I'm not familiar with WoW add-ons, but I am familiar with Lua scripting, and my guess is that the WoW client accesses the script and executes it in an environment created by the WoW client.
The script as application and the WoW client as a linked API library is not a good analog. The script is more closely analogous to the library than the client.
I think that this is one of the problems when the central premise of a show is a "mystery." It always ends up that the big reveal is a huge disappointment.
This is only true for shows that go rudderless. I'm a firm believer now that the entire plotline for a series ought to be mapped out from the beginning. See Heroes season 1 for example. "BSG" and "Lost" just try to milk it for a while then wing it at the big reveal. "Lost" was just milking the atmosphere of the show by episode 3, season 1. Japanese pulp adventure cartoons are the worst offenders, but oddly enough, some of the more adult dramas are consistently good at sticking to a tightly woven plot.
It's pretty relevant, because while Ayers is a known terrorist, friendship between Ayers and Obama is conjecture based on the fact that they live in the same neighborhood and have met. While Princess Haifa has retained plausible deniability WRT 9/11 (as thin as it is, since Saudi "charity" organizations were well known pathways for rich Saudis to funnel money to terrorists), her friendship with the Bush family is well established.
Congrats, you've discovered that racism still exists in America, thus the sensitivity over calling a black man an ape, a common way of dehumanizing black men in the not too distant past. Now, you can argue that it's more racist to be offended by the reference than it is to make it, and I hope someday that is the case, but today most people would disagree with you and rightly so.
You got a cite? My recollection is that we are well north of half a Trillion above and beyond associated defense budget increases. In anycase, our national debt has increased by 5 trillion over the last 8 years, and that was during relatively good economic times.
If it were soft science, they could just come up with a new theory for why sensor drift doesn't matter. If it were bad science, the could bluster and attack and cover it up. If it were good, hard science, they might correct the error, then issue an explanation on how it affected past calculations and predictions, which is what they did.
Evidence points towards the idea that consciousness is something the brain does. It's a verb, not a noun. From that perspective, asking what happens to consciousness after death is like wondering what happens to the music after a guitar is smashed, or asking where the flying went when an airplane breaks down.
Sure, we're nothing more than our atoms, but if those atoms aren't configured into us, then they can't do the things we're doing. A corpse can't even wipe his own ass.
...because human consciousness post-death is not observable (and therefore not reportable)
That's pretty strong evidence that it no longer exists.
That's what bothers me about people arguing about religion vs. science, because they're apples and oranges. One is based on the unobservable and unprovable, and the other is based only on the observable and provable. Neither side can reconcile with the other, so why even bother? A lot of famous scientists in history were devoutly religious.
That's a blinkered view that assumes the current situation to be static. Religion used to encompass everything, but science has beaten it back, surprisingly fast, until Religion's domain is only over the unseen or misunderstood. This conquest by science continues apace. For instance, the next major bugaboo to be wiped out will likely be human consciousness, as neuro-scientists make advances in how consciousness arises out of the activities of the brain. After this point, concepts like the human soul as a thing and life after death will seem as quaint as angels pushing the planets around or God as genetic engineer.
If religious fanatics realized this, that science was in fact not a threat to their domain,
But it is a threat, as much now as it ever was. They may be fanatics, but they have a better view about what's happening than you do. I hope they stay out of our schools, where we tell their children their beliefs are wrong. They have good reason to be afraid for their traditions.
And Bill Clinton Promised to be the 'most ethical administration in history', W promised to 'change the partisan tone'
Bill Clinton's was the most ethical administration of the last 45 years, barring Carter. Not only did no Clinton officials get indicted while in office, unlike either Bush, Reagan or Nixon, but he also didn't lie the country into a major war, unlike the recent Bush and Johnson.
W, on the other hand, was a piece of shit, but he did make hatred for him nearly bipartisan by the time he left.
Your argument is an exact mirror of the sad communist complaint that yeah, communism as practiced hasn't worked, but no-one's every really gone All The Way, if they did, everything would be perfect.
I'll be satisfied if Obama turns out not to be a torturing war criminal who makes trillions of dollars disappear. This is true even if he swaps Silverlight out for a streaming software written by clones of Hitler, or puts Hillary Clinton in the Cabinet.
I agree with you, though, that a president deserves only so much slack. If Obama hasn't proved himself to me by Wednesday or Thursday morning at the latest, I'm breaking up with him.
How can the scientific method be tested and modified without some external framework in which to value them? How can you evaluate which method is "better" without some way to rank them? To do this, you need a philosophical underpinning to make that value judgment.
Let's see: I'm trying to figure out the laws of the universe. If my method takes me down the wrong path and after some time I discover the error, it might by time to review and correct my method.
As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise.
Just because it is the default assumption, doesn't mean its correct. Should we be limited in all our endeavors, to the basic and oversimplified infantile way of thinking? Are you saying its not even worth thinking about?
Of course, he didn't say anything of the sort. And if he did, it would be pointless since so many people have already thought much about this and will probably continue to do so.
I don't know what it is you think philosophers do, but just randomly creating axioms is not it. Philosophers are constantly comparing the results of their theories against their perceptions, and modifying them if need be. You are grossly oversimplifying the practice of philosophy.
Any philosopher who looks around himself to test his theories has suddenly transformed into a scientist.
There have always been a subset of philosophers who spend their entire lives counting the angels on the heads of pins; but there is real, important work being done on many issues. The philosophy of science is just one example. You have no way to judge whether your "scientific method" is worth pursuing without philosophy; even a philosophy as basic as your common-sense approach.
So philosophy means just thinking about stuff? Then you're right, it's extremely useful, and we need more people thinking.
So it's not necessarily that reality is fuzzy and indistinct, more that our knowledge of it is limited.
This is a popular and comforting notion that has long been dis-proved by empirical evidence: the double slit experiment is the classic example that shows that a particle is fuzzy, it's not just our knowledge of it. Heck, this even the point of the cat in a box. Schroedinger didn't say that the cat's state was indeterminable, he said it was in an indeterminate state.
You're taking it as a given that those missing emails got trashed on purpose. But this is the kind of IT screwup that happens every day.
You're putting the federal government at the same level as a newbie IT team with no budget.
Innocent until proven guilty, yada yada. That's the proof standard for a conviction, not an investigation. In any case, we already know the data was destroyed.
Like so many things that have happened in the last eight years, that episode deserves to be observed with Hanlon's Razor in mind. Really, GWB is the poster child for that principle.
Hanlon's razor has no intellectual basis. It is a guide for interpersonal relationships, not a tool for getting at the truth. Besides, how much benefit of the doubt does one man get?
I admit that the Bush administration has a pretty bad record when it comes to obeying the law. But their usual strategy is to hide behind weird legal theories that don't stand up in court (an outcome that any sane lawyer would predict). They're simply not competent enough to succeed at the kind of conspiratorial skullduggery you give them credit for.
Can you really be unaware about how ruthlessly effective they've been at accruing power, stealing money, and breaking the law?
Do you really think these guys don't know how to keep a secret? If so, a few billion of us would like answers to the following.
What did the Whitehouse decided about torture? Why were the US Attorney's fired? What is the nature and what is the purpose of the illegal wire tapping operation? Where did the billions of dollars in cash that disappeared into Army planes go to? Who is in CIA secret prisons? What nation's agents were in contact with the 9/11 terrorists? What happened to the bailout money? Why does the administration fight efforts to investigate war profiteers? Why the hell did we invade Iraq, anyway?
And most importantly (and what incidentally blows Hanlon's Razor, surely the dullest razor ever devised, out of the water): Why didn't the Bush admin do anything to correct these crimes and punish the criminals?
"Leader of the Legislative Branch"... that has a Limbaugh Horse Hockey smell to it. If the Files of the President of the Senate contain anything more than discussions about tie votes and parliamentary procedure, then we've got some fraud on our hands.
You're right that it hasn't been free for 150 years, but it was very much less free up to that point.
Re:Does it always produce true responses?
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There was a guy a couple of years ago who got FBI agents running willy nilly all over the country breaking up imaginary terrorist attacks because he was just making up shit for his torturers. I couldn't find a link though in two minutes of Googling, so I'll just point out that the Nazis and the Japanese weren't able to torture themselves to victory, nor were the Soviets, past masters of the art, able to torture their way out of the Cold War. George Bush and Dick Cheney have looked at the Soviet's stunning success and are now trying to emulate it.
Now, you could take from this the idea that torture is ineffective and a waste of time, but I think otherwise. What ever benefits you see from torture are going to be washed away by the fact that I and everyone else hate your guts and want to kill you for being evil. Torture is one part of the reason Why We Fight whenever we do and you definitely want to be with us instead of against us.
I find crawl to be a bit more accessible, a bit more forgiving, and a bit more fun than Nethack. I don't know if there's anything out there like Falcon's Eye for it.
In other words, if these guys were privately employed, you'd advocate using tax money to keep them employed through hard times, but since they're publicly employed, they should be let go because they're paid with tax money.
think Lincoln raped our constitution pretty hard with regard to interpretation the voluntary nature of statehood, state sovereignty, 9th & 10th amendments,
Besides the disaster your interpretation would have created, it's not born out in the Constitution, since Amendments 10 and 9 refer to powers not enumerated in the Constitution, but the power to dispose of US territory is given to Congress in Article 4.
I am not trying to justify slavery, just that had there been any other means to that end would have been preferable.
Of course the South should have pursued other options instead of open hostilities, as a democratic people should have, but a people whose economy rests on the back of slaves can't be democratic.
Also, very little of the civil war had to do with slavery, and much more to do with a federal power grab, to over-simplify the issue.
By federal power grab you mean the attempt to limit the growth of slave states, am I right?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not familiar with WoW add-ons, but I am familiar with Lua scripting, and my guess is that the WoW client accesses the script and executes it in an environment created by the WoW client.
The script as application and the WoW client as a linked API library is not a good analog. The script is more closely analogous to the library than the client.
I think that this is one of the problems when the central premise of a show is a "mystery." It always ends up that the big reveal is a huge disappointment.
This is only true for shows that go rudderless. I'm a firm believer now that the entire plotline for a series ought to be mapped out from the beginning. See Heroes season 1 for example. "BSG" and "Lost" just try to milk it for a while then wing it at the big reveal. "Lost" was just milking the atmosphere of the show by episode 3, season 1. Japanese pulp adventure cartoons are the worst offenders, but oddly enough, some of the more adult dramas are consistently good at sticking to a tightly woven plot.
It's pretty relevant, because while Ayers is a known terrorist, friendship between Ayers and Obama is conjecture based on the fact that they live in the same neighborhood and have met. While Princess Haifa has retained plausible deniability WRT 9/11 (as thin as it is, since Saudi "charity" organizations were well known pathways for rich Saudis to funnel money to terrorists), her friendship with the Bush family is well established.
The wife of one of Bush's close friends helped to fund the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Bush has had dealings with Osama bin Laden's brother, Salim bin Laden. What does that tell you about Bush and terrorism, about Bush's involvement in 9/11?
You're correct, it tells you nothing.
Congrats, you've discovered that racism still exists in America, thus the sensitivity over calling a black man an ape, a common way of dehumanizing black men in the not too distant past. Now, you can argue that it's more racist to be offended by the reference than it is to make it, and I hope someday that is the case, but today most people would disagree with you and rightly so.
"Garden slave" is the plum job, just as long as I stay out of the mines.
"around 100 billion on his two wars,"
You got a cite? My recollection is that we are well north of half a Trillion above and beyond associated defense budget increases. In anycase, our national debt has increased by 5 trillion over the last 8 years, and that was during relatively good economic times.
If it were soft science, they could just come up with a new theory for why sensor drift doesn't matter. If it were bad science, the could bluster and attack and cover it up. If it were good, hard science, they might correct the error, then issue an explanation on how it affected past calculations and predictions, which is what they did.
Evidence points towards the idea that consciousness is something the brain does. It's a verb, not a noun. From that perspective, asking what happens to consciousness after death is like wondering what happens to the music after a guitar is smashed, or asking where the flying went when an airplane breaks down.
Sure, we're nothing more than our atoms, but if those atoms aren't configured into us, then they can't do the things we're doing. A corpse can't even wipe his own ass.
That's pretty strong evidence that it no longer exists.
That's a blinkered view that assumes the current situation to be static. Religion used to encompass everything, but science has beaten it back, surprisingly fast, until Religion's domain is only over the unseen or misunderstood. This conquest by science continues apace. For instance, the next major bugaboo to be wiped out will likely be human consciousness, as neuro-scientists make advances in how consciousness arises out of the activities of the brain. After this point, concepts like the human soul as a thing and life after death will seem as quaint as angels pushing the planets around or God as genetic engineer.
But it is a threat, as much now as it ever was. They may be fanatics, but they have a better view about what's happening than you do. I hope they stay out of our schools, where we tell their children their beliefs are wrong. They have good reason to be afraid for their traditions.
And Bill Clinton Promised to be the 'most ethical administration in history', W promised to 'change the partisan tone'
Bill Clinton's was the most ethical administration of the last 45 years, barring Carter. Not only did no Clinton officials get indicted while in office, unlike either Bush, Reagan or Nixon, but he also didn't lie the country into a major war, unlike the recent Bush and Johnson.
W, on the other hand, was a piece of shit, but he did make hatred for him nearly bipartisan by the time he left.
Your argument is an exact mirror of the sad communist complaint that yeah, communism as practiced hasn't worked, but no-one's every really gone All The Way, if they did, everything would be perfect.
I'll be satisfied if Obama turns out not to be a torturing war criminal who makes trillions of dollars disappear. This is true even if he swaps Silverlight out for a streaming software written by clones of Hitler, or puts Hillary Clinton in the Cabinet.
I agree with you, though, that a president deserves only so much slack. If Obama hasn't proved himself to me by Wednesday or Thursday morning at the latest, I'm breaking up with him.
That was you?
How can the scientific method be tested and modified without some external framework in which to value them? How can you evaluate which method is "better" without some way to rank them? To do this, you need a philosophical underpinning to make that value judgment.
Let's see: I'm trying to figure out the laws of the universe. If my method takes me down the wrong path and after some time I discover the error, it might by time to review and correct my method.
As I replied to another poster in the thread, this is the default assumption based on our experiences from infancy, and there is no reason to assume otherwise.
Just because it is the default assumption, doesn't mean its correct. Should we be limited in all our endeavors, to the basic and oversimplified infantile way of thinking? Are you saying its not even worth thinking about?
Of course, he didn't say anything of the sort. And if he did, it would be pointless since so many people have already thought much about this and will probably continue to do so.
I don't know what it is you think philosophers do, but just randomly creating axioms is not it. Philosophers are constantly comparing the results of their theories against their perceptions, and modifying them if need be. You are grossly oversimplifying the practice of philosophy.
Any philosopher who looks around himself to test his theories has suddenly transformed into a scientist.
There have always been a subset of philosophers who spend their entire lives counting the angels on the heads of pins; but there is real, important work being done on many issues. The philosophy of science is just one example. You have no way to judge whether your "scientific method" is worth pursuing without philosophy; even a philosophy as basic as your common-sense approach.
So philosophy means just thinking about stuff? Then you're right, it's extremely useful, and we need more people thinking.
So it's not necessarily that reality is fuzzy and indistinct, more that our knowledge of it is limited.
This is a popular and comforting notion that has long been dis-proved by empirical evidence: the double slit experiment is the classic example that shows that a particle is fuzzy, it's not just our knowledge of it. Heck, this even the point of the cat in a box. Schroedinger didn't say that the cat's state was indeterminable, he said it was in an indeterminate state.
You're taking it as a given that those missing emails got trashed on purpose. But this is the kind of IT screwup that happens every day.
You're putting the federal government at the same level as a newbie IT team with no budget.
Innocent until proven guilty, yada yada. That's the proof standard for a conviction, not an investigation. In any case, we already know the data was destroyed.
Like so many things that have happened in the last eight years, that episode deserves to be observed with Hanlon's Razor in mind. Really, GWB is the poster child for that principle.
Hanlon's razor has no intellectual basis. It is a guide for interpersonal relationships, not a tool for getting at the truth.
Besides, how much benefit of the doubt does one man get?
I admit that the Bush administration has a pretty bad record when it comes to obeying the law. But their usual strategy is to hide behind weird legal theories that don't stand up in court (an outcome that any sane lawyer would predict). They're simply not competent enough to succeed at the kind of conspiratorial skullduggery you give them credit for.
Can you really be unaware about how ruthlessly effective they've been at accruing power, stealing money, and breaking the law?
Do you really think these guys don't know how to keep a secret? If so, a few billion of us would like answers to the following.
What did the Whitehouse decided about torture?
Why were the US Attorney's fired?
What is the nature and what is the purpose of the illegal wire tapping operation?
Where did the billions of dollars in cash that disappeared into Army planes go to?
Who is in CIA secret prisons?
What nation's agents were in contact with the 9/11 terrorists?
What happened to the bailout money?
Why does the administration fight efforts to investigate war profiteers?
Why the hell did we invade Iraq, anyway?
And most importantly (and what incidentally blows Hanlon's Razor, surely the dullest razor ever devised, out of the water):
Why didn't the Bush admin do anything to correct these crimes and punish the criminals?
"Leader of the Legislative Branch"... that has a Limbaugh Horse Hockey smell to it. If the Files of the President of the Senate contain anything more than discussions about tie votes and parliamentary procedure, then we've got some fraud on our hands.
You're right that it hasn't been free for 150 years, but it was very much less free up to that point.
There was a guy a couple of years ago who got FBI agents running willy nilly all over the country breaking up imaginary terrorist attacks because he was just making up shit for his torturers. I couldn't find a link though in two minutes of Googling, so I'll just point out that the Nazis and the Japanese weren't able to torture themselves to victory, nor were the Soviets, past masters of the art, able to torture their way out of the Cold War. George Bush and Dick Cheney have looked at the Soviet's stunning success and are now trying to emulate it.
Now, you could take from this the idea that torture is ineffective and a waste of time, but I think otherwise. What ever benefits you see from torture are going to be washed away by the fact that I and everyone else hate your guts and want to kill you for being evil. Torture is one part of the reason Why We Fight whenever we do and you definitely want to be with us instead of against us.
I find crawl to be a bit more accessible, a bit more forgiving, and a bit more fun than Nethack. I don't know if there's anything out there like Falcon's Eye for it.
In other words, if these guys were privately employed, you'd advocate using tax money to keep them employed through hard times, but since they're publicly employed, they should be let go because they're paid with tax money.
You must be new here.
think Lincoln raped our constitution pretty hard with regard to interpretation the voluntary nature of statehood, state sovereignty, 9th & 10th amendments,
Besides the disaster your interpretation would have created, it's not born out in the Constitution, since Amendments 10 and 9 refer to powers not enumerated in the Constitution, but the power to dispose of US territory is given to Congress in Article 4.
I am not trying to justify slavery, just that had there been any other means to that end would have been preferable.
Of course the South should have pursued other options instead of open hostilities, as a democratic people should have, but a people whose economy rests on the back of slaves can't be democratic.
Also, very little of the civil war had to do with slavery, and much more to do with a federal power grab, to over-simplify the issue.
By federal power grab you mean the attempt to limit the growth of slave states, am I right?
Netflix definitely adds weight to movies nobody wants. If you've got Garfield 2 out, that's one slot they didn't have to fill with a good movie.