Also, their Portal 2 demo was not impressive. I'm not good, but I'm much quicker looking and better than that demo (not boasting, at all - I'm only average).
Hell, I'm quicker than that on the XBox controller.
I doubt that demonstrating speed was the point of the demo; any quicker than that and you'd probably not be able to keep up with what the player was doing with the controller.
Speak for yourself. I don't mind if you get pleasure from killing a deer or quail (or a fish for that matter), but I hope that you actually use the animal that you kill (whether it's meat, leather, or what have you).
How you kill the animal is also a very important consideration. In the UK, shooting or foxes for pest control is legal (and rightly so), but chasing and exhausting a fox which you then might kill for sport is not (and rightly so). A clean kill is humane, but torture is not.
I would very much like to know who modded this one "Troll". This is spot on.
I've never killed a cockroach in my life. Having said that, I do kill plenty of pests, but I try very hard not to torture them. Given that torturing animals is one of the Macdonald triad, this is a very relevant point.
I'm very happy to live under the shelter of my bearded gun-nut neighbour's "lead umbrella".
This alleged "lead umbrella" has basically never worked, though there have been ample opportunities for it to work. All it ensures is that totalitarianism carries a gun (and, of course, is wrapped in the flag).
Do remember that during WW2, the US government rounded up US citizens and put them in internment camps. Their gun-nut neighbours probably cheered the government on.
... it only affects me by having too many stories about it on/.
Speak for yourself. I'm enjoying the entertainment immensely. I'm thinking of selling popcorn.
When you live in the rest of the world, the US government is the bogeyman that your politicians try to scare you with. The surest way to cast doubt on a proposal to reform health care is to say "it would put us on the road to a US-style health care system". The surest way to cast doubt on a proposal to change election procedures is to say "we don't want US-style elections". I'm sure I don't even need to mention gun control.
So this is kind of like a hilariously cheesy horror movie, complete with slow pacing, bad over-the-top acting, and cheap effects. Think original Evil Dead trilogy.
Have they contributed any patches back to the community to improve the SteamOS/Steam on Linux experience?
Yes. They contributed quite a lot of improvements to SDL (and even hired Sam Lantinga), as well as a bunch of work on OpenGL drivers. That's all that I know about, but there's probably more. Valve is extremely aware that making games work better on Linux is good for Steam and SteamOS.
Incidentally, there is probably no "windowing system" on SteamOS as most Linux users understand it. In that respect, it's no different from other consoles.
Actually, I partly take that back. That study was from 1996, when the role of physiological responses to anger and anxiety in studies involving the penile plethysmograph weren't as well-understood.
I believe (please do correct me if I'm wrong) that as of now, there is no court in the US which accepts the PPG as evidence (e.g. in paraphilia cases) due to its scientific unreliability.
For example in this study two thirds of non-homophobic men showed no erectile response to a gay porn video, while 80% of homophobic men did have an erectile response.
Psychology Today is admittedly not Nature, but I'm surprised that it got such a misleading write-up, especially given that this has been fairly thoroughly debunked.
"Erectile response" is measured with a penile plethysmograph, which also happens to register a response to any kind of sudden blood pressure increase. Every guy knows what happens when when said guy first wakes up in the morning. It is also well-understood that sudden blood pressure increases are caused by anxiety, which is a reaction that one would expect homophobes to have to gay porn.
It's a similar story with the other kinds of measure. I know that I will typically spend more time looking at a picture which angers me than I do looking at a picture which bores me. One would expect gay porn to anger homophobic men and bore non-homophobic straight men.
While those incidents are certainly iconic, remember that there are a lot of "fervent anti-gay advocates" in the US. The null hypothesis is that the proportion of homophobes who are homosexual is no different from the proportion of homosexual people the general population. At the moment, there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
It might, but it is strongly believed that the decision problems in BQP are also in NP and, in particular, that quantum computers can't solve NP-hard decision problems "efficiently". Interestingly, there is some evidence that this may not be true of problems which are not decision problems. If that's true, then BQP sits in a very interesting space indeed.
As an aside, there is a small but growing set of problems which are known to be in BQP and in NP, but believed not to be outside P and not NP-hard. Interestingly, these tend to be problems which cryptosystems rely on, such as prime factoring and the discrete logarithm problem.
I therefore state what I hereby refer to as Pseudonym's Vague Conjecture: These problems constitute an "interesting" class of problems which are mutually reducible to each other in some sense. Moreover, graph isomorphism is another problem in the same class.
But did you seriously mean to suggest that money can currently buy a faster-than-light connection?
It's not faster than light. Washington DC to Chicago is about 950km, which by my calculations is just over 3ms as the photon flies. The "7ms" figure must take into account transducers and routers or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I'm quicker than that on the XBox controller.
I doubt that demonstrating speed was the point of the demo; any quicker than that and you'd probably not be able to keep up with what the player was doing with the controller.
Minecraft confirms that it's not dying. Does that count?
All compassion is discrimination, but not all discrimination is compassion.
Conveniently, it can be freely converted to bitcoin. Unfortunately, it can't be converted back.
During recorded history, actually. It was the discovery of touchstone which made it practical.
Some state boundaries have acute corners.
Speak for yourself. I don't mind if you get pleasure from killing a deer or quail (or a fish for that matter), but I hope that you actually use the animal that you kill (whether it's meat, leather, or what have you).
How you kill the animal is also a very important consideration. In the UK, shooting or foxes for pest control is legal (and rightly so), but chasing and exhausting a fox which you then might kill for sport is not (and rightly so). A clean kill is humane, but torture is not.
That sounds like a lot of work, when you could just squish them quickly.
Maybe we could use it as part of a psych screening programme?
I think it's okay to kill a pig or cow to eat it. I also think that intensive livestock farming is cruel to the animal, and therefore morally wrong.
Where I live, if a university scientist wanted to cyborgify a cockroach as part of a legitimate research project, it would require ethics approval.
I would very much like to know who modded this one "Troll". This is spot on.
I've never killed a cockroach in my life. Having said that, I do kill plenty of pests, but I try very hard not to torture them. Given that torturing animals is one of the Macdonald triad, this is a very relevant point.
Always time the launch of your web site when everyone is looking in the other direction?
This alleged "lead umbrella" has basically never worked, though there have been ample opportunities for it to work. All it ensures is that totalitarianism carries a gun (and, of course, is wrapped in the flag).
Do remember that during WW2, the US government rounded up US citizens and put them in internment camps. Their gun-nut neighbours probably cheered the government on.
Who says that I think you give a shit? If you don't want unsolicited opinions, get the hell off the Internet.
... it only affects me by having too many stories about it on /.
Speak for yourself. I'm enjoying the entertainment immensely. I'm thinking of selling popcorn.
When you live in the rest of the world, the US government is the bogeyman that your politicians try to scare you with. The surest way to cast doubt on a proposal to reform health care is to say "it would put us on the road to a US-style health care system". The surest way to cast doubt on a proposal to change election procedures is to say "we don't want US-style elections". I'm sure I don't even need to mention gun control.
So this is kind of like a hilariously cheesy horror movie, complete with slow pacing, bad over-the-top acting, and cheap effects. Think original Evil Dead trilogy.
Actually, I misread that. They provided specific feedback to NVIDIA to get them to fix the drivers.
(Part of me wanted to make a joke about Black Mesa, but I realised it was too dumb.)
Have they contributed any patches back to the community to improve the SteamOS/Steam on Linux experience?
Yes. They contributed quite a lot of improvements to SDL (and even hired Sam Lantinga), as well as a bunch of work on OpenGL drivers. That's all that I know about, but there's probably more. Valve is extremely aware that making games work better on Linux is good for Steam and SteamOS.
Incidentally, there is probably no "windowing system" on SteamOS as most Linux users understand it. In that respect, it's no different from other consoles.
Actually, I partly take that back. That study was from 1996, when the role of physiological responses to anger and anxiety in studies involving the penile plethysmograph weren't as well-understood.
I believe (please do correct me if I'm wrong) that as of now, there is no court in the US which accepts the PPG as evidence (e.g. in paraphilia cases) due to its scientific unreliability.
Psychology Today is admittedly not Nature, but I'm surprised that it got such a misleading write-up, especially given that this has been fairly thoroughly debunked.
"Erectile response" is measured with a penile plethysmograph, which also happens to register a response to any kind of sudden blood pressure increase. Every guy knows what happens when when said guy first wakes up in the morning. It is also well-understood that sudden blood pressure increases are caused by anxiety, which is a reaction that one would expect homophobes to have to gay porn.
It's a similar story with the other kinds of measure. I know that I will typically spend more time looking at a picture which angers me than I do looking at a picture which bores me. One would expect gay porn to anger homophobic men and bore non-homophobic straight men.
While those incidents are certainly iconic, remember that there are a lot of "fervent anti-gay advocates" in the US. The null hypothesis is that the proportion of homophobes who are homosexual is no different from the proportion of homosexual people the general population. At the moment, there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
It might, but it is strongly believed that the decision problems in BQP are also in NP and, in particular, that quantum computers can't solve NP-hard decision problems "efficiently". Interestingly, there is some evidence that this may not be true of problems which are not decision problems. If that's true, then BQP sits in a very interesting space indeed.
As an aside, there is a small but growing set of problems which are known to be in BQP and in NP, but believed not to be outside P and not NP-hard. Interestingly, these tend to be problems which cryptosystems rely on, such as prime factoring and the discrete logarithm problem.
I therefore state what I hereby refer to as Pseudonym's Vague Conjecture: These problems constitute an "interesting" class of problems which are mutually reducible to each other in some sense. Moreover, graph isomorphism is another problem in the same class.
Just in time for Half-Life 2: Episode 2.2.
It's not faster than light. Washington DC to Chicago is about 950km, which by my calculations is just over 3ms as the photon flies. The "7ms" figure must take into account transducers and routers or something.
The Almighty Invisible Pink Unicorn... erm, I mean Hand... moves faster than the speed of light.
There is nothing coincidental about it.