There are lots of reasons to suspect that our knowledge of impacts is less than we believe. For instance, we *assume* that the reason that nearly all impact craters are round is because the kinetic impact creates an explosion. But there are other potential plasma-based explanations that have been ignored. When two plasmaspheres come into contact, for instance, it is known that electrical interactions can occur. If a significant electrical discharge happens between the ground and the object, then a round crater would form. It may turn out, in fact, that this is the key to disrupting them. We just don't yet know.
Actually, when two plasma spheres come into contact, there is definitely electrical interactions because plasma == ionized (as in electrically charged) gas.
Also, we don't assume that kinetic impacts create round craters, the most basic of physics experiment (drop a weight in sand) shows that they do.
Disrupting any hypothetical electrical charge(it is reasonable to assume that a meteor would become charged travelling through the atmosphere if it isn't already) would involve discharging it, which is exactly what would cause any electricity-related crater. Nevertheless even if you could do this the rather substantial kinetic energy of the meteor would be unaffected and thus a large round crater is guaranteed should the meteor survive to hit the ground.
Sounds to me like a back-door way to sneak in more of that Electric Universe nonsense, where the most studied, most well understood of the fundamental forces, the one that is most frequently used to do astronomical observations with terrific accuracy, is also simultaneously mysterious and ephemeral, not well understood, and oddly enough denied by main-stream astronomy.
I looked through some of his past posts, but only one that I looked at seemed to provide a link to his website.
The links to his website are in his story submissions, and he has posted a lot of them. Instead of linking to the source of the story, he links to his blog which links to the story, basically directing traffic through his typically zero-value-added blog for no reason. Oh, except he gets money.
It's one thing to link to your own site if it is the source of the story (e.g. any of the various hobbyist projects that show up on/.), but another to link to your own site as an unecessary level of indirection, solely because it generates add revenue.
Its was great fun to do and added another dimension to the game - my only regret was that they didn't take it to higher levels!!
I imagine that part of the reason was that at higher levels the stakes are higher and thus you'd be more likely to get a friend to throw the match, making it easier. Or it was just a chapter from the Standard MMORPG Designers Manual, where you torture your players in part by designing really cool features that you never expand enough to be anything other than a minor sideshow.
If there are other players, whether controlling what are typically NPC mobs or not, that's multiplayer.
Asymetric multiplayer has been done before, AvP for example, and can be very fun though it is also very hard to work right. It's really not that different than Assault modes in UT, except the two sides are playing drastically different characters. In general, the idea of having one group of "players" who are trying to accomplish a mission, and another group of "monsters" with help from NPCs trying to stop the players appeals to me.
It's like a lot of things -- if you can make it work, it will be great, otherwise it will suck. Yeah, I know, real insightful.
I'm being evaluated for a medial temporal lobectomy for epileptic seizures.
I'll let you guys know if I wake up after the surgery to find that I'm altruistic on my left side only.
Heh. The image this conjured was of you giving a homeless person a dollar with your right hand, while simultaneously giving them the finger with your left.
Very true. However in terms of the second definition, where there structure appears the same, you would be pretty much guaranteed to find to "identical" 5mm radius 31-tooth brass cog simply by picking two up at random. Whereas, despite it being almost certain that there are pairs of identical snowflakes out there, you are highly unlikely to ever find an example.
Procedural content generation simply means that a computer (not a person) generates the content.
Um, yeah, that is the basic definition, but in the context of the end-product it is irrelevent (it's a static textrue or whatever on the disc regardless of how it was created), so that's not really the definition intended in the context of the game running on actual hardware.
Perhaps dynamic procedural content would be better, to make it clear that we're talking about content created procedurally on the fly by the system running the game. It refers to the technique that Spore is using, and the assembly demo scene that inspired Mr. Wright. In practice it's a completely different beast than pre-generating content procedurally, for the same reason 3D game engines are completely different beasts than Pixar's render farms.
Not that this really changes the point -- even in games like Spore the procedures for content generation are done in the creature editor interface once, not dynamically every frame of animation in the game proper. So the resources are still much more constrained than a grid of high-end workstations, but not necessarily competing with much else. I don't think the system requirements of Spore will be high because of the procedural content, at least, and given that the benefit of procedural content has yet to be proven I agree that you can't list this as a feature of next-gen hardware.
No harm done, unless he hunts me down with a BFG...
I think you're safe. For one, he's not the vindictive type. For two, the BFG is still hypothetical, unless Carmack has been diverting resources from Armadillo Aerospace to Armadillo Armaments.
That's a weird contradiction you've forced on him that isn't actually what he is saying.
He doesn't see much compelling about DX10 for game developers. He doesn't see anything compelling about Vista for game developers. DX10 will still be relevent -- an attribute which may or may not have anything to do with the quality of DX10 -- if game developers use it for games and because of the artificial Vista tie-in will still give gamers a reason to use Vista. He's saying Microsoft tied DX10 to Vista to try to compel you to switch to Vista for artificial reasons, not that you are actually being forced.
I can't see a way that the move to Vista for gaming can be at any point independent of DX10 performance
Um, yeah, that's part of his point. There's no reason to move to Vista for gaming outside of DX10, and there's no reason for DX10 to be tied to Vista outside of giving you said reason to move to Vista for gaming. Otherwise it would be independent. You see?
Well, if the most dire estimates of global warming are cozy understatments, and we seriously ramp up industrial production, then earth may become uninhabital for humans in a hundred years. Which wouldn't get rid of the lawyers, of course, and maybe not even the people paying them. We won't be around to see it though, which is close enough. I leave my car running in the parking lot, just to do my part.
Nuclear war is also promising. I think Iran and North Korea are as desperate to seeing this case end as we are.
Barring that, the Sun will turn into a red giant in about 5 billion years, and that will certainly end things.
Or SCO could run out of stalling tactics, but seriously, that seems far-fetched.
Now maybe other cops bribe and/or threaten other convicts into making cop killer's lives hell in prison, but they're a completely different class.
Yeah, you're right, they're different than the others... it's inmates making your lives hell vs the guards making your lives hell (or getting inmates to), it's just that either way life is less fun than it would be otherwise and that's all i was going for.
Hell, you might as well try and take down the police who attempt to bring you in. If you manage to get a few, it'd sorta be like a bonus.
Well, the only thing that I can think of is that then you'd be in the class of cop-killers, one of the groups along with pedophiles, snitches, and cops themselves whose lives are extra-special not-fun in prison.
I've also heard that a Game Genie serves well by making contact with the connector without requiring the spring-loading to work. This wouldn't work if the problem is corrosion.
it's a careful balancing act -- keep people afraid so that they're willing to go along, but not so afraid that they decide you aren't keeping them safe enough. Most of these "security" measures fall into the latter category in my opinion. An example of the first is no more apparent than in the HSA threat level. Over Christmas all throughout the airports the voice on the intercom kept saying "Be advised that Homeland Security has raised the threat level to orange." What can I possibly do with that information, other than be more afraid of terrorists than I would have been otherwise? Oh, but I have to put my shoes through the scanner, thank goodness they're keeping me safe...
I think so, this is probably a "set an example" type of case. Though it depends on how much money he actually stole; if not a huge amount -- serious criminals even if nobody is killed should get serious punishment, and yes I'm thinking corporate crooks here -- then I'd rather see violent criminals in prison instead of him. But that's just off-the-cuff reaction based on skimming the article.
Another off-the-cuff reaction: When the mafia lands in court, the witnesses get whacked. How appropriate is it that a spammer can't accomplish any more than witness harassment? I can only imagine his method: Emails stating "Y t3st1fy? Do and no more v14gr4 for U!"
Well, then there's maybe the fact that the vast majority of WWII games are about as close to "reality" as Doom with Ally/Axis player skins. Both the people you kill and the people you are fighting beside are anonymous and disposable with no connection outside of whatever you brought to the game with you. And they respawn 30 seconds later anyway.
Personally, his reaction makes sense to me. Like he says, he's killed thousands of video game characters. Yet rarely do they attempt to draw you into understanding your character as the killer, and understanding your victims, the whole scenario surrounding the killing. Rarely do they cover historical events, real murders, with any attempt at accuracy. So when he plays a game that does, it is as disturbing to him as watching a documentary about Columbine that then asks the viewer "So given you were them, would you have shot your schoolmates?" That's bound to create an emotional reaction that no FPS tries to.
Basically it supports what I've been saying all along -- despite all the "conditioning" he's received from playing video games, when the situation even got close to real violence, his natural reactions kicked in. Conditioning only works if you believe you are experiencing real consequences or rewards. The "real" rewards and consequences of an FPS are completely divorced from those of a real life murder spree, and no amount of Doom/BF1942 will forge an artificial connection in a normal person.
Normal people have no problem separating reality from fantasy, and thus no amount of "fantasy" killing will actually train them to kill in real life or be desensitized to real life killing. Only insane people who are incapable of this separation will directly transfer simulated killings into the real world, because for them the difference is blurry or non-existant to begin with.
Billions of dollars. Big deal. How about we discuss the real costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism and (for some reason) Muslims? Yes, I'm talking about the $1 trillion that the Iraq war is costing us. Then there's the human lives being lost. You can't really put a price tag on those, as you would have to do so your own in the process.
You have a fantastic point there. As much as I like to criticize any particular "security" measure that will of course be meaningless -- like basically all airline security features except locking the cabin door -- they are really just side-shows to the real War on Terror blunder that is Iraq.
At least anti-missle systems aren't going to make the terrorism problem worse. They're merely unecessary.
We're shoveling money and lives down a hole to create the most expensive pro-terrorist propaganda ever. And it's working. We know that this is the effect it is having, yet we are still shoveling money and lives. We're idiots.
According to the article this would definitely not work on the primitive systems. It is supposed to "direct a laser to the seeker system on the head of the missile and disrupt its guidance signals. The laser is not visible and is eye-safe, the company said." So it is not destroying the missile with the laser, only interfering with its guidance systems. Which means it only works on active-guidance (possibly only laser-guided) systems, and wouldn't work for dumbfire missiles or RPGs. It would probably only guarantee that a passive infra-red system has an even better lock on the airplane.
That's 10 per day per rail gun. You wouldn't need very many in a carrier group to easily match some of our largest cruise missle attacks in the past; it isn't as though we fire them willy-nilly, because they're expensive and designed to hit specific high-value targets and require some programming for each mission. Once you've built the 'rail gun cruisers' to work with/replace the missle cruisers, the primary cost is the energy. The ammo for each shot is cheap as can be, can be stored in greater numbers, and doesn't suffer from the 'secondary explosion' problem of other armaments, and even as a side effect is not vulnerable to anti-missle tech.
The main problem I see is that most of our ships are no longer designed around big naval guns, instead they use missles and smaller DP guns, so a fast retro-fit may not be easy. They don't say in the article, but even the more powerful planned versions are certainly smaller than traditional naval guns, so maybe it's not a big deal.
Yeah, and each of them is either right or wrong. Whenever two beliefs disagree, only one of them can be right. There are thousands of different beliefs, so a person claiming he has the correct one without giving sufficient evidence for it sure sounds quite ignorant.
You mean like the person I replied to?
"Whenever two beliefs disagree, only one of them can be right" is also a false dichotomy, by the way. There are many beliefs, and many of them can capture aspects of the truth that others do not, while those others reveal some truth. An example in the sciences would be Newtonian physics, which is not "wrong", it's just limited to what it was possible for Newton to know about at the time. It captures aspects of the truth.
If you mean that there is only one capital-T Truth, then I agree, but many belief systems have as part of them the idea that it is impossible for humans to actually know the capital-T Truth completely, which is itself an aspect of truth that they capture, exemplifying what I was saying about how "right/wrong" is a limiting false dichotomy.
This is why I like atheism (which, as christianity, means slightly different things to different people). To me it means that we sincerely don't have any answers at all, and all that we have are guesses. Some guesses are better than others, and which they are can be told apart by the evidence.
Which is what I would call Agnosticism, as Atheism seems to be the rejection of God and spiritual beliefs, as in I know there isn't one, as opposed to I don't know. Anyway, Agnosticism is a belief I can respect for its acknowledgement that capital-T Truth is a difficult thing to search for and something we should all be very leary of claiming to have found.
Last but not least, there is a huge contradiction in believing in what the Bible says and the big bang and evolution. These things are in complete disagreement. Now I've been told that christians think the Bible has more value than the other religions' books, which is weird considering the above. If I see ten errors on the first page of a book, I tend not to trust the book a whole lot.
No, that is certainly least. The word translated as "day" also means "age" in Hebrew, assume some artistic license, aka metaphor, in describing in just a few paragraphs the act of creation of the universe which is what any physicist would do describing the Big Bang to a modern high-school educated audience much less peasants thousands of years ago, and bam you're done. There's only two groups of people who feel the need to take every word of Genesis as though it were literally true, and that's Fundamentalist Christians, and anti-Christians. I find it funny how often those two groups are in agreement.
Now Fundamentalists should theoretically know better and thus they have my greatest ire, but others may not. The Bible makes it clear that we can not fully understand capital-T Truth, God must speak to us in metaphor for us to understand, Jesus talks in parables all the time and explicitly states that we will not understand completely, so trying to turn Genesis into a physics textbook is like trying to turn Lord of the Rings into socio-economics textbook. It was never meant to be that, so judging it based on that is foolish, and actually using it as if it were a physics textbook is even more foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anyone on the planet who wants to listen to BOTH Howard Stern AND Oprah?
No, but you could have two people, each who want to listen to one of the two, but who would also like to share a sattelite radio service.
How could such a mysterious circumstance come about? How should I know; I'm a slashdotter too.
There are lots of reasons to suspect that our knowledge of impacts is less than we believe. For instance, we *assume* that the reason that nearly all impact craters are round is because the kinetic impact creates an explosion. But there are other potential plasma-based explanations that have been ignored. When two plasmaspheres come into contact, for instance, it is known that electrical interactions can occur. If a significant electrical discharge happens between the ground and the object, then a round crater would form. It may turn out, in fact, that this is the key to disrupting them. We just don't yet know.
Actually, when two plasma spheres come into contact, there is definitely electrical interactions because plasma == ionized (as in electrically charged) gas.
Also, we don't assume that kinetic impacts create round craters, the most basic of physics experiment (drop a weight in sand) shows that they do.
Disrupting any hypothetical electrical charge(it is reasonable to assume that a meteor would become charged travelling through the atmosphere if it isn't already) would involve discharging it, which is exactly what would cause any electricity-related crater. Nevertheless even if you could do this the rather substantial kinetic energy of the meteor would be unaffected and thus a large round crater is guaranteed should the meteor survive to hit the ground.
Sounds to me like a back-door way to sneak in more of that Electric Universe nonsense, where the most studied, most well understood of the fundamental forces, the one that is most frequently used to do astronomical observations with terrific accuracy, is also simultaneously mysterious and ephemeral, not well understood, and oddly enough denied by main-stream astronomy.
I looked through some of his past posts, but only one that I looked at seemed to provide a link to his website.
/.), but another to link to your own site as an unecessary level of indirection, solely because it generates add revenue.
The links to his website are in his story submissions, and he has posted a lot of them. Instead of linking to the source of the story, he links to his blog which links to the story, basically directing traffic through his typically zero-value-added blog for no reason. Oh, except he gets money.
It's one thing to link to your own site if it is the source of the story (e.g. any of the various hobbyist projects that show up on
Its was great fun to do and added another dimension to the game - my only regret was that they didn't take it to higher levels!!
I imagine that part of the reason was that at higher levels the stakes are higher and thus you'd be more likely to get a friend to throw the match, making it easier. Or it was just a chapter from the Standard MMORPG Designers Manual, where you torture your players in part by designing really cool features that you never expand enough to be anything other than a minor sideshow.
If there are other players, whether controlling what are typically NPC mobs or not, that's multiplayer.
Asymetric multiplayer has been done before, AvP for example, and can be very fun though it is also very hard to work right. It's really not that different than Assault modes in UT, except the two sides are playing drastically different characters. In general, the idea of having one group of "players" who are trying to accomplish a mission, and another group of "monsters" with help from NPCs trying to stop the players appeals to me.
It's like a lot of things -- if you can make it work, it will be great, otherwise it will suck. Yeah, I know, real insightful.
I'm being evaluated for a medial temporal lobectomy for epileptic seizures.
I'll let you guys know if I wake up after the surgery to find that I'm altruistic on my left side only.
Heh. The image this conjured was of you giving a homeless person a dollar with your right hand, while simultaneously giving them the finger with your left.
Very true. However in terms of the second definition, where there structure appears the same, you would be pretty much guaranteed to find to "identical" 5mm radius 31-tooth brass cog simply by picking two up at random. Whereas, despite it being almost certain that there are pairs of identical snowflakes out there, you are highly unlikely to ever find an example.
I find that good enough for a colloquialism.
Procedural content generation simply means that a computer (not a person) generates the content.
Um, yeah, that is the basic definition, but in the context of the end-product it is irrelevent (it's a static textrue or whatever on the disc regardless of how it was created), so that's not really the definition intended in the context of the game running on actual hardware.
Perhaps dynamic procedural content would be better, to make it clear that we're talking about content created procedurally on the fly by the system running the game. It refers to the technique that Spore is using, and the assembly demo scene that inspired Mr. Wright. In practice it's a completely different beast than pre-generating content procedurally, for the same reason 3D game engines are completely different beasts than Pixar's render farms.
Not that this really changes the point -- even in games like Spore the procedures for content generation are done in the creature editor interface once, not dynamically every frame of animation in the game proper. So the resources are still much more constrained than a grid of high-end workstations, but not necessarily competing with much else. I don't think the system requirements of Spore will be high because of the procedural content, at least, and given that the benefit of procedural content has yet to be proven I agree that you can't list this as a feature of next-gen hardware.
No harm done, unless he hunts me down with a BFG...
I think you're safe. For one, he's not the vindictive type. For two, the BFG is still hypothetical, unless Carmack has been diverting resources from Armadillo Aerospace to Armadillo Armaments.
That's a weird contradiction you've forced on him that isn't actually what he is saying.
He doesn't see much compelling about DX10 for game developers. He doesn't see anything compelling about Vista for game developers. DX10 will still be relevent -- an attribute which may or may not have anything to do with the quality of DX10 -- if game developers use it for games and because of the artificial Vista tie-in will still give gamers a reason to use Vista. He's saying Microsoft tied DX10 to Vista to try to compel you to switch to Vista for artificial reasons, not that you are actually being forced.
I can't see a way that the move to Vista for gaming can be at any point independent of DX10 performance
Um, yeah, that's part of his point. There's no reason to move to Vista for gaming outside of DX10, and there's no reason for DX10 to be tied to Vista outside of giving you said reason to move to Vista for gaming. Otherwise it would be independent. You see?
FTA:
Stop using wooden crates in games!
-Anonymous
Uh... How about metal crates?
-Game Industry
Well, if the most dire estimates of global warming are cozy understatments, and we seriously ramp up industrial production, then earth may become uninhabital for humans in a hundred years. Which wouldn't get rid of the lawyers, of course, and maybe not even the people paying them. We won't be around to see it though, which is close enough. I leave my car running in the parking lot, just to do my part.
Nuclear war is also promising. I think Iran and North Korea are as desperate to seeing this case end as we are.
Barring that, the Sun will turn into a red giant in about 5 billion years, and that will certainly end things.
Or SCO could run out of stalling tactics, but seriously, that seems far-fetched.
Now maybe other cops bribe and/or threaten other convicts into making cop killer's lives hell in prison, but they're a completely different class.
Yeah, you're right, they're different than the others... it's inmates making your lives hell vs the guards making your lives hell (or getting inmates to), it's just that either way life is less fun than it would be otherwise and that's all i was going for.
Hell, you might as well try and take down the police who attempt to bring you in. If you manage to get a few, it'd sorta be like a bonus.
Well, the only thing that I can think of is that then you'd be in the class of cop-killers, one of the groups along with pedophiles, snitches, and cops themselves whose lives are extra-special not-fun in prison.
I've also heard that a Game Genie serves well by making contact with the connector without requiring the spring-loading to work. This wouldn't work if the problem is corrosion.
it's a careful balancing act -- keep people afraid so that they're willing to go along, but not so afraid that they decide you aren't keeping them safe enough. Most of these "security" measures fall into the latter category in my opinion. An example of the first is no more apparent than in the HSA threat level. Over Christmas all throughout the airports the voice on the intercom kept saying "Be advised that Homeland Security has raised the threat level to orange." What can I possibly do with that information, other than be more afraid of terrorists than I would have been otherwise? Oh, but I have to put my shoes through the scanner, thank goodness they're keeping me safe...
CL1cK HERE TO 3NLARGE MALE M3MBER.
I think so, this is probably a "set an example" type of case. Though it depends on how much money he actually stole; if not a huge amount -- serious criminals even if nobody is killed should get serious punishment, and yes I'm thinking corporate crooks here -- then I'd rather see violent criminals in prison instead of him. But that's just off-the-cuff reaction based on skimming the article.
Another off-the-cuff reaction: When the mafia lands in court, the witnesses get whacked. How appropriate is it that a spammer can't accomplish any more than witness harassment? I can only imagine his method: Emails stating "Y t3st1fy? Do and no more v14gr4 for U!"
Heh, I like the Informative mods. "Hey, that's a great idea! And I'll get so many fewer STDs that way!"
Well, then there's maybe the fact that the vast majority of WWII games are about as close to "reality" as Doom with Ally/Axis player skins. Both the people you kill and the people you are fighting beside are anonymous and disposable with no connection outside of whatever you brought to the game with you. And they respawn 30 seconds later anyway.
Personally, his reaction makes sense to me. Like he says, he's killed thousands of video game characters. Yet rarely do they attempt to draw you into understanding your character as the killer, and understanding your victims, the whole scenario surrounding the killing. Rarely do they cover historical events, real murders, with any attempt at accuracy. So when he plays a game that does, it is as disturbing to him as watching a documentary about Columbine that then asks the viewer "So given you were them, would you have shot your schoolmates?" That's bound to create an emotional reaction that no FPS tries to.
Basically it supports what I've been saying all along -- despite all the "conditioning" he's received from playing video games, when the situation even got close to real violence, his natural reactions kicked in. Conditioning only works if you believe you are experiencing real consequences or rewards. The "real" rewards and consequences of an FPS are completely divorced from those of a real life murder spree, and no amount of Doom/BF1942 will forge an artificial connection in a normal person.
Normal people have no problem separating reality from fantasy, and thus no amount of "fantasy" killing will actually train them to kill in real life or be desensitized to real life killing. Only insane people who are incapable of this separation will directly transfer simulated killings into the real world, because for them the difference is blurry or non-existant to begin with.
Billions of dollars. Big deal. How about we discuss the real costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism and (for some reason) Muslims? Yes, I'm talking about the $1 trillion that the Iraq war is costing us. Then there's the human lives being lost. You can't really put a price tag on those, as you would have to do so your own in the process.
You have a fantastic point there. As much as I like to criticize any particular "security" measure that will of course be meaningless -- like basically all airline security features except locking the cabin door -- they are really just side-shows to the real War on Terror blunder that is Iraq.
At least anti-missle systems aren't going to make the terrorism problem worse. They're merely unecessary.
We're shoveling money and lives down a hole to create the most expensive pro-terrorist propaganda ever. And it's working. We know that this is the effect it is having, yet we are still shoveling money and lives. We're idiots.
According to the article this would definitely not work on the primitive systems. It is supposed to "direct a laser to the seeker system on the head of the missile and disrupt its guidance signals. The laser is not visible and is eye-safe, the company said." So it is not destroying the missile with the laser, only interfering with its guidance systems. Which means it only works on active-guidance (possibly only laser-guided) systems, and wouldn't work for dumbfire missiles or RPGs. It would probably only guarantee that a passive infra-red system has an even better lock on the airplane.
That's 10 per day per rail gun. You wouldn't need very many in a carrier group to easily match some of our largest cruise missle attacks in the past; it isn't as though we fire them willy-nilly, because they're expensive and designed to hit specific high-value targets and require some programming for each mission. Once you've built the 'rail gun cruisers' to work with/replace the missle cruisers, the primary cost is the energy. The ammo for each shot is cheap as can be, can be stored in greater numbers, and doesn't suffer from the 'secondary explosion' problem of other armaments, and even as a side effect is not vulnerable to anti-missle tech.
The main problem I see is that most of our ships are no longer designed around big naval guns, instead they use missles and smaller DP guns, so a fast retro-fit may not be easy. They don't say in the article, but even the more powerful planned versions are certainly smaller than traditional naval guns, so maybe it's not a big deal.
No Blood for Poop!
Yeah, and each of them is either right or wrong. Whenever two beliefs disagree, only one of them can be right. There are thousands of different beliefs, so a person claiming he has the correct one without giving sufficient evidence for it sure sounds quite ignorant.
You mean like the person I replied to?
"Whenever two beliefs disagree, only one of them can be right" is also a false dichotomy, by the way. There are many beliefs, and many of them can capture aspects of the truth that others do not, while those others reveal some truth. An example in the sciences would be Newtonian physics, which is not "wrong", it's just limited to what it was possible for Newton to know about at the time. It captures aspects of the truth.
If you mean that there is only one capital-T Truth, then I agree, but many belief systems have as part of them the idea that it is impossible for humans to actually know the capital-T Truth completely, which is itself an aspect of truth that they capture, exemplifying what I was saying about how "right/wrong" is a limiting false dichotomy.
This is why I like atheism (which, as christianity, means slightly different things to different people). To me it means that we sincerely don't have any answers at all, and all that we have are guesses. Some guesses are better than others, and which they are can be told apart by the evidence.
Which is what I would call Agnosticism, as Atheism seems to be the rejection of God and spiritual beliefs, as in I know there isn't one, as opposed to I don't know. Anyway, Agnosticism is a belief I can respect for its acknowledgement that capital-T Truth is a difficult thing to search for and something we should all be very leary of claiming to have found.
Last but not least, there is a huge contradiction in believing in what the Bible says and the big bang and evolution. These things are in complete disagreement. Now I've been told that christians think the Bible has more value than the other religions' books, which is weird considering the above. If I see ten errors on the first page of a book, I tend not to trust the book a whole lot.
No, that is certainly least. The word translated as "day" also means "age" in Hebrew, assume some artistic license, aka metaphor, in describing in just a few paragraphs the act of creation of the universe which is what any physicist would do describing the Big Bang to a modern high-school educated audience much less peasants thousands of years ago, and bam you're done. There's only two groups of people who feel the need to take every word of Genesis as though it were literally true, and that's Fundamentalist Christians, and anti-Christians. I find it funny how often those two groups are in agreement.
Now Fundamentalists should theoretically know better and thus they have my greatest ire, but others may not. The Bible makes it clear that we can not fully understand capital-T Truth, God must speak to us in metaphor for us to understand, Jesus talks in parables all the time and explicitly states that we will not understand completely, so trying to turn Genesis into a physics textbook is like trying to turn Lord of the Rings into socio-economics textbook. It was never meant to be that, so judging it based on that is foolish, and actually using it as if it were a physics textbook is even more foolish.