Number of penguins eaten by polar bears on a yearly basis: zero.
Wrong side of the planet.
Yeah, so it's pretty unlikely, but can we really be sure the number is really zero? While I doubt a polar bear made it to the south pole, birds can get lost and are sometimes seen thousands and thousands of miles from their usual habitats, and penguins are strong and capable swimmers. Can't you just see the penguin couple?
"Dear, I think we went the wrong way back our vacation in Argentina. The sun seems to be in the wrong place. We should ask another bird for directions." "Geeze, get off my back. You've been saying that for weeks now, but I know where I'm going! It's getting cold again, just like I said it would, isn't it?" "Yes dear, but..." "Look! An iceberg! See! We'll be back on land in no time. First though let's take a break on this piece of ice which appears to have a soft fluffy mound of snow on it..." "RAWR! Nom-nom-nom-nom-gulp!"
Oh, damnit, the Orca got them first. Okay, well, maybe next year!
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 1
I remember the Arcade changing during that period. It was a pretty quick change. Either arcade owners saw what Space Invaders was leading to and began grabbing new video game, or there were sticking with pinball. By 1980 if you went with pin-ball, you where probably out of business.
Damn. Well kinda ironic then that for those arcades that are still holding on by the skin of their teeth, pinball is one of their mainstays.
While the following fact doesn't justify the high prices, giving money "directly to the band" does skip paying people who worked on other aspects of the music (promoting, recording, etc.).
I'm not well versed on the topic, but it was my understanding that most of the people like sound engineers and such were paid normally by the hour/job/etc instead of commission on record sales like the band itself. Marketing might be an exception but I doubt it and uh I don't care.
Well you're certainly right that it'll be vulnerable to discovery when it first arrives... I imagine (in the purest sense) that they'll send it to its destination at night and have it just camp out for as long as need be.
But it's nice of you to put words in the mouths of people like me to tear down to benefit your argument. You could call it a strawman. Congratulations on the insightful mod since that strawman was pretty tough to tear down.
Yeah, you're right. It was kind of a strawman, largely because it was too specific.
"I have no idea of what I'm talking about, I can't be arsed to find out, and my imagination of what is going on outrages me!"
This sort of "search" crap is beyond stupid. Either search something, or don't, but don't pretend that your "search dog", who in his/her downtime has hobbies that include sniffing and licking his/her own genitalia, is justification for doing so.
Look I get what you're saying and I agree with your point, but that's no reason to hate on some perfectly fine hobbies. They aren't my hobbies, though they would be if I was more flexible. And if the police officer who conducted the search with a legitimate warrant happens to have an auto-fellatio hobby, well, I just don't see how that affects their ability to perform their job! If anything they'd be less uptight...
Sure CD-Rs and pressed CDs would smell different... but I was under the impression that the large-scale piracy operations pressed their disks just like the legitimate ones. The article doesn't say either way. But if it's true that they were pressed, them I'm betting the other slashdotters were right who said that the dog simply sniffed out large quantities of optical media, and once found check to see if it belongs there.
But still, this only works if it looks enough like a bird to be inconspicuous, AND no one sees it land in the first place.
Well my point was that once its perched then no it doesn't really need to look convincingly like a bird because nobody is going to see it. If you're looking for actual birds they can be pretty hard to find if they aren't moving; motion is typically how you spot them. You probably walk past birds this size in trees without ever knowing they are there all the time. So as long as they make it drab instead of shiny, the best strategy for not being seen is to find a tree limb with a view and sit still.
If someone sees it come in, it has two choices - fly zig-zag or random pattern to take a couple pics and get away (and fly another mission), or land and make itself a sitting duck.
I don't think they're designing the perching feature for missions that have failed before they've even begun. Since the ability to fly is already part of the specs, adding the ability to perch in order to conduct prolonged surveillance is in no way a bad idea.
Well the 'bird' is for surveillance, and that means being inconspicuous. If they know where the robot is to shoot at it, then for the purposes of many missions it's already failed. A motionless bird, even one with a 29" wingspan, is much harder to spot when sitting still on a branch than when flying around.
Well yeah. It's developers going bankrupt had no effect on the chances of DNF being released. It's equally likely that it will be finished in 2011 as it was to be finished in 2008. So, you know, anything (equal to nothing) could happen!
With CGI porn, the disconnect is complete! It has become a truly solitary masturbatory experience, the last vestiges of shared sexuality banished.
Say what you will about it being impersonal. CGI is the only way I could afford to complete my masterpiece: Lord of the Cock Rings: The Battle of Purple Helm's Deep Penetration.
Agree completely, though I'd never threaten someone's Geek Card over their decision not to see a Tim Allen movie even if it happened to be awesome like Galaxy Quest.
Though one of the many great things about the movie is actually Tim's acting, which said to me that he realized his character in the movie was making fun of him as much as it was a lampoon of Shatner, and that he thought this was hilarious. Sigourney Weaver and, um, Monk/weird-guy-from-Wings give similarly inspired performances. You could never remake it and have it work.
This just theoretically reduces the alleles available to given sample... it isn't genetic evolution, which I think is the point being made.
Change in allele distribution is evolution. And once there are two separate breeding populations, any further mutations or allele frequency changes will not be transferred to the other group, and thus clearly it is only a matter of time until they are different enough that anyone can see that genetic evolution has taken place.
And it's a fairly valid point. There is a big difference between differentiation and evolution, and the blurred line between them by many "science buffs" is why they're scoffed at by ID proponents.
The line is blurry, and the inability of ID proponents to comprehend this, and most other things they ignorantly scoff at, is why they are scoffed at by biologists.
At any rate I'd make sure you're real sure you like being away from your landline. Give that decision a 6 month wait period before you decide to recycle your wires one way or another.
I dropped my land line a few years ago, and haven't missed it at all.
However now that I own my own house* I'm considering trying to get the cheapest land line service possible. The reason is simply that in the past there have been times when a storm would kill cell phone service, even knock out the power, but phone-over-copper was still up. So something like a $5/mo plan with no built-in long distance just as an emergency backup makes has some appeal. Not a ton of appeal, but some.
Either way, I wouldn't pull my copper just because I was sure I personally didn't want a land line. I wouldn't pull it unless either 1) I knew I was going to be living in that house until I died or 2) I knew that everyone else had dumped their landlines too and thus wouldn't balk** at buying a house with no phone lines.
* Of course there's a bank right now laughing its ass of at that statement, but hey.
** I love this word so much. To me it evokes the image of a skeptical chicken.
Is it necessarily evolution? Or is it simply training? I bet if I took a bird egg from the country and swapped it with one from the city, that the birds would identify with their adoptive culture.
Either way the result will be evolution. Even if the different call is learned behavior (which they theorize is the case), if the females from one group won't respond to the calls of the other (which they haven't tested yet) then they won't interbreed and barring substantial egg-swapping efforts by humans they are effectively different species on their own evolutionary paths.
They would need to examine the reaction of different populations from the countryside to see if the reaction is simply one of disputes between avian clans. As it stands, their data could mean too many different things. The adage, often repeated here, is that correlation is not causation.
As your knowledge of bird behavior stands, yes, it could mean just about anything. When you know nothing else but that correlation exists, then this in fact does not indicate causation. However when someone possess knowledge of other factors that suggest causation, then correlation can in fact support the causation conclusion.
In this case, a "dispute between avian clans" can easily be ruled out. You see, when a breeding male tit hears the call of another male tit nearby, that male will sing its own song to proclaim its territory, or investigate the source of the call in order to drive the intruder out. If the male country tit recognized the call of the male city tit, but didn't like city tits, then it would have responded more aggressively in trying to drive out the intruder. The lack of a response means that the country tit did not consider the city tit to be a threat, making the most likely explanation that the country tit didn't recognize the city tit's song as being that of a Great Tit at all.
There is as they say more research to be done. The next step is to see how females from each group respond to the calls of the other group. This is going to be trickier. While a male will react to any male that enters its territory and thus threatens its chances to mate, a female may or may not respond to the call of a male for any number of reasons. However if city tit females routinely reject the calls of country tit males and vice versa, then the question of whether the female recognizes the male call but just doesn't like it vs doesn't see them as the same species becomes largely moot. If the females aren't attracted to the other males, they won't breed, and they will slowly begin to separate as species.
On the other hand, if females don't appear significantly less attracted to the other males, then well I'm not really sure what would happen since I'm not terribly well versed in Great Tit behavior. It might mean more females breeding with multiple males on the edge of cities since the city/country males wouldn't compete with each other. It might mean that a bird born from mixed parentage would learn both songs, possibly eliminating the difference.
Re:Quickly Back on The Shelf...
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the review it says it talks about Rogue, progenitor of Nethack and all "Rogue-likes" (der). So who's just talking about their favorite games, history be damned? Okay, those were online 'bonus' chapters. Anyway.
There's only so much room in a book about an area of entertainment to mention/discuss all instances of that form of entertainment. And frankly the list presented here is one of the most varied and comprehensive I've seen in anything of this sort. Not everything can make it in, and focusing on "influence" willows out a lot of things that we might like to see because they are our favorite games.
Like, say, nethack, which I love, but lets be honest outside of inspiring other rogue-likes to add features and inspiring nerds to fail college in their attempts to Ascend, it's influence is limited. Diablo is much more influential in my view. Yes, Diablo was itself a graphical Rogue-like -- and I'd hope the Diablo chapter at least mentions Rogue, though obviously the author is aware of the game either way -- but it's Diablo, not Rogue, that others are apeing in the explosion of dungeon-crawl hack-and-slash games that followed. Diablo brought Rogue-like gaming to the masses. This is why it deserves a whole chapter, and frankly to be honest Nethack doesn't.
Seriously, I have tried it. I prefer firearms for target shooting. I had thought it'd be the other way around, I mean bows are cool, but here we are.
And neither is something I'd like to devote as much time to as I do to video games. For one thing, sure the 'input' may be more varied, but the objective is as non-variable as can be. Hit a target at X meters. Sometimes the outside of the target is shaped like a torso, but what you're actually aiming at is still, nevertheless, the same ol' concentric circles as always. Unless you're good enough where doing something like shooting from horseback is possible, you never do anything different than stand/sit there and plunk away at a target. Oh now I'm using a different gun/bow or ammo, which slightly changes the parabolic arc that I plunk away at the target with. Which sure has the nice advantage of having essentially infinite potential for improvements in your skill, and I'm sure is fun enough for the aficionado, but it's just not going to draw me away from shooting virtual people/dinosaurs/multi-phase boss monsters while riding a horse/hover-cycle or what have you.
Oh yeah, and then when I decide I've had enough fun killing people, I pop in Trauma Center and have fun saving people.:)
It's sad that Nintendo pioneered it - and moreso because the Wiimote is such a mediocre solution.
I have no idea what that sentence minus the "moreso" part is supposed to mean. Somebody had to be the first to make a functional and mainstream motion sensing controller. As usual, Nintendo was there to make controller innovation happen. Why's that sad? Would it not be sad if Microsoft had done it? Why?
Seriously, the more I played Wii Sports Golf and Wii Sports Tennis, the more I knew they'd screwed up. It works well enough for "big" movements - basic tennis swing, big golf swing, bat swing, etc - but for the "fine" motions, such as imparting "spin" to the tennis ball or trying to make a putt, the controller is Simply. Not. Sensitive. Enough.
Did it ever occur to you that it was just those games? That you weren't meant to be able to impart finely granular levels of spin to the ball in Wii Tennis? It works great in Trauma Center and Elebits for fine motions.
As the tech matures, it'll get better - but Big N's already, by producing an "add-on" sensor to tweak the sensitivity, admitting their initial setup wasn't good enough.
Admitting it wasn't good enough, or admitting that it could be better and that better is good? It's awesome how the Nintendo haters have retro-actively given the Wii the status of automatic success, instead of extremely risky proposition like they were happy to call it before its launch. Keeping the cost of controllers down was important, making something like the Wiimote at the time wasn't easy, and now that the technology has become cheaper and better, they take advantage of that. I'm not seeing the crime here.
Slashdot Mirror
Number of penguins eaten by polar bears on a yearly basis: zero.
Wrong side of the planet.
Yeah, so it's pretty unlikely, but can we really be sure the number is really zero? While I doubt a polar bear made it to the south pole, birds can get lost and are sometimes seen thousands and thousands of miles from their usual habitats, and penguins are strong and capable swimmers. Can't you just see the penguin couple?
"Dear, I think we went the wrong way back our vacation in Argentina. The sun seems to be in the wrong place. We should ask another bird for directions." "Geeze, get off my back. You've been saying that for weeks now, but I know where I'm going! It's getting cold again, just like I said it would, isn't it?" "Yes dear, but..." "Look! An iceberg! See! We'll be back on land in no time. First though let's take a break on this piece of ice which appears to have a soft fluffy mound of snow on it..." "RAWR! Nom-nom-nom-nom-gulp!"
Oh, damnit, the Orca got them first. Okay, well, maybe next year!
I remember the Arcade changing during that period. It was a pretty quick change. Either arcade owners saw what Space Invaders was leading to and began grabbing new video game, or there were sticking with pinball. By 1980 if you went with pin-ball, you where probably out of business.
Damn. Well kinda ironic then that for those arcades that are still holding on by the skin of their teeth, pinball is one of their mainstays.
While the following fact doesn't justify the high prices, giving money "directly to the band" does skip paying people who worked on other aspects of the music (promoting, recording, etc.).
I'm not well versed on the topic, but it was my understanding that most of the people like sound engineers and such were paid normally by the hour/job/etc instead of commission on record sales like the band itself. Marketing might be an exception but I doubt it and uh I don't care.
Well you're certainly right that it'll be vulnerable to discovery when it first arrives... I imagine (in the purest sense) that they'll send it to its destination at night and have it just camp out for as long as need be.
But it's nice of you to put words in the mouths of people like me to tear down to benefit your argument. You could call it a strawman. Congratulations on the insightful mod since that strawman was pretty tough to tear down.
Yeah, you're right. It was kind of a strawman, largely because it was too specific.
"I have no idea of what I'm talking about, I can't be arsed to find out, and my imagination of what is going on outrages me!"
There. That's not a strawman at all.
This sort of "search" crap is beyond stupid. Either search something, or don't, but don't pretend that your "search dog", who in his/her downtime has hobbies that include sniffing and licking his/her own genitalia, is justification for doing so.
Look I get what you're saying and I agree with your point, but that's no reason to hate on some perfectly fine hobbies. They aren't my hobbies, though they would be if I was more flexible. And if the police officer who conducted the search with a legitimate warrant happens to have an auto-fellatio hobby, well, I just don't see how that affects their ability to perform their job! If anything they'd be less uptight...
Sure CD-Rs and pressed CDs would smell different... but I was under the impression that the large-scale piracy operations pressed their disks just like the legitimate ones. The article doesn't say either way. But if it's true that they were pressed, them I'm betting the other slashdotters were right who said that the dog simply sniffed out large quantities of optical media, and once found check to see if it belongs there.
But still, this only works if it looks enough like a bird to be inconspicuous, AND no one sees it land in the first place.
Well my point was that once its perched then no it doesn't really need to look convincingly like a bird because nobody is going to see it. If you're looking for actual birds they can be pretty hard to find if they aren't moving; motion is typically how you spot them. You probably walk past birds this size in trees without ever knowing they are there all the time. So as long as they make it drab instead of shiny, the best strategy for not being seen is to find a tree limb with a view and sit still.
If someone sees it come in, it has two choices - fly zig-zag or random pattern to take a couple pics and get away (and fly another mission), or land and make itself a sitting duck.
I don't think they're designing the perching feature for missions that have failed before they've even begun. Since the ability to fly is already part of the specs, adding the ability to perch in order to conduct prolonged surveillance is in no way a bad idea.
- Hump like a bonobo!
Well the 'bird' is for surveillance, and that means being inconspicuous. If they know where the robot is to shoot at it, then for the purposes of many missions it's already failed. A motionless bird, even one with a 29" wingspan, is much harder to spot when sitting still on a branch than when flying around.
See what happens when someone acts like an adult. We learn stuff. Man, I hate to learn stuff.
On the plus side I did get to say "tit" like fifty times.
Well yeah. It's developers going bankrupt had no effect on the chances of DNF being released. It's equally likely that it will be finished in 2011 as it was to be finished in 2008. So, you know, anything (equal to nothing) could happen!
With CGI porn, the disconnect is complete! It has become a truly solitary masturbatory experience, the last vestiges of shared sexuality banished.
Say what you will about it being impersonal. CGI is the only way I could afford to complete my masterpiece: Lord of the Cock Rings: The Battle of Purple Helm's Deep Penetration.
What wasn't even a ton of appeal would then solidly be in the "Fuck No" category.
Agree completely, though I'd never threaten someone's Geek Card over their decision not to see a Tim Allen movie even if it happened to be awesome like Galaxy Quest.
Though one of the many great things about the movie is actually Tim's acting, which said to me that he realized his character in the movie was making fun of him as much as it was a lampoon of Shatner, and that he thought this was hilarious. Sigourney Weaver and, um, Monk/weird-guy-from-Wings give similarly inspired performances. You could never remake it and have it work.
(Ok, maybe boobies, science and beer...)
We need to apply for a grant from NSF to study The Effects of Fermented Berries and Other Plants on Great Tits, now.
This just theoretically reduces the alleles available to given sample... it isn't genetic evolution, which I think is the point being made.
Change in allele distribution is evolution. And once there are two separate breeding populations, any further mutations or allele frequency changes will not be transferred to the other group, and thus clearly it is only a matter of time until they are different enough that anyone can see that genetic evolution has taken place.
And it's a fairly valid point. There is a big difference between differentiation and evolution, and the blurred line between them by many "science buffs" is why they're scoffed at by ID proponents.
The line is blurry, and the inability of ID proponents to comprehend this, and most other things they ignorantly scoff at, is why they are scoffed at by biologists.
At any rate I'd make sure you're real sure you like being away from your landline. Give that decision a 6 month wait period before you decide to recycle your wires one way or another.
I dropped my land line a few years ago, and haven't missed it at all.
However now that I own my own house* I'm considering trying to get the cheapest land line service possible. The reason is simply that in the past there have been times when a storm would kill cell phone service, even knock out the power, but phone-over-copper was still up. So something like a $5/mo plan with no built-in long distance just as an emergency backup makes has some appeal. Not a ton of appeal, but some.
Either way, I wouldn't pull my copper just because I was sure I personally didn't want a land line. I wouldn't pull it unless either 1) I knew I was going to be living in that house until I died or 2) I knew that everyone else had dumped their landlines too and thus wouldn't balk** at buying a house with no phone lines.
* Of course there's a bank right now laughing its ass of at that statement, but hey.
** I love this word so much. To me it evokes the image of a skeptical chicken.
Is it necessarily evolution? Or is it simply training? I bet if I took a bird egg from the country and swapped it with one from the city, that the birds would identify with their adoptive culture.
Either way the result will be evolution. Even if the different call is learned behavior (which they theorize is the case), if the females from one group won't respond to the calls of the other (which they haven't tested yet) then they won't interbreed and barring substantial egg-swapping efforts by humans they are effectively different species on their own evolutionary paths.
They would need to examine the reaction of different populations from the countryside to see if the reaction is simply one of disputes between avian clans. As it stands, their data could mean too many different things. The adage, often repeated here, is that correlation is not causation.
As your knowledge of bird behavior stands, yes, it could mean just about anything. When you know nothing else but that correlation exists, then this in fact does not indicate causation. However when someone possess knowledge of other factors that suggest causation, then correlation can in fact support the causation conclusion.
In this case, a "dispute between avian clans" can easily be ruled out. You see, when a breeding male tit hears the call of another male tit nearby, that male will sing its own song to proclaim its territory, or investigate the source of the call in order to drive the intruder out. If the male country tit recognized the call of the male city tit, but didn't like city tits, then it would have responded more aggressively in trying to drive out the intruder. The lack of a response means that the country tit did not consider the city tit to be a threat, making the most likely explanation that the country tit didn't recognize the city tit's song as being that of a Great Tit at all.
There is as they say more research to be done. The next step is to see how females from each group respond to the calls of the other group. This is going to be trickier. While a male will react to any male that enters its territory and thus threatens its chances to mate, a female may or may not respond to the call of a male for any number of reasons. However if city tit females routinely reject the calls of country tit males and vice versa, then the question of whether the female recognizes the male call but just doesn't like it vs doesn't see them as the same species becomes largely moot. If the females aren't attracted to the other males, they won't breed, and they will slowly begin to separate as species.
On the other hand, if females don't appear significantly less attracted to the other males, then well I'm not really sure what would happen since I'm not terribly well versed in Great Tit behavior. It might mean more females breeding with multiple males on the edge of cities since the city/country males wouldn't compete with each other. It might mean that a bird born from mixed parentage would learn both songs, possibly eliminating the difference.
In the review it says it talks about Rogue, progenitor of Nethack and all "Rogue-likes" (der). So who's just talking about their favorite games, history be damned? Okay, those were online 'bonus' chapters. Anyway.
There's only so much room in a book about an area of entertainment to mention/discuss all instances of that form of entertainment. And frankly the list presented here is one of the most varied and comprehensive I've seen in anything of this sort. Not everything can make it in, and focusing on "influence" willows out a lot of things that we might like to see because they are our favorite games.
Like, say, nethack, which I love, but lets be honest outside of inspiring other rogue-likes to add features and inspiring nerds to fail college in their attempts to Ascend, it's influence is limited. Diablo is much more influential in my view. Yes, Diablo was itself a graphical Rogue-like -- and I'd hope the Diablo chapter at least mentions Rogue, though obviously the author is aware of the game either way -- but it's Diablo, not Rogue, that others are apeing in the explosion of dungeon-crawl hack-and-slash games that followed. Diablo brought Rogue-like gaming to the masses. This is why it deserves a whole chapter, and frankly to be honest Nethack doesn't.
Seriously, I have tried it. I prefer firearms for target shooting. I had thought it'd be the other way around, I mean bows are cool, but here we are.
And neither is something I'd like to devote as much time to as I do to video games. For one thing, sure the 'input' may be more varied, but the objective is as non-variable as can be. Hit a target at X meters. Sometimes the outside of the target is shaped like a torso, but what you're actually aiming at is still, nevertheless, the same ol' concentric circles as always. Unless you're good enough where doing something like shooting from horseback is possible, you never do anything different than stand/sit there and plunk away at a target. Oh now I'm using a different gun/bow or ammo, which slightly changes the parabolic arc that I plunk away at the target with. Which sure has the nice advantage of having essentially infinite potential for improvements in your skill, and I'm sure is fun enough for the aficionado, but it's just not going to draw me away from shooting virtual people/dinosaurs/multi-phase boss monsters while riding a horse/hover-cycle or what have you.
Oh yeah, and then when I decide I've had enough fun killing people, I pop in Trauma Center and have fun saving people. :)
Then stop playing on consoles, and go join an archery club.
I did, but they kicked me out when I shot someone in the face and humped their corpse. Then The Man got involved and things got even worse.
I want a real bow, but one I can shoot people with and not go to real PMITA prison.
Okay, now that I think about it, I don't want to go to a virtual PMITA prison... that game would suck.
It's sad that Nintendo pioneered it - and moreso because the Wiimote is such a mediocre solution.
I have no idea what that sentence minus the "moreso" part is supposed to mean. Somebody had to be the first to make a functional and mainstream motion sensing controller. As usual, Nintendo was there to make controller innovation happen. Why's that sad? Would it not be sad if Microsoft had done it? Why?
Seriously, the more I played Wii Sports Golf and Wii Sports Tennis, the more I knew they'd screwed up. It works well enough for "big" movements - basic tennis swing, big golf swing, bat swing, etc - but for the "fine" motions, such as imparting "spin" to the tennis ball or trying to make a putt, the controller is Simply. Not. Sensitive. Enough.
Did it ever occur to you that it was just those games? That you weren't meant to be able to impart finely granular levels of spin to the ball in Wii Tennis? It works great in Trauma Center and Elebits for fine motions.
As the tech matures, it'll get better - but Big N's already, by producing an "add-on" sensor to tweak the sensitivity, admitting their initial setup wasn't good enough.
Admitting it wasn't good enough, or admitting that it could be better and that better is good? It's awesome how the Nintendo haters have retro-actively given the Wii the status of automatic success, instead of extremely risky proposition like they were happy to call it before its launch. Keeping the cost of controllers down was important, making something like the Wiimote at the time wasn't easy, and now that the technology has become cheaper and better, they take advantage of that. I'm not seeing the crime here.
Once they are legally in the clear and have a good design, they will be able to build and sell a car for the US market.
Disclosure - I live in China.
[accent type="Cartman Chinese"] Hurro ferrow Chinese! Please to be explaining the lest of pran to be taking over Amelica? I forget! [/accent]