Being a realist, I'm am perfectly willing to admit the many failings of America and the ways in which the U.S. could learn from the folks across the pond. But this is one case where both historically and currently we do a much better job than Europe.
We have had waves and waves of immigration that have changed our demographics entirely. While at first they try to isolate themselves in their own communities, and are largely ostracized by those already living in the country, it doesn't take very long for them to become largely assimilated. In a large part because of our attitude which is open to immigrants. We see our country as a land of opportunity and someone coming here to live is as much a vindication of that promise as it is a threat.
The result? While there are cases of poorly-integrated immigrants, and non-immigrants (or rather non-1st-generation immigrants) who hate the people coming over, to a large degree they are accepted, and by virtue of that acceptance the immigrants come to see this country as their home.
Quick: Give the name, nationality, and ostensible religion of the last even modestly successful domestic terrorist. Times up, it's Timothy McVeigh, U.S., and Roman Catholic.
The ones most likely to conduct what we might call "terrorism" or just hate-based extremist violence are the anti-immigrant racist groups and fringe militias which often amount to the same thing.
Europe, on the other hand, seems to take a harsher attitude towards their immigrants and keeping them distinct from "natives". France in particular seems to go out of their way to make sure that all the Muslim immigrants are aware that they Are Not French. And gee, the Muslim immigrants go "You're right, fuck France".
Immigration is not the problem. Intolerance is the problem. And just like with any such situation, it's when the native majority is intolerant of the immigrant minority that the big problems arise.
With immigration, we have too much of a good thing. Immigration is good, but only when it is limited to people who actually want to **abandon** their old culture in favor of the new one. Multiculturalism is bullshit. If you like the way it was done back home, then stay there.
It would be a fun exercise to try to list every cultural influence from immigrant populations in just the last couple hundred years that is now considered to be a normal part of American culture, but we've both got better things to do. Suffice to say that multiculturalism is the parent of new culture, and is how American culture became what it is today.
Immigration isn't good when the immigrant abandons their old culture. Immigration is good when the immigrants adapt their culture to the native one, which requires that the native culture be tolerant of the immigrant's culture. When they feel accepted, they will accept us, and end up becoming one of us.
Placing a great divide between us and them and saying "you are not welcome unless you leap this divide and abandon all you knew" is a great way to end up with France-like situations.
I would like to see any examples of predictions based on evolution. I've actually grown more skeptical of it the more I study about it. To be clear: I'm not saying I don't believe in DNA or inherited traits (that would seem crazy - even to me).
Well then like I said you're already aware of one of the greatest triumphs of the theory. Long before microbiology was anywhere near advanced enough to find it, evolutionary theory predicted that there would be found a biological mechanism for passing traits between parents and offspring through reproductive cells. Many years later we discovered DNA, the very mechanism of heredity that evolution predicted. It even works largely how the theory predicted, with a mixing of portions of the parent's traits, and with random changes possible as well.
I even believe in natural selection changing traits of a population over time. What I am increasingly skeptical of is those minor changes ever adding up to an entirely new species, or leading to things as diverse as a dog and a lobster, or the first functioning eyeball. I just doubt that a species has that great a "range" of potential change.
Ah, micro- vs macro- evolution. Okay, so just to be clear, you believe that natural selection can change the traits of a population over time, that the random mixing of parent's genes and random mutations can create new traits? Do you believe it is impossible for any series of changes, no matter how many millions of years it took for them to occur, could possibly change Species A enough that you would no longer recognize it as being Species A? And do you believe it is impossible for any such series of changes to cause two sub-groups of Species A separated by geography to no longer be able to interbreed?
Because those two things put together is how micro-evolution becomes macro-evolution. Once a species splits into two subgroups that cannot interbreed then each is on their own evolutionary path. Since each will experience different changes over time, they will eventually diverge enough that they are clearly different species, and eventually to the point where one might presume that they could never have been the same species.
I doubt it's additional study of evolutionary research that has caused you to doubt that species have that much "range". Since in labs they've done things as diverse as getting bacteria to eat oil or plastics, to growing extra wings on flies. It's not a matter of "range" -- the "range" is anything DNA can express and we have yet to come close to putting limits on that.
Ring species are an interesting aspect of evolutionary research as well. These are species that started on one side of a geographic obstacle like a mountain range, and then spread in both directions around it until eventually the two branches meet on the other side. Yet because over the time it took for the populations to spread, they underwent enough genetic changes that the end points of the two branches are incapable of breeding with each other.
The first functioning eyeball was probably a single photo-sensitive nerve that could detect light and dark. This would be a major survival trait, and not out of the realm of imagination. More nerves closer to the surface, a clear membrane forming over them, the membrane filling with liquid to create a lens to focus more light, new kinds of photo-sensitive neurons to detect new wavelengths of light, none of these sound like particularly unlikely leaps though I'll admit I'm just speculating. I just don't see how that adds up to "impossible".
Besides, where did Archaeopteryx even come from then if it's impossible for any species to change into something so radically different? Where did mammals come from? "God" being both a theologically accurate but scientifically inadequate answer.
You might say, "ID is stupid when there's this perfectly good scientific explanation". Well, if you regard invoking a creator as "stupid", then you've shown that you're biased against that idea, just as I am biased against the idea that the universe "just happened" without a purposeful, creative agent behind it.
ID is stupid, not because it invokes a Creator, but because it pretends to be a scientific theory while invoking a Creator whose existence cannot be proven or disproven. ID is non-falsifiable, ergo not science, and is merely Christian theology dressed up with scientific terminology in order to get around the Separation Clause of the 1st Amendment. So it's not just stupid, it's also despicable.
And yes, I realize there are a lot of people who believe both -- the "God created the mechanism of evolution" view. That's fine, but for me I think that view assumes a solider scientific foundation for evolution than actually exists.
As someone who does believe both, you're wrong. The only thing I'm am completely sure of and believe absolutely, as a matter of faith, is that God created the Universe. What I'm not so sure about is how He did this, and how exactly this universe He created works.
However there is a very solid scientific foundation for evolution -- I think your view assumes that it isn't, but there are few theories as well tested as evolution, in fact you probably hear about one of the greatest predictive successes of evolution on a daily basis, which is DNA. Is it possible that evolutionary theory is wrong, and not just inaccurate and in need of tweaking but completely, utterly wrong? Sure. I welcome any proof anyone may have that this is the case, though just like proving Relativity is completely wrong that doesn't seem very likely. In any case, the theory is well tested and until such time as it fails testing I'm going to go with it.
Note that this is completely different than "assuming" or even more so different than having faith in evolution.
ID does nothing but confuse the issue of faith and scientific reasoning by adding "and God did it" to a scientific theory. Only worse they try to pretend that it isn't necessarily "God" but some "intelligence" because actually saying God would defeat the purpose of getting Creationism into schools. ID is stupid.
My comment was in a thread discussing whether or not it was a violation to begin with since the code had not even change. The crux of my comment was the GPL applies to any distribution, even if what you've not made changes before the distribution. That Valve/ID is no longer violating has no bearing to the conversation.
Ha ha, no it isn't! Your comment is in a thread discussing whether or not they are still violating the GPL by not distributing their "modified" source, not whether it was a GPL violation originally. That isn't in question, by anyone.
Yes, it's a violation because the GPL states that if you distribute the binaries you must distribute the source and license as well.
Well aside from the fact that this is what Valve is doing (distributing the source), it is actually not a requirement of the GPL that you distribute the source along with the binaries. Here's the relevent part of the GPL:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
So merely offering to send you the source if you ask (not even necessarily through steam, they could require you to mail a request with a small shipping fee and then they mail you a CD with the source on it) would be sufficient. But practically speaking, since compared to the games your downloading the source to dosbox is most likely very small, it's just easier for them to comply by giving you the binaries and source at the same time.
Ah, God bless people like Carmack, industry leaders with enough clout in their companies that they can actually stick to their principles even if it isn't clear that said principle is good for business!
Well there are "some users" who are stupid on every forum.
A wrapper isn't modification or linking. If a proprietary piece of code "fork(); execv()"s a GPL program, it has not modified the program no matter what requirements the wrapper has before it will actually perform the execv(). If this wasn't the case, then double-clicking on a GPL application in Windows Explorer would constitute a GPL violation on the part of Microsoft.
Extending the already fallacious notion of "linking" to include steam itself is just another layer of dumb.
His logic did not depend on the set being continuous. It would have worked just as well using rational numbers in the range [0, 1], of which there are an infinite number and which still has a largest element (again, 1).
And while there may in reality be a finite number of possible sizes, the argument the OP made and the GP rebutted was about an infinite universe with an infinite number of galaxies, which are not necessarily each a different size than every other galaxy. The argument still works exactly as well in that case.
I think I've heard that before, except the part about them not working, as there was certainly work to be done and women needed to do it. I've also heard the theory that the turning point was the rise of agriculture.
The intervening millennia have certainly be dominated by men and the opinion that women were good for little but making babies.
Islam is about peace?? Give me a F@#$ing break! Iraq should tell you somthing there. You have Suni's and Sheite's killing each other with the kurds on the side.
I like how people act like the current violence is simply the natural way of things for Iraqi Muslims and there's nothing that can be done, and are completely ignorant of the fact that Sunni vs Shiite violence in Iraq didn't reach significant levels until 2006 and the mosque bombing, and that before that Sunnis and Shiites lived, worked, married and raised families together with little concern for who was of what religious sect.
Iraq should tell you something. It should tell you that when you invade a country, throw it into chaos by deposing the government without so much of a plan for how to maintain peace in the aftermath, and by the lack of such a plan allow militias to become de-facto police forces, then you invite and empower extremism where before it was powerless. What we are looking at is a perfect example of how to turn peace and tolerance into violence and hate, and because you completely missed the transition, you thus fail to learn the lesson. Good job.
Next you'll tell me that Palestinians just inherently want to kill Israelis and it has nothing to do with how they've been treated, which makes about as much sense as saying Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights has nothing to do with Jordan invading them.
But you're right about one thing: it is terribly important that I defend your right to say such things. After all, if I tried to repress your right to speak, then you'd simply say the same thing in private, with nobody around who knows better to point out how ignorant you are. Ignorance is defeated by light and exposure and knowledge, while suppression and secrecy are its allies.
Well, I suggest you take your untrained eye out of the city to someplace nice and dark, and preferably with someone who can find some good objects for you to look at. But really you only need to look at two things -- any star in the sky (not a planet, look for the twinkle, if it doesn't twinkle it's a planet), and then look at Andromeda. Andromeda is easy to see with binoculars, and you can tell it isn't a star with the naked eye. Anyway, that'll show you how stars and galaxies can be distinguished. They really don't look anything alike. If your buddy brought a telescope, check out some globular clusters.
So why exactly does the man not have to fight "the thinking behind the stigma" while the woman does? The thinking behind the stigma and the stigma are really just one in the same.
They do, but the difference is this: "Women's work" was considered by society to be beneath men, while "men's work" was considered by society to be above women. This means that while both have to contend with society looking down on them from breaking from the accepted rules, women also have to contend with being considered by the men occupying positions of authority in that field that women as a whole are incapable of doing the job.
A woman may have to fight an individual who may not believe she is capable; a man has to fight a society that will mock him.
For the vast majority of jobs you can name, for such a vast majority of history that the present trend is a drop in the bucket as it only started less than a century ago, women were considered to be the inferiors of men and excluded by men and told to their faces that they should not aspire to doing such things. And the worst you can say as a man is that people will look at you and say "why would you lower yourself to doing a job that women do, you must be less of a man." Isn't it obvious why one is harder?
Weapons manufacturers and police departments have been using the terms "less-than-lethal" and "less-lethal" as standard practice for a while now.
Ah! I'm very glad to hear that, it's certainly most important for the police to remember the difference. I guess then it's just the media that has forgotten. Not surprising, really.
I'm not sure I believe that, and by your words, I'm not sure you do, either. Did women in the past really believe that "killing people" is a "grander pursuit"? If not, then where's the problem?
Um, in the time I'm speaking about, and I'm talking about 100 years ago, the opinion of women on the subject really didn't matter. "Women's work" was beneath men, and "Men's work" was above women, women who agreed on what was "women's work" were just accepting that. Of course I'm being ironic when I say "grander pursuits". I'm saying that's bullshit, there's no arbitrary definition of what sex as a whole wants to do what. You will find historical examples of women who agreed and pushed boundaries, and with increasing frequency into the recent past. Starting from, basically, nothing.
I don't see how it could possibly be more important or more challenging, since it's exactly the same problem.
You're viewing it purely analytically, the problem is a maximization problem, finding the optimum mix of sexes based on whatever criterion define that be it skill, passion, desire, ability, however you decide to define it. What I hope we both agree that we ultimately want is for each individual to be able to decide for themselves what they want, and be given the chance to try to achieve it. That is not ultimately what the problem is. The problem is -- how do you achieve such a goal given the existant reality behind the numbers. You're not accounting for history. Women have been excluded from professions due to a prejudiced belief that women are inferior or even incapable at those professions. In the past as a social norm, meaning girls were indoctrinated with these beliefs, and continuing to lesser extents into the present.
What's the problem? The problem is people occupying jobs that they would want to were it not for social assumptions of gender roles. In this country, women didn't gain the right to vote until 1920, much less take on jobs that were considered to be "man's work". That whole process didn't start until WWII where women were needed to work in factories making war machines. As recently as 70 years ago it took the crisis of a world war to get us to overcome our belief that women were unfit for doing these jobs. And at that time it certainly didn't include any woman who thought a "grander pursuit" would be to be an infrantry soldier! So the question of whether or not "women in general" or whatever think killing people was a grander pursuit is completely moot, because men had already decided for them that no it wasn't!
To put it in engineering terms, I'm talking about derivatives, I'm talking about trends. As a function of "number of jobs especially those that pay as a function of sex" over time, women came from a place men never have, and still haven't gotten there. The function is asymetrical. That's why the problems are different, and one given the reality is much more challenging. For example -- in only my lifetime, I've seen this exact same argument occur for the male-dominated professions of: Doctor, lawyer, stock broker, business owner, and corporate executive. Every time, the exact same thing. Men deciding women can't do it, and okay maybe they could but they don't want to! Telling women this. And acting like it doesn't influence their choice to not pursue the rarified profession. IT is one of the last places where even suggesting this doesn't make you look stupid.
You are correct in that non-lethal control measures are 'easier' to implement. But I think that once the decision is made to bring a situation under control, it is going to happen regardless. Maybe I just don't trust cops, but it seems like once things go bad they go the whole way. If firehoses are at hand, they bring out the firehoses. Tasers, clubs, rubber bullets, PIT maneuvers, etc etc.
Yes, that's true, and in riot-type situations that is exactly what happens.
In this particular case I'm more worried about the potential for abuse in encounters with a single suspect. While truncheons and rubber bullets leave marks, presumably this device will leave no indication that it was used other than a case of foul breath. It would be easy for a lawyer to argue that person did not beat themselves between the shoulder blades with a club, could they prove that the suspect did actually throw up, and that it wasn't a case where they vomited from anxiety (from their guilt, of course) then decided to blame the puke ray?
Basically I worry about any tool that can be used unaccountably, and yeah the lesser barrier to usage that "non-lethal"* weapons imply. Accountability means a lot -- for example it's why the police are more likely to prevent you from hitting your head as you get into the squad car rather than ensuring that you hit your head, because those kinds of bruises became easy lawsuit fodder. So now the good cops have to make sure the suspect doesn't hit their head on purpose, but that's the price that must be paid for the actions of bad cops.
* Oh yeah, and remember back when that innocent bystander to a protest in NYC was shot through her eye and killed by a rubber bullet? Remember that for a while the press was referring to the pellet guns as "less-lethal weapons"? Can we go back to using that term? Because I'd like for us to keep that in mind before some cop decides to stick this in the face of some suspect with a condition for five minutes just to teach them a lesson.
Heh, nice. I had a prof who would do the same thing for his AI class homeworks. There wasn't some backstory behind it like with the Green Sarge and Evil Physics Monkey. Each homework though would have a theme and have problems that described the adventures of characters ranging from Marvin the Martian to Marvin the Depressed Robot. While the actual grunt work was just as boring, it was nice to get a few yuks out of a homework assignment when spending a late evening in the computer lab.
Okay, so that isn't actually that much of a "range". Hopefully the organic AIs reading this will infer a broader spectrum than characters named "Marvin", unlike the learning algorithms of the class which would not!
I did have a physics professor who loved to use stuffed monkeys in physics demonstrations. What is it with physicists and monkeys?
If you concentrated more on telling people that you were in a movie, and less on Transformers trivia, you'd be far less "hated".
Er, I was trying to make a subtle joke in reference to comparing myself to the A-10 and their "gigantic gun", and the type of movie I was in (which I actually wasn't)... Oh well, no funny for me.
No, it doesn't apply equally both ways, and a lot of it has to do with how we got here.
Back when the world was separated into "men's work" and "women's work", it was so because the general view was that women were not as capable as men. Those things that were classified as "men's work" from hunting to warmaking to running a business to performing surgery to studying math were seen not just as things a man should do, but as things that women were simply incapable of doing as well as a man. Whereas those things that were "women's work" were never seen as things that a man couldn't do. Men could clean and cook and knit they just wouldn't because that was "women's work" and the man should be using his superior capacities for grander pursuits like killing people from the next country over.
So a man going into a woman-dominated field has to fight against the social stigma of going outside their gender-role. A woman not only has to fight the social stigma, they also have to fight the thinking behind that stigma which is that they aren't as capable of doing "manly" things. And if you've read any slashdot threads on this kind of subject before, you can easily see that this way of thinking is alive and well.
There are of course exceptions. I think nursing was one of those areas where men were not just seen as outside their role (they should be the doctor, of course, with the subservient female nurse to assist them), but also as lacking the nurturing and compassionate instincts for the job.
I really couldn't tell you where archaeology falls into this, or why there was a predominance of women. I'm also not saying by any means that you shouldn't try to increase male enrollment or that your SMA organization is ill-conceived. I'm just saying that there is a very real and valid reason why getting women into male-dominated fields is seen as both more important and more challenging than getting men into woman-dominated fields.
Ah, the A-10. Blessed with the biggest gun of any airplane, but hated because it's slow and ugly. Enough so that it gets nicknames based on each of these attributes, both "warthog" for it's poor appearance, and "tank killer" for it's amazing prowess.
Basically the ground support aircraft equivalent of me.
P.S. Anyone else a little dissapointed by the A-10s' cameo in Transformers? 40mm SABOT infantry rounds were effective, but 30mm depleted uranium wasn't? Oh well, it gave the gunship a chance to shine. I have a similar complaint about a movie I was in, but I'll save that for another time.
That's one way to look at it, if you view the algorithm as a form of compression. But is the seed to your random number generator the same as the series of random numbers which follow? At the very least, it's the combination of the string input and the algorithm that together can be called "the content", and this is distinct from say the algorithm needed to decompress a jpeg texture because there you start with the end result and apply a compression algorithm. Here the "compressed" form is actually the starting point and only by applying the "decompressor" do you ever actually have anything that can be called "content'. At least content that your rendering engine can use, and certainly the rendering engine doesn't care if the polygons and textures it's asked to draw came from an artist's hand or a procedure.
Interesting point here is that this is something of a continuum.
Are there examples of things in the middle of the continuum? I can think of some examples of things that are mostly artist-created with some algorithmic manipulation, those are near one end. It just seems like when people decide to use procedural content they go whole-hog.
If most of the work is in the engine, it's really easy to make lots of new kinds of content since you don't have to do as much work to make the content. However, making a powerful engine sure requires a lot of work, doesn't it? You have to make your engine handle absolutely every special case that you could ignore if it wasn't normally applicable to a very specific content instance.
Yah, that's part of what I think is causing Spore to take a long time. Guessing from the demos they've shown, the procedurally driven content is already working quite well. The problem is probably forcing artificial boundaries on the outputs of the procedures, lest creative gamers find a way to create a beast which does an end-run around whatever game mechanics are in place.
I think the main use for procedural content will be for allowing the user more freedom in creating things in the game. I imagine most fixed game content would still be created in the traditional manner (unless obscene size limitations are in place) because as you said it's hard. Not clearly easier than creating the art, and the output isn't as easy to control.
Slashdot Mirror
Being a realist, I'm am perfectly willing to admit the many failings of America and the ways in which the U.S. could learn from the folks across the pond. But this is one case where both historically and currently we do a much better job than Europe.
We have had waves and waves of immigration that have changed our demographics entirely. While at first they try to isolate themselves in their own communities, and are largely ostracized by those already living in the country, it doesn't take very long for them to become largely assimilated. In a large part because of our attitude which is open to immigrants. We see our country as a land of opportunity and someone coming here to live is as much a vindication of that promise as it is a threat.
The result? While there are cases of poorly-integrated immigrants, and non-immigrants (or rather non-1st-generation immigrants) who hate the people coming over, to a large degree they are accepted, and by virtue of that acceptance the immigrants come to see this country as their home.
Quick: Give the name, nationality, and ostensible religion of the last even modestly successful domestic terrorist. Times up, it's Timothy McVeigh, U.S., and Roman Catholic.
The ones most likely to conduct what we might call "terrorism" or just hate-based extremist violence are the anti-immigrant racist groups and fringe militias which often amount to the same thing.
Europe, on the other hand, seems to take a harsher attitude towards their immigrants and keeping them distinct from "natives". France in particular seems to go out of their way to make sure that all the Muslim immigrants are aware that they Are Not French. And gee, the Muslim immigrants go "You're right, fuck France".
Immigration is not the problem. Intolerance is the problem. And just like with any such situation, it's when the native majority is intolerant of the immigrant minority that the big problems arise.
With immigration, we have too much of a good thing. Immigration is good, but only when it is limited to people who actually want to **abandon** their old culture in favor of the new one. Multiculturalism is bullshit. If you like the way it was done back home, then stay there.
It would be a fun exercise to try to list every cultural influence from immigrant populations in just the last couple hundred years that is now considered to be a normal part of American culture, but we've both got better things to do. Suffice to say that multiculturalism is the parent of new culture, and is how American culture became what it is today.
Immigration isn't good when the immigrant abandons their old culture. Immigration is good when the immigrants adapt their culture to the native one, which requires that the native culture be tolerant of the immigrant's culture. When they feel accepted, they will accept us, and end up becoming one of us.
Placing a great divide between us and them and saying "you are not welcome unless you leap this divide and abandon all you knew" is a great way to end up with France-like situations.
I would like to see any examples of predictions based on evolution. I've actually grown more skeptical of it the more I study about it. To be clear: I'm not saying I don't believe in DNA or inherited traits (that would seem crazy - even to me).
Well then like I said you're already aware of one of the greatest triumphs of the theory. Long before microbiology was anywhere near advanced enough to find it, evolutionary theory predicted that there would be found a biological mechanism for passing traits between parents and offspring through reproductive cells. Many years later we discovered DNA, the very mechanism of heredity that evolution predicted. It even works largely how the theory predicted, with a mixing of portions of the parent's traits, and with random changes possible as well.
I even believe in natural selection changing traits of a population over time. What I am increasingly skeptical of is those minor changes ever adding up to an entirely new species, or leading to things as diverse as a dog and a lobster, or the first functioning eyeball. I just doubt that a species has that great a "range" of potential change.
Ah, micro- vs macro- evolution. Okay, so just to be clear, you believe that natural selection can change the traits of a population over time, that the random mixing of parent's genes and random mutations can create new traits? Do you believe it is impossible for any series of changes, no matter how many millions of years it took for them to occur, could possibly change Species A enough that you would no longer recognize it as being Species A? And do you believe it is impossible for any such series of changes to cause two sub-groups of Species A separated by geography to no longer be able to interbreed?
Because those two things put together is how micro-evolution becomes macro-evolution. Once a species splits into two subgroups that cannot interbreed then each is on their own evolutionary path. Since each will experience different changes over time, they will eventually diverge enough that they are clearly different species, and eventually to the point where one might presume that they could never have been the same species.
I doubt it's additional study of evolutionary research that has caused you to doubt that species have that much "range". Since in labs they've done things as diverse as getting bacteria to eat oil or plastics, to growing extra wings on flies. It's not a matter of "range" -- the "range" is anything DNA can express and we have yet to come close to putting limits on that.
Ring species are an interesting aspect of evolutionary research as well. These are species that started on one side of a geographic obstacle like a mountain range, and then spread in both directions around it until eventually the two branches meet on the other side. Yet because over the time it took for the populations to spread, they underwent enough genetic changes that the end points of the two branches are incapable of breeding with each other.
The first functioning eyeball was probably a single photo-sensitive nerve that could detect light and dark. This would be a major survival trait, and not out of the realm of imagination. More nerves closer to the surface, a clear membrane forming over them, the membrane filling with liquid to create a lens to focus more light, new kinds of photo-sensitive neurons to detect new wavelengths of light, none of these sound like particularly unlikely leaps though I'll admit I'm just speculating. I just don't see how that adds up to "impossible".
Besides, where did Archaeopteryx even come from then if it's impossible for any species to change into something so radically different? Where did mammals come from? "God" being both a theologically accurate but scientifically inadequate answer.
You might say, "ID is stupid when there's this perfectly good scientific explanation". Well, if you regard invoking a creator as "stupid", then you've shown that you're biased against that idea, just as I am biased against the idea that the universe "just happened" without a purposeful, creative agent behind it.
ID is stupid, not because it invokes a Creator, but because it pretends to be a scientific theory while invoking a Creator whose existence cannot be proven or disproven. ID is non-falsifiable, ergo not science, and is merely Christian theology dressed up with scientific terminology in order to get around the Separation Clause of the 1st Amendment. So it's not just stupid, it's also despicable.
And yes, I realize there are a lot of people who believe both -- the "God created the mechanism of evolution" view. That's fine, but for me I think that view assumes a solider scientific foundation for evolution than actually exists.
As someone who does believe both, you're wrong. The only thing I'm am completely sure of and believe absolutely, as a matter of faith, is that God created the Universe. What I'm not so sure about is how He did this, and how exactly this universe He created works.
However there is a very solid scientific foundation for evolution -- I think your view assumes that it isn't, but there are few theories as well tested as evolution, in fact you probably hear about one of the greatest predictive successes of evolution on a daily basis, which is DNA. Is it possible that evolutionary theory is wrong, and not just inaccurate and in need of tweaking but completely, utterly wrong? Sure. I welcome any proof anyone may have that this is the case, though just like proving Relativity is completely wrong that doesn't seem very likely. In any case, the theory is well tested and until such time as it fails testing I'm going to go with it.
Note that this is completely different than "assuming" or even more so different than having faith in evolution.
ID does nothing but confuse the issue of faith and scientific reasoning by adding "and God did it" to a scientific theory. Only worse they try to pretend that it isn't necessarily "God" but some "intelligence" because actually saying God would defeat the purpose of getting Creationism into schools. ID is stupid.
My comment was in a thread discussing whether or not it was a violation to begin with since the code had not even change. The crux of my comment was the GPL applies to any distribution, even if what you've not made changes before the distribution. That Valve/ID is no longer violating has no bearing to the conversation.
Ha ha, no it isn't! Your comment is in a thread discussing whether or not they are still violating the GPL by not distributing their "modified" source, not whether it was a GPL violation originally. That isn't in question, by anyone.
But thanks for playing.
Well aside from the fact that this is what Valve is doing (distributing the source), it is actually not a requirement of the GPL that you distribute the source along with the binaries. Here's the relevent part of the GPL:
So merely offering to send you the source if you ask (not even necessarily through steam, they could require you to mail a request with a small shipping fee and then they mail you a CD with the source on it) would be sufficient. But practically speaking, since compared to the games your downloading the source to dosbox is most likely very small, it's just easier for them to comply by giving you the binaries and source at the same time.
Ah, God bless people like Carmack, industry leaders with enough clout in their companies that they can actually stick to their principles even if it isn't clear that said principle is good for business!
Well there are "some users" who are stupid on every forum.
A wrapper isn't modification or linking. If a proprietary piece of code "fork(); execv()"s a GPL program, it has not modified the program no matter what requirements the wrapper has before it will actually perform the execv(). If this wasn't the case, then double-clicking on a GPL application in Windows Explorer would constitute a GPL violation on the part of Microsoft.
Extending the already fallacious notion of "linking" to include steam itself is just another layer of dumb.
Curt Russel starred in "John Carpenter's The Thing"
What do you mean? I plan on laughing at #516195 for actually paying money to get to see the story he so rightly ridicules, only two hours earlier.
His logic did not depend on the set being continuous. It would have worked just as well using rational numbers in the range [0, 1], of which there are an infinite number and which still has a largest element (again, 1).
And while there may in reality be a finite number of possible sizes, the argument the OP made and the GP rebutted was about an infinite universe with an infinite number of galaxies, which are not necessarily each a different size than every other galaxy. The argument still works exactly as well in that case.
I think I've heard that before, except the part about them not working, as there was certainly work to be done and women needed to do it. I've also heard the theory that the turning point was the rise of agriculture.
The intervening millennia have certainly be dominated by men and the opinion that women were good for little but making babies.
Islam is about peace?? Give me a F@#$ing break! Iraq should tell you somthing there. You have Suni's and Sheite's killing each other with the kurds on the side.
I like how people act like the current violence is simply the natural way of things for Iraqi Muslims and there's nothing that can be done, and are completely ignorant of the fact that Sunni vs Shiite violence in Iraq didn't reach significant levels until 2006 and the mosque bombing, and that before that Sunnis and Shiites lived, worked, married and raised families together with little concern for who was of what religious sect.
Iraq should tell you something. It should tell you that when you invade a country, throw it into chaos by deposing the government without so much of a plan for how to maintain peace in the aftermath, and by the lack of such a plan allow militias to become de-facto police forces, then you invite and empower extremism where before it was powerless. What we are looking at is a perfect example of how to turn peace and tolerance into violence and hate, and because you completely missed the transition, you thus fail to learn the lesson. Good job.
Next you'll tell me that Palestinians just inherently want to kill Israelis and it has nothing to do with how they've been treated, which makes about as much sense as saying Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights has nothing to do with Jordan invading them.
But you're right about one thing: it is terribly important that I defend your right to say such things. After all, if I tried to repress your right to speak, then you'd simply say the same thing in private, with nobody around who knows better to point out how ignorant you are. Ignorance is defeated by light and exposure and knowledge, while suppression and secrecy are its allies.
Well, I suggest you take your untrained eye out of the city to someplace nice and dark, and preferably with someone who can find some good objects for you to look at. But really you only need to look at two things -- any star in the sky (not a planet, look for the twinkle, if it doesn't twinkle it's a planet), and then look at Andromeda. Andromeda is easy to see with binoculars, and you can tell it isn't a star with the naked eye. Anyway, that'll show you how stars and galaxies can be distinguished. They really don't look anything alike. If your buddy brought a telescope, check out some globular clusters.
Nope, that's the one. Thanks. I get those east coast cities confused. :)
So why exactly does the man not have to fight "the thinking behind the stigma" while the woman does? The thinking behind the stigma and the stigma are really just one in the same.
They do, but the difference is this: "Women's work" was considered by society to be beneath men, while "men's work" was considered by society to be above women. This means that while both have to contend with society looking down on them from breaking from the accepted rules, women also have to contend with being considered by the men occupying positions of authority in that field that women as a whole are incapable of doing the job.
A woman may have to fight an individual who may not believe she is capable; a man has to fight a society that will mock him.
For the vast majority of jobs you can name, for such a vast majority of history that the present trend is a drop in the bucket as it only started less than a century ago, women were considered to be the inferiors of men and excluded by men and told to their faces that they should not aspire to doing such things. And the worst you can say as a man is that people will look at you and say "why would you lower yourself to doing a job that women do, you must be less of a man." Isn't it obvious why one is harder?
Weapons manufacturers and police departments have been using the terms "less-than-lethal" and "less-lethal" as standard practice for a while now.
Ah! I'm very glad to hear that, it's certainly most important for the police to remember the difference. I guess then it's just the media that has forgotten. Not surprising, really.
I'm not sure I believe that, and by your words, I'm not sure you do, either. Did women in the past really believe that "killing people" is a "grander pursuit"? If not, then where's the problem?
Um, in the time I'm speaking about, and I'm talking about 100 years ago, the opinion of women on the subject really didn't matter. "Women's work" was beneath men, and "Men's work" was above women, women who agreed on what was "women's work" were just accepting that. Of course I'm being ironic when I say "grander pursuits". I'm saying that's bullshit, there's no arbitrary definition of what sex as a whole wants to do what. You will find historical examples of women who agreed and pushed boundaries, and with increasing frequency into the recent past. Starting from, basically, nothing.
I don't see how it could possibly be more important or more challenging, since it's exactly the same problem.
You're viewing it purely analytically, the problem is a maximization problem, finding the optimum mix of sexes based on whatever criterion define that be it skill, passion, desire, ability, however you decide to define it. What I hope we both agree that we ultimately want is for each individual to be able to decide for themselves what they want, and be given the chance to try to achieve it. That is not ultimately what the problem is. The problem is -- how do you achieve such a goal given the existant reality behind the numbers. You're not accounting for history. Women have been excluded from professions due to a prejudiced belief that women are inferior or even incapable at those professions. In the past as a social norm, meaning girls were indoctrinated with these beliefs, and continuing to lesser extents into the present.
What's the problem? The problem is people occupying jobs that they would want to were it not for social assumptions of gender roles. In this country, women didn't gain the right to vote until 1920, much less take on jobs that were considered to be "man's work". That whole process didn't start until WWII where women were needed to work in factories making war machines. As recently as 70 years ago it took the crisis of a world war to get us to overcome our belief that women were unfit for doing these jobs. And at that time it certainly didn't include any woman who thought a "grander pursuit" would be to be an infrantry soldier! So the question of whether or not "women in general" or whatever think killing people was a grander pursuit is completely moot, because men had already decided for them that no it wasn't!
To put it in engineering terms, I'm talking about derivatives, I'm talking about trends. As a function of "number of jobs especially those that pay as a function of sex" over time, women came from a place men never have, and still haven't gotten there. The function is asymetrical. That's why the problems are different, and one given the reality is much more challenging. For example -- in only my lifetime, I've seen this exact same argument occur for the male-dominated professions of: Doctor, lawyer, stock broker, business owner, and corporate executive. Every time, the exact same thing. Men deciding women can't do it, and okay maybe they could but they don't want to! Telling women this. And acting like it doesn't influence their choice to not pursue the rarified profession. IT is one of the last places where even suggesting this doesn't make you look stupid.
You are correct in that non-lethal control measures are 'easier' to implement. But I think that once the decision is made to bring a situation under control, it is going to happen regardless. Maybe I just don't trust cops, but it seems like once things go bad they go the whole way. If firehoses are at hand, they bring out the firehoses. Tasers, clubs, rubber bullets, PIT maneuvers, etc etc.
Yes, that's true, and in riot-type situations that is exactly what happens.
In this particular case I'm more worried about the potential for abuse in encounters with a single suspect. While truncheons and rubber bullets leave marks, presumably this device will leave no indication that it was used other than a case of foul breath. It would be easy for a lawyer to argue that person did not beat themselves between the shoulder blades with a club, could they prove that the suspect did actually throw up, and that it wasn't a case where they vomited from anxiety (from their guilt, of course) then decided to blame the puke ray?
Basically I worry about any tool that can be used unaccountably, and yeah the lesser barrier to usage that "non-lethal"* weapons imply. Accountability means a lot -- for example it's why the police are more likely to prevent you from hitting your head as you get into the squad car rather than ensuring that you hit your head, because those kinds of bruises became easy lawsuit fodder. So now the good cops have to make sure the suspect doesn't hit their head on purpose, but that's the price that must be paid for the actions of bad cops.
* Oh yeah, and remember back when that innocent bystander to a protest in NYC was shot through her eye and killed by a rubber bullet? Remember that for a while the press was referring to the pellet guns as "less-lethal weapons"? Can we go back to using that term? Because I'd like for us to keep that in mind before some cop decides to stick this in the face of some suspect with a condition for five minutes just to teach them a lesson.
Heh, nice. I had a prof who would do the same thing for his AI class homeworks. There wasn't some backstory behind it like with the Green Sarge and Evil Physics Monkey. Each homework though would have a theme and have problems that described the adventures of characters ranging from Marvin the Martian to Marvin the Depressed Robot. While the actual grunt work was just as boring, it was nice to get a few yuks out of a homework assignment when spending a late evening in the computer lab.
Okay, so that isn't actually that much of a "range". Hopefully the organic AIs reading this will infer a broader spectrum than characters named "Marvin", unlike the learning algorithms of the class which would not!
I did have a physics professor who loved to use stuffed monkeys in physics demonstrations. What is it with physicists and monkeys?
Yes!
If you concentrated more on telling people that you were in a movie, and less on Transformers trivia, you'd be far less "hated".
Er, I was trying to make a subtle joke in reference to comparing myself to the A-10 and their "gigantic gun", and the type of movie I was in (which I actually wasn't)... Oh well, no funny for me.
No, it doesn't apply equally both ways, and a lot of it has to do with how we got here.
Back when the world was separated into "men's work" and "women's work", it was so because the general view was that women were not as capable as men. Those things that were classified as "men's work" from hunting to warmaking to running a business to performing surgery to studying math were seen not just as things a man should do, but as things that women were simply incapable of doing as well as a man. Whereas those things that were "women's work" were never seen as things that a man couldn't do. Men could clean and cook and knit they just wouldn't because that was "women's work" and the man should be using his superior capacities for grander pursuits like killing people from the next country over.
So a man going into a woman-dominated field has to fight against the social stigma of going outside their gender-role. A woman not only has to fight the social stigma, they also have to fight the thinking behind that stigma which is that they aren't as capable of doing "manly" things. And if you've read any slashdot threads on this kind of subject before, you can easily see that this way of thinking is alive and well.
There are of course exceptions. I think nursing was one of those areas where men were not just seen as outside their role (they should be the doctor, of course, with the subservient female nurse to assist them), but also as lacking the nurturing and compassionate instincts for the job.
I really couldn't tell you where archaeology falls into this, or why there was a predominance of women. I'm also not saying by any means that you shouldn't try to increase male enrollment or that your SMA organization is ill-conceived. I'm just saying that there is a very real and valid reason why getting women into male-dominated fields is seen as both more important and more challenging than getting men into woman-dominated fields.
ground support aircraft with even bigger guns
Ah, the A-10. Blessed with the biggest gun of any airplane, but hated because it's slow and ugly. Enough so that it gets nicknames based on each of these attributes, both "warthog" for it's poor appearance, and "tank killer" for it's amazing prowess.
Basically the ground support aircraft equivalent of me.
P.S. Anyone else a little dissapointed by the A-10s' cameo in Transformers? 40mm SABOT infantry rounds were effective, but 30mm depleted uranium wasn't? Oh well, it gave the gunship a chance to shine. I have a similar complaint about a movie I was in, but I'll save that for another time.
And then then string is the content, isn't it?
That's one way to look at it, if you view the algorithm as a form of compression. But is the seed to your random number generator the same as the series of random numbers which follow? At the very least, it's the combination of the string input and the algorithm that together can be called "the content", and this is distinct from say the algorithm needed to decompress a jpeg texture because there you start with the end result and apply a compression algorithm. Here the "compressed" form is actually the starting point and only by applying the "decompressor" do you ever actually have anything that can be called "content'. At least content that your rendering engine can use, and certainly the rendering engine doesn't care if the polygons and textures it's asked to draw came from an artist's hand or a procedure.
Interesting point here is that this is something of a continuum.
Are there examples of things in the middle of the continuum? I can think of some examples of things that are mostly artist-created with some algorithmic manipulation, those are near one end. It just seems like when people decide to use procedural content they go whole-hog.
If most of the work is in the engine, it's really easy to make lots of new kinds of content since you don't have to do as much work to make the content. However, making a powerful engine sure requires a lot of work, doesn't it? You have to make your engine handle absolutely every special case that you could ignore if it wasn't normally applicable to a very specific content instance.
Yah, that's part of what I think is causing Spore to take a long time. Guessing from the demos they've shown, the procedurally driven content is already working quite well. The problem is probably forcing artificial boundaries on the outputs of the procedures, lest creative gamers find a way to create a beast which does an end-run around whatever game mechanics are in place.
I think the main use for procedural content will be for allowing the user more freedom in creating things in the game. I imagine most fixed game content would still be created in the traditional manner (unless obscene size limitations are in place) because as you said it's hard. Not clearly easier than creating the art, and the output isn't as easy to control.
Scientist: But it's really important -- like that Norwegian study which proved that penguins don't fall on their back when observing passing planes.
Damn it, that was our only defense against the penguin hordes!