The pre-Christian world was not a nice place for anybody but the strong.
And the 1950s were a hell of a lot better in a hell of a lot of ways than today. But if I had my wish, it would probably be for the social structure of the 1890s.
There has been a massive shift in behavior and values in the last few decades, and little of that has been for the good. People are more violent and less happy. (But at least we're less racist, woot!—too bad that the black family and community has collapsed entirely since civil rights, and we're locking up 1/3rd of black males in the US.)
Pop culture is one of the things at the leading edge of the cultural shift. Its defenders always concentrate on the "just a little bit more won't hurt" aspect. But the little bit just continues and continues.
Russian television interviewed an old man a few years back. He had executed thousands of civilians during one of Stalins purges. One by one he shot them in the back of the head as they were brought to him.
The interviewer asked him "how could you kill all those people?"
He replied, "Well, there's a trick to it. You have to hold your elbow like this otherwise it gets sore."
Most of your neighbors have the potential to be concentration camp guards under the right circumstances. There is tremendous pleasure in murder and rape, and all that they really lack is the opportunity. It's only a thin veneer of civilization that separates us from our demons; the idea that that very civilization can be stripped away without consequence is the worst sort of idiocy.
Compare the case where n is 10,000 and when n is in the millions.
For n=10,000: The chance of your vote being the deciding vote is 1 in (2^10,000 + 2^9999 + 2^9998 +...) In other words, it would be easier to pick the winning number at roulette about 2000 times in a row.
For n=1,000,000: The chance of your vote bing the deciding vote is 1 in (2^1,000,000 + 2^999,999 +...) In other words, it would be easier to pick the winning number at roulette about 200,000 times in a row.
In which case is your vote more important?
The second, not that I see how that's very relavent. It's still zero for all intents and purposes either way.
Since you were originally talking about the chances of being the deciding vote I think you just proved my point.
Proved your point? You mean the one from above:
In elections for local representation, your vote certainly does matter. You've proven this in your original post as your variable n would be orders of magnitudes smaller!!!
Or did you have another point that was actually proved by your argument?
Set n equal to 10,000 in my equation to find out just how much your vote matters in the small case. (Comparison for the mathematically inept: There are only about 10^40 atoms in the universe.)
I assume that you realize that not all elections are for President, and that not everybody lives in the United States? (Actually I don't assume that -- it's very likely that you didn't realize either of those two things.) In fact there is no election for President in U.S. -- there actually an election for Electors who decide the President. Read your Constitution.
$100 says you're an idiot. I pointed out the only way of realistically stopping them. I didn't say I'd try to implement it. My post was actually a big "give up and die, you can't win, and your personal protest against Walmart doesn't matter, loser."
I've taken more mathematics than you, Asperger's reject. The chance of your vote making a difference (being the deciding vote) is 1 in (x=0 to n-2 ||| sum 2^x) where n is the number of voters total. Yes, that number does asymptotically approach zero with increasing n.
Not only does the limit approach zero (of course I don't know why you brought up the limit when we are talking about voting populations that never reach above several hundred million -- you probably never got beyond calculus in school and are still impressed by it) but the probability of being the deciding vote is a number so low that it zero for all practical purposes.
If you don't like how much Wal-Mart influences what producers produce, DON'T SHOP THERE."
No. If you don't like how Wal-Mart influences what producers produce, your shopping there or not doesn't matter. Instead you have change the habits of the entire buying public. A vastly different thing.
I like that you make the comparison with voting. You probably subscribe to the "your vote matters" fallacy. Nothing is more silly. Only votes in mass matter. Single votes do not. (Interestingly though, for popular figures, saying that peoples votes matter, does matter. Because that moves the masses.)
Thanks, SolusSD. It's always interesting to learn that even Mac fanatics admit that Windows is more useful for actually getting stuff done than OS X. And given the choice, most users will choose to run Windows over OS X on their hardware. Maybe instead of selling pretty GUIs, Apple should have sold backwards compatibility, something that Microsoft has been the only company doing right for years.
The first computer that I ran XP on was a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 128 megabytes of RAM. (The Pentium Pro was actually better than some of the early Pentium IIs for XP because the MMX instructions.) XP ran as well as anything did on that computer. And XP was a huge improvement over Windows 98.
Having been raised on Apple IIe's, C64s, 8086s, 286s, 386s, and 486s, I have trouble thinking of anything super-1GHz as 'slow.' Of course, that's not to say I didn't just spend $200 for 1 Gigabyte of memory for my Turion laptop which was "running like a dog" with just 256 Megabytes. (Firefox, I'm holding you responsible.)
Now go and punch your pastor in the nose for passing something off as true that he didn't have any evidence for. I will refrain from doing the same to you because this is the internet.
"IIRC, it was looking for/dev/mouse... when it should have been/dev/input/mouse0. Good luck figuring that one out newbie!"
I had this same thing happen to me on an upgrade from Debian stable to unstable earlier in the week. My current Fedora Core 5 woes are worse. Trying to get it to talk with our systems whacked out ldap schema for automount is fun.
Interesting how the article claims that this allows a user to "boot backups." A more neutral phrasing would have been "boot copies."
It's clear that the submitter of the article doesn't think the moral case for this type of thing is strong enough to stand on its own. He has to help it along, and slightly mislead his audience despite the fact that the vast majority of the copies this is used for will be pirated copies rather than backup copies.
So, submitter, why don't you have the courage of your convictions?
I'm not sure what to think. Please help me out with a little groupthink. Do I hate Apple here because of anti-competitive business practices with their non-open hardware, or do I hate the French because they are enemies of Apple? Or do I love the French because they hate George Bush?
Amazing how well the ideological absurdity of utopian communism finds its expression in the mechanics of a multi-player online game. Or maybe it's not that amazing. Surely you World of Warcraft players, engaged in the "grind" of leveling, have heard an Orwellian Animal Farm voice calling "Work is Fun. Fun is Work. Fun is Unfun." Co-operation and submission to the group is explicitly rewarded through "Guilds" and similar organizations.
Of course, not only is the gameplay of multi-player online games ideologically communist, but the mechanics of game economies are explicitly communist. They are planned economies. Gold farming and black markets are exactly the same phenomenon. The Chinese Socialist online game will be interesting to watch for observers due to this inevitablity. How will they deal with external and internal black markets? Will it be possible to distinguish countermeasures gameplay from reality as ingame countermeasures are taken?
His analogy wasn't trying to make those points. It was a reply to this: "Couldn't they prove their case with their own, damn webserver logs?"
And it was an excellent reply to that. But given the attention span of slashdot readers, the analogy is of course attacked as if it meant to prove something else. Your reply, which goes off on a number of tangents all at once, rather than examining the point the original posters were trying to make, is indicative of the the whole.
Your analogy was pretty good. Most slashdotters have this technique that lets them shut off their brains when an opposing viewpoint comes along, hence the criticism.
Just like you'd search the bank thief's house despite overwhelming evidence that it was her, you generally want to search a computer crime suspect's computers.
Familiar... Do they pay you marketing droids extra to work on Sundays? In actual fact, a player has almost zero freedom to influence the game world of Morrowind. Yeah, he can build a character with a different set of skills than another character. Whoo hoo. And scope? I hope you're talking about the mouth wash. Fighting huge birdy things for an hour just to walk to the next tiny dungeon does not add scope to a game. A billion cookie-cutter NPCs does not add scope. Look at Planescape Torment or Fallout to see a game with scope. (Sadly, Bethesda has got its grimy maws on the Fallout franchise; RIP.)
Instead of paying people to troll slashdot to talk up the next Bethesda bug-fest, maybe they should spend a bit more money and a first-class design and programming team.
Slashdot Mirror
None is any more justifiably worse than another, just different.
You came off as intelligent until that line.
The pre-Christian world was not a nice place for anybody but the strong.
And the 1950s were a hell of a lot better in a hell of a lot of ways than today. But if I had my wish, it would probably be for the social structure of the 1890s.
There has been a massive shift in behavior and values in the last few decades, and little of that has been for the good. People are more violent and less happy. (But at least we're less racist, woot!—too bad that the black family and community has collapsed entirely since civil rights, and we're locking up 1/3rd of black males in the US.)
Pop culture is one of the things at the leading edge of the cultural shift. Its defenders always concentrate on the "just a little bit more won't hurt" aspect. But the little bit just continues and continues.
Russian television interviewed an old man a few years back. He had executed thousands of civilians during one of Stalins purges. One by one he shot them in the back of the head as they were brought to him.
The interviewer asked him "how could you kill all those people?"
He replied, "Well, there's a trick to it. You have to hold your elbow like this otherwise it gets sore."
Most of your neighbors have the potential to be concentration camp guards under the right circumstances. There is tremendous pleasure in murder and rape, and all that they really lack is the opportunity. It's only a thin veneer of civilization that separates us from our demons; the idea that that very civilization can be stripped away without consequence is the worst sort of idiocy.
Your worldview is sophmoric as it is common, and you'll grow out of it. Ideas have consequences.
"The second, not that I see how that's very relavent." Should be, cause you're no doubt a pendant: The first, not that I see how that's very relevent.
For n=1,000,000: The chance of your vote bing the deciding vote is 1 in (2^1,000,000 + 2^999,999 +
Set n equal to 10,000 in my equation to find out just how much your vote matters in the small case. (Comparison for the mathematically inept: There are only about 10^40 atoms in the universe.)
I assume that you realize that not all elections are for President, and that not everybody lives in the United States? (Actually I don't assume that -- it's very likely that you didn't realize either of those two things.) In fact there is no election for President in U.S. -- there actually an election for Electors who decide the President. Read your Constitution.
$100 says you're an idiot. I pointed out the only way of realistically stopping them. I didn't say I'd try to implement it. My post was actually a big "give up and die, you can't win, and your personal protest against Walmart doesn't matter, loser."
I've taken more mathematics than you, Asperger's reject. The chance of your vote making a difference (being the deciding vote) is 1 in (x=0 to n-2 ||| sum 2^x) where n is the number of voters total. Yes, that number does asymptotically approach zero with increasing n.
Not only does the limit approach zero (of course I don't know why you brought up the limit when we are talking about voting populations that never reach above several hundred million -- you probably never got beyond calculus in school and are still impressed by it) but the probability of being the deciding vote is a number so low that it zero for all practical purposes.
I like that you make the comparison with voting. You probably subscribe to the "your vote matters" fallacy. Nothing is more silly. Only votes in mass matter. Single votes do not. (Interestingly though, for popular figures, saying that peoples votes matter, does matter. Because that moves the masses.)
I did this and it ruined the game for me. Now I never have to worry about how strong enemies are -- I can just adjust the level slider to fit.
I got that idea because SolusSD said it. If he's wrong, argue with him.
Thanks, SolusSD. It's always interesting to learn that even Mac fanatics admit that Windows is more useful for actually getting stuff done than OS X. And given the choice, most users will choose to run Windows over OS X on their hardware. Maybe instead of selling pretty GUIs, Apple should have sold backwards compatibility, something that Microsoft has been the only company doing right for years.
The first computer that I ran XP on was a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 128 megabytes of RAM. (The Pentium Pro was actually better than some of the early Pentium IIs for XP because the MMX instructions.) XP ran as well as anything did on that computer. And XP was a huge improvement over Windows 98.
Having been raised on Apple IIe's, C64s, 8086s, 286s, 386s, and 486s, I have trouble thinking of anything super-1GHz as 'slow.' Of course, that's not to say I didn't just spend $200 for 1 Gigabyte of memory for my Turion laptop which was "running like a dog" with just 256 Megabytes. (Firefox, I'm holding you responsible.)
Eye-bleeding boredom does not count as "motivation to leave the first town."
Because your Sunday pastor tells you that "leading evolutionists no longer claim that evolution was a slow graduate change" does not make it true.
Here are a few thousand examples of transitional fossils: Talkorigin's Transitional Vertebrate FAQ
Now go and punch your pastor in the nose for passing something off as true that he didn't have any evidence for. I will refrain from doing the same to you because this is the internet.
And only because this is the internet, dumbass.
"IIRC, it was looking for /dev/mouse... when it should have been /dev/input/mouse0. Good luck figuring that one out newbie!"
I had this same thing happen to me on an upgrade from Debian stable to unstable earlier in the week. My current Fedora Core 5 woes are worse. Trying to get it to talk with our systems whacked out ldap schema for automount is fun.
Interesting how the article claims that this allows a user to "boot backups." A more neutral phrasing would have been "boot copies."
It's clear that the submitter of the article doesn't think the moral case for this type of thing is strong enough to stand on its own. He has to help it along, and slightly mislead his audience despite the fact that the vast majority of the copies this is used for will be pirated copies rather than backup copies.
So, submitter, why don't you have the courage of your convictions?
I'm not sure what to think. Please help me out with a little groupthink. Do I hate Apple here because of anti-competitive business practices with their non-open hardware, or do I hate the French because they are enemies of Apple? Or do I love the French because they hate George Bush?
Amazing how well the ideological absurdity of utopian communism finds its expression in the mechanics of a multi-player online game. Or maybe it's not that amazing. Surely you World of Warcraft players, engaged in the "grind" of leveling, have heard an Orwellian Animal Farm voice calling "Work is Fun. Fun is Work. Fun is Unfun." Co-operation and submission to the group is explicitly rewarded through "Guilds" and similar organizations.
Of course, not only is the gameplay of multi-player online games ideologically communist, but the mechanics of game economies are explicitly communist. They are planned economies. Gold farming and black markets are exactly the same phenomenon. The Chinese Socialist online game will be interesting to watch for observers due to this inevitablity. How will they deal with external and internal black markets? Will it be possible to distinguish countermeasures gameplay from reality as ingame countermeasures are taken?
His analogy wasn't trying to make those points. It was a reply to this: "Couldn't they prove their case with their own, damn webserver logs?"
And it was an excellent reply to that. But given the attention span of slashdot readers, the analogy is of course attacked as if it meant to prove something else. Your reply, which goes off on a number of tangents all at once, rather than examining the point the original posters were trying to make, is indicative of the the whole.
Your analogy was pretty good. Most slashdotters have this technique that lets them shut off their brains when an opposing viewpoint comes along, hence the criticism.
Just like you'd search the bank thief's house despite overwhelming evidence that it was her, you generally want to search a computer crime suspect's computers.
"Amazing freedom and scope"?
Familiar... Do they pay you marketing droids extra to work on Sundays? In actual fact, a player has almost zero freedom to influence the game world of Morrowind. Yeah, he can build a character with a different set of skills than another character. Whoo hoo. And scope? I hope you're talking about the mouth wash. Fighting huge birdy things for an hour just to walk to the next tiny dungeon does not add scope to a game. A billion cookie-cutter NPCs does not add scope. Look at Planescape Torment or Fallout to see a game with scope. (Sadly, Bethesda has got its grimy maws on the Fallout franchise; RIP.)
Instead of paying people to troll slashdot to talk up the next Bethesda bug-fest, maybe they should spend a bit more money and a first-class design and programming team.