'Supernatural' is the label given to things that people do not understand. Yes, I realize there are a lot of hoaxes and BS out there, which is what makes the persuit of information about anything related to ESP a futile battle against an army of minds that were closed by so many liars and so many that proclaim they understand The Truth(TM) that are just as clueless as everyone else.
Imagine if you will, a video walkie-talkie. Simply a screen, a cheap camera, a microphone, a speaker, and small builtin antenna. While we could say the battery life would suck or that it would be quite an expensive device, we know very well we can create it, and being here on this site chances are you are one of the people who have a very good understanding of how it would work, and how the wireless radio signal works. However lets say a couple of these devices somehow magically end up 2 or 3 thousand years in the past, and either through luck or it's very simple design they manage to press the button and turn them on. They would have no idea how it worked, or anything about radio waves. They would just see these 'supernatural' "Magic mirrors" that were blessed by the gods to allow them to see the other's reflection... until the batteries died. In which case they'd very likely claim the Gods deemed them unworthy and removed their blessing from the "Magic mirrors".
We may understand the idea of radio waves now, but in reality we still have no clue as to how the universe works. Anyone who claims otherwise is either delusional or hasn't really examined the 'cutting edge' of science and technology. To claim anything, telepathy included, is impossible simply because you do not understand how it could work is a very closed minded and unscientific thing to do, and currently science is the only way to fully explain things without labels of 'supernatural';)
But I suppose simply pointing out how the lack of an explination is no more a disproof than the lack of evidence against is proof is not enough eh? So here is a perfectly plausible explination for you:
The brain is a collection of chemical and electrical signals correct? Large portions of which (i.e. damn near the whole thing) we don't really understand at all, and there is as much misinformation as real information out there. The one thing we do know is that there is a whole lot of electrical signals going on in all sorts of frequency waves, and we've been able to visual composites of these waves by placing electrical sensors around the head... What is to say a portion of the brain is not capable of acting as an antenna, broadcasting and/or receiving bits and pieces of these waves at some frequency/amplitude we simply do not understand enough about to detect or utilize?
If you really want something to think on, do some research into the cutting edge of scientific study of physics, especially things such as particle entanglement.
The whole argument Okian Warrior poses is based on the idea that telepathy has no prerequisites and could be spontaneously aquired via evolution, which as with other traits that have evolved over time simply does not seem to be the case.
If we make the relatively trivial assumption that telepathy would require a relatively high level of brain function (both as a matter of technical requirement, and also of being able to process and understand the information) then suddenly the point in our evolution it would be most possible for these traits to begin to appear we have already began stagnating our gene pool by artificially protecting those of weaker traits, thus significantly reducing any evolution.
If we look through recorded time, and due to our nature likely much before recorded time as well, people who can 'hear voices' or otherwise know things they should not be able to know are typically regarded as crazy, devilspawn, witches, or some other name in which heavy medication, stoning, or burning at the stake would be prescribed. I would pose that because of this, not only would telepathy not be a survival advantage, any marked ability would indeed be a disadvantage.
IMO it's also very realistic to assume telepathy would be like other ability, and require some practice and training before it would be any more than rare and involuntary flashes of thoughts.
...and yes, I am a firm believer in telepathy. I have seen and experienced enough that I'd be crazy not to believe in it. I just appears that like any other ability (sight and hearing included) different people have different levels of innate ability, and in the case of telepathy the vast majority are below the threshold of being able to notice it at all, and those few that do lack the a significant way of testing and training the ability.
For the work he is talking about, yes you can work with titanium in the same way. It can be more difficult work of course, depending on the exact alloy being used. On the softer end of the scale it's quite a bit easier to work with than stainless steel; and though softer alloys are not as strong as heavier alloys, the strength/weight ratio is great and it still has some other very nice properties.
I'd be more worried about a possible super-disease which may be laying in wait, as I'm sure any ancient building under antarctica would be well equiped to defend against aliens, assuming we can find enough power for the chair.
I could be mistaken, but IIRC they said they won't _require_ it... My understanding is the support is still there and publishers can enable region coding if they choose.
That's not true at all, unless you take so broad a view as to say all human interaction is schadenfreude. Puns and knock-knock jokes come to mind immediately as counterexamples.
If you don't think puns and knock-knock jokes are suffering then you must be the bastard that keeps telling those damned jokes.
So... naive college students are having troubles understanding something that was specifically designed to be confusing in order to prey upon the naive?
They said Adobe Reader, which last I checked was completely free and does a better job rendering than any open source PDF program does. Don't get me wrong, it has enough issues I typically use xpdf or other programs, but I still keep a copy of Acrobat Reader around because certain things just don't render correctly in anything else.
...and I don't know what you are smoking with ClamWin.. I'd recommend AVG over ClamWin any day, since ClamWin doesn't seem capable of automatically scanning files before letting the user run them (which lets face it, is the only way 99% of people will have a chance of knowing there is a virus before running it a dozen times over)
Your bus stops running at 4 in the afternoon? I think it's time to fire your public transportation committee.
They stop running around 5, or shortly after. The problem is, if you get off at 5, you can at most grab one bus, assuming you are close enough to a stop to get there before the bus would go by for the last time. But you have to transfer to get anywhere in town, so unfortunatly the best you can do is to get somewhere between the bus stop closest to where you work (if there is one close at all) and the downtown loop... Which essentially means unless you live in the same area as your job or in one of the college dorms downtown, you can't do it.
And yes... they should be fired... from a cannon. I kid you not, a bond to do unneccisary road work (that should have been taken care of in their budget anyways) that was pitched as "to improve traffic problems in downtown" (despite being entirely on a far edge of town, and I'll let you guess as to the income level of people in that area..) was voted down, then suddenly the timing on the traffic lights downtown were changed, causing traffic jams at numerous times of the day and slowing traffic in general way down (you can get across downtown faster on 25mph limit side roads than taking the 40mph limit main roads...) Some people here see a connection.
Buses are great and all, but if they always run less than a quarter full, they're actually less efficient than cars (because they are so much bigger).
The only way public transit would work in the US would be if people stopped moving out of cities and started moving back. Good public transit requires that kind of clumpiness.
I assure you the town I live in is plenty 'clumpy' enough to support a good public transit system, however I doubt any of the bus routes here have more than a quarter full for more than a couple hours a day. It's not that people aren't here to support it, but because everyone seems to be taught to treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with and that they need to have their own car.
To make matters worse the bus system here was designed around a busy downtown, which is now nearly desolate (save for bars, bars, and more bars), so they are shut down an hour too early to take a bus home if you work a 'normal' 9-5 job... If the bus system can't support people working 9-5 jobs, it's lost out on a huge part of it's potention passengers.
Oh yeah... shouldn't be hard to see I think the politicians here are among the ones that think public transit is a disease.
This may surprise you, but not everyone in the world has a driver's license at age 16. Hell, in a lot of countries the minimum age is 17, 18, or even higher. And believe it or not, in large portions of the world a substantial (majority?) of people don't have a driver's license and depend on public transit systems like rails, subways, and busses. It's a shame that most US citizens can't comprehend the benefits to society of having a good solid public transit system over a crappy (or non existant) public transist with everyone having their own vehicle and thus treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with; some even going as far as to redicule anyone who would even think of using public transit. You'd think after 20 or 30 minutes of rush hour traffic just about anyone would be converted..
Maybe that wasn't his reason... maybe he just didn't need a car and thus didn't care, maybe he couldn't afford one, or maybe he is a horrible driver. Doesn't really matter, because I don't care about the original topic anymore.. My point still stands in general.
But if sub-meter accurate navigation systems start to become common place in vehicles, I'd like to think we'd be smart enough to start having emergency vehicles (as well as road construction crews) equiped with some sort of beacon which would alert your navigation system as to the situation, causing you to get a message along the lines of "The lane you are currently in will be closed in 300 meters due to a traffic accident" Even better yet will be having it suggest another route to avoid the problem.
And one day we can hope to see major road ways being smart enough to report traffic levels to navigation systems, which can then offer a different route if the one you are taking is too congested.
None of this is out of the question, and sub meter accuracy would go a long way towards making it happen. When you start getting into 20m-50m error ranges in a downtown area, the system wouldn't even be able to tell what street you are on for sure, which just doesn't cut it. Otherwise all the technology is here... it's just a matter of getting it cheap enough to get enough saturation in the market to make it worthwild to setup the systems.
Unless he bought a metric buttload of stock, he's going to have no effect on the development of any of Take Twos games, and more than any other super-minority stockholder would have on product development at any other decent-sized company.
I'm sorry, but even with a metric buttload of stock he wouldn't have enough, he'll need at least a metric shit-ton to make any difference at all.
The only difference he is going to make is raising the value of their stock by adding another person into the bunch that wants to buy it...
the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copiesoverall sales of recorded music are down about 4.5%, if one considers 10 individual tracks the equivalent of an album.
And what if people don't like every song on an album and thus only buy those they do? Maybe we could assume it'd average out to one song per CD per person that they just don't like and thus don't buy. This is a pretty reasonable, and probably very conservative even.
So we are saying that 1 out of 10 songs are crap (10%) and just aren't bought when the songs are bought online. Oddly enough if we assume the entire 40% drop in CD sales went to online sales, that 10% would make up for a 4% drop in sales... which is pretty damn close to the overall drop in music sales. Hmm... Something seems odd here.
If we make the very reasonable assumption (I'd like to see numbers on this, but they don't exist AFAIK) that when buying songs individually on average people decide not to buy a little more than 1 song per CD per person (1.14 to be exact) simply because they know they don't like that song, it accounts for the entire 4.5% "loss" in sales they are reporting.
In other words, the "slump" in music sales are just people not buying crap songs. Hell, I'd bet the number of songs so crappy they don't want to buy is a lot closer to 2 songs per CD per person, if not higher. If thats the case, overall CD sales would actually be up 8%, if you take into account people not buying crap they don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
And at the time, Shakespeare's works were essentially the dime store novels and sitcoms of the day...
'Supernatural' is the label given to things that people do not understand. Yes, I realize there are a lot of hoaxes and BS out there, which is what makes the persuit of information about anything related to ESP a futile battle against an army of minds that were closed by so many liars and so many that proclaim they understand The Truth(TM) that are just as clueless as everyone else.
Imagine if you will, a video walkie-talkie. Simply a screen, a cheap camera, a microphone, a speaker, and small builtin antenna. While we could say the battery life would suck or that it would be quite an expensive device, we know very well we can create it, and being here on this site chances are you are one of the people who have a very good understanding of how it would work, and how the wireless radio signal works. However lets say a couple of these devices somehow magically end up 2 or 3 thousand years in the past, and either through luck or it's very simple design they manage to press the button and turn them on. They would have no idea how it worked, or anything about radio waves. They would just see these 'supernatural' "Magic mirrors" that were blessed by the gods to allow them to see the other's reflection... until the batteries died. In which case they'd very likely claim the Gods deemed them unworthy and removed their blessing from the "Magic mirrors".
We may understand the idea of radio waves now, but in reality we still have no clue as to how the universe works. Anyone who claims otherwise is either delusional or hasn't really examined the 'cutting edge' of science and technology. To claim anything, telepathy included, is impossible simply because you do not understand how it could work is a very closed minded and unscientific thing to do, and currently science is the only way to fully explain things without labels of 'supernatural' ;)
But I suppose simply pointing out how the lack of an explination is no more a disproof than the lack of evidence against is proof is not enough eh? So here is a perfectly plausible explination for you:
The brain is a collection of chemical and electrical signals correct? Large portions of which (i.e. damn near the whole thing) we don't really understand at all, and there is as much misinformation as real information out there. The one thing we do know is that there is a whole lot of electrical signals going on in all sorts of frequency waves, and we've been able to visual composites of these waves by placing electrical sensors around the head... What is to say a portion of the brain is not capable of acting as an antenna, broadcasting and/or receiving bits and pieces of these waves at some frequency/amplitude we simply do not understand enough about to detect or utilize?
If you really want something to think on, do some research into the cutting edge of scientific study of physics, especially things such as particle entanglement.
If we make the relatively trivial assumption that telepathy would require a relatively high level of brain function (both as a matter of technical requirement, and also of being able to process and understand the information) then suddenly the point in our evolution it would be most possible for these traits to begin to appear we have already began stagnating our gene pool by artificially protecting those of weaker traits, thus significantly reducing any evolution.
If we look through recorded time, and due to our nature likely much before recorded time as well, people who can 'hear voices' or otherwise know things they should not be able to know are typically regarded as crazy, devilspawn, witches, or some other name in which heavy medication, stoning, or burning at the stake would be prescribed. I would pose that because of this, not only would telepathy not be a survival advantage, any marked ability would indeed be a disadvantage.
IMO it's also very realistic to assume telepathy would be like other ability, and require some practice and training before it would be any more than rare and involuntary flashes of thoughts.
For the work he is talking about, yes you can work with titanium in the same way. It can be more difficult work of course, depending on the exact alloy being used. On the softer end of the scale it's quite a bit easier to work with than stainless steel; and though softer alloys are not as strong as heavier alloys, the strength/weight ratio is great and it still has some other very nice properties.
I'd be more worried about a possible super-disease which may be laying in wait, as I'm sure any ancient building under antarctica would be well equiped to defend against aliens, assuming we can find enough power for the chair.
I could be mistaken, but IIRC they said they won't _require_ it... My understanding is the support is still there and publishers can enable region coding if they choose.
If you don't think puns and knock-knock jokes are suffering then you must be the bastard that keeps telling those damned jokes.
Especially when you go messing with it's stability by drilling holes in it and altering it's integrity by drawing energy from it...
Something about that doesn't sound right to me...
I'm glad the author of the article did enough research to know who was who...
http://www.gamerevolution.com/oldsite/articles/vio lence/violence.htm
yes they did, but it's been in a top secret underground facility for decades
I have a problem seeing how we should be worried...
So... naive college students are having troubles understanding something that was specifically designed to be confusing in order to prey upon the naive?
They said Adobe Reader, which last I checked was completely free and does a better job rendering than any open source PDF program does. Don't get me wrong, it has enough issues I typically use xpdf or other programs, but I still keep a copy of Acrobat Reader around because certain things just don't render correctly in anything else.
It's been a long time since I've seen it... but isn't that what the original movie was all about as well?
Bravo.
They stop running around 5, or shortly after. The problem is, if you get off at 5, you can at most grab one bus, assuming you are close enough to a stop to get there before the bus would go by for the last time. But you have to transfer to get anywhere in town, so unfortunatly the best you can do is to get somewhere between the bus stop closest to where you work (if there is one close at all) and the downtown loop... Which essentially means unless you live in the same area as your job or in one of the college dorms downtown, you can't do it.
And yes... they should be fired... from a cannon. I kid you not, a bond to do unneccisary road work (that should have been taken care of in their budget anyways) that was pitched as "to improve traffic problems in downtown" (despite being entirely on a far edge of town, and I'll let you guess as to the income level of people in that area..) was voted down, then suddenly the timing on the traffic lights downtown were changed, causing traffic jams at numerous times of the day and slowing traffic in general way down (you can get across downtown faster on 25mph limit side roads than taking the 40mph limit main roads...) Some people here see a connection.
The only way public transit would work in the US would be if people stopped moving out of cities and started moving back. Good public transit requires that kind of clumpiness.
I assure you the town I live in is plenty 'clumpy' enough to support a good public transit system, however I doubt any of the bus routes here have more than a quarter full for more than a couple hours a day. It's not that people aren't here to support it, but because everyone seems to be taught to treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with and that they need to have their own car.
To make matters worse the bus system here was designed around a busy downtown, which is now nearly desolate (save for bars, bars, and more bars), so they are shut down an hour too early to take a bus home if you work a 'normal' 9-5 job... If the bus system can't support people working 9-5 jobs, it's lost out on a huge part of it's potention passengers.
Oh yeah... shouldn't be hard to see I think the politicians here are among the ones that think public transit is a disease.
This may surprise you, but not everyone in the world has a driver's license at age 16. Hell, in a lot of countries the minimum age is 17, 18, or even higher. And believe it or not, in large portions of the world a substantial (majority?) of people don't have a driver's license and depend on public transit systems like rails, subways, and busses. It's a shame that most US citizens can't comprehend the benefits to society of having a good solid public transit system over a crappy (or non existant) public transist with everyone having their own vehicle and thus treat public transit like a disease they want nothing to do with; some even going as far as to redicule anyone who would even think of using public transit. You'd think after 20 or 30 minutes of rush hour traffic just about anyone would be converted..
Maybe that wasn't his reason... maybe he just didn't need a car and thus didn't care, maybe he couldn't afford one, or maybe he is a horrible driver. Doesn't really matter, because I don't care about the original topic anymore.. My point still stands in general.
And one day we can hope to see major road ways being smart enough to report traffic levels to navigation systems, which can then offer a different route if the one you are taking is too congested.
None of this is out of the question, and sub meter accuracy would go a long way towards making it happen. When you start getting into 20m-50m error ranges in a downtown area, the system wouldn't even be able to tell what street you are on for sure, which just doesn't cut it. Otherwise all the technology is here... it's just a matter of getting it cheap enough to get enough saturation in the market to make it worthwild to setup the systems.
I'm sorry, but even with a metric buttload of stock he wouldn't have enough, he'll need at least a metric shit-ton to make any difference at all.
The only difference he is going to make is raising the value of their stock by adding another person into the bunch that wants to buy it...
And what if people don't like every song on an album and thus only buy those they do? Maybe we could assume it'd average out to one song per CD per person that they just don't like and thus don't buy. This is a pretty reasonable, and probably very conservative even.
So we are saying that 1 out of 10 songs are crap (10%) and just aren't bought when the songs are bought online. Oddly enough if we assume the entire 40% drop in CD sales went to online sales, that 10% would make up for a 4% drop in sales... which is pretty damn close to the overall drop in music sales. Hmm... Something seems odd here.
If we make the very reasonable assumption (I'd like to see numbers on this, but they don't exist AFAIK) that when buying songs individually on average people decide not to buy a little more than 1 song per CD per person (1.14 to be exact) simply because they know they don't like that song, it accounts for the entire 4.5% "loss" in sales they are reporting.
In other words, the "slump" in music sales are just people not buying crap songs. Hell, I'd bet the number of songs so crappy they don't want to buy is a lot closer to 2 songs per CD per person, if not higher. If thats the case, overall CD sales would actually be up 8%, if you take into account people not buying crap they don't want.
Does it come with more eagle?
They're linux drivers are half-assed
Please pay more attention so we can avoid this useless posting in the future.