Sorry your plundering didn't include the story. If it had, you'd have read the part where we humans are moving the super-colony ants back and forth across oceans, thus keeping their genetic pools pretty similar.
Normally, you were correct in thinking that genetic drift would happen, and they would then fight each other. We keep mixing them up, so that doesn't happen. (Thus sealing our own inevitable doom.)
Doubtful. Water is clear in the amounts needed to kill an ant. Plus there are a lot of ants small enough to walk on water. When 1" of clear water is enough to drown you, I have a hard time believing that you'd evolve to fear quantities of water large enough to look blue.
The ant on my blue mousepad right now would disagree with you. What's more likely:
I have some hardcore environmental friends, and they swear the best anti-ant stuff is baby powder. The small powder does something to bind up or block the ants' scent trail. So even if the explorers come into your house, they either can't find their way back home, or if they do, they can't return bringing the rest of the colony with them.
I'd imagine that the blue chalk does the same thing, being a line of fine powder. Have you tried white chalk in the same concentration?
I bought the first starcraft (probably multiple copies, plus the expansions) because ONE friend had ONE cd, and installed it on a 4-computer LAN.
I don't care if you have all sorts of copy protection and CD keys and authenticated servers required to play over the internet. That's fine. But if four of us drag our computers together and two people have the game and want to play, you need to ENCOURAGE the other two to play. That's how you make more sales.
That's being far too good to it. All my keyboards are missing the key altogether. Nothing helps you find the home-row like a volcanic crater at the beginning of it.
For awhile now I've been wondering about the connection between music and religion. For several thousand years, the most common place to hear a serious musical performance was at a religious ceremony. (Unless you were nobility)
A pipe organ in a cathedral is a staggeringly amazing experience even for those of us able to find and listen to recordings ahead of time. Imagine the reaction of the poor common folk who had nothing but a reed flute and some singing in a grass hut to prepare them for it.
As much as video killed the radio star, I wonder how much recorded music killed religion. (See the Taliban, who ban it, for instance.)
All my keyboards have that key ripped off. A bent paperclip and a tug is all it takes. Saves me no end of time, and I dearly miss missing it when working on someone else's computer.
I'll add a "+2" to this. My background is in Astrophysics, and the coding there is largely done in Fortran. The friends and people I know spread between 4-5 different universities all program in Fortran. I'm moving into Geophysics/Atmospheric/Oceanic sciences, and all that work is done in Fortran. From fluid dynamics to stress fault calculations, Fortran is the de facto language.
To be clear, we're not talking about programming here. We're talking about math. Pure, hardcore, overwhelming math. The crunching of terabytes of data. Matrices with millions upon millions of cells, being combined with more of the same.
If we were talking about pure programming, Fortran is a terrible language. What we're talking about here is automating massively complex mathematical calculations on enormous amounts of data.
most people are going to play it like it's free, as in, not paying for anything.
I don't know that that is the case. I've been involved in a handful of free-to-play, but pay-for-perks games, and most of the people I played with threw money at the game.
Currently, the game is Requiem: Bloodymare, and most of the people I play with throw a fair bit of money at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the average wasn't near WOW's average. Why would we throw money its way? The game makes it easy and fun. There is no marketing pressure, but a fair bit of social pressure. At the same time, money spent = easier advancement or more fun stuff.
All that I know don't treat it as free because they can play for free. They spend what they want to get the fun stuff. While my sample size isn't huge, it's a solid 10-15 people.
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can,
Bullshit! The field of sperm donation is still exclusively male.
It's a pie-in-the-sky dream, but how cool would it be if patches accepted into the main trunk could be written off as charitable donations?
(It will never happen, because the mechanics of it would be near impossible to hammer out, and gaming the system would probably be trivial. Plus the corporate software houses would throw money at it to block it. Still it would be cool if this ere possible.)
The reason we have so many choices is because....the users and developers want choices. OSS choices exist almost by definition because people are choosing them. To say, "your choice sucks, choose a better one" is ridiculous. Google is showing off the corporate mentality here. If you're not paying the thousands of developers of the toolchains for the major (and minor!) distributions, you don't get to complain about what they're producing. If you want standardization, you don't bitch about it - you make your platform of choice far superior to the other options.
There are choices because they all have something to offer to someone.
That is a really short-sighted comment. Microsoft would never hurt themselves like that. What they'd do, and what they're very likely to do is simply buy the company, and thus own the patent themselves.
If a court will let something this generic and this powerful stand, why WOULDN'T Microsoft want to own it?
Buy the company, take the patent, spin off the company if you don't want it. Is there any reason for MS not to do this to everyone who sues them and wins with such a vague patent?
This seems to be a shirking of the responsibilities of a free citizen. It's important to keep in mind that The Authorities cannot possibly protect everyone, it's just a flat physical impossibility. There will never be a cop everywhere at once. Even with a surveillance state the best that will happen is that there will be evidence of a crime after the fact.
I dunno, I can visualize a time where we might be able to have a police officer available to protect everyone. The trick is in using the vast amount of data available to you to spot crimes before they happen. Then you can have some sort of Precrime officer able to head off the crime, essentially being everywhere a crime is committed even before it happens.
Since I was late to the party here, I read rather than posted, expecting to see my first thought here. I completely agree that a common updater might be the real benefit of this idea.
Coming from a linux standpoint, this seems stupid on its face. However, all the luddites that I've swayed to the linux side find the lack of a package manager the most irritating and frustrating thing when they use a Windows box for some reason. For "joe sixpack", the most appealing thing about linux is often its package manager, once he learns how it works.
If Sun can get enough apps, and hit the right price-point, and get Pepsi to put SunPoints under their caps, they could make a killing. Well, if they also learn from our package managers, and make updates unobtrusive and easy to do in the background. (They could just let every app pop up its own update notifier, as per the windows standard.)
I like you geekoid. I friended you a long time ago, because I like how you think, despite your occasional grammatical issues. That being said, I'd like to translate your most recent post into English:
That's ok, because if history tells us anything, our robots will fight their robots...that they will have purchased from us.
Humm, that may be the perfect war: No human gets hurt, and there is a constant need to build replacement robots.
It was a good post, but the grammar hurt my brain a great deal.
Re:PLEASE CHANGE THE THUMBNAIL!!!
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps the archbishop is psychologically screaming for help.
It's hilarious, actually. I use Linux as my work system. Windows it my hobby OS. I play games on it.
I know a number of people who do the same - boot to Linux when you want to get serious work done. Boot to Windows when you want to play games. So which is the hobby system again?
In my state, there are 4-5 main North/South roads/highways. Only two have more than one lane going in each direction. The others aren't divided, and have *no* breakdown lane or shoulder. (Well, I guess you could call the 3"-6" of dirt between the white line and the ditch the "shoulder" but it's not a place you can really travel well in.)
The few times I've walked or biked on such roads, it was scary as hell. They are in no way designed to be pedestrian or cycle friendly. In fact, it's almost as if they're designed to be ANTI pedestrian and cycle. I might bike the 10 miles to work on nice days if I didn't have a strong opposition to dying.
Tax gas higher, and you'll have a lot of poor people in the US, some who aren't able to afford to drive to work. That said, you'd see a lot less big vehicles, and a lot more motorcycles and compact cars. Frankly, I'd say that would be worth it.
As an addendum, I have a Masters in Education. The "Education" coursework which you correctly point out as being the most important thing is garbage.
Most college "Education" courses are taught by people with a PhD in Education. How do you get a PhD in Education? By taking college classes in Education. And what do you do, after you take hundreds of hours of college Education coursework? You teach Education to people taking your college classes.
Notice anything striking there? Of all my "Education" professors, none had taught in a non-college classroom in the last two decades. Some never had. What made them *qualified* to teach me? A PhD in Education. Did they have anything useful to teach? No. How could they, when their entire background was full-time immersion in college-level educational philosophy? My "Education" professors were philosophers,(PhD) not teachers.
A good teacher will get nothing out of "Education" coursework, and bad teachers won't get anything either. Yet our entire system revolves around non-teaching-experts teaching teachers about Educational Philosophy in a college setting. It's truly mind-boggling that the nuts and bolts of teaching at a non-college level are never touched.
My personal theory is that it's to teach them to take standardized tests.
Drivers permit/license SAT/ACT GRE Industry Certifications Boards
That, or it's to teach people to work line shifts. Turn on, turn off. Do job a, switch to job b, switch to job c, then go home when the whistle sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry your plundering didn't include the story. If it had, you'd have read the part where we humans are moving the super-colony ants back and forth across oceans, thus keeping their genetic pools pretty similar.
Normally, you were correct in thinking that genetic drift would happen, and they would then fight each other. We keep mixing them up, so that doesn't happen. (Thus sealing our own inevitable doom.)
Doubtful. Water is clear in the amounts needed to kill an ant. Plus there are a lot of ants small enough to walk on water. When 1" of clear water is enough to drown you, I have a hard time believing that you'd evolve to fear quantities of water large enough to look blue.
The ant on my blue mousepad right now would disagree with you. What's more likely:
I have some hardcore environmental friends, and they swear the best anti-ant stuff is baby powder. The small powder does something to bind up or block the ants' scent trail. So even if the explorers come into your house, they either can't find their way back home, or if they do, they can't return bringing the rest of the colony with them.
I'd imagine that the blue chalk does the same thing, being a line of fine powder. Have you tried white chalk in the same concentration?
I bought the first starcraft (probably multiple copies, plus the expansions) because ONE friend had ONE cd, and installed it on a 4-computer LAN.
I don't care if you have all sorts of copy protection and CD keys and authenticated servers required to play over the internet. That's fine. But if four of us drag our computers together and two people have the game and want to play, you need to ENCOURAGE the other two to play. That's how you make more sales.
Your first sentence said it best.
Turn it off?
That's being far too good to it. All my keyboards are missing the key altogether. Nothing helps you find the home-row like a volcanic crater at the beginning of it.
For awhile now I've been wondering about the connection between music and religion. For several thousand years, the most common place to hear a serious musical performance was at a religious ceremony. (Unless you were nobility)
A pipe organ in a cathedral is a staggeringly amazing experience even for those of us able to find and listen to recordings ahead of time. Imagine the reaction of the poor common folk who had nothing but a reed flute and some singing in a grass hut to prepare them for it.
As much as video killed the radio star, I wonder how much recorded music killed religion. (See the Taliban, who ban it, for instance.)
I prefer coffee to raspberries in the morning, but to each his own.
All my keyboards have that key ripped off. A bent paperclip and a tug is all it takes. Saves me no end of time, and I dearly miss missing it when working on someone else's computer.
I'll add a "+2" to this. My background is in Astrophysics, and the coding there is largely done in Fortran. The friends and people I know spread between 4-5 different universities all program in Fortran. I'm moving into Geophysics/Atmospheric/Oceanic sciences, and all that work is done in Fortran. From fluid dynamics to stress fault calculations, Fortran is the de facto language.
To be clear, we're not talking about programming here. We're talking about math. Pure, hardcore, overwhelming math. The crunching of terabytes of data. Matrices with millions upon millions of cells, being combined with more of the same.
If we were talking about pure programming, Fortran is a terrible language. What we're talking about here is automating massively complex mathematical calculations on enormous amounts of data.
most people are going to play it like it's free, as in, not paying for anything.
I don't know that that is the case. I've been involved in a handful of free-to-play, but pay-for-perks games, and most of the people I played with threw money at the game.
Currently, the game is Requiem: Bloodymare, and most of the people I play with throw a fair bit of money at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the average wasn't near WOW's average. Why would we throw money its way? The game makes it easy and fun. There is no marketing pressure, but a fair bit of social pressure. At the same time, money spent = easier advancement or more fun stuff.
All that I know don't treat it as free because they can play for free. They spend what they want to get the fun stuff. While my sample size isn't huge, it's a solid 10-15 people.
In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it's been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can,
Bullshit! The field of sperm donation is still exclusively male.
It's a pie-in-the-sky dream, but how cool would it be if patches accepted into the main trunk could be written off as charitable donations?
(It will never happen, because the mechanics of it would be near impossible to hammer out, and gaming the system would probably be trivial. Plus the corporate software houses would throw money at it to block it. Still it would be cool if this ere possible.)
To get hits from everyone who doesn't use Chrome, but use Mozilla?
As an addendum to this good point:
The reason we have so many choices is because....the users and developers want choices. OSS choices exist almost by definition because people are choosing them. To say, "your choice sucks, choose a better one" is ridiculous. Google is showing off the corporate mentality here. If you're not paying the thousands of developers of the toolchains for the major (and minor!) distributions, you don't get to complain about what they're producing. If you want standardization, you don't bitch about it - you make your platform of choice far superior to the other options.
There are choices because they all have something to offer to someone.
That is a really short-sighted comment. Microsoft would never hurt themselves like that. What they'd do, and what they're very likely to do is simply buy the company, and thus own the patent themselves.
If a court will let something this generic and this powerful stand, why WOULDN'T Microsoft want to own it?
Buy the company, take the patent, spin off the company if you don't want it. Is there any reason for MS not to do this to everyone who sues them and wins with such a vague patent?
This seems to be a shirking of the responsibilities of a free citizen. It's important to keep in mind that The Authorities cannot possibly protect everyone, it's just a flat physical impossibility. There will never be a cop everywhere at once. Even with a surveillance state the best that will happen is that there will be evidence of a crime after the fact.
I dunno, I can visualize a time where we might be able to have a police officer available to protect everyone. The trick is in using the vast amount of data available to you to spot crimes before they happen. Then you can have some sort of Precrime officer able to head off the crime, essentially being everywhere a crime is committed even before it happens.
And it costs from 0 to $5 bucks
Don't forget to get Pepsi to put SunPoints under its caps. Piggyback on successful brands - it's the way to success.
Since I was late to the party here, I read rather than posted, expecting to see my first thought here. I completely agree that a common updater might be the real benefit of this idea.
Coming from a linux standpoint, this seems stupid on its face. However, all the luddites that I've swayed to the linux side find the lack of a package manager the most irritating and frustrating thing when they use a Windows box for some reason. For "joe sixpack", the most appealing thing about linux is often its package manager, once he learns how it works.
If Sun can get enough apps, and hit the right price-point, and get Pepsi to put SunPoints under their caps, they could make a killing. Well, if they also learn from our package managers, and make updates unobtrusive and easy to do in the background. (They could just let every app pop up its own update notifier, as per the windows standard.)
I like you geekoid. I friended you a long time ago, because I like how you think, despite your occasional grammatical issues. That being said, I'd like to translate your most recent post into English:
That's ok, because if history tells us anything, our robots will fight their robots...that they will have purchased from us.
Humm, that may be the perfect war: No human gets hurt, and there is a constant need to build replacement robots.
It was a good post, but the grammar hurt my brain a great deal.
Perhaps the archbishop is psychologically screaming for help.
(I know I would in his shoes...)
So, what are you this week?
It's hilarious, actually. I use Linux as my work system. Windows it my hobby OS. I play games on it.
I know a number of people who do the same - boot to Linux when you want to get serious work done. Boot to Windows when you want to play games. So which is the hobby system again?
In my state, there are 4-5 main North/South roads/highways. Only two have more than one lane going in each direction. The others aren't divided, and have *no* breakdown lane or shoulder. (Well, I guess you could call the 3"-6" of dirt between the white line and the ditch the "shoulder" but it's not a place you can really travel well in.)
The few times I've walked or biked on such roads, it was scary as hell. They are in no way designed to be pedestrian or cycle friendly. In fact, it's almost as if they're designed to be ANTI pedestrian and cycle. I might bike the 10 miles to work on nice days if I didn't have a strong opposition to dying.
Tax gas higher, and you'll have a lot of poor people in the US, some who aren't able to afford to drive to work. That said, you'd see a lot less big vehicles, and a lot more motorcycles and compact cars. Frankly, I'd say that would be worth it.
As an addendum, I have a Masters in Education. The "Education" coursework which you correctly point out as being the most important thing is garbage.
Most college "Education" courses are taught by people with a PhD in Education. How do you get a PhD in Education? By taking college classes in Education. And what do you do, after you take hundreds of hours of college Education coursework? You teach Education to people taking your college classes.
Notice anything striking there? Of all my "Education" professors, none had taught in a non-college classroom in the last two decades. Some never had. What made them *qualified* to teach me? A PhD in Education. Did they have anything useful to teach? No. How could they, when their entire background was full-time immersion in college-level educational philosophy? My "Education" professors were philosophers,(PhD) not teachers.
A good teacher will get nothing out of "Education" coursework, and bad teachers won't get anything either. Yet our entire system revolves around non-teaching-experts teaching teachers about Educational Philosophy in a college setting. It's truly mind-boggling that the nuts and bolts of teaching at a non-college level are never touched.
My personal theory is that it's to teach them to take standardized tests.
Drivers permit/license
SAT/ACT
GRE
Industry Certifications
Boards
That, or it's to teach people to work line shifts. Turn on, turn off. Do job a, switch to job b, switch to job c, then go home when the whistle sounds.
It's CLEARLY not designed for learning.