That threw me in a loop for a bit until I realized you meant "Adult sites" webmasters.
Same here. I was already mildly annoyed at the tendency of people to use "adult" as synonymous with "porn". Like "adult entertainment". Lots of adults can enjoy non-porn related entertainment. Just call it what it is, okay?
Very enlightening, but what I'm wondering is, does it really matter whether Spamhaus initially accepted any US court's jurisdiction, when Spamhaus doesn't actually live in the US? I mean, no matter what Spamhaus says, they don't live in the jurisdiction of even the federal court, so the court still doesn't hold any power over them.
all Ice Weasel is, is Firefox devoid of any nonfree trademarked art.
Not quite. Debian has a couple of their own patches for Firefox that Mozilla refuses to implement. So Debian patches their own version of Firefox, and Mozilla complains it's not really Firefox anymore, so it can't use the logo and name.
Some people on the Ubuntu forums are actually complaining about Debian's patches, because the official Debian/Ubuntu version of Firefox is apparently slower and less stable than a manually installed version. Not sure if that's true, but my Ubuntu Firefox does have a really annoying "feature" that my Windows version doesn't have.
And any updates to Firefox will be bought to Iceweasel.
Some of us are still around. In fact, there's still a small but active community. Best 4X game ever, after all.
But to get this back on topic, the way games like Stars! are distributed can also be very effective: give away a free playable demo, and by entering an activation code, you can turn it into the complete game. Anyone can try it out, and by paying you get more. Most importantly the ability to play against others, which is what the game is all about.
So if a publisher is to pirate their own games, they'll reap all the benefits of piracy, get a great name from the gaming community, and earn a ton of money.
The reason why this has never been done is because it doesn't work like that. If piracy is always helpful, people would've figured this out by now and pirate their own games.
Actually, this is almost exactly what Stardock did with Galactic Civilizations 1 and 2. It has no copy protection and no CD check. It does have an activation code, but yoou can install it on as many PCs as you like. And if you register and lose your PC and your CD, you can download the game again from their site.
So what do you think? Nobody bothered to pay and copied it from each other? Or or could it be that GC2 was one of the best selling games this year? And from a small publisher at that? GC2 sold way above their expectations, and it sold even more when StarForce, as part of an impromptu protection racket, pointed to a pirated copy of the game.
Ofcourse what also helps people to buy their games, is that Stardock actually supports them. Register, and you can install lots of patches and extra features.
Basically, they offered extra value for paying customers, instead of reduced value like every other publisher does.
choose 800x600. Most people don't have monitors large enough to justify using really high resolutions, but they use them anyway.
For a 15" monitor that's great, but for a 19" one, I'd hate to use anything less than 1600x1200.
But the real reason for high resolution isn't games (many games automatically reduce the resolution my PC is using), but programming. It's practical to have lots of information on your screen. For most games that aren't Stars!, that's not much of an issue.
Whedon has said this before and will probably have to repeat it again to fans hoping for a sequel. I'm hoping for a sequel too, but I seriously doubt it's ever going to happen.
Who cares about Ultima? As long as Planescape: Torment is in a well-deserved second place, I don't care about anything else. Torment was the first and still only computer game that actually feels like a RPG. Excellent storytelling and excellent writing on top of that, but the most important thing is that you actually roleplay an interesting character, instead of just an empty set of stats and weapons who's mainly exploring other people's lives. If that's not a leap forward in CRPGs, I don't know what is.
an the results of the Nedap voting machine be manipulated?
Much more difficult than with "paper" elections
Not sure if this is true. It's very hard to meaningfully manipulate 1000s of people counting paper votes and checking if they've been properyl counted. But once you can manipulate one computer, you can manipulate them all.
But even if voting computers are really much harder to manipulate than paper elections, the real issue is that they can't be checked. Manipulation is hard to detect and impossible to rectify. With paper elections, that's much easier.
The period during which Earth has had life: 3.8bn + 4.6bn = 8.4 billion years
Period of human existence: 2 million + 4.6bn ~= 4.6 billion years
Probability of intelligent life: ~50%
No, that just means this planet will have intelligent life for 50% of its existence. That says nothing whatsoever about the likelihood that intelligent life will evolve on any other planet. Not does it even mean that life will appear there at all.
At the moment, we still have no clear idea of what causes life. Will it appear automatically when you have the right mix of chemicals? Can it appear, but is it extremely unlikely? Does it require divine intervention? We truly have no idea. Well, we have hundreds of ideas, but none has been proven or backed up by any meaningful amount of evidence.
We also don't know how likely the evolution of intelligent life is. It's certainly not a given. A brain is an expensive organ, and there really has to be a pressing need for it. In evolutionary terms, what a brain basically does is allow us to adapt to many different environments. Most animals don't need to; as long as your environment stays the same, built-in instincts are good enough. If the environment changes slowly, there's plenty of time to evolve new instincts. I wouldn't be surprised if our oversized moon, earthquakes, volcanos, regular meteor strikes, etc, are all vital for the development of intelligent life. And even then it could still have been an unlikely accident that evolution took this path and not some other.
Also, our solar system has only 4 rocky planets, not 5. We do have a lot of rocky moons and dwarf planets, though.
But this just shows that there are lots of large gas giants. Maybe there's life on their moons...
If I'm not mistaken (TFA isn't very clear on this, and it's an awful website anyway), these new planets are all extremely hot Jupiters, so there won't even be life on their moons.
At least, that's what I wanted to reply. But a quick google showed that according to this, this and this, a hot Jupiter could actually mean that there are terrestrial planets in the same system.
Ofcourse that's still an untested theory. We have to actually find some terrestrial planets in such systems before we can be sure.
I think wars where both parties travel in time can get really messy, in the sense that complete timelines get changed or wiped out, or something.
For the Traveller universe (a game universe where 300,000 years ago unknown "Ancients" spread humans to dozens of planets, terraformed and/or destroyed lots of planets and generally made a big mess of things), I once read an alternative explanation for the Ancients that involved time travel: the Ancients were actually advanced humans that got involved in a time war, and by the "time" the war ended and the timeline was stable again, the galaxy had ruins everywhere and humans living all over the place.
Basically, a timewar doesn't just mean the future gets rewritten, but the whole of reality gets rewritten. Perhaps that's what happened in Doctor Who?
Or maybe the writers just didn't think much about it.
Which he doesn't. Come on! Doesn't anyone read the post they're responding to anymore? Someone mentions "The Designer of the Universe" in a joke and everybody is assuming he's advocating Intelligent Design?
IANAGS but I'd wait until there was some more evidence on offer.
And the best way to get that evidence is through experiment: give a mouse 200 copies of that gene and see if he turns into the Brain. And then make a human with 1 copy of the gene and see if he turns into Pinky.
Can't say I disagree with keeping the old definition, when they had to change the definition of a planet to exclude Pluto.
Remember that all of this has happened before. Once upon a time, Ceres was a planet. Then other asteroids were discovered. The first few became planets too. Then astronomers realised that these were all objects from a seperate class, and redefined them not to be planets. Pluto is exactly the same. We thought it was a planet when it was the only KBO we knew. Now we know there's millions more of them, and Pluto isn't even the biggest of them. Pluto is member of a seperate class of objects, and will be defined as such. If not now, than after a few more big KBOs have been discovered.
And, um, atheists are sans agenda? I mean, if you're going to use a ad hominem logical fallacy, you should at least realize when you're putting logic in the back seat.
So what about the millions of christians who have no problem combining a deep religious belief with accepting scientific facts like evolution? What's their agenda?
You point to a few birds on an island that can't mate, but that begs the question---another logical fallacy (c.f "Gentlement prefer blonds. I know this because a gentleman told me. I know he's a gentleman because he prefers blonds." with "Macro-evolution happens. I know this because there are some birds on an island that can't mate. I know they can't mate because of macro-evolution.").
Macro-evolution is a misnomer anyway. There's no difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution; macro-evolution is simply the accummulation of a lot of micro-evolutionary changes. The birds are an example of speciation: different populations of a single species developing into different species. Because of isolation the populations don't exchange enough genetic material, and at some point the genomes of the populations have accummulated so many differences that members of the different populations can't interbreed anymore.
Darwin had a problem (when he is alive) with the fossil record and macro-evolution. That is, there should be loads of evidence to show the migrations between species. Today, after over 140 years, there is still insufficent fossil evidence to show the trans-species move. Still can't prove the evolution of the eye conclusively. However, we have tons of evidence of intra-species (micro-evolution). In order to take what is known and create macro-evolution, scientists have to make firm belief in something for which there is insufficient proof. In English we call this taking something on faith. Faith of this nature tends to be more descriptive of a religious view.
There have been a few modifications to the theory of evolution since Darwin. Darwin thought that evolution happened at a slow but constant speed. We know now that is doesn't; evolution moves in leaps and bounds, seperated by long periods of stagnation. A species evolves quickly when there is a lot of room for easily achieved improvement in its genome. Once the population has adapted to its environment, most mutations will be neutral or negative, or have such a negligible positive effect that it's not enough to spread that new gene through the entire population. So evolution stagnates, until the environment changes again, and the population needs to adapt to this new environment.
This means that the vast majority of fossils are members of large, stable populations. When disaster strikes, environment changes, a different kind of fitness is required and all least fit members of the population die, you're suddenly faced with only a few thousand or million years with a much smaller population where evolutionary change happens a lot faster. Because of the smaller population size and the shorter time span, we're unfortunately very unlikely to find fossils of these creatures.
Ofcourse a lot of transitional species actually have been found since Darwin's time. The Tiktaalik is a recent and famous one. There's also a rapidly increasing number of bird fossils with dinosaur features and dinosaur fossils with bird features. The gaps in the fossil record are slowly being filled. We'll never find absolutely everything, because fossilisation is actually a pretty rare process, and you're more likely to find fossils of species with large populations that survived for many millions of years.
The fact is that neither creation nor evolution can be proven, which means both arguements belong to metaphysics.
Evolution is as proven as any scientific theory can be. It's comparable to the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Th
Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man? A being that has the power to create the universe in which we live. A being that set up the rules that we discover via science. That being is God, and he is the one that is responsible for us being here today.
The evolution-creationism discussion is not about whether there's a being greater than man, but about whether that being (if indeed he exists) used evolution to create us or not.
My position in this discussion is that I can use evolution to create new things, and if I can, then certainly so can God. Creationists seem to claim that God can't do that, for some reason.
For more information about using evolution to create software, take a look at John Koza's work on Genetic Programming. It works, and it easily refutes all the silly Intelligent Design claims about what evolution can't do.
Furthermore, I'd like to stress that the 168 hours of creation are a personal interpretation of the bible, and most christians do not interpret Genesis 1 quite that literally. Consider that the world around you is God's creation (if indeed God exists at all, for which I don't have any proof, but I do think he does), and teaches you just as much about who God is and what he does as the bible does, and certainly should be considered a more accurate source than your (or my) own fallible interpretation of the bible.
Looks like the German game industry is using some ideas from the Anglo-Saxon game industry: that of expansions. A well known name and a new feature often sells just as well for much less effort than a completely new game that needs to follow a complete development and testing track.
And now that German board games are booming, successful publishers are cashing in. You see stuff like that in any industry.
Real estate in the business areas is extremely expensive. Owning your own building in the center is too, but owning or renting a decent appartment can be a lot cheaper than those US prices I saw. Ofcourse if you go for something really good in an expensive neighbourhoor, I don't doubt it can be a lot more expensive too.
Come to think of it, perhaps I should buy a house in my current neighbourhood. There's a lot of improvement going on, so prices will probably go up.
n Amsterdam? It was my understanding that while rent might be cheap home prices were very expensive there (something to do with your a home being a better tax shelter there). A $600 mortgage would only buy a $120,000 home which sounds very low for anywhere in any major cities in North America or Western Europe.
Owning a home certainly gives some tax advantages (bad idea IMO; rich people in expensive homes get a double advantage), but a big shot at the bank where I'm currently working claims that $600 would get me a $200,000 home, which is quite reasonable. Not something that gets you a big house in the center, but certainly something pretty comfortable, I think.
[...] in NYC or San Francisco [...] rent starts at $1000+ (for your own place in a dive),
in a large US city (LA, DC, Chicago) [..] you can rent places for $750 and up (these won't be nice but they will be ok)
in a the rural west or south [...] you can rent a nice 1 bedroom for under $500,
Rent is pretty high in the US. I live in Amsterdam, the biggest city of one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and I pay only $200 rent. Now this is a rent-controlled hourse, and it really isn't very big, but my brother rents on the free market, and he pays about twice what I pay for a house that's twice as big. I've been told $600 a month will get you a mortgage for a decent 2 or 3-bedroom house.
And of course mass transit is green and has zero pollution as well. I live in an averge sized town and while we don't have subways, we do have a decent bus system. Based off of the amount of smoke they spew at every intersection, I'm not sure how much better public transportation is over driving yourself in a well maintained vehicle.
It helps a lot if they'd maintained those buses as well as your well-maintained vehicle.
When there are enough people living in an area that the buses, trains and subways are actually used, they'll always be more environmentally friendly than having everybody in his own car. And you won't get so many traffic jams. There are many places where public transport just isn't worth it, though. You need a car to get around, and buses are (or would be) mostly empty. Bad for mobility for children, both because they can't take the bus, and because interesting places are farther away, and a bicycle only gets you so far.
I live in Amsterdam: excellent public transport, and only an idiot would try to get around town in a car. And almost everywhere I want to go is within bicycle distance.
Even once you factor in the cost of vehicles, it's still cheaper where I live then in Silicon Valley.
As I understand it, any place is cheaper to live than Silicon Valley.
You comment about going out and discovering a world. How exactly does one do that when they are reliant on mass transportation to do it? Last I checked, most mass transit systems don't cover more then a relatively small geographical area.
I don't know about the US (but I'm willing to believe mass transit is really bad over there), but my mass transit system reaches to the farthest corners of Europe. Some places are easier to reach by car, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here. I was already mildly annoyed at the tendency of people to use "adult" as synonymous with "porn". Like "adult entertainment". Lots of adults can enjoy non-porn related entertainment. Just call it what it is, okay?
Very enlightening, but what I'm wondering is, does it really matter whether Spamhaus initially accepted any US court's jurisdiction, when Spamhaus doesn't actually live in the US? I mean, no matter what Spamhaus says, they don't live in the jurisdiction of even the federal court, so the court still doesn't hold any power over them.
Not quite. Debian has a couple of their own patches for Firefox that Mozilla refuses to implement. So Debian patches their own version of Firefox, and Mozilla complains it's not really Firefox anymore, so it can't use the logo and name.
Some people on the Ubuntu forums are actually complaining about Debian's patches, because the official Debian/Ubuntu version of Firefox is apparently slower and less stable than a manually installed version. Not sure if that's true, but my Ubuntu Firefox does have a really annoying "feature" that my Windows version doesn't have.
I really hope that will remain true.
Some of us are still around. In fact, there's still a small but active community. Best 4X game ever, after all.
But to get this back on topic, the way games like Stars! are distributed can also be very effective: give away a free playable demo, and by entering an activation code, you can turn it into the complete game. Anyone can try it out, and by paying you get more. Most importantly the ability to play against others, which is what the game is all about.
Actually, this is almost exactly what Stardock did with Galactic Civilizations 1 and 2. It has no copy protection and no CD check. It does have an activation code, but yoou can install it on as many PCs as you like. And if you register and lose your PC and your CD, you can download the game again from their site.
So what do you think? Nobody bothered to pay and copied it from each other? Or or could it be that GC2 was one of the best selling games this year? And from a small publisher at that? GC2 sold way above their expectations, and it sold even more when StarForce, as part of an impromptu protection racket, pointed to a pirated copy of the game.
Ofcourse what also helps people to buy their games, is that Stardock actually supports them. Register, and you can install lots of patches and extra features. Basically, they offered extra value for paying customers, instead of reduced value like every other publisher does.
For a 15" monitor that's great, but for a 19" one, I'd hate to use anything less than 1600x1200.
But the real reason for high resolution isn't games (many games automatically reduce the resolution my PC is using), but programming. It's practical to have lots of information on your screen. For most games that aren't Stars!, that's not much of an issue.
Whedon has said this before and will probably have to repeat it again to fans hoping for a sequel. I'm hoping for a sequel too, but I seriously doubt it's ever going to happen.
Time for a new quality SF TV series, I'd say.
Who cares about Ultima? As long as Planescape: Torment is in a well-deserved second place, I don't care about anything else. Torment was the first and still only computer game that actually feels like a RPG. Excellent storytelling and excellent writing on top of that, but the most important thing is that you actually roleplay an interesting character, instead of just an empty set of stats and weapons who's mainly exploring other people's lives. If that's not a leap forward in CRPGs, I don't know what is.
Still, pen & paper RPGs are better.
Not sure if this is true. It's very hard to meaningfully manipulate 1000s of people counting paper votes and checking if they've been properyl counted. But once you can manipulate one computer, you can manipulate them all.
But even if voting computers are really much harder to manipulate than paper elections, the real issue is that they can't be checked. Manipulation is hard to detect and impossible to rectify. With paper elections, that's much easier.
No, that just means this planet will have intelligent life for 50% of its existence. That says nothing whatsoever about the likelihood that intelligent life will evolve on any other planet. Not does it even mean that life will appear there at all.
At the moment, we still have no clear idea of what causes life. Will it appear automatically when you have the right mix of chemicals? Can it appear, but is it extremely unlikely? Does it require divine intervention? We truly have no idea. Well, we have hundreds of ideas, but none has been proven or backed up by any meaningful amount of evidence.
We also don't know how likely the evolution of intelligent life is. It's certainly not a given. A brain is an expensive organ, and there really has to be a pressing need for it. In evolutionary terms, what a brain basically does is allow us to adapt to many different environments. Most animals don't need to; as long as your environment stays the same, built-in instincts are good enough. If the environment changes slowly, there's plenty of time to evolve new instincts. I wouldn't be surprised if our oversized moon, earthquakes, volcanos, regular meteor strikes, etc, are all vital for the development of intelligent life. And even then it could still have been an unlikely accident that evolution took this path and not some other.
Also, our solar system has only 4 rocky planets, not 5. We do have a lot of rocky moons and dwarf planets, though.
If I'm not mistaken (TFA isn't very clear on this, and it's an awful website anyway), these new planets are all extremely hot Jupiters, so there won't even be life on their moons.
At least, that's what I wanted to reply. But a quick google showed that according to this, this and this, a hot Jupiter could actually mean that there are terrestrial planets in the same system.
Ofcourse that's still an untested theory. We have to actually find some terrestrial planets in such systems before we can be sure.
I think wars where both parties travel in time can get really messy, in the sense that complete timelines get changed or wiped out, or something.
For the Traveller universe (a game universe where 300,000 years ago unknown "Ancients" spread humans to dozens of planets, terraformed and/or destroyed lots of planets and generally made a big mess of things), I once read an alternative explanation for the Ancients that involved time travel: the Ancients were actually advanced humans that got involved in a time war, and by the "time" the war ended and the timeline was stable again, the galaxy had ruins everywhere and humans living all over the place.
Basically, a timewar doesn't just mean the future gets rewritten, but the whole of reality gets rewritten. Perhaps that's what happened in Doctor Who?
Or maybe the writers just didn't think much about it.
I prefer FreeFox. Still very recognisable, while at the same time rubbing it in that Firefox is not truly free.
If you're reading Slashdot, you're a nerd. What's your point?
Actually, over here it's on CNN. And weekly, so the name "Daily Show" doesn't make much sense. I wish it was daily. And at a more reasonable hour.
Which he doesn't. Come on! Doesn't anyone read the post they're responding to anymore? Someone mentions "The Designer of the Universe" in a joke and everybody is assuming he's advocating Intelligent Design?
And the best way to get that evidence is through experiment: give a mouse 200 copies of that gene and see if he turns into the Brain. And then make a human with 1 copy of the gene and see if he turns into Pinky.
Remember that all of this has happened before. Once upon a time, Ceres was a planet. Then other asteroids were discovered. The first few became planets too. Then astronomers realised that these were all objects from a seperate class, and redefined them not to be planets. Pluto is exactly the same. We thought it was a planet when it was the only KBO we knew. Now we know there's millions more of them, and Pluto isn't even the biggest of them. Pluto is member of a seperate class of objects, and will be defined as such. If not now, than after a few more big KBOs have been discovered.
So what about the millions of christians who have no problem combining a deep religious belief with accepting scientific facts like evolution? What's their agenda?
Macro-evolution is a misnomer anyway. There's no difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution; macro-evolution is simply the accummulation of a lot of micro-evolutionary changes. The birds are an example of speciation: different populations of a single species developing into different species. Because of isolation the populations don't exchange enough genetic material, and at some point the genomes of the populations have accummulated so many differences that members of the different populations can't interbreed anymore.
There have been a few modifications to the theory of evolution since Darwin. Darwin thought that evolution happened at a slow but constant speed. We know now that is doesn't; evolution moves in leaps and bounds, seperated by long periods of stagnation. A species evolves quickly when there is a lot of room for easily achieved improvement in its genome. Once the population has adapted to its environment, most mutations will be neutral or negative, or have such a negligible positive effect that it's not enough to spread that new gene through the entire population. So evolution stagnates, until the environment changes again, and the population needs to adapt to this new environment.
This means that the vast majority of fossils are members of large, stable populations. When disaster strikes, environment changes, a different kind of fitness is required and all least fit members of the population die, you're suddenly faced with only a few thousand or million years with a much smaller population where evolutionary change happens a lot faster. Because of the smaller population size and the shorter time span, we're unfortunately very unlikely to find fossils of these creatures.
Ofcourse a lot of transitional species actually have been found since Darwin's time. The Tiktaalik is a recent and famous one. There's also a rapidly increasing number of bird fossils with dinosaur features and dinosaur fossils with bird features. The gaps in the fossil record are slowly being filled. We'll never find absolutely everything, because fossilisation is actually a pretty rare process, and you're more likely to find fossils of species with large populations that survived for many millions of years.
Evolution is as proven as any scientific theory can be. It's comparable to the theory of relativity and quantum theory. Th
The evolution-creationism discussion is not about whether there's a being greater than man, but about whether that being (if indeed he exists) used evolution to create us or not.
My position in this discussion is that I can use evolution to create new things, and if I can, then certainly so can God. Creationists seem to claim that God can't do that, for some reason.
For more information about using evolution to create software, take a look at John Koza's work on Genetic Programming. It works, and it easily refutes all the silly Intelligent Design claims about what evolution can't do.
Furthermore, I'd like to stress that the 168 hours of creation are a personal interpretation of the bible, and most christians do not interpret Genesis 1 quite that literally. Consider that the world around you is God's creation (if indeed God exists at all, for which I don't have any proof, but I do think he does), and teaches you just as much about who God is and what he does as the bible does, and certainly should be considered a more accurate source than your (or my) own fallible interpretation of the bible.
Looks like the German game industry is using some ideas from the Anglo-Saxon game industry: that of expansions. A well known name and a new feature often sells just as well for much less effort than a completely new game that needs to follow a complete development and testing track.
And now that German board games are booming, successful publishers are cashing in. You see stuff like that in any industry.
Real estate in the business areas is extremely expensive. Owning your own building in the center is too, but owning or renting a decent appartment can be a lot cheaper than those US prices I saw. Ofcourse if you go for something really good in an expensive neighbourhoor, I don't doubt it can be a lot more expensive too.
Come to think of it, perhaps I should buy a house in my current neighbourhood. There's a lot of improvement going on, so prices will probably go up.
Rent is pretty high in the US. I live in Amsterdam, the biggest city of one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and I pay only $200 rent. Now this is a rent-controlled hourse, and it really isn't very big, but my brother rents on the free market, and he pays about twice what I pay for a house that's twice as big. I've been told $600 a month will get you a mortgage for a decent 2 or 3-bedroom house.
It helps a lot if they'd maintained those buses as well as your well-maintained vehicle.
When there are enough people living in an area that the buses, trains and subways are actually used, they'll always be more environmentally friendly than having everybody in his own car. And you won't get so many traffic jams. There are many places where public transport just isn't worth it, though. You need a car to get around, and buses are (or would be) mostly empty. Bad for mobility for children, both because they can't take the bus, and because interesting places are farther away, and a bicycle only gets you so far.
I live in Amsterdam: excellent public transport, and only an idiot would try to get around town in a car. And almost everywhere I want to go is within bicycle distance.
As I understand it, any place is cheaper to live than Silicon Valley.
I don't know about the US (but I'm willing to believe mass transit is really bad over there), but my mass transit system reaches to the farthest corners of Europe. Some places are easier to reach by car, though.