While yes, humans domesticated the cat. That domestication did not consist of teaching it to hunt and kill things. That attribute is entirely natural, and was the point of my sarcastic retort. I would not, therefore, be inclined to think that cats killing birds is, in any way, human induced.
Well to say it's not in any way is just wrong.
We also did not create the electromagnetic force which creates the normal forces which kill birds when they impact solid objects. That is entirely natural. Therefore birds striking buildings are not human induced? No. We put the buildings there, where they were not before. The resulting bird deaths are human-induced.
Humans created the domestic cat, and introduced this cat into North America where previously there was no cat that predated small passerines. We did not make the cat a predator. We did make the conditions where it would predate hundreds of millions of birds each year.
How many bird deaths due to felis catus were there in North America prior to European colonization and introduction of the cat? Zero.
Just because the cat takes an active role in killing birds while a building's role is passive does not change the fact that both are a direct consequence of human actions. Denying that is just stupid.
Right, now refer back to my post and tell me where I supported oil or gas as an alternative fuel source. Thank you for providing a perfect demonstration of the straw man argument.
Why would I try to do that when I didn't say you did?
You said windmills were a blight, I said I like them and there are sure as fuck a lot better looking than what we have now. I don't see how anyone can see windmills as ugly when we have true ugliness all over the place.
This point does not require you to advocate for more refineries. There is no strawman in my post. Yours, however, is full of arguments against things I never said.
Nuclear energy is absolutely safe, with zero emissions of any kind, cheap and reliable
I'd disagree with "absolutely" as that's just unrealistic, but indeed they are safe and we should be building more of them. Should have been building more, including breeders and other types more advanced than our antiques.
Why did you assume I'm anti-nuclear? Because I'm also pro-wind?
You just look at wind mills and get a warm fuzzy feeling inside without realizing their serious drawbacks. Yes, they work to power a few homes. Yes, they make sense in windy areas. But as an energy source for the entire planet? Give me a break.
See, I forget where I said that because windmills aren't ugly they should be used as our sole source of power. "Not able to provide baseline power" is not actually a drawback unless you for some reason assume that's the goal and anything less than that is failure.
Like I said, I'm 100% for more nuclear plants. How fast do you think they could be built? How fast do you think they will be built? Well, in the meantime, wind farms are going up and providing clean energy.
Sane energy strategy would be to use diversified sources. Using something as low-impact as wind and solar for whatever power we can get from it, and using nuclear with it's not-so-low-but-vastly-lower-than-coal impact to provide base load is an example of such a sane strategy.
You seem to think nuclear and wind are enemies for some reason. This is counterproductive. You're not going to win on a platform of "let's do nuclear and NOT any form of renewable energy." The resistance to nuclear is much greater than resistance to wind and solar. If you alienate everyone who is open to nuclear but thinks that green energy is good energy even though it can't be all energy, then you've just cut off your nose to spite your face.
Yes humans created the domestic cat as surely as we created the domestic dog; we didn't need genetic engineering to do it. We did not create their predator instinct, we created their willingness to co-habitate with humans and thus made them into a pet that we would bring with us around the world.
Which leads me to the main point that, yes, humans most certainly did introduce the domestic cat to North America.
The domestic cat was introduced to North America. Of all human-introduced causes of bird deaths, they are by far the greatest.
I just can't believe you flipped out over such an obvious and straightforward fact.
I see hundreds and hundreds of windmills all over west Texas (there are more every time I go out), and I still think they're beautiful. They're an aesthetically pleasing symbol of our progress towards a cleaner, better society.
And then when I head to the Gulf coast I pass all the oil refineries. Fucking disgusting blight on the land.
Oh, is that what this is about? Well that's even more retarded since low frequency sounds are ridiculously common and not something that should be mysterious to non-engineer/scientists.
Been there. After a week you don't hear it anymore, just like when you have a half-dozen computer fans on 24/7 in the same room as you through all four years of college.
People can get used to just about anything.
For something like two weeks in college our apartment had a malfunctioning CO detector that would go off randomly. It was really fucking annoying the first couple days but then we got used to it.
there is actually tangible reasons and evidence that there could be some health risks associated with living near large turbines.
Oh? Like what?
It's about constant exposure to low frequencies as I understand it, which is not something that people are generally exposed to in their daily lives.
Yeah I'm pretty sure we're all exposed to low-frequency EM radiation constantly. How exactly are low-energy photons supposed to be more dangerous than high-energy? Are all the Wi-fi/cell-phone people crazy for going after that rather than radio towers?
Now, I don't know if there are actual health risks or not - all I'm saying is that I accept the possibility.
Sure, it's possible. It's possible that there's some heretofore unknown mechanism that allows this to damage you. I just find it hard to believe that these protesters have stumbled across this revelatory new science so as to make them so sure that it's real.
If there is a real effect of being near wind turbines, then I'd bet anything it's actually due to a chemical like an herbicide with a perfectly understandable mechanism for causing harm. I don't know if these are organic farmers, but if they're not, then I have a hard time believing their occupation is less hazardous in this regard than wind towers.
I met an Amish who owns a computer and uses a cellphone for his work. Doesn't have them in his home, doesn't carry the phone with him all the time, but he uses them.
That offends my Boy Scout sensibilities: "Be prepared". I very much respect their goal to not have technology interfere with their lives and relationships. So just turn the ringer off and don't use it when at home. But a cell phone can be extremely handy to have in an emergency, and you don't want to waste time running to go get it, or worse have to leave it behind.
I guess that'd probably get into a gray area for them. I'm sure they have their reasons.
Whereas I will gladly exchange the ability to hack my character for a talent-reset ability and getting rid of having to choose whether I'm playing single or multi-player at character creation time.
Blizzard also has a habit of making dual DirectX and OpenGL rendering engines, so they probably are closer than most other companies would be to making a port.
Blizzard is not going to port the game to Linux, and they're not going to officially support Linux/Wine as a platform.
However, Blizzard has worked with Wine and Transgaming to fix issues specific to their games -- in particular WoW, which ran great on Wine. Also, while D2 always worked pretty damn well except for Battlenet, recently even that has worked.
I'm a Linux-exclusive gamer. I understand that means I won't be able to play all the games I might want to. But the odds are better than most that D3 will be among the games I can play.
who cares about game flow in a game like diablo 2 the mother of "let's play it from the beginning again with a boosted character!" ??
I don't, but I also don't care if you can't break the game flow just because. "Cheating" in a single player game doesn't matter to me. Not being able to cheat in a single player game also doesn't matter to me.
I do recall some areas being empty of monsters after the first run, but I may be mistaken. It's been too long.
If I'm already hacking the character, the reward is pointless, but yes, playing the boss battle again was fun, and that couldn't always be done.
Yeah, it hasn't been that long for me (decided I finally wanted to beat the game through Hell mode to prep for D3 ) and you're mistaken. All the monsters, including all bosses, are waiting for you again when you quit and restart. There's no reason to edit a character just to re-do content. Re-doing content is pretty much what the whole game is based on.:P
If I want to make a character with a single health point and an undead horde take on the final boss, what exactly is the problem?
Absolutely no problem! I don't care at all if you want to hack your single player game all to hell. I also don't care if you can't. Not every single-player RPG has character editors for them -- is this a crime?
Having to start a new character just to try out a different build of the same class -- or because you mis-clicked a single skill point -- is a gameplay issue that should be fixed. Not being able to do anything you want like skipping to the end boss with an unworkable build or giving yourself a zillion skill points is not an issue that needs to be fixed.
If not being able to do this ruins the fun of the game for you, I'm sorry you feel that way.
Oh, okay. I'm not as sympathetic to your desire to change classes without starting a new character, or mucking with the game flow. I doubt blizzard is either. Sucks to be you, I guess.
You could revisit any dungeon in the game in D2 as many times as you wanted; I don't know if D3 would change this but I don't see why they would. Do you mean you also wanted to get any unique prize at the end again, like the skill-point scroll?
I don't think it works that way. They even added a way to reset your skill points in D2 in a (very) late patch, though only once per difficulty. Still, I think you won't have to hack your character just to try a different build.
There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
But "the air force doesn't have fighters" isn't even disagreeing with the person. So how can it possibly be on that side of the line?
You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect.
It's not incorrect in any way that matters in this context. What you said is only correct in a legal context. For the purpose of the point being made "war" is any large military conflict -- what most people would call war despite the legal definition, e.g. the Vietnam War.
Which is more important to the OP's point: Whether something was labelled a "war" by Congress, or whether we were spending large amounts of blood and treasure in combat?
Pedantry only makes sense in contexts where precise, technical definitions exist. In natural languages like English, words like "war" have broad definitions and it makes no sense to nitpick whether Desert Storm was technically a war or not.
I call that "useless pedantry" or "slashdot pedantry". "Pedantic asshole point" would be another way of putting it. Key idea is that it's basically a factoid with no relevance.
If you were a lawyer, would you defend your client accused of murdering someone with a knife by saying that it was technically a kris?
Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute.
How well researched does the point "I wish we couldn't conduct wars because of all the money we were spending on science, instead of vice-versa" need to be? Useless pedantry allows you to say that they were technically wrong about something, but the problem is with whoever thinks that means it was "refuted". Like you're going to convince them of anything anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- obviously research and proper communication are important. Getting details right is better than not. You can't control how other people think, you can only control how you frame your message so they can best receive it.
I'm talking about whether you believe such pointlessly pedantic arguments actually refute anything. All it lets you do is say "you were wrong!" in some way. Seems like that'd only be enough if you just wanted to prove that because they disagreed with you, they were therefore wrong. And see, they technically were wrong about something! It all holds together!
This is all I'm getting at.
I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle
Hey!
I'll have you know my drunk uncles are quite capable of spouting out accurate factoids that nevertheless miss the point.
That happened after the bubble had already formed and then burst, you idiot. The free market did not prevent the bubble from forming, it did not prevent it bursting. People who aren't ideologically blind call that a failure of the free market, yes.
This obviously isn't you. You don't appear to realize that having an ideology does not free you from the constraints of reality. As long as you can't separate the two then you're just crazy and there is no point to anything you say except for some measure of amusement. So please don't reply with this or any sock puppet account you may have unless you're going to be either sane, or funny.
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
It was "Judicial Activism" when the court ruled that the 14th Amendment applied to Teh Gays, and it'll be the same if they rule that the Commerce Clause can't be used to justify literally anything.
You don't need to have a central monetary authority to have a bubble based on creation of fake currency if fake currency can be created by anybody anyway. It's perfect, it's as if everybody had their own printing press.
Thank you for demonstrating the obvious truth that markets don't need a government authority mucking with them to create instability. That roman_mir guy sure needs to open his damn eyes and... wait...
Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?
Um... the Supreme Court? Guess correctly and you can take home your very own Justice!
And that could easily have spelled disaster for their cloud capability.
Indeed, and I can't help but smile thinking about the reaction I would have had if back in 1997 you'd told me that one day Microsoft would be screwed if they didn't support Linux.:)
In this case, the fact that Slashdot is claiming Microsoft is suddenly "a key Linux contributor" is even more valuable to Microsoft than the actual kernel contributions it has made.
No it isn't. They want to sell their hypervisor. Customers want to run Linux. If they can't virtualize linux, or can't virtualize it efficiently, then the customers won't buy Microsoft's product. Being a player in the virtualization market, which is an increasingly large portion of the overall server market, is worth much more to Microsoft than a little "What, us destroy linux?" P.R. that only slashdotters care about and only slashdotters will notice.
The real story here is that Microsoft can no longer afford to use incompatibility as a lever against Linux. The fulcrum has moved, and now Linux has the leverage in that fight.
Slashdot Mirror
While yes, humans domesticated the cat. That domestication did not consist of teaching it to hunt and kill things. That attribute is entirely natural, and was the point of my sarcastic retort. I would not, therefore, be inclined to think that cats killing birds is, in any way, human induced.
Well to say it's not in any way is just wrong.
We also did not create the electromagnetic force which creates the normal forces which kill birds when they impact solid objects. That is entirely natural. Therefore birds striking buildings are not human induced? No. We put the buildings there, where they were not before. The resulting bird deaths are human-induced.
Humans created the domestic cat, and introduced this cat into North America where previously there was no cat that predated small passerines. We did not make the cat a predator. We did make the conditions where it would predate hundreds of millions of birds each year.
How many bird deaths due to felis catus were there in North America prior to European colonization and introduction of the cat? Zero.
Just because the cat takes an active role in killing birds while a building's role is passive does not change the fact that both are a direct consequence of human actions. Denying that is just stupid.
Right, now refer back to my post and tell me where I supported oil or gas as an alternative fuel source. Thank you for providing a perfect demonstration of the straw man argument.
Why would I try to do that when I didn't say you did?
You said windmills were a blight, I said I like them and there are sure as fuck a lot better looking than what we have now. I don't see how anyone can see windmills as ugly when we have true ugliness all over the place.
This point does not require you to advocate for more refineries. There is no strawman in my post. Yours, however, is full of arguments against things I never said.
Nuclear energy is absolutely safe, with zero emissions of any kind, cheap and reliable
I'd disagree with "absolutely" as that's just unrealistic, but indeed they are safe and we should be building more of them. Should have been building more, including breeders and other types more advanced than our antiques.
Why did you assume I'm anti-nuclear? Because I'm also pro-wind?
You just look at wind mills and get a warm fuzzy feeling inside without realizing their serious drawbacks. Yes, they work to power a few homes. Yes, they make sense in windy areas. But as an energy source for the entire planet? Give me a break.
See, I forget where I said that because windmills aren't ugly they should be used as our sole source of power. "Not able to provide baseline power" is not actually a drawback unless you for some reason assume that's the goal and anything less than that is failure.
Like I said, I'm 100% for more nuclear plants. How fast do you think they could be built? How fast do you think they will be built? Well, in the meantime, wind farms are going up and providing clean energy.
Sane energy strategy would be to use diversified sources. Using something as low-impact as wind and solar for whatever power we can get from it, and using nuclear with it's not-so-low-but-vastly-lower-than-coal impact to provide base load is an example of such a sane strategy.
You seem to think nuclear and wind are enemies for some reason. This is counterproductive. You're not going to win on a platform of "let's do nuclear and NOT any form of renewable energy." The resistance to nuclear is much greater than resistance to wind and solar. If you alienate everyone who is open to nuclear but thinks that green energy is good energy even though it can't be all energy, then you've just cut off your nose to spite your face.
Yes, to be fair the province did allow some turbines to either be built too close to houses or houses built to close to turbines
That does sound like a legit complaint.
WTF? Where the hell did that come from?
Yes humans created the domestic cat as surely as we created the domestic dog; we didn't need genetic engineering to do it. We did not create their predator instinct, we created their willingness to co-habitate with humans and thus made them into a pet that we would bring with us around the world.
Which leads me to the main point that, yes, humans most certainly did introduce the domestic cat to North America.
The domestic cat was introduced to North America. Of all human-introduced causes of bird deaths, they are by far the greatest.
I just can't believe you flipped out over such an obvious and straightforward fact.
So do buildings. Orders of magnitude more often, in fact.
And cats are even worse than that. They're the #1 human-introduced bird killer.
I see hundreds and hundreds of windmills all over west Texas (there are more every time I go out), and I still think they're beautiful. They're an aesthetically pleasing symbol of our progress towards a cleaner, better society.
And then when I head to the Gulf coast I pass all the oil refineries. Fucking disgusting blight on the land.
I know which I'd rather see.
Oh, is that what this is about? Well that's even more retarded since low frequency sounds are ridiculously common and not something that should be mysterious to non-engineer/scientists.
Been there. After a week you don't hear it anymore, just like when you have a half-dozen computer fans on 24/7 in the same room as you through all four years of college.
People can get used to just about anything.
For something like two weeks in college our apartment had a malfunctioning CO detector that would go off randomly. It was really fucking annoying the first couple days but then we got used to it.
there is actually tangible reasons and evidence that there could be some health risks associated with living near large turbines.
Oh? Like what?
It's about constant exposure to low frequencies as I understand it, which is not something that people are generally exposed to in their daily lives.
Yeah I'm pretty sure we're all exposed to low-frequency EM radiation constantly. How exactly are low-energy photons supposed to be more dangerous than high-energy? Are all the Wi-fi/cell-phone people crazy for going after that rather than radio towers?
Now, I don't know if there are actual health risks or not - all I'm saying is that I accept the possibility.
Sure, it's possible. It's possible that there's some heretofore unknown mechanism that allows this to damage you. I just find it hard to believe that these protesters have stumbled across this revelatory new science so as to make them so sure that it's real.
If there is a real effect of being near wind turbines, then I'd bet anything it's actually due to a chemical like an herbicide with a perfectly understandable mechanism for causing harm. I don't know if these are organic farmers, but if they're not, then I have a hard time believing their occupation is less hazardous in this regard than wind towers.
I met an Amish who owns a computer and uses a cellphone for his work. Doesn't have them in his home, doesn't carry the phone with him all the time, but he uses them.
That offends my Boy Scout sensibilities: "Be prepared". I very much respect their goal to not have technology interfere with their lives and relationships. So just turn the ringer off and don't use it when at home. But a cell phone can be extremely handy to have in an emergency, and you don't want to waste time running to go get it, or worse have to leave it behind.
I guess that'd probably get into a gray area for them. I'm sure they have their reasons.
Whereas I will gladly exchange the ability to hack my character for a talent-reset ability and getting rid of having to choose whether I'm playing single or multi-player at character creation time.
*shrug*
Blizzard also has a habit of making dual DirectX and OpenGL rendering engines, so they probably are closer than most other companies would be to making a port.
Blizzard is not going to port the game to Linux, and they're not going to officially support Linux/Wine as a platform.
However, Blizzard has worked with Wine and Transgaming to fix issues specific to their games -- in particular WoW, which ran great on Wine. Also, while D2 always worked pretty damn well except for Battlenet, recently even that has worked.
I'm a Linux-exclusive gamer. I understand that means I won't be able to play all the games I might want to. But the odds are better than most that D3 will be among the games I can play.
who cares about game flow in a game like diablo 2 the mother of "let's play it from the beginning again with a boosted character!" ??
I don't, but I also don't care if you can't break the game flow just because. "Cheating" in a single player game doesn't matter to me. Not being able to cheat in a single player game also doesn't matter to me.
I do recall some areas being empty of monsters after the first run, but I may be mistaken. It's been too long.
If I'm already hacking the character, the reward is pointless, but yes, playing the boss battle again was fun, and that couldn't always be done.
Yeah, it hasn't been that long for me (decided I finally wanted to beat the game through Hell mode to prep for D3 ) and you're mistaken. All the monsters, including all bosses, are waiting for you again when you quit and restart. There's no reason to edit a character just to re-do content. Re-doing content is pretty much what the whole game is based on. :P
If I want to make a character with a single health point and an undead horde take on the final boss, what exactly is the problem?
Absolutely no problem! I don't care at all if you want to hack your single player game all to hell. I also don't care if you can't. Not every single-player RPG has character editors for them -- is this a crime?
Having to start a new character just to try out a different build of the same class -- or because you mis-clicked a single skill point -- is a gameplay issue that should be fixed. Not being able to do anything you want like skipping to the end boss with an unworkable build or giving yourself a zillion skill points is not an issue that needs to be fixed.
If not being able to do this ruins the fun of the game for you, I'm sorry you feel that way.
Oh, okay. I'm not as sympathetic to your desire to change classes without starting a new character, or mucking with the game flow. I doubt blizzard is either. Sucks to be you, I guess.
You could revisit any dungeon in the game in D2 as many times as you wanted; I don't know if D3 would change this but I don't see why they would. Do you mean you also wanted to get any unique prize at the end again, like the skill-point scroll?
I don't think it works that way. They even added a way to reset your skill points in D2 in a (very) late patch, though only once per difficulty. Still, I think you won't have to hack your character just to try a different build.
There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
But "the air force doesn't have fighters" isn't even disagreeing with the person. So how can it possibly be on that side of the line?
You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect.
It's not incorrect in any way that matters in this context. What you said is only correct in a legal context. For the purpose of the point being made "war" is any large military conflict -- what most people would call war despite the legal definition, e.g. the Vietnam War.
Which is more important to the OP's point: Whether something was labelled a "war" by Congress, or whether we were spending large amounts of blood and treasure in combat?
Pedantry only makes sense in contexts where precise, technical definitions exist. In natural languages like English, words like "war" have broad definitions and it makes no sense to nitpick whether Desert Storm was technically a war or not.
I call that "useless pedantry" or "slashdot pedantry". "Pedantic asshole point" would be another way of putting it. Key idea is that it's basically a factoid with no relevance.
If you were a lawyer, would you defend your client accused of murdering someone with a knife by saying that it was technically a kris?
Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute.
How well researched does the point "I wish we couldn't conduct wars because of all the money we were spending on science, instead of vice-versa" need to be? Useless pedantry allows you to say that they were technically wrong about something, but the problem is with whoever thinks that means it was "refuted". Like you're going to convince them of anything anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- obviously research and proper communication are important. Getting details right is better than not. You can't control how other people think, you can only control how you frame your message so they can best receive it.
I'm talking about whether you believe such pointlessly pedantic arguments actually refute anything. All it lets you do is say "you were wrong!" in some way. Seems like that'd only be enough if you just wanted to prove that because they disagreed with you, they were therefore wrong. And see, they technically were wrong about something! It all holds together!
This is all I'm getting at.
I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle
Hey!
I'll have you know my drunk uncles are quite capable of spouting out accurate factoids that nevertheless miss the point.
That happened after the bubble had already formed and then burst, you idiot. The free market did not prevent the bubble from forming, it did not prevent it bursting. People who aren't ideologically blind call that a failure of the free market, yes.
This obviously isn't you. You don't appear to realize that having an ideology does not free you from the constraints of reality. As long as you can't separate the two then you're just crazy and there is no point to anything you say except for some measure of amusement. So please don't reply with this or any sock puppet account you may have unless you're going to be either sane, or funny.
Of course there is: An activist judge is a judge that makes a ruling which creates a precedent I don't like.
It was "Judicial Activism" when the court ruled that the 14th Amendment applied to Teh Gays, and it'll be the same if they rule that the Commerce Clause can't be used to justify literally anything.
You don't need to have a central monetary authority to have a bubble based on creation of fake currency if fake currency can be created by anybody anyway. It's perfect, it's as if everybody had their own printing press.
Thank you for demonstrating the obvious truth that markets don't need a government authority mucking with them to create instability. That roman_mir guy sure needs to open his damn eyes and... wait...
Wrong sci-fi universe. Also be careful. As unintuitive as it may seem, universes with robot slaves tend to be dystopias.
With Easter coming up, wouldn't it be more appropriate to spam about Cheep Viagra for those flaccid marshmallows?
Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?
Um... the Supreme Court? Guess correctly and you can take home your very own Justice!
And that could easily have spelled disaster for their cloud capability.
Indeed, and I can't help but smile thinking about the reaction I would have had if back in 1997 you'd told me that one day Microsoft would be screwed if they didn't support Linux. :)
In this case, the fact that Slashdot is claiming Microsoft is suddenly "a key Linux contributor" is even more valuable to Microsoft than the actual kernel contributions it has made.
No it isn't. They want to sell their hypervisor. Customers want to run Linux. If they can't virtualize linux, or can't virtualize it efficiently, then the customers won't buy Microsoft's product. Being a player in the virtualization market, which is an increasingly large portion of the overall server market, is worth much more to Microsoft than a little "What, us destroy linux?" P.R. that only slashdotters care about and only slashdotters will notice.
The real story here is that Microsoft can no longer afford to use incompatibility as a lever against Linux. The fulcrum has moved, and now Linux has the leverage in that fight.