Evolution seems to only occur in harsher conditions.
False. Evolution occurs in all conditions.
If the environment is not "harsh" enough for evolution, then the subject species merely overpopulates it to the point of starvation, at which time things are harsh again.
Some people falsely claim that modern conveniences have halted human evolution- but in reality, the new technological environment has just changed the meaning of what "fitness" is.
No it doesn't. The authors repeat that assertion, but do not support it. That article was written under the widespread assumption that the human species originated in Africa, so "Africa" is what they wrote to mean "the geographical range of the earlier non-lightskinned humans".
If hypothetically humans evolved in Asia, they could've been black there too.
They almost did. It is more likely than not that 50,000 years ago, there existed one dog that all modern dogs are descended from.
The same can be basically said for humans. For example, there is a quasi-scam service running now, which will take a gene sample from any European-descended person and list some royal ancestors. Customers get the impression they are lucky and cool, but they aren't, really. Even though less than 1 in 5 million medieval Europeans was a King, all living genetic-Europeans are descended from one.
You can see this with arithmetic. Note that your number of ancestors doubles every generation (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greatgrand...), and then say that a generation is about 20 years. Compute that back past 600-700 years, and you'll come down with a theoretical ancestor count of greater than the continent's whole population. That means everyone was your ancestor back then (and also that there was a great deal of incestuous overlap).
PS. The purely-maternal ancestor at such a far-distant past (the rightmost person, if they were listed on a chart) is called an "Eve".
As it is, the developers of King Kong are the only ones to blame, as they are the only ones who dropped the ball.
No. They're the only one you know of so far, but there will probably be more.
But even if 100% of future games looked to this example and carefully put in their own gamma-adjustment feature, this would still count as a design flaw.
Time is wasted by hundreds of developers reinventing the wheel, and by millions of players who now have to individually tweak each separate game, instead of recalibrating only when a new TV is attached.
Microsoft gave the xbox360 a "dashboard" including some centralized config controls. It should've had brightness settings, just like every high-end video card does- after all, Microsoft touts the Xbox360 as possessing amazing graphics, right? Consistent colors is a prerequisit for that.
No, be free to google. One was released by the army at the same time as AA, and was rather like a Sims game where you have a military career, going through training & promotions etc. Might've been "Soldier". Since it didn't involve shooting people, it wasn't too popular. There's also a lot of web-advertising games (of a higher caliber than "Punch the monkey") used by the Navy and AF. You might not thing that's much, but they are technically "games helped by military".
Multiple games have been released that reuse some code from military sims- one of the first was "Tank", from the 80s. Others have taken that same path.
Most recently, the reverse happened, and "Full Spectrum Warrior" was remade in a military-training version.
I think it translates as?
Yes, although you can pretend everyone hates me, and that works too.
A) The difference between mine and Bill Gate's wealth is greater than between any two individual Chinese citizens. Therefore, global economic disparities are mostly an illusion.
B) Using any simple arithmetic formula to measure variation (such as subtracting corresponding pixels), the difference between any two photos of me can be greater than between ones of me and you. Therefore, individual humans are not distinctly recognizable.
Have you read Quicksilver and Confusion? Until Stephenson gets off his anachronism kick and begins writing with a computer again, the things he says not only aren't "best", they're usually not even nominal.
You couldn't have said that earlier? Instead you went on implying that some data was lost, which would've been actually bad.
So a person dumbly reconfigures the CLI, and then other people dumbly type meaningless things, and it crashes. Boo-hoo. When a program crashes, it does nothing from then on. So all those respondents who guessed that nothing bad happened were quite right.
You would pick the one named Excel in a list, as opposed to "GNUmeric."
Please. At least Gnumeric gives you a hint that it involves NUMBERS somehow (as does "Lotus 1-2-3"). "Excel" sounds like it should be a flashcard trainer for standardized tests.
Nobody would think Excel is a spreadsheet if they hadn't been taught it.
None, and that's why so many Linux distros have blatantly copied the concept of the Start Menu and Taskbar.
Unix window managers were already using menus of descriptive names for application launching back when Bill Gates was still selling Program Manager icons as the epitomy of GUI style.
You began this discussion with "I just can't fathom why a responsible admin would risk the possible data corruption that could come with compression" and I felt compelled to respond to this insulting statement.
Take 10,000 files. Randomly kill 1 byte. You now have 9,999 good files.
Compress 10,000 files into an archive. Randomly kill 1 byte. You now have ZERO good files.
What is hard to understand about that? You act like you don't even recognize that category of problem.
Compression isn't corruption
Are you blind to the words "risk" and "possible"? Do you just skip over them like they weren't even there? You've just wasted a huge amount of typing, because no one will take you seriously since you evidently didn't accurately read the starting post.
it can harm their core business that is selling Windows OS for PC. What's the main usage of PC in home today, web browsing, email, and what?
Technically, they are selling some reduced version of Windows included with the XBox360 price.
Indeed, Microsoft would like to get Windows off the PC, and onto custom hardware, where the market is less competitive. There is Linux (and maybe soon Mac) providing PC-based web browsing, which gives them lower-cost competition. Bill Gates would be most happy if the public switched to locked-down XBoxes in preference to PCs, because it's less likely that alternative OSes will ever encroach on their marketplace there.
Some people will say that "Linux will never be ready for the desktop, because it can't run the huge library of Windows software". But when talking specifically about users who ONLY need web and email, Linux is more than enough.
Yeah, it might have been nice to have thrown in there, but a design mistake? No.
So, you think that the fact that the programmers for King Kong tell people to buy the PS2 version instead of the Xbox360 doesn't indicate any kind of flaw in the latter console?
Indeed, this error is a classic case of a software design flaw. There is a feature (gamma adjustment) which is needed by almost every program on the platform. But instead of the platform's OS providing the feature, it's up to each individual game to implement its own brightness adjustment. That is guaranteed to waste development time, disk space, end-user time, and lead to many sub-optimal implementations.
It is a failure to centralize commonly-needed features, and that is bad.
The only video game I know of that the US Army (or any DoD agency) helped to create was "America's Army".
There are many others. At least 2 were fully sponsored by the Army/Navy as promotional items, although they weren't as popular as the action-packed AA.
Plus, the DoD has helped in the production of numerous other games (sometimes indirectly, such as by purchasing a training sim from a software vendor, and then allowing the vendor to subtract sensitive data and sell it to the public).
(and quite a good Halo PC player, if I may be so bold)
That's not bold. Everybody is good at Halo PC, because it's too easy.
I have to say this is absolutely false. I've never had mine get stuck
It's not literally "stuck", but I didn't want to type out 6 pages of subtle HCI behavior.
All the adapter does is allow someone who's used to playing first-person shooters the "right" way to competently play them on consoles, without spending a year getting used to the controller layout.
This is hilarious. Typically, people display an egocentric bias, meaning they assume other people think they way they do. You're doing the opposite: you cannot play FPS with thumbsticks, and yet you imagine that you are unique, and other people can use them just fine.
In truth, the reason you (and many others) can't cope with thumbstick Halo is that thumbsticks are just fundamentally worse controls. It's more than a matter of taste.
It's illegal for a theater owner in most of the places I've ever lived to allow someone under 18 to see an R-rated movie without a guardian.
Name a few of those places.... the USA certainly does not have such laws!
The MPAA film-ratings system is a fine example of an industry adopting voluntary controls, which worked well enough to dampen any legislative desire to pass a real law controlling movie access.
Forgotten passwords have to be reset by some method.
I don't know how the current game consoles actually work, but that problem is solvable. The trick is that kids can reset any reasonable console, but a reset can be detected. The parent either knows the timestamp of the last authorized access, or chose her own password or id code.
When the parent next logs into the control system and sees it has been reset, she knows to punish the children.
However, if there is no rating on it, then the law doesn't apply.
Ergo, any game of "M Level" has zero motivation to accept a rating, because the only possible effect can be less sales from the game. Therefore no games will ever be M rated, and your law does exactly nothing, making it worse than useless.
I personally don't have a problem with a law blocking media with certain content from minors. Because A. I am over 18, B. I am not a retailer.
Dangerously shortsighted. Anyone with even a minor interest in buying "offensive" (violent or sexual) games (or any media, really) should be against this. Once the stores can't sell to minors without putting themselves at legal risk, they just won't stock those games, period.
There will be less sales, and less R&D, and the consumers will have less available selection of products they are proven to enjoy.
Many conservative talkshow hosts accuse liberals of expanding the government to eliminate the bother of proper parenting.
Liberal hosts (like Howard Stern) frequently accuse conservatives of exactly the same thing, such as when they push for mandated abstinence/religious programs in schools.
The grenade indicator feels like supernatural ability to me, not something that your basic ww2 grunt possessed.
A real-life grunt has a visual field almost 200 degrees wide, compared to under 30 degrees for a player using a TV screen. He can quickly scan around with inuitive movements of the neck or eyeballs, instead of the clumsier left-thumbstick. And he's got perfect 3d-spatial audio to pinpoint the clump and clang of a landing grenade.
With all of those unrealistic disadvantages the gameplayer suffers, a special indicator is almost a necessity to compensate him up to normal abilities.
AC: Even people who win houses or cars in a sweepstakes still have to pay property tax on them, despite having paid zilch for it.
Somebody paid non-zero for that house, and that's the price you'll be taxed at. The sweepstake winner could decide to sell his prize-home at any time, and that potential liquidity is why it's taxable.
AC: Software doesn't apprecaite in value like real estate does, however, it still has a value
Nope. Only if you have the ability to put that software on the market and convert it to dollars does it have "value" (for tax purposes). And obviously, software which is downloadable for free will have at best a minimal resale value.
The state determines its value based on some criteria
In all cases, that formula is based on describing the current resale value of the item, as it grew or shrank in worth over time.
Depending on the difference in assessed value of Free and Open Source software and Closed Source software, I believe this will have a detrimental effect on the adoption of Free and Open Source software by businesses.
That depends on how accurate the assessment is. If they use an even slightly honest approach, it can only be helpful to the Free Software movement.
The fair way to assign a dollar value software would be taking it's marketplace replacement cost- how much you'd need to spend to get a new copy, today. Obviously, for a Free/OpenSource program, that cost is nearly zero (time must be spent installing it, but that's not the cost of the item, rather your own handling expenses).
If that approach is taken, then corporations will have a big new incentive to use Free Software: its untaxable. That'll help out in the ROI calcuations all the consultants push at everybody.
The later one could be used against Open Source, that is cheap to buy but very valuable.
No it isn't. OS software isn't an asset you could sell for cash. Any actual taxable good has an estimated value that tracks the resale cost of the item (as much as possible, with a depreciation rate & such). Try putting up some old Linux CD-Rs on ebay and see if you get any bids enough to cover postage...
False. If you just use software, and don't modify it, you never have to pay anything for GPL programs.
All those normal people who want to use Linux (the same way they might use Windows) get it for free. The only ones who need to "pay" (in some sense) are those who wish to distributed modified versions, which isn't something you could legally do with proprietary code anyhow.
For anyone without the ability to meaningfully edit a program, GPL is just like public domain.
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Evolution seems to only occur in harsher conditions.
False. Evolution occurs in all conditions.
If the environment is not "harsh" enough for evolution, then the subject species merely overpopulates it to the point of starvation, at which time things are harsh again.
Some people falsely claim that modern conveniences have halted human evolution- but in reality, the new technological environment has just changed the meaning of what "fitness" is.
this supports the out of africa idea:
No it doesn't. The authors repeat that assertion, but do not support it. That article was written under the widespread assumption that the human species originated in Africa, so "Africa" is what they wrote to mean "the geographical range of the earlier non-lightskinned humans".
If hypothetically humans evolved in Asia, they could've been black there too.
not all dog's came from the same wolf right?
They almost did. It is more likely than not that 50,000 years ago, there existed one dog that all modern dogs are descended from.
The same can be basically said for humans. For example, there is a quasi-scam service running now, which will take a gene sample from any European-descended person and list some royal ancestors. Customers get the impression they are lucky and cool, but they aren't, really. Even though less than 1 in 5 million medieval Europeans was a King, all living genetic-Europeans are descended from one.
You can see this with arithmetic. Note that your number of ancestors doubles every generation (2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 greatgrand...), and then say that a generation is about 20 years. Compute that back past 600-700 years, and you'll come down with a theoretical ancestor count of greater than the continent's whole population. That means everyone was your ancestor back then (and also that there was a great deal of incestuous overlap).
PS. The purely-maternal ancestor at such a far-distant past (the rightmost person, if they were listed on a chart) is called an "Eve".
As it is, the developers of King Kong are the only ones to blame, as they are the only ones who dropped the ball.
No. They're the only one you know of so far, but there will probably be more.
But even if 100% of future games looked to this example and carefully put in their own gamma-adjustment feature, this would still count as a design flaw.
Time is wasted by hundreds of developers reinventing the wheel, and by millions of players who now have to individually tweak each separate game, instead of recalibrating only when a new TV is attached.
Microsoft gave the xbox360 a "dashboard" including some centralized config controls. It should've had brightness settings, just like every high-end video card does- after all, Microsoft touts the Xbox360 as possessing amazing graphics, right? Consistent colors is a prerequisit for that.
Can you name the games?
No, be free to google. One was released by the army at the same time as AA, and was rather like a Sims game where you have a military career, going through training & promotions etc. Might've been "Soldier". Since it didn't involve shooting people, it wasn't too popular. There's also a lot of web-advertising games (of a higher caliber than "Punch the monkey") used by the Navy and AF. You might not thing that's much, but they are technically "games helped by military".
Multiple games have been released that reuse some code from military sims- one of the first was "Tank", from the 80s. Others have taken that same path.
Most recently, the reverse happened, and "Full Spectrum Warrior" was remade in a military-training version.
I think it translates as?
Yes, although you can pretend everyone hates me, and that works too.
BTW, with the filesystem root gone,
Oh, now you say some files disappeared? Then why did you previously say it only "Instant crash"ed? Make up your mind.
The races are mostly an illusion.
Two examples of equivalently-valid reasoning:
A) The difference between mine and Bill Gate's wealth is greater than between any two individual Chinese citizens. Therefore, global economic disparities are mostly an illusion.
B) Using any simple arithmetic formula to measure variation (such as subtracting corresponding pixels), the difference between any two photos of me can be greater than between ones of me and you.
Therefore, individual humans are not distinctly recognizable.
As usual Neal Stephenson said it best.
Have you read Quicksilver and Confusion? Until Stephenson gets off his anachronism kick and begins writing with a computer again, the things he says not only aren't "best", they're usually not even nominal.
Instant crash.
You couldn't have said that earlier? Instead you went on implying that some data was lost, which would've been actually bad.
So a person dumbly reconfigures the CLI, and then other people dumbly type meaningless things, and it crashes. Boo-hoo. When a program crashes, it does nothing from then on. So all those respondents who guessed that nothing bad happened were quite right.
You would pick the one named Excel in a list, as opposed to "GNUmeric."
Please. At least Gnumeric gives you a hint that it involves NUMBERS somehow (as does "Lotus 1-2-3"). "Excel" sounds like it should be a flashcard trainer for standardized tests.
Nobody would think Excel is a spreadsheet if they hadn't been taught it.
None, and that's why so many Linux distros have blatantly copied the concept of the Start Menu and Taskbar.
Unix window managers were already using menus of descriptive names for application launching back when Bill Gates was still selling Program Manager icons as the epitomy of GUI style.
You began this discussion with "I just can't fathom why a responsible admin would risk the possible data corruption that could come with compression" and I felt compelled to respond to this insulting statement.
Take 10,000 files. Randomly kill 1 byte. You now have 9,999 good files.
Compress 10,000 files into an archive. Randomly kill 1 byte. You now have ZERO good files.
What is hard to understand about that? You act like you don't even recognize that category of problem.
Compression isn't corruption
Are you blind to the words "risk" and "possible"? Do you just skip over them like they weren't even there? You've just wasted a huge amount of typing, because no one will take you seriously since you evidently didn't accurately read the starting post.
it can harm their core business that is selling Windows OS for PC. What's the main usage of PC in home today, web browsing, email, and what?
Technically, they are selling some reduced version of Windows included with the XBox360 price.
Indeed, Microsoft would like to get Windows off the PC, and onto custom hardware, where the market is less competitive. There is Linux (and maybe soon Mac) providing PC-based web browsing, which gives them lower-cost competition. Bill Gates would be most happy if the public switched to locked-down XBoxes in preference to PCs, because it's less likely that alternative OSes will ever encroach on their marketplace there.
Some people will say that "Linux will never be ready for the desktop, because it can't run the huge library of Windows software". But when talking specifically about users who ONLY need web and email, Linux is more than enough.
Yeah, it might have been nice to have thrown in there, but a design mistake? No.
So, you think that the fact that the programmers for King Kong tell people to buy the PS2 version instead of the Xbox360 doesn't indicate any kind of flaw in the latter console?
Indeed, this error is a classic case of a software design flaw. There is a feature (gamma adjustment) which is needed by almost every program on the platform. But instead of the platform's OS providing the feature, it's up to each individual game to implement its own brightness adjustment. That is guaranteed to waste development time, disk space, end-user time, and lead to many sub-optimal implementations.
It is a failure to centralize commonly-needed features, and that is bad.
The only video game I know of that the US Army (or any DoD agency) helped to create was "America's Army".
There are many others. At least 2 were fully sponsored by the Army/Navy as promotional items, although they weren't as popular as the action-packed AA.
Plus, the DoD has helped in the production of numerous other games (sometimes indirectly, such as by purchasing a training sim from a software vendor, and then allowing the vendor to subtract sensitive data and sell it to the public).
(and quite a good Halo PC player, if I may be so bold)
That's not bold. Everybody is good at Halo PC, because it's too easy.
I have to say this is absolutely false. I've never had mine get stuck
It's not literally "stuck", but I didn't want to type out 6 pages of subtle HCI behavior.
All the adapter does is allow someone who's used to playing first-person shooters the "right" way to competently play them on consoles, without spending a year getting used to the controller layout.
This is hilarious. Typically, people display an egocentric bias, meaning they assume other people think they way they do. You're doing the opposite: you cannot play FPS with thumbsticks, and yet you imagine that you are unique, and other people can use them just fine.
In truth, the reason you (and many others) can't cope with thumbstick Halo is that thumbsticks are just fundamentally worse controls. It's more than a matter of taste.
It's illegal for a theater owner in most of the places I've ever lived to allow someone under 18 to see an R-rated movie without a guardian.
Name a few of those places.... the USA certainly does not have such laws!
The MPAA film-ratings system is a fine example of an industry adopting voluntary controls, which worked well enough to dampen any legislative desire to pass a real law controlling movie access.
Forgotten passwords have to be reset by some method.
I don't know how the current game consoles actually work, but that problem is solvable. The trick is that kids can reset any reasonable console, but a reset can be detected. The parent either knows the timestamp of the last authorized access, or chose her own password or id code.
When the parent next logs into the control system and sees it has been reset, she knows to punish the children.
However, if there is no rating on it, then the law doesn't apply.
Ergo, any game of "M Level" has zero motivation to accept a rating, because the only possible effect can be less sales from the game. Therefore no games will ever be M rated, and your law does exactly nothing, making it worse than useless.
I personally don't have a problem with a law blocking media with certain content from minors. Because A. I am over 18, B. I am not a retailer.
Dangerously shortsighted. Anyone with even a minor interest in buying "offensive" (violent or sexual) games (or any media, really) should be against this. Once the stores can't sell to minors without putting themselves at legal risk, they just won't stock those games, period.
There will be less sales, and less R&D, and the consumers will have less available selection of products they are proven to enjoy.
Many conservative talkshow hosts accuse liberals of expanding the government to eliminate the bother of proper parenting.
Liberal hosts (like Howard Stern) frequently accuse conservatives of exactly the same thing, such as when they push for mandated abstinence/religious programs in schools.
The grenade indicator feels like supernatural ability to me, not something that your basic ww2 grunt possessed.
A real-life grunt has a visual field almost 200 degrees wide, compared to under 30 degrees for a player using a TV screen. He can quickly scan around with inuitive movements of the neck or eyeballs, instead of the clumsier left-thumbstick. And he's got perfect 3d-spatial audio to pinpoint the clump and clang of a landing grenade.
With all of those unrealistic disadvantages the gameplayer suffers, a special indicator is almost a necessity to compensate him up to normal abilities.
AC: Even people who win houses or cars in a sweepstakes still have to pay property tax on them, despite having paid zilch for it.
Somebody paid non-zero for that house, and that's the price you'll be taxed at. The sweepstake winner could decide to sell his prize-home at any time, and that potential liquidity is why it's taxable.
AC: Software doesn't apprecaite in value like real estate does, however, it still has a value
Nope. Only if you have the ability to put that software on the market and convert it to dollars does it have "value" (for tax purposes). And obviously, software which is downloadable for free will have at best a minimal resale value.
The state determines its value based on some criteria
In all cases, that formula is based on describing the current resale value of the item, as it grew or shrank in worth over time.
Depending on the difference in assessed value of Free and Open Source software and Closed Source software, I believe this will have a detrimental effect on the adoption of Free and Open Source software by businesses.
That depends on how accurate the assessment is. If they use an even slightly honest approach, it can only be helpful to the Free Software movement.
The fair way to assign a dollar value software would be taking it's marketplace replacement cost- how much you'd need to spend to get a new copy, today. Obviously, for a Free/OpenSource program, that cost is nearly zero (time must be spent installing it, but that's not the cost of the item, rather your own handling expenses).
If that approach is taken, then corporations will have a big new incentive to use Free Software: its untaxable. That'll help out in the ROI calcuations all the consultants push at everybody.
The later one could be used against Open Source, that is cheap to buy but very valuable.
No it isn't. OS software isn't an asset you could sell for cash. Any actual taxable good has an estimated value that tracks the resale cost of the item (as much as possible, with a depreciation rate & such). Try putting up some old Linux CD-Rs on ebay and see if you get any bids enough to cover postage...
If you use it, one way or another, you'll pay.
False. If you just use software, and don't modify it, you never have to pay anything for GPL programs.
All those normal people who want to use Linux (the same way they might use Windows) get it for free. The only ones who need to "pay" (in some sense) are those who wish to distributed modified versions, which isn't something you could legally do with proprietary code anyhow.
For anyone without the ability to meaningfully edit a program, GPL is just like public domain.