Would it be plausible to record in a Faraday Cage or equivalent, negating both cell phone and internet device access for the duration of the recording?
I can understand the appeal of actors being able to react subtly to the audience - but I always found the blurts of audience sounds annoying - ESPECIALLY in shows with canned laughter or artificially "enhanced" audience reactions.
Red Dwarf seems like it would be better with a smaller audience of insiders anyway - comedians playing to other comedians are always filthier, funnier, and less self-censoring, and I think that would be a better result.
1. Manufacturers will very likely isolate their product from function, only selling unprogrammed tools with APIs, to companies who resell the devices with an OS with strict functionality limitations, and DRM-like lockouts to isolate themselves from liability.
2. Companies will be careful in the beginning to set precedence that allows them to bypass such liability. Likely they'll create a set of manufactured "harm" scenarios, with honest but complicit victims with a vested interest in blocking most future lawsuits based on indirect liability.
Only once liability precedence has been set will the APIs open up on consumer tools from the major manufacturers. The court system may be insane in many ways - but they function to the needs of large companies - mostly as a negotiation device, and a filter for amount of money owned ("You must be this rich to use the court system").
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
If anyone can fix the input mechanisms for those spells using the source code, you'd be helping the game immensely.
Oh, and of course, remaking Ulima I & II would be a nice follow up... seems that's always been in the works for FPS modders, but it never seems to get completed. They're beautiful games that deserve the chance to appeal to modern gamers with a modern interface.
Does this process potentially make the world more massive, in creating particle pairs - one of which escapes into space? Would this potentially be a way of testing gravity theories in controlled circumstances?
Crazy, paranoid, murderous people exist in every society - in all subcultures, in all religions, in all age groups (with the capability to express it), across all education levels, etc.
The problems we've been having in the US, as I see it, largely spring from ignoring this, and forcing every response to a tragedy to be an implication of any groups they belong to.
Are republicans or tea party members responsible for this act? That's a misleading question. Neither answer leads to a meaningful result - and only forces us to alienate eachother further, resulting in more tragedy.
If we are to avoid having every response wedge us further into madness, the shame of such tragedies, the murder of well-meaning and innocent people, must be a problem that we all have to solve, rather than a point of blame we use as a tool.
Does the frequent madness expressed the tea party help? No - but that's all of our problem, and it isn't going to be solved just by mocking them as an enemy, or thinking of them only as monsters who kill people.
Any of us could find ourselves romanticizing violence, like the tea partiers (the legend of the tea party IS one of violence) and other folks. There but for the grace of chance go any of us.
Insanity is not something we can every 'get even' for - whether it is terrorists or confused local murderers. We can only rebuild, and work together to be able to live in a way that makes it ever less likely, while knowing that freedom will always allow it in one way or another.
Switching something when it is in the middle of fast movement is the basis of all kinds of slight of hand tricks. There's just a certain state where the mind identifies something just as a blurb of overlapping color, rather than anything processed meaningfully, and you can freely swap it with a similar item without any notice. Mix in basic misdirection, and you can fool almost anyone's expectations. It's also why you kind of have to learn to juggle by feel & pattern rather than just sight - because the hand really does have to be faster than the (mind's ability to process information from the) eye to keep up with the pattern.
1. Improved communications, including the Internet has helped make some forms of travel less necessary.
2. Optimized analysis of usage patterns have allowed businesses to minimize travel costs better.
3. A general drastic shift in income towards the more wealthy at the cost of growth in other income levels has minimized the ability for most folks to have the opportunity for leisure travel (time as much as money).
Those create a trend - but there's no inherent "peak travel" there. Start electing folks who will tax wealth in order to give meaningful freedom to everyone else again (see: 1940's to 1970's US), and you will see more frequent travel again as people have resources to start businesses, engage in leisure activities, and do more than just go to WalMart every long once in a while, rather than a few rich having exponential increases.
Politics is important - it is composed almost entirely of things that are important to people, almost by definition of what becomes political. I totally get that.
What I don't get is why so many folks let themselves uniquely be turned into raving lunatics about politics - especially given how important the issues are to them.
If you have a mission, and that mission is important - you need to focus. Turning explosive (figuratively, or literally when you mix in religion) might seem a good way to get attention on something that is overlooked - but if you pay any attention to how political events turn out, it rarely has a positive net effect.
I also understand that a good number of folks are just crazy to begin with - but something about politics seems to flip a obsession switch in ordinarily constructive people, while flipping off the part of the mind willing to consider other points of view as helpful or useful.
I'll certainly agree - Obama will likely be remembered as a rather bad president - something of a combination of the worst aspects of Carter and Bush in terms of policy, approach, and effectiveness. You can't let the presence of what you consider a bad person in power let you destroy yourself in response though - that defeats your very purpose of disagreeing, and invalidates your point entirely.
Sure - the Tea Party is getting the news cycles, and is certainly disrupting the Democratic party. But in the process, it is making itself so nasty, that the revolution it is seeking is quickly becoming self-defeating, like France and its many counter-revolutions. Crazy will do in a brawl - but the most important bits of politics don't work in anyone's favor if all you can do is brawl - and the crazy won't want to be put away.
In most nations, crazy politics is seen as a shameful thing - something only failed states let dominate their politics, lest they fall into decades of senseless war. True - you can't capitulate yourself away from a bully, nor should you bow to the demands of the cruel and selfish (see: Obama), but you don't have to be crazy to make a principled stand, or to speak softly while holding a large political stick.
Two fires that found a way to indirectly fuel eachother over the millennia by way of oxygen. Somewhat romantic, actually. Actually makes more sense to give a flower in that context.
This is exactly the kind of framing that brings joy to those with a grudge against effective government - playing entirely in their end zone, scoring point after point when they're supposed to have the ball.
Corporations have proven that, given the option, they will simply not do basic research. Now, we're using recent tax breaks (plus extra double tax cuts for the rich) causing further massive deficits to argue that huge swaths of basic research be eliminated, because they're too luxurious for us to afford (compared to the utter non-luxury of war-time double-tax-cuts for the mega-rich).
Basic science is really our only path towards actually knowing how to solve a lot of deep, inherent, and growing problems in our world. Problems that will only get worse as more resources are pulled into the hands of the few who will never let that money out of their small investment circles and estate holdings by choice.
The rich (frequently) aren't villains - they're just those that are good at gathering resources, the natural end result of selecting for people who can best acquire resources from others. The dynamic of a glut of rich getting more controlling over more resources is an ancient dynamic - the very word Crass is an example of this - take a little time to read up on Marcus Licinius Crassus adventures in emergency real estate acquisitions if you want a little insight into to today's real estate capitalism. Of course, he did die getting gold poured down his throat after his overreach - but he also created an empire too.
Sacrifice research on the alter of making room for tax breaks, however, and you're selling the very soul of your nation's future. You're creating an empire at the cost of drowning your future in your acquired gold.
Death wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have to involve every memory you ever had being erased from existence. Written word and other recordings are completely inadequate to compensate for everything that is lost when a person dies. Just because death is currently inevitable does not make fear of it irrational - fear focuses awareness, which is perfectly appropriate when it involves everything you are in the world ceasing to be, lost to everyone.
That's one of the reasons I've always been fascinated by computers and programming - it goes further down the path of being able to record experiences more and more completely as they advance, beyond the single narrative of previous recording technology.
Oh noes! They're taking the bandwidth! Except everyone's being paid, and its still cheaper all around per movie than using the mail. The cable companies are being paid for internet access, the entertainment owners are paid for the right to distribute the content, all the equipment is more than being paid for - and everyone is making a profit.
The fact that it's using 20% of the bandwidth isn't alarming either - a movie is a lot of web pages/email/etc., but everyone involved can afford to keep the equipment running, and do a little infrastructure expansion to get more customers needs met, all to make more profit.
This isn't the end either - the moment some form of mass entertainment can be created that legitimately requires more bandwidth, and a service provider can successfully provide that bandwidth to unseat the other service providers, then they will do that, and will likely use several times more bits per second - and by then it will be even cheaper relative to the gasoline used for mail service.
The real alarm is that this process is making other forms of entertainment less relatively appealing to the masses. The cable companies don't like playing the role of bulk service providers in a realm they prefer to be premium content providers in - and thanks to monopoly powers, they're considering providing a non-neutral-net internet service in the name of "saving bandwidth" to fight Netflix's little game.
Interesting tidbit: The vast majority of known snake species are capable of swimming. Get a snake washed out to sea, let it drift between islands on flotsam, and with this mutation, a lone female is suddenly capable of being the foundation of a new population in a new ecosystem.
While not advantageous to individuals, this female-only birth trait would be a powerful force in mass extinction events, as it leads to a diverse set of multiply adaptive groups being formed, each specialized in a different direction for a different ecosystem niche. If a meteor equivalent hits, and all the rules of living change to some degree, you have a greater chance of having some in the right niche to survive.
The downside is if female-only births become too common, you stand a chance of losing genetic diversity in the smaller groups - so it being in the background like this, only occasionally popping up makes sense for a species that might have gained benefit from it in more ancient life cycles.
"Folks have been saying your platform seems a bit proprietary and closed." "Hey, how about them White Sox?" "Your platform might be proprietary and closed." "Yeah, well so is your mother!" "Your platform is proprietary and closed." "Oh yeah? Well, you just must not like having a good experience with your phone."
The problem is that all the more reasonable responses might paint them into a corner where they have to offer an option for a sandbox for a more open use of their platform - and their strategy precludes that as an option. So, like with elections where offering a valid option to voters is too risky (to your various monied interests), insulting the other option becomes the rule of the day.
Actually, our planet should have been out of easily consumable resources a LONG time ago - but thanks to the Green Revolution of artificial fertilizers and improved farming techniques, scientists like Norman Borlaug have saved more lives than any other group in the history of the world.
The same thing needs to keep happening if we're going to keep increasing our population. We're going to have to convert more sunlight into usable foods, using more than just simple soil in order to keep scaling.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
It'll be interesting to see whether populations will continue to curve towards neutral growth on their own, or what decisions people will come to. I certainly hope the Malthusian worldview doesn't come back into dominance.
This is a classic base Vs. stakeholders issue - when the organization (church in this case) fails to represent a view compatible with its base, and so long as it doesn't hold some critical resource away from its base, it will lose that base.
The usual resolution of such disputes is not the organization changing though - it is either a major structural failure of the organization followed by minimal changes, or the organization deciding threaten its base into staying in more harsh terms. This happens particularly often in politics.
Why do organizations tend to act this way? Because they virtually always exist to serve the stakeholders first, and not to serve the base they were designed to represent, whatever their origin. This is based on the idea that one has to serve one's own interest before they can logically be able to serve others - and carries through to individual members decisions to either serve the organizations resource gathering, or suppress others altruistic actions, more often than deciding to actually act altruistically through the organization. In other words, organizations select for selfishness towards the organization, and against other factors like serving those not as much a part of the organization.
So, leave all you want - even if it threatens to destroy the church, as long as the stakeholders can be comfortable with the process, it's just those fickle folks straying from the true path. But the second a true insider nails something to the Church door, then suddenly its something meaningful.
See also most group disputes inside the Democratic/Republican parties - it takes core insiders to cause the party to blink. The base falling apart is just unfortunate noise. Reality ignored all over the place, when it doesn't serve the interests of the core shareholders.
Same thing with most businesses, unions, communes, mutual funds, and so on - they all organize, then tend to find themselves more unresponsive to their base over time.
So, you've got to query for functionality, design to fallback in some cases for the features you work with/around, then design tests to make sure it works in the cases you design for. From that, you budget your time, allocate test machines/staff, and ballpark your costs.
Doesn't sound too unusual - the more features you implement, the more combined testing you have to do for edge cases.
It's just like with video cards and graphics programming - you design for a limited subset of possible cards, have code to query the cards capabilities, have fallback code for some cards, then test against a good range of cards. Blaming card manufacturers at large for their variety of design isn't productive - they're what makes the market you have the chance to code for.
From his perspective, this is actually quite an understandable reaction. Technology exposes people to a larger variety of fictions that other people believe - which makes picking out the "right" story of reality less clearly a matter of where you were born as with previous generations.
When the ultimate truths of the universe are less a matter of derived logic and reason, and more revealed wisdom, then the entire key to "properly receiving" that truth is framing. Framing that is only reliable when information is controlled by a correctly-thinking organization.
From that viewpoint, it is completely understandable that outside ideas exposed by technology would be seen as pollution to young minds, sources of confusing reason that distract from the truth that must be learned, but cannot be derived merely by the methods of science or otherwise observing reality alone.
Once you've seen enough of these stories, they certainly do all start looking VERY similar in terms of "protecting" the truths, and even the truths start looking suspiciously similar in their advocacy of the interests of the founders and maintainers of the beliefs. Those are exactly the kinds of observations that would risk the basis of belief in many of these revealed truths - and also why so many of these belief groups cut themselves off from the ideas of outsiders, or work so hard at inoculating themselves against outside ideas.
The real kicker is that any of these beliefs might actually be true - there is rarely a clear way to outright disprove them - and the world would be mostly the same with a liberal interpretation of them. The main difference would be that one of these groups would be correct, and that we should teach their, and only their glorious revealed story - but when looking at all of their stories, there would be no way of choosing which one had evidence that made only them correct.
So, I can't fault him for his belief, or his attempt to push his exclusive truth - but I'll keep my technology, and listen to other perspectives all the same. I'd prefer not to believe in any gods that would punish me for that, thank you very much.
Agreed in spirit - but you can only go so far with that logic. Enforce ALL vehicle rules, completely enough, and no one can afford to drive.
You'd get home, and you'd find a letter in your mail, rather thick. You open it, and there's a rather remarkable list:
"4 way stop at 3rd and A. St. - rolling stop, $200" (you went ahead, when the oncoming car waved you ahead, and you didn't want to delay them with a lengthy stop) "BP Oil, 3rd and B. St - Illegal toxic substance disposal, second violation, $350" (The gasoline ended up dripping once after carefully pulling the nozzle from the tank)
These would go on for hundreds of entries - dozens for each time you drove, each time gotchas, clever in their technicalities - and each time increasing in fine. Every merge, every speed change, every time you blinked or looked in the wrong direction could be counted as a violation. You would owe millions of dollars (if not more) by the end of the statement.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were a more computer automated method of driving that meant you could avoid the human error with cars in a place like the US - but there aren't, so human leeway has to be a part of the system, rather than a blind technical snap judgment.
Steam is proud to announce a patch for GNU and Microsoft Visual Studio compiler sets, which enables the new 'ifmo' command in most programming environments.
The 'ifmo' statement is a traditional if statement, with one extra parameter, for the amount of money you want to be paid to make a given state true.
The 'ifmo' statement coordinates with the Steam framework in most OS environments to manage a list of opportunities the user has to pay for events to happen.
'ifmo' should be compatible with most common languages, from FORTRAN, to Visual Basic, to C/C++, to common scripting languages like Python.
To me, its more of an issue of "we can't yet reasonably say from what we can observe". Let's propose that beyond our currently observable universe, there are spaces where other "observable universe" sized objects exist.
Let's say there are billions of them, all at currently unobservably great distances. How would they interact with our universe and eachother? We can guess gravity - but even then we have no idea if even that force would attenuate differently over such distances. But perhaps from that we discover strings have a limit on how many universe-units worth of distant gravity they can represent - something we couldn't discover without a way to observe yet.
Perhaps we can achieve the same end by understanding the small - figuring out the limits of strings before we observe the massively larger scope in that case, but none of these are guarantees.
Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation (fewer elements to explain) is the best one to choose when no other factors are present. The idea here is that you may still continue to need actual new complexity to describe actual complex interactions of very large aggregations - that it is simpler to use a new equation with a couple new terms, than to actually describe just how trillions of interactions end up with a different dynamic than thousands, and that you can't always guess the new dynamics just by working with the previous equations.
I don't actually mind if this is the case. What it means then, is that new properties of aggregated matter emerge as you go up, and up in scope and scale, and that there does not have to be a set relationship on what rules must emerge.
Other than aesthetics, those emergent rules don't have to carry a thread of logic visible at all scopes. Rather, you just need to have the large number of interactions actually occur in relationship to eachother to see the combined effect, with many aspects unforeseeable by only observing the elements many magnitudes smaller.
Whether this might make the universe a more or less beautiful puzzle to figure out is open to interpretation.
Essentially, they call their customers suckers after taking away access to the games they chose to pay GOG money for, then call them too sensitive for feeling pissed off by that ("We're sorry you were offended"), then say that taking money for games is no longer good enough, so everyone's just going to have to take, oh, let's say whatever we decide is good enough for you.
This certainly matches with the usual playbook of corporate non-apologies - smarmy, fake ingratiation, blame shifting their own words, all while asking for more control and resources.
Say what you want about Steam's DRM model - they don't have this level of open contempt for their customers (yet). I'd seriously reconsider any titles I had associated with these jokers if I were ever looking to publish.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be plausible to record in a Faraday Cage or equivalent, negating both cell phone and internet device access for the duration of the recording?
I can understand the appeal of actors being able to react subtly to the audience - but I always found the blurts of audience sounds annoying - ESPECIALLY in shows with canned laughter or artificially "enhanced" audience reactions.
Red Dwarf seems like it would be better with a smaller audience of insiders anyway - comedians playing to other comedians are always filthier, funnier, and less self-censoring, and I think that would be a better result.
Ryan Fenton
1. Manufacturers will very likely isolate their product from function, only selling unprogrammed tools with APIs, to companies who resell the devices with an OS with strict functionality limitations, and DRM-like lockouts to isolate themselves from liability.
2. Companies will be careful in the beginning to set precedence that allows them to bypass such liability. Likely they'll create a set of manufactured "harm" scenarios, with honest but complicit victims with a vested interest in blocking most future lawsuits based on indirect liability.
Only once liability precedence has been set will the APIs open up on consumer tools from the major manufacturers. The court system may be insane in many ways - but they function to the needs of large companies - mostly as a negotiation device, and a filter for amount of money owned ("You must be this rich to use the court system").
Ryan Fenton
I liked that game - but the really, REALLY disliked the amount of time it took to properly shape out letters with the mouse input. There just seemed to be no consistency with the way it judged the curves of input - I can understand the games with subtle puzzles on learning input mechanisms, but even with practice it came out more as random than a skill to build up.
If anyone can fix the input mechanisms for those spells using the source code, you'd be helping the game immensely.
Oh, and of course, remaking Ulima I & II would be a nice follow up... seems that's always been in the works for FPS modders, but it never seems to get completed. They're beautiful games that deserve the chance to appeal to modern gamers with a modern interface.
Ryan Fenton
Does this process potentially make the world more massive, in creating particle pairs - one of which escapes into space? Would this potentially be a way of testing gravity theories in controlled circumstances?
Ryan Fenton
Crazy, paranoid, murderous people exist in every society - in all subcultures, in all religions, in all age groups (with the capability to express it), across all education levels, etc.
The problems we've been having in the US, as I see it, largely spring from ignoring this, and forcing every response to a tragedy to be an implication of any groups they belong to.
Are republicans or tea party members responsible for this act? That's a misleading question. Neither answer leads to a meaningful result - and only forces us to alienate eachother further, resulting in more tragedy.
If we are to avoid having every response wedge us further into madness, the shame of such tragedies, the murder of well-meaning and innocent people, must be a problem that we all have to solve, rather than a point of blame we use as a tool.
Does the frequent madness expressed the tea party help? No - but that's all of our problem, and it isn't going to be solved just by mocking them as an enemy, or thinking of them only as monsters who kill people.
Any of us could find ourselves romanticizing violence, like the tea partiers (the legend of the tea party IS one of violence) and other folks. There but for the grace of chance go any of us.
Insanity is not something we can every 'get even' for - whether it is terrorists or confused local murderers. We can only rebuild, and work together to be able to live in a way that makes it ever less likely, while knowing that freedom will always allow it in one way or another.
Ryan Fenton
Switching something when it is in the middle of fast movement is the basis of all kinds of slight of hand tricks. There's just a certain state where the mind identifies something just as a blurb of overlapping color, rather than anything processed meaningfully, and you can freely swap it with a similar item without any notice. Mix in basic misdirection, and you can fool almost anyone's expectations. It's also why you kind of have to learn to juggle by feel & pattern rather than just sight - because the hand really does have to be faster than the (mind's ability to process information from the) eye to keep up with the pattern.
Ryan Fenton
1. Improved communications, including the Internet has helped make some forms of travel less necessary.
2. Optimized analysis of usage patterns have allowed businesses to minimize travel costs better.
3. A general drastic shift in income towards the more wealthy at the cost of growth in other income levels has minimized the ability for most folks to have the opportunity for leisure travel (time as much as money).
Those create a trend - but there's no inherent "peak travel" there. Start electing folks who will tax wealth in order to give meaningful freedom to everyone else again (see: 1940's to 1970's US), and you will see more frequent travel again as people have resources to start businesses, engage in leisure activities, and do more than just go to WalMart every long once in a while, rather than a few rich having exponential increases.
Ryan Fenton
Politics is important - it is composed almost entirely of things that are important to people, almost by definition of what becomes political. I totally get that.
What I don't get is why so many folks let themselves uniquely be turned into raving lunatics about politics - especially given how important the issues are to them.
If you have a mission, and that mission is important - you need to focus. Turning explosive (figuratively, or literally when you mix in religion) might seem a good way to get attention on something that is overlooked - but if you pay any attention to how political events turn out, it rarely has a positive net effect.
I also understand that a good number of folks are just crazy to begin with - but something about politics seems to flip a obsession switch in ordinarily constructive people, while flipping off the part of the mind willing to consider other points of view as helpful or useful.
I'll certainly agree - Obama will likely be remembered as a rather bad president - something of a combination of the worst aspects of Carter and Bush in terms of policy, approach, and effectiveness. You can't let the presence of what you consider a bad person in power let you destroy yourself in response though - that defeats your very purpose of disagreeing, and invalidates your point entirely.
Sure - the Tea Party is getting the news cycles, and is certainly disrupting the Democratic party. But in the process, it is making itself so nasty, that the revolution it is seeking is quickly becoming self-defeating, like France and its many counter-revolutions. Crazy will do in a brawl - but the most important bits of politics don't work in anyone's favor if all you can do is brawl - and the crazy won't want to be put away.
In most nations, crazy politics is seen as a shameful thing - something only failed states let dominate their politics, lest they fall into decades of senseless war. True - you can't capitulate yourself away from a bully, nor should you bow to the demands of the cruel and selfish (see: Obama), but you don't have to be crazy to make a principled stand, or to speak softly while holding a large political stick.
Ryan Fenton
Two fires that found a way to indirectly fuel eachother over the millennia by way of oxygen. Somewhat romantic, actually. Actually makes more sense to give a flower in that context.
Ryan Fenton
This is exactly the kind of framing that brings joy to those with a grudge against effective government - playing entirely in their end zone, scoring point after point when they're supposed to have the ball.
Corporations have proven that, given the option, they will simply not do basic research. Now, we're using recent tax breaks (plus extra double tax cuts for the rich) causing further massive deficits to argue that huge swaths of basic research be eliminated, because they're too luxurious for us to afford (compared to the utter non-luxury of war-time double-tax-cuts for the mega-rich).
Basic science is really our only path towards actually knowing how to solve a lot of deep, inherent, and growing problems in our world. Problems that will only get worse as more resources are pulled into the hands of the few who will never let that money out of their small investment circles and estate holdings by choice.
The rich (frequently) aren't villains - they're just those that are good at gathering resources, the natural end result of selecting for people who can best acquire resources from others. The dynamic of a glut of rich getting more controlling over more resources is an ancient dynamic - the very word Crass is an example of this - take a little time to read up on Marcus Licinius Crassus adventures in emergency real estate acquisitions if you want a little insight into to today's real estate capitalism. Of course, he did die getting gold poured down his throat after his overreach - but he also created an empire too.
Sacrifice research on the alter of making room for tax breaks, however, and you're selling the very soul of your nation's future. You're creating an empire at the cost of drowning your future in your acquired gold.
Ryan Fenton
Death wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have to involve every memory you ever had being erased from existence. Written word and other recordings are completely inadequate to compensate for everything that is lost when a person dies. Just because death is currently inevitable does not make fear of it irrational - fear focuses awareness, which is perfectly appropriate when it involves everything you are in the world ceasing to be, lost to everyone.
That's one of the reasons I've always been fascinated by computers and programming - it goes further down the path of being able to record experiences more and more completely as they advance, beyond the single narrative of previous recording technology.
Ryan Fenton
Oh noes! They're taking the bandwidth! Except everyone's being paid, and its still cheaper all around per movie than using the mail. The cable companies are being paid for internet access, the entertainment owners are paid for the right to distribute the content, all the equipment is more than being paid for - and everyone is making a profit.
The fact that it's using 20% of the bandwidth isn't alarming either - a movie is a lot of web pages/email/etc., but everyone involved can afford to keep the equipment running, and do a little infrastructure expansion to get more customers needs met, all to make more profit.
This isn't the end either - the moment some form of mass entertainment can be created that legitimately requires more bandwidth, and a service provider can successfully provide that bandwidth to unseat the other service providers, then they will do that, and will likely use several times more bits per second - and by then it will be even cheaper relative to the gasoline used for mail service.
The real alarm is that this process is making other forms of entertainment less relatively appealing to the masses. The cable companies don't like playing the role of bulk service providers in a realm they prefer to be premium content providers in - and thanks to monopoly powers, they're considering providing a non-neutral-net internet service in the name of "saving bandwidth" to fight Netflix's little game.
Ryan Fenton
Interesting tidbit: The vast majority of known snake species are capable of swimming. Get a snake washed out to sea, let it drift between islands on flotsam, and with this mutation, a lone female is suddenly capable of being the foundation of a new population in a new ecosystem.
While not advantageous to individuals, this female-only birth trait would be a powerful force in mass extinction events, as it leads to a diverse set of multiply adaptive groups being formed, each specialized in a different direction for a different ecosystem niche. If a meteor equivalent hits, and all the rules of living change to some degree, you have a greater chance of having some in the right niche to survive.
The downside is if female-only births become too common, you stand a chance of losing genetic diversity in the smaller groups - so it being in the background like this, only occasionally popping up makes sense for a species that might have gained benefit from it in more ancient life cycles.
Ryan Fenton
'Changing the subject'.
"Folks have been saying your platform seems a bit proprietary and closed."
"Hey, how about them White Sox?"
"Your platform might be proprietary and closed."
"Yeah, well so is your mother!"
"Your platform is proprietary and closed."
"Oh yeah? Well, you just must not like having a good experience with your phone."
The problem is that all the more reasonable responses might paint them into a corner where they have to offer an option for a sandbox for a more open use of their platform - and their strategy precludes that as an option. So, like with elections where offering a valid option to voters is too risky (to your various monied interests), insulting the other option becomes the rule of the day.
Ryan Fenton
Actually, our planet should have been out of easily consumable resources a LONG time ago - but thanks to the Green Revolution of artificial fertilizers and improved farming techniques, scientists like Norman Borlaug have saved more lives than any other group in the history of the world.
The same thing needs to keep happening if we're going to keep increasing our population. We're going to have to convert more sunlight into usable foods, using more than just simple soil in order to keep scaling.
Meanwhile, the "organic food" folks insist that food must be grown using only slightly modified classical techniques, for a variety of reasons from vitamin density (overstated relative to studies, at best), to mystical mumbo jumbo like vibrations and auras. The other argument is that a given technique is sustainable for a given circumstance, or allows for smaller farms - but none of them are sustainable across the populations modern farming techniques functionally do now.
It'll be interesting to see whether populations will continue to curve towards neutral growth on their own, or what decisions people will come to. I certainly hope the Malthusian worldview doesn't come back into dominance.
Ryan Fenton
This is a classic base Vs. stakeholders issue - when the organization (church in this case) fails to represent a view compatible with its base, and so long as it doesn't hold some critical resource away from its base, it will lose that base.
The usual resolution of such disputes is not the organization changing though - it is either a major structural failure of the organization followed by minimal changes, or the organization deciding threaten its base into staying in more harsh terms. This happens particularly often in politics.
Why do organizations tend to act this way? Because they virtually always exist to serve the stakeholders first, and not to serve the base they were designed to represent, whatever their origin. This is based on the idea that one has to serve one's own interest before they can logically be able to serve others - and carries through to individual members decisions to either serve the organizations resource gathering, or suppress others altruistic actions, more often than deciding to actually act altruistically through the organization. In other words, organizations select for selfishness towards the organization, and against other factors like serving those not as much a part of the organization.
So, leave all you want - even if it threatens to destroy the church, as long as the stakeholders can be comfortable with the process, it's just those fickle folks straying from the true path. But the second a true insider nails something to the Church door, then suddenly its something meaningful.
See also most group disputes inside the Democratic/Republican parties - it takes core insiders to cause the party to blink. The base falling apart is just unfortunate noise. Reality ignored all over the place, when it doesn't serve the interests of the core shareholders.
Same thing with most businesses, unions, communes, mutual funds, and so on - they all organize, then tend to find themselves more unresponsive to their base over time.
Ryan Fenton
So, you've got to query for functionality, design to fallback in some cases for the features you work with/around, then design tests to make sure it works in the cases you design for. From that, you budget your time, allocate test machines/staff, and ballpark your costs.
Doesn't sound too unusual - the more features you implement, the more combined testing you have to do for edge cases.
It's just like with video cards and graphics programming - you design for a limited subset of possible cards, have code to query the cards capabilities, have fallback code for some cards, then test against a good range of cards. Blaming card manufacturers at large for their variety of design isn't productive - they're what makes the market you have the chance to code for.
Ryan Fenton
From his perspective, this is actually quite an understandable reaction. Technology exposes people to a larger variety of fictions that other people believe - which makes picking out the "right" story of reality less clearly a matter of where you were born as with previous generations.
When the ultimate truths of the universe are less a matter of derived logic and reason, and more revealed wisdom, then the entire key to "properly receiving" that truth is framing. Framing that is only reliable when information is controlled by a correctly-thinking organization.
From that viewpoint, it is completely understandable that outside ideas exposed by technology would be seen as pollution to young minds, sources of confusing reason that distract from the truth that must be learned, but cannot be derived merely by the methods of science or otherwise observing reality alone.
Once you've seen enough of these stories, they certainly do all start looking VERY similar in terms of "protecting" the truths, and even the truths start looking suspiciously similar in their advocacy of the interests of the founders and maintainers of the beliefs. Those are exactly the kinds of observations that would risk the basis of belief in many of these revealed truths - and also why so many of these belief groups cut themselves off from the ideas of outsiders, or work so hard at inoculating themselves against outside ideas.
The real kicker is that any of these beliefs might actually be true - there is rarely a clear way to outright disprove them - and the world would be mostly the same with a liberal interpretation of them. The main difference would be that one of these groups would be correct, and that we should teach their, and only their glorious revealed story - but when looking at all of their stories, there would be no way of choosing which one had evidence that made only them correct.
So, I can't fault him for his belief, or his attempt to push his exclusive truth - but I'll keep my technology, and listen to other perspectives all the same. I'd prefer not to believe in any gods that would punish me for that, thank you very much.
Ryan Fenton
Agreed in spirit - but you can only go so far with that logic. Enforce ALL vehicle rules, completely enough, and no one can afford to drive.
You'd get home, and you'd find a letter in your mail, rather thick. You open it, and there's a rather remarkable list:
"4 way stop at 3rd and A. St. - rolling stop, $200" (you went ahead, when the oncoming car waved you ahead, and you didn't want to delay them with a lengthy stop)
"BP Oil, 3rd and B. St - Illegal toxic substance disposal, second violation, $350" (The gasoline ended up dripping once after carefully pulling the nozzle from the tank)
These would go on for hundreds of entries - dozens for each time you drove, each time gotchas, clever in their technicalities - and each time increasing in fine. Every merge, every speed change, every time you blinked or looked in the wrong direction could be counted as a violation. You would owe millions of dollars (if not more) by the end of the statement.
It wouldn't be so bad if there were a more computer automated method of driving that meant you could avoid the human error with cars in a place like the US - but there aren't, so human leeway has to be a part of the system, rather than a blind technical snap judgment.
Ryan Fenton
I love it when any nation does ambitious explorations like this, to progress and promote their general state of science and technology.
I just hope they release any findings freely - I do dislike the idea of scientific projects where most of the results end up state/company secrets.
Ryan Fenton
Steam is proud to announce a patch for GNU and Microsoft Visual Studio compiler sets, which enables the new 'ifmo' command in most programming environments.
The 'ifmo' statement is a traditional if statement, with one extra parameter, for the amount of money you want to be paid to make a given state true.
The 'ifmo' statement coordinates with the Steam framework in most OS environments to manage a list of opportunities the user has to pay for events to happen.
'ifmo' should be compatible with most common languages, from FORTRAN, to Visual Basic, to C/C++, to common scripting languages like Python.
'you get mo with ifmo!'
Ryan Fenton
To me, its more of an issue of "we can't yet reasonably say from what we can observe". Let's propose that beyond our currently observable universe, there are spaces where other "observable universe" sized objects exist.
Let's say there are billions of them, all at currently unobservably great distances. How would they interact with our universe and eachother? We can guess gravity - but even then we have no idea if even that force would attenuate differently over such distances. But perhaps from that we discover strings have a limit on how many universe-units worth of distant gravity they can represent - something we couldn't discover without a way to observe yet.
Perhaps we can achieve the same end by understanding the small - figuring out the limits of strings before we observe the massively larger scope in that case, but none of these are guarantees.
Occam's razor suggests that the simpler explanation (fewer elements to explain) is the best one to choose when no other factors are present. The idea here is that you may still continue to need actual new complexity to describe actual complex interactions of very large aggregations - that it is simpler to use a new equation with a couple new terms, than to actually describe just how trillions of interactions end up with a different dynamic than thousands, and that you can't always guess the new dynamics just by working with the previous equations.
Ryan Fenton
I don't actually mind if this is the case. What it means then, is that new properties of aggregated matter emerge as you go up, and up in scope and scale, and that there does not have to be a set relationship on what rules must emerge.
Other than aesthetics, those emergent rules don't have to carry a thread of logic visible at all scopes. Rather, you just need to have the large number of interactions actually occur in relationship to eachother to see the combined effect, with many aspects unforeseeable by only observing the elements many magnitudes smaller.
Whether this might make the universe a more or less beautiful puzzle to figure out is open to interpretation.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah - that was the fake ingratiation part.
Ryan Fenton
Essentially, they call their customers suckers after taking away access to the games they chose to pay GOG money for, then call them too sensitive for feeling pissed off by that ("We're sorry you were offended"), then say that taking money for games is no longer good enough, so everyone's just going to have to take, oh, let's say whatever we decide is good enough for you.
This certainly matches with the usual playbook of corporate non-apologies - smarmy, fake ingratiation, blame shifting their own words, all while asking for more control and resources.
Say what you want about Steam's DRM model - they don't have this level of open contempt for their customers (yet). I'd seriously reconsider any titles I had associated with these jokers if I were ever looking to publish.
Ryan Fenton