I used to reccomend Dell, despite my bad experiences with them. I reccomended Dell to my inlaws (who were compu-clueless) and this is what dell sold them (this was a few years ago):
A 2.2Ghz intel processor with 128 megs of RAMBUS ram running Windows ME with no antivirus. I inherited it after they died (probably from frustration), and it would have cost me 700 dollars to upgrade the ram to the point where I could have a use for it (512 megs). I threw it away and built a better box with 2 gigs of ram and a faster processor for 600.
I can only assume that the salesperson had an active grudge against my poor inlaws.
Heh. They already do stuff like that, as a gag. WoW is packed with pop culture references, though I doubt they get money for it.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Who cares about the sense of touch in your feet? All our major predator avoidance senses...Sight, Hearing, Smell...ALL of them, are proximate to the brain. Evolution clearly favors this (since all things that actually HAVE brains, have them right next to their major senses), and common sense would suggest that traveling three inches is faster than traveling 3 feet, given a constant velocity.
I work for a decent sized corporation with gold support and it doesn't work like that even when it's supposed to. You have to jump through hoops for hours to even convince them you need the part, and then they send some monkey who has to be baby sat to make sure he doesn't do something stupid. And same day support for Joe Shmo? Yea right.
For my dime, I'll buy a spare of anything that should go south, and replace it myself in 5 minutes, but for a home user who can't afford the extra parts? Screw Dell. Much easier to do it yourself, working with a reputable manufacturer. Dell sucks that bad.
That's why I buy all my own damn components. Get a harddrive with a three year warantee, and if it craps out in two, call the company and they'll mail you another one for free. Most decent ram comes with a lifetime warantee. It's hard not to get a better warantee straight out of the box than dell gives for it's whole systems.
It used to be easier to go through Dell, but these days it's much easier to go through hardware manufacturers. Call 'em up, wait on hold for maybe 10 minutes, get an RMA, send it back. Wait a few days, install the new one. I can maybe see it for someone's grandma, but even there, they'd be better off sending it to the local repair shop...They could die while waiting for customer service from Dell.
Meh. He's a jackass, and he decided, in public, to try and get rough with two people who make their living by being smartasses. He got what he had coming.
Personally, I can't stand him. If he was half as good as he thinks he is, that attitude would be one thing, but as it stands it's pretty sorry.
Yea, it still sucks. The stuff they're providing as a service is mickey mouse crap that any self-respecting IT department should be able to handle, not the kind of stuff that REALLY takes serious work.
I work in a place that depends on about 5 big apps...What I'd give for some kind of liscensing that would allow us to keep current without having to pay huge migration costs. That would be software-as-a-service...This is just not powerful enough to meet our needs.
God says, very specifically, in the bible that he'll never offer definite proof of his own existence, because proof is the enemy of faith. That being the case, I don't think that just because evolution could occur without god, means that it did.
Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the one you've espoused is the only one I ever find compelling. If it really is a purely materialistic universe, then it really does leave us in a moral quandry.
At the same time, I don't see that we should deny science, just because we don't want to rock God's boat. There is nothing in science that denies god...Anyone who tells you different is perverting science to support his own views. Science has no opinion on God. Now, if you subscribe to a literal view of the bible, science is definitely going to cause you some problems, because the bible isn't literally true. It's an allegory, meant to teach you what you need to get through life. It's not a history text.
But if you don't ascribe to the literal read, science should give you no problems. The bible tells you what god did. Science tells you how he did it.
Hmmm. Don't know about the paragraphs. You can fudge it by putting in break tags though...
No, evolution cannot be completely proven to the standards set by logical deduction, but what the genius grandparent is willfully ignoring, in the true style of a logical positivist, is that, in the real world, induction is often as good as it gets...We don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but it's a real good bet (unless you're in Antarctica).
Now, a lot of people will be quick to say, "INDUCTION ISN'T PROOF" and they're right. But we live our lives by induction every day...It is the single most useful tool in our intellectual toolkits. It keeps us from sticking forks in lightsockets, it keeps us from burning ourselves on hot things, it tells us that up is up and down is down, and pretty much everything else that we need to get through our days.
Evolution has about that level of proof. Finding out that evolution is utterly wrong at this point would be like slapping your hand down on a red hot stove, and feeling a pleasantly refreshing tickling sensation.
So that's why I buy into Evolution. It has predictive power; you see evolutionary priciples applied to microbiology all the time. It has tons of proof, much more proof than things we take for granted in our daily lives. If you walked around only believing things that could be proven logically, without a shadow of a doubt, you'd have an extremely limited worldview. There is nothing to prove that gravity, for example, is not some weird brainfart that the universe is currently experiencing and that it's not suddenly going to go away. You can't go through life like that.
*Scratches Ubisoft off the "Completely Evil" list, and puts them on the "Evil, but I'm not so pissed off I won't buy their stuff" list.*
Since game companies absolutely depend on the goodwill of the consumers of their product, I'm glad to see they made the right choice, and I hope other companies *coughSONYcoughcough* will see that the right choice can also be the smart choice.
Oh yes, your amazing pseduo-pretention, coupled with cognitive dishonesty, intellectual snobbery, and a mastery of philosophcal jargon so obscure as to be meaningless even to other philosophers, has catapulted your discourse to another plane...If only the rest of you would follow, the world would be a better place.
Blah blah, they don't agree with you either, and they view your insistence that there is a god with the same tooth-grinding ire which which you view their instistence that there's not a god.
I think both of you need to get over yourselves. Some people use science to fuel their personal agendas the same way other people use religion.
It's morons like you who give philosophy a bad name. At this point, yes, it is impossible to test, under controlled conditions, anything resembling macro evolution. It is also impossible to test theories about the formation of stars and planets, the material composition of the earths core, fusion conditions in the sun, etc, all objects of physics which is apparently a "real" science, where biology, in your opinion, is not.
"Look at it from practical point of view. It is self-consistent in the way our gnoseological state matches both ontological and etological states of humanity." If I was teaching a philosophy class, and this sentence popped out of someone's mouth, I'd take him out into the hall for 20 minutes, to beat the stupid out of him. Between the use of "gnoseological" *shudder*, and etological, you toss any supposed analytic credibility you ever sought out the window.
Oh, and Karl Popper would say absolutely, that macro-evolution can be falsified by finding an A that turned into a B without intervening steps, or by finding a complex creature that has no evolutionary forebears.
I don't mind completely skill based systems. I mean, if you limit the equipment to just off-the-shelf stuff, then skills become damn important, and a rich skill system coupled with a "free" economy a la Star Trek, could definitely be cool.
It's true, standardized tests teach memorization. I did a brief stint teaching one of Kaplan's SAT prep classes in the 90's due to my high verbal scores.
Now, I had high verbal scores because I lived in the sticks, with no internet, until I was 16 and it was either read or have sex with farm animals. I took the high road (after I was rejected by all the animals) and read everything I could to stave off boredom. In consequence I had kickin verbal scores.
So I'm supposed to be "better qualified" to teach this class because I got good scores. But the "class" was all about memorization...They basically took all the words from the last 20 years worth of tests and said, "If you memorize all of these, you'll do fine." I've got kids asking me how they can get my scores, and I'm thinking, "Read a lot, be a dork and take latin in high school, and work up a logical bent or those analogies will eat you for breakfast."
Just sad. I have problems in job interviews sometimes because people see that I studied CS and Philosophy, and they express concern that the liberal arty part of my brain will jump out and screw up my code or something. I studied analytic philosophy at arguably the best analytic school in the fricking world, and the CS was actually required for my degree path (CS requires one dinky logic course. I had 8), along with higher math and fricking neuroanatomy, and they're expressing doubts because their completely logic-free MBA program taught them how to read the crappy pieces of paper that fail to do anything but scratch the surface of 7 years of my life? Oy vey.
I don't know what moron modded you up, but your analogies are terrible.
1) Yes, in fact, you have a right to discriminate on your private property. End of fricking story. Country Clubs, Private Schools, etc, have won court cases about this for years. The only time you don't have this right is when you're running an establishment that is open to the public at large, which is where you're confused. No you can't discriminate if you own a restaraunt where clients walk in off the street, yes, you can discriminate if you make people go though an interview process first, and pay fees, whatever.
2) Yelling "Fire" and yelling "Fag" are two different things, unless you're in a church, where yelling "Fag" may cause a stampede for the exit, creating a public hazard. That is the criteria: you have to be creating a dangerous situation where people could get hurt. If I want to walk around being an insensitive bigot all day long, that's my right. It's called freedomn of speech, and just because it may hurt someone's feelings, doesn't make it illegal. The Klan regularly gets permits to march and spout their crappy ideas, have you never noticed this?
3) Freedom from people being assholes is nowhere guanteed in the consitution. If someone physically harms you, you have recourse, but you only have recouse against bigotry if it gets physical, if you get denied access to otherwise public services, or if it crosses the line to harassment. That's it. End of story. You can't have someone censured by the law just because you don't like their beliefs.
So many fricking hypocrites in this country. Everyone loves freedom of speech, religion, assembly...as long as the only people who are allowed to exercise those freedoms are people that they like. That's not the way it works. Tolerance also means, unfortunately, that you have to tolerate the opinions of people you'd rather see squashed by a truck.
Well Planetside is more of a MMOFPS, but I take your point. I always thought the game DID suffer for not having an economy, if only because everyone and their mother could grab one of those damn mortars...
I said hours. It all depends. I logged on once, slogged across a zone, turned off a path to pick a damn herb, and got aggro'd by a scorpion who dropped an epic ring worth 900 gold. That's 100 bucks or so worth of gold, and it took, what, half an hour? Mind you, the odds of me ever finding another one are nill, but still.
Farmer that I am, I gave it to a friend of mine because he needed it, and couldn't have afforded it.
It also works there because there really aren't that many items, and almost all of them you buy from NPCs, so the economy doesn't really encourage you to have a big pile of influence lying around in case some cool thing goes on sale at the local shop. In CoH the most important thing was your build, and your leveling choices...Different levels of enchancements mattered, but it was a bigger deal that you'd added more enhancement slots to skill X as you leveled.
But with MMOs like WoW, with so much of the economy driven by players and random drop items, building large stockpiles of money is necessary in order to get the best equipment. Hell, there was a brief period where player run casino's were thriving, and they were competing with each other for odds and crap. It was wild. Bliz ended up banning them, for whatever reason, which I thought was a mistake. What better sign that your currency system is working well?
What's the flaw? That it is a challenge to get enough gold for an epic mount? Aren't there supposed to be challenges? What's the solution? Make it so there are no challenges, so no one feels the need to cheat their way through it?
I've played that game since it was released. You start off at lvl 1 with nothing. At lvl 5 you can pick up a gathering skill, and, if you choose mining, or herbalism, you can go right out and make a decent amount of money. Copper bars sell for more than a gold a stack, most times. It was up to 2 gold earlier this year because the supply was so low. So, at that point, you can run out and, in 30 minutes to an hour, you can pick copper enough to pay all your leveling costs to level 14.
Is this a challege? No. So, you would think that no one under lvl 14 would be begging for money, right?
Utterly. Wrong.
Point to the flaw. Hell, if there is a flaw in that transaction, it's that copper is useful for too long, and so you have to pay through the nose for it due to limited supply, thus making things TOO easy for people hanging out in zones where copper is abundant. Bronze costs less than copper, which should never be the case.
But they still beg. They beg like freaking MAD, despite how easy it is to get money. I'm sure a number of them buy gold from the farmers. It stands to reason. If they can't be bothered to make gold when it's easy to get more than you need, then they're sure as hell going to be looking hard for another way when making 1 or 2 gold at a time just isn't enough.
For the most part, they're not getting cheap gold by tricks, they're legitimately going out and mining minerals, picking herbs, grinding mobs and instances, and selling the loot on the open auction house. It's the exact way I make all my money in the game.
The difference is, they then turn around and sell the proceeds to people who don't want to do that much work. That's just the devil of human nature. You're always going to have people who're lazy, who want things to be easy, and don't mind throwing down 30 bucks so they don't have to do hours of grinding.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the spyware/adware/virus writers are just as thrilled to have such expanded control over the UI.
I used to reccomend Dell, despite my bad experiences with them. I reccomended Dell to my inlaws (who were compu-clueless) and this is what dell sold them (this was a few years ago):
A 2.2Ghz intel processor with 128 megs of RAMBUS ram running Windows ME with no antivirus. I inherited it after they died (probably from frustration), and it would have cost me 700 dollars to upgrade the ram to the point where I could have a use for it (512 megs). I threw it away and built a better box with 2 gigs of ram and a faster processor for 600.
I can only assume that the salesperson had an active grudge against my poor inlaws.
Heh. They already do stuff like that, as a gag. WoW is packed with pop culture references, though I doubt they get money for it.
Who cares about the sense of touch in your feet? All our major predator avoidance senses...Sight, Hearing, Smell...ALL of them, are proximate to the brain. Evolution clearly favors this (since all things that actually HAVE brains, have them right next to their major senses), and common sense would suggest that traveling three inches is faster than traveling 3 feet, given a constant velocity.
That's a good analogy...uh...BadAnalogyGuy...
*wanders off muttering to himself*
I work for a decent sized corporation with gold support and it doesn't work like that even when it's supposed to. You have to jump through hoops for hours to even convince them you need the part, and then they send some monkey who has to be baby sat to make sure he doesn't do something stupid. And same day support for Joe Shmo? Yea right.
For my dime, I'll buy a spare of anything that should go south, and replace it myself in 5 minutes, but for a home user who can't afford the extra parts? Screw Dell. Much easier to do it yourself, working with a reputable manufacturer. Dell sucks that bad.
That's why I buy all my own damn components. Get a harddrive with a three year warantee, and if it craps out in two, call the company and they'll mail you another one for free. Most decent ram comes with a lifetime warantee. It's hard not to get a better warantee straight out of the box than dell gives for it's whole systems.
It used to be easier to go through Dell, but these days it's much easier to go through hardware manufacturers. Call 'em up, wait on hold for maybe 10 minutes, get an RMA, send it back. Wait a few days, install the new one. I can maybe see it for someone's grandma, but even there, they'd be better off sending it to the local repair shop...They could die while waiting for customer service from Dell.
Meh. He's a jackass, and he decided, in public, to try and get rough with two people who make their living by being smartasses. He got what he had coming.
Personally, I can't stand him. If he was half as good as he thinks he is, that attitude would be one thing, but as it stands it's pretty sorry.
Bork Bork Bork BORK?
I don't think it's working...
Yea, it still sucks. The stuff they're providing as a service is mickey mouse crap that any self-respecting IT department should be able to handle, not the kind of stuff that REALLY takes serious work.
I work in a place that depends on about 5 big apps...What I'd give for some kind of liscensing that would allow us to keep current without having to pay huge migration costs. That would be software-as-a-service...This is just not powerful enough to meet our needs.
God says, very specifically, in the bible that he'll never offer definite proof of his own existence, because proof is the enemy of faith. That being the case, I don't think that just because evolution could occur without god, means that it did.
Of all the arguments for the existence of God, the one you've espoused is the only one I ever find compelling. If it really is a purely materialistic universe, then it really does leave us in a moral quandry.
At the same time, I don't see that we should deny science, just because we don't want to rock God's boat. There is nothing in science that denies god...Anyone who tells you different is perverting science to support his own views. Science has no opinion on God. Now, if you subscribe to a literal view of the bible, science is definitely going to cause you some problems, because the bible isn't literally true. It's an allegory, meant to teach you what you need to get through life. It's not a history text.
But if you don't ascribe to the literal read, science should give you no problems. The bible tells you what god did. Science tells you how he did it.
They're doing okay. I think that's more in line with their ability to stifle the market than from any other cause.
Hmmm. Don't know about the paragraphs. You can fudge it by putting in break tags though...
No, evolution cannot be completely proven to the standards set by logical deduction, but what the genius grandparent is willfully ignoring, in the true style of a logical positivist, is that, in the real world, induction is often as good as it gets...We don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but it's a real good bet (unless you're in Antarctica).
Now, a lot of people will be quick to say, "INDUCTION ISN'T PROOF" and they're right. But we live our lives by induction every day...It is the single most useful tool in our intellectual toolkits. It keeps us from sticking forks in lightsockets, it keeps us from burning ourselves on hot things, it tells us that up is up and down is down, and pretty much everything else that we need to get through our days.
Evolution has about that level of proof. Finding out that evolution is utterly wrong at this point would be like slapping your hand down on a red hot stove, and feeling a pleasantly refreshing tickling sensation.
So that's why I buy into Evolution. It has predictive power; you see evolutionary priciples applied to microbiology all the time. It has tons of proof, much more proof than things we take for granted in our daily lives. If you walked around only believing things that could be proven logically, without a shadow of a doubt, you'd have an extremely limited worldview. There is nothing to prove that gravity, for example, is not some weird brainfart that the universe is currently experiencing and that it's not suddenly going to go away. You can't go through life like that.
*Scratches Ubisoft off the "Completely Evil" list, and puts them on the "Evil, but I'm not so pissed off I won't buy their stuff" list.*
Since game companies absolutely depend on the goodwill of the consumers of their product, I'm glad to see they made the right choice, and I hope other companies *coughSONYcoughcough* will see that the right choice can also be the smart choice.
Oh yes, your amazing pseduo-pretention, coupled with cognitive dishonesty, intellectual snobbery, and a mastery of philosophcal jargon so obscure as to be meaningless even to other philosophers, has catapulted your discourse to another plane...If only the rest of you would follow, the world would be a better place.
Blah blah, they don't agree with you either, and they view your insistence that there is a god with the same tooth-grinding ire which which you view their instistence that there's not a god.
I think both of you need to get over yourselves. Some people use science to fuel their personal agendas the same way other people use religion.
It's morons like you who give philosophy a bad name. At this point, yes, it is impossible to test, under controlled conditions, anything resembling macro evolution. It is also impossible to test theories about the formation of stars and planets, the material composition of the earths core, fusion conditions in the sun, etc, all objects of physics which is apparently a "real" science, where biology, in your opinion, is not.
"Look at it from practical point of view. It is self-consistent in the way our gnoseological state matches both ontological and etological states of humanity." If I was teaching a philosophy class, and this sentence popped out of someone's mouth, I'd take him out into the hall for 20 minutes, to beat the stupid out of him. Between the use of "gnoseological" *shudder*, and etological, you toss any supposed analytic credibility you ever sought out the window.
Oh, and Karl Popper would say absolutely, that macro-evolution can be falsified by finding an A that turned into a B without intervening steps, or by finding a complex creature that has no evolutionary forebears.
I don't mind completely skill based systems. I mean, if you limit the equipment to just off-the-shelf stuff, then skills become damn important, and a rich skill system coupled with a "free" economy a la Star Trek, could definitely be cool.
It's true, standardized tests teach memorization. I did a brief stint teaching one of Kaplan's SAT prep classes in the 90's due to my high verbal scores.
Now, I had high verbal scores because I lived in the sticks, with no internet, until I was 16 and it was either read or have sex with farm animals. I took the high road (after I was rejected by all the animals) and read everything I could to stave off boredom. In consequence I had kickin verbal scores.
So I'm supposed to be "better qualified" to teach this class because I got good scores. But the "class" was all about memorization...They basically took all the words from the last 20 years worth of tests and said, "If you memorize all of these, you'll do fine." I've got kids asking me how they can get my scores, and I'm thinking, "Read a lot, be a dork and take latin in high school, and work up a logical bent or those analogies will eat you for breakfast."
Just sad. I have problems in job interviews sometimes because people see that I studied CS and Philosophy, and they express concern that the liberal arty part of my brain will jump out and screw up my code or something. I studied analytic philosophy at arguably the best analytic school in the fricking world, and the CS was actually required for my degree path (CS requires one dinky logic course. I had 8), along with higher math and fricking neuroanatomy, and they're expressing doubts because their completely logic-free MBA program taught them how to read the crappy pieces of paper that fail to do anything but scratch the surface of 7 years of my life? Oy vey.
I don't know what moron modded you up, but your analogies are terrible.
1) Yes, in fact, you have a right to discriminate on your private property. End of fricking story. Country Clubs, Private Schools, etc, have won court cases about this for years. The only time you don't have this right is when you're running an establishment that is open to the public at large, which is where you're confused. No you can't discriminate if you own a restaraunt where clients walk in off the street, yes, you can discriminate if you make people go though an interview process first, and pay fees, whatever.
2) Yelling "Fire" and yelling "Fag" are two different things, unless you're in a church, where yelling "Fag" may cause a stampede for the exit, creating a public hazard. That is the criteria: you have to be creating a dangerous situation where people could get hurt. If I want to walk around being an insensitive bigot all day long, that's my right. It's called freedomn of speech, and just because it may hurt someone's feelings, doesn't make it illegal. The Klan regularly gets permits to march and spout their crappy ideas, have you never noticed this?
3) Freedom from people being assholes is nowhere guanteed in the consitution. If someone physically harms you, you have recourse, but you only have recouse against bigotry if it gets physical, if you get denied access to otherwise public services, or if it crosses the line to harassment. That's it. End of story. You can't have someone censured by the law just because you don't like their beliefs.
So many fricking hypocrites in this country. Everyone loves freedom of speech, religion, assembly...as long as the only people who are allowed to exercise those freedoms are people that they like. That's not the way it works. Tolerance also means, unfortunately, that you have to tolerate the opinions of people you'd rather see squashed by a truck.
Well Planetside is more of a MMOFPS, but I take your point. I always thought the game DID suffer for not having an economy, if only because everyone and their mother could grab one of those damn mortars...
I said hours. It all depends. I logged on once, slogged across a zone, turned off a path to pick a damn herb, and got aggro'd by a scorpion who dropped an epic ring worth 900 gold. That's 100 bucks or so worth of gold, and it took, what, half an hour? Mind you, the odds of me ever finding another one are nill, but still.
Farmer that I am, I gave it to a friend of mine because he needed it, and couldn't have afforded it.
It also works there because there really aren't that many items, and almost all of them you buy from NPCs, so the economy doesn't really encourage you to have a big pile of influence lying around in case some cool thing goes on sale at the local shop. In CoH the most important thing was your build, and your leveling choices...Different levels of enchancements mattered, but it was a bigger deal that you'd added more enhancement slots to skill X as you leveled.
But with MMOs like WoW, with so much of the economy driven by players and random drop items, building large stockpiles of money is necessary in order to get the best equipment. Hell, there was a brief period where player run casino's were thriving, and they were competing with each other for odds and crap. It was wild. Bliz ended up banning them, for whatever reason, which I thought was a mistake. What better sign that your currency system is working well?
What's the flaw? That it is a challenge to get enough gold for an epic mount? Aren't there supposed to be challenges? What's the solution? Make it so there are no challenges, so no one feels the need to cheat their way through it?
I've played that game since it was released. You start off at lvl 1 with nothing. At lvl 5 you can pick up a gathering skill, and, if you choose mining, or herbalism, you can go right out and make a decent amount of money. Copper bars sell for more than a gold a stack, most times. It was up to 2 gold earlier this year because the supply was so low. So, at that point, you can run out and, in 30 minutes to an hour, you can pick copper enough to pay all your leveling costs to level 14.
Is this a challege? No. So, you would think that no one under lvl 14 would be begging for money, right?
Utterly. Wrong.
Point to the flaw. Hell, if there is a flaw in that transaction, it's that copper is useful for too long, and so you have to pay through the nose for it due to limited supply, thus making things TOO easy for people hanging out in zones where copper is abundant. Bronze costs less than copper, which should never be the case.
But they still beg. They beg like freaking MAD, despite how easy it is to get money. I'm sure a number of them buy gold from the farmers. It stands to reason. If they can't be bothered to make gold when it's easy to get more than you need, then they're sure as hell going to be looking hard for another way when making 1 or 2 gold at a time just isn't enough.
So how do you solve that? Welfare? Seriously.
For the most part, they're not getting cheap gold by tricks, they're legitimately going out and mining minerals, picking herbs, grinding mobs and instances, and selling the loot on the open auction house. It's the exact way I make all my money in the game.
The difference is, they then turn around and sell the proceeds to people who don't want to do that much work. That's just the devil of human nature. You're always going to have people who're lazy, who want things to be easy, and don't mind throwing down 30 bucks so they don't have to do hours of grinding.