Cool, so I'll just come to your place, steal your stuff and murder you. It's okay that I do it since other people do it too!
You just inadvertently described what it's like to live in an active war zone where all semblance of governance has broken down.
Again, they key is "as long as you don't get caught". In the middle of a war zone your chances of getting caught are much lower, so you actually could get away with that in the right circumstances. In any country with a functioning government, it's generally much harder to not get caught.
Just don't scoff and dismiss offhand those who decide to survive when push comes to shove by tossing conventional morality out the door instead of dying as a morally upstanding victim.
Congratulations for brainlessly repeating the propaganda they instilled in you in elementary school.
Or noting my observations of friends in high school and college who developed problems with cocaine and methamphetamines and either upped dosages over time to "cope" or switched to other equally hard drugs of different families once the high became harder to achieve. But yes, it's anecdotal evidence. YMMV.
What you describe is how it works for reactional users chasing the rush. It is not at all true that your body completely adjusts to low to moderate doses as "the new normal" and you have to increase the dose to get any effect.
Depends on the substance. E or LSD? Sure. Heroin? Not so much.
An interesting exception to the psychiatric taboo against prescribing euphoric drugs is of course in children with ADHD, who are routinely given Ritalin or Adderall (amphetamine, i.e. something that's very very similar to that stuff Walter White was making.)
Good lord man, I mean I know this is Slashdot, but that is one of the most gross oversimplifications of biochemistry I've seen in a long time! Why not revive the bogus "glucose, sucrose, and fructose are the same chemical and are metabolized the same way!" argument all over again while you're at it?
These drugs have significant effects that persist even though the dose is held constant. It's also pretty well-established that constant-dose opioids have persistent effects. In both cases, it's primarily those people who want instant gratification, pure recreational euphoria, who are compelled to raise the dose.
Why yes, dosage and exact chemical makeup are important. Designed and administered in a controlled fashion there is much less risk of adverse side effects. Are you suggesting that self-medicating with euphorics would be more beneficial than the current controlled medications prescribed for panic attacks and depression? Personally, I would find a study on the subject fascinating (though unlikely to occur) and would love to read the results. But I really just want to figure out what, exactly, you're suggesting as an alternative to current drug treatment practices.
Even if you were correct that euphoric drugs (Just Say No!) lose all potency once the body develops tolerance, this would still be an incorrect conclusion.
What about illnesses that are episodic, like sporadic panic attacks (these, too, are often treated with spectacularly ineffective SSRIs)? What about regular cases of depression (as opposed to refractory major depressive disorder), which can often resolve over just a couple months?
I was unaware of SSRIs spectacular ineffectiveness in treating panic attacks or depression. I would be interested in details of the trials showing just how spectacularly ineffective they are. I am, however, aware of a concerns that began within the last couple of years that seemed to show that unpublished clinical trials showed SSRIs to be no more effective than placebos. I felt that the issue was most effectively explained in this article in Molecular Psychology: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v21/n4/pdf/mp201553a.pdf. In short, aggregating loosely related symptoms into an overall score instead of focusing specifically on anxiety or depression does indeed make SSRIs look little better than placebos. But if you look at their effectiveness on those areas specifically, they show extremely consistent improvement.
If you're going to nitpick on the outliers, then what about severe depression that does not resolve over just a couple of months and leads to suicide? Is it better to err on the side of overprescription that may buy someone time for treatment through cognitive behavioral therapy to save their life and/or help them put their life back together or is it better to err on the side of not prescribing until you're absolutely sure other options haven't worked and run the risk of the person's life becoming steadily worse or ending altogether?
No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous.
I guess that depends on how you define "work". Do they make pretty much anyone feel better or at least different? Sure. For a little while, anyway. Most restricted drugs produce short term intense effects. Not very useful for treating ongoing mental illness. And used recreationally, it is easy to abuse and develop a tolerance, causing the user to seek ever higher and more dangerous dosages.
Now, I will say that this is no different from something like alcohol or other legal recreational substances. And I agree that it's hypocritical to provide legal framework for the consumption of some and give a blanket total ban on all others. But as a means for treating mental illness, I have to disagree with your implied hypothesis that mental illnesses would often be better treated with recreational drugs that are currently illegal.
Point taken. It's certainly been long enough at this point that in the vast majority of cases blame can be more readily attributed to ourselves and our currently elected representatives for STILL not fixing ongoing problems.
There is honestly very little to blame on Bush at this point. The systemic problems we still face either reach back to policies built up over the past 30+ years, or are primarily the result of a changing world (such as working class stagnation).
I'd like to blame not necessarily him, but at least his administration for the "everything is fine, nothing is wrong, and even if something were wrong, the states would take care of it themselves" mentality/ideology that crept in and solidified during his tenure. I'm very much willing to admit that he did not make a lot of things worse (other than foreign policy) with his actions. But I have to insist that he did make things worse with his INaction and unwillingness to admit to the existence of problems.
Had there been a different president (even a different republican one), I suspect the recession still would have hit, but at least there could have been at least ATTEMPTS to acknowledge and begin to combat the systemic problems.
So your definition of ownership is that whoever has ultimate control over the good is the true owner? By that logic, if I steal a gun from your house then I am the gun's owner unless you can steal it back from me. The only thing stopping that from being true is laws that are enforced stating that if the registration is in my name, I am the legal owner of the gun and have rights to it.
This car story has the same theme. The manufacturer has the ability to affect the car remotely. They cannot, however, legally do so without a request from the legal owner of the car.
Your arguments mostly seem to boil down to a feeling that legality is increasingly being tipped in scale against your favor. If that's the case, your options are simple: vote/lobby for changes in your interests, revolt, or acquiesce.
Vaccines, where a small part of the disease causing agent is administered in accordance with the Homeopathic principle, work.
But everything else... totally a sham.
Vaccines are homeopathic medicine in the same way that controlled burns help with forest fires. Using a little bit of something harmful as a preventative measure does work. Adding it when the harm is already ongoing just makes things worse. Homeopathy would prescribe a vaccine to someone ALREADY sick with whatever virus was in the vaccine.
Did they maybe not do the same to the other side? Who cares so what?
I offer you two bottles. You MUST buy and drink from one of them. They both look a bit murky, and you're not really sure which one would be the least harmful. Someone closely tied to the manufacturing of the contents of bottle B tells you truthfully that bottle A will make you blind if you drink it. According to you, this is good, because it's given you a more informed decision. You drink bottle B. Not only did it make you blind, it paralyzed you too.
My point is, extra information on just one side of a choice does not actually improve your decision. If the person releasing said information had nefarious purposes, it actually leads you to making a *worse* decision and thinking you made a better one.
That's all they want everyone to know that its mans fault and if we don't just die and leave the planet, all hope is lost.
... or we could take some time to evaluate whether we're seeing a tragedy of the commons problem caused by actors chasing short-term goals. That's a solvable problem without extreme measures. But yeah, if you really believe that the only proposed solution is to wipe out humanity then I guess I can see where burying your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine seems like a sensible alternative.
A speed limit is infact a limit, so the FCC is correct - the plan is not unlimited.
So you're demanding unlimited speed? Good luck with that.
This being Slashdot, I think it's high time we had a car analogy!
Imagine I built a race track for cars. I advertise nationally that my track is "unlimited" - anyone can go as fast as they can manage to achieve in their car for as long as they want on my race track as long as they pay their entry fee. It's one of the biggest advertised draws for my track. Then, when customers show up with their car and have already paid their fee, I install a governor in their car that will cap their car's top speed if they've been going really fast for longer than I'm uncomfortable with. After all, at speeds that fast they're tearing up my track and hogging its usage, and that's not fair to everyone else who wants to use the track.
The issue isn't that people couldn't achieve the speed of light on my track. The issue isn't even that I wanted to solve the problem of overuse of my track by a few people. The issue is that I told everyone that my track was something that it isn't and I never bothered to qualify my statement until my service had already been sold.
I think of "DNA testing for jobs may be on its way" in much the same way that I think of the knowledge that a world-ending meteor may be on its way. It could be devastating if it happens, but it's unlikely and can be averted via human intervention.
Play league of legends. It has a whole field of study behind it called Theroy crafting.
Just a quick point. Theorycraft applies to nearly every game. Not just League of Legends. And it's debatable whether WoW or Starcraft was the true origin of the term "theorycraft", but it definitely did not originate from League of Legends. The -craft suffix is a dead giveaway that it was a bastardized term from the player population of a Blizzard game. Plus, I remember discussing theorycraft back in vanilla WoW, which was before League of Legends even existed.
I do remember, in my experience at least, that discussions of theorycraft coinciding strongly with the first public discussions of metagame content. That was both fascinating to me and made sense. I mean, if stat X is always superior to stat Y when you have a choice according to theorycraft, and some dungeons favor gear with stat Y whereas other dungeons favor gear with stat X, your logical conclusion would be to favor the dungeon with items that give more stat X items. At that point, you're no longer just playing the original game. You're playing a new game centered around statistically maximizing positive outcomes based on theorycrafting.
I used to play a ton of Quake and Quake 2. I *think* Cytotoxic is referring to Eraser bot. As noted here, the bot will learn maps it has never seen before. Now, I don't remember ever seeing any documentation about the bots learning your play style or anything, but I do remember most of the rest of what Cytotoxic said.
A Quake 2 version existed as well, so a friend and I used these bots in Quake 2 to test custom levels. At first, some would run around, not picking up much. Others would just sit still until you killed them and would only fire at you if you fired at them first. After several minutes, the bots would usually quickly start to get a lot better. I do remember some times when the bots continued to be stupid for a lot longer than you would expect. I never found out why, but it had something to do with how you interacted with them and how they interacted with each other in their learning match. I believe at some point you could save what the bots had learned to a file so that they wouldn't have the "stupid" period of startup on the map. Once you had the bots trained, they knew where powerful weapons were and exactly how long the weapons had been absent, so they would often arrive at a weapon location EXACTLY as it respawned so that they could either get the weapon or grab the ammo and deny the weapon to their opponents.
It was a little buggy, but it did have some real learning algorithms to it and generally worked quite well and could provide either a brutally unforgiving experience (if you allowed them to play at their "hardest" skill level) or an enjoyable testing experience for new maps you had downloaded or created if you set the "skill" to the appropriate setting once they had learned a map. Definitely not as impressive as what's described in this article, but I was certainly impressed with it at the time.
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED
Unless this article is mistaken, this sounds like an extension of a known phenomenon. And I can't remember where I read it, but I also remember reading another article years ago theorizing that in some cases this effect could be the brain sort of "redistributing" its load to areas that are underutilized and can handle it. There was no proof, but I thought it was an interesting theory.
In short, just because you don't have a functioning sensory organ, that doesn't mean the brain will completely stop using the main area the organ would have used to interpret its input.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure quite a few people along the chain of command responsible for this decision know all the things you just said. I suspect they did it anyway because allowing Zika to spread is a PR nightmare after the rabid hype that's been devoted to it by various news outlets. Far easier to make a wasteful and inadvertently harmful attempt to control the outbreak and say "but we were trying to help!" than to do nothing and say "but it was right to do nothing and we couldn't have stopped it anyway!" The people who would have made the latter decision could never last in a position that ultimately has to answer to the general public.
As far as I can tell from the articles, the only thing that is provable that is going on is that the app has constant access to the microphone. That's a bug and potential concern for anyone using the app, but doesn't on its own point to anything nefarious.
Also, why would an app use your MICROPHONE instead of your LOCATION data to determine your location? Are the claimants suggesting the app uses a voice-to-text converter and parses through the logs to find out that someone said "Wal-Mart" and then target them with Wal-Mart ads? Why wouldn't they just use location data instead to see if you're near a Wal-Mart? I mean, I know the old adage about "if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail," but that would be taking things to a whole new level.
Unless there's something missing from the reporting on this article, it sounds like an overly litigious person/group crying wolf over what is at worst developer incompetence and is at best a bug.
Oof. That makes the "atom of dust collision" problem even worse. Provided the wafer probe survives the impact, that's likely to be a big momentum change with so little mass. I suppose the relatively small cross section of the probe that can be hit helps, but doesn't the dust collision likelihood just get worse as you get closer to a celestial body?
I love the whole "it's only 20 years if you travel at 20% of the speed of light!" part. It makes it sound so close. But you're not going to snap your fingers and jump right to 20% of the speed of light from one second to the next. That's 6,114,064.6 standard Earth g-forces! You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back. Unless I did the math wrong, you'd need to maintain about 0.38 m/s^2 (yeah, I rounded - I'm not the one sending the craft) the entire trip. Half the time pointing your vector towards your eventual destination, half the time pointing away to decelerate. Doesn't sound like much, but you need to maintain that for 20 years on a ship with enough mass to support whatever you're sending for that long trip. And considering the fastest any spacecraft has ever attained when leaving the solar system is about 17000 m/s according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., that would be quite a feat!
Seriously, do we need an icon for vBulletin now? That's 4 stories in less than 2 weeks about major forums having their information leaked via known vBulletin exploits. It sounds like some people (maybe the same ones each time, maybe not) are just going around to all the major forums that run vBulletin and seeing if they're running an older version with the known vulnerability. Surprise, surprise - most forums haven't bothered to upgrade their vBulletin software. If we're going to keep seeing this story every time there's another vBulletin security exploit, we may as well have a specific tag for it, because I'm guessing it's going to go on for a while longer.
The staying power of many video games these days is all about the metagame. Some video games have an end. Traditional role playing games almost always have an ending that the player is working towards. Many "arcade" type games, on the other hand, are all about racking up the highest score. Games like pinball never really "end" even though your play session may have. Along the way, we've seen meldings of all sorts between the genres. World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, for example, have an "end" goal of the story to work towards like a traditional RPG, but even after killing the final boss in the current game content the game isn't "over". Like an old arcade game, there are goals beyond the story that allow you to compare and compete against other players in meaningful ways.
The problems with Pokemon Go are the same ones faced by every other massively online game without an ending - players without significant time or money to devote to the game will never be able to compete with players who have an abundance of those resources. That's not very important in the first month or two when lots of people are starting from scratch and won't be at a significant disadvantage for starting late. But by now, nobody is going to care that you evolved your first Pokemon or were victorious in your first gym battle. In addition, the players who want to do things mostly on their own and not interact with other players much really have almost nothing to draw them into the game once the pace of content unlocking slows (as it always does in MMO games). Frankly, I'm amazed the game was able to hook as many people as it did with its initial launch given the lack of any sort of meaningful "end game" content for any type of player.
Agreed. I don't understand at all how voice mail solves ANY of the problems with email other than more clearly conveying emotion. And even then, you can clearly convey emotion via email, you just have to take a lot more time and care to do it. But let's be honest, how often do most people really need to convey nuanced emotion in business communications? Maybe a filmmaker like Philippa who wants to make sure the right feeling gets conveyed in a scene that's being filmed in a remote location needs to do that a lot, but it's hardly fair to call email a "scourge" because it doesn't fit 100% of all communication needs.
Furthermore, this isn't even an inventive solution to the problem. If what you want is to be able to clearly convey inflection, tone, and nuance in a few places in a few emails, why don't you find a way to attach audio snippets in an efficient and obvious but unobtrusive way to key places of an otherwise normal email? That would have been far more impressive than just reinventing voice mail.
Ok, apparently I don't have enough friends who also use Steam to know about this. I myself have a Steam account and was under the impression that a key is a one-time use code to activate a game in your account. If that's true, why in the world would you want to share a Steam game key? And even if you did share one, isn't there a finite amount of time until whoever you shared it with activates it and it's no longer useful to anyone else? Why would there be millions of unredeemed Steam game keys lying around in a FORUM database?!
Anyone at all have information that can shed some light on a few more of the technical details? Because TFA is pretty much a verbatim copy of the summary.
Also, criminals are well aware of the risks they take
If this were true, then setting penalties at 50% more than the reward of the crime divided by the probability of being caught would eliminate crime, yet time and time again we've seen that increasing penalties has a negligible effect on crime rates.
I think you're actually both right. Criminals are aware of the risks, but their *perception* of those risks convinces them to do it anyway.
At some point penalties can lose meaning. The difference between 3 months in jail and a year is significant. The difference between 50 years and life in prison, not quite as much. You've still lost your place in the outside world when you get out either way about it. The difference between a $50 fine and a $250 fine is significant. A $50 million judgement against the average individual and a $250 million judgement, not so much. Either way you're going to end up bankrupt, so what's the difference?
As others have already pointed out, you also need to factor in how likely someone *thinks* they are of getting caught. Most people are well aware that there have been draconian judgements against people who were convicted of distributing copyrighted content. But that makes no difference if they believe their chances of having a case brought against them are roughly the same as being struck by lightning. At that point it's just an act of god that happens to unlucky people.
Tougher sentencing alone will never eliminate crime. At best, it will just skew the criminal population a little more towards those with little to lose and those who don't think they'll be caught anyway.
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Cool, so I'll just come to your place, steal your stuff and murder you. It's okay that I do it since other people do it too!
You just inadvertently described what it's like to live in an active war zone where all semblance of governance has broken down.
Again, they key is "as long as you don't get caught". In the middle of a war zone your chances of getting caught are much lower, so you actually could get away with that in the right circumstances. In any country with a functioning government, it's generally much harder to not get caught.
Just don't scoff and dismiss offhand those who decide to survive when push comes to shove by tossing conventional morality out the door instead of dying as a morally upstanding victim.
Congratulations for brainlessly repeating the propaganda they instilled in you in elementary school.
Or noting my observations of friends in high school and college who developed problems with cocaine and methamphetamines and either upped dosages over time to "cope" or switched to other equally hard drugs of different families once the high became harder to achieve. But yes, it's anecdotal evidence. YMMV.
What you describe is how it works for reactional users chasing the rush. It is not at all true that your body completely adjusts to low to moderate doses as "the new normal" and you have to increase the dose to get any effect.
Depends on the substance. E or LSD? Sure. Heroin? Not so much.
An interesting exception to the psychiatric taboo against prescribing euphoric drugs is of course in children with ADHD, who are routinely given Ritalin or Adderall (amphetamine, i.e. something that's very very similar to that stuff Walter White was making.)
Good lord man, I mean I know this is Slashdot, but that is one of the most gross oversimplifications of biochemistry I've seen in a long time! Why not revive the bogus "glucose, sucrose, and fructose are the same chemical and are metabolized the same way!" argument all over again while you're at it?
These drugs have significant effects that persist even though the dose is held constant. It's also pretty well-established that constant-dose opioids have persistent effects. In both cases, it's primarily those people who want instant gratification, pure recreational euphoria, who are compelled to raise the dose.
Why yes, dosage and exact chemical makeup are important. Designed and administered in a controlled fashion there is much less risk of adverse side effects. Are you suggesting that self-medicating with euphorics would be more beneficial than the current controlled medications prescribed for panic attacks and depression? Personally, I would find a study on the subject fascinating (though unlikely to occur) and would love to read the results. But I really just want to figure out what, exactly, you're suggesting as an alternative to current drug treatment practices.
Even if you were correct that euphoric drugs (Just Say No!) lose all potency once the body develops tolerance, this would still be an incorrect conclusion.
What about illnesses that are episodic, like sporadic panic attacks (these, too, are often treated with spectacularly ineffective SSRIs)? What about regular cases of depression (as opposed to refractory major depressive disorder), which can often resolve over just a couple months?
I was unaware of SSRIs spectacular ineffectiveness in treating panic attacks or depression. I would be interested in details of the trials showing just how spectacularly ineffective they are. I am, however, aware of a concerns that began within the last couple of years that seemed to show that unpublished clinical trials showed SSRIs to be no more effective than placebos. I felt that the issue was most effectively explained in this article in Molecular Psychology: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/v21/n4/pdf/mp201553a.pdf. In short, aggregating loosely related symptoms into an overall score instead of focusing specifically on anxiety or depression does indeed make SSRIs look little better than placebos. But if you look at their effectiveness on those areas specifically, they show extremely consistent improvement.
If you're going to nitpick on the outliers, then what about severe depression that does not resolve over just a couple of months and leads to suicide? Is it better to err on the side of overprescription that may buy someone time for treatment through cognitive behavioral therapy to save their life and/or help them put their life back together or is it better to err on the side of not prescribing until you're absolutely sure other options haven't worked and run the risk of the person's life becoming steadily worse or ending altogether?
No, the actual difference between modern antidepressants and "addictive" drugs that actually make you feel good is... the latter actually work. Consistently and compellingly. And it's for that very reason that they are deemed dangerous.
I guess that depends on how you define "work". Do they make pretty much anyone feel better or at least different? Sure. For a little while, anyway. Most restricted drugs produce short term intense effects. Not very useful for treating ongoing mental illness. And used recreationally, it is easy to abuse and develop a tolerance, causing the user to seek ever higher and more dangerous dosages.
Now, I will say that this is no different from something like alcohol or other legal recreational substances. And I agree that it's hypocritical to provide legal framework for the consumption of some and give a blanket total ban on all others. But as a means for treating mental illness, I have to disagree with your implied hypothesis that mental illnesses would often be better treated with recreational drugs that are currently illegal.
Point taken. It's certainly been long enough at this point that in the vast majority of cases blame can be more readily attributed to ourselves and our currently elected representatives for STILL not fixing ongoing problems.
There is honestly very little to blame on Bush at this point. The systemic problems we still face either reach back to policies built up over the past 30+ years, or are primarily the result of a changing world (such as working class stagnation).
I'd like to blame not necessarily him, but at least his administration for the "everything is fine, nothing is wrong, and even if something were wrong, the states would take care of it themselves" mentality/ideology that crept in and solidified during his tenure. I'm very much willing to admit that he did not make a lot of things worse (other than foreign policy) with his actions. But I have to insist that he did make things worse with his INaction and unwillingness to admit to the existence of problems.
Had there been a different president (even a different republican one), I suspect the recession still would have hit, but at least there could have been at least ATTEMPTS to acknowledge and begin to combat the systemic problems.
So your definition of ownership is that whoever has ultimate control over the good is the true owner? By that logic, if I steal a gun from your house then I am the gun's owner unless you can steal it back from me. The only thing stopping that from being true is laws that are enforced stating that if the registration is in my name, I am the legal owner of the gun and have rights to it.
This car story has the same theme. The manufacturer has the ability to affect the car remotely. They cannot, however, legally do so without a request from the legal owner of the car.
Your arguments mostly seem to boil down to a feeling that legality is increasingly being tipped in scale against your favor. If that's the case, your options are simple: vote/lobby for changes in your interests, revolt, or acquiesce.
Vaccines, where a small part of the disease causing agent is administered in accordance with the Homeopathic principle, work.
But everything else... totally a sham.
Vaccines are homeopathic medicine in the same way that controlled burns help with forest fires. Using a little bit of something harmful as a preventative measure does work. Adding it when the harm is already ongoing just makes things worse. Homeopathy would prescribe a vaccine to someone ALREADY sick with whatever virus was in the vaccine.
Did they maybe not do the same to the other side? Who cares so what?
I offer you two bottles. You MUST buy and drink from one of them. They both look a bit murky, and you're not really sure which one would be the least harmful. Someone closely tied to the manufacturing of the contents of bottle B tells you truthfully that bottle A will make you blind if you drink it. According to you, this is good, because it's given you a more informed decision. You drink bottle B. Not only did it make you blind, it paralyzed you too.
My point is, extra information on just one side of a choice does not actually improve your decision. If the person releasing said information had nefarious purposes, it actually leads you to making a *worse* decision and thinking you made a better one.
That's all they want everyone to know that its mans fault and if we don't just die and leave the planet, all hope is lost.
... or we could take some time to evaluate whether we're seeing a tragedy of the commons problem caused by actors chasing short-term goals. That's a solvable problem without extreme measures. But yeah, if you really believe that the only proposed solution is to wipe out humanity then I guess I can see where burying your head in the sand and pretending everything is fine seems like a sensible alternative.
A speed limit is infact a limit, so the FCC is correct - the plan is not unlimited.
So you're demanding unlimited speed? Good luck with that.
This being Slashdot, I think it's high time we had a car analogy!
Imagine I built a race track for cars. I advertise nationally that my track is "unlimited" - anyone can go as fast as they can manage to achieve in their car for as long as they want on my race track as long as they pay their entry fee. It's one of the biggest advertised draws for my track. Then, when customers show up with their car and have already paid their fee, I install a governor in their car that will cap their car's top speed if they've been going really fast for longer than I'm uncomfortable with. After all, at speeds that fast they're tearing up my track and hogging its usage, and that's not fair to everyone else who wants to use the track.
The issue isn't that people couldn't achieve the speed of light on my track. The issue isn't even that I wanted to solve the problem of overuse of my track by a few people. The issue is that I told everyone that my track was something that it isn't and I never bothered to qualify my statement until my service had already been sold.
I think of "DNA testing for jobs may be on its way" in much the same way that I think of the knowledge that a world-ending meteor may be on its way. It could be devastating if it happens, but it's unlikely and can be averted via human intervention.
Play league of legends. It has a whole field of study behind it called Theroy crafting.
Just a quick point. Theorycraft applies to nearly every game. Not just League of Legends. And it's debatable whether WoW or Starcraft was the true origin of the term "theorycraft", but it definitely did not originate from League of Legends. The -craft suffix is a dead giveaway that it was a bastardized term from the player population of a Blizzard game. Plus, I remember discussing theorycraft back in vanilla WoW, which was before League of Legends even existed.
I do remember, in my experience at least, that discussions of theorycraft coinciding strongly with the first public discussions of metagame content. That was both fascinating to me and made sense. I mean, if stat X is always superior to stat Y when you have a choice according to theorycraft, and some dungeons favor gear with stat Y whereas other dungeons favor gear with stat X, your logical conclusion would be to favor the dungeon with items that give more stat X items. At that point, you're no longer just playing the original game. You're playing a new game centered around statistically maximizing positive outcomes based on theorycrafting.
I used to play a ton of Quake and Quake 2. I *think* Cytotoxic is referring to Eraser bot. As noted here, the bot will learn maps it has never seen before. Now, I don't remember ever seeing any documentation about the bots learning your play style or anything, but I do remember most of the rest of what Cytotoxic said.
A Quake 2 version existed as well, so a friend and I used these bots in Quake 2 to test custom levels. At first, some would run around, not picking up much. Others would just sit still until you killed them and would only fire at you if you fired at them first. After several minutes, the bots would usually quickly start to get a lot better. I do remember some times when the bots continued to be stupid for a lot longer than you would expect. I never found out why, but it had something to do with how you interacted with them and how they interacted with each other in their learning match. I believe at some point you could save what the bots had learned to a file so that they wouldn't have the "stupid" period of startup on the map. Once you had the bots trained, they knew where powerful weapons were and exactly how long the weapons had been absent, so they would often arrive at a weapon location EXACTLY as it respawned so that they could either get the weapon or grab the ammo and deny the weapon to their opponents.
It was a little buggy, but it did have some real learning algorithms to it and generally worked quite well and could provide either a brutally unforgiving experience (if you allowed them to play at their "hardest" skill level) or an enjoyable testing experience for new maps you had downloaded or created if you set the "skill" to the appropriate setting once they had learned a map. Definitely not as impressive as what's described in this article, but I was certainly impressed with it at the time.
We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7
Activity Recorded M.Y. 2302.22467
TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED
Unless this article is mistaken, this sounds like an extension of a known phenomenon. And I can't remember where I read it, but I also remember reading another article years ago theorizing that in some cases this effect could be the brain sort of "redistributing" its load to areas that are underutilized and can handle it. There was no proof, but I thought it was an interesting theory.
In short, just because you don't have a functioning sensory organ, that doesn't mean the brain will completely stop using the main area the organ would have used to interpret its input.
The thing is, I'm pretty sure quite a few people along the chain of command responsible for this decision know all the things you just said. I suspect they did it anyway because allowing Zika to spread is a PR nightmare after the rabid hype that's been devoted to it by various news outlets. Far easier to make a wasteful and inadvertently harmful attempt to control the outbreak and say "but we were trying to help!" than to do nothing and say "but it was right to do nothing and we couldn't have stopped it anyway!" The people who would have made the latter decision could never last in a position that ultimately has to answer to the general public.
As far as I can tell from the articles, the only thing that is provable that is going on is that the app has constant access to the microphone. That's a bug and potential concern for anyone using the app, but doesn't on its own point to anything nefarious.
Also, why would an app use your MICROPHONE instead of your LOCATION data to determine your location? Are the claimants suggesting the app uses a voice-to-text converter and parses through the logs to find out that someone said "Wal-Mart" and then target them with Wal-Mart ads? Why wouldn't they just use location data instead to see if you're near a Wal-Mart? I mean, I know the old adage about "if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail," but that would be taking things to a whole new level.
Unless there's something missing from the reporting on this article, it sounds like an overly litigious person/group crying wolf over what is at worst developer incompetence and is at best a bug.
Oof. That makes the "atom of dust collision" problem even worse. Provided the wafer probe survives the impact, that's likely to be a big momentum change with so little mass. I suppose the relatively small cross section of the probe that can be hit helps, but doesn't the dust collision likelihood just get worse as you get closer to a celestial body?
I love the whole "it's only 20 years if you travel at 20% of the speed of light!" part. It makes it sound so close. But you're not going to snap your fingers and jump right to 20% of the speed of light from one second to the next. That's 6,114,064.6 standard Earth g-forces! You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back. Unless I did the math wrong, you'd need to maintain about 0.38 m/s^2 (yeah, I rounded - I'm not the one sending the craft) the entire trip. Half the time pointing your vector towards your eventual destination, half the time pointing away to decelerate. Doesn't sound like much, but you need to maintain that for 20 years on a ship with enough mass to support whatever you're sending for that long trip. And considering the fastest any spacecraft has ever attained when leaving the solar system is about 17000 m/s according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., that would be quite a feat!
Seriously, do we need an icon for vBulletin now? That's 4 stories in less than 2 weeks about major forums having their information leaked via known vBulletin exploits. It sounds like some people (maybe the same ones each time, maybe not) are just going around to all the major forums that run vBulletin and seeing if they're running an older version with the known vulnerability. Surprise, surprise - most forums haven't bothered to upgrade their vBulletin software. If we're going to keep seeing this story every time there's another vBulletin security exploit, we may as well have a specific tag for it, because I'm guessing it's going to go on for a while longer.
The staying power of many video games these days is all about the metagame. Some video games have an end. Traditional role playing games almost always have an ending that the player is working towards. Many "arcade" type games, on the other hand, are all about racking up the highest score. Games like pinball never really "end" even though your play session may have. Along the way, we've seen meldings of all sorts between the genres. World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs, for example, have an "end" goal of the story to work towards like a traditional RPG, but even after killing the final boss in the current game content the game isn't "over". Like an old arcade game, there are goals beyond the story that allow you to compare and compete against other players in meaningful ways.
The problems with Pokemon Go are the same ones faced by every other massively online game without an ending - players without significant time or money to devote to the game will never be able to compete with players who have an abundance of those resources. That's not very important in the first month or two when lots of people are starting from scratch and won't be at a significant disadvantage for starting late. But by now, nobody is going to care that you evolved your first Pokemon or were victorious in your first gym battle. In addition, the players who want to do things mostly on their own and not interact with other players much really have almost nothing to draw them into the game once the pace of content unlocking slows (as it always does in MMO games). Frankly, I'm amazed the game was able to hook as many people as it did with its initial launch given the lack of any sort of meaningful "end game" content for any type of player.
Agreed. I don't understand at all how voice mail solves ANY of the problems with email other than more clearly conveying emotion. And even then, you can clearly convey emotion via email, you just have to take a lot more time and care to do it. But let's be honest, how often do most people really need to convey nuanced emotion in business communications? Maybe a filmmaker like Philippa who wants to make sure the right feeling gets conveyed in a scene that's being filmed in a remote location needs to do that a lot, but it's hardly fair to call email a "scourge" because it doesn't fit 100% of all communication needs.
Furthermore, this isn't even an inventive solution to the problem. If what you want is to be able to clearly convey inflection, tone, and nuance in a few places in a few emails, why don't you find a way to attach audio snippets in an efficient and obvious but unobtrusive way to key places of an otherwise normal email? That would have been far more impressive than just reinventing voice mail.
Ok, that makes WAY more sense. Thanks!
Ok, apparently I don't have enough friends who also use Steam to know about this. I myself have a Steam account and was under the impression that a key is a one-time use code to activate a game in your account. If that's true, why in the world would you want to share a Steam game key? And even if you did share one, isn't there a finite amount of time until whoever you shared it with activates it and it's no longer useful to anyone else? Why would there be millions of unredeemed Steam game keys lying around in a FORUM database?!
Anyone at all have information that can shed some light on a few more of the technical details? Because TFA is pretty much a verbatim copy of the summary.
Also, criminals are well aware of the risks they take
If this were true, then setting penalties at 50% more than the reward of the crime divided by the probability of being caught would eliminate crime, yet time and time again we've seen that increasing penalties has a negligible effect on crime rates.
I think you're actually both right. Criminals are aware of the risks, but their *perception* of those risks convinces them to do it anyway.
At some point penalties can lose meaning. The difference between 3 months in jail and a year is significant. The difference between 50 years and life in prison, not quite as much. You've still lost your place in the outside world when you get out either way about it. The difference between a $50 fine and a $250 fine is significant. A $50 million judgement against the average individual and a $250 million judgement, not so much. Either way you're going to end up bankrupt, so what's the difference?
As others have already pointed out, you also need to factor in how likely someone *thinks* they are of getting caught. Most people are well aware that there have been draconian judgements against people who were convicted of distributing copyrighted content. But that makes no difference if they believe their chances of having a case brought against them are roughly the same as being struck by lightning. At that point it's just an act of god that happens to unlucky people.
Tougher sentencing alone will never eliminate crime. At best, it will just skew the criminal population a little more towards those with little to lose and those who don't think they'll be caught anyway.