The Queen of England has declared that, as the head of the Church of England, she has decided that everyone is to worship the pig's head in front of the palace entrance. This is what happens when children run the government.
since "Even libertarians" will tell you that the Federal government ought to have the most rights, according to you.
that was a typo. unfortunately i only saw it after i posted. i meant, of course, that the rights should be inversely proportionate to the size of the of the administrative unit.
There is a place for both socialistic and free market economies. The key question to ask is "How does the efficiency gained by consolidating an industry or potential industry or creating a government backed competitor, through economies of scale, lower administrative overhead, and so on, compare to the opportunity cost of not having multiple competing firms? That is to say, when comparing a government solution to the free market solution, you have to consider the work ofall the competing firms, and the sum of the resources they used. The reward for these resources is a greater opportunity for innovation.
It's kind of irrelevant. The market (the actual market rather than the ideological fantasy) will find the most optimal solution for a given state of technology and resources available. Any attempt to go against it will fail. "market" is just a term economists used for "state of equilibrium" before economics were studied on par with chemistry. Any attempt to force everyone to use a government monopoly rather than allowing competition to a government service will produce the same result as all other monopolies -- long-term stagnation resulting in eventual dilapidation followed by collapse. The key here is eventually. Because it will be an attempt to artificially keep a system away from the state of equilibrium. Generally, it will demand more and more resources as time progresses. If economies of scale have their place, then their profitability will propel them forward. The problem is that both technological state and the availability of natural resources is changing too quickly. And micro-adjustments for profitability are much more likely to find the state of equilibrium than macro-planning.
"Even libertarians" are idiotic.
Get over yourself. People getting angry over economic theories are their own satire.
Well, it's pretty much established now that you can't get away with 1 scale system. As much as people try to create conversion factors between social liberties and commercial liberties, it doesn't seem to work. Your political view pretty much needs 2-dimensional scale: 1 for social issues and 1 for commercial. Government ownership of infrastructure is a commercially socialist move no matter how you cut it. Yes, we have the interstate highways. Yes, building them was socialist. Yes, it was a disaster, but only because of the unintended consequences (environmental disaster that is ubiquitous car system would be one, bankruptcy and eventual government take over or outright destruction of public transportation would be another). How well this will work in Stockholm will depend on whether politics will be allowed to trample technical issues. On municipal level, they have a good chance of that not happening. Give it time. Conversion to socialist commercial arrangement usually works well in the beginning (cause when you rob the rich you end up with a lot of free stuff) and falls apart over time (cause when you rob the rich, they don't want to build anything anymore and they move into positions of bureaucracy or plain leave).
Not quite. Even libertarians will tell you that the rights should grow with the size of administrative unit (with fed govt having least rights and individual having most rights). Socialism is the reverse system: the bigger the administrative unit, the more rights it has. This is municipal government building local infrastructure according to its needs. When you get down to municipal level, bureaucracy is much easier to keep in check through voting process. So this might not be so bad. Now, if a national government did this, it would no-doubt start with a lot of fanfare and work for the first 5-10 years and then become a legacy system that everyone would be forced to use and never upgrade. Whether or not this will work on municipal level (which is fairly large) will depend on level of political involvement of citizenry and the priority that this particular issue has among other municipal issues. After all, when you vote, you have to vote for the people who will handle all municipal issues.
You are talking about dimensions of data. I am not a physicist, but my physicist friends tell me that these 11 dimensions that string theory needs refer to physical dimensions. Having more than 3 dimensions of data is nothing impressive. Heck, Fourier Analysis is (more or less) infinite dimensional linear algebra. But just as in my reply to the other post, I have to say that C^3 simply won't fit into R^4. The original article sounded more like the equations were too complicated in R^3, so they embedded the structure into R^4, exploited some symmetry and then restricted the results back to R^3. It's just a common oversight of people who don't see complex numbers in their day-to-day life to forget that "complex" already has a very standard meaning when it comes to math.
Whether you realize it or not, you are proposing letting them bottom out and then make a choice. This is actually one of the ways to treat addiction. I haven't heard many arguments that WoW players should get money to treat their addiction. But to pretend that it's not addictive can underplay its effect and ruin lives of some unsuspected individuals who start playing it. I would argue that treating of any addiction is responsibility of the addict (or those who care about him). But don't forget that tough love is often a viable treatment. Pretending that addiction is not an addiction is never a viable treatment.
You do understand that video games hone addiction? The elephant in the room is WoW. So I will speak about that scourge (pun intended) directly. The game is designed to get people addicted. It's not addictive like chocolate cake. Or even like alcohol. It's addictive the way poetry is addictive to poetry lovers: once formed, the addiction will be remembered years past and longing will persist. It uses both positive and negative reinforcement to encourage daily play. It penalizes those who don't play daily and rewards those who do.
The makers of the game go through great lengths to make sure that people don't take short cuts in doing trivial tasks (hiring others to level characters, buying in-game currency). Why? Because it's not "fair"? What does that mean? If it's just a form of entertainment (the way TV is), then there must also be a way to "unfairly" watch TV. If it's "cheating", the way having someone attend your practice during sports would be, then leveling in the game must also improve a person's skills at playing the game (for the most part it doesn't). So what's the only remaining effect of this gradual day-to-day play? Conditioning to play and to miss the playing when it doesn't happen.
But that alone wouldn't get people addicted to daily playing. This game, however, creates a great deal of pressure to progress through game content. It creates conditions that facilitate peer-pressure to do so. "Kids create peer pressure all the time," you say? Well, sure. But this game manages to get adults to engage in very intense peer pressure -- in a way that most real-world situations never could.
For most people, progression is impossible without getting their hands on in-game equipment that is crafted through in-game skills. The kicker is that some of that equipment cannot be crafted without materials that can be created only once a day or once every few days. So those who want to log in only once in a while are penalized by not being able to take advantage of this daily crafting. They are ridiculed and ostracized by most other players. And they depend on those other players for access to content (because most content is multiplayer).
This kinds of a set up would be a drug dealer's dream. Imagine if drug dealers managed to create a situation where pot heads were not just pressured to do pot, but were pressured to do it once a day or be cut off from the supply and from fellow pot heads altogether. This is the set up that Blizzard created in WoW.
Most people have their addictiveness level. It might be hard for some people to understand, but just because they or their cousin, uncle, nephew or neighbor manages to play WoW and live a fully adjusted life, it doesn't mean that it's not addictive. Some people can do coke and not get addicted. I personally don't get nicotine addiction. I can smoke for a month and then stop and not miss it. Most people (I am told) would not be able to do that. Same with alcohol.
You may or may not have heard the phrase "chose your poison". Well, WoW definitely rises to the level of being one of the poisons out there. It's just not honest to pretend otherwise. Just as it is dishonest to pretend that long-term exposure to such highly attuned conditioning doesn't change people's brains. WoW players can be easily spotted. The game causes personality changes. It causes adults to act in abrasive and impulsive manner. It does so much more than sports participation. "Hard-core" WoW players act like jocks on steroids. Their moments of humanity are rare and generally exception to the rule. This happens even if they start out as fairly adjusted and kind individuals.
People have lost job, marriages, and other social support structures that require degrees of commitment because of their WoW addictions. To anyone arguing that any entertaining behavior can cause this in extreme cases, I would answer, "yes, it can." But in WoW this extreme is a norm.
Well, I am using a plain agree/disagree as possible decisions. So you got me there. So it's only relevant if an issue can be identified as being of the highest priority. The way I was reading the post to which gp replied was that bickering would forestall consensus even after an issue had been identified as being the highest priority. I am not sure that security can be evaluated by past performance. "Hasn't cost us much yet" doesn't seem like a good indication of whether it will continue to cost more in the future. It is, after all, similar to saying that a predator won't do much damage to a prey which doesn't have natural defenses based on how little damage such a predator has done so far.
To be even more pedantic: Science does require belief. Digging deep down in the fundamental of mathematics you get to axioms you just have to accept or not since they are not provable. Sure, it's not really hard to accept that something can't be true and false at the same time, but it still goes unproven. The same thing in physics and science based on observations. At some point you go from observing the sun rise every day to stating that the sun will rise every day as a fact. It is a belief based on observation and calculations. Lots of observations and lots of calculations, but still not a fact.
The problem is that the device you use for fact finding (your brain) is not a logical device. It's a probability estimator. Which means that, if your logic is taken to an extreme, then we don't know anything (because we don't know it with absolute certainty). What we call "fact" when referring to empirical knowledge is what would be synonymous with "so very, very probable as to be extremely plausible". The problem with doubting even that much is that you then, essentially, doubt your own sanity. So some empirical facts can be taken as facts as long as you make the assumption that you are not insane. As far as your statement about math, it's not so. Information can be based on assumptions. It's still knowledge. You just need to carefully state your assumptions. And certain conclusions (theorems) are certain with 100% probability from those assumptions (axioms). You don't need to prove mathematical axioms. But not because you can't. Rather because they are essentially definitions. Ie, you don't observe point,line and plane to satisfy the 5 postulates. You define point, line and plane as objects related by those 5 postulates. The reason math is used as the language of science, btw, is not that the axioms happen to coincide with what we observe, but rather because we only bother to think about the axioms which happen to coincide with what we observe. So people make statements like "this math might end up being useful a 100 years from now" because a lot of the "useless" (frivolous at the time) math endeavors ended up having their axioms fulfilled by later-observed phenomenon. This, however, is not a guarantee. We might very well be creating some axiomatic systems that will never end up describing constrains on any phenomenon that we observe. I know wondered off the point... "Belief" refers to information that is based on very little empirical evidence, but still uses that empirical evidence as justification for it's factual bases. To summarize: believes are conclusions accepted after they've been established with less than 50% certainty from the observed, science is conclusions that have been accepted after they've been established with 95+% certainty from the observed, math is conclusions accepted after they've been shown to follow from arbitrary assumptions with 100% certainty.
In fact, there are some serious advantages in having shorter lifespans as a species could more easily adapt to new environmental conditions.
Human beings adapt much more rapidly by learning. It allows for adaptation within a lifespan. This mechanism is why we rule the planet -- we adapt to environments faster than we can be killed off by them. Longer lifespans produce advantages under that system (you have individuals who have accumulated more experience and can assist fellow tribesman with adapting through use of that richer experience).
I honestly have no idea, but I don't think it's quite so cut and dry. As far as I know, we still don't really understand why "aging" happens, and last I heard, there were some who classify aging itself as a disease to be cured, rather than something inevitable.
My understanding is the opposite. Aging happens because edges of chromosomes contain extra stuff. After every cell division a bit of that extra stuff has a chance of not making it into the copy. After enough division, too much gets chopped off. After some of the "useful" stuff is chopped off more divisions are not possible anymore. As higher and higher percentage of cells fail to be divisible, the usual mechanisms in the body stop working properly. The only known mechanisms to stop this process also immediately causes cancerous tumors.... This was overly vague, I know... my knowledge of the subject is second-hand. This, btw, is why having children late in life is a bad idea -- dna that is passed on is likely (not guaranteed, of course) to be too short at the edges. So the offspring is likely to develop health problems earlier in life.
For instance, we know that cells have "self destruct" signals that tell it when to die. Could this have not existed at one point?
That would cause cancer. Division would still happen. If cells didn't die and more of them were produced through division, you'd get tumors.
You seemed to genuinely want to know what I thought about God
I didn't.
You asked me to define God and that is God to me.
I wanted you to define an English word. I didn't ask for your opinion of it or any emotional connection that you have to it. If I asked you to define the word "yogurt", I would expect something along the lines "a fermented milk product produced by adding lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus bacteria". I would not expect something along the lines "yogurt is the only way to have good middle eastern food". You throw around the word "god" and capitalize it to emphasize that it has some personal meaning to you. That's fine. But you used that word in a discussion of a scientific topic. That's when you get to have the burden of producing an objective definition. Instead you gave a sermon. If you don't think you can explain a term you use, don't use it when you describe a scientific phenomenon.
Have you ever tried to get, say, three competing companies to agree to a standard? Well, now try the same with a few hundred. Also, get international and you might get an idea what the problem could be.
Actually, I have a game-theoretic proof that there is a strategy for forming consensus in such a way that the O-function of players who will not agree to consensus is lower than O(n). As a matter of fact, I can present a strategy where that number will be O(n^{1/m}), where m is arbitrary positive integer. In practice that means, that if you do it right, than the greater your number of players, the smaller percentage of "disagreeables" you should expect.
Define "God". If your definition uses the word "intelligence", define "intelligence". If it uses a word derived from "conscious", define "conscious". This isn't even an argument (not yet). So far it's just an attempt to reduce miscommunication.
The biggest advantage of this is not being pigeon-holed into a specific role during a raid. The game is involved enough that even a specific purpose character can benefit from having specializations for different types of encounters (physical vs magic damage or multi-target vs single-target healing, for example). Having said, the games staff is still an obnoxious collection of sob's. So any entertainment value that the game itself provides is offset too much by the pain that Blizzard staff can cause due to their half-ass arbitrary and capricious decisions on whether certain standard game behaviors violate terms of service. If you add in the fact that the game actively hones addiction (by encouraging daily logins with daily quests and 20 hour cool downs on crafting abilities), you'll quickly realize that no matter what content they create, the game is not worth it.
This would be funny except it's scary instead . ..
the article mentions COLLEGE police. have you met them? they are about as dumb as phone operators. the best way to deal with them is to throw a few big words at them ("transparency", "mandate", "prioritize" will do just fine) and they crawl away. just
remember, they are as scared as all dumb people are. the world is a very random and difficult place for them. if you convince
them that you feel sorry for them without condescending, they'll be even better friends than your dog.
Slashdot Mirror
The Queen of England has declared that, as the head of the Church of England, she has decided that everyone is to worship the pig's head in front of the palace entrance. This is what happens when children run the government.
since "Even libertarians" will tell you that the Federal government ought to have the most rights, according to you.
that was a typo. unfortunately i only saw it after i posted. i meant, of course, that the rights should be inversely proportionate to the size of the of the administrative unit.
There is a place for both socialistic and free market economies. The key question to ask is "How does the efficiency gained by consolidating an industry or potential industry or creating a government backed competitor, through economies of scale, lower administrative overhead, and so on, compare to the opportunity cost of not having multiple competing firms? That is to say, when comparing a government solution to the free market solution, you have to consider the work ofall the competing firms, and the sum of the resources they used. The reward for these resources is a greater opportunity for innovation.
It's kind of irrelevant. The market (the actual market rather than the ideological fantasy) will find the most optimal solution for a given state of technology and resources available. Any attempt to go against it will fail. "market" is just a term economists used for "state of equilibrium" before economics were studied on par with chemistry. Any attempt to force everyone to use a government monopoly rather than allowing competition to a government service will produce the same result as all other monopolies -- long-term stagnation resulting in eventual dilapidation followed by collapse. The key here is eventually. Because it will be an attempt to artificially keep a system away from the state of equilibrium. Generally, it will demand more and more resources as time progresses. If economies of scale have their place, then their profitability will propel them forward. The problem is that both technological state and the availability of natural resources is changing too quickly. And micro-adjustments for profitability are much more likely to find the state of equilibrium than macro-planning.
"Even libertarians" are idiotic.
Get over yourself. People getting angry over economic theories are their own satire.
cogent political arguments
I was going for "funny".
inconvenient truth?
Well, it's pretty much established now that you can't get away with 1 scale system. As much as people try to create conversion factors between social liberties and commercial liberties, it doesn't seem to work. Your political view pretty much needs 2-dimensional scale: 1 for social issues and 1 for commercial. Government ownership of infrastructure is a commercially socialist move no matter how you cut it. Yes, we have the interstate highways. Yes, building them was socialist. Yes, it was a disaster, but only because of the unintended consequences (environmental disaster that is ubiquitous car system would be one, bankruptcy and eventual government take over or outright destruction of public transportation would be another). How well this will work in Stockholm will depend on whether politics will be allowed to trample technical issues. On municipal level, they have a good chance of that not happening. Give it time. Conversion to socialist commercial arrangement usually works well in the beginning (cause when you rob the rich you end up with a lot of free stuff) and falls apart over time (cause when you rob the rich, they don't want to build anything anymore and they move into positions of bureaucracy or plain leave).
Not quite. Even libertarians will tell you that the rights should grow with the size of administrative unit (with fed govt having least rights and individual having most rights). Socialism is the reverse system: the bigger the administrative unit, the more rights it has. This is municipal government building local infrastructure according to its needs. When you get down to municipal level, bureaucracy is much easier to keep in check through voting process. So this might not be so bad. Now, if a national government did this, it would no-doubt start with a lot of fanfare and work for the first 5-10 years and then become a legacy system that everyone would be forced to use and never upgrade. Whether or not this will work on municipal level (which is fairly large) will depend on level of political involvement of citizenry and the priority that this particular issue has among other municipal issues. After all, when you vote, you have to vote for the people who will handle all municipal issues.
You are talking about dimensions of data. I am not a physicist, but my physicist friends tell me that these 11 dimensions that string theory needs refer to physical dimensions. Having more than 3 dimensions of data is nothing impressive. Heck, Fourier Analysis is (more or less) infinite dimensional linear algebra. But just as in my reply to the other post, I have to say that C^3 simply won't fit into R^4. The original article sounded more like the equations were too complicated in R^3, so they embedded the structure into R^4, exploited some symmetry and then restricted the results back to R^3. It's just a common oversight of people who don't see complex numbers in their day-to-day life to forget that "complex" already has a very standard meaning when it comes to math.
Whether you realize it or not, you are proposing letting them bottom out and then make a choice. This is actually one of the ways to treat addiction. I haven't heard many arguments that WoW players should get money to treat their addiction. But to pretend that it's not addictive can underplay its effect and ruin lives of some unsuspected individuals who start playing it. I would argue that treating of any addiction is responsibility of the addict (or those who care about him). But don't forget that tough love is often a viable treatment. Pretending that addiction is not an addiction is never a viable treatment.
You do understand that video games hone addiction? The elephant in the room is WoW. So I will speak about that scourge (pun intended) directly. The game is designed to get people addicted. It's not addictive like chocolate cake. Or even like alcohol. It's addictive the way poetry is addictive to poetry lovers: once formed, the addiction will be remembered years past and longing will persist. It uses both positive and negative reinforcement to encourage daily play. It penalizes those who don't play daily and rewards those who do.
The makers of the game go through great lengths to make sure that people don't take short cuts in doing trivial tasks (hiring others to level characters, buying in-game currency). Why? Because it's not "fair"? What does that mean? If it's just a form of entertainment (the way TV is), then there must also be a way to "unfairly" watch TV. If it's "cheating", the way having someone attend your practice during sports would be, then leveling in the game must also improve a person's skills at playing the game (for the most part it doesn't). So what's the only remaining effect of this gradual day-to-day play? Conditioning to play and to miss the playing when it doesn't happen.
But that alone wouldn't get people addicted to daily playing. This game, however, creates a great deal of pressure to progress through game content. It creates conditions that facilitate peer-pressure to do so. "Kids create peer pressure all the time," you say? Well, sure. But this game manages to get adults to engage in very intense peer pressure -- in a way that most real-world situations never could.
For most people, progression is impossible without getting their hands on in-game equipment that is crafted through in-game skills. The kicker is that some of that equipment cannot be crafted without materials that can be created only once a day or once every few days. So those who want to log in only once in a while are penalized by not being able to take advantage of this daily crafting. They are ridiculed and ostracized by most other players. And they depend on those other players for access to content (because most content is multiplayer).
This kinds of a set up would be a drug dealer's dream. Imagine if drug dealers managed to create a situation where pot heads were not just pressured to do pot, but were pressured to do it once a day or be cut off from the supply and from fellow pot heads altogether. This is the set up that Blizzard created in WoW.
Most people have their addictiveness level. It might be hard for some people to understand, but just because they or their cousin, uncle, nephew or neighbor manages to play WoW and live a fully adjusted life, it doesn't mean that it's not addictive. Some people can do coke and not get addicted. I personally don't get nicotine addiction. I can smoke for a month and then stop and not miss it. Most people (I am told) would not be able to do that. Same with alcohol.
You may or may not have heard the phrase "chose your poison". Well, WoW definitely rises to the level of being one of the poisons out there. It's just not honest to pretend otherwise. Just as it is dishonest to pretend that long-term exposure to such highly attuned conditioning doesn't change people's brains. WoW players can be easily spotted. The game causes personality changes. It causes adults to act in abrasive and impulsive manner. It does so much more than sports participation. "Hard-core" WoW players act like jocks on steroids. Their moments of humanity are rare and generally exception to the rule. This happens even if they start out as fairly adjusted and kind individuals.
People have lost job, marriages, and other social support structures that require degrees of commitment because of their WoW addictions. To anyone arguing that any entertaining behavior can cause this in extreme cases, I would answer, "yes, it can." But in WoW this extreme is a norm.
Well, I am using a plain agree/disagree as possible decisions. So you got me there. So it's only relevant if an issue can be identified as being of the highest priority. The way I was reading the post to which gp replied was that bickering would forestall consensus even after an issue had been identified as being the highest priority. I am not sure that security can be evaluated by past performance. "Hasn't cost us much yet" doesn't seem like a good indication of whether it will continue to cost more in the future. It is, after all, similar to saying that a predator won't do much damage to a prey which doesn't have natural defenses based on how little damage such a predator has done so far.
kk. i probably got carried away. sorry. i guess i just couldn't see why the Spaghetti Monster would want us to have faith in "string theory".
To be even more pedantic: Science does require belief. Digging deep down in the fundamental of mathematics you get to axioms you just have to accept or not since they are not provable. Sure, it's not really hard to accept that something can't be true and false at the same time, but it still goes unproven. The same thing in physics and science based on observations. At some point you go from observing the sun rise every day to stating that the sun will rise every day as a fact. It is a belief based on observation and calculations. Lots of observations and lots of calculations, but still not a fact.
The problem is that the device you use for fact finding (your brain) is not a logical device. It's a probability estimator. Which means that, if your logic is taken to an extreme, then we don't know anything (because we don't know it with absolute certainty). What we call "fact" when referring to empirical knowledge is what would be synonymous with "so very, very probable as to be extremely plausible". The problem with doubting even that much is that you then, essentially, doubt your own sanity. So some empirical facts can be taken as facts as long as you make the assumption that you are not insane. As far as your statement about math, it's not so. Information can be based on assumptions. It's still knowledge. You just need to carefully state your assumptions. And certain conclusions (theorems) are certain with 100% probability from those assumptions (axioms). You don't need to prove mathematical axioms. But not because you can't. Rather because they are essentially definitions. Ie, you don't observe point,line and plane to satisfy the 5 postulates. You define point, line and plane as objects related by those 5 postulates. The reason math is used as the language of science, btw, is not that the axioms happen to coincide with what we observe, but rather because we only bother to think about the axioms which happen to coincide with what we observe. So people make statements like "this math might end up being useful a 100 years from now" because a lot of the "useless" (frivolous at the time) math endeavors ended up having their axioms fulfilled by later-observed phenomenon. This, however, is not a guarantee. We might very well be creating some axiomatic systems that will never end up describing constrains on any phenomenon that we observe. I know wondered off the point... "Belief" refers to information that is based on very little empirical evidence, but still uses that empirical evidence as justification for it's factual bases. To summarize: believes are conclusions accepted after they've been established with less than 50% certainty from the observed, science is conclusions that have been accepted after they've been established with 95+% certainty from the observed, math is conclusions accepted after they've been shown to follow from arbitrary assumptions with 100% certainty.
In fact, there are some serious advantages in having shorter lifespans as a species could more easily adapt to new environmental conditions.
Human beings adapt much more rapidly by learning. It allows for adaptation within a lifespan. This mechanism is why we rule the planet -- we adapt to environments faster than we can be killed off by them. Longer lifespans produce advantages under that system (you have individuals who have accumulated more experience and can assist fellow tribesman with adapting through use of that richer experience).
I honestly have no idea, but I don't think it's quite so cut and dry. As far as I know, we still don't really understand why "aging" happens, and last I heard, there were some who classify aging itself as a disease to be cured, rather than something inevitable.
My understanding is the opposite. Aging happens because edges of chromosomes contain extra stuff. After every cell division a bit of that extra stuff has a chance of not making it into the copy. After enough division, too much gets chopped off. After some of the "useful" stuff is chopped off more divisions are not possible anymore. As higher and higher percentage of cells fail to be divisible, the usual mechanisms in the body stop working properly. The only known mechanisms to stop this process also immediately causes cancerous tumors.... This was overly vague, I know... my knowledge of the subject is second-hand. This, btw, is why having children late in life is a bad idea -- dna that is passed on is likely (not guaranteed, of course) to be too short at the edges. So the offspring is likely to develop health problems earlier in life.
For instance, we know that cells have "self destruct" signals that tell it when to die. Could this have not existed at one point?
That would cause cancer. Division would still happen. If cells didn't die and more of them were produced through division, you'd get tumors.
You seemed to genuinely want to know what I thought about God
I didn't.
You asked me to define God and that is God to me.
I wanted you to define an English word. I didn't ask for your opinion of it or any emotional connection that you have to it. If I asked you to define the word "yogurt", I would expect something along the lines "a fermented milk product produced by adding lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus bacteria". I would not expect something along the lines "yogurt is the only way to have good middle eastern food". You throw around the word "god" and capitalize it to emphasize that it has some personal meaning to you. That's fine. But you used that word in a discussion of a scientific topic. That's when you get to have the burden of producing an objective definition. Instead you gave a sermon. If you don't think you can explain a term you use, don't use it when you describe a scientific phenomenon.
If anything, God is the answer to all this.
This is white noise. Aka "dodging the question". The rest was just a sermon, so it wasn't worth addressing.
Pfff, wait until latter 20th century when all trade will be conducted in oil promissory notes.
Have you ever tried to get, say, three competing companies to agree to a standard? Well, now try the same with a few hundred. Also, get international and you might get an idea what the problem could be.
Actually, I have a game-theoretic proof that there is a strategy for forming consensus in such a way that the O-function of players who will not agree to consensus is lower than O(n). As a matter of fact, I can present a strategy where that number will be O(n^{1/m}), where m is arbitrary positive integer. In practice that means, that if you do it right, than the greater your number of players, the smaller percentage of "disagreeables" you should expect.
Encryption is a two-edged sword. Encrypted data (including pin numbers) are useless until they are decrypted.
Not true. Unix passwords are never decrypted.
thanks. my bad.
real 4d is not big enough to fit complex 3d
Define "God". If your definition uses the word "intelligence", define "intelligence". If it uses a word derived from "conscious", define "conscious". This isn't even an argument (not yet). So far it's just an attempt to reduce miscommunication.
"math" is not singular.... gentlemen, start your engines. let the best pun win.
The biggest advantage of this is not being pigeon-holed into a specific role during a raid. The game is involved enough that even a specific purpose character can benefit from having specializations for different types of encounters (physical vs magic damage or multi-target vs single-target healing, for example). Having said, the games staff is still an obnoxious collection of sob's. So any entertainment value that the game itself provides is offset too much by the pain that Blizzard staff can cause due to their half-ass arbitrary and capricious decisions on whether certain standard game behaviors violate terms of service. If you add in the fact that the game actively hones addiction (by encouraging daily logins with daily quests and 20 hour cool downs on crafting abilities), you'll quickly realize that no matter what content they create, the game is not worth it.
This would be funny except it's scary instead . . .
the article mentions COLLEGE police. have you met them? they are about as dumb as phone operators. the best way to deal with them is to throw a few big words at them ("transparency", "mandate", "prioritize" will do just fine) and they crawl away. just remember, they are as scared as all dumb people are. the world is a very random and difficult place for them. if you convince them that you feel sorry for them without condescending, they'll be even better friends than your dog.