Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
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The Mind of God
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· Score: 1
More like looking everywhere for gold and then having someone tell you "Hey, you know.. there's not only no gold to be found, but the idea that there Is gold is stupid and, were this a few hundred years ago i think we'd kill you for even suggesting it. Oh, and while you're at it.. the meaning of life is to be enslaved to someone you won't meet while you're alive, most things that active the pleasure centers of your brain are horribly wrong, and when you die there's a fairly good chance you'll be tortured forever because you went looking for that gold that doesn't exist."
Personally, i'd dismiss the guy for a few cans short of a 6-pack and go back to looking for gold.
Anti-gravity devices are not practal or proven because we can't even create a practal fusion reastor and we can't even get a decent explanation of various forces in quantum mechanics that's why.
We can make very practical (assuming this is what you meant) fusion reactors, we just can't make efficient enough magnetic bottles to contain the plasma with a low enough energy ratio that they outperform other energy sources. this is, however, an engineering problem (defeating inefficiency in electromagnets) not a fundamental misunderstanding of fusion reactions. As for quantum mechanics, we've been able to do an amazing amount with the limited understand we currently have. And, despite the great deal of knee-jerk 'it's all SF!' to the words 'anti-gravity', this project is more about validating the graviton concept than building the Enterprise. If an object can be shielded from gravitons, it means there are gravitons there to be shielded. Since we have no idea how else to look for the things, it seems as good a way as any to me. Just look at neutrino research. We can't detect them as they are, so we have to watch them blow through a giant volume of water and (maybe) slam into a detector.
As for douglas adams, he's quoted because he's funny as heck, and most people find comedic exaggeration to be a good way of ridiculing pretty much anything.. and this isn't really a logical argument. You haven't presented any facts or chains of logical reasoning, just poorly worded opinions and unrelated analogies. Dreamweaver
You're right. There are alot of cranks and not alot of breakthrough discoveries, and the fact that there are any does tend to make people want to root for the underdog (that and all of human history really), but when it comes to research i think it highly stupid to just come out and say "Bah, it's impossible. Give it up already". If someone wants to research something, be it anti-gravity or reducing cancer rates in cigarette smokers, i say let 'em go for it. If they fail, they fail. At the worst we have one more way to show anti-gravity Doesn't work and one more drug regime that doesn't cure cancer. On the other hand, maybe they come up with something. It may not be what they're going for, but the space program didn't set out to invent velcro either. On the far other hand, maybe they actually stumble across something revolutionary, but don't bash someone as wasting time if they want to expand the sphere of human knowledge.
Skepticism is all well and good and a useful standpoint for good science, but if you want extreme evidence, or even un-extreme evidence, you have to let people give it a shot, and telling anyone who even thinks about it they're idiots and wasting time isn't the way to do it.
I can respect religious people while not sharing their beliefs. Most people would agree that socrates was a great thinker, but nobody (that i know of anyway) still worships greek gods. Same with the subject of this article.. i respect Dyson but that doesn't mean i've always got to agree with him. Dreamweaver
Yes, religion had it's place in society. Mainly to scare people into obeying laws when it couldn't be done directly, give people who didn't understand the world around them an excuse to continue not understand it, and give people a sense of 'meaning' without actually having to do anything with their lives.
Those things Were important to a developing society, but we don't need them anymore and the only place they have is to hold us back. An average human is now self-aware enough to make their own choices based on societal values in terms of morality without a religion telling them what's right and wrong.
So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society. We needed stone tools a long time ago to advance our society, but we don't use those anymore.. Dreamweaver
Well, let me start off by taking my side in the traditional RPG war: i like d&d. I play d&d. I intend to continue playing d&d for the forseeable future. I don't think the system sucks. It's easily abused, the rules are either convoluted or nonexistent for some situations, and it's been cloned so many times people seem to think it's now un-origional. I could make the obvious parallels to linux, but i won't because this really isn't about linux or open-anything. There. Now, on with the details.
This is, short-version, a bunch of whooie. Every halfway serious d&d player (or any other rpg player in any system i can think of) has been doing this forever. Need a new rule? You make it up based on what's there. Want some new d&d classes, use the cheesy class-creation chart, or just come up with something reasonable. All this says (so far as i can tell) is it's now legal to publish and distribute it. This isn't 'open source' at all, at least not in any way comparable to the origional defenition. But, geeks RP and TSR makes RPGs, and geeks have this weird magnetic attraction to the word 'Open', so there it is. I was just thinking yesterday that one of these days someone was going to publish and 'OpenSource' book with nothing but page upon page of random letters.. But anyway, back to the topic at hand. What this thingy means, so far as i can tell, is that any budding RPG maker can now publish their own game worlds, adventures, and modules for 3rd ed d&d (assuming they don't have the gaul to Call them that). In and of itself, i think this is a fairly good thing really.. TSR's adventure writing has gone fairly downhill and with the recent killoff of gaming worlds, so new blood would be nice. It doesn't mean that all the geeks on earth can now write their own rules modifications to their heart's content. Why not? Because they've been doing it all along. Nobody publishes their house rules, it'd be as cheesy as those stupid 'unofficial expansion pack' things for war/star craft.. a bunch of stuff that was probably really cool for the guy who made it and lots of fun for their friends, but not something i want to pay $20 for.
So is this a good thing? Yeah i guess, it means d&d will live on in the publishing world a while longer. It really doesn't make a difference though. Young kids will probably never play d&d.. they're all sucked into the world of pokemon (gag) and Everquest (gag). Flashy graphics, low comprehension requirement, little imagination needed. It's a sad thing, but it still doesn't really matter. I've no intention of playing d&d with a 7 year old, but when i'm 70 and drifting through my golden years in a retirement home on mars, i'm positive i'll be able to pull together a game session of my fellow retirees, hunt down a copy of the PHB and DMG online somewhere, and have a few last goes with old sword +1 kobold-slayer.
RPG's are in your head and your heart. If you want to play, you're going to play.. if you can't get rules for what you want to play, you'll write them yourself and play anyway. You don't get any more 'open source' than that. And as for the whole 'my rpg is better than your rpg' thing.. give it a rest. If you don't like d&d, for gods sakes, play something else. Nobody's forcing you to play it and there are limitless other systems to choose from, both in your head and on the shelf. I've played at least a dozen myself and written 3.. when i want to be a 5th level dwarven fighter, i play d&d. When i want to be a vampire, i play Vampire. When i want to be an interstellar hydrogen-3 smuggler, i play one of my rpg's. This is what the rest of the 'open source' community should be striving for, an environment where you can do what you want, when you want, how you want.. not trying to force it's own peculiar restrictions on a world freer than it will probably ever be.
So when my eyestrain flares up and i can't tell vi from dos anymore, toss me my wand of wonder and get out of my way or beware 2d10 gems (1 gp value). Dreamweaver
Besides, colleges aren't there to teach facts and data, they are there to teach things like critical thinking, research and writing skills
And yet you're tested on facts and data and your grades are based on the tests.. and if that's what college is for, what were the other 12 years of school for, the crappy lunches? By the time you get to college you should already know how to write and think, and these days you'll probably know 60% of whatever you're majoring in as well. I certainly never would have passed my computer tech classes if i didn't know the info already, those profs didn't even bother teaching the data, just gave out homework and told us what we'd be tested on. Dreamweaver
Wouldn't really work.. the message (and the primers) are just more dna pairs (you know, the old TAGCCAGTTGetc). Given such a limited vocabulary to encode in, you'd need a number of pairs for each character in the message. You'd need to know not only that there Is a message, but also where to begin decoding (if you start at one point you get 'hello world' start a couple pairs down and get 'rglno9p:f' and the encoding scheme used ('TAGACCATA' == A). If you just scanned the whole thing (which would, with current technology, take a hell of a long time) you'd get probably hundreds of possible messages even if you knew the encoding scheme. Not to mention the possibility that the message itself is encoded.. i don't think this will become an encryption standard, but it could certainly be useful for those messages that just have to be sent securely for military purposes. Dreamweaver
Now i can send messages faster than light while i use my pyramid powered time machine and discover the secrets of the universe via my magnetic mind reading device.. sheesh. Dreamweaver
50k ways to say 'lets bump uglies'
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Date Pagers
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· Score: 2
I agree. I wouldn't use it to find a date because, well, one i already have a girlfriend and two, i don't think i'd want to date a person' who's idea of romance is a pager.. but it'd defenitly be great as a way to find people to talk to and/or hang out with for a while.
There are dozens of ways to pick up women out there, from walking up to random females and saying "Nice shoes, wanna fsck?" to video dating services, but there are hardly any ways to find a new friend. Just walking up to people randomly would weird them out (i know it'd weird Me out anyway) and while talking to people you meet online is great, it's hard to go catch a movie or hit the mall or whatever your choice of friend-activities is, with people who live halfway across the continent.
And the car battery thing is genius.. i'd love some kinda thingy that i could use to inform people in the area that i could use a jump, need some phone change, or have locked my keys in my car and need a coathanger. Especially if your car dies out on the highway.. in a parking lot it's just inconvenient to ask people for help, but i've had cops cruise past me broke down on the side of the road without even slowing down.
So yeah, this is a bit weird and stupid as a date-finding application, but could work pretty well as a way to just meet new people. Dreamweaver
Baldur's gate suffered from too many crippling flaws to come near diablo as far as my experience went. I've played through diablo 3 or 4 times and never got more than 3/4ths of the way through baldur's gate. Not because of difficulty, but because it just wasn't much fun to play.
It took forever to search through the enormous wilderness spaces with nothing in them, the quests had a tendency to be along the lines of "Oh no, X is missing, help me find it!" with no hint as to where X might be, or a reference to a place but with only vauge directions as to where that place might be. But even those could have been ignored if it weren't for the Awful interface. It was clunky, it was non-intuitive, and the combat system was moronic. For those of you who haven't played it, Baldur's Gate's combat system consisted of pausing the game, telling each character in your party what to do, then unpausing and hoping they did what you told them to. If you wanted to use something in your inventory you had to go as fast through the inventory screens as possible since accessing it un-paused the game, leaving your characters open to attack while you can't even see the display. The party system was almost well made, except that it seemed like every time you found a character worth having, they were attached to some worthless sidekick who you couldn't get rid of short of getting them destroyed in combat.
As far as the graphics go.. i personally preferred Diablo's over Baldur's Gate. Diablo might not have had the detail that Baldur's Gate did, and Diablo was tiled, not individually rendered, but too many things in Baldur's Gate looked like they'd taken a photo of some grass or a tree or whatever and pasted it on top of the environment. Some scenes were stunningly well done, but too many were just lackluster. That and in too many situations it was impossible to see things because, unlike diablo, they didn't provide a partially-transparent effect to intervening walls, meaning characters, enemies, and equipment could dissapear behind a wall.
Now, before you say it, yes they could fix all these things in the sequel and make a wonderful game. But from their own statements they're hardly altering the engine at all. Baldur's Gate II will basically just be a standalone expansion and I for one probably won't buy it for the same reason taht I haven't bought Planescape: Torment. I was really looking forward to Baldur's Gate as a real d&d game and it really let me down. Diablo might not have been deep, but it was insanely fun as a hack'n'slash and even if Diablo II were just a standalone expansion of Diablo I i'd still want it. Dreamweaver
That's not actually MS forcing software on people, it's the companies supporting MS forcing software on people.
Yes, MS had the computer manufacturers sign agreements saying they'd put windows on their systems etc, but the companies didn't Have to go along with it. Compaq could easily have chosen to put OS/2 on all of their computers instead. Why didn't they? Because Compaq felt that MS Windows was the best choice to make them money. If they thought people would buy more of their computers if they came with linux on them, i'm sure they would have turned down MS and looked for a deal with redhat. However, linux is not (yet anyway) a popular consumer OS. Had compaq released all of their computers with redhat they'd have lost money to companies who released with windows. Sure, MS Could have let the computer manufacturers decide on a computer-by-computer basis if they wanted to put windows on it, then ship a selection of computers with windows and a selection with linux, but that would make MS lose money and it's anything that makes you lose money is bad corporate strategy. Sure the contract they offered was unfair to an os maker struggling to get his product known, but the computer manufacturer's didn't Have to sign it.. they could just use OS/2 instead.
Now there's a rising demand for computers without windows and right away we see computer manufacturers making a stink because they're losing money, and right away we get the ability to purchase a computer sans the price of windows.
Among others i can't entirely recall at the moment, i know this happens in both Mars by Bova and Titan by Baxter.. except that in the case of Mars it was a lead-shielded room and in the case of Titan one of the astronauts got caught unawares in an unshielded connection tube and wound up with radiation poisoning. Dreamweaver
For those of us who haven't had our state governments introduced to this one and have no pending decision at the moment, should we go to them in advance? On the one hand prevention might keep them from even listening to lobbyists for the bill when it Does come around to the state, but on the other hand if they think it's a good idea despite our evidence to the contrary, we might have just made a sympathetic ear when UCITA lobbyists come calling.
So which is the better idea? Go now, before anyone gets to them, or wait until it's an issue and then try to stop it?
Are we going to fucking complain every time the Slashdot readers post something that THEY think is relevant? Nobody is forcing these responses down your throat! If you don't want to read it, DON'T READ IT. Then move on with life!
This is not your website. Start your own website, then you can keep people from posting whatever the hell you want. In the interim, don't bitch about what Slashdot posters put out. Some people agree with their thoughts, and could live without your complaints.
Nope, i only have about a half a dozen friends.. however they're actually my friends as opposed to the hordes of acquantances most people seem willing to make do with. I act like myself with my friends, me as myself enjoys intelligent conversation and intellectually stimulating recreational activities.. thereby i don't hang out with stupid people. If it's a fault that i don't like having to explain jokes to my friends or that i like to be able to talk about things that interest me without their eyes glazing over.. then i guess i'm a faulty person:) Dreamweaver
I think the double standard here exists because we have to deal with closemindedness and stupidity.
You spend some part of your day every day dealing with people who react with hostility, disinterest, stupidity, and closemindedness and you start expecting it from everybody. So we fall back on our communities of fellow geeks who we know will have interests at least sort of similar to ours, even if they come at the from the other end (the endless distro wars amongst the linux-entrenchd sections of our community for instance).
In that respect, slashdot is one of our little havens of geekfulness where we go after a long hard day of 'oh! i have to turn on the monitor too?!' to get in a little tech news and arguing with our peers. So while, as you said, nobody chains us down and Forces us to read Katz, the mere fact of his existence is like graffitti on my livingroom wall. Sure, i don't really Have to look at it, but it's there and i dont like it. Similarly with other non-techies. If i owe someone (either due to being paid directly, or just because they're a friend) i'll gladly be polite and help them through their technological ineptitude, but in my free time i don't want the hassle. Dreamweaver
Projects never get done just on time with the exact planned budget.. but you have to draw the line somewhere. Thanks to russian delays (and some US ones too, but mainly russian) the station is way, Way behind schedule. At some point you have to say "Okay, enough is enough. If you're not going to do it, we'll get someone else to." And NASA did. Dreamweaver
I've got to disagree.. speaking as a US citizen, i'm pretty sure i can say that most of us realize just how f***ed up russia is right now. The point here isn't that we're expecting russia to do something we shouldn't, it's that russia has been stalling and stalling saying "Okay, okay, no problems comrade, just a little more time and we'll have the module ready. And how about a little more cash while we're at it?"
Personally i think it's about time. No offense and i hate to sound nationalist, but like you said russia's in no condition to be doing much of anything in space right now.. but i don't think that's a reason to hold up the whole station. Let the countries with the money for it pony up with the parts and russia can supply us what heavy lifting rockets it has already.
I must admit to not understanding what exactly you're expecting from hollywood.. or any movie maker for that matter.
Movies, from the first, existed as a means to entertain. Personally I don't go to a movie expecting to learn anything or be intellectually challenged. If i do or am, it's a pleasant surprise, but i go to distract myself from life's difficulties for two hours. If i wanted to be entertained and still be intellectually stimulated, i'd read a book (which i do, considerably more often than i watch movies for that matter).
As for boycotting hollywood because of CSS encryption.. do you really think that most screenwriters, directors, and actors have Any idea about it? The upper few % of the more intellectual sort might, but the rest are worrying about what movie to do next and what to wear to opening night. I can understand boycotting DVD makers or a letter-writing campaign, but boycotting movies made in hollywood altogether? That's about 3 steps west of sane.
Dreamweaver
Re:sad commentary on science
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 2
Probes are great up to a point. Sure, NASA could probably spend the rest of our natural lives sending probes to mars and find some new experiment to put on each one, but while this will collect mounds of scientific data, we won't really have gained much of anything.
Perhaps i'm insane but i've always thought that the eventual goal of space exploration was to expand the boundries of humanity beyond our little hunk of rock. While von Neumann may have felt that replicating space robots would be the best way to explore, it doesn't do a Thing for the people back home. No resources garnished from other planets, no interaction with any possible alien cultures, not even a relief to overpopulation on the home world.
Just imagine if when we finally decide we're ready to explore another solar system, we send a probe to land on a planet: it finds something amazing. Be it living intelligent aliens, the ruins of a city, even just living macro-scale alien life or even just some amazing geological phenomenon. What do we do about it? Nothing. It'd take years just to get the pictures and any other data the lander collects back to earth, years to construct another probe to explore the new phenomenon (whatever it may be) on the planet, more years to send it to the planet, and then years for the data to come back again.
So you say: "Sure, but that's a whole other solar system. I'm just talking about mars. Hell, we can See mars from here." But if we just probe the hell out of our solar system, will we be ready when the technology emerges to let us visit another? Or will we still be using shuttle-level life support with horrible living conditions on the years-long flight there and back?
Probes are great, like i said, and they should be used as much as feasible.. but don't knock humanity out of the equation altogether. Send enough probes to determine the basics and then send in the humans. It's not scientific, but I for one don't want to die knowing that in my lifetime we could have gone, but instead we sent our toys.
and NOW let's THROW IN some MORE capital LETTERS in totally RANDOM places because it makes us look like we have SOME IDEA what we're TALKING about.
Of course science is replacing religion.. science explains things in a rational manner that can be reproduced instead of chalking it up to things that we pitiful little humans can't possibly understand.
Humans want to live forever because: 1) They want to see what happens tomorrow. Nobody wants to have lived for x years just to miss something really cool because they died a year too soon. 2) We can't stand the thought that we're not the center of the universe. How can life possibly go on if I'm not here for it to center on? 3) And this only applies to the whole 'afterlife' thing in religions: people hate the idea that this is all there is. If you screw it up this time around, you don't get another shot at it, and despite how badly this life might suck, it's all you get. Obviously the benevolent god that people need to believe in so that it's not them vs. the universe would provide us with a place to spend eternity being happy, since we had to spend 90 years in the crapfest we call life.
Sarcophogi(sp)? Come on.. people put each other in boxes because we don't like to see dead people and we don't like the idea of worms and rats eating our loved ones after we dump dirt on them. Egyptians did it because they didn't want grave robbers vandalizing the corpse.. same as the worms'n'rats thing but with humans.. nowhere in either one is anything involving eternal life. Yes the egyptians beleived in an afterlife, as do many people who get buried in boxes, but the mechanics of burial very rarely have Anything to do with thelogical beliefs.
As for the actual pointful part of your rant.. why shouldn't we be capable of artificially reproducing a brain? Unless you believe some nice bearded man in the sky made us whole cloth, our brain is, as vonnegut put it, a dog's breakfast. Nine pounds of sponge soaked in blood and other liquids. You're telling me that a 'sentient' being with a few thousand years of research behind him couldn't purposefully replicate the action of a million years of random chances?
Here's an easy example: Step 1) Go outside and find two rocks, one larger than the other. Step 2) Find a master sculptor. Step 3) Give him the two rocks and an appropriate sum of money to carve the smaller rock from the larger. There you go, man reproducing nature's creation synthetically. Reproducing the human brain is excatly the same as carving out a rock. Yes it's more complicated but if you don't throw in bull like the 'soul' or 'essence' or 'consciousness' we're just a bunch of electrochemical reactions between cells.
We probably couldn't just copy over the current settings of the brain and expect it to run, you'd have to do a sort of copy-in-motion of the brain in action so the thought patterns over a reasonable variety of stimuli were covered. The computer-you might react slightly differently than the real-you would in a given situation because it has to extrapolate new reactions based on other reactions in memory, but the computer-you wouldn't be conscious of the difference and given that the real-you was dead at the time, it wouldn't really matter.
As for our 'immutable LAWS', i'd hardly call them immutable.. the whole point of one of your majors is the continued search for reasons we're wrong. Physicists perform experiments constantly in an attempt to prove current laws and theories incorrect. Usually the results point to the law's correctness so it stands. If it doesn't prove correct we try again to make sure, and when the law's obviously broken we go looking for a new one. Only an idiot would say that physical laws are 'immutable'. We still have the whole gravity thing, but it's certainly changed a hell of a lot since newton's day.
And finally, being as the universe is the only truly closed system, i'd certainly hope it's the largest one you know of.
I don't suppose you've considered the facts that: 1) It's an Adobe product, which are all huge resource hogs to begin with. 2) He's running win98 which is even worse about resources than Adobe? Friend of mine has to reboot his win98 box every few hours because it doesn't free memory after using it half the time with Any software.
I disagree. Speed doesn't kill, cars and stupid drivers kill. Ever seen the 15mph collision tests on cars? They get just as trashed as in a high-speed accident and survivability is only marginally altered.
Instead of keeping people from speeding, i say issue varied speed drivers liscences. When you get your liscence, you take a test to see how fast you can safely drive and it's put in a barcode or magnetic strip on your liscence. In order to start a car you have to swipe your liscence and a little transceiver thing tells road-side devices if you're speeding and you're issued a ticket.
This way, if you're grandma-with-enzima and can't drive more than 50 without wrecking that's fine for you. If you're a normal person and can drive safely at 85 you can go ahead without worrying about the cops pulling you for going faster than the median speed established for everybody so that grandma doesn't feel the need to do 65 and slam into someone.
Of course, this still leaves out the factor of bad and/or stupid drivers. A friend of mine got his liscence on the first try and yet has nearly gotten himself killed dozens of times by cutting off semis and swerving across 3+ lanes of traffic without realizing what he was doing was stupid. Now, if we could just find a way to weed out the idiots and put them on their own highways...
Okay.. and i suppose you're going to go around beating people if they don't use the new system? Because you Do of course realize nobody who isn't paid to do so will.. people shorten KB to K and MB to M as it is, you think they're going to accept Another letter? Not even to mention all the people who have trouble enough as it is with computer terms.. I can't count how many times i've had to correct my parents when they screw up megabytes and gigabytes.
Even beyond all that, who *wants* to say "Kibobyte" or "Gibabyte"? I mean come on, they just sound stupid. I know you're thinking "well, how it sounds doesnt matter" but no geek is going to go around saying "kibobyte".. we get enough flak for talking about computers as it is. Dreamweaver
Slashdot Mirror
More like looking everywhere for gold and then having someone tell you "Hey, you know.. there's not only no gold to be found, but the idea that there Is gold is stupid and, were this a few hundred years ago i think we'd kill you for even suggesting it. Oh, and while you're at it.. the meaning of life is to be enslaved to someone you won't meet while you're alive, most things that active the pleasure centers of your brain are horribly wrong, and when you die there's a fairly good chance you'll be tortured forever because you went looking for that gold that doesn't exist."
Personally, i'd dismiss the guy for a few cans short of a 6-pack and go back to looking for gold.
Dreamweaver
Anti-gravity devices are not practal or proven because we can't even create a practal fusion reastor and we can't even get a decent explanation of various forces in quantum mechanics that's why.
We can make very practical (assuming this is what you meant) fusion reactors, we just can't make efficient enough magnetic bottles to contain the plasma with a low enough energy ratio that they outperform other energy sources. this is, however, an engineering problem (defeating inefficiency in electromagnets) not a fundamental misunderstanding of fusion reactions. As for quantum mechanics, we've been able to do an amazing amount with the limited understand we currently have. And, despite the great deal of knee-jerk 'it's all SF!' to the words 'anti-gravity', this project is more about validating the graviton concept than building the Enterprise. If an object can be shielded from gravitons, it means there are gravitons there to be shielded. Since we have no idea how else to look for the things, it seems as good a way as any to me. Just look at neutrino research. We can't detect them as they are, so we have to watch them blow through a giant volume of water and (maybe) slam into a detector.
As for douglas adams, he's quoted because he's funny as heck, and most people find comedic exaggeration to be a good way of ridiculing pretty much anything.. and this isn't really a logical argument. You haven't presented any facts or chains of logical reasoning, just poorly worded opinions and unrelated analogies.
Dreamweaver
*sigh*
You're right. There are alot of cranks and not alot of breakthrough discoveries, and the fact that there are any does tend to make people want to root for the underdog (that and all of human history really), but when it comes to research i think it highly stupid to just come out and say "Bah, it's impossible. Give it up already". If someone wants to research something, be it anti-gravity or reducing cancer rates in cigarette smokers, i say let 'em go for it. If they fail, they fail. At the worst we have one more way to show anti-gravity Doesn't work and one more drug regime that doesn't cure cancer. On the other hand, maybe they come up with something. It may not be what they're going for, but the space program didn't set out to invent velcro either. On the far other hand, maybe they actually stumble across something revolutionary, but don't bash someone as wasting time if they want to expand the sphere of human knowledge.
Skepticism is all well and good and a useful standpoint for good science, but if you want extreme evidence, or even un-extreme evidence, you have to let people give it a shot, and telling anyone who even thinks about it they're idiots and wasting time isn't the way to do it.
Dreamweaver
I can respect religious people while not sharing their beliefs. Most people would agree that socrates was a great thinker, but nobody (that i know of anyway) still worships greek gods. Same with the subject of this article.. i respect Dyson but that doesn't mean i've always got to agree with him.
Dreamweaver
Yes, religion had it's place in society. Mainly to scare people into obeying laws when it couldn't be done directly, give people who didn't understand the world around them an excuse to continue not understand it, and give people a sense of 'meaning' without actually having to do anything with their lives.
Those things Were important to a developing society, but we don't need them anymore and the only place they have is to hold us back. An average human is now self-aware enough to make their own choices based on societal values in terms of morality without a religion telling them what's right and wrong.
So while religion doesn't deserve to be totally bashed since it did have it's place, it does deserve to be removed from modern society. We needed stone tools a long time ago to advance our society, but we don't use those anymore..
Dreamweaver
Well, let me start off by taking my side in the traditional RPG war: i like d&d. I play d&d. I intend to continue playing d&d for the forseeable future. I don't think the system sucks. It's easily abused, the rules are either convoluted or nonexistent for some situations, and it's been cloned so many times people seem to think it's now un-origional. I could make the obvious parallels to linux, but i won't because this really isn't about linux or open-anything.
There. Now, on with the details.
This is, short-version, a bunch of whooie. Every halfway serious d&d player (or any other rpg player in any system i can think of) has been doing this forever. Need a new rule? You make it up based on what's there. Want some new d&d classes, use the cheesy class-creation chart, or just come up with something reasonable. All this says (so far as i can tell) is it's now legal to publish and distribute it. This isn't 'open source' at all, at least not in any way comparable to the origional defenition. But, geeks RP and TSR makes RPGs, and geeks have this weird magnetic attraction to the word 'Open', so there it is. I was just thinking yesterday that one of these days someone was going to publish and 'OpenSource' book with nothing but page upon page of random letters..
But anyway, back to the topic at hand. What this thingy means, so far as i can tell, is that any budding RPG maker can now publish their own game worlds, adventures, and modules for 3rd ed d&d (assuming they don't have the gaul to Call them that). In and of itself, i think this is a fairly good thing really.. TSR's adventure writing has gone fairly downhill and with the recent killoff of gaming worlds, so new blood would be nice. It doesn't mean that all the geeks on earth can now write their own rules modifications to their heart's content. Why not? Because they've been doing it all along. Nobody publishes their house rules, it'd be as cheesy as those stupid 'unofficial expansion pack' things for war/star craft.. a bunch of stuff that was probably really cool for the guy who made it and lots of fun for their friends, but not something i want to pay $20 for.
So is this a good thing? Yeah i guess, it means d&d will live on in the publishing world a while longer. It really doesn't make a difference though. Young kids will probably never play d&d.. they're all sucked into the world of pokemon (gag) and Everquest (gag). Flashy graphics, low comprehension requirement, little imagination needed. It's a sad thing, but it still doesn't really matter. I've no intention of playing d&d with a 7 year old, but when i'm 70 and drifting through my golden years in a retirement home on mars, i'm positive i'll be able to pull together a game session of my fellow retirees, hunt down a copy of the PHB and DMG online somewhere, and have a few last goes with old sword +1 kobold-slayer.
RPG's are in your head and your heart. If you want to play, you're going to play.. if you can't get rules for what you want to play, you'll write them yourself and play anyway. You don't get any more 'open source' than that. And as for the whole 'my rpg is better than your rpg' thing.. give it a rest. If you don't like d&d, for gods sakes, play something else. Nobody's forcing you to play it and there are limitless other systems to choose from, both in your head and on the shelf. I've played at least a dozen myself and written 3.. when i want to be a 5th level dwarven fighter, i play d&d. When i want to be a vampire, i play Vampire. When i want to be an interstellar hydrogen-3 smuggler, i play one of my rpg's. This is what the rest of the 'open source' community should be striving for, an environment where you can do what you want, when you want, how you want.. not trying to force it's own peculiar restrictions on a world freer than it will probably ever be.
So when my eyestrain flares up and i can't tell vi from dos anymore, toss me my wand of wonder and get out of my way or beware 2d10 gems (1 gp value).
Dreamweaver
Besides, colleges aren't there to teach facts and data, they are there to teach things like critical thinking, research and writing skills
And yet you're tested on facts and data and your grades are based on the tests.. and if that's what college is for, what were the other 12 years of school for, the crappy lunches? By the time you get to college you should already know how to write and think, and these days you'll probably know 60% of whatever you're majoring in as well. I certainly never would have passed my computer tech classes if i didn't know the info already, those profs didn't even bother teaching the data, just gave out homework and told us what we'd be tested on.
Dreamweaver
Wouldn't really work.. the message (and the primers) are just more dna pairs (you know, the old TAGCCAGTTGetc). Given such a limited vocabulary to encode in, you'd need a number of pairs for each character in the message.
You'd need to know not only that there Is a message, but also where to begin decoding (if you start at one point you get 'hello world' start a couple pairs down and get 'rglno9p:f' and the encoding scheme used ('TAGACCATA' == A). If you just scanned the whole thing (which would, with current technology, take a hell of a long time) you'd get probably hundreds of possible messages even if you knew the encoding scheme. Not to mention the possibility that the message itself is encoded.. i don't think this will become an encryption standard, but it could certainly be useful for those messages that just have to be sent securely for military purposes.
Dreamweaver
Now i can send messages faster than light while i use my pyramid powered time machine and discover the secrets of the universe via my magnetic mind reading device.. sheesh.
Dreamweaver
I agree. I wouldn't use it to find a date because, well, one i already have a girlfriend and two, i don't think i'd want to date a person' who's idea of romance is a pager.. but it'd defenitly be great as a way to find people to talk to and/or hang out with for a while.
There are dozens of ways to pick up women out there, from walking up to random females and saying "Nice shoes, wanna fsck?" to video dating services, but there are hardly any ways to find a new friend. Just walking up to people randomly would weird them out (i know it'd weird Me out anyway) and while talking to people you meet online is great, it's hard to go catch a movie or hit the mall or whatever your choice of friend-activities is, with people who live halfway across the continent.
And the car battery thing is genius.. i'd love some kinda thingy that i could use to inform people in the area that i could use a jump, need some phone change, or have locked my keys in my car and need a coathanger. Especially if your car dies out on the highway.. in a parking lot it's just inconvenient to ask people for help, but i've had cops cruise past me broke down on the side of the road without even slowing down.
So yeah, this is a bit weird and stupid as a date-finding application, but could work pretty well as a way to just meet new people.
Dreamweaver
Baldur's gate suffered from too many crippling flaws to come near diablo as far as my experience went. I've played through diablo 3 or 4 times and never got more than 3/4ths of the way through baldur's gate. Not because of difficulty, but because it just wasn't much fun to play.
It took forever to search through the enormous wilderness spaces with nothing in them, the quests had a tendency to be along the lines of "Oh no, X is missing, help me find it!" with no hint as to where X might be, or a reference to a place but with only vauge directions as to where that place might be. But even those could have been ignored if it weren't for the Awful interface. It was clunky, it was non-intuitive, and the combat system was moronic.
For those of you who haven't played it, Baldur's Gate's combat system consisted of pausing the game, telling each character in your party what to do, then unpausing and hoping they did what you told them to. If you wanted to use something in your inventory you had to go as fast through the inventory screens as possible since accessing it un-paused the game, leaving your characters open to attack while you can't even see the display. The party system was almost well made, except that it seemed like every time you found a character worth having, they were attached to some worthless sidekick who you couldn't get rid of short of getting them destroyed in combat.
As far as the graphics go.. i personally preferred Diablo's over Baldur's Gate. Diablo might not have had the detail that Baldur's Gate did, and Diablo was tiled, not individually rendered, but too many things in Baldur's Gate looked like they'd taken a photo of some grass or a tree or whatever and pasted it on top of the environment. Some scenes were stunningly well done, but too many were just lackluster. That and in too many situations it was impossible to see things because, unlike diablo, they didn't provide a partially-transparent effect to intervening walls, meaning characters, enemies, and equipment could dissapear behind a wall.
Now, before you say it, yes they could fix all these things in the sequel and make a wonderful game. But from their own statements they're hardly altering the engine at all. Baldur's Gate II will basically just be a standalone expansion and I for one probably won't buy it for the same reason taht I haven't bought Planescape: Torment. I was really looking forward to Baldur's Gate as a real d&d game and it really let me down. Diablo might not have been deep, but it was insanely fun as a hack'n'slash and even if Diablo II were just a standalone expansion of Diablo I i'd still want it.
Dreamweaver
That's not actually MS forcing software on people, it's the companies supporting MS forcing software on people.
Yes, MS had the computer manufacturers sign agreements saying they'd put windows on their systems etc, but the companies didn't Have to go along with it. Compaq could easily have chosen to put OS/2 on all of their computers instead. Why didn't they? Because Compaq felt that MS Windows was the best choice to make them money. If they thought people would buy more of their computers if they came with linux on them, i'm sure they would have turned down MS and looked for a deal with redhat. However, linux is not (yet anyway) a popular consumer OS. Had compaq released all of their computers with redhat they'd have lost money to companies who released with windows.
Sure, MS Could have let the computer manufacturers decide on a computer-by-computer basis if they wanted to put windows on it, then ship a selection of computers with windows and a selection with linux, but that would make MS lose money and it's anything that makes you lose money is bad corporate strategy. Sure the contract they offered was unfair to an os maker struggling to get his product known, but the computer manufacturer's didn't Have to sign it.. they could just use OS/2 instead.
Now there's a rising demand for computers without windows and right away we see computer manufacturers making a stink because they're losing money, and right away we get the ability to purchase a computer sans the price of windows.
Dreamweaver
Among others i can't entirely recall at the moment, i know this happens in both Mars by Bova and Titan by Baxter.. except that in the case of Mars it was a lead-shielded room and in the case of Titan one of the astronauts got caught unawares in an unshielded connection tube and wound up with radiation poisoning.
Dreamweaver
For those of us who haven't had our state governments introduced to this one and have no pending decision at the moment, should we go to them in advance?
On the one hand prevention might keep them from even listening to lobbyists for the bill when it Does come around to the state, but on the other hand if they think it's a good idea despite our evidence to the contrary, we might have just made a sympathetic ear when UCITA lobbyists come calling.
So which is the better idea? Go now, before anyone gets to them, or wait until it's an issue and then try to stop it?
Dreamweaver
Are we going to fucking complain every time the Slashdot readers post something that THEY think is relevant? Nobody is forcing these responses down your throat! If you don't want to read it, DON'T READ IT. Then move on with life!
This is not your website. Start your own website, then you can keep people from posting whatever the hell you want. In the interim, don't bitch about what Slashdot posters put out. Some people agree with their thoughts, and could live without your complaints.
Dreamweaver
Nope, i only have about a half a dozen friends.. however they're actually my friends as opposed to the hordes of acquantances most people seem willing to make do with. :)
I act like myself with my friends, me as myself enjoys intelligent conversation and intellectually stimulating recreational activities.. thereby i don't hang out with stupid people. If it's a fault that i don't like having to explain jokes to my friends or that i like to be able to talk about things that interest me without their eyes glazing over.. then i guess i'm a faulty person
Dreamweaver
I think the double standard here exists because we have to deal with closemindedness and stupidity.
You spend some part of your day every day dealing with people who react with hostility, disinterest, stupidity, and closemindedness and you start expecting it from everybody. So we fall back on our communities of fellow geeks who we know will have interests at least sort of similar to ours, even if they come at the from the other end (the endless distro wars amongst the linux-entrenchd sections of our community for instance).
In that respect, slashdot is one of our little havens of geekfulness where we go after a long hard day of 'oh! i have to turn on the monitor too?!' to get in a little tech news and arguing with our peers. So while, as you said, nobody chains us down and Forces us to read Katz, the mere fact of his existence is like graffitti on my livingroom wall. Sure, i don't really Have to look at it, but it's there and i dont like it. Similarly with other non-techies. If i owe someone (either due to being paid directly, or just because they're a friend) i'll gladly be polite and help them through their technological ineptitude, but in my free time i don't want the hassle.
Dreamweaver
Projects never get done just on time with the exact planned budget.. but you have to draw the line somewhere. Thanks to russian delays (and some US ones too, but mainly russian) the station is way, Way behind schedule. At some point you have to say "Okay, enough is enough. If you're not going to do it, we'll get someone else to." And NASA did.
Dreamweaver
I've got to disagree.. speaking as a US citizen, i'm pretty sure i can say that most of us realize just how f***ed up russia is right now. The point here isn't that we're expecting russia to do something we shouldn't, it's that russia has been stalling and stalling saying "Okay, okay, no problems comrade, just a little more time and we'll have the module ready. And how about a little more cash while we're at it?"
Personally i think it's about time. No offense and i hate to sound nationalist, but like you said russia's in no condition to be doing much of anything in space right now.. but i don't think that's a reason to hold up the whole station. Let the countries with the money for it pony up with the parts and russia can supply us what heavy lifting rockets it has already.
Dreamweaver
I must admit to not understanding what exactly you're expecting from hollywood.. or any movie maker for that matter.
Movies, from the first, existed as a means to entertain. Personally I don't go to a movie expecting to learn anything or be intellectually challenged. If i do or am, it's a pleasant surprise, but i go to distract myself from life's difficulties for two hours. If i wanted to be entertained and still be intellectually stimulated, i'd read a book (which i do, considerably more often than i watch movies for that matter).
As for boycotting hollywood because of CSS encryption.. do you really think that most screenwriters, directors, and actors have Any idea about it? The upper few % of the more intellectual sort might, but the rest are worrying about what movie to do next and what to wear to opening night. I can understand boycotting DVD makers or a letter-writing campaign, but boycotting movies made in hollywood altogether? That's about 3 steps west of sane.
Dreamweaver
Probes are great up to a point. Sure, NASA could probably spend the rest of our natural lives sending probes to mars and find some new experiment to put on each one, but while this will collect mounds of scientific data, we won't really have gained much of anything.
Perhaps i'm insane but i've always thought that the eventual goal of space exploration was to expand the boundries of humanity beyond our little hunk of rock. While von Neumann may have felt that replicating space robots would be the best way to explore, it doesn't do a Thing for the people back home. No resources garnished from other planets, no interaction with any possible alien cultures, not even a relief to overpopulation on the home world.
Just imagine if when we finally decide we're ready to explore another solar system, we send a probe to land on a planet: it finds something amazing. Be it living intelligent aliens, the ruins of a city, even just living macro-scale alien life or even just some amazing geological phenomenon. What do we do about it? Nothing. It'd take years just to get the pictures and any other data the lander collects back to earth, years to construct another probe to explore the new phenomenon (whatever it may be) on the planet, more years to send it to the planet, and then years for the data to come back again.
So you say: "Sure, but that's a whole other solar system. I'm just talking about mars. Hell, we can See mars from here." But if we just probe the hell out of our solar system, will we be ready when the technology emerges to let us visit another? Or will we still be using shuttle-level life support with horrible living conditions on the years-long flight there and back?
Probes are great, like i said, and they should be used as much as feasible.. but don't knock humanity out of the equation altogether. Send enough probes to determine the basics and then send in the humans. It's not scientific, but I for one don't want to die knowing that in my lifetime we could have gone, but instead we sent our toys.
Dreamweaver
and NOW let's THROW IN some MORE capital LETTERS in totally RANDOM places because it makes us look like we have SOME IDEA what we're TALKING about.
Of course science is replacing religion.. science explains things in a rational manner that can be reproduced instead of chalking it up to things that we pitiful little humans can't possibly understand.
Humans want to live forever because:
1) They want to see what happens tomorrow. Nobody wants to have lived for x years just to miss something really cool because they died a year too soon.
2) We can't stand the thought that we're not the center of the universe. How can life possibly go on if I'm not here for it to center on?
3) And this only applies to the whole 'afterlife' thing in religions: people hate the idea that this is all there is. If you screw it up this time around, you don't get another shot at it, and despite how badly this life might suck, it's all you get. Obviously the benevolent god that people need to believe in so that it's not them vs. the universe would provide us with a place to spend eternity being happy, since we had to spend 90 years in the crapfest we call life.
Sarcophogi(sp)? Come on.. people put each other in boxes because we don't like to see dead people and we don't like the idea of worms and rats eating our loved ones after we dump dirt on them. Egyptians did it because they didn't want grave robbers vandalizing the corpse.. same as the worms'n'rats thing but with humans.. nowhere in either one is anything involving eternal life. Yes the egyptians beleived in an afterlife, as do many people who get buried in boxes, but the mechanics of burial very rarely have Anything to do with thelogical beliefs.
As for the actual pointful part of your rant.. why shouldn't we be capable of artificially reproducing a brain? Unless you believe some nice bearded man in the sky made us whole cloth, our brain is, as vonnegut put it, a dog's breakfast. Nine pounds of sponge soaked in blood and other liquids. You're telling me that a 'sentient' being with a few thousand years of research behind him couldn't purposefully replicate the action of a million years of random chances?
Here's an easy example:
Step 1) Go outside and find two rocks, one larger than the other.
Step 2) Find a master sculptor.
Step 3) Give him the two rocks and an appropriate sum of money to carve the smaller rock from the larger.
There you go, man reproducing nature's creation synthetically. Reproducing the human brain is excatly the same as carving out a rock. Yes it's more complicated but if you don't throw in bull like the 'soul' or 'essence' or 'consciousness' we're just a bunch of electrochemical reactions between cells.
We probably couldn't just copy over the current settings of the brain and expect it to run, you'd have to do a sort of copy-in-motion of the brain in action so the thought patterns over a reasonable variety of stimuli were covered. The computer-you might react slightly differently than the real-you would in a given situation because it has to extrapolate new reactions based on other reactions in memory, but the computer-you wouldn't be conscious of the difference and given that the real-you was dead at the time, it wouldn't really matter.
As for our 'immutable LAWS', i'd hardly call them immutable.. the whole point of one of your majors is the continued search for reasons we're wrong. Physicists perform experiments constantly in an attempt to prove current laws and theories incorrect. Usually the results point to the law's correctness so it stands. If it doesn't prove correct we try again to make sure, and when the law's obviously broken we go looking for a new one. Only an idiot would say that physical laws are 'immutable'. We still have the whole gravity thing, but it's certainly changed a hell of a lot since newton's day.
And finally, being as the universe is the only truly closed system, i'd certainly hope it's the largest one you know of.
Dreamweaver
I don't suppose you've considered the facts that:
1) It's an Adobe product, which are all huge resource hogs to begin with.
2) He's running win98 which is even worse about resources than Adobe? Friend of mine has to reboot his win98 box every few hours because it doesn't free memory after using it half the time with Any software.
Dreamweaver
I disagree. Speed doesn't kill, cars and stupid drivers kill. Ever seen the 15mph collision tests on cars? They get just as trashed as in a high-speed accident and survivability is only marginally altered.
Instead of keeping people from speeding, i say issue varied speed drivers liscences. When you get your liscence, you take a test to see how fast you can safely drive and it's put in a barcode or magnetic strip on your liscence. In order to start a car you have to swipe your liscence and a little transceiver thing tells road-side devices if you're speeding and you're issued a ticket.
This way, if you're grandma-with-enzima and can't drive more than 50 without wrecking that's fine for you. If you're a normal person and can drive safely at 85 you can go ahead without worrying about the cops pulling you for going faster than the median speed established for everybody so that grandma doesn't feel the need to do 65 and slam into someone.
Of course, this still leaves out the factor of bad and/or stupid drivers. A friend of mine got his liscence on the first try and yet has nearly gotten himself killed dozens of times by cutting off semis and swerving across 3+ lanes of traffic without realizing what he was doing was stupid. Now, if we could just find a way to weed out the idiots and put them on their own highways...
Dreamweaver
Okay.. and i suppose you're going to go around beating people if they don't use the new system? Because you Do of course realize nobody who isn't paid to do so will.. people shorten KB to K and MB to M as it is, you think they're going to accept Another letter?
Not even to mention all the people who have trouble enough as it is with computer terms.. I can't count how many times i've had to correct my parents when they screw up megabytes and gigabytes.
Even beyond all that, who *wants* to say "Kibobyte" or "Gibabyte"? I mean come on, they just sound stupid. I know you're thinking "well, how it sounds doesnt matter" but no geek is going to go around saying "kibobyte".. we get enough flak for talking about computers as it is.
Dreamweaver