IMO Steam is a glorified shopping cart that invades your PC and "manages" your purchases, they don't "own" anything, they are middlemen. I prefer to go directly to the vendor, if it's exclusive to steam I won't buy it because I refuse to install their malware gateway on my PCs. IMO the freemium model used by game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly, just register, d/l, scan, hit install, and you done. From a business POV, wargaming.net has proved beyond doubt that a talented game studio combined with a player friendly freemium model can make you very rich, very quickly.
It's important that players who subscribe to a freemium game only gain a meta-game advantage, for example in WoT nothing you can buy in-game for real cash will give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. However a "wallet warrior" (me) will climb the tech/skill ladder ~1.5X faster than a "welfare warrior", a "wallet warrior" is able to extend the size of their garage/barracks, recycle expensive tank add-ons, paint their tank, etc.
Freemium models that significantly handicap a "welfare warriors" ability to compete with "wallet warriors" simply won't get enough players to attract a profitable community of paying customers, and the game will die. Note that the freemium model also applies to some traditional games (on a computer), such as internet bridge clubs who make money hosting tournaments, hosting bridge holidays on a cruise ship, selling/advertising advanced lessons, etc.
NVidia - I have found them to be a developer friendly company (CUDA, etc). NVidia have a large linux user community for scientific applications, their linux driver works, Yes, it would be nice if they could find a way to open source everything and there's no harm politely asking/reminding them, but hurling abuse at them for choosing not to is the act of a spoilt child. I for one, don't want OSS devs to be associated with spoilt children.
Disclaimer: Buying video games since I dropped my pocket money into a pong machine at mum & dad's local pub, circa 1970.
Don't talk nonsense and dress it up as "scientific". "Scientific consensus" is just the modern phrase for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". People who complain about the meaning of either term are not scientists, they are usually partisan political hacks who have never heard of Karl Popper and think AGW is a some kind of gigantic conspiracy to take away their SUV.
4-17% of the rest of the world is tone deaf and can't learn them.
Nothing to do with tone deafness. If you weren't exposed to an Asian language as a child then your brain simply won't hear some of the sounds in Asian languages, in fact your brain actively filters out the unfamiliar sounds as "noise". The same is true for Asian children, which is why virtually ALL Asians have trouble with "R" and "L" sounds. It's all about how your neurons are wired in the first few years of life, it's why a 2yo can become fluent in a new language in a matter of months while an adult may take years or even decades to achieve "native" fluency.
I saw a short doco about a guy who taught his toddler to speak Klingon. The kid loved playing the Klingon "game" up until the age of 3, then suddenly refused to play the Klingon game with dad. Turns out that Klingon is great for describing life aboard a star ship but was useless to the toddler because there were too many everyday things that did not have a Klingon word ( eg: no word for "cookie" ). At 3 years old the kid had already worked out what many geeks (and the submitter) still struggle with, English is useful, Klingon is not.
The number of entry points into programming that are available on the internet is staggering to someone like me who learned basic on a Apple II. The only "problem" these days is picking the entry point. Minecraft is a great pick for a child but not if the kid isn't interested.
It was just an example of how knowing an algorithm can modify behaviour to change the outcome.
Why is that a bad thing? If I am going to be judged by an algorithm, don't you think I should know what the parameters are? How can I ever rectify a problem parameter if I don't know what it is?
There will always be cheats, you can't eliminate them all you can do is minimise their damage. There comes a point when the efforts to catch cheats outweighs the benefits, the system itself suffers as the rules and parameters expand in an attempt to catch every last petty cheat. The US health system(s) are a prime example, both private and public systems spend an inordinate amount of resources on lawyers and accounts that do nothing except look for ways to deny coverage / payment. It ends up costing the honest players up to 10X what it does in comparable countries such as Australia, but it still hasn't eliminated cheats.
It's very odd behaviour - people bitch and moan about YT ads or the thought of paying a nominal amount to remove them. How many of these same people have paid a couple of grand for a flat screen TV that broadcasts unavoidable ads for 1/4 of the time it's on?
There was also the theory that explained the Moon's density by proposing it was like honeycomb inside, only a handful of people thought either of those theories made any sense.
Yep, oxygen build up was a disaster for the cyanobacteria that created it and had reigned Earth for 3+ billion years. On the plus side the free oxygen enabled collagen to form, which is the substance that holds single cells together in multi-cellular organisms. We call that transition "The Cambrian explosion". The collision we are talking about occurred 3.5 billions years before the Cambrian explosion.
Never heard of Shad Moss but the "value" is in what he says to his fans off-show. If he tells his fans something like - "Forensics is a fascinating science. CSI is a TV drama that takes the boring bits out of police work and adds a bit of hi tech magic." - then more power to him.
I saw a real live astronaut say that Star Trek was his inspiration -- surely it was not the technical accuracy that inspired him.
I grew up in the 60's, loved star trek and I dream of Genie. The "adult" backdrop was the Moon race, portrayed as scientific but driven by the fear sputnik induced in the pentagon. Virtually every boy in my school wanted to be an astronaut even though we knew there was no such thing as an Aussie astronaut at the time.
Humans are inspired by human stories, "magic" is just a plot device. To enjoy fiction such as Dr Who or CSI you have to "suspend belief", often that is not possible if you are expert in a specific kind of "magic"; eg "infinite zoom" which was ok in the 80's has now become a bad cliché because the general population are more familiar with pixilation. The problem starts when popular actors/storytellers start conflating their fiction with reality to drum up business (eg: Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code).
If the storyteller offers details about the magic it's important to me that the details are correct (eg: Big Bang Theory), a few correct details makes the magic much harder to reject. For example has Dr Who ever explained how the magic wand (sonic screwdriver) works? Do we need an explanation to enjoy the show?
Fracking and disposal wells are very similar, they both involve pumping liquid deep underground. I've heard it said that water pumped into faults can lubricate the interface between the "boulder" and the mountain, I believe there have been experiments on minor faults in CA to examine that theory that tension can be relived in the fault by pumping water into it.
The theory is that faults are similar to large glaciers where melt water has been shown to lubricate the interface between a glacier and the bedrock, accelerating the flow of the glacier and speeding up the calving of icebergs. This phenomena has long been a concern by climate scientists looking at east Antarctica. There is a difference between horizontal/vertical, ice/rock, but it seems to me that the mathematically chaotic behaviour of the crust means pumping water into deep wells is something we should should avoid if possible.
I've been a "science based greenie" since the 70's. It doesn't matter to me if you call it a fracking operation or a disposal well, the unpredictability and risks associated with pumping (often polluted) water deep underground is the core issue for both types of well.
The act that tied teacher / administrator salaries to the test results.
When will the US learn that capitalism doesn't work on things like health, education, and justice?
Standardised tests are an essential tool used to monitor and compare the progress of different student populations. Making a huge deal about them is not essential, in fact it is detrimental. Stress severely impairs the brain's ability to lay down memories, people simply don't learn well when stressed (eg: cramming for a test). This is not just my opinion, it is what neuroscience has been telling us for a couple of decades now.
- Did any of his victims (or customers) remedy their "social inconvenience" via suicide?
- What is a "killer", do spiders count?
Using the phrase "social inconvenience" to describe extortion via sexual humiliation shows that you don't even recognise sexual abuse when it's right under your nose, let alone begin to understand it. Educate yourself on the human mind, you have one of your own, right? I suggest starting with some of the talks from Ruby Wax on YT
And yet people who sexually abuse children get less time than that.
Their business model is to profit from revenge, it is implemented via sexual humiliation (abuse). Personally I don't think 20yrs is long enough to rehabilitate such a badly broken moral compass. The customer may also have psychological problems or may suffer psychological problems associated with the guilt and shame of what they did on the internet at a drunken pity party. The people who run the business have no feelings of guilt or shame, let's all hope they find some in the next 20yrs.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO Steam is a glorified shopping cart that invades your PC and "manages" your purchases, they don't "own" anything, they are middlemen. I prefer to go directly to the vendor, if it's exclusive to steam I won't buy it because I refuse to install their malware gateway on my PCs. IMO the freemium model used by game studios such as wargaming.net is much more consumer friendly, just register, d/l, scan, hit install, and you done. From a business POV, wargaming.net has proved beyond doubt that a talented game studio combined with a player friendly freemium model can make you very rich, very quickly.
It's important that players who subscribe to a freemium game only gain a meta-game advantage, for example in WoT nothing you can buy in-game for real cash will give you a significant advantage on the battlefield. However a "wallet warrior" (me) will climb the tech/skill ladder ~1.5X faster than a "welfare warrior", a "wallet warrior" is able to extend the size of their garage/barracks, recycle expensive tank add-ons, paint their tank, etc.
Freemium models that significantly handicap a "welfare warriors" ability to compete with "wallet warriors" simply won't get enough players to attract a profitable community of paying customers, and the game will die. Note that the freemium model also applies to some traditional games (on a computer), such as internet bridge clubs who make money hosting tournaments, hosting bridge holidays on a cruise ship, selling/advertising advanced lessons, etc.
NVidia - I have found them to be a developer friendly company (CUDA, etc). NVidia have a large linux user community for scientific applications, their linux driver works, Yes, it would be nice if they could find a way to open source everything and there's no harm politely asking/reminding them, but hurling abuse at them for choosing not to is the act of a spoilt child. I for one, don't want OSS devs to be associated with spoilt children.
Disclaimer: Buying video games since I dropped my pocket money into a pong machine at mum & dad's local pub, circa 1970.
Don't talk nonsense and dress it up as "scientific". "Scientific consensus" is just the modern phrase for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". People who complain about the meaning of either term are not scientists, they are usually partisan political hacks who have never heard of Karl Popper and think AGW is a some kind of gigantic conspiracy to take away their SUV.
Of course we're not on a balloon, everyone knows we are the raisins in an expanding pudding.
Is there any other kind?
4-17% of the rest of the world is tone deaf and can't learn them.
Nothing to do with tone deafness. If you weren't exposed to an Asian language as a child then your brain simply won't hear some of the sounds in Asian languages, in fact your brain actively filters out the unfamiliar sounds as "noise". The same is true for Asian children, which is why virtually ALL Asians have trouble with "R" and "L" sounds. It's all about how your neurons are wired in the first few years of life, it's why a 2yo can become fluent in a new language in a matter of months while an adult may take years or even decades to achieve "native" fluency.
I saw a short doco about a guy who taught his toddler to speak Klingon. The kid loved playing the Klingon "game" up until the age of 3, then suddenly refused to play the Klingon game with dad. Turns out that Klingon is great for describing life aboard a star ship but was useless to the toddler because there were too many everyday things that did not have a Klingon word ( eg: no word for "cookie" ). At 3 years old the kid had already worked out what many geeks (and the submitter) still struggle with, English is useful, Klingon is not.
If you are going to blame Clinton (or Bush) for the GFC, then logically you must credit Obama with fixing it.
Really, that was her job?
much like the aether
...and gravity, it is a model that fits our observations.
never ever helps out the common man
A modern $200 video card has more raw processing power than any supercomputer built before 2000.
The number of entry points into programming that are available on the internet is staggering to someone like me who learned basic on a Apple II. The only "problem" these days is picking the entry point. Minecraft is a great pick for a child but not if the kid isn't interested.
What points? He called the GP a liar because he hasn't got a fucking clue what he talking about.
It was just an example of how knowing an algorithm can modify behaviour to change the outcome.
Why is that a bad thing? If I am going to be judged by an algorithm, don't you think I should know what the parameters are? How can I ever rectify a problem parameter if I don't know what it is?
There will always be cheats, you can't eliminate them all you can do is minimise their damage. There comes a point when the efforts to catch cheats outweighs the benefits, the system itself suffers as the rules and parameters expand in an attempt to catch every last petty cheat. The US health system(s) are a prime example, both private and public systems spend an inordinate amount of resources on lawyers and accounts that do nothing except look for ways to deny coverage / payment. It ends up costing the honest players up to 10X what it does in comparable countries such as Australia, but it still hasn't eliminated cheats.
It's very odd behaviour - people bitch and moan about YT ads or the thought of paying a nominal amount to remove them. How many of these same people have paid a couple of grand for a flat screen TV that broadcasts unavoidable ads for 1/4 of the time it's on?
Good pick up.
There was also the theory that explained the Moon's density by proposing it was like honeycomb inside, only a handful of people thought either of those theories made any sense.
Causing an environmental catastrophe at the time.
Yep, oxygen build up was a disaster for the cyanobacteria that created it and had reigned Earth for 3+ billion years. On the plus side the free oxygen enabled collagen to form, which is the substance that holds single cells together in multi-cellular organisms. We call that transition "The Cambrian explosion". The collision we are talking about occurred 3.5 billions years before the Cambrian explosion.
Never heard of Shad Moss but the "value" is in what he says to his fans off-show. If he tells his fans something like - "Forensics is a fascinating science. CSI is a TV drama that takes the boring bits out of police work and adds a bit of hi tech magic." - then more power to him.
I saw a real live astronaut say that Star Trek was his inspiration -- surely it was not the technical accuracy that inspired him.
I grew up in the 60's, loved star trek and I dream of Genie. The "adult" backdrop was the Moon race, portrayed as scientific but driven by the fear sputnik induced in the pentagon. Virtually every boy in my school wanted to be an astronaut even though we knew there was no such thing as an Aussie astronaut at the time.
Humans are inspired by human stories, "magic" is just a plot device. To enjoy fiction such as Dr Who or CSI you have to "suspend belief", often that is not possible if you are expert in a specific kind of "magic"; eg "infinite zoom" which was ok in the 80's has now become a bad cliché because the general population are more familiar with pixilation. The problem starts when popular actors/storytellers start conflating their fiction with reality to drum up business (eg: Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code).
If the storyteller offers details about the magic it's important to me that the details are correct (eg: Big Bang Theory), a few correct details makes the magic much harder to reject. For example has Dr Who ever explained how the magic wand (sonic screwdriver) works? Do we need an explanation to enjoy the show?
Fracking and disposal wells are very similar, they both involve pumping liquid deep underground. I've heard it said that water pumped into faults can lubricate the interface between the "boulder" and the mountain, I believe there have been experiments on minor faults in CA to examine that theory that tension can be relived in the fault by pumping water into it.
The theory is that faults are similar to large glaciers where melt water has been shown to lubricate the interface between a glacier and the bedrock, accelerating the flow of the glacier and speeding up the calving of icebergs. This phenomena has long been a concern by climate scientists looking at east Antarctica. There is a difference between horizontal/vertical, ice/rock, but it seems to me that the mathematically chaotic behaviour of the crust means pumping water into deep wells is something we should should avoid if possible.
I've been a "science based greenie" since the 70's. It doesn't matter to me if you call it a fracking operation or a disposal well, the unpredictability and risks associated with pumping (often polluted) water deep underground is the core issue for both types of well.
Must be good, it has ubiquitous hardware support. ;)
If an obsession does not "fuck up your life", it's just a hobby.
The act that tied teacher / administrator salaries to the test results.
When will the US learn that capitalism doesn't work on things like health, education, and justice?
Standardised tests are an essential tool used to monitor and compare the progress of different student populations. Making a huge deal about them is not essential, in fact it is detrimental. Stress severely impairs the brain's ability to lay down memories, people simply don't learn well when stressed (eg: cramming for a test). This is not just my opinion, it is what neuroscience has been telling us for a couple of decades now.
There are killers that gets away with less
- Did any of his victims (or customers) remedy their "social inconvenience" via suicide? - What is a "killer", do spiders count?
Using the phrase "social inconvenience" to describe extortion via sexual humiliation shows that you don't even recognise sexual abuse when it's right under your nose, let alone begin to understand it. Educate yourself on the human mind, you have one of your own, right? I suggest starting with some of the talks from Ruby Wax on YT
And yet people who sexually abuse children get less time than that.
Their business model is to profit from revenge, it is implemented via sexual humiliation (abuse). Personally I don't think 20yrs is long enough to rehabilitate such a badly broken moral compass. The customer may also have psychological problems or may suffer psychological problems associated with the guilt and shame of what they did on the internet at a drunken pity party. The people who run the business have no feelings of guilt or shame, let's all hope they find some in the next 20yrs.