Uh... which ones? Have you gotten to the levels where you have to deal with orbital mechanics at all? I can play those levels for hours on end. And then there's levels with actually intelligent AIs who either try to eat you or run away, puzzle levels where you have to use a mixture of blob ju-jitsu and Newtonian physics in order to actually get to something smaller than yourself... the game is remarkably deep, once you get past the first few tutorial levels.
I mean yes, the basic concept is expressed in a shitload of free Flash games - eat stuff that's smaller than you, run away from stuff that's bigger than you - but the polish and scenarios and music all come together to make Osmos worthwhile.
Who knows? It could be a form of white mutiny - after all, blocking military members' access to popular news sites is a really stupid thing to do, but if the regulations say you have to do it then maybe everyone gets blocked, including the people who are in a position to change the regulations.
I don't get it, actually - the profile seems to almost be a parody of itself, and the article says absolutely nothing about how they know the profile is actually Mr. Assange's. How do they know it's his, exactly?
(I've been wondering the same thing about the diplomatic cables honestly)
You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society that takes the mandates for the latest and greatest technologies regardless of whether they are practical there or feasible elsewhere.
Which explains why major US cities and technology centers like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle and other such places have average Internet connection speeds equivalent to Japan's, right?
Not just that: the only effective way to enforce CD key checks and other such anti-piracy measures is via a significant multiplayer component. In short, either our servers validate you or you don't get to play the game. It's the only form of DRM that works, because it turns them into the gatekeepers of content - in essence, due to the fact that the game is primarily multiplayer, the other people become the game's content and the publisher sticks their server between you and other people.
I mean, just look at Star Craft 2! Oh, how the once-great have fallen; in Starcraft 1, you could use the second disk to create a multiplayer-only spawn install for an essentially unlimited number of LAN players; now, every single multiplayer game has to be authenticated via Battle.Net, even if it's just going to be played over the local network between two full copies of the game (which is, I suppose, something of a misnomer, because now there's nothing but full copies of the game).
In other words: as long as gay Uncle Tony is not a detriment to you raising your children, then he's partially genetically successful; after all, on average, you share half of his genes, and your children share 1/4th. Thus, for every successful child he helps you raise, he gets 1/4th of an "evolution win", much like for every child you successfully raise you get 1/2 of an "evolution win". If he doesn't prevent his siblings from raising four children, gay Uncle Tony has basically pulled his own genetic weight and on average his genes will be passed on even though he had no children of his own, and might not have even helped to raise any. The thing is, though, that despite the fact that I've phrased this in terms of not being a detriment, in practice gay Uncle Tony will be helpful (as long as you don't ostracize him, of course) - he'll provide babysitting, he'll share food, he'll help throw parties, he'll hunt mammoths, etcetera - thus meaning that families with a gay Uncle Tony are, on average, more successful than ones without one.
The thing is, this works even for people who are not directly related. If gay Uncle Tony adopts a child, on average that child will share some large fraction of his human-specific genes (I forget the exact number, but it was surprisingly large - something like 1/36th I think?). Even by raising an adoptive child, gay Uncle Tony's genes still get a relatively noticeable "evolution win".
The way to understand the anti-abortion mindset is extremely simple, but very difficult (apparently) for many supposedly "rational" thinkers. They believe that a person is alive and has rights from the moment of conception. Potential life, in their eyes, is to be as revered as full life-- in fact in some ways more so because it has no adequate defenses or ability to survive without help*.
By what logic do they stop at the moment of conception? The thing that was just conceived is almost exactly as alive as the amoebas you killed washing your hands, and yet you do it anyway. The only thing abortion does is kill the potential of a human life. At what point does it stop? Why is conception the point at which it goes from being "not a potential human life" to "a potential human life"? After all, every second you spend not having procreative sex is a second in which you are preventing the birth of a potential human life. And should we start charging women who miscarry with negligence? It was a potential human life, and there are definitely steps a woman can take to reduce the risk of miscarriage; if the woman didn't take those steps, isn't she causing the death of a potential human just like an abortion doctor would have?
The main thing, though, is that I simply don't see the anti-abortion movement putting their money where their mouth is. Protesters are always in front of clinics saying "Don't get an abortion! Abortions are bad!" - but if they really cared about the potential baby's life, why aren't they saying "Don't get an abortion! We'll adopt the child!"?
Keep in mind also that we're talking about first trimester abortions here; the pro-choice movement is not saying "abortions for everyone whenever they want them!", they're saying "abortions for everyone as long as it's before the fetus has developed past a certain point".
Maybe you should stop buying cables at brick and mortar stores? They always rip you off on cables, no exceptions - the theory being, I imagine, that you need to have the cable right now or else you wouldn't be buying it from them.
Right, because our understanding of the Earth's climate hasn't changed at all since 2000, when that article was published. And scientists are uniformly immune to the lure of a journalist's empty note pad.
And the worst part is that people just don't understand that climate is a giant interconnected system.
Consider: last year (IIRC) England experienced one of the snowiest winters on record. People said "Hah, screw you global warming!"
Except, if you work out the relationships between systems, warmer weather leads to more snow in winter - there's more water in the atmosphere overall, which means that there's more water to make snow with.
I've yet to see an anthropogenic global warming "skeptic" who wasn't just a denier JAQing off. I mean seriously, what is there to be skeptical about? What part of the IPCC Working Group 1 report is wrong? The Earth is getting warmer, it's due to our carbon emissions, and all that's left to argue about is what the impact will be.
You can kinda sorta be "skeptical" about how negative of an impact that will be, but again I've yet to see anyone who's managed to make a good argument that more carbon and warmer average temperatures will somehow be good for us in general. And no, "carbon is plant food!" is not a good argument.
That's actually one of the major problems with many of the current formulations of string theory; they're testable in theory, but in practice by the time we can throw that much energy around we probably won't care about the answer any more, one way or the other.
If Fox News or CNN or the New York Times got a hold of a bunch of newsworthy diplomatic cables between Pakistan and Iran do you really think they'd keep them under wraps because the Pakistan and/or Iran government consider them secret? Of course not.
Actually, I bet you they would. I mean think about it: what is wikileaks? most people didn't even know about it until recently.
Now imagine that you've just walked away with gigabytes of diplomatic cables. What do you do, if you want to make them publically available? Do you offer them to some relatively unknown upstart without much of a history, or to a well known and respected news organization?
Honestly, I don't think it makes much sense to assume that Wikileaks is the only (or even the first) organization that has or was offered this data. They're probably just the first to have the balls to publish it.
Yeah, I don't really know what we're talking about here. I said that the government currently makes companies give zero paid days off. You responded with "well I get 47 days off, and I'll take that over a government mandated thirty days off" - the obvious implication being that if 30 days off were the minimum, that would somehow affect the number of days off you have.
But that's the thing - even our average number of days off is nowhere near the mandated number of days off in most countries. Companies are being miserly with days off, which is probably why employees are being miserly with them as well.
I'm not sure how you get from "This is the state mandated minimum" to "nobody ever has more vacation days than the state mandated minimum". How does that work, pray tell?
What I find interesting in this comparison of worldwide vacation time is that there is simply no column for "sick days".
I wouldn't be surprised if many other countries just don't have the concept of "sick day" - if you're sick, you stay home and that's it. It doesn't eat in to your vacation time because, of course, we don't want you coming in to work when you're going to get everyone else infected, and if you abuse it you get fired.
In other words: employees start being being miserly with their sick days when they know they'll have to start losing vacation days as well, which is bad for the company overall.
The US is in bold and has a star. Do you know why? Because there's no minimum requirement, that is apparently the average at several large firms. This means that the US's statistic is essentially bullshit; if they measured the other countries' days off using the same criteria as the US's, all of the other statistics would get bumped up (after all, the values can't go down due to regulation, so the only direction they can go is up).
Anyway, as for your 22 paid days off: you're including holidays and sick days. The number for (say) Finland does not include that - they get 30 days of strictly vacation time, not including holidays and sick days. When you sort by total number of days off, the US still ranks near the bottom - and they would probably be at the bottom, if the statistics were at all comparable.
Basically, corporations have US workers bent over the table and we're laying there saying "It's not so bad, at least I get six holidays".
It still counts as a sick day if you're taking the day off for your mental health, right?
Of course, if American employers would just provide a reasonable number of vacation days, this wouldn't be an issue; unfortunately it seems like the company has to squeeze you for every last ounce of productivity, even when squeezing less might make you more productive.
Meanwhile there are now bunches of people running the old cracks who might never figure it out... especially if the impact is subtle.
And if the impacts aren't subtle, then there's a now bunches of people running poorly working version of your game, and badmouthing it everywhere on the Internet and in real life - "It crashed after the first dungeon! The bosses are too hard! The game just sucks!"
And if your piracy detection isn't absolutely perfect, there's now bunches of people who have legitimate versions of your game that just don't work, and they'll be rightly pissed off as well.
I loan my car to a friend. That friend attempts to run over some cops, who fill it with bullets, causing it to catch fire and burn.
Not quite - your friend smuggles cocaine in the car. The government seizes the car, and says "In order to ensure that there's no cocaine left in this car, we must scrap it".
Putting bullets in a car is one thing - you might have to do that in order to get the driver to stop - but this is not a volatile situation, so there's no urgent need to destroy the house.
If I believed that there was a good chance that after I died I would be thrown into a lake of fire and otherwise punished for the rest of eternity, you can bet your sorry ass that I would be scared shitless of dying. Yes yes if you're good you get to go to heaven, but what if you accidentally committed a mortal sin without realizing it or something? After all, if you read the Bible, God is nothing if not capricious; how can you know that when He said "No mixed fabrics!", He didn't really mean it? What if you really are supposed to believe in the Miracle of Transubstantiation, reality be damned? It's just so uncertain.
Fortunately there's no hell, so there's no worries on that front. Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort. What is any amount of Earthly reassurance, in the face of the threat of infinite torture? (take that, Pascal!)
People with a university degree tend to be (in b4 outliers) more conformist, walking in lockstep with society and less willing to question themselves or their surroundings. Like the old stereotype says, the easterner spends too much time in meditation staring into space, and the westerner spends too little time doing so.
[citation needed]
In fact, I'll see your "more conformist" and raise you a "no they're not" - politically speaking, academics (a subset of people with degrees, I know) tend to be Democrats where the general population is mostly Republican. That doesn't sound at all like "walking in lockstep with society" to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... which ones? Have you gotten to the levels where you have to deal with orbital mechanics at all? I can play those levels for hours on end. And then there's levels with actually intelligent AIs who either try to eat you or run away, puzzle levels where you have to use a mixture of blob ju-jitsu and Newtonian physics in order to actually get to something smaller than yourself... the game is remarkably deep, once you get past the first few tutorial levels.
I mean yes, the basic concept is expressed in a shitload of free Flash games - eat stuff that's smaller than you, run away from stuff that's bigger than you - but the polish and scenarios and music all come together to make Osmos worthwhile.
Who knows? It could be a form of white mutiny - after all, blocking military members' access to popular news sites is a really stupid thing to do, but if the regulations say you have to do it then maybe everyone gets blocked, including the people who are in a position to change the regulations.
I don't get it, actually - the profile seems to almost be a parody of itself, and the article says absolutely nothing about how they know the profile is actually Mr. Assange's. How do they know it's his, exactly?
(I've been wondering the same thing about the diplomatic cables honestly)
Which explains why major US cities and technology centers like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle and other such places have average Internet connection speeds equivalent to Japan's, right?
Not just that: the only effective way to enforce CD key checks and other such anti-piracy measures is via a significant multiplayer component. In short, either our servers validate you or you don't get to play the game. It's the only form of DRM that works, because it turns them into the gatekeepers of content - in essence, due to the fact that the game is primarily multiplayer, the other people become the game's content and the publisher sticks their server between you and other people.
I mean, just look at Star Craft 2! Oh, how the once-great have fallen; in Starcraft 1, you could use the second disk to create a multiplayer-only spawn install for an essentially unlimited number of LAN players; now, every single multiplayer game has to be authenticated via Battle.Net, even if it's just going to be played over the local network between two full copies of the game (which is, I suppose, something of a misnomer, because now there's nothing but full copies of the game).
In other words: as long as gay Uncle Tony is not a detriment to you raising your children, then he's partially genetically successful; after all, on average, you share half of his genes, and your children share 1/4th. Thus, for every successful child he helps you raise, he gets 1/4th of an "evolution win", much like for every child you successfully raise you get 1/2 of an "evolution win". If he doesn't prevent his siblings from raising four children, gay Uncle Tony has basically pulled his own genetic weight and on average his genes will be passed on even though he had no children of his own, and might not have even helped to raise any. The thing is, though, that despite the fact that I've phrased this in terms of not being a detriment, in practice gay Uncle Tony will be helpful (as long as you don't ostracize him, of course) - he'll provide babysitting, he'll share food, he'll help throw parties, he'll hunt mammoths, etcetera - thus meaning that families with a gay Uncle Tony are, on average, more successful than ones without one.
The thing is, this works even for people who are not directly related. If gay Uncle Tony adopts a child, on average that child will share some large fraction of his human-specific genes (I forget the exact number, but it was surprisingly large - something like 1/36th I think?). Even by raising an adoptive child, gay Uncle Tony's genes still get a relatively noticeable "evolution win".
By what logic do they stop at the moment of conception? The thing that was just conceived is almost exactly as alive as the amoebas you killed washing your hands, and yet you do it anyway. The only thing abortion does is kill the potential of a human life. At what point does it stop? Why is conception the point at which it goes from being "not a potential human life" to "a potential human life"? After all, every second you spend not having procreative sex is a second in which you are preventing the birth of a potential human life. And should we start charging women who miscarry with negligence? It was a potential human life, and there are definitely steps a woman can take to reduce the risk of miscarriage; if the woman didn't take those steps, isn't she causing the death of a potential human just like an abortion doctor would have?
The main thing, though, is that I simply don't see the anti-abortion movement putting their money where their mouth is. Protesters are always in front of clinics saying "Don't get an abortion! Abortions are bad!" - but if they really cared about the potential baby's life, why aren't they saying "Don't get an abortion! We'll adopt the child!"?
Keep in mind also that we're talking about first trimester abortions here; the pro-choice movement is not saying "abortions for everyone whenever they want them!", they're saying "abortions for everyone as long as it's before the fetus has developed past a certain point".
Umm? Or how about this?
Maybe you should stop buying cables at brick and mortar stores? They always rip you off on cables, no exceptions - the theory being, I imagine, that you need to have the cable right now or else you wouldn't be buying it from them.
What.
Seriously, what.
Arrhenius figured out the physical basis for CO2 driven global warming back in 1896. Do you have any evidence to challenge his conclusions?
Right, because our understanding of the Earth's climate hasn't changed at all since 2000, when that article was published. And scientists are uniformly immune to the lure of a journalist's empty note pad.
And the worst part is that people just don't understand that climate is a giant interconnected system.
Consider: last year (IIRC) England experienced one of the snowiest winters on record. People said "Hah, screw you global warming!"
Except, if you work out the relationships between systems, warmer weather leads to more snow in winter - there's more water in the atmosphere overall, which means that there's more water to make snow with.
It's just not simple.
I've yet to see an anthropogenic global warming "skeptic" who wasn't just a denier JAQing off. I mean seriously, what is there to be skeptical about? What part of the IPCC Working Group 1 report is wrong? The Earth is getting warmer, it's due to our carbon emissions, and all that's left to argue about is what the impact will be.
You can kinda sorta be "skeptical" about how negative of an impact that will be, but again I've yet to see anyone who's managed to make a good argument that more carbon and warmer average temperatures will somehow be good for us in general. And no, "carbon is plant food!" is not a good argument.
That's actually one of the major problems with many of the current formulations of string theory; they're testable in theory, but in practice by the time we can throw that much energy around we probably won't care about the answer any more, one way or the other.
Actually, I bet you they would. I mean think about it: what is wikileaks? most people didn't even know about it until recently.
Now imagine that you've just walked away with gigabytes of diplomatic cables. What do you do, if you want to make them publically available? Do you offer them to some relatively unknown upstart without much of a history, or to a well known and respected news organization?
Honestly, I don't think it makes much sense to assume that Wikileaks is the only (or even the first) organization that has or was offered this data. They're probably just the first to have the balls to publish it.
Yeah, I don't really know what we're talking about here. I said that the government currently makes companies give zero paid days off. You responded with "well I get 47 days off, and I'll take that over a government mandated thirty days off" - the obvious implication being that if 30 days off were the minimum, that would somehow affect the number of days off you have.
But that's the thing - even our average number of days off is nowhere near the mandated number of days off in most countries. Companies are being miserly with days off, which is probably why employees are being miserly with them as well.
I'm not sure how you get from "This is the state mandated minimum" to "nobody ever has more vacation days than the state mandated minimum". How does that work, pray tell?
This is otherwise known as the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice.
I'm pretty sure there's almost nothing Terry Pratchett hasn't written about at one point or another.
What I find interesting in this comparison of worldwide vacation time is that there is simply no column for "sick days".
I wouldn't be surprised if many other countries just don't have the concept of "sick day" - if you're sick, you stay home and that's it. It doesn't eat in to your vacation time because, of course, we don't want you coming in to work when you're going to get everyone else infected, and if you abuse it you get fired.
In other words: employees start being being miserly with their sick days when they know they'll have to start losing vacation days as well, which is bad for the company overall.
Um, here's a better list (and in English).
The US is in bold and has a star. Do you know why? Because there's no minimum requirement, that is apparently the average at several large firms. This means that the US's statistic is essentially bullshit; if they measured the other countries' days off using the same criteria as the US's, all of the other statistics would get bumped up (after all, the values can't go down due to regulation, so the only direction they can go is up).
Anyway, as for your 22 paid days off: you're including holidays and sick days. The number for (say) Finland does not include that - they get 30 days of strictly vacation time, not including holidays and sick days. When you sort by total number of days off, the US still ranks near the bottom - and they would probably be at the bottom, if the statistics were at all comparable.
Basically, corporations have US workers bent over the table and we're laying there saying "It's not so bad, at least I get six holidays".
It still counts as a sick day if you're taking the day off for your mental health, right?
Of course, if American employers would just provide a reasonable number of vacation days, this wouldn't be an issue; unfortunately it seems like the company has to squeeze you for every last ounce of productivity, even when squeezing less might make you more productive.
Somewhat less than what he's making astroturfing for Microsoft, I would imagine.
And if the impacts aren't subtle, then there's a now bunches of people running poorly working version of your game, and badmouthing it everywhere on the Internet and in real life - "It crashed after the first dungeon! The bosses are too hard! The game just sucks!"
And if your piracy detection isn't absolutely perfect, there's now bunches of people who have legitimate versions of your game that just don't work, and they'll be rightly pissed off as well.
Smooth move, guys.
Not quite - your friend smuggles cocaine in the car. The government seizes the car, and says "In order to ensure that there's no cocaine left in this car, we must scrap it".
Putting bullets in a car is one thing - you might have to do that in order to get the driver to stop - but this is not a volatile situation, so there's no urgent need to destroy the house.
If I believed that there was a good chance that after I died I would be thrown into a lake of fire and otherwise punished for the rest of eternity, you can bet your sorry ass that I would be scared shitless of dying. Yes yes if you're good you get to go to heaven, but what if you accidentally committed a mortal sin without realizing it or something? After all, if you read the Bible, God is nothing if not capricious; how can you know that when He said "No mixed fabrics!", He didn't really mean it? What if you really are supposed to believe in the Miracle of Transubstantiation, reality be damned? It's just so uncertain.
Fortunately there's no hell, so there's no worries on that front. Honestly, I can't for the life of me see why theists think that religion brings peace and comfort. What is any amount of Earthly reassurance, in the face of the threat of infinite torture? (take that, Pascal!)
[citation needed]
In fact, I'll see your "more conformist" and raise you a "no they're not" - politically speaking, academics (a subset of people with degrees, I know) tend to be Democrats where the general population is mostly Republican. That doesn't sound at all like "walking in lockstep with society" to me.