If it's anything about life, it's going to be another one of those NASA bullshit PR announcements about how they've discovered something that may indicate the presence of or possibility of life. And, as always they'll conveniently forget to amend this with "...or it may mean fucking nothing."
Actually, the topic was about observations that imply the existence of a process that *could* be explained by the presence of liquid water (brine, actually) flowing across the surface of Mars. The existence or non-existence of life never came up in the press conference, though Dr. Pratt was at pains to point out that we now have more observational evidence that a key element of life as we know it is present on the surface of Mars. In science one can't confirm an hypothesis; one can only fail to refute it. Your crass "or it may mean fucking nothing" part is always implied, and doesn't really need to be asserted; scientists and other rational people know they live in a doubt-filled world. If this uncertainty bothers you, I suggest you stay away from science and stick to the comforting guarantees of religion, where you don't have to be troubled by rational processes like doubt...
It's not a tautology. It's just incredibly obvious that better-reviewed games would be downloaded more on BitTorrent.
[To be clear a tautology is something that is by definition true, like... "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
That's not a tautology. That's a mathematical consequence. Tautology is a repetition of meaning. "a and b are rational" has a different meaning than "ab is rational", even though one can be shown to always imply the second. Otherwise you could say that the entirety of provable mathematics is tautologous.
No. GP has it right, and you do not. Tautology is not about meaning, it is about truth. Bertrand Russell's quote from the Wiktionary entry is particularly apt, here. The proposition "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational" *is* tautological, because in the deductive modality, the conclusion is always implicit in the premise; there is no way to "deduce" a new truth via the deductive modality. One can only restate a truth that was already present in the premise, and that is what makes the deductive modality tautological. Think GIGO, replacing "garbage" with "truth". So, as you implied, the entirety of provable mathematics is definitely not tautologous. There indeed exists another modality that is not tautological. The other modality is inductive logic, which *can* produce new truths, rendering it non-tautological.
Just finished reading The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, a respected string theorist. He explicitly mentions mining the CMB data for exactly this kind of observation.
A lot more than air conditioning and heat-stroke deaths are at stake. Humans indeed existed without electrical power for a long time -- in isolated, agrarian communities, or indeed, as roving bands of hunter-gatherers. Once humanity started to build larger, more dense communities that all changed. Advances in power generation and storage energy density haven't quite kept up with population density, though, so that is where we need to be focusing our efforts. Standing there like you are and cursing the coming darkness is not the solution -- figuring out how to generate some candlepower without having to schlep the energy across a continent is a much better use of our mental resource.
Nah, this is politics. And politics has absolutely nothing to do with science.
If you think politics has absolutely nothing to do with science, think again. Good or bad, science has to be paid for in advance -- you have to fund it, or you don't get any kind of science at all. Everything that humans accomplish is accomplished via politics, including science funding. To quote Robert Heinlein, politics is only slightly less important than your own heartbeat. Refusing to play politics in the funding game just means you are playing the game badly. Consider America's much-vaunted space program: It took a serious game of political one-upmanship to kick start it and sustain it, and it lasted almost fifty years. Played correctly, I believe AGW can keep science funded for at least another half century.
So companies "employ" robots now? I hope they pay them a fair wage.
Don't be disingenuous. I'm "employing" rhetoric right now to disparage your incomplete understanding of the definition of "employ." And I'm not paying it a dime.
Because we only have a few hundred years of weather data.
I'm not a dendochronologist,paleoecolgoist, nor even a glaciologist, but I am certain we have more than a "few hundred years" worth of weather data. In fact, I would go so far as to say we have roughly 4.5B years worth of data...
Agreed. Nobody ever prayed their way to the surface of the moon. I'm baffled that the world is still dealing with this level of superstition. HELLO, PEOPLE? WE'VE BEEN SHOWING YOU SCIENCE FOR LIKE THREE HUNDRED YEARS NOW! GET WITH THE PROGRAM! Sheesh.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I think you are being a tad disingenuous. Indeed, as someone once pointed out, it's better to light a single candle than to stand there and curse the darkness, so 300 years of (relative) enlightenment is a *good* thing. However, I think you do grasp, unlike whoever originally made the candle remark, just how fucking many people there are that have a vested interest in maintaining the darkness for as long as they possibly can.
It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.
Indeed. Ours is not a zero sum world, though politicians (successful ones, anyway) often frame an economic issue as if it were a zero sum game. Taxpayer funded energy initiatives (including indirect funding via tax breaks) mean that every job created via those initiatives has a non-trivial cost associated with it.
Michael Lind sums it up in an article at salon. A relevant quote:
And if the green crony capitalists of the left succeed, working Americans will be forced permanently to pay artificially higher utility bills to subsidize politically-connected "venture capitalists" who will derive a permanent, rigged stream of income from zombie green corporations, whose uneconomical solar and wind energy will be purchased by utility companies under legal mandates written by green lobbyists.
One need look no further than the the ethanol subsidy program for an easy example from the alternative energy sector of the economy.
Scientific American is amongst the least accessible of this type imo.
Not sure what you mean by "accessible", because I find it very readable in every subject area -- physics, biology, geology, what have you -- even though I have little or no training in any of those beyond some basic high school or college classes. (my degree is in C.S.)
And I still find new ideas and concepts in there that just knock my socks off -- the small-molecule theory of the origin of life, for example. This even though I've been reading it and Science News for nearly 30 years now.
Until recently, perhaps the last two years or so, SciAm pretty much was the way you've characterized it -- readable and informative to anybody with a four-year degree in a scientific discipline and curiosity about accomplishments outside their discipline. But that is no longer the case. The articles changed in tone -- to me they are trying to adopt Wired's pop-geek approach, compromising the technical depth of the articles to increase their entertainment value. I dropped SciAm because I (usually) want to be informed more than I want to be entertained. When I do want to be entertained, Wired trumps SciAm hands down.
Being someone who lives on an entirely different continent, I don't really care about this whole affair, but I am nevertheless curious as to what's going to happen if this suit ends with concluding that the elections were stolen.
Maybe they will throw Bush into jail. So what? What's past is past, and having someone serve prison time won't help a bit. I mean, prison time is to punish someone for their deeds and hopefully teach them to not do it again. Bush won't do it again anyway, and punishing him could get a bit more creative.
Maybe they will throw some small fish into jail. Bah, nobody would care after a few months anyway.
So I wonder if there's indeed a goal for this trial. "Bringing the truth to the surface" is not really a goal, is a welcome addition to the goal itself. So... what's the goal?
There is more to a justice system than teaching somebody a lesson. This is a tort, ie, a civil case, not a criminal case. The punishment in tort cases will be lost money, and lost reputation for the losing party -- two things that will make people who still have both take notice, and hopefully deter that kind of behavior in the future.
Haven't citizens already passed judgment on a law in the very process of creating it? What is the point of having a duly elected legislature to conceive, debate, amend, and enact laws, if the laws can be nullified at their point of application by a jury, who was not elected but drawn randomly from the population? (Or not so randomly -- read up about voir dire.) It seems to me that fully informed juries would only weaken a democracy, not protect it from the excesses of tyrants.
Science is a collaborative effort. Nearly every advance the parent cited can be traced back to development work done by people who were not born in the US. Von Braun, Tsiolkovsky, and Fermi come to mind immediately, along with Einstein, Turing, Goedel, Bohr, Pauling, Dirac, Mendeleev, and Roentgen. National pride is fine, but it rings kinda hollow when one is aware of just how connected all scientific advancement is. The idea that all of those achievements are somehow the sole purview of the US is absurd.
Independent study has been around at least since the '60s, when I was in primary school. Khan Academy videos and the like supplement that experience, they don't change it. Unfortunately, independent study in primary/secondary education is not as widely available now as it was back then, probably because conservatives in the US don't want an educated electorate. They want an indoctrinated one, so they have been systematically reducing governmental support for higher education, where independent study is necessary, and legislatively dictating standards-based systems for primary and secondary education, which promote conformity over creativity.
I'm not saying what he's doing is bad or wrong. I'm just saying there is a difference between fighting for what you believe in and fighting against what other people believe in. I have issues with a lot of people who claim to be Jewish and people who claim to be Christian. But what they wear on their head isn't one of those issues. And I wouldn't have a problem with this guy wearing a spaghetti strainer on his head, except for the fact that the only reason he's doing it is to insult people who believe in things he doesn't believe in. I can understand him being upset if the person believes in something that hurts him. But what they wear on their head doesn't hurt him.
Time to torch this strawman. This guy is insulted by the exemptions granted to people who are peddling fairy tales to other people for profit. He is not fighting against belief in a given fairy tale, but against a legal system that grants exceptions based on that belief.
In my own country, there are two really big industries that peddle fairy tales to the public at large for profit. One of the industries pays taxes, and the other doesn't. This is an absurd situation, and this guy's protest simply underlines that absurdity.
Same here -- my $9.99/month plan just went to $15.98/month. I stream many, many titles every month, and my queue turns over at a steady rate of one DVD every two days. Even ignoring all the titles I stream, I'm still paying less than a dollar per movie. Factor in the streams, and I'm at pennies per show. I can't even get a basic cable package from Cox Cable for under $40/month, let alone any of the premium tiers. So fuck Cox and the rest of the cable content providers -- I think Netflix rocks. It will continue to be my vector for video entertainment into the foreseeable future.
And even more important, unlike StatCounter and other junk, they do show users with properly configured AdBlock.
Chrome's AdBlock is crippled, it allows you to remove only visual components but not tracking junk, that's why Chrome's stats seem better.
Hmmm. I imagine people savvy enough to use ABP also use Ghostery, so I am skeptical of that explanation. Not perfect with Chrome, by the author's admission, but I've been to very few pages where Ghostery doesn't work.
OK, I read the article and searched google. How is a city in Israel somehow part of the North Atlantic? I would be more interested in how the whale got that far into the Med without being spotted.
Obviously, you didn't use Google Maps.:) There are only two sea routes into the Med, the Straits of Gibraltar in the west and the Suez Canal in the east. Given the width and depth of the canal and the level of maritime traffic through the canal, it is unlikely the whale would have escaped notice if that is the way he arrived off the coast of Israel. That leaves the Straits of Gibraltar as it's point of entry to the Med, which means the whale probably came east through the Northwest Passage, then south through the North Atlantic, and east again through the Straights of Gibraltar to Israel. I doubt whales are high on NATO's threat list, so even if it was pinged by some sonars in the Atlantic or the Med during the trip, the operator(s) probably just logged it and shrugged it off, not realizing the significance.
Going to a CS department with the expectation of learning how to be a commercial code jockey is not an optimal strategy. Perhaps this is off-topic, but I'll try to keep it brief and focussed. One recent poster wanted to take a CS degree to become a better coder, but wanted to skip the gen ed requirements that four year degrees have, and this poster also suggests that taking CS courses will help him be a better coder. The thing is, CS is not about coding. It's about investigating the nature of computability and developing models and the mathematical tools capable of describing the models in rigorous ways so that they can be analyzed. You already have to be a good coder if you want to do CS, and if you aren't, you need to take programming courses which are usually found in engineering or MIS departments, not in CS departments.
Tweaking the supply of high-demand in-game items attacks gold farmers directly *and* adds another revenue stream to the game. Why shouldn't the owner of an MMO take steps to reduce the siphoning of profits from their IP by gold farmers and simultaneoulsy exploit it themselves as a revenue source? It will no doubt alter the game in unfavorable directions for some fraction of their subscribers, and some fraction of these subscribers will be lost, but I'm certain that the addictive nature of the game will limit those kinds of losses. End result is more revenue from their IP, and reduced dissipation of potential profit by gold farmers, at the cost of some fraction of their subscriber base.
CLEP (college level examination program) is what you are looking for. I CLEP'd my way out of nearly every general ed requirement at my alma mater (BS in CS from the University of Arizona, 1998.) Like you, I had an excellent high school preparatory experience that let me pass every English, math, social studies, chemistry, and physics CLEP test. The only thing I couldn't CLEP was a gender studies requirement, but that was only because there was no CLEP to cover it. The tests aren't cheap, but for less than the cost of resident tuition for one semester at the UofA, I CLEP'd out of three semester's worth of general education requirements, leaving me free to finish my 4 year degree in 5 semesters.
And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate?
If the entire work is cached locally, fast forward and rewind don't require a round trip to a server, and they don't require transcoding to create a new keyframe at the seek point. Nor will re-watching a video require sending it again.
...and with a local copy of the video, the data miners can't profile your watching habits. When you stream content, a profile of not only what you watch, but *how* you watch can be created and tagged to you. This kind of information is extremely valuable to marketing firms. You can be certain that Netflix, Hulu, Apple and everybody else that provides streaming content is happily selling it to anybody who wants it. You, in effect, are now the content being streamed to a new set of consumers, the marketing agencies.
Remember -- in an information economy, the distinction between content and consumer is arbitrary. If you want to minimize your value as content, you should support efforts that minimize the opportunity to capture information about you.
Great. My friends already get glassy-eyed with dismay and start eyeing the exits if I happen to mention WoW or Star Trek in the course of a conversation, and bolt for cover if both happen to come up in the same conversation. Now I can skip to the chase by just mentioning the latest episode of Defiance...
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't, who would want to play with tiny, hard plastic boobies.
Ahh, c'mon, silicone isn't all that hard...
If it's anything about life, it's going to be another one of those NASA bullshit PR announcements about how they've discovered something that may indicate the presence of or possibility of life. And, as always they'll conveniently forget to amend this with "...or it may mean fucking nothing."
Actually, the topic was about observations that imply the existence of a process that *could* be explained by the presence of liquid water (brine, actually) flowing across the surface of Mars. The existence or non-existence of life never came up in the press conference, though Dr. Pratt was at pains to point out that we now have more observational evidence that a key element of life as we know it is present on the surface of Mars. In science one can't confirm an hypothesis; one can only fail to refute it. Your crass "or it may mean fucking nothing" part is always implied, and doesn't really need to be asserted; scientists and other rational people know they live in a doubt-filled world. If this uncertainty bothers you, I suggest you stay away from science and stick to the comforting guarantees of religion, where you don't have to be troubled by rational processes like doubt...
It's not a tautology. It's just incredibly obvious that better-reviewed games would be downloaded more on BitTorrent.
[To be clear a tautology is something that is by definition true, like ... "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational".
That's not a tautology. That's a mathematical consequence. Tautology is a repetition of meaning. "a and b are rational" has a different meaning than "ab is rational", even though one can be shown to always imply the second. Otherwise you could say that the entirety of provable mathematics is tautologous.
No. GP has it right, and you do not. Tautology is not about meaning, it is about truth. Bertrand Russell's quote from the Wiktionary entry is particularly apt, here. The proposition "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational" *is* tautological, because in the deductive modality, the conclusion is always implicit in the premise; there is no way to "deduce" a new truth via the deductive modality. One can only restate a truth that was already present in the premise, and that is what makes the deductive modality tautological. Think GIGO, replacing "garbage" with "truth". So, as you implied, the entirety of provable mathematics is definitely not tautologous. There indeed exists another modality that is not tautological. The other modality is inductive logic, which *can* produce new truths, rendering it non-tautological.
Just finished reading The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, a respected string theorist. He explicitly mentions mining the CMB data for exactly this kind of observation.
A lot more than air conditioning and heat-stroke deaths are at stake. Humans indeed existed without electrical power for a long time -- in isolated, agrarian communities, or indeed, as roving bands of hunter-gatherers. Once humanity started to build larger, more dense communities that all changed. Advances in power generation and storage energy density haven't quite kept up with population density, though, so that is where we need to be focusing our efforts. Standing there like you are and cursing the coming darkness is not the solution -- figuring out how to generate some candlepower without having to schlep the energy across a continent is a much better use of our mental resource.
Nah, this is politics. And politics has absolutely nothing to do with science.
If you think politics has absolutely nothing to do with science, think again. Good or bad, science has to be paid for in advance -- you have to fund it, or you don't get any kind of science at all. Everything that humans accomplish is accomplished via politics, including science funding. To quote Robert Heinlein, politics is only slightly less important than your own heartbeat. Refusing to play politics in the funding game just means you are playing the game badly. Consider America's much-vaunted space program: It took a serious game of political one-upmanship to kick start it and sustain it, and it lasted almost fifty years. Played correctly, I believe AGW can keep science funded for at least another half century.
So companies "employ" robots now? I hope they pay them a fair wage.
Don't be disingenuous. I'm "employing" rhetoric right now to disparage your incomplete understanding of the definition of "employ." And I'm not paying it a dime.
Because we only have a few hundred years of weather data.
I'm not a dendochronologist, paleoecolgoist, nor even a glaciologist, but I am certain we have more than a "few hundred years" worth of weather data. In fact, I would go so far as to say we have roughly 4.5B years worth of data...
You can use science to find out stuff.
Agreed. Nobody ever prayed their way to the surface of the moon. I'm baffled that the world is still dealing with this level of superstition. HELLO, PEOPLE? WE'VE BEEN SHOWING YOU SCIENCE FOR LIKE THREE HUNDRED YEARS NOW! GET WITH THE PROGRAM! Sheesh.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but I think you are being a tad disingenuous. Indeed, as someone once pointed out, it's better to light a single candle than to stand there and curse the darkness, so 300 years of (relative) enlightenment is a *good* thing. However, I think you do grasp, unlike whoever originally made the candle remark, just how fucking many people there are that have a vested interest in maintaining the darkness for as long as they possibly can.
It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.
Indeed. Ours is not a zero sum world, though politicians (successful ones, anyway) often frame an economic issue as if it were a zero sum game. Taxpayer funded energy initiatives (including indirect funding via tax breaks) mean that every job created via those initiatives has a non-trivial cost associated with it. Michael Lind sums it up in an article at salon. A relevant quote:
And if the green crony capitalists of the left succeed, working Americans will be forced permanently to pay artificially higher utility bills to subsidize politically-connected "venture capitalists" who will derive a permanent, rigged stream of income from zombie green corporations, whose uneconomical solar and wind energy will be purchased by utility companies under legal mandates written by green lobbyists.
One need look no further than the the ethanol subsidy program for an easy example from the alternative energy sector of the economy.
Scientific American is amongst the least accessible of this type imo.
Not sure what you mean by "accessible", because I find it very readable in every subject area -- physics, biology, geology, what have you -- even though I have little or no training in any of those beyond some basic high school or college classes. (my degree is in C.S.)
And I still find new ideas and concepts in there that just knock my socks off -- the small-molecule theory of the origin of life, for example. This even though I've been reading it and Science News for nearly 30 years now.
Until recently, perhaps the last two years or so, SciAm pretty much was the way you've characterized it -- readable and informative to anybody with a four-year degree in a scientific discipline and curiosity about accomplishments outside their discipline. But that is no longer the case. The articles changed in tone -- to me they are trying to adopt Wired's pop-geek approach, compromising the technical depth of the articles to increase their entertainment value. I dropped SciAm because I (usually) want to be informed more than I want to be entertained. When I do want to be entertained, Wired trumps SciAm hands down.
Being someone who lives on an entirely different continent, I don't really care about this whole affair, but I am nevertheless curious as to what's going to happen if this suit ends with concluding that the elections were stolen. Maybe they will throw Bush into jail. So what? What's past is past, and having someone serve prison time won't help a bit. I mean, prison time is to punish someone for their deeds and hopefully teach them to not do it again. Bush won't do it again anyway, and punishing him could get a bit more creative. Maybe they will throw some small fish into jail. Bah, nobody would care after a few months anyway. So I wonder if there's indeed a goal for this trial. "Bringing the truth to the surface" is not really a goal, is a welcome addition to the goal itself. So... what's the goal?
There is more to a justice system than teaching somebody a lesson. This is a tort, ie, a civil case, not a criminal case. The punishment in tort cases will be lost money, and lost reputation for the losing party -- two things that will make people who still have both take notice, and hopefully deter that kind of behavior in the future.
Haven't citizens already passed judgment on a law in the very process of creating it? What is the point of having a duly elected legislature to conceive, debate, amend, and enact laws, if the laws can be nullified at their point of application by a jury, who was not elected but drawn randomly from the population? (Or not so randomly -- read up about voir dire.) It seems to me that fully informed juries would only weaken a democracy, not protect it from the excesses of tyrants.
Science is a collaborative effort. Nearly every advance the parent cited can be traced back to development work done by people who were not born in the US. Von Braun, Tsiolkovsky, and Fermi come to mind immediately, along with Einstein, Turing, Goedel, Bohr, Pauling, Dirac, Mendeleev, and Roentgen. National pride is fine, but it rings kinda hollow when one is aware of just how connected all scientific advancement is. The idea that all of those achievements are somehow the sole purview of the US is absurd.
Independent study has been around at least since the '60s, when I was in primary school. Khan Academy videos and the like supplement that experience, they don't change it. Unfortunately, independent study in primary/secondary education is not as widely available now as it was back then, probably because conservatives in the US don't want an educated electorate. They want an indoctrinated one, so they have been systematically reducing governmental support for higher education, where independent study is necessary, and legislatively dictating standards-based systems for primary and secondary education, which promote conformity over creativity.
I'm not saying what he's doing is bad or wrong. I'm just saying there is a difference between fighting for what you believe in and fighting against what other people believe in. I have issues with a lot of people who claim to be Jewish and people who claim to be Christian. But what they wear on their head isn't one of those issues. And I wouldn't have a problem with this guy wearing a spaghetti strainer on his head, except for the fact that the only reason he's doing it is to insult people who believe in things he doesn't believe in. I can understand him being upset if the person believes in something that hurts him. But what they wear on their head doesn't hurt him.
Time to torch this strawman. This guy is insulted by the exemptions granted to people who are peddling fairy tales to other people for profit. He is not fighting against belief in a given fairy tale, but against a legal system that grants exceptions based on that belief. In my own country, there are two really big industries that peddle fairy tales to the public at large for profit. One of the industries pays taxes, and the other doesn't. This is an absurd situation, and this guy's protest simply underlines that absurdity.
Same here -- my $9.99/month plan just went to $15.98/month. I stream many, many titles every month, and my queue turns over at a steady rate of one DVD every two days. Even ignoring all the titles I stream, I'm still paying less than a dollar per movie. Factor in the streams, and I'm at pennies per show. I can't even get a basic cable package from Cox Cable for under $40/month, let alone any of the premium tiers. So fuck Cox and the rest of the cable content providers -- I think Netflix rocks. It will continue to be my vector for video entertainment into the foreseeable future.
...is it safe?
And even more important, unlike StatCounter and other junk, they do show users with properly configured AdBlock.
Chrome's AdBlock is crippled, it allows you to remove only visual components but not tracking junk, that's why Chrome's stats seem better.
Hmmm. I imagine people savvy enough to use ABP also use Ghostery, so I am skeptical of that explanation. Not perfect with Chrome, by the author's admission, but I've been to very few pages where Ghostery doesn't work.
OK, I read the article and searched google. How is a city in Israel somehow part of the North Atlantic? I would be more interested in how the whale got that far into the Med without being spotted.
Obviously, you didn't use Google Maps. :) There are only two sea routes into the Med, the Straits of Gibraltar in the west and the Suez Canal in the east. Given the width and depth of the canal and the level of maritime traffic through the canal, it is unlikely the whale would have escaped notice if that is the way he arrived off the coast of Israel. That leaves the Straits of Gibraltar as it's point of entry to the Med, which means the whale probably came east through the Northwest Passage, then south through the North Atlantic, and east again through the Straights of Gibraltar to Israel. I doubt whales are high on NATO's threat list, so even if it was pinged by some sonars in the Atlantic or the Med during the trip, the operator(s) probably just logged it and shrugged it off, not realizing the significance.
Going to a CS department with the expectation of learning how to be a commercial code jockey is not an optimal strategy. Perhaps this is off-topic, but I'll try to keep it brief and focussed. One recent poster wanted to take a CS degree to become a better coder, but wanted to skip the gen ed requirements that four year degrees have, and this poster also suggests that taking CS courses will help him be a better coder. The thing is, CS is not about coding. It's about investigating the nature of computability and developing models and the mathematical tools capable of describing the models in rigorous ways so that they can be analyzed. You already have to be a good coder if you want to do CS, and if you aren't, you need to take programming courses which are usually found in engineering or MIS departments, not in CS departments.
Tweaking the supply of high-demand in-game items attacks gold farmers directly *and* adds another revenue stream to the game. Why shouldn't the owner of an MMO take steps to reduce the siphoning of profits from their IP by gold farmers and simultaneoulsy exploit it themselves as a revenue source? It will no doubt alter the game in unfavorable directions for some fraction of their subscribers, and some fraction of these subscribers will be lost, but I'm certain that the addictive nature of the game will limit those kinds of losses. End result is more revenue from their IP, and reduced dissipation of potential profit by gold farmers, at the cost of some fraction of their subscriber base.
CLEP (college level examination program) is what you are looking for. I CLEP'd my way out of nearly every general ed requirement at my alma mater (BS in CS from the University of Arizona, 1998.) Like you, I had an excellent high school preparatory experience that let me pass every English, math, social studies, chemistry, and physics CLEP test. The only thing I couldn't CLEP was a gender studies requirement, but that was only because there was no CLEP to cover it. The tests aren't cheap, but for less than the cost of resident tuition for one semester at the UofA, I CLEP'd out of three semester's worth of general education requirements, leaving me free to finish my 4 year degree in 5 semesters.
And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate?
If the entire work is cached locally, fast forward and rewind don't require a round trip to a server, and they don't require transcoding to create a new keyframe at the seek point. Nor will re-watching a video require sending it again.
...and with a local copy of the video, the data miners can't profile your watching habits. When you stream content, a profile of not only what you watch, but *how* you watch can be created and tagged to you. This kind of information is extremely valuable to marketing firms. You can be certain that Netflix, Hulu, Apple and everybody else that provides streaming content is happily selling it to anybody who wants it. You, in effect, are now the content being streamed to a new set of consumers, the marketing agencies. Remember -- in an information economy, the distinction between content and consumer is arbitrary. If you want to minimize your value as content, you should support efforts that minimize the opportunity to capture information about you.
Great. My friends already get glassy-eyed with dismay and start eyeing the exits if I happen to mention WoW or Star Trek in the course of a conversation, and bolt for cover if both happen to come up in the same conversation. Now I can skip to the chase by just mentioning the latest episode of Defiance...