You answered a different question, "why do the protagonists sit next to the window?" Not the question i asked, which is "why is the window on the protagonist's left instead of on their right?"
As someone who watches a lot of anime i think this is an interesting question and i am interested in the article. But i still don't understand why it was posted on Slashdot.
But hey, as long as we're asking questions about weird anime stuff, why is it that in high school anime the classrooms are always oriented so that the windows are on the left? (From the students' perspective.) From what i understand this is generally the way real classrooms in Japan are, but that doesn't answer the more fundamental question.
Good advice! But you can do better! Don't eat food at restaurants, you can cook food at home for a lot cheaper! And don't drink beer at a pub, you can drink beer at home for less than a dollar a bottle! Actually, why drink alcohol at all when you can get water for free? Just travel straight from work to home every day and have your break and water for dinner. But why have a home when you could just buy a cheap used van and get a gym membership? You can get a hot pot to cook ramen and eat vitamins and you should be fine! And after a year or two of that you should have enough money saved up that you can go buy some cheap property hundreds of miles away from civilization, get a few basic tools and some seeds and you can build your own log cabin and grow your own food! And don't worry about farming equipment, tens of thousands years ago people got by just by poking holes in the ground with a stick, so you can do the same! You'll never have to spend any money on anything ever again!
More seriously, i'm not going to say that saving money isn't a good thing, but everyone has to make their own decisions about what compromises they're willing to make for that, because making every decision on the basis of what will save you money can lead to some pretty weird behaviour. Some things just aren't worth the trouble. And honestly if you've got a net worth of several hundred million like Kevin O'Leary the amount you can reasonably spend on overpriced coffee is practically a rounding error. And ultimately, what are you saving all that money for if not to make your life a little more comfortable and enjoyable? If you live a miserable life but die with millions in the bank do you think you've "won" at life somehow?
That said; it isn't like other MMOs don't have the diminishing returns system in place as well, wonder why they intentionally hid it?
I'm only familiar with one other MMO, Final Fantasy 14, but that one does not have diminishing returns. You can (if you do the research) know very precisely how much XP any given activity will grant you.
Because of this FF14 actually has the inverse problem. People have calculated the most efficient ways to level. This varies over time based on new content being released and changes in patches, but at various times over the past year the most efficient way to level has been "Palace of the Dead", "Squadron Command Missions", or PvP. This has resulted in complaints that A: doing the same thing over and over and over and over again can get rather tedious, and B: that PvP was being "ruined" because too many people were signing up for PvP matches just for the Exp and not actually doing anything during the match itself.
What boggles me is the "hiding it" part. I'm a little shocked that in Destiny 2 there's apparently no actual hard numbers attached to the experience bar that you can independently verify, and that the player base has (so far) let them get away with that.
True, i guess this is something we can all agree on, regardless of our politics or personal hobby horses. But it would still be great if we could manage to focus this same kind of energy on solving bigger issues.
And to be fair i guess Child's Play is the one case where we do manage to collectively do something big, because you'd have to have some pretty extreme views to think that helping sick children wasn't a good thing.
"EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record."
Okay, i have very mixed feelings about EA and in general i'm fine with people expressing displeasure over them trying to pull off crappy behavior like this. But it's kind of sad that the most unpopular thing on Reddit is because a bunch of people got upset that a company was trying to charge too much for a video game. I'm proud to be a geek, but our tendency to get triggered by relatively trivial issues like this while being collectively blind to bigger issues has got to be one of our greater weaknesses.
I definitely read less as an adult than i did as a kid, and less while in a relationship than when i'm single. In fact these days my "reading" is mostly restricted to audiobooks during my commute. When i'm at home my leisure time is usually spent watching TV or playing FF14 with my SO.
It depends on the lengths of the books involved, but i spend about 40 hours on my commute per month, which works out to one really long book, 2-4 "normal" books, or a larger number of short stories or novellas. However if i get really engrossed in a book i'll find excuses to listen to it at other times.
On audiobook i just finished up Martha Wells' novella "All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)" and stated James Alan Gardner's novel "All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault". My SO and i also listen to audiobooks when we're in the car together, currently we're listening to Sharon Shinn's "Unquiet Land", and when we're not too tired we'll read to each other a little before bed, for which we're currently on Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign".
In theory i sometimes actually read a physical book on my own time at home as well. I picked up "The Last Deathship off Antares" a couple months ago because i wanted to see how it compared to my memories of reading it as a child, but despite it only being about 200 pages i still haven't managed to finish it. (There's always something else to grind out in FF14...) I'm going to have to do something about that soon however. I read the first two of Brandon Sanderson's "Stormlight Archive" books in physical format, so I'll need to change my patterns a bit if i want to continue that habit when "Oathbringer" comes out next week.
I'm with you. I don't want this thing, i think the people who do want this thing may be making a mistake, and i'm worried about the amount of control Amazon is taking over both the retail market and peoples' lives. But using these statistics to argue against the idea is just dumb.
A quick google search shows an article from Forbes claiming that 64% of US households have Prime. There are about 125 million US households, which would mean a little over 81 million households with Prime. If "only 5 percent said they would definitely buy Amazon Key" that would be slightly over 4 million sales. Most retailers would kill for a product that 4 million people would "definitely buy"!
If i'd looked at the URL first i wouldn't have been expecting much from a FOX article, but it failed even to meet those low standards. It says nothing at all about the robot and consists almost entirely of Kaywell's semi-coherent musings on the topic.
A quick search resulted in this article from Bloomberg. Which at least explains what they're talking about, though still not in very great detail.
As expected it's a PR stunt, relating to the "robot city" they're planning to build.
Please please please make a "small" version of the Pixel 2! I was fine with the 3.7" of the Nexus One, but the 4.7" of the Moto X was tolerable as well! I'd happily accept anything in that range!
Also, a curved back like the Moto X and a headphone jack would be great too! K THX BYE!
(Yes, i know i'm shouting into the wind and the odds of getting what i want are probably indistinguishable from zero.)
This is not surprising seeing as the IRS is part of the Administration of He Who Shall Not Be Named Responsible.
I'm actually unsure which administration you're trying to blame for this problem, but the IRS has been around for over a century and a half, there's not really much about it that you can blame on a single administration, or even a single party.
The problem is that we, as a country and quite possibly as a species, just can't math. Or rather we can math, but we then throw it all out the window as soon as emotions get involved.
We've spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on wars and military actions that in some ways have made the problem worse because 3000 people died in a terrorist attack 16 years ago. Meanwhile over _30,000_ people are killed in car accidents every year, that's more than half a million dead since 9/11. Just a fraction of what we've spent on war could probably have saved a lot of lives if it were invested in traffic safety instead. Or just generally made our lives better if invested in numerous other areas.
Likewise we've spent who knows how much time and money and effort fighting over stupid moral issues like abortion and gay rights and drugs when we should be just letting everyone live their own lives and investing that time and money and effort into potential solutions for real practical problems, like properly updating the SSN "system" and how IRS collects information and taxes. But politicians have learned that inciting moral outrage will get out the vote far more effectively than any practical plan to address real problems, so here we are.
And to be fair this is a problem that happens on both sides of the aisle, though each side has different particular issues they try to stir up outrage about.
Also, i'm not sure where the last two disks i received went when i moved. They'll probably want them back before before i can cancel that portion of the account?
Perhaps when it's Waymo/Google's cars that get stuck trying to make a left turn across a four lane road at an uncontrolled non-intersection during rush hour because Google Maps thought that was quicker they'll get around to correcting those suggestions.
That's just Hubris and I am going to store this little nugget for when Cloudflare does get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh.
That's just Hubris and I am going to store this little nugget for when Cloudflare doesn't get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh.
That's just Hubris, and I am going to store both these little nuggets for when Cloudflare does or doesn't get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh. At someone. (This isn't Hubris, this is just good planning.)
I'm very confused by the number of self-professed heterosexual men who are upset about more women being featured in a TV show.
Personally i tend to think everything is better with more women. You could replace the whole crew with women like the captain and first officer and i would be quite happy!
I _suppose_ that after a few years having no male representation in the show might start to wear a bit, but i'd be happy to put that theory to the test. (Especially since it would still presumably be awash in a sea of other male-dominated shows.)
This touches on a dichotomy of intelligence that SF frequently screws up, the difference between sentience and sapience. Sentience means "feeling" and is (generally) the ability to have feelings, perceive the world around you, and be self-aware, while sapience means "wisdom" and is the ability to act with reason using both past experience and intuition as a guide.
Sentience is something that all the higher animals on the planet possess while we believe that sapience is what sets us apart, hence the name Homo Sapiens. Over time we've learned that sapience is not quite so clear-cut, primates, ravens, dolphins, beavers, and others have all challenged the idea in one way or another, but despite that humans obviously have a leg up in the sapience department over every other living creature.
Of course that makes it a bit weird when people talk about looking for (or finding, in SF books) sentient life. There are thousands of species on Earth that are definitely sentient, and although finding sentient life on another planet would obviously be amazing it's _sapient_ aliens that we really want to meet.
However in the case of computers we have created something that is arguably sapient but not sentient. Given the right programming a computer can out-reason any animal, including humans, in a particular area. But they don't have the self-awareness to ask, and answer, their own questions. As soon as you get one iota outside of what they have been programmed to do they fail completely, and if they have been programmed badly they will barrel on ahead performing their assigned task "incorrectly" with no awareness of that fact.
So if we could figure out how to combine the intelligence of machines (sapience) with the intelligence of your dog (sentience) we will have potentially created our own replacement.
Since when is disagreeing with someone the same thing as hating free speech?
Free speech gave the original poster the right to say whatever they wanted, and they exercised that right. It does not guarantee them some kind of "safe space" where they can be free of criticism or counterargument of whatever they choose to say.
The reason free speech was guaranteed by the Founders was in order to allow reasoned debate and criticism, particularly of the government, without fear of retribution by that government. But if people as individuals aren't allowed to disagree with each other then you don't have a debate, you just have a bunch of sheep compelled to follow whoever speaks first.
It's unclear to me how i was being a "snarky know-it-all". I thought i'd read something about it but i wasn't sure, so i asked a question, which hardly seems like a "know-it-all" to me. And aside from that i believe the rest of the post is still accurate. Certainly a lot of conservative groups are strongly supporting the baker's side. (I have mixed feelings about the issue myself.)
The question of whether Google should be treated differently is a legitimate avenue of discussion, and perhaps you should have included that in your first post instead of your snarky addendum of "Unless you're posting this from the future."
I'm not sure why this is an antitrust issue however given that it sounds like the app is alternative to Twitter, which is not owned by Google.
Oops, upon double-checking there was a lot of news about the Department of Justice deciding in favor of the bakers, but i wasn't reading closely enough and thought the Supreme Court had decided in favor of them instead. My bad!
Slashdot Mirror
You answered a different question, "why do the protagonists sit next to the window?" Not the question i asked, which is "why is the window on the protagonist's left instead of on their right?"
As someone who watches a lot of anime i think this is an interesting question and i am interested in the article. But i still don't understand why it was posted on Slashdot.
But hey, as long as we're asking questions about weird anime stuff, why is it that in high school anime the classrooms are always oriented so that the windows are on the left? (From the students' perspective.) From what i understand this is generally the way real classrooms in Japan are, but that doesn't answer the more fundamental question.
I was trying to figure out how to describe what i was experiencing, and this is much better than what i was coming up with! Thanks!
Good advice! But you can do better! Don't eat food at restaurants, you can cook food at home for a lot cheaper! And don't drink beer at a pub, you can drink beer at home for less than a dollar a bottle! Actually, why drink alcohol at all when you can get water for free? Just travel straight from work to home every day and have your break and water for dinner. But why have a home when you could just buy a cheap used van and get a gym membership? You can get a hot pot to cook ramen and eat vitamins and you should be fine! And after a year or two of that you should have enough money saved up that you can go buy some cheap property hundreds of miles away from civilization, get a few basic tools and some seeds and you can build your own log cabin and grow your own food! And don't worry about farming equipment, tens of thousands years ago people got by just by poking holes in the ground with a stick, so you can do the same! You'll never have to spend any money on anything ever again!
More seriously, i'm not going to say that saving money isn't a good thing, but everyone has to make their own decisions about what compromises they're willing to make for that, because making every decision on the basis of what will save you money can lead to some pretty weird behaviour. Some things just aren't worth the trouble. And honestly if you've got a net worth of several hundred million like Kevin O'Leary the amount you can reasonably spend on overpriced coffee is practically a rounding error. And ultimately, what are you saving all that money for if not to make your life a little more comfortable and enjoyable? If you live a miserable life but die with millions in the bank do you think you've "won" at life somehow?
That said; it isn't like other MMOs don't have the diminishing returns system in place as well, wonder why they intentionally hid it?
I'm only familiar with one other MMO, Final Fantasy 14, but that one does not have diminishing returns. You can (if you do the research) know very precisely how much XP any given activity will grant you.
Because of this FF14 actually has the inverse problem. People have calculated the most efficient ways to level. This varies over time based on new content being released and changes in patches, but at various times over the past year the most efficient way to level has been "Palace of the Dead", "Squadron Command Missions", or PvP. This has resulted in complaints that A: doing the same thing over and over and over and over again can get rather tedious, and B: that PvP was being "ruined" because too many people were signing up for PvP matches just for the Exp and not actually doing anything during the match itself.
What boggles me is the "hiding it" part. I'm a little shocked that in Destiny 2 there's apparently no actual hard numbers attached to the experience bar that you can independently verify, and that the player base has (so far) let them get away with that.
True, i guess this is something we can all agree on, regardless of our politics or personal hobby horses. But it would still be great if we could manage to focus this same kind of energy on solving bigger issues.
And to be fair i guess Child's Play is the one case where we do manage to collectively do something big, because you'd have to have some pretty extreme views to think that helping sick children wasn't a good thing.
.
"EA's Reddit account is plastered with a barrage of downvotes, with one particular response receiving over 600,000 downvotes -- a record."
Okay, i have very mixed feelings about EA and in general i'm fine with people expressing displeasure over them trying to pull off crappy behavior like this. But it's kind of sad that the most unpopular thing on Reddit is because a bunch of people got upset that a company was trying to charge too much for a video game. I'm proud to be a geek, but our tendency to get triggered by relatively trivial issues like this while being collectively blind to bigger issues has got to be one of our greater weaknesses.
I definitely read less as an adult than i did as a kid, and less while in a relationship than when i'm single. In fact these days my "reading" is mostly restricted to audiobooks during my commute. When i'm at home my leisure time is usually spent watching TV or playing FF14 with my SO.
It depends on the lengths of the books involved, but i spend about 40 hours on my commute per month, which works out to one really long book, 2-4 "normal" books, or a larger number of short stories or novellas. However if i get really engrossed in a book i'll find excuses to listen to it at other times.
On audiobook i just finished up Martha Wells' novella "All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)" and stated James Alan Gardner's novel "All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault". My SO and i also listen to audiobooks when we're in the car together, currently we're listening to Sharon Shinn's "Unquiet Land", and when we're not too tired we'll read to each other a little before bed, for which we're currently on Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign".
In theory i sometimes actually read a physical book on my own time at home as well. I picked up "The Last Deathship off Antares" a couple months ago because i wanted to see how it compared to my memories of reading it as a child, but despite it only being about 200 pages i still haven't managed to finish it. (There's always something else to grind out in FF14...) I'm going to have to do something about that soon however. I read the first two of Brandon Sanderson's "Stormlight Archive" books in physical format, so I'll need to change my patterns a bit if i want to continue that habit when "Oathbringer" comes out next week.
"It then moved the firm holding most of its untaxed offshore cash, now $252 billion, to the Channel Island of Jersey."
Where is this happening?
Across the Channel in Jersey.
Everything is legal in Jersey.
.
I'm with you. I don't want this thing, i think the people who do want this thing may be making a mistake, and i'm worried about the amount of control Amazon is taking over both the retail market and peoples' lives. But using these statistics to argue against the idea is just dumb.
A quick google search shows an article from Forbes claiming that 64% of US households have Prime. There are about 125 million US households, which would mean a little over 81 million households with Prime. If "only 5 percent said they would definitely buy Amazon Key" that would be slightly over 4 million sales. Most retailers would kill for a product that 4 million people would "definitely buy"!
If i'd looked at the URL first i wouldn't have been expecting much from a FOX article, but it failed even to meet those low standards. It says nothing at all about the robot and consists almost entirely of Kaywell's semi-coherent musings on the topic.
A quick search resulted in this article from Bloomberg. Which at least explains what they're talking about, though still not in very great detail.
As expected it's a PR stunt, relating to the "robot city" they're planning to build.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'"
- Isaac Asimov
Hey, this new plan isn't Beyond Unlimited. This is _beyond_ Beyond Unlimited!
Each of them is not like the others.
Please please please make a "small" version of the Pixel 2! I was fine with the 3.7" of the Nexus One, but the 4.7" of the Moto X was tolerable as well! I'd happily accept anything in that range!
Also, a curved back like the Moto X and a headphone jack would be great too! K THX BYE!
(Yes, i know i'm shouting into the wind and the odds of getting what i want are probably indistinguishable from zero.)
This is not surprising seeing as the IRS is part of the Administration of He Who Shall Not Be Named Responsible.
I'm actually unsure which administration you're trying to blame for this problem, but the IRS has been around for over a century and a half, there's not really much about it that you can blame on a single administration, or even a single party.
The problem is that we, as a country and quite possibly as a species, just can't math. Or rather we can math, but we then throw it all out the window as soon as emotions get involved.
We've spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives on wars and military actions that in some ways have made the problem worse because 3000 people died in a terrorist attack 16 years ago. Meanwhile over _30,000_ people are killed in car accidents every year, that's more than half a million dead since 9/11. Just a fraction of what we've spent on war could probably have saved a lot of lives if it were invested in traffic safety instead. Or just generally made our lives better if invested in numerous other areas.
Likewise we've spent who knows how much time and money and effort fighting over stupid moral issues like abortion and gay rights and drugs when we should be just letting everyone live their own lives and investing that time and money and effort into potential solutions for real practical problems, like properly updating the SSN "system" and how IRS collects information and taxes. But politicians have learned that inciting moral outrage will get out the vote far more effectively than any practical plan to address real problems, so here we are.
And to be fair this is a problem that happens on both sides of the aisle, though each side has different particular issues they try to stir up outrage about.
Obligatory Penny Arcade
Also, i'm not sure where the last two disks i received went when i moved. They'll probably want them back before before i can cancel that portion of the account?
Perhaps when it's Waymo/Google's cars that get stuck trying to make a left turn across a four lane road at an uncontrolled non-intersection during rush hour because Google Maps thought that was quicker they'll get around to correcting those suggestions.
That's just Hubris and I am going to store this little nugget for when Cloudflare does get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh.
That's just Hubris and I am going to store this little nugget for when Cloudflare doesn't get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh.
That's just Hubris, and I am going to store both these little nuggets for when Cloudflare does or doesn't get DDoS'd. Then I will laugh. At someone. (This isn't Hubris, this is just good planning.)
I'm very confused by the number of self-professed heterosexual men who are upset about more women being featured in a TV show.
Personally i tend to think everything is better with more women. You could replace the whole crew with women like the captain and first officer and i would be quite happy!
I _suppose_ that after a few years having no male representation in the show might start to wear a bit, but i'd be happy to put that theory to the test. (Especially since it would still presumably be awash in a sea of other male-dominated shows.)
.
This touches on a dichotomy of intelligence that SF frequently screws up, the difference between sentience and sapience. Sentience means "feeling" and is (generally) the ability to have feelings, perceive the world around you, and be self-aware, while sapience means "wisdom" and is the ability to act with reason using both past experience and intuition as a guide.
Sentience is something that all the higher animals on the planet possess while we believe that sapience is what sets us apart, hence the name Homo Sapiens. Over time we've learned that sapience is not quite so clear-cut, primates, ravens, dolphins, beavers, and others have all challenged the idea in one way or another, but despite that humans obviously have a leg up in the sapience department over every other living creature.
Of course that makes it a bit weird when people talk about looking for (or finding, in SF books) sentient life. There are thousands of species on Earth that are definitely sentient, and although finding sentient life on another planet would obviously be amazing it's _sapient_ aliens that we really want to meet.
However in the case of computers we have created something that is arguably sapient but not sentient. Given the right programming a computer can out-reason any animal, including humans, in a particular area. But they don't have the self-awareness to ask, and answer, their own questions. As soon as you get one iota outside of what they have been programmed to do they fail completely, and if they have been programmed badly they will barrel on ahead performing their assigned task "incorrectly" with no awareness of that fact.
So if we could figure out how to combine the intelligence of machines (sapience) with the intelligence of your dog (sentience) we will have potentially created our own replacement.
For me it's Ginger Ale that i'll guzzle on plane flights but never touch on the ground.
Since when is disagreeing with someone the same thing as hating free speech?
Free speech gave the original poster the right to say whatever they wanted, and they exercised that right. It does not guarantee them some kind of "safe space" where they can be free of criticism or counterargument of whatever they choose to say.
The reason free speech was guaranteed by the Founders was in order to allow reasoned debate and criticism, particularly of the government, without fear of retribution by that government. But if people as individuals aren't allowed to disagree with each other then you don't have a debate, you just have a bunch of sheep compelled to follow whoever speaks first.
It's unclear to me how i was being a "snarky know-it-all". I thought i'd read something about it but i wasn't sure, so i asked a question, which hardly seems like a "know-it-all" to me. And aside from that i believe the rest of the post is still accurate. Certainly a lot of conservative groups are strongly supporting the baker's side. (I have mixed feelings about the issue myself.)
The question of whether Google should be treated differently is a legitimate avenue of discussion, and perhaps you should have included that in your first post instead of your snarky addendum of "Unless you're posting this from the future."
I'm not sure why this is an antitrust issue however given that it sounds like the app is alternative to Twitter, which is not owned by Google.
Oops, upon double-checking there was a lot of news about the Department of Justice deciding in favor of the bakers, but i wasn't reading closely enough and thought the Supreme Court had decided in favor of them instead. My bad!