Are you serious!? Talked about overpriced. I pay $15 per month for World of Warcraft, which could easily be 1200 hours of entertainment. A good game that provides 80-100 hours of gameplay normally sells for $50 to $60.
I don't quite understand this obsession with duration. If I go to watch a film, I don't feel disappointed if it only lasts 90 minutes compared to one lasting 2 hours. Nor would I pick the second over the first on that basis; some films just take a different amount of time to tell their story.
Most games I've played are packed with filler. Half Life and sequel managed it OK (with only about a third of the game made up of tedious bits) but some, like Doom3 and Halo were ridiculous. Why should I fight my way through another corridor of zombies almost identical to the previous ten when they could make it a bit more concentrated? "Just condense it!" I keep thinking, "I want to get to the fun bits!"
I could then use the time saved to go out and do something more interesting. Or even play another game.
That is an incredibly ignorant comment. Blair's government is by no means socialist! It is now significantly more right wing economically than the Conservative government that it deposed (if not yet as corrupt). In terms of authoritarianism it is probably about equal: though it has eroded many civil liberties, it has brought in new ones (such as gay rights).
In any case, the government's social policies can be independent of its economic policies. See The Political Compass for an alternative (compared to left/right) measurement of political stances.
I think you might want to check on the homocide rate per capita in both England, and the US.
I think you should check it out. It's much much higher in the US than in the UK (per capita). And I think you should also read up on the difference between England and the UK.
some 70 year old lady manages to stop a mugging with a gun, it is in the local paper.
If an OAP managed to fight off a mugger it certainly would make the national news -- human interest story. I have visited the US and the biggest fans of guns were not little old ladies.
Of the many civil rights abuses perpetrated by the UK government you could have chosen, you seem to have picked on the "abuses" that almost everyone thinks are beneficial.
Do you expect the author of a book to go round to everyone with a printing press and tell them he would rather they didn't reprint his book?
That's not a fair analogy. You only have to create one file to stop Google indexing your site. It's the digital equivalent of printing "please do not copy this book" on the publication (which though not required is in effect done by most publishers).
Anyway, you're being silly. People usually only look at the cache if the original site is unavailable. I'm sure you get several orders of magnitude more visitors to your site following Google searches than you lose through people visiting the cache.
Ever heard of the concept of civility? You made a point, and I responded. If you didn't want an answer, why bother posting in the first place? Would you respond in the same manner if I was talking to you in a pub? Do you get punched in the face a lot?
Those shares may earn me privileges (e.g. being on the board of company and making *real* money that I can buy my next car with). The shares and the numbers in a bank account are tangible - you can have hard cash in return. It's just a convenience method of storing them.
You can exchange virtual goods for (real life) cash too. It's actually official in Second Life.
Why should I spend that time cooped up in front of a screen when you can get out and have a *real* life?
What's the difference if you become immersed enough in the virtual world that you don't notice the difference? It doesn't work for me, but that seems to be the case for some people.
Seriously, this is a disturbing trend - just *why*? Spending an odd hour or two is one thing, obsessing over this stuff and paying huge sums of money for virtual things
1)The license is there as a "tax of choice". So, if you don't have a TV, then you don't pay (not even if you do listen to the radio). This made sense in 1960 - but not so much now, when virtually everyone has a television.
Not everyone has a telly, but most people who don't have a radio and/or use other aspects of the BBC, such as the website.
3)With the exception of pensioners, the TV license is the same for everyone. Yet, some can afford to pay more than others.
It seems ridiculous to me that students and the unemployed, two groups that are generally worse off than pensioners, have to pay for TV licenses.
I would prefer to see the license fee taken from the general (income) taxation system. This would also remove the huge (financial and social) cost of enforcement.
You're wrong. He did write the original versions of gcc and gdb, and Emacs among many other things. The original Emacs was ground breaking, not trivial as you allege. Whatever else you may think of him, RMS's code contributions are huge.
Let the Earth take care of nature. We're so focused on manipulating nature for the survival of every single life on Earth, we lose site of the fact that every now and then, nature has to correct our mistakes to restore its own balance, whether in the form of a plague, a change in the weather patterns, or an ice age.
"The Earth" won't take care of anything. It's a huge ball of rock orbiting the Sun, with an extremely thin covering of green stuff. It has no thought processes, or mechanisms of carrying out any decisions if it did have any. "Nature" is simply the sum of the physical laws we observe around us. It does not "have" to do anything. Ice ages, plagues etc. do not occur because some mythical "Nature" process is trying to balance things out -- they're just events that happen because of other things. And proof by TV programme won't change matters.
I know you were playing devil's advocate, but also remember I allowed it might not be easy for someone to lose weight.
What I was saying was it might be impossible for some people to lose weight in a modern western society. Though they might desire to be slim, their willpower might not be strong enough to decline the short-term pleasure of food, particularly in the face of modern advertising and processed foods. Telling them to take responsibility isn't going to change that.
People's behaviour is based on two things: genetics, and society. Genetics is a lottery, and we can't change that short of genetic engineering. Therefore, our only chance of changing people's behaviour is to change how society operates.
You said yourself it wouldn't be easy to lose weight, but it is possible [...] It's different when someone cannot change their condition.
(Playing devil's advocate to a certain extent)
How is it different if someone wants to lose weight but does not have the willpower to do so? Disabled person A does not have full control over their legs due to nerve damage, obese person B does not have full control over their eating habits due to a poorly-regulated amygdala. What exactly is the difference?
You're missing the point. Your original claim was that evolutionary theory was flawed because organisms undergoing speciation would have to spontaneously develop new mating rituals. That idea has now been shot full of holes so you're now arguing... what, exactly?
I don't insist so; biologists who specialize in studying animal culture do.
They do not.
Read the current literature (my source is the prosaic BBC science pages on the web) and you will see science now accepts that each species of bird responds only to a particular call and, in a separate article covered on/. scientists reported humans have a genetic code that helps them remember tunes.
Just because some species of bird respond to some specific calls does not mean all species of bird do, and this certainly does not scale to all species.
Science also recognizes, for example, the dance of a male pigeon or the display of a peacock is mandatory for mating to occur. A pigeon will not try to mate with a peacock, partly because his dance does not stir the response that "turns him on."
Pigeons don't attempt to mate with peacocks because peacocks are about twenty times the size of pigeons, and they're quite genetically distinct. I bet you could find examples of rock pigeons mating with other species of pigeon though.
Would a woman's "come-hither-glance" work with Chimpanzees? (Rhetorical question.)
Yes. Humans working with chimps have occasionally reported sexual advances from chimps. In fact there is considerable speculation whether a human/chimp hybrid child could be produced from mating a chimp with a human.
Arg, something was bothering me, and I just checked it up on the Web. Chimps actually have an extra pair of chromosomes compared to humans (23 pairs excluding sex chromosomes) so what actually happened was that two pairs of chromosomes actually fused at some point in the human development.
And another thing, humans didn't evolve from chimps, but both evolved from a common ancestor.
A species (chimpanzees, our "closest" relatives, for example) with 21 pairs of chromosomes can EVOLVE into one with 22 pairs. Do the fossil records indicate critters with 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4.... pairs of choromosomes?
No. Fossil records do not show DNA. However the clues in our genomes today show that what happened was that in a human ancestor one chromosome split into two.
If not, then explain how a (presumably) mutant new example of an "evolved" chimpanzee with 22 pairs of chromosomes can find another exactly evolved 22-paired mutant -- at the same time -- in the same place -- recognize him or her -- and develop a brand new and unique mating ritual that works. All of these steps are recognized as being necessary to begin to form a new species.
These are not the steps recognized as being necessary to form a new species. It is not clear that the offspring of a 22-pair mutant and a 21-pair non-mutant would be infertile, so it might not be necessary for two 22-pair mutants to mate. And there is certainly no reason for a new mating ritual to magically appear or for mutants to recognise each other.
That said, to deny Darwinism is to ignore the stages and features our own embryos develop and discard: gills, tail, front legs.
This is also incorrect, and has been widely discredited. I wonder if I have just been trolled.
There are too many factors in the atmosphere to even predict local weather, let alone the cause of global warming.
The logic in your argument is faulty. It's often easier to predict long term trends than short ones. You can predict to a large degree of accuracy the spread of numbers you'll get if you make 1000 dice rolls, but it's much more difficult to say what number you'll get on an individual roll.
Slashdot Mirror
However, the homocide rate per capita in the UK is 13 people out of 100,000. In the US it is 6 people per 100,000.
You're an idiot. Check your facts before you try to "correct" someone.
No, it doesn't. I have seen many police reports where someone has thwarted an attack with a fire arm. None of which ever made national news.
Maybe it is because it doesn't happen very often?
So saying x number of people were killed by guns is meaningless without comparative data.
Well you find the comparative data then. But you'd better provide references because I don't trust your "fact" finding skills.
Plus, how can an unarmed subject protect themselves against abuses?
That is why we have democracy, a legal system, a police force, a free(ish) media, etc.
Are you serious!? Talked about overpriced. I pay $15 per month for World of Warcraft, which could easily be 1200 hours of entertainment. A good game that provides 80-100 hours of gameplay normally sells for $50 to $60.
I don't quite understand this obsession with duration. If I go to watch a film, I don't feel disappointed if it only lasts 90 minutes compared to one lasting 2 hours. Nor would I pick the second over the first on that basis; some films just take a different amount of time to tell their story.
Most games I've played are packed with filler. Half Life and sequel managed it OK (with only about a third of the game made up of tedious bits) but some, like Doom3 and Halo were ridiculous. Why should I fight my way through another corridor of zombies almost identical to the previous ten when they could make it a bit more concentrated? "Just condense it!" I keep thinking, "I want to get to the fun bits!"
I could then use the time saved to go out and do something more interesting. Or even play another game.
That is an incredibly ignorant comment. Blair's government is by no means socialist! It is now significantly more right wing economically than the Conservative government that it deposed (if not yet as corrupt). In terms of authoritarianism it is probably about equal: though it has eroded many civil liberties, it has brought in new ones (such as gay rights).
In any case, the government's social policies can be independent of its economic policies. See The Political Compass for an alternative (compared to left/right) measurement of political stances.
I think you might want to check on the homocide rate per capita in both England, and the US.
I think you should check it out. It's much much higher in the US than in the UK (per capita). And I think you should also read up on the difference between England and the UK.
some 70 year old lady manages to stop a mugging with a gun, it is in the local paper.
If an OAP managed to fight off a mugger it certainly would make the national news -- human interest story. I have visited the US and the biggest fans of guns were not little old ladies.
Of the many civil rights abuses perpetrated by the UK government you could have chosen, you seem to have picked on the "abuses" that almost everyone thinks are beneficial.
Do you expect the author of a book to go round to everyone with a printing press and tell them he would rather they didn't reprint his book?
That's not a fair analogy. You only have to create one file to stop Google indexing your site. It's the digital equivalent of printing "please do not copy this book" on the publication (which though not required is in effect done by most publishers).
Anyway, you're being silly. People usually only look at the cache if the original site is unavailable. I'm sure you get several orders of magnitude more visitors to your site following Google searches than you lose through people visiting the cache.
It just seems that the applicants I get are rarely suited for the position they're applying for. They seem to just fire resumes out of a shotgun.
Well why not? It doesn't cost them anything.
They don't have any experience in the specific field (database driven websites)
Perhaps all the other employers also want people with experience? Everyone has to start somewhere.
Surely Ctrl-s works in Excel?
What the hell are you talking about?
Ever heard of the concept of civility? You made a point, and I responded. If you didn't want an answer, why bother posting in the first place? Would you respond in the same manner if I was talking to you in a pub? Do you get punched in the face a lot?
Those shares may earn me privileges (e.g. being on the board of company and making *real* money that I can buy my next car with). The shares and the numbers in a bank account are tangible - you can have hard cash in return. It's just a convenience method of storing them.
You can exchange virtual goods for (real life) cash too. It's actually official in Second Life.
Why should I spend that time cooped up in front of a screen when you can get out and have a *real* life?
What's the difference if you become immersed enough in the virtual world that you don't notice the difference? It doesn't work for me, but that seems to be the case for some people.
Seriously, this is a disturbing trend - just *why*? Spending an odd hour or two is one thing, obsessing over this stuff and paying huge sums of money for virtual things
What, like shares? Or numbers in a bank account?
What the hell is wrong with England?!?
:/
Small point -- it is the British government that it is introducing this legislation. We all get to suffer, not just England
And what kind of politics have you got going now where the Conservatives are for civil liberties and Labour are the fascists?
Sadly the situation is worse than this. Labour are acting like fascists and the Tories are only for civil liberties so far as it embarrasses Labour.
1)The license is there as a "tax of choice". So, if you don't have a TV, then you don't pay (not even if you do listen to the radio). This made sense in 1960 - but not so much now, when virtually everyone has a television.
Not everyone has a telly, but most people who don't have a radio and/or use other aspects of the BBC, such as the website.
3)With the exception of pensioners, the TV license is the same for everyone. Yet, some can afford to pay more than others.
It seems ridiculous to me that students and the unemployed, two groups that are generally worse off than pensioners, have to pay for TV licenses.
I would prefer to see the license fee taken from the general (income) taxation system. This would also remove the huge (financial and social) cost of enforcement.
Don't tell slashdot, talk to your MP. (or AM).
I don't believe it. Citation please.
You're wrong. He did write the original versions of gcc and gdb, and Emacs among many other things. The original Emacs was ground breaking, not trivial as you allege. Whatever else you may think of him, RMS's code contributions are huge.
His biography is pretty good. See also his Wikipedia entry.
Let the Earth take care of nature. We're so focused on manipulating nature for the survival of every single life on Earth, we lose site of the fact that every now and then, nature has to correct our mistakes to restore its own balance, whether in the form of a plague, a change in the weather patterns, or an ice age.
"The Earth" won't take care of anything. It's a huge ball of rock orbiting the Sun, with an extremely thin covering of green stuff. It has no thought processes, or mechanisms of carrying out any decisions if it did have any. "Nature" is simply the sum of the physical laws we observe around us. It does not "have" to do anything. Ice ages, plagues etc. do not occur because some mythical "Nature" process is trying to balance things out -- they're just events that happen because of other things. And proof by TV programme won't change matters.
I know you were playing devil's advocate, but also remember I allowed it might not be easy for someone to lose weight.
What I was saying was it might be impossible for some people to lose weight in a modern western society. Though they might desire to be slim, their willpower might not be strong enough to decline the short-term pleasure of food, particularly in the face of modern advertising and processed foods. Telling them to take responsibility isn't going to change that.
People's behaviour is based on two things: genetics, and society. Genetics is a lottery, and we can't change that short of genetic engineering. Therefore, our only chance of changing people's behaviour is to change how society operates.
I am not fat. I go caving on weekends, do muay thai during the week, and walk, run, do other martial arts or play rugby in any other spare time I get.
I can name parts of the brain because I have been working on a PhD in AI, and considering moving into cognitive science.
You said yourself it wouldn't be easy to lose weight, but it is possible [...] It's different when someone cannot change their condition.
(Playing devil's advocate to a certain extent)
How is it different if someone wants to lose weight but does not have the willpower to do so? Disabled person A does not have full control over their legs due to nerve damage, obese person B does not have full control over their eating habits due to a poorly-regulated amygdala. What exactly is the difference?
You're missing the point. Your original claim was that evolutionary theory was flawed because organisms undergoing speciation would have to spontaneously develop new mating rituals. That idea has now been shot full of holes so you're now arguing... what, exactly?
I don't insist so; biologists who specialize in studying animal culture do.
/. scientists reported humans have a genetic code that helps them remember tunes.
They do not.
Read the current literature (my source is the prosaic BBC science pages on the web) and you will see science now accepts that each species of bird responds only to a particular call and, in a separate article covered on
Just because some species of bird respond to some specific calls does not mean all species of bird do, and this certainly does not scale to all species.
Science also recognizes, for example, the dance of a male pigeon or the display of a peacock is mandatory for mating to occur. A pigeon will not try to mate with a peacock, partly because his dance does not stir the response that "turns him on."
Pigeons don't attempt to mate with peacocks because peacocks are about twenty times the size of pigeons, and they're quite genetically distinct. I bet you could find examples of rock pigeons mating with other species of pigeon though.
Would a woman's "come-hither-glance" work with Chimpanzees? (Rhetorical question.)
Yes. Humans working with chimps have occasionally reported sexual advances from chimps. In fact there is considerable speculation whether a human/chimp hybrid child could be produced from mating a chimp with a human.
Arg, something was bothering me, and I just checked it up on the Web. Chimps actually have an extra pair of chromosomes compared to humans (23 pairs excluding sex chromosomes) so what actually happened was that two pairs of chromosomes actually fused at some point in the human development.
And another thing, humans didn't evolve from chimps, but both evolved from a common ancestor.
A species (chimpanzees, our "closest" relatives, for example) with 21 pairs of chromosomes can EVOLVE into one with 22 pairs. Do the fossil records indicate critters with 21.1, 21.2, 21.3, 21.4.... pairs of choromosomes?
No. Fossil records do not show DNA. However the clues in our genomes today show that what happened was that in a human ancestor one chromosome split into two.
If not, then explain how a (presumably) mutant new example of an "evolved" chimpanzee with 22 pairs of chromosomes can find another exactly evolved 22-paired mutant -- at the same time -- in the same place -- recognize him or her -- and develop a brand new and unique mating ritual that works. All of these steps are recognized as being necessary to begin to form a new species.
These are not the steps recognized as being necessary to form a new species. It is not clear that the offspring of a 22-pair mutant and a 21-pair non-mutant would be infertile, so it might not be necessary for two 22-pair mutants to mate. And there is certainly no reason for a new mating ritual to magically appear or for mutants to recognise each other.
That said, to deny Darwinism is to ignore the stages and features our own embryos develop and discard: gills, tail, front legs.
This is also incorrect, and has been widely discredited. I wonder if I have just been trolled.
There are too many factors in the atmosphere to even predict local weather, let alone the cause of global warming.
The logic in your argument is faulty. It's often easier to predict long term trends than short ones. You can predict to a large degree of accuracy the spread of numbers you'll get if you make 1000 dice rolls, but it's much more difficult to say what number you'll get on an individual roll.
Ever heard of the mimivirus?
Everything I've seen says that climate scientists say there's no connection at all.
Then you haven't been looking very hard.