There are no e-sport athletes any more than there are chess athletes or darts athletes or snooker athletes. E-sports are not athletic sports.
That's not to detract from the skill required to be a pro-level Starcraft II player. Nor do I disagree that they may be called "e-sports". However, calling practicioners of a sport which involves no strenuous physical activity an "athlete" just doesn't make sense (unless they also play an athletic sport).
Minecraft with FTB unleashed mod on a server with some friends. The Feed the Beast mods add so much to the game and take away a lot of the mining grind and you can build industrial machinery.
Starcraft II. I love SC2 but unfortunately Blizzard recently completely screwed up the matchmaking system. It used to work really well, but then they added a very aggressive MMR decay which means many 1v1 matchups are no longer fun - because I've played a bit sporadically and their brain-dead MMR decay system means my MMR has decayed to such an extent that I'm winning 75% of the time and it's just no challenge. The remaining 25% of the time I'm playing against former low masters who have had their MMR decayed in the same manner meaning I just get stomped into the ground, so I've given up on Starcraft until they put the matchmaking system back to how it was or fix it some other way. It's just stopped being fun because there are so few games now where I get a good, close, hard fought game.
KSP - another time sink. The only problem I have with Kerbal Space Program is that its physics engine is single-threaded, so I've sort of given up - any largish structure ends up maxing up a single core leaving 7 other cores almost idle. Apparently the problem is that the Unity engine uses a single threaded physics engine, so it's probably not going to get fixed soon (or more likely ever - because if you don't design something to be multithreaded from the get go it's not usually practical to tack it on some time later save a complete rewrite).
The latency is only about 150ms. This is simply unnoticable for email, so major US email providers aren't going to have servers in the EU for latency reasons.
If I were running a simulation, and the things that evolved in my simulation became self-aware and finally figured out they were in a simulation, I would find it pretty damned exciting. The purpose of the simulation at that point may change, but it still retains a purpose.
So where is this being taught? Where are people proposing it be taught in school?
That's right, nowhere. Nor is anyone proposing it be taught in science classes. As an atheist I would be against this being taught in science class precisely because it is not science, it's merely a philosophical conjecture.
No one is singling out religion for not being taught in science class. In fact I have no problem with Religious Education classes in school since they are a part of human cultural history, we had them in my country and it helped convince me that religions were fundamentally incorrect. However, what I am against teaching is things that are not science in science class. Creationism isn't science and should not be taught in science class. Nor is this simulation conjecture, and it should be left to a general studies class or other class where such philosophical waffle can be debated.
Try also wearing something retroreflective if you're out on the bike at night. Anyone with full beams still on will get it reflected straight back at them (your retroreflectives will look as dazzling to them as they are to you). The plus point of retroreflectives is that the drivers of cars on dipped beams can see you well outside of the nominal range of the dipped headlights so they'll be able to recognise what you are a lot further away.
Streetlamps are orange or light orange not because of a design decision to use a wavelength at which we're sensitive, but merely because low pressure sodium lights are still by a country mile the most efficient high power lighting we have. Since LEDs are now beating high pressure sodium lights (the lighter yellow type), these are being increasingly replaced by LEDs.
We don't use sodium lights as car headlights because if you wanted to drive at night, you would have to get in your car and wait five or ten minutes for the lights to get up to temperature before you could drive anywhere. Watch one of the orange streetlights come on some time - they start a dull red (which always makes me crave strawberry ice lollies) - that's just the inert gas mix glowing - and it takes a while for the lamp to warm up enough for the sodium to vaporise before you start seeing the orange colour. High pressure Na lights start off a dim bluish white colour (mercury discharge) until the sodium has vaporised and they become full brightness.
Back when we started putting sodium streetlights up the only technology that could produce enough light for a car headlight and was also instant on was the incandescent bulb.
But is the incremental risk out of all proportion? You've not demonstrated this. First we know it's an LED laser. LED lasers tend not to put out a collimated beam - your laser pointer for instance isn't just a laser diode with a bit of protective glass on the front, it also includes a collimating lens to keep the beam narrow. Without this lens the beam of the naked laser diode would have about a 30 degree angle on it. The danger from powerful lasers is due to the beam being highly collimated (all the energy focused into one very small spot). If the beam without a lens spreads out at 30 degrees without a lens, it's not more dangerous than any other type of lamp of equivalent power with a beam spread out over an equivalent angle.
It's also highly likely that the laser, phosphor and lens will be one moulded assembly, so if you break the lens you're also pretty much likely to break the laser diode at the same time, and any significant disruption to the assembly will also ruin the heatsink causing the diode to overheat and fail quickly. It'll also not be trivial to disassemble, and will still require the addition of a collimating lens system to form a dangerous narrow beam.
It's also likely a product of when the law was made, and I wager this law was probably made when there were no conceivable technologies for car headlights other than incandescent bulbs (probably the legislation was written before LEDs were even invented, let alone the power illuminator LEDs that are available now). It was probably drafted by a civil servant then rubber stamped by parliament too.
The FAA does allow relatively inexpensive aircraft like the Auster Autocrat, indeed the FAA allows a lot more than what our country allows. Experimentals also shouldn't be discounted - many do NOT limit you and are far more capable than a certified aircraft five times as expensive. When I lived in the United States, I had a Cessna 140. This (about 10 years ago) worked out at about $19/hr, that's with everything included - hangarage, fuel, maintenance, insurance. It was in almost mint condition. (Part of the low hourly cost is that I flew it *a lot*, so the fixed costs were spread over a lot of hours - I owned it in a partnership with a friend and between us we flew her about 400 hours a year). Both my partner and his wife flew so although he was married, that wasn't a problem. When my contract in the US ended, I spent two months flying from coast to coast. It was awesome.
I can understand marriage putting an end to this. There is a phenomenon we have in GA called AIDS. It stands for Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome.
1970s? Ours is 1940s technology in the cockpit! It's not the technology about flying that excites me. I don't really care about the technology. I fly to be in the air, not to play with technology.
If you only care about flying technology (you mentioned drones) I can really recommend getting into RC, it's something I do also (radio controlled helicopters, which is also a problem because they aren't cheap). RC helicopters (proper ones, single rotor ones) have a lot of interesting technology challenges because they are inherently unstable. There's quite a few various gyro and control boards from places like Sparkfun and if you really want to get your hands dirty there is a lot of interesting stuff you can do with a RC helicopter.
Some safeguards and cutoffs that failed safe and prevented disasters:
- Countless runaway trains have been prevented by failsafe brakes (vacuum in the early days, air brakes today). - Countless boiler explosions prevented by safety valves - Several nuclear explosions prevented by failsafe arming mechanisms when the bomber carrying the nukes crashed.
There's three. The thing is you only get to hear about the failures. A failsafe working and preventing a disaster is not news so no one ever reports it. But I can guarantee you every day dozens of industrial disasters are averted by failsafe devices like safety power cutoffs, pressure activated safety valves, braking systems that come on when there's an air leak, signalling systems that fail to "stop" when there's a system failure etc.
If we had your attitude we'd still be insisting a man with a red flag walk in front of every car.
He was selling transit. It was customers of his customers. The customer of the customer had a valid source address in the customer of the customer's assigned netblock. The customer of the customer's netblock isn't one of the customer's netblocks.
Nobody does it like that, though. For instance, Chip+PIN wasn't all done at the same time in the UK - there was a transition period of about a decade (I think the first time I saw a chip in my credit card was a full 7 years before I saw a Chip+PIN reader in a store). There's no reason why the US has to do it all in one big bang either, and the US as a whole is smaller than the EU as a whole in terms of population.
I've had to bale out a couple of friends of mine visiting from the US when they got to a shop and their chip-less credit or debit card couldn't be used at all. The ATMs however seemed to mostly still accept chipless cards.
That isn't a good explanation in this case. The UK (and pretty much every European Union country) for instance had a swipe and sign credit card infrastructure just like the United States decades before the introduction of chip and PIN, yet the UK changed to chip and pin 10 years ago despite having the same infrastructure issue as the US.
You don't have to do it as a job. I work a pretty normal IT job full time, but by making certain sacrifices (such as I've never bought a new car nor have I ever bought a car on credit) I can afford to own my own aircraft (and I live in Europe which is a significantly more expensive place to fly than the United States). I have an antique Auster Autocrat (which cost less than most new cars), and it's the very purity of flying for the joy of it - it's uncomplicated stick and rudder flying and it's simply awesome. I can have the job I like that pays pretty well AND I can go flying places on the weekend on my own schedule.
I'm in the same (work situation) as you, yet I fly and I do so somewhere that's more expensive to fly than the United States and can afford it. It's about opportunity costs. I have never owned a new car for instance.
I fly not to do more technology (I spend 99% of my waking life tinkering with technology), I fly to get away from technology a bit. The aircraft I own has zero automation, it's an ancient Auster Autocrat (built in 1945) with pretty much the original instruments in it including World War II style gyros. It's good to be away from chittering beeping devices for a while and just look out the window at the awesome scenery. Sure it's ancient, needs lots of tinkering with, and costs a lot. Why is it worth it? I get to look out the window. I'm actually *flying myself*. I learned to fly in 1997 and I've never got tired of it.
The only bit of technology I really like to have in this environment is my iPad running SkyDemon. We have some very complex airspace not far away, and when flying cross country it makes it a bit more pleasant to have a good easy to use GPS.
Depends how you term "longer flight". When I lived in the US, our flying club had a Beech Bonanza which I used to like to fly. It cruises at about 163 knots. I lived in Texas - I could beat the airlines flying up to southern Illinois from south Texas (the Bo had enough range to go from south east TX to southern IL in one go).
I live somewhere where fuel is fantastically expensive (in the US people whine about $4 a gallon, but fuel where I live costs the equivalent of nearly $10 a gallon). I have a sensible every day use bike that's fun to ride (BMW F800ST) and requires about the same maintenance as a car (service it every year, make sure it has enough fuel and oil etc). You can bet when you can do 68mpg by riding quietly that the bike tends to get ridden quite a lot...
Not even close. I live in a country where GA is much more expensive than it is in the United States, yet I spend a fraction of that amount (even though my aircraft is an antique and needs quite a lot of TLC, and I have to pay a landing fee every time I go to the big airport to get avgas).
Humans wash dishes pretty damned well, but dishwashers are pretty popular despite this. Labour saving devices and appliances to do things we can do, but find boring, are pretty popular things.
And yes - something to help care for the elderly. We have nurses but they are so expensive that only the rich can afford to have them to care for them in their own home. A robot that can help out with various tasks can mean an elderly person of normal means can retain their independence for a bit longer at their own home, instead of being sent to an expensive nursing home where in many cases they get treated like dirt.
The point of machines is not just to do things we can't do, but to do things we don't like doing, or is expensive for a human to do.
Precisely, a *good* engineer would take this into account.
Warranties are supposed to take care of faults through defective design and workmanship. An audio subsystem that allows software to destroy it (doubly so if it lets userland software destroy it) is defective workmanship.
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There are no e-sport athletes any more than there are chess athletes or darts athletes or snooker athletes. E-sports are not athletic sports.
That's not to detract from the skill required to be a pro-level Starcraft II player. Nor do I disagree that they may be called "e-sports". However, calling practicioners of a sport which involves no strenuous physical activity an "athlete" just doesn't make sense (unless they also play an athletic sport).
Minecraft with FTB unleashed mod on a server with some friends. The Feed the Beast mods add so much to the game and take away a lot of the mining grind and you can build industrial machinery.
Starcraft II. I love SC2 but unfortunately Blizzard recently completely screwed up the matchmaking system. It used to work really well, but then they added a very aggressive MMR decay which means many 1v1 matchups are no longer fun - because I've played a bit sporadically and their brain-dead MMR decay system means my MMR has decayed to such an extent that I'm winning 75% of the time and it's just no challenge. The remaining 25% of the time I'm playing against former low masters who have had their MMR decayed in the same manner meaning I just get stomped into the ground, so I've given up on Starcraft until they put the matchmaking system back to how it was or fix it some other way. It's just stopped being fun because there are so few games now where I get a good, close, hard fought game.
KSP - another time sink. The only problem I have with Kerbal Space Program is that its physics engine is single-threaded, so I've sort of given up - any largish structure ends up maxing up a single core leaving 7 other cores almost idle. Apparently the problem is that the Unity engine uses a single threaded physics engine, so it's probably not going to get fixed soon (or more likely ever - because if you don't design something to be multithreaded from the get go it's not usually practical to tack it on some time later save a complete rewrite).
The latency is only about 150ms. This is simply unnoticable for email, so major US email providers aren't going to have servers in the EU for latency reasons.
Isn't a Jetta just a Golf with a boot (trunk) ? So a Jetta and Golf are effectively the same size.
The Polo would be considered a small car, I think.
2008 Honda Civic. Now you know of a mid size 5 door vehicle with a 52 litre fuel tank (closer to 60L than 30L).
Or it may gain additional or different value.
If I were running a simulation, and the things that evolved in my simulation became self-aware and finally figured out they were in a simulation, I would find it pretty damned exciting. The purpose of the simulation at that point may change, but it still retains a purpose.
So where is this being taught? Where are people proposing it be taught in school?
That's right, nowhere. Nor is anyone proposing it be taught in science classes. As an atheist I would be against this being taught in science class precisely because it is not science, it's merely a philosophical conjecture.
No one is singling out religion for not being taught in science class. In fact I have no problem with Religious Education classes in school since they are a part of human cultural history, we had them in my country and it helped convince me that religions were fundamentally incorrect. However, what I am against teaching is things that are not science in science class. Creationism isn't science and should not be taught in science class. Nor is this simulation conjecture, and it should be left to a general studies class or other class where such philosophical waffle can be debated.
Try also wearing something retroreflective if you're out on the bike at night. Anyone with full beams still on will get it reflected straight back at them (your retroreflectives will look as dazzling to them as they are to you). The plus point of retroreflectives is that the drivers of cars on dipped beams can see you well outside of the nominal range of the dipped headlights so they'll be able to recognise what you are a lot further away.
Streetlamps are orange or light orange not because of a design decision to use a wavelength at which we're sensitive, but merely because low pressure sodium lights are still by a country mile the most efficient high power lighting we have. Since LEDs are now beating high pressure sodium lights (the lighter yellow type), these are being increasingly replaced by LEDs.
We don't use sodium lights as car headlights because if you wanted to drive at night, you would have to get in your car and wait five or ten minutes for the lights to get up to temperature before you could drive anywhere. Watch one of the orange streetlights come on some time - they start a dull red (which always makes me crave strawberry ice lollies) - that's just the inert gas mix glowing - and it takes a while for the lamp to warm up enough for the sodium to vaporise before you start seeing the orange colour. High pressure Na lights start off a dim bluish white colour (mercury discharge) until the sodium has vaporised and they become full brightness.
Back when we started putting sodium streetlights up the only technology that could produce enough light for a car headlight and was also instant on was the incandescent bulb.
But is the incremental risk out of all proportion? You've not demonstrated this. First we know it's an LED laser. LED lasers tend not to put out a collimated beam - your laser pointer for instance isn't just a laser diode with a bit of protective glass on the front, it also includes a collimating lens to keep the beam narrow. Without this lens the beam of the naked laser diode would have about a 30 degree angle on it. The danger from powerful lasers is due to the beam being highly collimated (all the energy focused into one very small spot). If the beam without a lens spreads out at 30 degrees without a lens, it's not more dangerous than any other type of lamp of equivalent power with a beam spread out over an equivalent angle.
It's also highly likely that the laser, phosphor and lens will be one moulded assembly, so if you break the lens you're also pretty much likely to break the laser diode at the same time, and any significant disruption to the assembly will also ruin the heatsink causing the diode to overheat and fail quickly. It'll also not be trivial to disassemble, and will still require the addition of a collimating lens system to form a dangerous narrow beam.
It's also likely a product of when the law was made, and I wager this law was probably made when there were no conceivable technologies for car headlights other than incandescent bulbs (probably the legislation was written before LEDs were even invented, let alone the power illuminator LEDs that are available now). It was probably drafted by a civil servant then rubber stamped by parliament too.
The FAA does allow relatively inexpensive aircraft like the Auster Autocrat, indeed the FAA allows a lot more than what our country allows. Experimentals also shouldn't be discounted - many do NOT limit you and are far more capable than a certified aircraft five times as expensive. When I lived in the United States, I had a Cessna 140. This (about 10 years ago) worked out at about $19/hr, that's with everything included - hangarage, fuel, maintenance, insurance. It was in almost mint condition. (Part of the low hourly cost is that I flew it *a lot*, so the fixed costs were spread over a lot of hours - I owned it in a partnership with a friend and between us we flew her about 400 hours a year). Both my partner and his wife flew so although he was married, that wasn't a problem. When my contract in the US ended, I spent two months flying from coast to coast. It was awesome.
I can understand marriage putting an end to this. There is a phenomenon we have in GA called AIDS. It stands for Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome.
1970s? Ours is 1940s technology in the cockpit! It's not the technology about flying that excites me. I don't really care about the technology. I fly to be in the air, not to play with technology.
If you only care about flying technology (you mentioned drones) I can really recommend getting into RC, it's something I do also (radio controlled helicopters, which is also a problem because they aren't cheap). RC helicopters (proper ones, single rotor ones) have a lot of interesting technology challenges because they are inherently unstable. There's quite a few various gyro and control boards from places like Sparkfun and if you really want to get your hands dirty there is a lot of interesting stuff you can do with a RC helicopter.
Some safeguards and cutoffs that failed safe and prevented disasters:
- Countless runaway trains have been prevented by failsafe brakes (vacuum in the early days, air brakes today).
- Countless boiler explosions prevented by safety valves
- Several nuclear explosions prevented by failsafe arming mechanisms when the bomber carrying the nukes crashed.
There's three. The thing is you only get to hear about the failures. A failsafe working and preventing a disaster is not news so no one ever reports it. But I can guarantee you every day dozens of industrial disasters are averted by failsafe devices like safety power cutoffs, pressure activated safety valves, braking systems that come on when there's an air leak, signalling systems that fail to "stop" when there's a system failure etc.
If we had your attitude we'd still be insisting a man with a red flag walk in front of every car.
He was selling transit. It was customers of his customers. The customer of the customer had a valid source address in the customer of the customer's assigned netblock. The customer of the customer's netblock isn't one of the customer's netblocks.
Nobody does it like that, though. For instance, Chip+PIN wasn't all done at the same time in the UK - there was a transition period of about a decade (I think the first time I saw a chip in my credit card was a full 7 years before I saw a Chip+PIN reader in a store). There's no reason why the US has to do it all in one big bang either, and the US as a whole is smaller than the EU as a whole in terms of population.
I've had to bale out a couple of friends of mine visiting from the US when they got to a shop and their chip-less credit or debit card couldn't be used at all. The ATMs however seemed to mostly still accept chipless cards.
That isn't a good explanation in this case. The UK (and pretty much every European Union country) for instance had a swipe and sign credit card infrastructure just like the United States decades before the introduction of chip and PIN, yet the UK changed to chip and pin 10 years ago despite having the same infrastructure issue as the US.
You don't have to do it as a job. I work a pretty normal IT job full time, but by making certain sacrifices (such as I've never bought a new car nor have I ever bought a car on credit) I can afford to own my own aircraft (and I live in Europe which is a significantly more expensive place to fly than the United States). I have an antique Auster Autocrat (which cost less than most new cars), and it's the very purity of flying for the joy of it - it's uncomplicated stick and rudder flying and it's simply awesome. I can have the job I like that pays pretty well AND I can go flying places on the weekend on my own schedule.
I'm in the same (work situation) as you, yet I fly and I do so somewhere that's more expensive to fly than the United States and can afford it. It's about opportunity costs. I have never owned a new car for instance.
I fly not to do more technology (I spend 99% of my waking life tinkering with technology), I fly to get away from technology a bit. The aircraft I own has zero automation, it's an ancient Auster Autocrat (built in 1945) with pretty much the original instruments in it including World War II style gyros. It's good to be away from chittering beeping devices for a while and just look out the window at the awesome scenery. Sure it's ancient, needs lots of tinkering with, and costs a lot. Why is it worth it? I get to look out the window. I'm actually *flying myself*. I learned to fly in 1997 and I've never got tired of it.
The only bit of technology I really like to have in this environment is my iPad running SkyDemon. We have some very complex airspace not far away, and when flying cross country it makes it a bit more pleasant to have a good easy to use GPS.
Depends how you term "longer flight". When I lived in the US, our flying club had a Beech Bonanza which I used to like to fly. It cruises at about 163 knots. I lived in Texas - I could beat the airlines flying up to southern Illinois from south Texas (the Bo had enough range to go from south east TX to southern IL in one go).
I live somewhere where fuel is fantastically expensive (in the US people whine about $4 a gallon, but fuel where I live costs the equivalent of nearly $10 a gallon). I have a sensible every day use bike that's fun to ride (BMW F800ST) and requires about the same maintenance as a car (service it every year, make sure it has enough fuel and oil etc). You can bet when you can do 68mpg by riding quietly that the bike tends to get ridden quite a lot...
Not even close. I live in a country where GA is much more expensive than it is in the United States, yet I spend a fraction of that amount (even though my aircraft is an antique and needs quite a lot of TLC, and I have to pay a landing fee every time I go to the big airport to get avgas).
Humans wash dishes pretty damned well, but dishwashers are pretty popular despite this. Labour saving devices and appliances to do things we can do, but find boring, are pretty popular things.
And yes - something to help care for the elderly. We have nurses but they are so expensive that only the rich can afford to have them to care for them in their own home. A robot that can help out with various tasks can mean an elderly person of normal means can retain their independence for a bit longer at their own home, instead of being sent to an expensive nursing home where in many cases they get treated like dirt.
The point of machines is not just to do things we can't do, but to do things we don't like doing, or is expensive for a human to do.
Precisely, a *good* engineer would take this into account.
Warranties are supposed to take care of faults through defective design and workmanship. An audio subsystem that allows software to destroy it (doubly so if it lets userland software destroy it) is defective workmanship.