...in a few million years time the whole universe will be part of one big American empire. And all because of the incompetence of one slighly insane British king during the 18th century. He couldn't he have had any clue about the significance of what was to emerge from his mishandling of the colonies.
...into a myriad fragments as we take control of our own DNA and do with it what we will. This will happen over the next couple of centuries. In 100,000 years humans won't be recognisable, apart from maybe a handful of people synthesised from the archived DNA of 'original' humans and maybe also some weird luddites.
"Locking up while trying to download a really huge file."
That's the plugin, not the standalone. Adobe can't write plugins to save their lives. Just remove the plugin and configure your browser to kick up the app externally. It'll improve your quality of life no end...
I should add - I stopped using Adobe reader anyway because I use Apple's Preview which has 99% of the features without the crap - for MacOS X of course.
The Adobe reader plugins for browsers are as horrible as Real Player. But I've not had too many problems from the stand alone Adobe reader, just a handful of GUI annoyances. What problems have you encountered?
There's going to be a place for realism and for exaggeration.
There's room for all kinds of things. But sometimes the wrong decisions seem to get made. For example the Spiderman movies have some really amazing mocap that looks indistinguishable from an actor in a suit, but the exaggerations can look terrible, especially the rubbery Spiderman swinging through the streets in a really unnatural looking way. On the other hand, mocap would probably look just wrong in a Pixar production. What we rwally need are more tools to allow animators to exercise their skills better in conjunction with mocap - but these are hard to design.
My roommate is a digital animator and if his comments are worth anything then Mo-Cap is not all it's cracked up to be
Here's how it works. You employ animators to animate humans, or you use mocap. Suppose mocap produces better results. How likely are the animators to admit it?
The truth is that good results often require a blend of human animation and mocap, But dealing with mocap is more technical than just hand animating. So for most artists mocap is hard to do well, and less interesting. So artists bitch and moan about mocap despite the fact that they can't even come close to photorealistic results without it.
There's no such thing as wisdom. It's a concept invented by non-smart people who resent smart people. It makes them feel better to be able to say "he might have been smart but he wasn't wise".
Your simple statement belies a more subtle issue. Obviously anyone who has been convicted as been arrested. That trivial logical fact alone, is enough to provide evidence that Reiser is more likely to be convicted than a randomly chosen other person such as me (who happens to live not far from Reiser).
But there's another issue - are cops selective about who they arrest? If cops are significanty more likely to arrest guilty people than non-guilty people (and we hope they are, otherwise police investigation is a waste of tax money) then the fact that Reiser has been arrested is evidence to me in favour of his guilt. Of course it's not good evidence for the cop - the cops are arresting him because they already have some evidence, and to use his arrest as evidence would mean using the same evidence twice. So the fact that Reiser has been arrested is evidence (but not proof) of his guilt for me, but obviously it should never be used in a court of law.
Apart from a few people pushed out to its East and West coasts, and dismissed by the rest of the country as wet liberals, the US already is in a dark age.
The overanalyzation of this purchase is mind numbing.
Mind numbing? I actually agree with your demolition of the argument. Nonetheless, the original argument is pretty damn interesting. It might not apply here but now that the idea has been suggested to me I'll looking for applications of it elsewhere. So far from mind numbing, I find it mind expanding.
The fact that he has been arrested is evidence. It's not evidence that would stand up in court, obviously. But it is evidence in the sense used in ordinary speech. I'll put money on there being a significant correlation between people being arrested and people being convicted. To deny that would be silly, it would mean that arresting peole served no purpose and we might as well put randomly selected people on trial. So if there is such a correlation, someone's arrest is most definitely evidence that they have committed a crime. Whether or not someone who has been arrested probably committed the crime is a different matter. That would require scrutinizing arrest and conviction records. But only an insane person would deny any correlation whatsoever.
The non-deterministic parts, the atoms that decay, aren't really part of the computer, they're a phenomenon that the computer measures.
I don't get what you're saying. If I build such a random number generator into the computer it's part of the computer. What you're doing is like saying that no car can travel faster than 30mph. When I find a car that travels faster you simply say "that's a weird kind of engine, I don't consider that engine to be truly part of the car". That's just plain silly. I'm claiming that a computer with a random number generator built into it doesn't simply follow instructions because it's behaviour can be unpredictable.
it's usually implied that they must be told to do so in their own special language.
My point was only that you need to be precise about what you mean by "tell". But my bigger point is that even though you might tell a machine what to do, it can still produce interesting and surprising results that even with today's rudimentary technology can look like creative acts.
Computers arn't intelligent, they do exactly as they are told by you or someone else, never more or less
Computers might not be intelligent, but your argument for this is complete crap. All you have to do is add a true random number generator (eg. using radioactive decay) and they no longer "do exactly as they are told by you or someone else".
And even if your argument were sound, I'd have to completely disagree with you anyway. If I had a machine that did exactly what I told it do do, I think it'd be a lot smarter than you or me. "Computer, prove Riemann's Hypothesis".
...farts themselves, are only funny in moderation.
I beg to differ. If someone farted in a meeting at work, that would be mildly entertaining. If they farted twice, it would be funny. If they farted 5 times it would be hilarious. And if they farted 20 times, the remaining survivors would write comedy epics about it.
That's nothing compared to the way Israelis and Jews are presented on TV in Muslim countries. Nobody bats an eyelid there when Jews are presented as harvesting organs from unwitting Palestinians, or plotting to take over the world, or sacrificing Muslim children to drain their blood.
There is a perpetual scam carried out by speakers of Arabic. English is widely spoken in Arabic speaking countries and so English media are well known in the Arabic speaking world. On the other hand, you can publish what you like in the Arabic speaking world, and be offensive as you like about Jews, Christians and others, and there will be very little publicity outside of the Arabic speaking world.
Nobody can accurately map out the processes of nature with the technology we have now
Exactly. Talk about missing the point. Any such processes illustrated in a game are completely made up and bear no necessary relation to reality at all. It might make for a fun game, but there's no 'firsthand' about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not convinced about authorship. Has an expert actually authenticated this work?
...in a few million years time the whole universe will be part of one big American empire. And all because of the incompetence of one slighly insane British king during the 18th century. He couldn't he have had any clue about the significance of what was to emerge from his mishandling of the colonies.
...into a myriad fragments as we take control of our own DNA and do with it what we will. This will happen over the next couple of centuries. In 100,000 years humans won't be recognisable, apart from maybe a handful of people synthesised from the archived DNA of 'original' humans and maybe also some weird luddites.
That's the plugin, not the standalone. Adobe can't write plugins to save their lives. Just remove the plugin and configure your browser to kick up the app externally. It'll improve your quality of life no end...
I should add - I stopped using Adobe reader anyway because I use Apple's Preview which has 99% of the features without the crap - for MacOS X of course.
The Adobe reader plugins for browsers are as horrible as Real Player. But I've not had too many problems from the stand alone Adobe reader, just a handful of GUI annoyances. What problems have you encountered?
The truth is that good results often require a blend of human animation and mocap, But dealing with mocap is more technical than just hand animating. So for most artists mocap is hard to do well, and less interesting. So artists bitch and moan about mocap despite the fact that they can't even come close to photorealistic results without it.
A heroin tipped needle? You say that as if finding a heroin tipped needle in earphones is somehow scarier than finding a needle in earphones.
There's no such thing as wisdom. It's a concept invented by non-smart people who resent smart people. It makes them feel better to be able to say "he might have been smart but he wasn't wise".
Because it's more entertaining than American Idol? The music's certainly better.
But there's another issue - are cops selective about who they arrest? If cops are significanty more likely to arrest guilty people than non-guilty people (and we hope they are, otherwise police investigation is a waste of tax money) then the fact that Reiser has been arrested is evidence to me in favour of his guilt. Of course it's not good evidence for the cop - the cops are arresting him because they already have some evidence, and to use his arrest as evidence would mean using the same evidence twice. So the fact that Reiser has been arrested is evidence (but not proof) of his guilt for me, but obviously it should never be used in a court of law.
Apart from a few people pushed out to its East and West coasts, and dismissed by the rest of the country as wet liberals, the US already is in a dark age.
The fact that he has been arrested is evidence. It's not evidence that would stand up in court, obviously. But it is evidence in the sense used in ordinary speech. I'll put money on there being a significant correlation between people being arrested and people being convicted. To deny that would be silly, it would mean that arresting peole served no purpose and we might as well put randomly selected people on trial. So if there is such a correlation, someone's arrest is most definitely evidence that they have committed a crime. Whether or not someone who has been arrested probably committed the crime is a different matter. That would require scrutinizing arrest and conviction records. But only an insane person would deny any correlation whatsoever.
And even if your argument were sound, I'd have to completely disagree with you anyway. If I had a machine that did exactly what I told it do do, I think it'd be a lot smarter than you or me. "Computer, prove Riemann's Hypothesis".
Thanks. There used to be a bunch of links to similar stuff here but I couldn't find it.
There is a perpetual scam carried out by speakers of Arabic. English is widely spoken in Arabic speaking countries and so English media are well known in the Arabic speaking world. On the other hand, you can publish what you like in the Arabic speaking world, and be offensive as you like about Jews, Christians and others, and there will be very little publicity outside of the Arabic speaking world.