NeverVotedBush asked three or four interesting questions, and Palaia avoided answering any of them just by saying "Who said we were competing?"
It doesn't answer at all the first question or two of "what do you expect one colony will do if the other fails." It's kind of an answer to the last two questions of "how will competition affect things" and "do you think competition might be detrimental to the projects?" but only by dismissing the question entirely. Every time two companies are doing closely related things in the same field and one of them says "we don't really think we're competing" or something to that effect it's never very convincing. It always comes across either as a slam against the other company, or an attempt to dismiss an obviously worrying concern without admitting it might be a problem.
Two high-cost missions to the same place, both competing for public attention. Yes it's possible for more than one show of the same type to survive on the air, but sometimes one show cannibalizes the audience of the other. Yet it's claimed that they're nor competing, and despite that he doesn't want to discuss how they might cooperate either.
I said "the large small-brained dinosaurs all died". You said the small large-brained dinosaurs (aka birds) survived. What exactly is the conflict? I admit i didn't specifically address the case of birds, but there were a lot of things that survived besides just mammals that i didn't address either. I also said the mammals survived, reproduced and evolved, which they clearly did because here we are right now. I didn't claim they dominated during any specific period.
If you want to champion the case of birds that's fine. However all i did was gave a general outline of a small part of the situation, and nothing i said was grossly inaccurate, so please stop trying to frame things as if that were the case.
It took me 5-10 seconds of trying to slide the outer cover off before i realized it really wanted to slide in the other direction, and then another 5-10 seconds to wedge the lid off the box (after cutting the tape of course.) Is it slightly harder to open than some packaging i've seen? Yes. Is it in any way comparable to clamshell packaging? Not even close. Is this whole thing being blown way out of proportion? Definitely
Actually, there's a "popular" opinion among paleontologists now that a lot of the dinosaurs were warm blooded, or something like it. So that's not a sufficient explanation. Size was probably a much bigger factor, which is part of what this whole study was about. When times are good, being large helps you out-compete others. When times are hard, like after an asteroid strike or while a particular large-brain mammal is busy destroying the planet, being small makes it easier to hide and lets you get by on less food.
And pointing out that in the real world trends don't continue on infinitely isn't really contributing anything unless you've got at least a theory, and preferably some kind of experiment, to establish where exactly those boundaries are. Just shouting "Being small and big-brained is good, but if you get too small then you don't have any room for a brain!" or "Being large is good, but if you get too large the square-cube law means you won't be able to move!" doesn't contribute a great deal.
But even so, we're rather large ourselves. If we kill off ourselves but don't manage to kill off all other life on the planet, it's quite likely that we'll take most of the other large animals with us, but quite a number of small large-brained animals will survive. (Rats in particular strike me as being pretty good survivors.) So the theory _still_ holds.
Hmmm, so what happened in that case? Let's see, the large small-brained dinosaurs all died, while some of the small large-brained mammals survived, reproduced, and evolved. Exactly matching up with the research in this study. So what's the question exactly? I mean i could come up with a bunch of theories as to the exact ways in which relatively big brains helped the mammals survive, but that seems slightly outside the scope of the discussion.
Alternatively one could formulate a hypothesis, make a prediction based on your hypothesis, figure out a way to test that prediction (either by direct experiment or comparison to previous measurements), perform the test, and verify the results. Welcome to science! You may like it here!
...oh sorry, nevermind, from the above it seems that you're of the "make a wild-ass guess and then go home and call it a day" philosophy. I suppose it's always easy to make fun of people doing the actual work than to do it yourself.
More seriously you're also entirely skipping over the part where they determined the benefit of intelligence vs the detriment of being large.
There shouldn't be a lot of rules about what is and isn't allowed in such an Olympics, but i think the #1 rule ought to be "No strap-ons" unless specifically allowed by the particular event. By which i mean no strapping on an exoskeleton just before the even, racing to the finish line, then taking it off again.
If they want to get extra servos surgically implanted in their legs, or replace their legs completely with something mechanical that they have to deal with in their day to day life, that's fine. But as soon as you start allowing temporary attachments you're going to get into arguments about why an exoskeleton should be allowed and a motorcycle or car or jet plane shouldn't. And although it would be great for a couple events where it's specifically allowed i don't think you'd want _every_ event to devolve into who can come up with the biggest, strongest, fastest set of Starship Troopers/MechWarrior armor.
Personally i don't keep my Facebook account because of friends. I keep it because of the food trucks that i like that put their detailed posts on facebook, and the groups/organizations i'm interested in that send out updates about what is going on when via facebook.
In short i need to use it to keep track of groups that have no particular interest in me as an individual and aren't going to go out of their way to keep me updated if i choose to exclude myself from their usual channel of communication.
Maybe what you suggest will work for people more concerned about friends than events, but it's also possible that you either have better friends or are more charismatic than others. My friends all know that i don't actually read my facebook feed, and yet when most of them jumped ship from LJ to facebook about half of them stopped talking to me instead of keeping me updated via some other means. I'm apparently a boring kind of guy, and if i don't make the effort to keep in contact with them where they choose to be then a lot of them just tend to forget about me. If i wanted to renew/maintain those friendships i'd have to seek them out on facebook. And to be fair, do i have any more of a right to insist that they keep checking LJ than they do to insist that i start checking facebook? (And on the plus side, with a small number of them we've managed to reconnect on G+ =)
I regret the loss of so much socialization, but i'm just not willing to deal with staying glued to facebook on a daily basis to get it. I doubt everyone else in the same situation feels that way however.
There's also the fact that a number of people (including me) only use Facebook because they feel "forced" to do so. Friends or family members they want to keep in touch with only use Facebook, or events they want to be notified of are only announced on Facebook, or some game or website or something forces people to use Facebook to participate.
That "forcing" is part of what keeps Facebook's numbers so high, but it also leads to discontent. No one likes being forced into something, and it tends to aggravate any negative feelings they already have. On the other hand no one (except possibly Google employees =) feels forced to use G+. If you're there, it's because you want to be there.
I have noticed some swings in G+ activity, at least amongst the people i follow. Sometimes it slows down to four or five dedicated people/groups posting on a somewhat regular basis, sometimes it swings up. Currently it seems to be in a bit of an upswing with about a dozen "regular" posters, but that's a _very_ small and biased bit of anecdotal data.
A quick check of my circles shows about two dozen people who post occasionally, about a dozen of which post on a fairly regular basis, and if i'm counting right seven have posted in the last 24 hours. Oh, and that's not counting the two Google topics i follow. I have two friends who work for Google who post occasionally, but i also have three or four friends who work for Google and never post at all.
I certainly wouldn't mind those numbers being a little higher, and perhaps i should go out looking for a few more interesting people to follow, but that doesn't seem too bad to me.
Obviously this is a theoretical discussion since you're not interested in men, but why the hell would you bother hiding that?
Here i am, a moderately smart and very geeky guy hoping to find a smart and geeky girl and being frustrated by the relatively small number of such women. The idea that there are some of them out there trying to camouflage what they are is even more frustrating!
And what value does it serve? Say you (again theoretically/generically speaking) manage to successfully hide your brains and attract a guy based on the misrepresentation? Are you then going to continue the lie for the entire rest of your life? Or do you think that revealing later that you're not what you presented yourself is won't have any negative effects?
Why not just be who you actually are and attract those who appreciate it in the first place?
You're either trying to compare apples to oranges or just trying to derail the conversation, i'm not sure which. There is a group of people in America who buy unsubsidized phones and get cheaper plans from places like T-Mobile, but i'm relatively confident those people are not the ones potentially interested in buying the Lumia. If those people did not buy the Lumia they would buy some other subsidized phone. The amount you pay for the subsidy does not vary based on the price of the phone you buy, the carrier charges the same rate for plans with a subsidy (and for plans without a subsidy if you're not smart) because they want the subsidy charge to be invisible.
So from the perspective of those consumers that phone costs $50. Which makes you wonder why Nokia doesn't just cut their marketing budget in half and pay people $50 to take the phone. Even if it doubled their "sales" that way they'd still come out ahead.
Very much agreed. It may have been the poor and powerless who originally came up with the idea that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for having such shit lives, but once the idea got around the rich and powerful were quite happy to encourage them. Especially when the religion became popular enough that large sums of money were being given to the church by the moderately well off and somewhat influential middle class.
So the poor get comfort (valid or not) and one set of rich people get a less rebellious populace to govern while another set of rich people get large piles of cash and power. Something for everyone!
Most of the time i drive fast because i like driving fast. Honestly the amount of time saved by going 85 or 90 instead of 70 is pretty trivial. But here's the thing about driving fast, at least for me. It's really not the same thing if someone _else_ is driving fast while i'm in the car. At best it makes no impression at all, at worst it's terrifying. You don't get the same sense of zooming down the freeway when you're not at the wheel.
So i think if you _really_ want to drive fast, you're not going to be interested in an autonomous vehicle. If you're interested in an autonomous vehicle it's because you don't want to deal with the hassle of driving yourself. And if you're kicking back reading or cruising the internet or whatever while the car drives itself, do you really care if a 15 mile commute takes 11 minutes at 85 mph or 13 minutes at 70 mph?
I'm sure the speed limits will be raised for autonomous vehicles once there are enough of them to make a difference, but it will be purely for logistic reasons, not because rich speed demons are demanding to be driven by a CPU at a higher velocity.
(And for that matter, the people rich enough to influence laws to that degree already have autonomous vehicles. They come with a special module called a "chauffeur" which can be directed to drive at whatever speed they want, traffic permitting.)
Well to be fair, CM9 has apparently only been out for a couple weeks, and not everyone is aware of it (well, i wasn't at least till just now.)
And even so, if you honestly feel that Google is going in the wrong direction with some aspect of the UI there's nothing wrong with speaking up about it instead of just saying "Well i've got what i want thanks to CyanogenMod and all the less technical users who are stuck with whatever Google decides can go suck it."
From what i understand CM7 was based on 2.3 Gingerbread. The disappearing menu/settings button was only introduced in 3.0 Honeycomb and carried over to 4.0 ICS and 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Thanks! That's good to know. I haven't actually experimented much with Cyanogen yet because i've never felt to need to install it on my Nexus One. (I'm trying to hold out until the rumored five new Nexus phones this fall.) But i'm definitely going to be looking into it once i get my Nexus 7.
Is an option to add back the settings/menu button. I like having the settings always in a known and easy to reach place rather than depending on the app author to place it someplace convenient. And i wouldn't mind having the search button back either. Really the bottom button bar ought to be much more configurable than it is.
I love FF and enjoyed Elite Beat Agents but do not want to encourage developers to nickel and time customers with DLC micro-transactions.
A slight reality check here. Elite Beat Agent had 16 basic tracks and 3 unlockable tracks.
Theatrhythm comes with about 80 songs, a couple of which are apparently only used in special situations, but over 70 of which are "general" songs.
So you think having about four times as many songs as Elite Beat Agents isn't good enough? Or are you just so offended at the idea of DLC that you refuse to buy any game that offers it, no matter how much content is included in the base package? Are you also waiting out on Rock Band 3 until they offer a deluxe package that offers all 3,500 or so songs in a single package for a low low price?
(The disastrous MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV is conspicuously absent.)
Well that's a shame! In retrospect the only good thing about FF14 was that they got Nobuo Uematsu to "come back" and do the soundtrack. (Well, hired him and his studio on contract rather.)
I got ahold of an early leak of the soundtrack and it was enough to get me kind of excited about the game, despite never having played an MMO before. Then of course the game was actually released and the reviews started coming in and there went that idea.
But still, the music was the only redeeming feature of the game, so it's kind of a shame that they didn't include it in the one context where the quality of the music is the only thing that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook and Wal-Mart. That's certainly a marriage made in... well, somewhere significant definitely.
NeverVotedBush asked three or four interesting questions, and Palaia avoided answering any of them just by saying "Who said we were competing?"
It doesn't answer at all the first question or two of "what do you expect one colony will do if the other fails." It's kind of an answer to the last two questions of "how will competition affect things" and "do you think competition might be detrimental to the projects?" but only by dismissing the question entirely. Every time two companies are doing closely related things in the same field and one of them says "we don't really think we're competing" or something to that effect it's never very convincing. It always comes across either as a slam against the other company, or an attempt to dismiss an obviously worrying concern without admitting it might be a problem.
Two high-cost missions to the same place, both competing for public attention. Yes it's possible for more than one show of the same type to survive on the air, but sometimes one show cannibalizes the audience of the other. Yet it's claimed that they're nor competing, and despite that he doesn't want to discuss how they might cooperate either.
I said "the large small-brained dinosaurs all died". You said the small large-brained dinosaurs (aka birds) survived. What exactly is the conflict? I admit i didn't specifically address the case of birds, but there were a lot of things that survived besides just mammals that i didn't address either. I also said the mammals survived, reproduced and evolved, which they clearly did because here we are right now. I didn't claim they dominated during any specific period.
If you want to champion the case of birds that's fine. However all i did was gave a general outline of a small part of the situation, and nothing i said was grossly inaccurate, so please stop trying to frame things as if that were the case.
It took me 5-10 seconds of trying to slide the outer cover off before i realized it really wanted to slide in the other direction, and then another 5-10 seconds to wedge the lid off the box (after cutting the tape of course.) Is it slightly harder to open than some packaging i've seen? Yes. Is it in any way comparable to clamshell packaging? Not even close. Is this whole thing being blown way out of proportion? Definitely
Actually, there's a "popular" opinion among paleontologists now that a lot of the dinosaurs were warm blooded, or something like it. So that's not a sufficient explanation. Size was probably a much bigger factor, which is part of what this whole study was about. When times are good, being large helps you out-compete others. When times are hard, like after an asteroid strike or while a particular large-brain mammal is busy destroying the planet, being small makes it easier to hide and lets you get by on less food.
And pointing out that in the real world trends don't continue on infinitely isn't really contributing anything unless you've got at least a theory, and preferably some kind of experiment, to establish where exactly those boundaries are. Just shouting "Being small and big-brained is good, but if you get too small then you don't have any room for a brain!" or "Being large is good, but if you get too large the square-cube law means you won't be able to move!" doesn't contribute a great deal.
But even so, we're rather large ourselves. If we kill off ourselves but don't manage to kill off all other life on the planet, it's quite likely that we'll take most of the other large animals with us, but quite a number of small large-brained animals will survive. (Rats in particular strike me as being pretty good survivors.) So the theory _still_ holds.
Hmmm, so what happened in that case? Let's see, the large small-brained dinosaurs all died, while some of the small large-brained mammals survived, reproduced, and evolved. Exactly matching up with the research in this study. So what's the question exactly? I mean i could come up with a bunch of theories as to the exact ways in which relatively big brains helped the mammals survive, but that seems slightly outside the scope of the discussion.
Alternatively one could formulate a hypothesis, make a prediction based on your hypothesis, figure out a way to test that prediction (either by direct experiment or comparison to previous measurements), perform the test, and verify the results. Welcome to science! You may like it here!
...oh sorry, nevermind, from the above it seems that you're of the "make a wild-ass guess and then go home and call it a day" philosophy. I suppose it's always easy to make fun of people doing the actual work than to do it yourself.
More seriously you're also entirely skipping over the part where they determined the benefit of intelligence vs the detriment of being large.
There shouldn't be a lot of rules about what is and isn't allowed in such an Olympics, but i think the #1 rule ought to be "No strap-ons" unless specifically allowed by the particular event. By which i mean no strapping on an exoskeleton just before the even, racing to the finish line, then taking it off again.
If they want to get extra servos surgically implanted in their legs, or replace their legs completely with something mechanical that they have to deal with in their day to day life, that's fine. But as soon as you start allowing temporary attachments you're going to get into arguments about why an exoskeleton should be allowed and a motorcycle or car or jet plane shouldn't. And although it would be great for a couple events where it's specifically allowed i don't think you'd want _every_ event to devolve into who can come up with the biggest, strongest, fastest set of Starship Troopers/MechWarrior armor.
Personally i don't keep my Facebook account because of friends. I keep it because of the food trucks that i like that put their detailed posts on facebook, and the groups/organizations i'm interested in that send out updates about what is going on when via facebook.
In short i need to use it to keep track of groups that have no particular interest in me as an individual and aren't going to go out of their way to keep me updated if i choose to exclude myself from their usual channel of communication.
Maybe what you suggest will work for people more concerned about friends than events, but it's also possible that you either have better friends or are more charismatic than others. My friends all know that i don't actually read my facebook feed, and yet when most of them jumped ship from LJ to facebook about half of them stopped talking to me instead of keeping me updated via some other means. I'm apparently a boring kind of guy, and if i don't make the effort to keep in contact with them where they choose to be then a lot of them just tend to forget about me. If i wanted to renew/maintain those friendships i'd have to seek them out on facebook. And to be fair, do i have any more of a right to insist that they keep checking LJ than they do to insist that i start checking facebook? (And on the plus side, with a small number of them we've managed to reconnect on G+ =)
I regret the loss of so much socialization, but i'm just not willing to deal with staying glued to facebook on a daily basis to get it. I doubt everyone else in the same situation feels that way however.
There's also the fact that a number of people (including me) only use Facebook because they feel "forced" to do so. Friends or family members they want to keep in touch with only use Facebook, or events they want to be notified of are only announced on Facebook, or some game or website or something forces people to use Facebook to participate.
That "forcing" is part of what keeps Facebook's numbers so high, but it also leads to discontent. No one likes being forced into something, and it tends to aggravate any negative feelings they already have. On the other hand no one (except possibly Google employees =) feels forced to use G+. If you're there, it's because you want to be there.
I have noticed some swings in G+ activity, at least amongst the people i follow. Sometimes it slows down to four or five dedicated people/groups posting on a somewhat regular basis, sometimes it swings up. Currently it seems to be in a bit of an upswing with about a dozen "regular" posters, but that's a _very_ small and biased bit of anecdotal data.
A quick check of my circles shows about two dozen people who post occasionally, about a dozen of which post on a fairly regular basis, and if i'm counting right seven have posted in the last 24 hours. Oh, and that's not counting the two Google topics i follow. I have two friends who work for Google who post occasionally, but i also have three or four friends who work for Google and never post at all.
I certainly wouldn't mind those numbers being a little higher, and perhaps i should go out looking for a few more interesting people to follow, but that doesn't seem too bad to me.
Obviously this is a theoretical discussion since you're not interested in men, but why the hell would you bother hiding that?
Here i am, a moderately smart and very geeky guy hoping to find a smart and geeky girl and being frustrated by the relatively small number of such women. The idea that there are some of them out there trying to camouflage what they are is even more frustrating!
And what value does it serve? Say you (again theoretically/generically speaking) manage to successfully hide your brains and attract a guy based on the misrepresentation? Are you then going to continue the lie for the entire rest of your life? Or do you think that revealing later that you're not what you presented yourself is won't have any negative effects?
Why not just be who you actually are and attract those who appreciate it in the first place?
You're either trying to compare apples to oranges or just trying to derail the conversation, i'm not sure which. There is a group of people in America who buy unsubsidized phones and get cheaper plans from places like T-Mobile, but i'm relatively confident those people are not the ones potentially interested in buying the Lumia. If those people did not buy the Lumia they would buy some other subsidized phone. The amount you pay for the subsidy does not vary based on the price of the phone you buy, the carrier charges the same rate for plans with a subsidy (and for plans without a subsidy if you're not smart) because they want the subsidy charge to be invisible.
So from the perspective of those consumers that phone costs $50. Which makes you wonder why Nokia doesn't just cut their marketing budget in half and pay people $50 to take the phone. Even if it doubled their "sales" that way they'd still come out ahead.
Very much agreed. It may have been the poor and powerless who originally came up with the idea that they would be rewarded in the afterlife for having such shit lives, but once the idea got around the rich and powerful were quite happy to encourage them. Especially when the religion became popular enough that large sums of money were being given to the church by the moderately well off and somewhat influential middle class.
So the poor get comfort (valid or not) and one set of rich people get a less rebellious populace to govern while another set of rich people get large piles of cash and power. Something for everyone!
Entirely correct, except that what may be new now is that those asteroids may _not_ be from further away than first anticipated.
recent hype surrounding 3-D display technology has finally peaked and begun to subside.
Well, screw it then, I'm going to LOOT THE VENDING MACHINE!
but then you took a Twix bar to the knee?
Most of the time i drive fast because i like driving fast. Honestly the amount of time saved by going 85 or 90 instead of 70 is pretty trivial. But here's the thing about driving fast, at least for me. It's really not the same thing if someone _else_ is driving fast while i'm in the car. At best it makes no impression at all, at worst it's terrifying. You don't get the same sense of zooming down the freeway when you're not at the wheel.
So i think if you _really_ want to drive fast, you're not going to be interested in an autonomous vehicle. If you're interested in an autonomous vehicle it's because you don't want to deal with the hassle of driving yourself. And if you're kicking back reading or cruising the internet or whatever while the car drives itself, do you really care if a 15 mile commute takes 11 minutes at 85 mph or 13 minutes at 70 mph?
I'm sure the speed limits will be raised for autonomous vehicles once there are enough of them to make a difference, but it will be purely for logistic reasons, not because rich speed demons are demanding to be driven by a CPU at a higher velocity.
(And for that matter, the people rich enough to influence laws to that degree already have autonomous vehicles. They come with a special module called a "chauffeur" which can be directed to drive at whatever speed they want, traffic permitting.)
Yo dawg, i heard you _really_ like watching TV, so i put a LCD panel inside your LCD panel inside your LCD panel inside your LCD panel....
Well to be fair, CM9 has apparently only been out for a couple weeks, and not everyone is aware of it (well, i wasn't at least till just now.)
And even so, if you honestly feel that Google is going in the wrong direction with some aspect of the UI there's nothing wrong with speaking up about it instead of just saying "Well i've got what i want thanks to CyanogenMod and all the less technical users who are stuck with whatever Google decides can go suck it."
From what i understand CM7 was based on 2.3 Gingerbread. The disappearing menu/settings button was only introduced in 3.0 Honeycomb and carried over to 4.0 ICS and 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Thanks! That's good to know. I haven't actually experimented much with Cyanogen yet because i've never felt to need to install it on my Nexus One. (I'm trying to hold out until the rumored five new Nexus phones this fall.) But i'm definitely going to be looking into it once i get my Nexus 7.
Is an option to add back the settings/menu button. I like having the settings always in a known and easy to reach place rather than depending on the app author to place it someplace convenient. And i wouldn't mind having the search button back either. Really the bottom button bar ought to be much more configurable than it is.
I love FF and enjoyed Elite Beat Agents but do not want to encourage developers to nickel and time customers with DLC micro-transactions.
A slight reality check here. Elite Beat Agent had 16 basic tracks and 3 unlockable tracks.
Theatrhythm comes with about 80 songs, a couple of which are apparently only used in special situations, but over 70 of which are "general" songs.
So you think having about four times as many songs as Elite Beat Agents isn't good enough? Or are you just so offended at the idea of DLC that you refuse to buy any game that offers it, no matter how much content is included in the base package? Are you also waiting out on Rock Band 3 until they offer a deluxe package that offers all 3,500 or so songs in a single package for a low low price?
(The disastrous MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV is conspicuously absent.)
Well that's a shame! In retrospect the only good thing about FF14 was that they got Nobuo Uematsu to "come back" and do the soundtrack. (Well, hired him and his studio on contract rather.)
I got ahold of an early leak of the soundtrack and it was enough to get me kind of excited about the game, despite never having played an MMO before. Then of course the game was actually released and the reviews started coming in and there went that idea.
But still, the music was the only redeeming feature of the game, so it's kind of a shame that they didn't include it in the one context where the quality of the music is the only thing that matters.