close to 16:9 with square pixels. 480p at 16:9 with square pixels would be 854x480.
Even today, sets under 46" (which make up the majority of the market) aren't 1080i.
LCDs never have an interlaced native resolution. The current generation of LCDs has a 1080p native resolution. The prices are coming down on these sets, and the represent about half of the 32+" sets on the market now. 47" 1080p LCDs are available for under $2000 (I just bought one for $1799). You will probably find that LCD sets over 20" that aren't 1080p will be practically gone from the marketplace within a year.
CRTs with a 1080i resolution have been the norm as long as CRT HD sets have been available. Dispite all the marketing hype around high profit LCD, Plasma, LCD projection, and DLP displays, cheap CRT sets are common.
About half of rear projection HDTVs on the market right now are 1080p.
The most common HD display by far is the PC monitor. Almost every one built since 1995 supports 1080+ lines of vertical resolution.
720 line displays will be a footnote in history. They'll only have been available for these past few years.
To repeat what I've said elsewhere, comparing a Faroudja-upscaled HDMI-connected 480p 16:9 DVD with 16:9 OTA 720p HDTV, on a normal size set, I really don't see a big difference.
That's probably because you were watching poorly encoded 720p OTA content, or more likely, upscaled 480i content that was broadcast at 720p, which is probably why it looked so similar to your DVD. Or another alternative: Most OTA HD content is broadcast at 1080i. For example, on my Tivo right now there isn't a single OTA HD recording at 720p. They're all 1080i. Perhaps your TV is doing a very poor job of downscaling the 1080i content to 720p? That's not an uncommon problem, and it would explain why you don't think 720p looks very good.
On a 1080p set, it is hard to distinguish between 720p and 1080i at a quick glance. If you say upscaled 480p is practically as good as 720p, are you saying it's almost as good as 1080i as well?
Most 480p content is NTSC video after a 3:2 pullup. With square pixels, 480p is *never* 16x9. It is 640x480. 720x480 with rectangular pixels is as good as 480p gets. Simple math. You've got both horizontal and vertical resolution loss between 480p and 720p no matter how you get your signal. If you've got reasonable vision, and a screen that is larger than 30", you can walk into a room and tell at a glance if the video is 480p or 720p (or 1080i. It is very hard to tell the difference between 720p and 1080i at a glance).
480p content is good enough for me, but I'm not going to say I can't tell the difference. I can, and very easily. Anecdotally, I'll say that most people can.
What grit sandpaper did you use on your corneas? 150 perhaps? Or maybe you have a 13" TV?
The difference between 480p and 720p is like night and day. I don't mind how 480p looks at all. I think with good equipment it looks very good, but I'm not going to say that they're practically indistinguishable. The difference is glaringly obvious. (Even more obvious when you consider that most 480p content is 4:3, while most 720p content is 16:9).
That said, Even with a native 1080p resolution on my television, I bought a Wii and not a PS3. (Though I may end up getting a PS3 some day) The fact of the matter is that people buy the system that has the games they want to play nothing (literally, nothing) else matters.
I happened to be at BestBuy the night before the PS3 launch to return a TV (damned dead pixels...) and I was talking to the manager for a few hours while the BestBuy.com people figured out how to work their computers so that they didn't say the television I clearly had in my possession hadn't been delivered yet. He said that they were getting so many Wii that he didn't expect a line and that people would be able to get one without a problem. I drove by again Saturday night just to see. There were twice as many people in line as systems by midnight, and the store didn't open until 9:00AM.
There is a middle ground. My primary board is an older Dell keyboard with mechanical keyswitches. They feel like a lightweight version of the model M. The keyboard is solid, with two layers of fairly low gauge metal inside (it could easily be used as a blunt weapon; the skull would give before the board) but the keys are about half volume from the IBM keyboard. I wonder if it uses the same 'Altus' switches that you describe. Whatever is in there, I love it, and I easily type 10-15WPM faster on it than on any membrane keyboard.
It does, but the data still crosses the PCI bus... It has to, since the ports are on separate chips. The chips I'm talking about have multiple ports on the chip, and can communicate with other chips directly via a SPI bus.
In order to be genuinely arbitrary, you'd need to have some kind of a biological genuine random-number generator. Unless you think humans have little quantum-detectors in their brains, it's hard to imagine how this could work.
Define detector. Why can't a system that contains parts which behave randomly when observed individually produce random output? Biological neurons are capable of firing based on the stimulus of a single particle. Quantum physicists say that the movement of individual particles is completely random. Isn't that enough of a quantum detector? (Of course that still doesn't answer the question of whether said randomness qualifies as 'will'...)
The cogs of the machine are not taken on faith. They are called neurons. As well as other biological entities. Do you disbelieve in neurons? Would you consider neuroscience to be "spiritual"?
No, but you said:
"We're talking about a highly complex (e.g. chaotic) system. So it would be naive to expect the inputs to map directly to the outputs."
For any given state of a neural network, you can describe a direct map between a set of inputs and the output. Your application of your definition of direct seems dubious to me, as an input driven by feedback (state) is still an input to the system. Furthermore, if you follow your hypothesis to it's logical conclusion, the entirety of existence is simply the intermediary between the initial input and the final output. Doesn't that mean that every input into the human system is merely state in the system. After all, then inputs at t1-y in your example couldn't possibly have been anything but what they were... Lastly, if you don't buy that state is an input, how can human reaction be considered stimulus/response when clearly the response is the result of a sequence of stimuli?
complex (that's the modern term for chaotic)
Frankly, while the rest of what we're discussing is philosophical, that statement is just bullshit.
chaotic - adj, Completely unordered and unpredictable complex - adj, Involving many parts; complicated
A system can be extremely complex without being chaotic. Chaos is practically synonymous with nondeterminism.
it's pretty clear to me that you had no logical basis for it in the first place, and are continuing to react to my viewpoint viscerally instead of rationally.
Right. If I was being logical I would come to the same conclusion as you?
I'm just trying to explain to you that there's a lot more going on. When I see someone say "stimulus/response" I immediately think: "deterministic". To me it doesn't matter how many intermediaries you throw up between the stimulus and the response. You could have an entire rube goldberg contraption that would make any simple function-mapping impossible, but would fail to alter the fundamental nature of "stimulus/respones" - determinism.
I see what you're saying, and I come to exactly the opposite conclusion that you have given the same data. If anything you have further strengthened my opinion that most human behavior is not purely stimulus/response. Human behavior is not deterministic based solely on stimuli. It is not a matter of how many intermediaries there are between the stimulus and the response. In fact, given the same stimuli repeatedly, a human may not respond the same way twice simply because there are many factors in the response that cannot reasonably be considered stimuli. Furthermore, given exactly the same stimuli, people have the capability of choosing a response arbitrarily. You may argue, though, that context is a stimulus...
From a physical perspective, you cannot convince me that any level of simulation, down to a quantum mechanical copy of a human being would be able to predict the responses of the subject. Such a copy would diverge immediately and rapidly from the subject person. So, is a system that is not provably deterministic actually deterministic? I would say no. I have a feeling that many quantum physicists would agree with me. Perhaps materialists are right, and "free will" is merely a set of quantum states, but that certainly isn't deterministic; the outcome is not yet defined. Or perhaps I'm wrong and even in quantum mechanics, nothing is random. Even so, that still leaves the problem of The Beginning, which is essentially the same philosophical problem when you boil it all down.
Now, I'd like to go back to something you said early on in your comment:
it would be naive to expect the inputs to map directly to the outputs.
Then you say:
That means that you've got a vast array of systems, all of which act deterministically. You feed in input (stimulus) and the output is determined by the system (response) without any intervention of a human will. The will, in essence, disappears into the cogs of the machine. Instead of an actual entity, human will becomes merely a simplified description of the system as a whole.
How can you not see that those two statements contradict each other? You're saying that the inputs don't map directly to the outputs (presumably because you don't know how to describe the mapping), and then you are saying that the inputs do map directly to the output. So, are you saying that the statistical model doesn't apply because we have to take the "cogs of the machine" on faith? If so, you seem to be describing yourself as a materialist using an argument that is spiritual.
Reducing an activity to stimulus/response may seem clever, but the trouble is that it works for pretty much every human behavior imaginable. And it certainly works for every leisure activity.
People never tire of making that argument. The trouble is that, while it sounds good, it's just plain wrong. Most human activities fall into a stimulus-reasoning-response pattern. There is even a mathematical description of stimulus-response that explains why you are wrong. If you can't come up with a function of stimulus x that produces the predictable response y, you don't have a stimulus-response model.
After that, your argument goes off into the weeds on some wild tangent that basically adds up to "I like Warcraft. This guy didn't like something that I like. Therefore this guy is a whiner." Of course now, if you really are a WoW fan, I have become what your kind calls a "hater", and by calling me such you'll have proven to your peers that I'm an idiot. It's stimulus-response.
There are chips available that do on-chip processing for fast-path switching and basic routing, and give control the host processor for more complex "control-path" processing. I don't know of anybody who sells such things in a ready-built configuration for ethernet, but you can get exactly that for fibre-channel from Qlogic. Presumably, if you reprogrammed the chips every reconfiguration you could get almost all your work done in the fast-path.
This isn't really a do-it-yourself kind of project though, as you're almost certainly going to spend more on a single unit without software (assuming that you don't have to build the box yourself, including board design, etc...) than you would pay for a commercial product with the software included. If you're planning on doing it in bulk for resale, you'll still get killed unless you have some really novel killer feature you're going to include as a value add. If he does, he should contact a venture capitalist ASAP.
Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own
Part of the fun of being a parent is teaching you child why they shouldn't be little assholes so they grow out of that phase in their lives eventually. Instead we outlaw discipline, have pep-rallies, endzone celebrations in high-school football games, and encourage childish behaviors right up into early adulthood.
It is not harmless to let your kid be a little brat with no guidance on why it is wrong. Someday they will have to grow up and work with other people instead of having a need to one-up everybody.
Sure, they could go flip burgers or become a sandwich artist and come home smelling like the garbage disposal.
Try painting, or working for a carpenter on light construction. Be a box jockey for UPS. Try selling shoes (probably the highest paying job on this list. I was making $500 a week part time selling shoes when I was in High School). There are plenty of non-fast-food entry level jobs that don't require you to be an asshole for a living.
I've been pondering the architecture already. Clearly it would have to key of a random sentence subject in the article summary. That can map to a database of tangentially related concepts. The hard part would be making sure that the analogy was truly bad. It would be a total giveaway if the script happened to generate an apt analogy.
I'm truly beginning to appreciate the amount of work required in the service you provide to the slashdot community.
Don't feel too bad for them. They're only working there for the discount. It's not like there aren't other jobs... You know, jobs where they don't have to blatantly lie to their customers in order to meet their quotas? If they're willing to be evil for $7.75 an hour....
I think it would be fun to write a script to emulate BadAnalogyGuy. I bet nobody would notice the difference. Hell, BadAnalogyGuy may already be a script! I think I'll put it on my list of 1,000,000 projects I want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not calling you irrational because you're not agreeing with me. I'm calling you irrational because as long as you continue to use words without knowing the meaning of those words you can't even join in the discussion.
That's truly hilarious.
The only reason we ended up in this conversation (instead of me not responding to your second comment) is because you presnted your argument using words that mean something completely different. You, of course, justified your incorrect terminology by saying that you are using the "technical" definition, which is utter bullshit. Alternatively, you use a word (chaos), and then later say you were refering to chaos theory which is something completely different.
You are now number three on my list of idiots who have claimed the OED definition of an english word is incorrect. I would like to continue the philosophical portion of our discussion, but I cannot because we don't speak the same language. I don't have time to argue simply because what was written isn't what was meant.
MSRP of e-Reader cards says otherwise.
Yeah, that sounds right. Sony isn't going to make and sell any more PS3s until February.
Wait, no, that doesn't sound right at all. A very slow flow I'll believe, but none for months just isn't plausible. Unless their manufacturing facilities blew up it can't possibly be true.
While GameStop and its EB Games brand collectively account for about 25 percent of the US gaming market, the company believes it didn't receive that much of either system's day-one shipments.
They won't get more than 25% of the ongoing shipments either. They used to be a specialty retailer that added excellent customer service to the product you could get elsewhere. Recently, the bent over backwards to please the game publishers under the mistaken impression that if they didn't give in to their demands the publishers would give preferential treatment to the big guys (Wal-Mart, Target, etc...). Now that they don't offer any additional value, the publishers not only don't need them, but they actually have incentive to push them out of the market to reduce used game sales. Now, they get crappy allotments, they have to take pre-orders on everything because they can't return unsold merchandise to the distributor, they can't take returns from their customers for the same reason, and instead of being helpful the employees are reduced to bullying their customers in order to meet the quotas that keep the company in the black. It's only a matter of time. In the meantime, you may as well shop for your gaming gear at Wal-Mart, because you'll get equivalent service, and Wal-Mart has better stock levels.
When I have two systems, I'd like to be able to use my content on either one like I can with every previous generation console. They need to figure out how to make downloaded content do *everything* that physical media can do if they want my money (including allowing resale). Either that, or they have to offer the downloaded content at a steep discount.
"bricked."
The call just came in from marketing. Apparently they would prefer you to refer to it as 'Boat Anchor Mode'. Apparently that evokes a higher valued mental image.
Most embedded systems with updateable firmware have two copies of firmware around at any given time, or a socketed memory chip.
Regardless, if there's a manufacturing defect with with the memory hardware for the firmware, no update architecture is going to save you from failure.
I don't watch any of the channels that broadcast in 1080. There's only one channel in 1080 I'm interested in, and I'm not interested enough to pay the $10/month extra the satellite company wants to charge me
I'm talking OTA. It's hard for me to even find 720p OTA broadcast content. It's all either SD or 1080i. Perhaps it's different where you live...
As to almost every PC monitor supporting 1080p... Again, I think not. None of the computer displays in our house (4 of them) can show 1080p without downscaling.
And your point is? That you buy crappy monitors? 17" LCDs with 1024 lines of resolution are less than $200, and come for free with most entry level Dell setups. You have to go out of your way to get a 1024x768 native resolution monitor these days, and you'll only be saving $15-20. Most PC monitors are still CRTs that easily support 1280x1024. You can display 1080p on such a display with only an unnoticeable bit of cropping. No downscaling required. These are entry level displays we're talking about. There are *very few* gamers out there using a low-end LCD as their display because they can't stand the ghosting. Low-end displays usually end up on the desk of an office worker.
I think you have a strange idea of what most people's equipment is like. 20" LCD computer monitors and 50" TVs are not the norm.
The cheapest 17" display that Dell sells has 1024 lines of resolution. I don't know where you pulled the 20" and 50" numbers out of.
Regardless of what people have for displays, it doesn't change the fact that 720p clearly looks better than 480p.
The anamorphic DVD is 720x480. That's a 16:9 image with (almost) square pixels. The image is sent down the HDMI cable to the TV, which displays it on the 1280x720 screen by scaling to 1.5x original size. Where is this "horizontal and vertical resolution loss" supposed to be coming from?
720x480 isn't even close to 16:9 with square pixels. 480p at 16:9 with square pixels would be 854x480.
Even today, sets under 46" (which make up the majority of the market) aren't 1080i.
LCDs never have an interlaced native resolution. The current generation of LCDs has a 1080p native resolution. The prices are coming down on these sets, and the represent about half of the 32+" sets on the market now. 47" 1080p LCDs are available for under $2000 (I just bought one for $1799). You will probably find that LCD sets over 20" that aren't 1080p will be practically gone from the marketplace within a year.
CRTs with a 1080i resolution have been the norm as long as CRT HD sets have been available. Dispite all the marketing hype around high profit LCD, Plasma, LCD projection, and DLP displays, cheap CRT sets are common.
About half of rear projection HDTVs on the market right now are 1080p.
The most common HD display by far is the PC monitor. Almost every one built since 1995 supports 1080+ lines of vertical resolution.
720 line displays will be a footnote in history. They'll only have been available for these past few years.
To repeat what I've said elsewhere, comparing a Faroudja-upscaled HDMI-connected 480p 16:9 DVD with 16:9 OTA 720p HDTV, on a normal size set, I really don't see a big difference.
That's probably because you were watching poorly encoded 720p OTA content, or more likely, upscaled 480i content that was broadcast at 720p, which is probably why it looked so similar to your DVD. Or another alternative: Most OTA HD content is broadcast at 1080i. For example, on my Tivo right now there isn't a single OTA HD recording at 720p. They're all 1080i. Perhaps your TV is doing a very poor job of downscaling the 1080i content to 720p? That's not an uncommon problem, and it would explain why you don't think 720p looks very good.
On a 1080p set, it is hard to distinguish between 720p and 1080i at a quick glance. If you say upscaled 480p is practically as good as 720p, are you saying it's almost as good as 1080i as well?
Most 480p content is 4:3? Since when?
Most 480p content is NTSC video after a 3:2 pullup. With square pixels, 480p is *never* 16x9. It is 640x480. 720x480 with rectangular pixels is as good as 480p gets. Simple math. You've got both horizontal and vertical resolution loss between 480p and 720p no matter how you get your signal. If you've got reasonable vision, and a screen that is larger than 30", you can walk into a room and tell at a glance if the video is 480p or 720p (or 1080i. It is very hard to tell the difference between 720p and 1080i at a glance).
480p content is good enough for me, but I'm not going to say I can't tell the difference. I can, and very easily. Anecdotally, I'll say that most people can.
What grit sandpaper did you use on your corneas? 150 perhaps? Or maybe you have a 13" TV?
The difference between 480p and 720p is like night and day. I don't mind how 480p looks at all. I think with good equipment it looks very good, but I'm not going to say that they're practically indistinguishable. The difference is glaringly obvious. (Even more obvious when you consider that most 480p content is 4:3, while most 720p content is 16:9).
That said, Even with a native 1080p resolution on my television, I bought a Wii and not a PS3. (Though I may end up getting a PS3 some day) The fact of the matter is that people buy the system that has the games they want to play nothing (literally, nothing) else matters.
Heh.
I happened to be at BestBuy the night before the PS3 launch to return a TV (damned dead pixels...) and I was talking to the manager for a few hours while the BestBuy.com people figured out how to work their computers so that they didn't say the television I clearly had in my possession hadn't been delivered yet. He said that they were getting so many Wii that he didn't expect a line and that people would be able to get one without a problem. I drove by again Saturday night just to see. There were twice as many people in line as systems by midnight, and the store didn't open until 9:00AM.
There is a middle ground. My primary board is an older Dell keyboard with mechanical keyswitches. They feel like a lightweight version of the model M. The keyboard is solid, with two layers of fairly low gauge metal inside (it could easily be used as a blunt weapon; the skull would give before the board) but the keys are about half volume from the IBM keyboard. I wonder if it uses the same 'Altus' switches that you describe. Whatever is in there, I love it, and I easily type 10-15WPM faster on it than on any membrane keyboard.
It does, but the data still crosses the PCI bus... It has to, since the ports are on separate chips. The chips I'm talking about have multiple ports on the chip, and can communicate with other chips directly via a SPI bus.
In order to be genuinely arbitrary, you'd need to have some kind of a biological genuine random-number generator. Unless you think humans have little quantum-detectors in their brains, it's hard to imagine how this could work.
Define detector. Why can't a system that contains parts which behave randomly when observed individually produce random output? Biological neurons are capable of firing based on the stimulus of a single particle. Quantum physicists say that the movement of individual particles is completely random. Isn't that enough of a quantum detector? (Of course that still doesn't answer the question of whether said randomness qualifies as 'will'...)
The cogs of the machine are not taken on faith. They are called neurons. As well as other biological entities. Do you disbelieve in neurons? Would you consider neuroscience to be "spiritual"?
No, but you said:
"We're talking about a highly complex (e.g. chaotic) system. So it would be naive to expect the inputs to map directly to the outputs."
For any given state of a neural network, you can describe a direct map between a set of inputs and the output. Your application of your definition of direct seems dubious to me, as an input driven by feedback (state) is still an input to the system. Furthermore, if you follow your hypothesis to it's logical conclusion, the entirety of existence is simply the intermediary between the initial input and the final output. Doesn't that mean that every input into the human system is merely state in the system. After all, then inputs at t1-y in your example couldn't possibly have been anything but what they were... Lastly, if you don't buy that state is an input, how can human reaction be considered stimulus/response when clearly the response is the result of a sequence of stimuli?
complex (that's the modern term for chaotic)
Frankly, while the rest of what we're discussing is philosophical, that statement is just bullshit.
chaotic - adj, Completely unordered and unpredictable
complex - adj, Involving many parts; complicated
A system can be extremely complex without being chaotic. Chaos is practically synonymous with nondeterminism.
it's pretty clear to me that you had no logical basis for it in the first place, and are continuing to react to my viewpoint viscerally instead of rationally.
Right. If I was being logical I would come to the same conclusion as you?
I'm just trying to explain to you that there's a lot more going on. When I see someone say "stimulus/response" I immediately think: "deterministic". To me it doesn't matter how many intermediaries you throw up between the stimulus and the response. You could have an entire rube goldberg contraption that would make any simple function-mapping impossible, but would fail to alter the fundamental nature of "stimulus/respones" - determinism.
I see what you're saying, and I come to exactly the opposite conclusion that you have given the same data. If anything you have further strengthened my opinion that most human behavior is not purely stimulus/response. Human behavior is not deterministic based solely on stimuli. It is not a matter of how many intermediaries there are between the stimulus and the response. In fact, given the same stimuli repeatedly, a human may not respond the same way twice simply because there are many factors in the response that cannot reasonably be considered stimuli. Furthermore, given exactly the same stimuli, people have the capability of choosing a response arbitrarily. You may argue, though, that context is a stimulus...
From a physical perspective, you cannot convince me that any level of simulation, down to a quantum mechanical copy of a human being would be able to predict the responses of the subject. Such a copy would diverge immediately and rapidly from the subject person. So, is a system that is not provably deterministic actually deterministic? I would say no. I have a feeling that many quantum physicists would agree with me. Perhaps materialists are right, and "free will" is merely a set of quantum states, but that certainly isn't deterministic; the outcome is not yet defined. Or perhaps I'm wrong and even in quantum mechanics, nothing is random. Even so, that still leaves the problem of The Beginning, which is essentially the same philosophical problem when you boil it all down.
Now, I'd like to go back to something you said early on in your comment:
it would be naive to expect the inputs to map directly to the outputs.
Then you say:
That means that you've got a vast array of systems, all of which act deterministically. You feed in input (stimulus) and the output is determined by the system (response) without any intervention of a human will. The will, in essence, disappears into the cogs of the machine. Instead of an actual entity, human will becomes merely a simplified description of the system as a whole.
How can you not see that those two statements contradict each other? You're saying that the inputs don't map directly to the outputs (presumably because you don't know how to describe the mapping), and then you are saying that the inputs do map directly to the output. So, are you saying that the statistical model doesn't apply because we have to take the "cogs of the machine" on faith? If so, you seem to be describing yourself as a materialist using an argument that is spiritual.
Reducing an activity to stimulus/response may seem clever, but the trouble is that it works for pretty much every human behavior imaginable. And it certainly works for every leisure activity.
People never tire of making that argument. The trouble is that, while it sounds good, it's just plain wrong. Most human activities fall into a stimulus-reasoning-response pattern. There is even a mathematical description of stimulus-response that explains why you are wrong. If you can't come up with a function of stimulus x that produces the predictable response y, you don't have a stimulus-response model.
After that, your argument goes off into the weeds on some wild tangent that basically adds up to "I like Warcraft. This guy didn't like something that I like. Therefore this guy is a whiner." Of course now, if you really are a WoW fan, I have become what your kind calls a "hater", and by calling me such you'll have proven to your peers that I'm an idiot. It's stimulus-response.
There are chips available that do on-chip processing for fast-path switching and basic routing, and give control the host processor for more complex "control-path" processing. I don't know of anybody who sells such things in a ready-built configuration for ethernet, but you can get exactly that for fibre-channel from Qlogic. Presumably, if you reprogrammed the chips every reconfiguration you could get almost all your work done in the fast-path.
This isn't really a do-it-yourself kind of project though, as you're almost certainly going to spend more on a single unit without software (assuming that you don't have to build the box yourself, including board design, etc...) than you would pay for a commercial product with the software included. If you're planning on doing it in bulk for resale, you'll still get killed unless you have some really novel killer feature you're going to include as a value add. If he does, he should contact a venture capitalist ASAP.
It's no big deal that the Zune doesn't support Vista. Vista isn't out yet.
The big red flag here is that Vista doesn't support a Microsoft app that was written for XP. Oops.
Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own
Part of the fun of being a parent is teaching you child why they shouldn't be little assholes so they grow out of that phase in their lives eventually. Instead we outlaw discipline, have pep-rallies, endzone celebrations in high-school football games, and encourage childish behaviors right up into early adulthood.
It is not harmless to let your kid be a little brat with no guidance on why it is wrong. Someday they will have to grow up and work with other people instead of having a need to one-up everybody.
Sure, they could go flip burgers or become a sandwich artist and come home smelling like the garbage disposal.
Try painting, or working for a carpenter on light construction. Be a box jockey for UPS. Try selling shoes (probably the highest paying job on this list. I was making $500 a week part time selling shoes when I was in High School). There are plenty of non-fast-food entry level jobs that don't require you to be an asshole for a living.
I've been pondering the architecture already. Clearly it would have to key of a random sentence subject in the article summary. That can map to a database of tangentially related concepts. The hard part would be making sure that the analogy was truly bad. It would be a total giveaway if the script happened to generate an apt analogy.
I'm truly beginning to appreciate the amount of work required in the service you provide to the slashdot community.
Don't feel too bad for them. They're only working there for the discount. It's not like there aren't other jobs... You know, jobs where they don't have to blatantly lie to their customers in order to meet their quotas? If they're willing to be evil for $7.75 an hour....
I think it would be fun to write a script to emulate BadAnalogyGuy. I bet nobody would notice the difference. Hell, BadAnalogyGuy may already be a script! I think I'll put it on my list of 1,000,000 projects I want to do.