You've apparently never played Guild Wars. On virtually every point you raise, WoW is just terribly bad in comparison. WoW is a horrible grind, and terribly non-dynamic/repetitious in comparison.
Yeah, I was planning on dropping WoW as soon as GW2 is out (I only started in 2009 after playing GW to death). OTOH, I was planning on buying Diablo III as soon as it's released, and with the offer to get it free... I may just commit to another year of WoW (which won't stop me from getting GW2 the moment it's out, but may drop me from immediately dropping WoW if it's within the next year).
Ah, yes, true. I was hoping to avoid dragging general relativity into it. My understanding, though, is that there is still a difference -- gravity and uniform acceleration are not distinguishable without outside reference -- but rotational acceleration is different as it's not uniform (your head and feet experience different acceleration, unlike the situation were you standing on the floor in a uniformly accelerating rocket, or the same rocket stationary but sitting on the surface of a planet with gravity). Possibly its still relative, but not in the straightforward way uniform acceleration is. Alas, this is where my understanding of general relativity comes to an end...
In any case, the team of physicists at U.Mich most certainly understand it better than I do. If they say you can say that objective, and I say you can't, I'm almost certainly wrong... I'll take the expert's word for it here.
Apparently you've never taken a statistics course. As such, it's not easy to explain to you why, but as a matter of fact, the chances of some conclusion being right or wrong based on a random sampling depends only on the size of the random sample, not on the size of the population the sample was taken from. The same odds apply regardless of whether it's 15158 out of a million, a hundred billion, or a trillion trillion. This, however, does assume it is a truly random sample. The criticism of this result is not that it's such a small portion of the hundred billion galaxies, but that it's not truly random selection from across all hundred billion, and thus, might bring in a local bias.
I was going to ask that too. As of now, my head is spinning trying to understand how you could be spinning in nothing.
That's easy to wrap your head around, given that spin is relative to your center, not to any outside object. Even if you were the only object in the universe, and thus could not see things spinning around you, you could easily feel the pull of your limbs away from your center if you're spinning, or the complete lack of such if you weren't. If there were two disks in the universe, me on one and you on another, and you looked at mine and I looked at yours and each seemed to be spinning relative to the other, you might be confused as to which of us was actually spinning, and which isn't (assuming one isn't), but if we both step away from the center of our disks, one of us will feel pulled towards the edge and one won't, and this won't be relative. We won't each see the other being flung off their disks while we remain unaffected, which would be absurd, rather, we'll both observe one of us fine and the other flung into space. Or possibly we both will be, if both are disks are rotating. In any case, the rate and which we are or aren't flung off will depend entirely on the actual spin of our disks, which are relative to their own centers, and be entirely unrelated to their relative spin to each other. Trying to look at spin from an outside frame of reference will just confuse you, as spin is not, ultimately, a relative measurement, unlike linear motion which is.
Rotational motion is not linear motion. It can be measured absolutely, or if you prefer, relative to itself. There is no need to reference an outside object to determine spin, it can be measured without.
So if I have a spinning top sitting on my desk that is not currently spinning, its angular momentum is determined by the spin of its electrons? I guess this is bad astronomy week on slashdot huh.
Yes, and you can tell its color by summing up the colors of its quarks, too./sarcasm
No. Spinning is not linear motion, and thus, is not relative. Someone on/in a spinning object and measure the amount of spin absolutely and without reference to any outside objects.
Step 1: Read way too much into something someone says, turning it into something absurd.
Step 2: Point out that your misread is patently absurd.
Step 3: Claim they are misleading you, despite the fact that you weren't misled into believing the absurd thing.
Seriously, you're right. Life is too short. Don't waste it going out of your way manufacturing things to complain about.
Actually, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other type of claim. The reason I know that is because the scientific method says...
It's irrelevant what the scientific method says. You're really reading something into the quote that isn't there. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" isn't a description of proper scientific methodology, it's a commentary on human psychology, and you're badly misreading it if the question occurs, "who determines what's an 'extraordinary' claim", since it's subjective -- it's just a matter of what each individual who hears the claim personally considers extraordinary or not. If you don't find the claim extraordinary, you'll find it easy to accept with pretty much any evidence more for than against. If you do find it extraordinary, you'll require something a lot more convincing to accept it.
Someone might come up with a way of diverting certain death some day.
True, but it certainly won't be me. Way outside my area of expertise. As such, its probably just as well for me and people like me to just not think about it.:p
But... if you've seen pictures of Alan Turing, particularly from when he was younger than the more common pics, you know he was, in fact, a very attractive man.
Actually, I suspect most former Debian users left for the lack of choices. I used to run Testing because the choices I wanted to make weren't in Stable because it took forever for Debian to actually do releases. Then I moved to Unstable because even testing was crusty old stuff that didn't have the software I wanted to run. Then I left for another distribution because even Unstable didn't have the new versions of the software I wanted to run. This was, however, a few years back -- for all I know, they've fixed whatever was so horribly broken in their bureaucracy that prevent them from ever including the choices I wanted, but I wouldn't know as I haven't felt any great desire to go back...
Did you realise that scientific studies have shown that eating ice-cream (and other "bad" foods) can have the positive effect of reducing stress levels and (in moderation) actually be beneficial to your health?
Aside from poisonous things, there are no "bad foods". There are a lot of foods you shouldn't eat too much of, but that's the point, innit -- "don't each too much of" does not mean "do not eat (period)". Every food you can possibly name is beneficial to your health as long as you don't eat too much of it.
Um, yeah... when the worst economic downturn in recent history has them wringing their hands about how their stratospheric economic growth is a couple percentage points down (but still far beyond anything the US has had in modern times, bigger "boom times" at their worst than any of us living in the west have seen at our best), I can see how you might call that a "boom-bust" cycle rather than a "boom-boom" cycle with occasional smaller boom times.../sarcasm
As for overproducing cities, it's telling that they can waste that much and still be booming...
Seriously, though, you should talk to them (your current employer). Explain the situation, and give them the chance to make it worth your while to stay. See if they want you badly enough to pay for it. The results, either way, may surprise you and make your choice very much more clear.
What I don't get is why every time somebody finds a planet, it makes the front page.
It doesn't. Not by a long shot. The vast majority of planetary discoveries are never even mentioned on/. or anyone else's front page. What makes the front page is when the discovery is unusual in some way. If you actually read the article (or, for that matter, the summary), you'd understand what exact about this story is news. Hint: It's not that a planet has been discovered.
To an extremist, any statement of disagreement is taken as advocacy for their opposite extreme. The idea of a moderated position is incomprehensible -- the dial only had two settings: zero and eleven. Five is right out...
Slashdot Mirror
You've apparently never played Guild Wars. On virtually every point you raise, WoW is just terribly bad in comparison. WoW is a horrible grind, and terribly non-dynamic/repetitious in comparison.
Yeah, I was planning on dropping WoW as soon as GW2 is out (I only started in 2009 after playing GW to death). OTOH, I was planning on buying Diablo III as soon as it's released, and with the offer to get it free... I may just commit to another year of WoW (which won't stop me from getting GW2 the moment it's out, but may drop me from immediately dropping WoW if it's within the next year).
Ah, yes, true. I was hoping to avoid dragging general relativity into it. My understanding, though, is that there is still a difference -- gravity and uniform acceleration are not distinguishable without outside reference -- but rotational acceleration is different as it's not uniform (your head and feet experience different acceleration, unlike the situation were you standing on the floor in a uniformly accelerating rocket, or the same rocket stationary but sitting on the surface of a planet with gravity). Possibly its still relative, but not in the straightforward way uniform acceleration is. Alas, this is where my understanding of general relativity comes to an end...
In any case, the team of physicists at U.Mich most certainly understand it better than I do. If they say you can say that objective, and I say you can't, I'm almost certainly wrong... I'll take the expert's word for it here.
Apparently you've never taken a statistics course. As such, it's not easy to explain to you why, but as a matter of fact, the chances of some conclusion being right or wrong based on a random sampling depends only on the size of the random sample, not on the size of the population the sample was taken from. The same odds apply regardless of whether it's 15158 out of a million, a hundred billion, or a trillion trillion. This, however, does assume it is a truly random sample. The criticism of this result is not that it's such a small portion of the hundred billion galaxies, but that it's not truly random selection from across all hundred billion, and thus, might bring in a local bias.
tl;dr version: You don't spin "in" anything, you spin around your own axis.
I was going to ask that too. As of now, my head is spinning trying to understand how you could be spinning in nothing.
That's easy to wrap your head around, given that spin is relative to your center, not to any outside object. Even if you were the only object in the universe, and thus could not see things spinning around you, you could easily feel the pull of your limbs away from your center if you're spinning, or the complete lack of such if you weren't. If there were two disks in the universe, me on one and you on another, and you looked at mine and I looked at yours and each seemed to be spinning relative to the other, you might be confused as to which of us was actually spinning, and which isn't (assuming one isn't), but if we both step away from the center of our disks, one of us will feel pulled towards the edge and one won't, and this won't be relative. We won't each see the other being flung off their disks while we remain unaffected, which would be absurd, rather, we'll both observe one of us fine and the other flung into space. Or possibly we both will be, if both are disks are rotating. In any case, the rate and which we are or aren't flung off will depend entirely on the actual spin of our disks, which are relative to their own centers, and be entirely unrelated to their relative spin to each other. Trying to look at spin from an outside frame of reference will just confuse you, as spin is not, ultimately, a relative measurement, unlike linear motion which is.
Rotational motion is not linear motion. It can be measured absolutely, or if you prefer, relative to itself. There is no need to reference an outside object to determine spin, it can be measured without.
So if I have a spinning top sitting on my desk that is not currently spinning, its angular momentum is determined by the spin of its electrons? I guess this is bad astronomy week on slashdot huh.
Yes, and you can tell its color by summing up the colors of its quarks, too. /sarcasm
*can* measure, that should read...
No. Spinning is not linear motion, and thus, is not relative. Someone on/in a spinning object and measure the amount of spin absolutely and without reference to any outside objects.
Step 1: Read way too much into something someone says, turning it into something absurd.
Step 2: Point out that your misread is patently absurd.
Step 3: Claim they are misleading you, despite the fact that you weren't misled into believing the absurd thing.
Seriously, you're right. Life is too short. Don't waste it going out of your way manufacturing things to complain about.
Deflecting a comet or asteroid or two is a manageable problem, but how do we handle 3000 objects all at the same time?
That's easy. Don't be here when they hit. :) WTB ticket to Mars, please...
Actually, I think we should colonize Venus, but a lot of people don't realize how much more hospitable Venus is.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Actually, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other type of claim. The reason I know that is because the scientific method says...
It's irrelevant what the scientific method says. You're really reading something into the quote that isn't there. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" isn't a description of proper scientific methodology, it's a commentary on human psychology, and you're badly misreading it if the question occurs, "who determines what's an 'extraordinary' claim", since it's subjective -- it's just a matter of what each individual who hears the claim personally considers extraordinary or not. If you don't find the claim extraordinary, you'll find it easy to accept with pretty much any evidence more for than against. If you do find it extraordinary, you'll require something a lot more convincing to accept it.
Someone might come up with a way of diverting certain death some day.
True, but it certainly won't be me. Way outside my area of expertise. As such, its probably just as well for me and people like me to just not think about it. :p
But... if you've seen pictures of Alan Turing, particularly from when he was younger than the more common pics, you know he was, in fact, a very attractive man.
Actually, I suspect most former Debian users left for the lack of choices. I used to run Testing because the choices I wanted to make weren't in Stable because it took forever for Debian to actually do releases. Then I moved to Unstable because even testing was crusty old stuff that didn't have the software I wanted to run. Then I left for another distribution because even Unstable didn't have the new versions of the software I wanted to run. This was, however, a few years back -- for all I know, they've fixed whatever was so horribly broken in their bureaucracy that prevent them from ever including the choices I wanted, but I wouldn't know as I haven't felt any great desire to go back...
Yes, reverse DNS records should be standard. No, they should not be required. Yes, they are useless as a toll for fighting spam.
I thought the third line was: "It's a frog!"
Probably dating myself...
Period inside the quote.
Not in proper English, no. In American English, perhaps, but that's almost an oxymoron at this point. :p
Did you realise that scientific studies have shown that eating ice-cream (and other "bad" foods) can have the positive effect of reducing stress levels and (in moderation) actually be beneficial to your health?
Aside from poisonous things, there are no "bad foods". There are a lot of foods you shouldn't eat too much of, but that's the point, innit -- "don't each too much of" does not mean "do not eat (period)". Every food you can possibly name is beneficial to your health as long as you don't eat too much of it.
Um, yeah... when the worst economic downturn in recent history has them wringing their hands about how their stratospheric economic growth is a couple percentage points down (but still far beyond anything the US has had in modern times, bigger "boom times" at their worst than any of us living in the west have seen at our best), I can see how you might call that a "boom-bust" cycle rather than a "boom-boom" cycle with occasional smaller boom times... /sarcasm
As for overproducing cities, it's telling that they can waste that much and still be booming...
Flee! Flee while you still can!
Seriously, though, you should talk to them (your current employer). Explain the situation, and give them the chance to make it worth your while to stay. See if they want you badly enough to pay for it. The results, either way, may surprise you and make your choice very much more clear.
What I don't get is why every time somebody finds a planet, it makes the front page.
It doesn't. Not by a long shot. The vast majority of planetary discoveries are never even mentioned on /. or anyone else's front page. What makes the front page is when the discovery is unusual in some way. If you actually read the article (or, for that matter, the summary), you'd understand what exact about this story is news. Hint: It's not that a planet has been discovered.
I could care less. People will get the gist of these bits of phraseology, irregardless of what is technically correct.
Eye sea watt ewe meen.
Who said anything about isolationism?
To an extremist, any statement of disagreement is taken as advocacy for their opposite extreme. The idea of a moderated position is incomprehensible -- the dial only had two settings: zero and eleven. Five is right out...