A living, breathing umpire makes all these subjective decisions on every pitch. There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.
Why stop with just robot umpires? Why not robot players? Robot bats? Robot fans?
Part of the allure of baseball for many fans is that it is a pure sport that hasn't dramatically changed for over 100 years (certainly there have been advances in player training, in the ball, and in bat design, but those are fairly minor compared to the changes in many other sports). While a robot umpire would perhaps be more "accurate," it wouldn't make baseball a better game because it would be fundamentally making it a different game.
The "purity" of baseball is a myth. Take off the rose-colored glasses and wake up and smell the game-throwing, steroid abusing, racially-biased, and ethically bankrupt reality that is MLB. To cite this fantasy purity as justification for not bringing in a machine that actually *is* pure in the sense you are using the word is fucking ludicrous.
I make a good bit of coin betting on pro sports, and participating in fantasy sports leagues. Removing the refs from pro baseball would blow an effective statistical model I've been using for nearly a decade. I've been pretty successful at predicting per game performances for pitchers (especially strike counts) in MLB by correlating the races of the homeplate umpire and the pitcher in question, and if the umpires are replaced by non-racially biased computers, I lose that edge. Unfortunately, somebody has twigged to my model. If this study gets picked up by the press, it might be enough to overcome some of the doubts about robot refs in pro sports, and pave the way for automated officiating.
It still gives an advantage to those that are willing to pay real money for game money. No new gold is created, but it does allow people to pool the existing money by buying multiples of the pet and selling them to accumulate wealth. Since gear can be bought with gold, this will give the players that are willing to spend real money an advantage over those that are not willing to or cannot afford to.
For what it is worth, obtaining BiS gear is no longer that difficult to do, thanks to Blizz allowing BoP gear obtained in raids to be traded among raid members for up to an hour after the end of the raid. Both my 'locks (undead and human) have four pieces of Tier 11 gear, thanks to heavy and frequent abuse of this benign rule change designed to reduce the number of in-game petitions to reassign BoP gear that was mis-assigned by the lootmaster. Thanks to this rule change, it is possible to offer a shit-ton of gold for that Tier item that somebody out-diced you for, and I've rarely had somebody refuse a high five-figure offer. When the phoenix dropped for our pug 25 man two years ago, I offered 100k gold to the roll winner, who didn't even hesitate. That is the rarest drop in the game, and this guy sold it for the equivalent of 5 Titansteel cool downs. Also, look up "gold DKP" raids on any wow forum to see how pugging end-content raids is an efficient and very cheap way to get BiS gear for even toons you only leveled to get their trade skills up.
So, yeah, having more gold helps on these gold DKP runs. But -- and this is where I think you are wrong about more gold conferring an advantage - you are ignoring the Tier sets. More gold does not confer an advantage to players because of the Tier sets. You can't buy Tier items with gold (gold DKP runs and the change to the BoP rules in raids being the exceptions, as I noted above, but which are pretty limited exceptions.) Last time I checked with elitistjerks, at least for my class ('lock) the Tier sets are still considered BiS for all our specs. You can buy some good gear for gold; outside of raid drops, you can't get a better trinket than the darkmoon card-based ones, or for clothies, the tailored pants and belt. But nothing you buy for gold confers anything beyond the base stats on the item. Tier gear, which are BoP, class specific, and can only be obtained in a raid, have cumulative bonuses on them which do confer a significant, non-trivial advantage in PvE.
The viewpoint is a part of gameplay. BTW, in this particular game the viewpoint isn't the only thing that's different from modern first person rpgs. Watch a video of the gameplay on youtube for example. It has a distinct feel of dungeon crawlers of the past while still being visually appealing to the audiences of today.
Absolutely. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the camera switches effortlessly between a first-person POV and an over-the-shoulder semi-omniscient view point when you are using the game's cover mechanic to stealth around enemies. It is not jarring or immersion breaking at all. Limited POV and having to confine a player to essentially a single path are constraints that any modern FPS should easily overcome. First Far Cry, and then Crysis set the bar pretty high; Deus Ex: HR clears it easily. I'm looking forward to Grimrock.
Or is your concern that its "within a browser", and thus inherently must be insecure?
In a nutshell, yes. One great way to take relatively small security concerns and greatly magnify them is to have a single application that tries to be everything and do everything for everyone. The browser is involved in too many different things as it is. As it becomes more and more central, it is also a more and more tempting target. A worst-case compromise now has fewer barriers in terms of the damage it can do.
If you are (implicitly, of course) saying that adding remote access to an already complex Web browser has absolutely no security implications whatsoever and no amount of caution could possibly be reasonable, well, I say that statement carries with it a burden of proof. Until you demonstrate otherwise, that positive claim is rightly considered false.
Those who disagree with you by default are merely being sensible.
Hmmm. Isn't "a single application that tries to be everything and do everything for everyone" a reasonable description of the OS? I'm not attempting a reductio ad absurdum, but it seems to me your (legitimate!) concerns over the security issues involved when you start adding functionality to software had to be solved for the OS, and those lessons can be applied to the browser.
This is just a reminder that like economics, scientific method is really a confidence game. Its all a matter of whether you believe the rules stated so far are consistent.
Hmmmm -- like you, I am a mathematician, not a physicist. But I'm also a philosopher, from the post-positivism school of anti-realism that Feynman and the other quantum theorists helped to create when they successfully reconciled the emerging quantum theory with special relativity. What is your consistency criterion? I'm a constructive empiricist -- empirical adequacy is what I demand from a theory.
As an example, let's stick with Feynman. Feynman was fond of magic tricks, and renormalization is a particularly egregious bit of magical mathematical trickery (Feynman called it "hocus pocus" and "a shell game") that he, Hans Bethe, and Freeman Dyson used to hide some troubling infinite integrals in perturbation theory that kept fucking with a Lorentz-invariant formulation of QED. Those infinities most assuredly are not observed in the universe, but they don't need to be. A theory need only be empirically adequate -- as long as the model can make testable predictions about observable phenomena, hang what the mathematics are saying about the currently non-observable part of reality. Would you have thrown QED out with the bathwater because of the shell game aspect of renormalization? You would have been very hard-pressed indeed to find a replacement that was as elegant, and as accurate (16 decimals!) at predicting observed values.
So, what does your consistency check say about QED? Is QED right or wrong? For a constructive empiricist, QED is neither right nor wrong -- it is just empirically adequate.
Riiiight. Might work in the east, where the masses have never had a computer in the first place, won't work in the west and here is why: Just last year one of the local vendors in my area sold "Windows netbooks for $100" with in tiny writing "Compact Edition" but hell, people don't know what that means. it looked like XP, that was all that they saw.
Within a few weeks the local CL was filled to the brim with folks practically GIVING the things away. Why was that? Was there something wrong with them? Nope I tried one for a few weeks before giving it away and it was just fine for basic net surfing but it wouldn't run Windows programs so everyone (including me) got rid of them.
The reason why MSFT rules the desktop is the same reason why MSFT has to royally bust their ass maintaining backwards compatibility and that is the millions of x86 apps written that folks use every day, from the software that came with their cameras and printers to the software they use at the office. it is ALL x86 and while Linux guys can scream "We got stuff just as good!" frankly that's bullshit. Where is the custom medical and shipping apps? software equal to Quicken/Quickbooks? it doesn't exist in Linux and it sure as hell doesn't exist in ARM Linux, which has even less apps than x86 Linux.
The reason Apple can get away with the numbers they do is because everyone considers their cell phones throw away items. folks use it until their contract is up and then get another one and they have been trained that their programs won't work because what worked with phone foo don't with phone bar. Hell everyone I know has drawers filled with the things as they don't know WTF to do with all their old phones. from what I've seen the masses treat the tablet as "a big cell phone" and therefor phone rules apply. but when you start talking netbooks and the like? those are "baby laptops" and they damned well WILL expect it to run everything their desktop runs, just slower because "its a baby". Believe me as a retailer I've seen it first hand.
I would mod your post insightful except for one thing -- you seem oblivious to the concept of emulation. Every thing you say could be true, if computers weren't Turing machines -- anything that can be implemented on one Turing machine can be implemented on another, and this includes the Turing machine itself. As processors and storage evolve, you can expect to see VM implementations for *any* hardware/software architecture you care to name transparently available for any platform. Right now, I run Windows-specific apps on my Solaris CDE desktop in a Windows XP VM that boots automagically when the app is launched. It is only a matter of (probably very little) time when you will be able to do this on your Android or IOS tablet. It just takes a little bit more CPU horsepower than is presently commercially available, and Moore's law isn't dead yet, not by a long shot.
No rights, no matter how precious, are without responsibilities. You can't hold up a white flag, then shoot soldiers as they lower their fire-arms. The more people we allow to abuse these rights, the sooner they will cease to exist.
We need to fight to protect Democracy. It might shock certain people, but fighting abuse is part of that fight. I leave it up to the smart people of Slashdot to propose ways of combating said abuse without eroding the rights of people who act in good faith.
As far as white flags go, Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Mushashi would beg to differ, as would Niccolo Machiavelli. The Geneva Conventions agree with you, of course, but a nation that adheres to the Geneva Conventions is not going to be a nation for long if its opponent in war isn't subject to the same crippling handicaps. War is the art of deception -- your analogy is competely misplaced in a debate on politics, which is the art of the possible. As far as these rights your are talking about go, they exist if and only if the people with more power than you allow you to have them. Read John Stuart Mill, especially On Liberty to get a feel for just how complex this issue really is. While the people on Slashdot are pretty damn enlightened, the problem of the balance between social responsibility and individual liberty is not going to be resolved by them or anyone else. You can't have both -- you can only agree to how much one may preempt the other.
It's just that when it comes to restricting free speech rights it seems like it's usually the Democrats who are doing it. (Before you bring up flag burning, skin on TV, etc note that those aren't actual speech - Republicans are objecting to the behaviors, Republicans aren't objecting to the use of words to communicate ideas the way Democrats do.)
Hardly. The Republicans are the ones who got seriously whiny about the equal time doctrine promulgated by the FCC, and cheered en mass when it was finally revoked under Reagan. It is the Republicans that are constantly trying to defund PBS. It is the Republicans that are trying to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. It is the Republicans that want to end net neutrality. Why are they doing this? Simple -- The Republicans are afraid to give the opposition equal time to rebut Republican lies and myths, because they know that an informed electorate would never let another Republican get near a public office.
At some point the warm light of day will shine on your sheltered, precious little snow flake and melt him in a matter of seconds. Get the fuck over it people. Kids commit suicide. It's not new. The only thing different is Nancy Grace shows it to ya (oh and boy does she show it to you) every night and decry's how terrible it is and that your kid will be next.
One suicide is a tragedy, but everyone living in a rubber room singing Kum ba yah until we all kill ourselves is worse. Will these kids be able to go into a job interview and say "You have to hire me, or I will tell on you for excluding me!"? Stop preempting Darwin, people!
Darwinism can't be preempted -- but the various behaviors that emerge as the result of Darwinism can. Your understanding of Darwinism is a basic example of this.
This is not the use of force to prevent the unjust use of force, these fucktwits have corrupted Mills for their own big-government nanny-state ends. This is simply the outright abuse of force and twisting of the very concept of our rights recognized, not granted, by the government. I'm sorry. Words do not hurt. You can call me what you want -- it only affects me as much as I allow it.
You are so fucking wrong. Where to begin? John Stuart Mill would have blanched in dismay at this screed of yours, especially with the liberty you have taken with his words. Here's Mill's quote that you are totally corrupting. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if you got it right or wrong.
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Chap I, p. 14)
Not only did you completely miss the point of that quote, you ignored a far more salient quote from the same goddamn work by Mill (emphasis mine).
We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Ch. IV, p. 95
Indeed, your entire polemic seems to be founded on the very shaky ground that humans, absent laws or regulations, will always act rationally in every possible situation. Mills himself knew this wasn't the case, to wit:
All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Ch. I, p. 10
Dude, if you are going to cite one of the most rational thinkers of the Enlightenment to support your bullshit screed, you fucking A better take the time to really understand what he had to say. Otherwise, your words are just so much shit floating in a turd bowl full of it.
ALTHOUGH SPEECH IS GENERALLY PROTECTED UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT, THERE ARE INSTANCES IN WHICH RESTRICTIONS ARE WARRANTED.
HOLY SHIT, THEYRE CONSIDERING THE LAW AS IT'S WRITTEN AND APPLIED IN THE REAL WORLD
There is no "general protection" for speech in the first amendment, there is absolute protection:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
How are they considering the law as it is written?
The first amendment guarantees the right to say anything you want to say in whatever forum you choose. What it does not guarantee is freedom from the consequences of that speech. Nobody is going to defend a person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater with an appeal to the first amendment; ditto people who slander, libel, mislead, deceive, harrass, or intimidate other people with their speech. As my constitutional law professor suggested, think of the amendment as protecting a bucket, and think of speech as the contents being carried in the bucket. The bucket is sacrosanct -- you can put whatever you want in it, and it can be taken anywhere and dumped, but once the contents spill out, they no longer have the protection provided by the bucket. If you take a bucket full of lies and threats to a tea party rally, and spill it out there, where nobody has a problem with it, you are golden. But if you take the same bucket and spill it on the web, expect to be challenged in court.
Yes because it was the free market that took us to moon, created the Internet, nuclear power, the U.S interstate system, and the Hoover Dam.
No...you are almost totally wrong.
The fear of communism took America to the moon, created the interstate system and the Internet, and promoted the use of nuclear power. The free market was only a factor in that if the commies won, there would be no free market. The Apollo program was a calculated response to Soviet space capability. The internet highway system was known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and was the result of Eisenhower's direct experience with the impressive German autobahn system when the US invaded Germany in WWII, and his own terrible experiences as a junior transportation officer trying to get a convoy across the US. The US lacked a road infrastructure to support national defense, so when Eisenhower became president, he made one happen. The internet was conceived as a way to promote data sharing (and survivability via a distributed network in the case of a Soviet invasion) among US universities that were conducting research on nuclear weapons. It was called DARPA-Net (for "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for that reason up until the mid eighties, when it became just the "internet." Nuclear power was developed to propel warships, not light cities (that came much later, when some far-thinkers at Rand and Bechtel realized that God had buried our strategic petroleum reserves under the wrong nations.) And though it wasn't the Commies that drove the development of the Hoover Dam, the project included funding to replace an existing canal that was under Mexican control with a the aptly named "All American" canal.
Back then, we didn't molly-coddle everyone and give medals to everyone for participation. We rewarded only the winners, the brave, and left the rest in the dust.
Then liberals (note the lower case useage please) took over the schooling systems and have been doing their damnedest to make everything "fair", and as such, we have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue. It's not wonder we are where we are these days.
I see three possibilities here:
1) You had kids in the public education system. You failed as a parent to choose a good school district for them, and you further failed as a parent to teach them yourself and use the free public system as a adjunct only. If this is the case, please do not project your failure to educate your children onto everyone else. Parents have the primary responsibility for their childrens' educations. It was your fault, not the "system".
2) You worked in the public education system. In which case, you are blaming yourself for "coddling" and whatever else you feel has mediocritized the new generation. Strange. But again, please don't project your failure on others.
3) You have absolutely no real-world experience with the public education system, either as a parent or an educator, and you are simply parroting politically-biased crap that you heard on Fox News, read in USA Today, etc.
Which of these three describes you?
You are obviously an American, and like most Americans, think that the American way is the only way on the planet. There is a fourth option, one that would never occur to a provincial lout like you.
4) You raised your children in Europe, where people don't suffer from the delusion that parents are supposed to be the only ones raising their children.
Hmmmm...technological innovation (as encapsulated by many of the innovations you cite) is the direct result of the need to defend against the depredations of greedy neighbors (aviation, and electronics/computers/internet are especially good examples of this.) Also, there has to be a stable economy, and enough consumers with disposable income to purchase the technology that your innovation produces to motivate the creation of a civilian market for these technologies. With the decrease in armed conflict at the national level since world war II, and the squeezing of the middle class by the rise of corporate oligarchies in the US, I would predict that innovation is going to slow down, if not halt completely. There is a difference between innovating and refining. You seemed to be focussed on the former with the Ford quote. I think innovation is much more a function of conflict, so my counter quote comes from Plato -- Magister artis ingeniique largitor venter.
Yes, it's quite simple. Take existing models that work, copy those. Use science, not philosophy. Fashion, food, open source. Industries that are incredibly innovative and where ideas are properly treated as worthless. It's execution that counts, not ideas. Here's an idea: "send a man to the moon". Now execute that.
To suggest that innovation needs patents is like suggesting reproduction needs divorce lawyers.
...and to ignore reality, like you are doing, is not the solution. Profitability in a business (or marriage, which is essentially an ecclesiastically sanctioned civil contract, in most jurisdictions I'm aware of) is directly proportional to the number of competitors in that market. As long as people hold the irrational belief that the playing field must be level, profitability will be impaired. Domination of the market is what businesses aim for, and the rules and regulations that society generates, like patents (or marriage law) are the tools that businesses use to achieve that market domination.
Patents aren't evil. Only in a perfect utopian world could somebody develop an idea and not have to fear it being ripped off for the profit of others.
I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.
You make that sound like it is bad or something. I am not a patent lawyer, but the lead guitarist in my band is one, and he summed it up for me pretty succinctly. Business is about making a profit, and eliminating competition means huge profitability, period. Attempts to constrain businesses from eliminating competition are therefore, by definition, anti-business and need to be legislated out of existence. Fortunately, in America at least, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government are recognizing this simple truth, and are starting to undo a century and a half's worth of anti-business legislation that have impeded profitability.
Paragraph 2 says: "still allows for high visibility."
Paragraph 6 says: "The film blocks or absorbs about 80 percent of visible light"
I am not an engineer - but can you actually prevent 80 % of visible light from getting through and really claim there is "high visibility" ?
Indeed you can. In order to see clearly, humans need only a fraction of the visible light of a typical sunny day. During the day, your pupils are contracted, allowing relatively little of the available light to hit your retinas; you would be blinded by the glare if your pupils allowed all available light in. Blocking eighty percent of the light on a clear day at noon still leaves a lot of light, more than enough to see clearly with. Your pupils would simply dilate enough to compensate.
You're right, it's only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources. You know, real energy.
I never said it was "only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources".
You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.
Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.
Indeed. People want to *feel* like they are doing something positive, even if what they are doing has no demonstrable benefit. This gap between desire and and reality is one of the drivers of the luxury market, and it leaves room to profit for both business and government. Alternative energy sources should be marketed as a luxury for people with enough disposable income to indulge their desires on a regular basis. But then it should be *taxed* for the luxury it really is, and not subsidized. Subsidies for luxuries are simply stupid, as Solyndra proved in spectacular fashion.
I agree with you, and was going to make fun of this... But it still may be a useful technological improvement.. Unless they go all Solyndra on us, it will get cheaper over time. (OK, that's a bad joke, there may be technological advances in the Solyndra technology too... and I even cut out an editorial showing that the government has paid & lost FAR more money on other investments, including oil.)
Solyndra managed to extract half a billion dollars from the alternative energy bubble before dissolving. That is quite an accomplishment in this economic climate. Whether or not Solyndra had viable technology is beside the point. Solyndra is just more empirical confirmation of P. T. Barnum's commentary on the birth rate...
I don't know about your area, dude, but the the cable and telphone infrastructure (along with the roads, sewer, and airport facilities) in my location were bought and paid for by the tax payers via construction bonds and tax write-offs for the cable and telcos. They lease the lines from we the people. Those lines belong to the community; selling them off as scrap would be just as criminal as scrapping a fire station or police station and selling the bits to a junkyard.
Your naivete would be stunning if it wasn't so depressing.
You have a horrible misunderstanding of the public internet.
They participate with the public internet, and in exchange for that participation, they get to charge people to access it. Charging people for access is all they should be allowed to do. Instead, they want to throttle, re-route, re-direct, inspect, block and all manner of things which is contradiction to their participation in the public internet.
But let's look at it this way.
There is no public telephone system either. There is a public telephone network. How pissed would you be to find that when you want to call your bank or your grocery store that your call quality was intentionally decreased or that your calls were blocked or redirected to the competitors of the parties you wanted to call? It's all the same damned thing. How you fail to see it amazes me.
Dude, you have a horrible misunderstanding of reality. On a tiered internet, and none of the dire things you outline can ever happen. In fact, it becomes in the best interest of the service providers on a tiered internet to not let any of that happen. How you fail to see this is because you believe governments and corporations exist to benefit you, the citizen or consumer. I can assure you that you are living in cloud cuckoo land, if you are that ignorant of economic and political reality.
I'd just blame it on their pathological hate of any form of regulation. I'm sure a few of them would abolish the police and just give everyone guns for self-defence if they could.
please...would that it were so. An armed society is a *polite* society.
Slashdot Mirror
A living, breathing umpire makes all these subjective decisions on every pitch. There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.
I'm just quoting the meat of your argument for the sake of brevity. You don't need to trick an umpire to influence his interpretation of the strike zone. The pitcher apparently only needs to be a different race than the umpire.
Why stop with just robot umpires? Why not robot players? Robot bats? Robot fans?
Part of the allure of baseball for many fans is that it is a pure sport that hasn't dramatically changed for over 100 years (certainly there have been advances in player training, in the ball, and in bat design, but those are fairly minor compared to the changes in many other sports). While a robot umpire would perhaps be more "accurate," it wouldn't make baseball a better game because it would be fundamentally making it a different game.
The "purity" of baseball is a myth. Take off the rose-colored glasses and wake up and smell the game-throwing, steroid abusing, racially-biased, and ethically bankrupt reality that is MLB. To cite this fantasy purity as justification for not bringing in a machine that actually *is* pure in the sense you are using the word is fucking ludicrous.
I make a good bit of coin betting on pro sports, and participating in fantasy sports leagues. Removing the refs from pro baseball would blow an effective statistical model I've been using for nearly a decade. I've been pretty successful at predicting per game performances for pitchers (especially strike counts) in MLB by correlating the races of the homeplate umpire and the pitcher in question, and if the umpires are replaced by non-racially biased computers, I lose that edge. Unfortunately, somebody has twigged to my model. If this study gets picked up by the press, it might be enough to overcome some of the doubts about robot refs in pro sports, and pave the way for automated officiating.
It still gives an advantage to those that are willing to pay real money for game money. No new gold is created, but it does allow people to pool the existing money by buying multiples of the pet and selling them to accumulate wealth. Since gear can be bought with gold, this will give the players that are willing to spend real money an advantage over those that are not willing to or cannot afford to.
For what it is worth, obtaining BiS gear is no longer that difficult to do, thanks to Blizz allowing BoP gear obtained in raids to be traded among raid members for up to an hour after the end of the raid. Both my 'locks (undead and human) have four pieces of Tier 11 gear, thanks to heavy and frequent abuse of this benign rule change designed to reduce the number of in-game petitions to reassign BoP gear that was mis-assigned by the lootmaster. Thanks to this rule change, it is possible to offer a shit-ton of gold for that Tier item that somebody out-diced you for, and I've rarely had somebody refuse a high five-figure offer. When the phoenix dropped for our pug 25 man two years ago, I offered 100k gold to the roll winner, who didn't even hesitate. That is the rarest drop in the game, and this guy sold it for the equivalent of 5 Titansteel cool downs. Also, look up "gold DKP" raids on any wow forum to see how pugging end-content raids is an efficient and very cheap way to get BiS gear for even toons you only leveled to get their trade skills up.
So, yeah, having more gold helps on these gold DKP runs. But -- and this is where I think you are wrong about more gold conferring an advantage - you are ignoring the Tier sets. More gold does not confer an advantage to players because of the Tier sets. You can't buy Tier items with gold (gold DKP runs and the change to the BoP rules in raids being the exceptions, as I noted above, but which are pretty limited exceptions.) Last time I checked with elitistjerks, at least for my class ('lock) the Tier sets are still considered BiS for all our specs. You can buy some good gear for gold; outside of raid drops, you can't get a better trinket than the darkmoon card-based ones, or for clothies, the tailored pants and belt. But nothing you buy for gold confers anything beyond the base stats on the item. Tier gear, which are BoP, class specific, and can only be obtained in a raid, have cumulative bonuses on them which do confer a significant, non-trivial advantage in PvE.
The viewpoint is a part of gameplay. BTW, in this particular game the viewpoint isn't the only thing that's different from modern first person rpgs. Watch a video of the gameplay on youtube for example. It has a distinct feel of dungeon crawlers of the past while still being visually appealing to the audiences of today.
Absolutely. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the camera switches effortlessly between a first-person POV and an over-the-shoulder semi-omniscient view point when you are using the game's cover mechanic to stealth around enemies. It is not jarring or immersion breaking at all. Limited POV and having to confine a player to essentially a single path are constraints that any modern FPS should easily overcome. First Far Cry, and then Crysis set the bar pretty high; Deus Ex: HR clears it easily. I'm looking forward to Grimrock.
In a nutshell, yes. One great way to take relatively small security concerns and greatly magnify them is to have a single application that tries to be everything and do everything for everyone. The browser is involved in too many different things as it is. As it becomes more and more central, it is also a more and more tempting target. A worst-case compromise now has fewer barriers in terms of the damage it can do.
If you are (implicitly, of course) saying that adding remote access to an already complex Web browser has absolutely no security implications whatsoever and no amount of caution could possibly be reasonable, well, I say that statement carries with it a burden of proof. Until you demonstrate otherwise, that positive claim is rightly considered false.
Those who disagree with you by default are merely being sensible.
Hmmm. Isn't "a single application that tries to be everything and do everything for everyone" a reasonable description of the OS? I'm not attempting a reductio ad absurdum, but it seems to me your (legitimate!) concerns over the security issues involved when you start adding functionality to software had to be solved for the OS, and those lessons can be applied to the browser.
Fuck man, now i'm not going to do a damn THING tonight thanks to TVTropes.
Enjoy! TVtropes + Netflix helped me break my WoW addiction. My guild misses their destro 'lock, and they are going to keep missing him...
This is just a reminder that like economics, scientific method is really a confidence game. Its all a matter of whether you believe the rules stated so far are consistent.
Hmmmm -- like you, I am a mathematician, not a physicist. But I'm also a philosopher, from the post-positivism school of anti-realism that Feynman and the other quantum theorists helped to create when they successfully reconciled the emerging quantum theory with special relativity. What is your consistency criterion? I'm a constructive empiricist -- empirical adequacy is what I demand from a theory.
As an example, let's stick with Feynman. Feynman was fond of magic tricks, and renormalization is a particularly egregious bit of magical mathematical trickery (Feynman called it "hocus pocus" and "a shell game") that he, Hans Bethe, and Freeman Dyson used to hide some troubling infinite integrals in perturbation theory that kept fucking with a Lorentz-invariant formulation of QED. Those infinities most assuredly are not observed in the universe, but they don't need to be. A theory need only be empirically adequate -- as long as the model can make testable predictions about observable phenomena, hang what the mathematics are saying about the currently non-observable part of reality. Would you have thrown QED out with the bathwater because of the shell game aspect of renormalization? You would have been very hard-pressed indeed to find a replacement that was as elegant, and as accurate (16 decimals!) at predicting observed values.
So, what does your consistency check say about QED? Is QED right or wrong? For a constructive empiricist, QED is neither right nor wrong -- it is just empirically adequate.
Riiiight. Might work in the east, where the masses have never had a computer in the first place, won't work in the west and here is why: Just last year one of the local vendors in my area sold "Windows netbooks for $100" with in tiny writing "Compact Edition" but hell, people don't know what that means. it looked like XP, that was all that they saw.
Within a few weeks the local CL was filled to the brim with folks practically GIVING the things away. Why was that? Was there something wrong with them? Nope I tried one for a few weeks before giving it away and it was just fine for basic net surfing but it wouldn't run Windows programs so everyone (including me) got rid of them.
The reason why MSFT rules the desktop is the same reason why MSFT has to royally bust their ass maintaining backwards compatibility and that is the millions of x86 apps written that folks use every day, from the software that came with their cameras and printers to the software they use at the office. it is ALL x86 and while Linux guys can scream "We got stuff just as good!" frankly that's bullshit. Where is the custom medical and shipping apps? software equal to Quicken/Quickbooks? it doesn't exist in Linux and it sure as hell doesn't exist in ARM Linux, which has even less apps than x86 Linux.
The reason Apple can get away with the numbers they do is because everyone considers their cell phones throw away items. folks use it until their contract is up and then get another one and they have been trained that their programs won't work because what worked with phone foo don't with phone bar. Hell everyone I know has drawers filled with the things as they don't know WTF to do with all their old phones. from what I've seen the masses treat the tablet as "a big cell phone" and therefor phone rules apply. but when you start talking netbooks and the like? those are "baby laptops" and they damned well WILL expect it to run everything their desktop runs, just slower because "its a baby". Believe me as a retailer I've seen it first hand.
I would mod your post insightful except for one thing -- you seem oblivious to the concept of emulation. Every thing you say could be true, if computers weren't Turing machines -- anything that can be implemented on one Turing machine can be implemented on another, and this includes the Turing machine itself. As processors and storage evolve, you can expect to see VM implementations for *any* hardware/software architecture you care to name transparently available for any platform. Right now, I run Windows-specific apps on my Solaris CDE desktop in a Windows XP VM that boots automagically when the app is launched. It is only a matter of (probably very little) time when you will be able to do this on your Android or IOS tablet. It just takes a little bit more CPU horsepower than is presently commercially available, and Moore's law isn't dead yet, not by a long shot.
No rights, no matter how precious, are without responsibilities. You can't hold up a white flag, then shoot soldiers as they lower their fire-arms. The more people we allow to abuse these rights, the sooner they will cease to exist.
We need to fight to protect Democracy. It might shock certain people, but fighting abuse is part of that fight. I leave it up to the smart people of Slashdot to propose ways of combating said abuse without eroding the rights of people who act in good faith.
As far as white flags go, Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Mushashi would beg to differ, as would Niccolo Machiavelli. The Geneva Conventions agree with you, of course, but a nation that adheres to the Geneva Conventions is not going to be a nation for long if its opponent in war isn't subject to the same crippling handicaps. War is the art of deception -- your analogy is competely misplaced in a debate on politics, which is the art of the possible. As far as these rights your are talking about go, they exist if and only if the people with more power than you allow you to have them. Read John Stuart Mill, especially On Liberty to get a feel for just how complex this issue really is. While the people on Slashdot are pretty damn enlightened, the problem of the balance between social responsibility and individual liberty is not going to be resolved by them or anyone else. You can't have both -- you can only agree to how much one may preempt the other.
It's just that when it comes to restricting free speech rights it seems like it's usually the Democrats who are doing it. (Before you bring up flag burning, skin on TV, etc note that those aren't actual speech - Republicans are objecting to the behaviors, Republicans aren't objecting to the use of words to communicate ideas the way Democrats do.)
Hardly. The Republicans are the ones who got seriously whiny about the equal time doctrine promulgated by the FCC, and cheered en mass when it was finally revoked under Reagan. It is the Republicans that are constantly trying to defund PBS. It is the Republicans that are trying to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. It is the Republicans that want to end net neutrality. Why are they doing this? Simple -- The Republicans are afraid to give the opposition equal time to rebut Republican lies and myths, because they know that an informed electorate would never let another Republican get near a public office.
At some point the warm light of day will shine on your sheltered, precious little snow flake and melt him in a matter of seconds. Get the fuck over it people. Kids commit suicide. It's not new. The only thing different is Nancy Grace shows it to ya (oh and boy does she show it to you) every night and decry's how terrible it is and that your kid will be next.
One suicide is a tragedy, but everyone living in a rubber room singing Kum ba yah until we all kill ourselves is worse. Will these kids be able to go into a job interview and say "You have to hire me, or I will tell on you for excluding me!"? Stop preempting Darwin, people!
Darwinism can't be preempted -- but the various behaviors that emerge as the result of Darwinism can. Your understanding of Darwinism is a basic example of this.
This is not the use of force to prevent the unjust use of force, these fucktwits have corrupted Mills for their own big-government nanny-state ends. This is simply the outright abuse of force and twisting of the very concept of our rights recognized, not granted, by the government. I'm sorry. Words do not hurt. You can call me what you want -- it only affects me as much as I allow it.
You are so fucking wrong. Where to begin? John Stuart Mill would have blanched in dismay at this screed of yours, especially with the liberty you have taken with his words. Here's Mill's quote that you are totally corrupting. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if you got it right or wrong.
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Chap I, p. 14)
Not only did you completely miss the point of that quote, you ignored a far more salient quote from the same goddamn work by Mill (emphasis mine).
We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Ch. IV, p. 95
Indeed, your entire polemic seems to be founded on the very shaky ground that humans, absent laws or regulations, will always act rationally in every possible situation. Mills himself knew this wasn't the case, to wit:
All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty Ch. I, p. 10
Dude, if you are going to cite one of the most rational thinkers of the Enlightenment to support your bullshit screed, you fucking A better take the time to really understand what he had to say. Otherwise, your words are just so much shit floating in a turd bowl full of it.
ALTHOUGH SPEECH IS GENERALLY PROTECTED UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT, THERE ARE INSTANCES IN WHICH RESTRICTIONS ARE WARRANTED.
HOLY SHIT, THEYRE CONSIDERING THE LAW AS IT'S WRITTEN AND APPLIED IN THE REAL WORLD
There is no "general protection" for speech in the first amendment, there is absolute protection:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
How are they considering the law as it is written?
The first amendment guarantees the right to say anything you want to say in whatever forum you choose. What it does not guarantee is freedom from the consequences of that speech. Nobody is going to defend a person who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater with an appeal to the first amendment; ditto people who slander, libel, mislead, deceive, harrass, or intimidate other people with their speech. As my constitutional law professor suggested, think of the amendment as protecting a bucket, and think of speech as the contents being carried in the bucket. The bucket is sacrosanct -- you can put whatever you want in it, and it can be taken anywhere and dumped, but once the contents spill out, they no longer have the protection provided by the bucket. If you take a bucket full of lies and threats to a tea party rally, and spill it out there, where nobody has a problem with it, you are golden. But if you take the same bucket and spill it on the web, expect to be challenged in court.
Yes because it was the free market that took us to moon, created the Internet, nuclear power, the U.S interstate system, and the Hoover Dam.
No...you are almost totally wrong.
The fear of communism took America to the moon, created the interstate system and the Internet, and promoted the use of nuclear power. The free market was only a factor in that if the commies won, there would be no free market. The Apollo program was a calculated response to Soviet space capability. The internet highway system was known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and was the result of Eisenhower's direct experience with the impressive German autobahn system when the US invaded Germany in WWII, and his own terrible experiences as a junior transportation officer trying to get a convoy across the US. The US lacked a road infrastructure to support national defense, so when Eisenhower became president, he made one happen. The internet was conceived as a way to promote data sharing (and survivability via a distributed network in the case of a Soviet invasion) among US universities that were conducting research on nuclear weapons. It was called DARPA-Net (for "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) for that reason up until the mid eighties, when it became just the "internet." Nuclear power was developed to propel warships, not light cities (that came much later, when some far-thinkers at Rand and Bechtel realized that God had buried our strategic petroleum reserves under the wrong nations.) And though it wasn't the Commies that drove the development of the Hoover Dam, the project included funding to replace an existing canal that was under Mexican control with a the aptly named "All American" canal.
Back then, we didn't molly-coddle everyone and give medals to everyone for participation. We rewarded only the winners, the brave, and left the rest in the dust.
Then liberals (note the lower case useage please) took over the schooling systems and have been doing their damnedest to make everything "fair", and as such, we have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue. It's not wonder we are where we are these days.
I see three possibilities here:
1) You had kids in the public education system. You failed as a parent to choose a good school district for them, and you further failed as a parent to teach them yourself and use the free public system as a adjunct only. If this is the case, please do not project your failure to educate your children onto everyone else. Parents have the primary responsibility for their childrens' educations. It was your fault, not the "system".
2) You worked in the public education system. In which case, you are blaming yourself for "coddling" and whatever else you feel has mediocritized the new generation. Strange. But again, please don't project your failure on others.
3) You have absolutely no real-world experience with the public education system, either as a parent or an educator, and you are simply parroting politically-biased crap that you heard on Fox News, read in USA Today, etc.
Which of these three describes you?
You are obviously an American, and like most Americans, think that the American way is the only way on the planet. There is a fourth option, one that would never occur to a provincial lout like you.
4) You raised your children in Europe, where people don't suffer from the delusion that parents are supposed to be the only ones raising their children.
Hmmmm...technological innovation (as encapsulated by many of the innovations you cite) is the direct result of the need to defend against the depredations of greedy neighbors (aviation, and electronics/computers/internet are especially good examples of this.) Also, there has to be a stable economy, and enough consumers with disposable income to purchase the technology that your innovation produces to motivate the creation of a civilian market for these technologies. With the decrease in armed conflict at the national level since world war II, and the squeezing of the middle class by the rise of corporate oligarchies in the US, I would predict that innovation is going to slow down, if not halt completely. There is a difference between innovating and refining. You seemed to be focussed on the former with the Ford quote. I think innovation is much more a function of conflict, so my counter quote comes from Plato -- Magister artis ingeniique largitor venter.
Yes, it's quite simple. Take existing models that work, copy those. Use science, not philosophy. Fashion, food, open source. Industries that are incredibly innovative and where ideas are properly treated as worthless. It's execution that counts, not ideas. Here's an idea: "send a man to the moon". Now execute that.
To suggest that innovation needs patents is like suggesting reproduction needs divorce lawyers.
...and to ignore reality, like you are doing, is not the solution. Profitability in a business (or marriage, which is essentially an ecclesiastically sanctioned civil contract, in most jurisdictions I'm aware of) is directly proportional to the number of competitors in that market. As long as people hold the irrational belief that the playing field must be level, profitability will be impaired. Domination of the market is what businesses aim for, and the rules and regulations that society generates, like patents (or marriage law) are the tools that businesses use to achieve that market domination.
Patents aren't evil. Only in a perfect utopian world could somebody develop an idea and not have to fear it being ripped off for the profit of others.
I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.
You make that sound like it is bad or something. I am not a patent lawyer, but the lead guitarist in my band is one, and he summed it up for me pretty succinctly. Business is about making a profit, and eliminating competition means huge profitability, period. Attempts to constrain businesses from eliminating competition are therefore, by definition, anti-business and need to be legislated out of existence. Fortunately, in America at least, the legislative and the judicial branches of the government are recognizing this simple truth, and are starting to undo a century and a half's worth of anti-business legislation that have impeded profitability.
Paragraph 2 says: "still allows for high visibility."
Paragraph 6 says: "The film blocks or absorbs about 80 percent of visible light"
I am not an engineer - but can you actually prevent 80 % of visible light from getting through and really claim there is "high visibility" ?
Indeed you can. In order to see clearly, humans need only a fraction of the visible light of a typical sunny day. During the day, your pupils are contracted, allowing relatively little of the available light to hit your retinas; you would be blinded by the glare if your pupils allowed all available light in. Blocking eighty percent of the light on a clear day at noon still leaves a lot of light, more than enough to see clearly with. Your pupils would simply dilate enough to compensate.
You're right, it's only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources. You know, real energy.
I never said it was "only fair to subsidize energy from fossil fuel sources".
You're right though, fossil fuels (for example) are an actual energy source when compared to typical current photovoltaic solar panels which use more energy to produce than they'll generate over their lifetime (and that's before the conversion losses). The typical solar panel you see on a rooftop is really more a coal burning panel.
Nothing against research into solar energy, just when you find people deploying with current technology onto their rooftops (or window panes) and announcing their "helping the environment" or that they have a "carbon neutral" energy source or that what they're doing makes economic sense is laughable.
Indeed. People want to *feel* like they are doing something positive, even if what they are doing has no demonstrable benefit. This gap between desire and and reality is one of the drivers of the luxury market, and it leaves room to profit for both business and government. Alternative energy sources should be marketed as a luxury for people with enough disposable income to indulge their desires on a regular basis. But then it should be *taxed* for the luxury it really is, and not subsidized. Subsidies for luxuries are simply stupid, as Solyndra proved in spectacular fashion.
(BTW, I didn't RTFM yet, if at all.)
I agree with you, and was going to make fun of this... But it still may be a useful technological improvement.. Unless they go all Solyndra on us, it will get cheaper over time. (OK, that's a bad joke, there may be technological advances in the Solyndra technology too... and I even cut out an editorial showing that the government has paid & lost FAR more money on other investments, including oil.)
Solyndra managed to extract half a billion dollars from the alternative energy bubble before dissolving. That is quite an accomplishment in this economic climate. Whether or not Solyndra had viable technology is beside the point. Solyndra is just more empirical confirmation of P. T. Barnum's commentary on the birth rate...
I don't know about your area, dude, but the the cable and telphone infrastructure (along with the roads, sewer, and airport facilities) in my location were bought and paid for by the tax payers via construction bonds and tax write-offs for the cable and telcos. They lease the lines from we the people. Those lines belong to the community; selling them off as scrap would be just as criminal as scrapping a fire station or police station and selling the bits to a junkyard.
Your naivete would be stunning if it wasn't so depressing.
You have a horrible misunderstanding of the public internet.
They participate with the public internet, and in exchange for that participation, they get to charge people to access it. Charging people for access is all they should be allowed to do. Instead, they want to throttle, re-route, re-direct, inspect, block and all manner of things which is contradiction to their participation in the public internet.
But let's look at it this way.
There is no public telephone system either. There is a public telephone network. How pissed would you be to find that when you want to call your bank or your grocery store that your call quality was intentionally decreased or that your calls were blocked or redirected to the competitors of the parties you wanted to call? It's all the same damned thing. How you fail to see it amazes me.
Dude, you have a horrible misunderstanding of reality. On a tiered internet, and none of the dire things you outline can ever happen. In fact, it becomes in the best interest of the service providers on a tiered internet to not let any of that happen. How you fail to see this is because you believe governments and corporations exist to benefit you, the citizen or consumer. I can assure you that you are living in cloud cuckoo land, if you are that ignorant of economic and political reality.
I'd just blame it on their pathological hate of any form of regulation. I'm sure a few of them would abolish the police and just give everyone guns for self-defence if they could.
please...would that it were so. An armed society is a *polite* society.