Why the hell should I have to register to take a picture of myself.
The magazine is aimed at amateurs, at people looking to hook up with other people who like sex. Why the hell should you have to register your personal habits?
Not to mention the fact that it is very different being a new player in an established multiplayer community from being a new player in a new community. It's a lot more fun (in my opinion) to be around as new strategies and techniques are developed (and possibly discover some of them yourself before your opponents have seen them) instead of walking into a world where if you don't play like the guides say to, you're going to get owned.
This can be even worse in MMO type games, where depending on how many new people the game is getting, you can spend a lot of time playing the "Massively Multiplayer" game alone until your character is strong enough to play with most of the people you meet.
Seems like this should have been fairly simple to resolve. Kick the google van off their property (they did have "no trespassing" signs up) and have google remove the offending issues.
Assigning damaging here is ridiculous, aside from possibly some minor amount to cover the plaintiff's legal costs.
I think it really, really depends on what part of the country (or the world) you're in.
There are almost no roofs in the midwest that are not asphalt shingles. I believe this is fairly different in the southwest. I'm not sure the exact reasons (my guess would be something to do with snow, but it could be relative availability of materials).
But yes, shingle roofs are still hugely common in certain areas of the country. In two years doing residential buildings in Minnesota I never did a roof that wasn't shingles.
Oh, they failed miserably... but they learned from it, and had a fair idea by the end of it what sort of things worked and what didn't. The books written by generals researching what happened in Vietnam are what guide our current strategy in Iraq since Petraeus took over.
On the steel issue.. a large part of that problem is using vehicles for purposes they were never designed for.
A humvee is supposed to be a relatively light support vehicle that follows behind the front. It was not generally designed to get shot at - adding extra armor plates is a lot of weight that significantly changes how the vehicle handles.
By taking our army that was designed to kick ass and take names against another army, throwing them into anti-insurgency duty where they have to deal with civilians who may or may not be setting bomb, we've gone completely outside of the expected parameters our military was designed for. Once you come to this realization, it takes a lot of time to actually design, build, and install hundreds of armor plates, assuming that your distributors even have free space on the machines to do it (since they're probably full up making armor plates for your armored vehicles). The Iraq war has been like trying to use an attack dog as a seeing eye dog - he probably capable of learning how, but he just isn't set up for it.
The interesting thing to me is that, according to the articles I've read, the US military actively dismantled their anti-insurgency units and doctrines after Vietnam over concerns that if we had units trained to do this sort of thing, leadership would be dumb enough to try to do it again. Never underestimate the stupidity of government leaders, I guess.
Without getting in massive trouble from animal rights advocacy groups? Announcing that you are releasing a bunch of cats into an area crowded with cars, feral cats, dogs, and mean people just seems like a lawsuit waiting to happening.
Creationists, and a lot of people on the edge of the debate who haven't learned anything about science since junior high.
At least in my school, evolution was presented at least half of the time by teachers who didn't believe in it but were required to teach it, and in any case, we never got farther than Mendel in genetics. So to the vast majority of people, evolution begins and ends with Darwin because that's all they were ever taught about. And so they are willing to believe the creationist attacks on "Darwinism," because they don't realize that many of the criticisms of Darwin's original theory have already been found and fixed by scientists. If all you ever heard about science was what I learned in school and what you see on the nightly news, you'd think that biologists had been sitting on their asses for the last hundred years worshipping this guy.
I don't normally feed the trolls, but relax. I was just letting people know that there are limitations to this sort of thing that you have to work around, even when it comes to games. In the camera case, it's generally an easy fix - do whatever transformations you need from world space in double precision on the CPU. From the general opinion here, though ("you never need precision for games") it seemed as though people didn't recognize some of these exceptions that one might have to work around.
You won't notice if it is "off", but you will notice if it is inconsistent. It will result in a strangely flashing or pulsating pixel every time something influencing it moves. Think aliasing.
If you apply it to something a little more important than a single pixel value (like, say, the location and rotation of your camera) you get much more disturbing effects.
Most current GPU's only work in single precision floating point, and in many(most) it is less than 32 bit precision. This is usually fine for the scale of objects you are dealing with in most video games, but in some types of game (for example, flight sims) it is something you have to make sure you pay attention to when you design your engine.
There are a few areas where games care a little bit about accuracy. You've got to be really careful about it in any kind of flight game with playing fields of more than a few miles in size. It's amazing the kind of graphical artifacts you can get if you don't take the error in floating points into account when you handle that sort of thing. In our first naive implementation of the engine, at around 50 kilometers out every character would jitter constantly every time they moved because of the last floating point bits being inaccurate.
The problem with the monomyth is that it is generic enough that you can find a way to fit nearly any story into its form. And you may even be right (it is disgustingly overused, I agree) but oftentimes that isn't the interesting part.
You could argue Fight Club is a monomyth - the narrator goes through various trials with his mentor which he has to overcome and learn from, and eventually has to become separate from him and grow into his own person, sometime around rescuing the girl. But that isn't the part that makes it an interesting movie at all.
Saying that a movie generally conforms to the monomyth tells me jack squat about whether the movie is interesting, and how. Taking the king of monomythism, Star Wars, as an example - and someone tells you "I can't believe he was his father!" You can know that it's a monomyth - hell, you kind of assume it once the movie is established as a fantasy-scifi setting - but that doesn't mess with the story anywhere close to as much as the above quote. Monomythism just lets you know that Luke is probably going to be a lot more special than you'd expect out of a random farmboy - and I don't think anyone considered that a surprise at all.
On other hand, even knowing that there *is* a major twist can completely change how you watch something.
SPOILER WARNING (sortof)
Before I watched Fight Club, someone had given me vague ideas that the twist was good, so I was watching the whole movie for the twist, and figured it out about a half hour before anyone else in the room did, and long before the movie actually presents it to you. Whereas when I watched the Sixth Sense, I knew nothing about the movie going in, and the twist caught me completely by surprise. You watch clues in a movie very differently when you know you should be looking for them.
There's a scene in FEAR where the lights go out in an elevator, and suddenly the antagonist is standing right next to you in it, with nowhere to go and nothing you can do to save yourself. Some of my (admittedly, younger) friends literally fell out of their chairs during that scene, then talked about it incessantly for weeks. By the time I played the game and got there, my only reaction was "hey, this is that elevator scene they were talking about. Yeah, I can see this being a little creepy."
What I'm saying is that little innocuous bits of knowledge can completely change how you approach something, because the way you have a good twist or surprise in a movie/video game is by leading up to it with other innocuous bits of information that you aren't supposed to know that you need to pay attention to. That way when it happens, everything "clicks" in your head, and the twist makes sense, but you don't come to the proper conclusion more than a couple seconds or minutes before it is revealed. Just knowing that you need to be paying attention to those details makes it a completely different experience.
A species which does not place its survival first will not remain a species for very long. Your birds would gladly eat the last human on earth if they could.
I'll allow that the situation is more complex than I indicated in a two paragraph forum post:)
DDT does continue to be used worldwide as a local vector control agent. Its unrestricted use as an agricultural pesticide did most likely damage its ability to be used against malaria through the encouragement of resistant strains of the disease.
But many third world countries have had to cut back on DDT use because of pressure from the US aid groups supplying their anti-malaria money. And hundreds of environmentalist groups lobbied hard against allowing it into the 2004 Stockholm Convention. I consider this preference for animal over human life to be strongly misguided, even as someone who is strongly for the protection of animal life when it is reasonable.
I'm sure that the nearly 900,000 people who die a year from malaria are happy our birds are safe. I love birds of prey, too - they are some of the coolest creatures on the planet. But fuck you if you think they're more important than close to a million people a year. If you even reduce that number by half through reasonable DDT usage (I'm not saying farmers should be able to spray it wherever they want to stop whatever pests they want), in the years since DDT was banned you'd have stopped the equivalent of several holocausts.
We should look at the environmental effects of DDT and use it carefully - but you have to balance human and environmental factors here, and in the case of hundreds of thousands of yearly deaths, I'd say the balance shifts a little bit toward the human end.
What ticks me off is not that they are charging more for these extra features - that's fine! I am all for being able to buy a cheaper version of something that doesn't have features I don't need.
But why the hell are they separate versions of the OS instead of applications I can buy?
Why do I have to buy media center edition to install the media center app - why can't I buy JUST media center for $25?
Why isn't touchscreen support a $5 option that OEM's can opt to get?
Why don't they sell Bitlocker as an addon for small business for $50?
These are great *applications*, and I don't have a problem with them offering a bundled version that includes a lot of them together - but why are they tying them to an operating system version? Someone explain to me how that isn't retarded.
evolution is the process of the continuance and betterment of life
This is a common misconception. Evolution is simply the process by which life changes. "Better" as in better able to survive in the new environment than the previous *population*, possibly.
I am saying that natural selection is the process of life and death. Those who survive are the ones who survived - whether they were lucky or better suited - on average, those who are better suited will survive more often, and so therefore you have a change in the population.
Natural selection *requires* death - more specifically, it requires a lack of progeny. If there is no death, there is no evolutionary pressure, and any old idiotic mutation and variant survives. It's a descriptive theory - this is what happens. The result may or may not be beneficial to a specific species, but it is what will happen, and nature will not "care." There is no "working out." There is only what survives.
Now, from our perspective, there are definitely worse and better outcomes (from a standpoint of our own survival and from our constructed moral sensibility). And we should work to encourage those. But natural processes don't have a preference for whether a species gets destroyed by a virus or by over-hunting - whatever is virus resistent or un-tasty can probably survive and fill that niche.
And this is the fun problem with the layman's explanation of evolution. Unless you were trying to be funny.
The fossil record is littered with hundreds and thousands of creatures that have no direct genetic descendants. They failed, they went extinct, they lost.
However, quite a few other ones survived to evolve into the mass of life we have today.
Natural selection is based on extinction. The failed mutations die. Sometimes the whole failed species dies. But somewhere up the evolutionary tree, their second or third cousins twice removed were better adapted and survived.
It is pure arrogance to think we are the only creatures who drive this process. How many herbivores were eaten by tigers? How many carnivores went extinct their prey moved on or died? How many fish died simply because their part of the world dried up? How many diseases have wiped out hundreds of acres of trees - entire species have gone locally extinct in the last hundred years. Yes, we have a huge affect, but we aren't the only thing.
Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't try to mitigate our effects - if we destroy the environment, we'll be dealing with an entirely new mess that *we* didn't evolve for. But have some perspective.
The fun thing about disasters is that they come fairly randomly. Cities have been hit as hard as New Orleans was several times during our history, and many more times than that around the world. It's been just long enough in between for people to forget how to handle the things.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell should I have to register to take a picture of myself.
The magazine is aimed at amateurs, at people looking to hook up with other people who like sex. Why the hell should you have to register your personal habits?
Not to mention the fact that it is very different being a new player in an established multiplayer community from being a new player in a new community. It's a lot more fun (in my opinion) to be around as new strategies and techniques are developed (and possibly discover some of them yourself before your opponents have seen them) instead of walking into a world where if you don't play like the guides say to, you're going to get owned.
This can be even worse in MMO type games, where depending on how many new people the game is getting, you can spend a lot of time playing the "Massively Multiplayer" game alone until your character is strong enough to play with most of the people you meet.
Seems like this should have been fairly simple to resolve. Kick the google van off their property (they did have "no trespassing" signs up) and have google remove the offending issues.
Assigning damaging here is ridiculous, aside from possibly some minor amount to cover the plaintiff's legal costs.
I think we may just be talking difference in terms?
I'm not talking wood shingles. I'm talking asphalt shingles http://www.bobvila.com/HowTo_Library/Asphalt_Shingles-Asphalt_Shingles-A1464.html
Wood shingles are indeed fairly rare around here. But so are clay tiles and metal roofs.
This is entirely reasonable.
I think it really, really depends on what part of the country (or the world) you're in.
There are almost no roofs in the midwest that are not asphalt shingles. I believe this is fairly different in the southwest. I'm not sure the exact reasons (my guess would be something to do with snow, but it could be relative availability of materials).
But yes, shingle roofs are still hugely common in certain areas of the country. In two years doing residential buildings in Minnesota I never did a roof that wasn't shingles.
Oh, they failed miserably... but they learned from it, and had a fair idea by the end of it what sort of things worked and what didn't. The books written by generals researching what happened in Vietnam are what guide our current strategy in Iraq since Petraeus took over.
Not to mention that a cat on a leash is not particularly creepy.
On the steel issue.. a large part of that problem is using vehicles for purposes they were never designed for.
A humvee is supposed to be a relatively light support vehicle that follows behind the front. It was not generally designed to get shot at - adding extra armor plates is a lot of weight that significantly changes how the vehicle handles.
By taking our army that was designed to kick ass and take names against another army, throwing them into anti-insurgency duty where they have to deal with civilians who may or may not be setting bomb, we've gone completely outside of the expected parameters our military was designed for. Once you come to this realization, it takes a lot of time to actually design, build, and install hundreds of armor plates, assuming that your distributors even have free space on the machines to do it (since they're probably full up making armor plates for your armored vehicles). The Iraq war has been like trying to use an attack dog as a seeing eye dog - he probably capable of learning how, but he just isn't set up for it.
The interesting thing to me is that, according to the articles I've read, the US military actively dismantled their anti-insurgency units and doctrines after Vietnam over concerns that if we had units trained to do this sort of thing, leadership would be dumb enough to try to do it again. Never underestimate the stupidity of government leaders, I guess.
Without getting in massive trouble from animal rights advocacy groups? Announcing that you are releasing a bunch of cats into an area crowded with cars, feral cats, dogs, and mean people just seems like a lawsuit waiting to happening.
Creationists, and a lot of people on the edge of the debate who haven't learned anything about science since junior high.
At least in my school, evolution was presented at least half of the time by teachers who didn't believe in it but were required to teach it, and in any case, we never got farther than Mendel in genetics. So to the vast majority of people, evolution begins and ends with Darwin because that's all they were ever taught about. And so they are willing to believe the creationist attacks on "Darwinism," because they don't realize that many of the criticisms of Darwin's original theory have already been found and fixed by scientists. If all you ever heard about science was what I learned in school and what you see on the nightly news, you'd think that biologists had been sitting on their asses for the last hundred years worshipping this guy.
I don't normally feed the trolls, but relax. I was just letting people know that there are limitations to this sort of thing that you have to work around, even when it comes to games. In the camera case, it's generally an easy fix - do whatever transformations you need from world space in double precision on the CPU. From the general opinion here, though ("you never need precision for games") it seemed as though people didn't recognize some of these exceptions that one might have to work around.
You won't notice if it is "off", but you will notice if it is inconsistent. It will result in a strangely flashing or pulsating pixel every time something influencing it moves. Think aliasing.
If you apply it to something a little more important than a single pixel value (like, say, the location and rotation of your camera) you get much more disturbing effects.
Most current GPU's only work in single precision floating point, and in many(most) it is less than 32 bit precision. This is usually fine for the scale of objects you are dealing with in most video games, but in some types of game (for example, flight sims) it is something you have to make sure you pay attention to when you design your engine.
There are a few areas where games care a little bit about accuracy. You've got to be really careful about it in any kind of flight game with playing fields of more than a few miles in size. It's amazing the kind of graphical artifacts you can get if you don't take the error in floating points into account when you handle that sort of thing. In our first naive implementation of the engine, at around 50 kilometers out every character would jitter constantly every time they moved because of the last floating point bits being inaccurate.
The problem with the monomyth is that it is generic enough that you can find a way to fit nearly any story into its form. And you may even be right (it is disgustingly overused, I agree) but oftentimes that isn't the interesting part.
You could argue Fight Club is a monomyth - the narrator goes through various trials with his mentor which he has to overcome and learn from, and eventually has to become separate from him and grow into his own person, sometime around rescuing the girl. But that isn't the part that makes it an interesting movie at all.
Saying that a movie generally conforms to the monomyth tells me jack squat about whether the movie is interesting, and how. Taking the king of monomythism, Star Wars, as an example - and someone tells you "I can't believe he was his father!" You can know that it's a monomyth - hell, you kind of assume it once the movie is established as a fantasy-scifi setting - but that doesn't mess with the story anywhere close to as much as the above quote. Monomythism just lets you know that Luke is probably going to be a lot more special than you'd expect out of a random farmboy - and I don't think anyone considered that a surprise at all.
At which point the problem becomes a cost benefit analysis of people killed from cancer versus those killed from malaria.
On other hand, even knowing that there *is* a major twist can completely change how you watch something.
SPOILER WARNING (sortof)
Before I watched Fight Club, someone had given me vague ideas that the twist was good, so I was watching the whole movie for the twist, and figured it out about a half hour before anyone else in the room did, and long before the movie actually presents it to you. Whereas when I watched the Sixth Sense, I knew nothing about the movie going in, and the twist caught me completely by surprise. You watch clues in a movie very differently when you know you should be looking for them.
There's a scene in FEAR where the lights go out in an elevator, and suddenly the antagonist is standing right next to you in it, with nowhere to go and nothing you can do to save yourself. Some of my (admittedly, younger) friends literally fell out of their chairs during that scene, then talked about it incessantly for weeks. By the time I played the game and got there, my only reaction was "hey, this is that elevator scene they were talking about. Yeah, I can see this being a little creepy."
What I'm saying is that little innocuous bits of knowledge can completely change how you approach something, because the way you have a good twist or surprise in a movie/video game is by leading up to it with other innocuous bits of information that you aren't supposed to know that you need to pay attention to. That way when it happens, everything "clicks" in your head, and the twist makes sense, but you don't come to the proper conclusion more than a couple seconds or minutes before it is revealed. Just knowing that you need to be paying attention to those details makes it a completely different experience.
A species which does not place its survival first will not remain a species for very long. Your birds would gladly eat the last human on earth if they could.
I'll allow that the situation is more complex than I indicated in a two paragraph forum post :)
DDT does continue to be used worldwide as a local vector control agent. Its unrestricted use as an agricultural pesticide did most likely damage its ability to be used against malaria through the encouragement of resistant strains of the disease.
But many third world countries have had to cut back on DDT use because of pressure from the US aid groups supplying their anti-malaria money. And hundreds of environmentalist groups lobbied hard against allowing it into the 2004 Stockholm Convention. I consider this preference for animal over human life to be strongly misguided, even as someone who is strongly for the protection of animal life when it is reasonable.
If you were a bird, I'd think you were being reasonable.
I'm sure that the nearly 900,000 people who die a year from malaria are happy our birds are safe. I love birds of prey, too - they are some of the coolest creatures on the planet. But fuck you if you think they're more important than close to a million people a year. If you even reduce that number by half through reasonable DDT usage (I'm not saying farmers should be able to spray it wherever they want to stop whatever pests they want), in the years since DDT was banned you'd have stopped the equivalent of several holocausts.
We should look at the environmental effects of DDT and use it carefully - but you have to balance human and environmental factors here, and in the case of hundreds of thousands of yearly deaths, I'd say the balance shifts a little bit toward the human end.
What ticks me off is not that they are charging more for these extra features - that's fine! I am all for being able to buy a cheaper version of something that doesn't have features I don't need.
But why the hell are they separate versions of the OS instead of applications I can buy?
Why do I have to buy media center edition to install the media center app - why can't I buy JUST media center for $25?
Why isn't touchscreen support a $5 option that OEM's can opt to get?
Why don't they sell Bitlocker as an addon for small business for $50?
These are great *applications*, and I don't have a problem with them offering a bundled version that includes a lot of them together - but why are they tying them to an operating system version? Someone explain to me how that isn't retarded.
evolution is the process of the continuance and betterment of life
This is a common misconception. Evolution is simply the process by which life changes. "Better" as in better able to survive in the new environment than the previous *population*, possibly.
I am saying that natural selection is the process of life and death. Those who survive are the ones who survived - whether they were lucky or better suited - on average, those who are better suited will survive more often, and so therefore you have a change in the population.
Natural selection *requires* death - more specifically, it requires a lack of progeny. If there is no death, there is no evolutionary pressure, and any old idiotic mutation and variant survives. It's a descriptive theory - this is what happens. The result may or may not be beneficial to a specific species, but it is what will happen, and nature will not "care." There is no "working out." There is only what survives.
Now, from our perspective, there are definitely worse and better outcomes (from a standpoint of our own survival and from our constructed moral sensibility). And we should work to encourage those. But natural processes don't have a preference for whether a species gets destroyed by a virus or by over-hunting - whatever is virus resistent or un-tasty can probably survive and fill that niche.
And this is the fun problem with the layman's explanation of evolution. Unless you were trying to be funny.
The fossil record is littered with hundreds and thousands of creatures that have no direct genetic descendants. They failed, they went extinct, they lost.
However, quite a few other ones survived to evolve into the mass of life we have today.
Natural selection is based on extinction. The failed mutations die. Sometimes the whole failed species dies. But somewhere up the evolutionary tree, their second or third cousins twice removed were better adapted and survived.
It is pure arrogance to think we are the only creatures who drive this process. How many herbivores were eaten by tigers? How many carnivores went extinct their prey moved on or died? How many fish died simply because their part of the world dried up? How many diseases have wiped out hundreds of acres of trees - entire species have gone locally extinct in the last hundred years. Yes, we have a huge affect, but we aren't the only thing.
Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't try to mitigate our effects - if we destroy the environment, we'll be dealing with an entirely new mess that *we* didn't evolve for. But have some perspective.
The fun thing about disasters is that they come fairly randomly. Cities have been hit as hard as New Orleans was several times during our history, and many more times than that around the world. It's been just long enough in between for people to forget how to handle the things.