What I think is really happening is that game devs are notoriously incapable of programming any challenging sort of AI for their games - resulting in people turning to multiplayer games for a challenge. Easier to give up than just convince the project leads to use a few less cpu cycles for eye candy and a few more cycles for better algorithms.
Of course there will always be demand for single player games because frankly the "lol lol lol I pwnz joo n00b!!11" gets old fast, as does the bunch of people incapable of actually completing a game and dropping out halfway through.
The hypocrisy in US in unbelievable. Violence and killing people is all okay in TV, but when it's teaching persons about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
You have to remember who originally founded the US in the first place - puritanical religious nutbags. Now you know why they were being persecuted in Europe...
But seriously, the US has always had this double standard. Most Americans would be outraged to see a bare-breasted girl on page 3 of the newspaper right before "borrowing" said newspaper for an extended trip to the bathroom. This is the country where your TV station will face huge fines and a public outcry for showing a nipple during a super-bowl, and yet is also the home of a thriving print, video and on-line porn industry.
It's my personal belief that kids should be taught this at home.
Public health and public safety have nothing to do with your personal belief. Which is why you will be vaccinated regardless. Newborns will be screened for metabolic disease regardless. You will be ticketed for speeding regardless. And your kids will receive certain information at school regardless.
Because while YOU may be a responsible parent, there is a significant number of IRRESPONSIBLE parents. The idea is that the government must ensure that this information is made available to everyone because kids contracting HIV, Hepatitis B/C or gonorrhea, for example, are a PUBLIC HEALTH risk.
Especially in a public health care setting, where it is the taxpayer who is/will be footing the bill for treatment.
The big gaming companies lost sight of what makes a good game a long, long time ago. Of course they would much rather turn out endless sequels of a "proven thing" for the console gamers - because console gamers, like Mac users, are dumb enough to put up with this crap without complaining. All the keys on a computer keyboard make their brains hurt. Much better to keep the options simple - follow the path. Press the magic button combination at the right time. If you think about it, most console games could really play themselves. You'll never see something like Europa Universalis III on a console. Too complicated!
Yes far easier writing drivel like this than doing something called "innovation". Nope - when something completely new comes along they just buy it and then milk it for a decade.
I've mentioned this before - but frankly with one billion users and relatively easy entry into the PC game development market (all you need is a PC, a compiler, a free OpenGL/Ogre/Quake graphics engine and a brain), the PC is where you will ALWAYS find the innovation first simply because there are more creative brains capable of coding for it.
You forgot a very important group (the one I happen to be in):
The group that installs a pirated copy to try out the game, and either deletes it or buys it depending on this evaluation. Somehow every time I DON'T do this, I end up getting burned with shitty, buggy software (aka Empire:Total War, Hearts of Iron 3, etc).
But remember, the bigger you are, the harder the fall. How would the average Chinese peasant's life change in some form of global economic collapse? He would be on the verge of starvation. But then again, he's on the verge of starvation today anyway. Now how is your average US suburbanite going to take starvation...?
Obviously they have no idea of what their target market is. Anyone interested in endangered species is probably nerdy and thus has no use for a condom - they get in the way of masturbation.
Perhaps "pro football" or "pro wrestling" or "NASCAR" condoms would sell better...
Agreed. Like everything else there is a normal/bell/Gauss curve. Some very few of us excel. Some very few of us really shouldn't be there. But most of us are hopefully somewhere in the middle. I myself can only comment on what is/should be considered "normal", and I consider myself to be somewhere in the middle. But we're none of us perfect.
EXCEPT in the case of STI's, where the social implications of having an asymptomatic carrier spreading disease around the population far outweighs the standard procedure for treating, for instance, community acquired pneumonia. In the case of STI's you give the RIGHT antibiotic the first time (which is why it's useful to carry one of these in your pocket).
Reminds me of all those emails I get from the head of the International Bank of Nigeria who somehow has to use hotmail/gmail/yahoo mail. Or how the "British National Lottery" also can't afford it's own mail server.
Seriously, "journalists" can't use anything but yahoo? Or even if they were limited to yahoo - they can't encrypt their email?
I suspect these "journalists" are just some "random group of people" and that the story is just more hype.
Frankly, I don't think most doctors know what they are doing when it comes to dealing with this cruft. They are the reason why we are getting these "super bugs". It's a matter of "try a little of this, and if that doesn't work, try a little of that".
Frankly as a doctor I can say you have no idea about the subject which you are attempting to speak. It saddens me to learn that in your ignorance you choose to blame the people who actually have researched and understand infectious disease and antibiotic resistance, when you have absolutely no idea even of how your own body works. You know. The one you've been living in all your life?
Suggesting that any physician was "experimenting" with you is preposterous. Such a thing is both immoral AND illegal. We follow treatment guidelines that result from numerous published scientific studies that show that one drug is statistically superior to another. No one just picks a drug "at random" to treat you. Statistical superiority does not guarantee that the drug will work in your particular case - that's not what statistics do, however it is logically your "best chance" at a first time cure. The fact that your disease was resistant to the new drug only goes to show the severity of this problem.
Also understand that there is nothing "magical" about penicillin. Different categories of antibiotics work in different ways. Penicillin affects the ability for bacteria to grow their cell walls. Other drugs (cipro for example) inhibit bacteria's ability to copy their DNA. Still others (macrolides like Azithromycin) inhibit protein synthesis at the ribosome level. Some of these drugs never work on some type of bacteria. All of these drugs can be rendered useless by some bacteria - and what's worse, these resistance genes can be passed across species of bacteria through plasmids.
As to your philosophy regarding infections - perhaps keeping your penis in your pants and avoiding them would be wiser. Getting one STI is bad enough. Getting THREE means you were either paying for unprotected sex with prostitutes or are simply sleeping with everything in sight. I hope you have been checked recently for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis B and C and HPV, because most sexually transmitted infections come in groups - the person(s) who gave you gonorrhea probably gave you quite a few other things too. It also pains me to think how many other people you might have harmed or might harm in the future in your ignorance.
Please educate yourself. And please masturbate from now on, you'll be doing the world a favor.
I am very much a scientist. I have a wall full of degrees. I am also a critical thinker. And frankly your opinion is worth zero to me. The fact that you try to insult me without even knowing me only makes me laugh harder. High school chemistry indeed.
Goes to show exactly why climate change nut-jobs are DANGEROUS PEOPLE. But the history of the world is full of examples of killing people for lies. Climate change is a good substitute for (insert diety of choice), or even a political credo (Communism/Maoism/(proving Godwin's law)National Socialism). Hey let's suspend freedom to "save the environment".
The real problem behind all of this is, of course, overpopulation. I propose that instead of eliminating democracy we should just eliminate around 80% of the population. I can provide a list of volunteers for extermination (starting with Mr. Lovelock), and I ask others to do likewise. I, of course, choose not to be on any list.
designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities
This is a classic case of correlation not equal to causation. While it is very true that accidents at high speeds are likely to cause fatal rather than non fatal injuries, and it is also true that the greater the number of people driving at high speeds - non-perfect humans being what they are, the greater the number of fatal accidents are to be expected.
However from an engineering point of view it will be interesting to see if designing a road ONLY to force people to drive less quickly actually reduces the number of accidents. Of course roads could be designed like a brick wall, which will discourage people from driving AT ALL, thus eliminating all automobile accidents. At some point the engineering gets in the way of what a road is actually supposed to do, if you follow me.
This is typical bureaucratic thinking. Instead of focusing perhaps on increased driver education, increased safety mechanisms, or alternative mechanisms that prevent accidents entirely, the bureaucrat wants to design a 5 million dollar per mile of construction high speed highway with a maximum speed limit of 5mph.
Not without violating international law, which prevents territorial claims on the moon.
Sorry, but international law is only valid on or around planet Earth. You are welcome to cite examples where international law has been applied and/or enforced outside of L1.
hint: it's not the current rate, it's the rate of change which is important.
hint, it's not the rate of change that's important, it's the trend. The "average rate of change" is just an average. Some years it could go the other direction, and the average "rate of change" over a 10 year period would just diminish slightly. A one year (or even 100 year) rate of change means NOTHING on a geological time scale. Hardly anything in nature moves in a straight line or a nice bezier curve.
Seitz says adding bubbles to a 1-square-kilometer patch of ocean is feasible, but scaling it up may be technically difficult.
No shit, Sherlock. I'm glad he goes to Harvard!
When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C.
Well I'll be damned. It's too bad he failed to mention how many millions of square miles that need to be filled with bubbles to achieve this (hint: it's more than 1-square-kilometer), and of course like all good theoreticians there is no mention of the energy required to create this amount of bubbles 12 hours per day, what power source will be used, and of course how much equipment and manpower required and what THAT would cost.
I have my own hypothesis: Climate Science research leads to severe degeneration of higher brain functions.
If sea level rises and begins wiping out portions of Manhattan, are you going to tell New Yorkers that they shouldn't worry about it because it's normal?
Venice is still a functional city...
Manhattan is currently 10 meters above sea level. At a rate of 0.2 cm per year, Manhattan might start having trouble IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. Frankly I have serious doubts that New York city will even exist in 100 years as it is today, let alone 500 years. Why? Because far more trouble is/will be caused by overpopulation than rising sea levels. Resources that are already scarce today are going to be unavailable if current population growth rates are sustained. So a crash in population when these resources run out (per capita, the resources aren't actually being "destroyed", only shared among an ever greater number of people) is inevitable. How this crash will happen is anyone's guess: disease, war, economic collapse.
Really it's a self correcting problem. When we're all dead, there will be no more pollution. Global warming, on the other hand, will continue, until the natural cycle reverses and the Earth cools into another ice age in a few million years...
If you assume a 1% grade (probably less in lowland areas like Florida), a foot of sea level rise means the coast recedes by 100 feet.
Funny my grandfather bought a condo on the beach in Boca Raton, Florida in 1970, and the ocean is still pretty much where it used to be when I went there earlier this year. Let's see now, 30 years at.12 inches per year + 10 years at 0.2 inches per year = 5.6 inches, almost half a foot. So what, the apartment building should now be about 10 feet offshore you say? Funny I don't remember wearing my waders.
Just like inflation and unemployment numbers, "observation does not match the reported figures".
That's ten meters every two thousand years. Or rather as much rise in sea level in the next two thousand years as we've seen in the last eight thousand years.
Or it could be that an "average" is merely a "central tendency" of data, however the data itself is not constant and varies year to year - as clearly shown in the graph. Even 1000 year's worth of recent data is not enough to "predict" anything more than a general trend - increasing vs. decreasing. Anyone who would have estimated future increases based on data from the years -22,000 to -20,000 would never have expected the Meltwater Pulse 1A. Likewise, anyone estimating future increases from 10,000 to 8,000 years ago would have been surprised by the failure of the oceans to live up to their promise.
Therefore anyone can say what they want about any sudden "increase" - the reality will probably be something else. However you have to expect that at some point soon there will be no more ice. This "steep slope" you are "predicting" is going to be powered by what, exactly?
No. I am saying that there is a long term trend of increasing sea level. However if you note from the graph - those increases are increasing by decreasing amounts (ie the average rate is diminishing). Why? Because the vast quantities of glaciers that existed 20,000 years ago have already melted. You can't "create" more water - it's ALREADY in the ocean - 140 meters worth.
You are the one mentioning "global cataclysms". First you must prove that one exists.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, so what does your programmer buddy who works on the WGA team at Microsoft have to do with this discussion?
That's where the Chinese cartridge comes in...
Be sure to read the label:
Warning! Do not use for burns around the eyes or you may obtain unexpected results.
What I think is really happening is that game devs are notoriously incapable of programming any challenging sort of AI for their games - resulting in people turning to multiplayer games for a challenge. Easier to give up than just convince the project leads to use a few less cpu cycles for eye candy and a few more cycles for better algorithms.
Of course there will always be demand for single player games because frankly the "lol lol lol I pwnz joo n00b!!11" gets old fast, as does the bunch of people incapable of actually completing a game and dropping out halfway through.
The hypocrisy in US in unbelievable. Violence and killing people is all okay in TV, but when it's teaching persons about natural human function like sex it's all bad and must be hidden.
You have to remember who originally founded the US in the first place - puritanical religious nutbags. Now you know why they were being persecuted in Europe...
But seriously, the US has always had this double standard. Most Americans would be outraged to see a bare-breasted girl on page 3 of the newspaper right before "borrowing" said newspaper for an extended trip to the bathroom. This is the country where your TV station will face huge fines and a public outcry for showing a nipple during a super-bowl, and yet is also the home of a thriving print, video and on-line porn industry.
It's my personal belief that kids should be taught this at home.
Public health and public safety have nothing to do with your personal belief. Which is why you will be vaccinated regardless. Newborns will be screened for metabolic disease regardless. You will be ticketed for speeding regardless. And your kids will receive certain information at school regardless.
Because while YOU may be a responsible parent, there is a significant number of IRRESPONSIBLE parents. The idea is that the government must ensure that this information is made available to everyone because kids contracting HIV, Hepatitis B/C or gonorrhea, for example, are a PUBLIC HEALTH risk.
Especially in a public health care setting, where it is the taxpayer who is/will be footing the bill for treatment.
The big gaming companies lost sight of what makes a good game a long, long time ago. Of course they would much rather turn out endless sequels of a "proven thing" for the console gamers - because console gamers, like Mac users, are dumb enough to put up with this crap without complaining. All the keys on a computer keyboard make their brains hurt. Much better to keep the options simple - follow the path. Press the magic button combination at the right time. If you think about it, most console games could really play themselves. You'll never see something like Europa Universalis III on a console. Too complicated!
Yes far easier writing drivel like this than doing something called "innovation". Nope - when something completely new comes along they just buy it and then milk it for a decade.
I've mentioned this before - but frankly with one billion users and relatively easy entry into the PC game development market (all you need is a PC, a compiler, a free OpenGL/Ogre/Quake graphics engine and a brain), the PC is where you will ALWAYS find the innovation first simply because there are more creative brains capable of coding for it.
You forgot a very important group (the one I happen to be in):
The group that installs a pirated copy to try out the game, and either deletes it or buys it depending on this evaluation. Somehow every time I DON'T do this, I end up getting burned with shitty, buggy software (aka Empire:Total War, Hearts of Iron 3, etc).
We go down, they go down...
But remember, the bigger you are, the harder the fall. How would the average Chinese peasant's life change in some form of global economic collapse? He would be on the verge of starvation. But then again, he's on the verge of starvation today anyway. Now how is your average US suburbanite going to take starvation...?
Obviously they have no idea of what their target market is. Anyone interested in endangered species is probably nerdy and thus has no use for a condom - they get in the way of masturbation.
Perhaps "pro football" or "pro wrestling" or "NASCAR" condoms would sell better...
Not all of them have their scruples.
Agreed. Like everything else there is a normal/bell/Gauss curve. Some very few of us excel. Some very few of us really shouldn't be there. But most of us are hopefully somewhere in the middle. I myself can only comment on what is/should be considered "normal", and I consider myself to be somewhere in the middle. But we're none of us perfect.
- to use the lowest powerful antibiotic
EXCEPT in the case of STI's, where the social implications of having an asymptomatic carrier spreading disease around the population far outweighs the standard procedure for treating, for instance, community acquired pneumonia. In the case of STI's you give the RIGHT antibiotic the first time (which is why it's useful to carry one of these in your pocket).
Reminds me of all those emails I get from the head of the International Bank of Nigeria who somehow has to use hotmail/gmail/yahoo mail. Or how the "British National Lottery" also can't afford it's own mail server.
Seriously, "journalists" can't use anything but yahoo? Or even if they were limited to yahoo - they can't encrypt their email?
I suspect these "journalists" are just some "random group of people" and that the story is just more hype.
Frankly, I don't think most doctors know what they are doing when it comes to dealing with this cruft. They are the reason why we are getting these "super bugs". It's a matter of "try a little of this, and if that doesn't work, try a little of that".
Frankly as a doctor I can say you have no idea about the subject which you are attempting to speak. It saddens me to learn that in your ignorance you choose to blame the people who actually have researched and understand infectious disease and antibiotic resistance, when you have absolutely no idea even of how your own body works. You know. The one you've been living in all your life?
Suggesting that any physician was "experimenting" with you is preposterous. Such a thing is both immoral AND illegal. We follow treatment guidelines that result from numerous published scientific studies that show that one drug is statistically superior to another. No one just picks a drug "at random" to treat you. Statistical superiority does not guarantee that the drug will work in your particular case - that's not what statistics do, however it is logically your "best chance" at a first time cure. The fact that your disease was resistant to the new drug only goes to show the severity of this problem.
Also understand that there is nothing "magical" about penicillin. Different categories of antibiotics work in different ways. Penicillin affects the ability for bacteria to grow their cell walls. Other drugs (cipro for example) inhibit bacteria's ability to copy their DNA. Still others (macrolides like Azithromycin) inhibit protein synthesis at the ribosome level. Some of these drugs never work on some type of bacteria. All of these drugs can be rendered useless by some bacteria - and what's worse, these resistance genes can be passed across species of bacteria through plasmids.
As to your philosophy regarding infections - perhaps keeping your penis in your pants and avoiding them would be wiser. Getting one STI is bad enough. Getting THREE means you were either paying for unprotected sex with prostitutes or are simply sleeping with everything in sight. I hope you have been checked recently for HIV, syphilis, hepatitis B and C and HPV, because most sexually transmitted infections come in groups - the person(s) who gave you gonorrhea probably gave you quite a few other things too. It also pains me to think how many other people you might have harmed or might harm in the future in your ignorance.
Please educate yourself. And please masturbate from now on, you'll be doing the world a favor.
I am very much a scientist. I have a wall full of degrees. I am also a critical thinker. And frankly your opinion is worth zero to me. The fact that you try to insult me without even knowing me only makes me laugh harder. High school chemistry indeed.
No I haven't seen a "program", I just live in a neighboring country and have talked to the people leaving the country.
Goes to show exactly why climate change nut-jobs are DANGEROUS PEOPLE. But the history of the world is full of examples of killing people for lies. Climate change is a good substitute for (insert diety of choice), or even a political credo (Communism/Maoism/(proving Godwin's law)National Socialism). Hey let's suspend freedom to "save the environment".
The real problem behind all of this is, of course, overpopulation. I propose that instead of eliminating democracy we should just eliminate around 80% of the population. I can provide a list of volunteers for extermination (starting with Mr. Lovelock), and I ask others to do likewise. I, of course, choose not to be on any list.
designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities
This is a classic case of correlation not equal to causation. While it is very true that accidents at high speeds are likely to cause fatal rather than non fatal injuries, and it is also true that the greater the number of people driving at high speeds - non-perfect humans being what they are, the greater the number of fatal accidents are to be expected.
However from an engineering point of view it will be interesting to see if designing a road ONLY to force people to drive less quickly actually reduces the number of accidents. Of course roads could be designed like a brick wall, which will discourage people from driving AT ALL, thus eliminating all automobile accidents. At some point the engineering gets in the way of what a road is actually supposed to do, if you follow me.
This is typical bureaucratic thinking. Instead of focusing perhaps on increased driver education, increased safety mechanisms, or alternative mechanisms that prevent accidents entirely, the bureaucrat wants to design a 5 million dollar per mile of construction high speed highway with a maximum speed limit of 5mph.
Not without violating international law, which prevents territorial claims on the moon.
Sorry, but international law is only valid on or around planet Earth. You are welcome to cite examples where international law has been applied and/or enforced outside of L1.
hint: it's not the current rate, it's the rate of change which is important.
hint, it's not the rate of change that's important, it's the trend. The "average rate of change" is just an average. Some years it could go the other direction, and the average "rate of change" over a 10 year period would just diminish slightly. A one year (or even 100 year) rate of change means NOTHING on a geological time scale. Hardly anything in nature moves in a straight line or a nice bezier curve.
From TFA:
Seitz says adding bubbles to a 1-square-kilometer patch of ocean is feasible, but scaling it up may be technically difficult.
No shit, Sherlock. I'm glad he goes to Harvard!
When Seitz plugged that data into a climate model, he found that the microbubble strategy could cool the planet by up to 3C.
Well I'll be damned. It's too bad he failed to mention how many millions of square miles that need to be filled with bubbles to achieve this (hint: it's more than 1-square-kilometer), and of course like all good theoreticians there is no mention of the energy required to create this amount of bubbles 12 hours per day, what power source will be used, and of course how much equipment and manpower required and what THAT would cost.
I have my own hypothesis: Climate Science research leads to severe degeneration of higher brain functions.
If sea level rises and begins wiping out portions of Manhattan, are you going to tell New Yorkers that they shouldn't worry about it because it's normal?
Venice is still a functional city...
Manhattan is currently 10 meters above sea level. At a rate of 0.2 cm per year, Manhattan might start having trouble IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. Frankly I have serious doubts that New York city will even exist in 100 years as it is today, let alone 500 years. Why? Because far more trouble is/will be caused by overpopulation than rising sea levels. Resources that are already scarce today are going to be unavailable if current population growth rates are sustained. So a crash in population when these resources run out (per capita, the resources aren't actually being "destroyed", only shared among an ever greater number of people) is inevitable. How this crash will happen is anyone's guess: disease, war, economic collapse.
Really it's a self correcting problem. When we're all dead, there will be no more pollution. Global warming, on the other hand, will continue, until the natural cycle reverses and the Earth cools into another ice age in a few million years...
If you assume a 1% grade (probably less in lowland areas like Florida), a foot of sea level rise means the coast recedes by 100 feet.
Funny my grandfather bought a condo on the beach in Boca Raton, Florida in 1970, and the ocean is still pretty much where it used to be when I went there earlier this year. Let's see now, 30 years at .12 inches per year + 10 years at 0.2 inches per year = 5.6 inches, almost half a foot. So what, the apartment building should now be about 10 feet offshore you say? Funny I don't remember wearing my waders.
Just like inflation and unemployment numbers, "observation does not match the reported figures".
That's ten meters every two thousand years. Or rather as much rise in sea level in the next two thousand years as we've seen in the last eight thousand years.
Or it could be that an "average" is merely a "central tendency" of data, however the data itself is not constant and varies year to year - as clearly shown in the graph. Even 1000 year's worth of recent data is not enough to "predict" anything more than a general trend - increasing vs. decreasing. Anyone who would have estimated future increases based on data from the years -22,000 to -20,000 would never have expected the Meltwater Pulse 1A. Likewise, anyone estimating future increases from 10,000 to 8,000 years ago would have been surprised by the failure of the oceans to live up to their promise.
Therefore anyone can say what they want about any sudden "increase" - the reality will probably be something else. However you have to expect that at some point soon there will be no more ice. This "steep slope" you are "predicting" is going to be powered by what, exactly?
OK, but how about spending $10T to save, well, nothing really.
No. I am saying that there is a long term trend of increasing sea level. However if you note from the graph - those increases are increasing by decreasing amounts (ie the average rate is diminishing). Why? Because the vast quantities of glaciers that existed 20,000 years ago have already melted. You can't "create" more water - it's ALREADY in the ocean - 140 meters worth.
You are the one mentioning "global cataclysms". First you must prove that one exists.