Are you trolling, or are you just being stupid? The name of the game is "LEGO Universe". The quoted statement can be interpreted in two ways based on the two meanings of "universe" in this context, one of them being a (very slightly) humorous exaggeration--it's a textbook pun: "the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound."
If you're going to nitpick something related to this story, go with the "wiith" from the announcement's second paragraph.
The end of the video (in case you stopped watching partway through) gives some random philosophical musings as well.
Finally, we'd like to discuss as to why we are opening this up. The answer is actually very simple--because we have the power to do so. The world is not in a good shape and we believe there is a problem of power. There is imbalance with giving and receiving. We would like to add our two cents by showing things can be done different--that there is a way of giving things that benefits both the giver and receiver. That's why we're offering our consulting services to anybody who is interested in pursuing this endeavor. We also opened a blog at volumetricprojection.blogspot.com where we will be posting news related to this project.
Finally, a philosophical note. Never forget: you have power. And the enemy of this power of yours is fear. That's why we are constantly bombarded with bad news. That's why accepting things you don't like is giving away your power. We believe it is a good time to change things in the world, and we know you can be part of that. Also, do not use your power in an evil way. You can be assured evil things will come out. Use your power with goodness, and we'll live in a world where our grandchildren will be happy to live in.
So, we hope that this project will crystalize soon, and that all the changes that are happening in the world will not lead to an evil outcome. You can be part of a good change. Don't forget.
Personally, while I wish them luck in their endeavor, I also find their proof of concept very lame, and these philosophical musings ramble around some potentially decent points, but are out of place. They can sort of project very basic geometric shapes, if you're willing to put up with lots of smoke and very poor resolution, with poor color. It's not ready even for a YouTube preview, let alone a/. story.
Interesting point. Maybe. I imagine most people who use Firefox are regular users who hardly care what search engine they use, but I have no data to back up that intuition. In the tech community, though, I agree: Microsoft is disliked enough that it would alienate tech-savvy users to swap the default, even if it's very easy to change.
but that will be the end of Firefox if it happens.
Why? I get it, Microsoft is evil, but is their money tainted? If you respond, please only use specific and realistic example scenarios. (I won't pay any attention to vague assertions that boil down to "Micorosoft is evil and their money is tainted" anyway.)
It made me laugh. I figured it was +4 funny until reading the comments responding to it seriously, and was surprised to find it's +4 interesting. I doubt the author meant to seriously poke fun at Europe. They already have the LHC.
You missed my point. I said "No, that does not mean I should post my half-assed opinion as fact. The fact is, [my half-assed opinion]". I was just trying to show how easy it is to "discuss" this issue while knowing next to nothing about it.
Am I just out of the loop, or are most people here just talking out of their ass? What is SecureBoot and why is it controversial?
The article assumes you already know what it is. All the highly rated posts assume you already know. Yes, I can pick up some things from context (enough to argue about it even!). No, that does not mean I should post my half-assed opinion as fact.
The fact is, SecureBoot is a hardware manufacturer's issue. If Apple had suggested it, there would be no controversy. And anyway, manufacturers would have to be stupid not to provide an option to disable it / install another OS: it doesn't serve their interests. If Microsoft paid them so that it served their interests, well there's anti-trust for you if I ever saw it. Complete non-issue brought to you by Microsoft Hate (tm).
You understand your argument is that someone who wants to install an alternative OS themselves can't be bothered to change a BIOS setting? How often have you set up a Linux box without the need for any tweaks/configuration that's not harder to do (or figure out/find!) than changing a BIOS setting? I just don't buy it. Yes, this would be a barrier for my grandparents to switch to Linux, but there are so many other things in the way it's ridiculous to focus on that.
That's not to say there might be other, more workable arguments against this feature. It's just that your example situation is ridiculous.
humans aren't going to evolve resistance to being shot in the head, no matter how many times it happens.
Strictly speaking, I'm not so sure. Imagine a (horrific) society where a randomly selected fraction of people, before being allowed to procreate, must get shot in the head. Some live (eg. Rep. Giffords). Once in a while the survivors are better adapted to surviving such an injury (say with thicker skulls). After a while, the fatality rate decreases a bit, allowing for an increase in the fraction of those randomly selected (the fraction being chosen to avoid extinction while encouraging evolution). After a very long time of fatality rate decrease and survivor adaptations, you'd probably evolve high resistance to being shot in the head.
The same reasoning can be applied to any desired trait which a species is even remotely capable of evolving resistance to. This one just happens to be extraordinarily horrible. Evolving resistance to having your atoms separated spacially around the universe, for instance, would be asking too much.
Wow, why does this post have so many comments when it hasn't even been moderated? Oh wait, it's the first comment (ignoring the -1 Golden Girls lyrics [wonderful show, by the way] posted by an AC just above you). Never mind. Move along.
Seriously though, can something be done about the prevalence of posting in the first comment with a score >= 2? It buries high quality posts at the bottom, unmoderated and largely unseen. Would randomly reordering the top-level comments be so terrible?
There was a story about The Hurt Locker a few months back where you can find plenty of random comments saying that it was a bad movie. The only ones that raised a real objection to it that I saw were here, saying that it was unrealistic. It seems like it's just a movie some people love to hate for no good reason, and a few people dislike for good reasons. The vast majority of reviewers loved it, it was the Best Picture winner, and it made several times its budget.
I imagine you're talking about marks of the world tree. After you turn in the IIRC 150, you get to do it twice more, albeit with a few more marks per day in additional quests. At least, that's as far as I got before I quit that grind.
There's a lot more to the game than those Firelands dailies, though.
One word: laptops. Sleep mode still uses power. Hibernate can work, though it usually takes a while anyway. I rarely turn off my Windows machine because it wants to restart.
Well, I imagine humans will still drive some vehicles/sometimes, which is why I left lights in existence and didn't change existing road structures too much. But perhaps not:).
Agreed. I've always loved the idea of automated cars, even since I was young. There are so many benefits: greatly reduced traffic fatalities, alleviation of most traffic jams*, optimized stoplights, higher fuel efficiency--and, of course, convenience. But, there would almost inevitably be deaths and injuries caused by the machines. Liability for traffic fatalities nowadays is pretty much on the human behind the wheel. Even if the machines lower traffic accidents greatly, I don't see how the company that produced it can get away with not taking on all that formerly human liability. An informed legal analysis would be wonderful.
*Suppose an accident blocked 4 out of 8 lanes of traffic. In a perfect world, everybody upstream of the blockage would slow to half their original speed, and whenever you got to the blockage you would speed up to your regular speed. The number of cars/minute past any point is then constant. In reality, average humans cannot hope to manage such logistical feats, and so everyone uses a greedy algorithm where they go as fast as they can as long as they can. After a bunch of inefficiencies build up, you're stopped, and throughput through the blockage is well below its optimal capacity. A sufficiently advanced computer network could coordinate optimized strategies for handling things that would otherwise cause huge traffic jams. This would be both extremely convenient and fuel efficient.
There are similar potential benefits to networked cars in regular traffic. For instance, you could optimize light timing in real-time so that a bunch of cars get through without having to stop at multiple lights. Even getting started after a light could stand to benefit, since a group of automated cars could all accelerate together, rather than one after another as humans do. You could dynamically route people around jams as well.
I imagine such advanced functions would take years or decades to set up even after automated cars catch on. Still, their benefits are so great and their downsides so minimal that I have difficulty understanding how anyone could not be excited by the prospect of (networked) automated cars.
I've always thought this sort of thing is a "second rate" way to get your name remembered, like writing a definitive biography on someone who actually did enough stuff to be remembered, or organizing/editing such a person's collected works. Ah well; we can't all be {Newton/Einstein/Bach/...}.
What English speaking country/region uses the long scale today? I didn't see any on the page linked. It seems that short/long scale is a historical issue for English speakers and a modern issue for translators into various other languages.
Perhaps I'm missing your point. If pi were rational, e^(pi*i) would itself be irrational, so it couldn't be the rational number -1, as you suggest, though it is, a contradiction: hence pi is irrational. That was implicit. Did you just mean to fill a gap? If so, I left larger ones unfilled--for instance, even if you were to take the theorem on faith (which, incidentally, I do; transcendental number theory is interesting for me to read summaries about, but no more), specializing the theorem's positive transcendence degree to give irrationality takes a little bit of churning through terminology.
I've never seen "Pi" written out to indicate a product in standard writing, so I'm not sure if there's any issue here (in reality that is; theoretically the issue clearly might occur). That I've never seen it is probably just because "Pi" (now I want to write \Pi) is only really used in higher level contexts than "pi".
Slashdot Mirror
Are you trolling, or are you just being stupid? The name of the game is "LEGO Universe". The quoted statement can be interpreted in two ways based on the two meanings of "universe" in this context, one of them being a (very slightly) humorous exaggeration--it's a textbook pun: "the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound."
If you're going to nitpick something related to this story, go with the "wiith" from the announcement's second paragraph.
If you noticed there were advertisements in that, you're gay.
Speaking of which, I think I need a new 2-speed battery drill.
Finally, we'd like to discuss as to why we are opening this up. The answer is actually very simple--because we have the power to do so. The world is not in a good shape and we believe there is a problem of power. There is imbalance with giving and receiving. We would like to add our two cents by showing things can be done different--that there is a way of giving things that benefits both the giver and receiver. That's why we're offering our consulting services to anybody who is interested in pursuing this endeavor. We also opened a blog at volumetricprojection.blogspot.com where we will be posting news related to this project.
Finally, a philosophical note. Never forget: you have power. And the enemy of this power of yours is fear. That's why we are constantly bombarded with bad news. That's why accepting things you don't like is giving away your power. We believe it is a good time to change things in the world, and we know you can be part of that. Also, do not use your power in an evil way. You can be assured evil things will come out. Use your power with goodness, and we'll live in a world where our grandchildren will be happy to live in.
So, we hope that this project will crystalize soon, and that all the changes that are happening in the world will not lead to an evil outcome. You can be part of a good change. Don't forget.
Personally, while I wish them luck in their endeavor, I also find their proof of concept very lame, and these philosophical musings ramble around some potentially decent points, but are out of place. They can sort of project very basic geometric shapes, if you're willing to put up with lots of smoke and very poor resolution, with poor color. It's not ready even for a YouTube preview, let alone a /. story.
Interesting point. Maybe. I imagine most people who use Firefox are regular users who hardly care what search engine they use, but I have no data to back up that intuition. In the tech community, though, I agree: Microsoft is disliked enough that it would alienate tech-savvy users to swap the default, even if it's very easy to change.
but that will be the end of Firefox if it happens.
Why? I get it, Microsoft is evil, but is their money tainted? If you respond, please only use specific and realistic example scenarios. (I won't pay any attention to vague assertions that boil down to "Micorosoft is evil and their money is tainted" anyway.)
It made me laugh. I figured it was +4 funny until reading the comments responding to it seriously, and was surprised to find it's +4 interesting. I doubt the author meant to seriously poke fun at Europe. They already have the LHC.
You missed my point. I said "No, that does not mean I should post my half-assed opinion as fact. The fact is, [my half-assed opinion]". I was just trying to show how easy it is to "discuss" this issue while knowing next to nothing about it.
Am I just out of the loop, or are most people here just talking out of their ass? What is SecureBoot and why is it controversial?
The article assumes you already know what it is. All the highly rated posts assume you already know. Yes, I can pick up some things from context (enough to argue about it even!). No, that does not mean I should post my half-assed opinion as fact.
The fact is, SecureBoot is a hardware manufacturer's issue. If Apple had suggested it, there would be no controversy. And anyway, manufacturers would have to be stupid not to provide an option to disable it / install another OS: it doesn't serve their interests. If Microsoft paid them so that it served their interests, well there's anti-trust for you if I ever saw it. Complete non-issue brought to you by Microsoft Hate (tm).
You understand your argument is that someone who wants to install an alternative OS themselves can't be bothered to change a BIOS setting? How often have you set up a Linux box without the need for any tweaks/configuration that's not harder to do (or figure out/find!) than changing a BIOS setting? I just don't buy it. Yes, this would be a barrier for my grandparents to switch to Linux, but there are so many other things in the way it's ridiculous to focus on that.
That's not to say there might be other, more workable arguments against this feature. It's just that your example situation is ridiculous.
...so that I can get the +5 funny achievement!
Who 'Owns' the Google Driverless Car IP?
Google, obviously. Since they have "the" IP address for all these driverless cars, how will drivers' private data be protected?!
humans aren't going to evolve resistance to being shot in the head, no matter how many times it happens.
Strictly speaking, I'm not so sure. Imagine a (horrific) society where a randomly selected fraction of people, before being allowed to procreate, must get shot in the head. Some live (eg. Rep. Giffords). Once in a while the survivors are better adapted to surviving such an injury (say with thicker skulls). After a while, the fatality rate decreases a bit, allowing for an increase in the fraction of those randomly selected (the fraction being chosen to avoid extinction while encouraging evolution). After a very long time of fatality rate decrease and survivor adaptations, you'd probably evolve high resistance to being shot in the head.
The same reasoning can be applied to any desired trait which a species is even remotely capable of evolving resistance to. This one just happens to be extraordinarily horrible. Evolving resistance to having your atoms separated spacially around the universe, for instance, would be asking too much.
Wow, why does this post have so many comments when it hasn't even been moderated? Oh wait, it's the first comment (ignoring the -1 Golden Girls lyrics [wonderful show, by the way] posted by an AC just above you). Never mind. Move along.
Seriously though, can something be done about the prevalence of posting in the first comment with a score >= 2? It buries high quality posts at the bottom, unmoderated and largely unseen. Would randomly reordering the top-level comments be so terrible?
...has a typo. It should be "since '95" instead of "since 95'". Since it talks about product quality, I figured it was worth pointing out.
There was a story about The Hurt Locker a few months back where you can find plenty of random comments saying that it was a bad movie. The only ones that raised a real objection to it that I saw were here, saying that it was unrealistic. It seems like it's just a movie some people love to hate for no good reason, and a few people dislike for good reasons. The vast majority of reviewers loved it, it was the Best Picture winner, and it made several times its budget.
XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve the problem, use more!
Is it just me, or did this saying lose its pithiness about 6 months ago?
I imagine you're talking about marks of the world tree. After you turn in the IIRC 150, you get to do it twice more, albeit with a few more marks per day in additional quests. At least, that's as far as I got before I quit that grind.
There's a lot more to the game than those Firelands dailies, though.
One word: laptops. Sleep mode still uses power. Hibernate can work, though it usually takes a while anyway. I rarely turn off my Windows machine because it wants to restart.
Well, I imagine humans will still drive some vehicles/sometimes, which is why I left lights in existence and didn't change existing road structures too much. But perhaps not :).
Agreed. I've always loved the idea of automated cars, even since I was young. There are so many benefits: greatly reduced traffic fatalities, alleviation of most traffic jams*, optimized stoplights, higher fuel efficiency--and, of course, convenience. But, there would almost inevitably be deaths and injuries caused by the machines. Liability for traffic fatalities nowadays is pretty much on the human behind the wheel. Even if the machines lower traffic accidents greatly, I don't see how the company that produced it can get away with not taking on all that formerly human liability. An informed legal analysis would be wonderful.
*Suppose an accident blocked 4 out of 8 lanes of traffic. In a perfect world, everybody upstream of the blockage would slow to half their original speed, and whenever you got to the blockage you would speed up to your regular speed. The number of cars/minute past any point is then constant. In reality, average humans cannot hope to manage such logistical feats, and so everyone uses a greedy algorithm where they go as fast as they can as long as they can. After a bunch of inefficiencies build up, you're stopped, and throughput through the blockage is well below its optimal capacity. A sufficiently advanced computer network could coordinate optimized strategies for handling things that would otherwise cause huge traffic jams. This would be both extremely convenient and fuel efficient.
There are similar potential benefits to networked cars in regular traffic. For instance, you could optimize light timing in real-time so that a bunch of cars get through without having to stop at multiple lights. Even getting started after a light could stand to benefit, since a group of automated cars could all accelerate together, rather than one after another as humans do. You could dynamically route people around jams as well.
I imagine such advanced functions would take years or decades to set up even after automated cars catch on. Still, their benefits are so great and their downsides so minimal that I have difficulty understanding how anyone could not be excited by the prospect of (networked) automated cars.
I've always thought this sort of thing is a "second rate" way to get your name remembered, like writing a definitive biography on someone who actually did enough stuff to be remembered, or organizing/editing such a person's collected works. Ah well; we can't all be {Newton/Einstein/Bach/...}.
Correct, it hasn't been shown to be normal.
What English speaking country/region uses the long scale today? I didn't see any on the page linked. It seems that short/long scale is a historical issue for English speakers and a modern issue for translators into various other languages.
Perhaps I'm missing your point. If pi were rational, e^(pi*i) would itself be irrational, so it couldn't be the rational number -1, as you suggest, though it is, a contradiction: hence pi is irrational. That was implicit. Did you just mean to fill a gap? If so, I left larger ones unfilled--for instance, even if you were to take the theorem on faith (which, incidentally, I do; transcendental number theory is interesting for me to read summaries about, but no more), specializing the theorem's positive transcendence degree to give irrationality takes a little bit of churning through terminology.
I've never seen "Pi" written out to indicate a product in standard writing, so I'm not sure if there's any issue here (in reality that is; theoretically the issue clearly might occur). That I've never seen it is probably just because "Pi" (now I want to write \Pi) is only really used in higher level contexts than "pi".