...hard-core players who prefer first-person-player games like
Nintendo's "Final Fantasy" series... (emphasis mine),/i>
I was going to make some lame jokes about the journalists poor fact checking abilities, but it's honestly an easy mistake to make. I mean, he at least correctly associated the games with their primary console platform, assuming the article was written in 1994.
I always find it funny when people talking about Cel-Shading being new to the Zelda series. The SNES Link to the Past and the (attrocious) Zelda games for the CD-i were all cartoon style. The original NES games are pretty hard to categorize, since it's NES sprites, but they could be called cartoony. Really, Orcina of Time and Majora's Mask are the only two which couldn't be called cel shaded.
Actually, I was in a psych experiment just last year and they did the same darn thing. The experiment sign up said that it was a test of logical abilities. I went in and they gave me a test of logic problems. Then they gave me a quiz over some fine details of my conversation with the test administrator. It wasn't a study on logic problems at all; it was a study on human memory.
However, one of the things which has changed is rules on disclosure. If you lied to the subject about the purpose of the experiment, you have to tell them the true purpose after it is over. So, if this was a study on human interfaces, the subject would have been told this after the program. Since he wasn't, I think we can assume that this was an actual study on gaming.
Not exactly. Your claim would be scientific. It would be unscientific to claim that there's no invisible aliens on mars who amke no sound and are permeable by all matter and energy.
Purple Polka-dotted aliens can be seen. God, if he exists, is so nebulous that he can redefine himself to by pass any test. The existence of God would bypass all rules of logic ( p -> q and q -> ~p could both be true). Any test that eliminated the existence of logic is not scientific. Therefore, the very concept of God, whose omnipotence would allow him to bypass the rules of logic, is unscientific.
Ah. I see you're lucky enough not to live in the Bible Belt. The various religioous nuts that I put up with on a daily basis would claim that:
God's existence can be tested and proven.
Prayer will work even if you don't believe in it.
The fact that all you want to do is test his existence won't stop him from intervening.
I am a Christian myself and largely agree with what most of you said. The problem is that I deal with people on a daily basis who claim that the works of God are Entirely scientific. I'm just glad that we have this study so that I can tell them to shut up.
Oh, and, for the record, I disagree with some of your complaints about the study. First off, I doubt they went out and rounded up a bunch of atheists for their prayers. This was Duke, after all; they probably had no trouble finding plenty of people who believed very strongly. Furthermore, if the leaders of the study had any knowledge of scientific procedure (I'll give Duke the benefit of the doubt), they would approach the participants and say "We want you to pray to prove the existence of God". The would probably say "This person is feeling very ill and we were wondering if you would pray for them." Furthermore, if it was a true double blind study, it wouldn't be the scientists themselves who were approaching. Instead, a scientist would go to a local preacher and have him tell some of his constituents to pray for this person in need. The individuals doing the praying wouldn't know that they were testing the existence of God; they would simply be praying for a healthy recovery for a sick person. The scientists themselves really shouldn't have been praying at all if the study was going to be valid. Well, since the praying individuals were sincere in their prayers, the whole thing with the testing of God becomes a bit trickier. Would God ignore these honest prayers just because the scientists were watching?
The point of the study was not to test the existence of God. God may very well have been mucking around in the results as she felt fit to do. God could have been helping some people and killing others. However, God's involvement wasn't the question being asked here. What the scientists wanted to know was whether God's involvement was effected by prayer. Yes, he's mucking around with the patients, but does he muck around any more with patients that are prayed for? It would be completely unscientific to claim that there is no God, for God himself is an unscientific concept. However, stating that human prayer does not lead to an increased probability of survival is a concept that can be tested. In other words, we are not testing God's effect on Medical patients, but prayer's effect on God. And that can be scientifically quantified.
I'm sorry, but your theory doesn't quite hold water. Yes, there's a lot of fame to be acquired in science. Just take a look at Jonas Salk, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, or Enrico Fermi. All these men are pretty much household names. So, yes, there's fame to be gained in science.
However, look at their work. Two vaccines, one book of equations, and proof that the power of the atom could be harnassed. Now, let's contrast that with the guy who created Sarin gas, the men who first started isolating Anthrax, the man who developed dynamite, and the guy who found mustard gas. The problem is that, beyond the dynamite guy, I don't know who any of them are. And even he is more famous for his philanthropic work than his explosives.
Science can be driven by greed and ego. However, the best power trips are given by developments that help man kind. For the most part, the weapons come from the mistakes. For instance, hypotheitcally say that a scientist does put his knowledge to true good and says that he wants to develop a method of power generation that doesn't polute. He then decides to use the power of the atom to do it. He creates a self sustaining nuclear pile that can be used to generate power. Unfortunately, it produces more radiation than he intended. Furthermore, he discovers that, if someone screw up at the plant, there's going to be a massive explosion. Thus, his drive for "true good" leads to a device that kills millions of people. He never intends for this to happen; he never intended for it to be developed at all.
No, they will make another mistake again. Normalization of deviance is a basic human instinct.
Think about it. Your car starts making some weird noise while you're driving along one day. You get worried about it, so you pull off and look under the hood. You can't find anything wrong though. You then sit at home and analyze what was making the sound, but you can't think of anything. So you take the thing to a mechanic, but he tells you that everything is fine. So you just keep driving with the weird rattle. Eventually, after enough miles, you get used to the rattling and don't even notice it's there.
Basically, if space launches halted everytime something went outside of spec, we would probably be preparing for our third launch right about now. For every O-ring or falling problem, there's plenty of other problems that occur that never amont to a darn thing. Once we get all of those fixed, a hundred new things will pop up in the repairs; once again, most of those will never be an issue. And some day, one of them may cause a problem. However, the odds are generally in favor of them not being a problem today, just like the odds are against an astronaut getting hit by a bus on the way home today. There are things that you can do to improve your odds, but there's also a law of diminishing returns. I ultimately comes down to how safe you want to be.
Your post helped me to reach an epiphany. Yes, games should be fun! I paid good money for this, so I darn well better be entertained.
Just like movies. People keep talking about Citizen Kane; what's the big deal? It's not funny, there's no sex, and nothing blows up. Orson Welles was a hack. Now Dumb and Dumber is a true classic of American cinema. I mean, is there anything more important than a van that looks like a dog taking a leak? Movies are supposed to be fun and have explosions and scantily clad women and gorgeous CG; not any of this pretentious plot and subtext crap. Just like games.
I am an Opera user and, no, I'm not going to flame you. To be honest, in all the time I've been using Opera, I've never found a page that Opera conldn't load that any other non-IE browser could. Basically, Opera does a darn good job in keeping with published specs, so any developer that actualyl give a crap and tries to go cross platform will usually get their Opera compliance for free.
I love that being forced to pay $15 for a cable that you just need for headphones is stupid, but NOT charging me $25 for a memory card to save my #$^%ing game is also stupid.
True, rules should be respected and should be changed frivolously. However, consider the wonderful Blue Laws of the various states. For instance, I live in Indiana; as such, it is illegal for me to catch fish with my hands. Am I really required to respect this law? Would the world really be worse off if we did away with it? Or, to put it into different terms, should I not fight to have congress repeal the DMCA, simply because it is a rule? Wouldn't congress have then also been wrong to pass the DMCA, since doing so changed the rules?
Personally, I will always obey the rules. However, I fight to end rules that are idiotic. In this case, I find the morse code requirement idiotic. The main reason people have been posting for keeping the requirement is that it keeps riff-raff off the airways. I see that that is a valid goal, but it could be achieved in other ways. How about requiring all HAM radio traffic be in Latin? That would eliminate even more of the riff-raff. Besides, Latin's not that hard to learn; I know it. Anyone who's serious about HAM radio should be willing to put in the effort to learn the second language. It will facillitate communication, since everyone will be speaking the same language. Besides, Latin is a much older tradition than Morse code.
Yes, but binary is even more important, for tapping messages into the head of a decapitated android (TNG, Episode "Time's Arrow").
(Wow, knowing that is like having an emergency back-up virginity.)
I've always wondered why it was that I never got into table top RPG's. After all, I'm an enormous geek (I'm here after all); how did I resist the lure of the twenty sided dice?
Then I took a stroll over to the Pen & Paper RPG database to take a look around. The Army of Darkness RPG caught my eye. Clicked the link.
They wanted $35! The movie only cost me ten bucks, and it had better acting.
Taking a look at how much they get for books and dice, it all makes sense. I didn't get into RPGs because I wanted a less expensive hobby, like cocaine.
As I said, I will admit when I'm wrong. Today, I was again wrong. If anyone has actually been reading this thread, please mod the parent's poster up or mod my posts down (help me hide my shame).
I have the humility to admit when I am wrong. I've made a complete moron out of myself on Slashdot several times before. So I swallowed my pride and googled 'raleigh scattering' to learn from my mistakes. I checked out three sites on Raleigh scattering. They told me the same damn thing I told you. Raleigh scattering doesn't have any relations to the oceans at all.
As for why the sky isn't yellow, it's because you are working on a faulty assumption. The sun is not yellow, it is white. The sun emits all frequencies of light. If I were to look directly at the sun, I would see white, up until I went blind. However, I can look at the sky without looking directly at the sun. When I am gazing off in a direction that is not a straight geometrical path between the sun and my retina, I am seeing light that has been refracted (through Raleigh Scattering) by the atmosphere into a direction that will hit my retina. Now, since the sun is directly overhead, the light cannot have been refracted too heavily. Thus it appears blue, since the blue light has undergone the least refraction and thus has the highest saturation (there will also be some yellow and red, but not as heavily as the blue).
Now, I really hate to think that I'm making a giant ass out of myself again. So, please, if you can find any sources that back up your ocean reflection theory, please point me to them. Using Google to search for 'rayleigh scattering' didn't turn up any mention of the ocean until the second page, and that was on the refraction of sound waves.
isn't that because we have huge oceans for light to reflect off of, and cast a blue hue through the atmosphere?
Sorry, but not quite. After all, wouldn't that mean that, for those of us that are living out in the middle of corn field hell, our sky should be yellow?
The sky is blue because of light refraction, not reflection. The air of the earth acts like a giant prism, bending light accordnig to it's frequencies. Red light is bent the most, while blue light is bent to a lesser extent. So, when the sun is up at the top of the sky, the incoming light rays are bent the lest, and the sky is blue. At sunrise and sunset, however, the light has been bent further to reach our eyes, so what we see is the red.
Now, if Mars did have an atmosphere of similar composition to earth, it should also have a blue sky, regardless of the presence of water. (I am assuming of course that the Oxygen generator has also magically filtered out the dust from the atmosphere that gives the martian sky its brownish haze.)
extra features that everyone wants == more sales of said console
I'm going to have to disagree with your equation. Simply remember the Nintendo64. Granted, this was a poor selling system compared to the Playstation, but it beat the crap out of the Sega Saturn, 3DO, and CDi. Yet these three consoles could all play music CDs, which the N64 could not. Also, the 3DO could play Kodak PictureCDs and VCDs. Yet Nintendo's console stayed long after these others were lost. The net conclusion is that features alone do not sell a console.
Another common theme has been that it's such a small price difference between buying a DVD player and buying a console. Take a trip out to Walmart; you can pick up a DVD player for one-third of the price of a PS2 or XBox. Yes, this DVD player is garbage, but the average consumer won't notice; he's too busy trying to figure out why widescreen DVDs aren't using his whole screen. Most of the parents I've know who have bought PS2s or XBoxen for their kids didn't even figure the DVD player into the equation, as they weren't aware that it would do it. If the family is getting a DVD player, the PS2 or XBox doesn't cross the parent's mind; those are just "video games".
Now, as you will also point out, this doesn't really hold for the 20-30 crowd of gamers. Here, you are correct; we are likely to know the diference and try and save some money by buying a game console and selling our DVD player. The problem is that there's a much larger market than 20-30 year old males. Nintendo is not, nor was it ever, trying to market solely at kids. Nintendo wants to cross all the markets. So, while the DVD player may impress college age guys, it won't do a thing for the forty year old housewives that love Super Monkey Ball.
An owner of a Hummer once told the owner of a motorcycle that his Hummer got better gas milage. The motorcycle owner said this is ridiculous, and challenged him to a contest. The would each drive the same hundred miles of road and see who used more gas. They did, and the motorcycle used less gas. The Hummer owner immediately pointed out that the test was unfair "Your motorcycle weighs far less than my Hummer. That's part of the reason you're getting better milage. Also, you're using a different engine with less horsepower. If your motorcycle weighed as much as my Hummer and used the exact same engine, you would see that I get better milage"
You see, part of the reason that you would use Debian or Mandrake is that the developers have gone in and done those little tweaks. You are trusting those developers to have compiled a faster kernel and to turn on only the correct number of services. With Gentoo, you are claiming that you can do a better job yourself.
I also wouldn't be overly surprised if they were using different versions of the X libraries. After all, several of the other poster here have talked about how they loved that Gentoo always gave them the latest and greatest libraries, many stating that they do weekly emerge syncs. The binary distro users, on the other hand, don't have that option and usually use the older binaries for a while. Therefore, to have the Gentoo machines and the binary ones run the same versions of the libraries assumes that the Gentoo user hasn't been updating his system to the new libraries, which doesn't seem to be a realistic expectation in practice.
As for whether the machines were running the same services, binary distros tend to run a lot of them by default, Mandrake in particular. Gentoo, if I understand correctly, usually wants you to choose which services to run. I highly doubt that the testers would have turned on more services than necessary, so, if anything, Gentoo has the advantage on this front.
I do agree with you that they should have ran each of the tests several times to make sure that there were no flukes. But to say that the test is invalid because there were differences between the systems is to miss the entire point of the test.
Granted, I am a moron. I also have poor spelling and grammer. I may also be completely, utterly, blatantly wrong and I hope that I am. But if this is the most bizarre thing you've seen on the Internet today, you aren't trying hard enough.
Like everyone else posting on this topic, IANAL. However, from what little I do know of copyright law, your statement number two is not specifically correct. While you are purchasing the right to listen to and enjoy the product, you are actually limited on the number of times that you can do this. Of course, this limit is somewhere in the thousands, if memory serves me correctly, and there isn't a way of enforcing this, but, in theory, after you reach the limit, you are legally required to by a nwe CD.
I had always hear rumors that those 'lifestyle programs' lie through their teeth, but IT professional perfect catch? That's just outside the realm of reason.
There is a common misconception that scientific ideas work by revolution, as opposed to evolution. By this, I don't mean that people don't have revolutionary ideas, but that the scientific community doesn't just revolt overnight.
Let's use your example. John has a theory which shows that the Earth is only 10,000 years old. Some old, well established scientist says "Well, carbon dating shows your theory is wrong." John goes home for a while, plays with his theory, and comes back saying "My theory explains why carbon dating gives a wrong answer. Oh, and I also found that my theory explains the results from Sam's experiment." The old established professor gives John the brush off, but Sam is happy to learn that someone can explain his results. He publishes his results with John's explanation attached. Mike reads the article and comes up with a new experiment using John's theory. Mike performs the experiment and it agrees with John's theory while not being explained by the Old Earth Theory. This contniues for a decade or two (I'm sorry, but science isn't that fast of a process. Live with it.) There is now a large amount of experimental results that the old, well established scientist can't explain, but John can, so everyone stops paying attention to the old, established scientist. John is now the well-established scientist and his theories prevail. Note that John never had to convince the old scientist of anything, he just had to provide good results.
Now, as to why creation science never gets a good reception from mainstream science. In the above parable, John's theory explained the outcome of Sam's experiment which the prevailing theory did not. Now, creation scientists are getting much better about this. Still, the bigger the discrepency, the easier it is to bring people to the new theory. Furthermore, when introducing a new theory, the experiments which you can explain better outway those that you can't. We don't expect Creation Scientists to explain everything about the known universe; we ourselves cannot. Furthermore, they often bring in evidence which we cannot currently explain. However, to gain practical acceptance, they should also try and explain the results of the past hundred years of biology, geology, and physics experiments which are explained by theories that they are asking us to abandon.
The other important event in the parable was Mike making a prediction based on John's theory. With enough time and arrogance, anyone can make a theory that explains all current natural phenomena. However, the test of a true scientific theory is that it can predict the result of an experiment that has yet to be performed. I've never heard of a creation scientist making a prediction then proving it based on their theory. They usually just wait till others perform experiments then try and explain the results. To put it differently, if the current popular scientific age for the universe is wrong, what experiment can I perform today whose results creation science can accurately predict but popular science cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
I always find it funny when people talking about Cel-Shading being new to the Zelda series. The SNES Link to the Past and the (attrocious) Zelda games for the CD-i were all cartoon style. The original NES games are pretty hard to categorize, since it's NES sprites, but they could be called cartoony. Really, Orcina of Time and Majora's Mask are the only two which couldn't be called cel shaded.
Actually, I was in a psych experiment just last year and they did the same darn thing. The experiment sign up said that it was a test of logical abilities. I went in and they gave me a test of logic problems. Then they gave me a quiz over some fine details of my conversation with the test administrator. It wasn't a study on logic problems at all; it was a study on human memory. However, one of the things which has changed is rules on disclosure. If you lied to the subject about the purpose of the experiment, you have to tell them the true purpose after it is over. So, if this was a study on human interfaces, the subject would have been told this after the program. Since he wasn't, I think we can assume that this was an actual study on gaming.
Not exactly. Your claim would be scientific. It would be unscientific to claim that there's no invisible aliens on mars who amke no sound and are permeable by all matter and energy. Purple Polka-dotted aliens can be seen. God, if he exists, is so nebulous that he can redefine himself to by pass any test. The existence of God would bypass all rules of logic ( p -> q and q -> ~p could both be true). Any test that eliminated the existence of logic is not scientific. Therefore, the very concept of God, whose omnipotence would allow him to bypass the rules of logic, is unscientific.
- God's existence can be tested and proven.
- Prayer will work even if you don't believe in it.
- The fact that all you want to do is test his existence won't stop him from intervening.
I am a Christian myself and largely agree with what most of you said. The problem is that I deal with people on a daily basis who claim that the works of God are Entirely scientific. I'm just glad that we have this study so that I can tell them to shut up.Oh, and, for the record, I disagree with some of your complaints about the study. First off, I doubt they went out and rounded up a bunch of atheists for their prayers. This was Duke, after all; they probably had no trouble finding plenty of people who believed very strongly. Furthermore, if the leaders of the study had any knowledge of scientific procedure (I'll give Duke the benefit of the doubt), they would approach the participants and say "We want you to pray to prove the existence of God". The would probably say "This person is feeling very ill and we were wondering if you would pray for them." Furthermore, if it was a true double blind study, it wouldn't be the scientists themselves who were approaching. Instead, a scientist would go to a local preacher and have him tell some of his constituents to pray for this person in need. The individuals doing the praying wouldn't know that they were testing the existence of God; they would simply be praying for a healthy recovery for a sick person. The scientists themselves really shouldn't have been praying at all if the study was going to be valid. Well, since the praying individuals were sincere in their prayers, the whole thing with the testing of God becomes a bit trickier. Would God ignore these honest prayers just because the scientists were watching?
The point of the study was not to test the existence of God. God may very well have been mucking around in the results as she felt fit to do. God could have been helping some people and killing others. However, God's involvement wasn't the question being asked here. What the scientists wanted to know was whether God's involvement was effected by prayer. Yes, he's mucking around with the patients, but does he muck around any more with patients that are prayed for? It would be completely unscientific to claim that there is no God, for God himself is an unscientific concept. However, stating that human prayer does not lead to an increased probability of survival is a concept that can be tested. In other words, we are not testing God's effect on Medical patients, but prayer's effect on God. And that can be scientifically quantified.
I'm sorry, but your theory doesn't quite hold water. Yes, there's a lot of fame to be acquired in science. Just take a look at Jonas Salk, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, or Enrico Fermi. All these men are pretty much household names. So, yes, there's fame to be gained in science. However, look at their work. Two vaccines, one book of equations, and proof that the power of the atom could be harnassed. Now, let's contrast that with the guy who created Sarin gas, the men who first started isolating Anthrax, the man who developed dynamite, and the guy who found mustard gas. The problem is that, beyond the dynamite guy, I don't know who any of them are. And even he is more famous for his philanthropic work than his explosives. Science can be driven by greed and ego. However, the best power trips are given by developments that help man kind. For the most part, the weapons come from the mistakes. For instance, hypotheitcally say that a scientist does put his knowledge to true good and says that he wants to develop a method of power generation that doesn't polute. He then decides to use the power of the atom to do it. He creates a self sustaining nuclear pile that can be used to generate power. Unfortunately, it produces more radiation than he intended. Furthermore, he discovers that, if someone screw up at the plant, there's going to be a massive explosion. Thus, his drive for "true good" leads to a device that kills millions of people. He never intends for this to happen; he never intended for it to be developed at all.
No, they will make another mistake again. Normalization of deviance is a basic human instinct. Think about it. Your car starts making some weird noise while you're driving along one day. You get worried about it, so you pull off and look under the hood. You can't find anything wrong though. You then sit at home and analyze what was making the sound, but you can't think of anything. So you take the thing to a mechanic, but he tells you that everything is fine. So you just keep driving with the weird rattle. Eventually, after enough miles, you get used to the rattling and don't even notice it's there. Basically, if space launches halted everytime something went outside of spec, we would probably be preparing for our third launch right about now. For every O-ring or falling problem, there's plenty of other problems that occur that never amont to a darn thing. Once we get all of those fixed, a hundred new things will pop up in the repairs; once again, most of those will never be an issue. And some day, one of them may cause a problem. However, the odds are generally in favor of them not being a problem today, just like the odds are against an astronaut getting hit by a bus on the way home today. There are things that you can do to improve your odds, but there's also a law of diminishing returns. I ultimately comes down to how safe you want to be.
Your post helped me to reach an epiphany. Yes, games should be fun! I paid good money for this, so I darn well better be entertained. Just like movies. People keep talking about Citizen Kane; what's the big deal? It's not funny, there's no sex, and nothing blows up. Orson Welles was a hack. Now Dumb and Dumber is a true classic of American cinema. I mean, is there anything more important than a van that looks like a dog taking a leak? Movies are supposed to be fun and have explosions and scantily clad women and gorgeous CG; not any of this pretentious plot and subtext crap. Just like games.
I am an Opera user and, no, I'm not going to flame you. To be honest, in all the time I've been using Opera, I've never found a page that Opera conldn't load that any other non-IE browser could. Basically, Opera does a darn good job in keeping with published specs, so any developer that actualyl give a crap and tries to go cross platform will usually get their Opera compliance for free.
True, rules should be respected and should be changed frivolously. However, consider the wonderful Blue Laws of the various states. For instance, I live in Indiana; as such, it is illegal for me to catch fish with my hands. Am I really required to respect this law? Would the world really be worse off if we did away with it? Or, to put it into different terms, should I not fight to have congress repeal the DMCA, simply because it is a rule? Wouldn't congress have then also been wrong to pass the DMCA, since doing so changed the rules? Personally, I will always obey the rules. However, I fight to end rules that are idiotic. In this case, I find the morse code requirement idiotic. The main reason people have been posting for keeping the requirement is that it keeps riff-raff off the airways. I see that that is a valid goal, but it could be achieved in other ways. How about requiring all HAM radio traffic be in Latin? That would eliminate even more of the riff-raff. Besides, Latin's not that hard to learn; I know it. Anyone who's serious about HAM radio should be willing to put in the effort to learn the second language. It will facillitate communication, since everyone will be speaking the same language. Besides, Latin is a much older tradition than Morse code.
Yes, but binary is even more important, for tapping messages into the head of a decapitated android (TNG, Episode "Time's Arrow"). (Wow, knowing that is like having an emergency back-up virginity.)
I've always wondered why it was that I never got into table top RPG's. After all, I'm an enormous geek (I'm here after all); how did I resist the lure of the twenty sided dice? Then I took a stroll over to the Pen & Paper RPG database to take a look around. The Army of Darkness RPG caught my eye. Clicked the link. They wanted $35! The movie only cost me ten bucks, and it had better acting. Taking a look at how much they get for books and dice, it all makes sense. I didn't get into RPGs because I wanted a less expensive hobby, like cocaine.
As I said, I will admit when I'm wrong. Today, I was again wrong. If anyone has actually been reading this thread, please mod the parent's poster up or mod my posts down (help me hide my shame).
As for why the sky isn't yellow, it's because you are working on a faulty assumption. The sun is not yellow, it is white. The sun emits all frequencies of light. If I were to look directly at the sun, I would see white, up until I went blind. However, I can look at the sky without looking directly at the sun. When I am gazing off in a direction that is not a straight geometrical path between the sun and my retina, I am seeing light that has been refracted (through Raleigh Scattering) by the atmosphere into a direction that will hit my retina. Now, since the sun is directly overhead, the light cannot have been refracted too heavily. Thus it appears blue, since the blue light has undergone the least refraction and thus has the highest saturation (there will also be some yellow and red, but not as heavily as the blue).
Now, I really hate to think that I'm making a giant ass out of myself again. So, please, if you can find any sources that back up your ocean reflection theory, please point me to them. Using Google to search for 'rayleigh scattering' didn't turn up any mention of the ocean until the second page, and that was on the refraction of sound waves.
You see, part of the reason that you would use Debian or Mandrake is that the developers have gone in and done those little tweaks. You are trusting those developers to have compiled a faster kernel and to turn on only the correct number of services. With Gentoo, you are claiming that you can do a better job yourself.
I also wouldn't be overly surprised if they were using different versions of the X libraries. After all, several of the other poster here have talked about how they loved that Gentoo always gave them the latest and greatest libraries, many stating that they do weekly emerge syncs. The binary distro users, on the other hand, don't have that option and usually use the older binaries for a while. Therefore, to have the Gentoo machines and the binary ones run the same versions of the libraries assumes that the Gentoo user hasn't been updating his system to the new libraries, which doesn't seem to be a realistic expectation in practice.
As for whether the machines were running the same services, binary distros tend to run a lot of them by default, Mandrake in particular. Gentoo, if I understand correctly, usually wants you to choose which services to run. I highly doubt that the testers would have turned on more services than necessary, so, if anything, Gentoo has the advantage on this front.
I do agree with you that they should have ran each of the tests several times to make sure that there were no flukes. But to say that the test is invalid because there were differences between the systems is to miss the entire point of the test.
Granted, I am a moron. I also have poor spelling and grammer. I may also be completely, utterly, blatantly wrong and I hope that I am. But if this is the most bizarre thing you've seen on the Internet today, you aren't trying hard enough.
Like everyone else posting on this topic, IANAL. However, from what little I do know of copyright law, your statement number two is not specifically correct. While you are purchasing the right to listen to and enjoy the product, you are actually limited on the number of times that you can do this. Of course, this limit is somewhere in the thousands, if memory serves me correctly, and there isn't a way of enforcing this, but, in theory, after you reach the limit, you are legally required to by a nwe CD.
I had always hear rumors that those 'lifestyle programs' lie through their teeth, but IT professional perfect catch? That's just outside the realm of reason.
Once again, old news. Or am I the only one that's ever used Yggdrasil?
Let's use your example. John has a theory which shows that the Earth is only 10,000 years old. Some old, well established scientist says "Well, carbon dating shows your theory is wrong." John goes home for a while, plays with his theory, and comes back saying "My theory explains why carbon dating gives a wrong answer. Oh, and I also found that my theory explains the results from Sam's experiment." The old established professor gives John the brush off, but Sam is happy to learn that someone can explain his results. He publishes his results with John's explanation attached. Mike reads the article and comes up with a new experiment using John's theory. Mike performs the experiment and it agrees with John's theory while not being explained by the Old Earth Theory. This contniues for a decade or two (I'm sorry, but science isn't that fast of a process. Live with it.) There is now a large amount of experimental results that the old, well established scientist can't explain, but John can, so everyone stops paying attention to the old, established scientist. John is now the well-established scientist and his theories prevail. Note that John never had to convince the old scientist of anything, he just had to provide good results.
Now, as to why creation science never gets a good reception from mainstream science. In the above parable, John's theory explained the outcome of Sam's experiment which the prevailing theory did not. Now, creation scientists are getting much better about this. Still, the bigger the discrepency, the easier it is to bring people to the new theory. Furthermore, when introducing a new theory, the experiments which you can explain better outway those that you can't. We don't expect Creation Scientists to explain everything about the known universe; we ourselves cannot. Furthermore, they often bring in evidence which we cannot currently explain. However, to gain practical acceptance, they should also try and explain the results of the past hundred years of biology, geology, and physics experiments which are explained by theories that they are asking us to abandon.
The other important event in the parable was Mike making a prediction based on John's theory. With enough time and arrogance, anyone can make a theory that explains all current natural phenomena. However, the test of a true scientific theory is that it can predict the result of an experiment that has yet to be performed. I've never heard of a creation scientist making a prediction then proving it based on their theory. They usually just wait till others perform experiments then try and explain the results. To put it differently, if the current popular scientific age for the universe is wrong, what experiment can I perform today whose results creation science can accurately predict but popular science cannot.