My faith seems to have forgot what persecution is.
on
NASA Science Under Attack
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Having people prove you wrong isn't persecution.
Having people hunt you down and kill you because of what you believe, is. Since this hasn't happened to christians in america, ever, at all, I think it's time the other members of my faith started shutting up and showing their faith and values through the most effective means of all: by example.
I feel most of us feel the same way, but the few of us that are loudly calling for the derailment of everyone who thinks differently, they are by far the loudest voices.
Debian is acceptable, and Google knows how to make a decent UI, so if they're writing their own window manager for this, this could be the best linux ever. Too few details to get excited about, but the concept has potential.
The concept of being able to archiave my DNA is just so amazing that I am perfectly willing to wait 20 years before I can afford it. Not even having children offers this level of hereditary legacy. One day there may even be a library where everyone can submit their DNA for archive. It's very exciting.
I'm not paying for shipping AND sales tax. That would totally eat the price advantage online stores have on B&M's and decimate ecommerce.
Sales tax is bogus to begin with, it's a terribly regressive tax, ESPECIALLY in states that still tax food and such. States ought to be able to raise their income through property or income taxes. I live in washington where sales tax is 8.8%, so I try to buy as much stuff as possible online, depending on shipping costs. As it sits there are online stores that actually charge sales tax allready. The iTunes store comes to mind, even though I'm pretty sure Apple is based in California. It's just wrong.
If they start doing this I'm going to be extremely pissed.
When people can spend all their time watching the garbage the typical TV channel shows, and yet this pinnicle of excellence in modern Sci-Fi cinema can't even overtake the freaking DOOM movie in sales, that's a pretty shocking indication of how very crappy our culture in the US has become. It makes you realize what a miricle it was that this movie ever got made in the first place. Spoonfeeding stupidity to the unwashed masses is much more profitible than making good movies that people don't watch.
It's a script that analyzes your web surfing. It IS spyware, except that you install it on purpose. In that regard, it's not spyware at all. It's lookware.
Disclaimer: I actually work at Amazon. I (have to) use a modified version of Alexa (and IE, ugh) every day for my job. Other than javascript conflicts that make some web pages slow, it works as advertised. In that it looks at and analyzes your browsing and reports it to Amazon, which in this case happens to be on the LAN.
It's not a good idea to deride students or christians, and it's not as if every christian thinks evolution is wrong. I think it would have been a good thing to hold a class like that in a state like that, but if the prof is going to be confrontational about it, that's going to cheapen the whole point. Teaching ID in anything outside a philosophy class is such a crazy idea and so easily debunked that being negative is entirely unessicary, plain facts will do.
That's not entirely fair. Did I say I wasn't going to (eventually) buy a 360? Of course not! I fully plan on it, the new Treasure Sh'mup alone guarentees that.
While the Revolution isn't real yet, there's enough info to make a comparison, at least for minor points like this. WiFi connection is allready live, and is a pleasure, primarily due to the fact that nobody can be stupid at you, due to the lack of voice chat.
I didn't mean to come off as a Nintendo fanboy, but the Cube has been capable of handling virtually anything that has been thrown at it, except in the graphics department, and even there it's done fairly well. The PS2 is really the only console that still suffers from a lack of resources to devote to non-graphical aspects of the game. So that's not really a valid point, the only difference between the consoles this generation is going to lie in graphical capabilities, online capabilities, media storage, and controller. That was really my whole point.
There's a few more functions that are terribly expensive, computation wise, like ray tracing and stuff. But at least it looks a great deal like what it's supposed to now. That's what I mean by "photorealistic", not actually indistinguitiable from actual photos. I'm sure that's where we'll end up, but the difference isn't that big between that and this, at least from my perspective. Technologically, yes, but not so much visually. All CG is supposed to be is a representation of something, an avatar. This is why Wind Waker was so badly accepted, because people forgot how to use their imaginations.
You are right, in that we're not quite at pure photorealism yet, especially not in real-time. But I'm looking at this from a cost/effect viewpoint. The Xbox 360 is $300 and only looks marginally better than the GCN, which sells for a third the price (with a game). There's no telling how expensive the PS3 will be ($400 is my guess).
Concerning "hardcore", I guess I wasn't being specific. The ones that came in with the PS1, the ones that call themselves "hardcore" and rant about pwning newbies on Xbox live in a robot voice filter, those are the ones I can do without on Nintendo WiFi. The actual hardcore you describe are generally the best gamers. And Nintendo just knows they're good at making party games. They still make normal games (Zelda, Metroid). Though they need to put out more original titles like Pikmin.
I seem to be fairly resistant to that effect. Example: Other than some discontent about the way the charectors were portrayed, in that it was very hard to empathize with them and they didn't come across as having very strong personalities, other than that issue, I rather enjoyed FF:Spirits Within. It didn't bug me at all, I thought the animation was pretty good. I should probably finish FF7 so I can watch Advent Children.
"Why do people continue to compare Xbox360's graphics on a 480i NTSC TV to other consoles?"
Because that's the TV I have. And, for your information, I have seen 360 gaming on an HDTV. Higher resolutions are really nice, I'll agree, but not $1000-for-a-new-TV nice. It looked pretty good, but I wouldn't call it a more than 3xGCN. Possibly twice as good. (this was some basketball game). But the practical issue is that even if the 360 is capable of HD, nobody actually has HD, so it's virtually pointless, at least right now.
Furthmore, my point was that even if it is 3x better of 10x better, it can not possibly accomplish the same jump as the PSX/N64 -> GCN/PS2/XBox/DC jump. We're hitting the ceiling, and graphics power that costs twice is much is going to provide a fractional increase in perceptable graphics improvement.
Maybe I'm just not picky, but I haven't really been terribly upset with the Cube's graphics. In fact games like Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Resident Evil 4, and it would seem the new Zelda are just graphically stunning. (in fact Wind Waker was too, in a completely different way). Three times that is almost overkill. The Xbox 360 I would say, from what I've seen, is barely hitting that metric, except of course it can do HD, which really only matters for 5-10% of gamers anyway. Sure it's early, and I'm sure by the time we're almost done with the 360 it'll far surpassed anything I can differentiate (would anyone have possibly imagined a game that looks as good as Shadow of the Collosus could have come out of the PS2 when it launched in 2000?), but we're hitting the photorealistic barrier pretty hard as it is. There's only so much more graphical power is going to be able to accomplish.
However, hype is everything, and having an "underpowered" console isn't going to help Nintendo regain their hardcore group. It seems like they've given up on them anyway. Which is fine, they aren't terribly good gamers anyway. With online I'm going to have to interact with fellow Revolution gamers and it will probably be a good thing that it won't be filled with the sort of people who eat marketing hype like candy and actually care about graphical powers that might possibly result in a fractionally better looking game.
My high school had 150 students. Let me put it this way: The head of our computer "department", and I swear to God I'm not making this up, did not know HTML. He knew Microsoft Office and basic computer hardware, these were the only qualifications nessicary at my school. Computer Hardware, "Computer Applications"(Office), and Keyboarding were the only computer classes taught in my high school.
I graduated in two thousand and freaking one. We were in the stone age, computer wise.
capitalizing "KNOW" was supposed to emphesis that I pay attention to general programming culture, not that I actually have a lot of factual knowledge about VB or any other language. And regardless of merits or lack thereof, it's at least a very unpopular language amongst the unix inclined. I didn't mean act like I actually know much about VB, or any other language except Perl and Ruby, except that VB is fairly automated and windows-centric. Although that's more an effect of the development program, not the language itself. I think. Hell, I don't know.
Well, I'm sure that will come in handy Spring quarter. You see, I have to take classes because I'm working on a CS degree (I'm getting a transfer degree at the CC). I'll be transfering, idealy, to the University of Washington, which from what I hear has an excellent CS department. Though I'm more interested in hardware than programming, it's a very useful skill, and needed for the degree.
Next quarter. At the community college (don't laugh) I'm going to it's a prerequisite to take Java. WHY? I have no clue. Maybe the Java Prof doesn't want to have to explain what a method is. I don't know. But I am going to have to go through an entire 3 months of this.
I am upset, because I allready know a lot of programming concepts, even if I'm not fluent in any particular language (I know a smidgen of Perl). I'd rather just jump right into Java, but I can't. (or, you know, C++. They don't even offer that. Stupid High School 2.0) Maybe I won't be totally ruined. I at least KNOW that VB isn't exactly the best language on the planet. And knowing is half the battle!
Any help on keeping the mind clear of the crud and pulling any useful info from the class?
If "they" are out there at all, they would have to be looking pretty hard to see us. Our electromagnetic transmissions, which only started 100 years ago and so couldn't possibly have reached any habitable star systems yet, are excedingly weak compared to the glare of our own sun, so are very likely not going to be picked up by anything. We ought to, if we think we're ready (I'm not so sure about that myself), put a probe out as fast as we can, into deep interstellar space, with some sort of nuclear battery, that would occasionally (oh, maybe once or twice a decade) BLAST an obviously intellegent, yet effiecient, signal into space, like, to pull something straight from Contact, prime numbers. Or some sort of representation of Pi. Something. There's no reason to think that there are no aliens, and there's no reason to think they'd be initialy hostal. They'd probably see us as trade partners, assuming their society still uses (or has begun to use) money.
Of course we have better things to spend public money on, so hopefully some rich eccentric guy will do the honors, assuming we as a planet can agree to such a proposition.
Considering how unsociable we are generally anyway I can't imagine this being too much of a problem. I presume most gamers don't have girlfriends to irritate in the first place. It really solves the whole issue.
On the same vein of thinking, I can't possibly imagine that a gamer, finding themselves in a situation where they actually had a girlfriend, would let anything screw that up, up to and including getting their gaming in. I would think one would be able to balence the two, assuming of course the girlfriend doesn't expect 100% of one's free time.
I think this looks at it wrong perspective. What they should ask is: Why aren't other industries abandoning Dress Codes? They seem unnessicary to me. I don't see why wearing what one wants, within reason, is dressing "badly". I happen to think the clothes look good, otherwise I wouldn't be wearing them!
As blasphemous at the combination seems at first, Google is the only way AOL could ever be saved from a death by obscurity. Google could buy it. Fire EVERYONE that was ever involved with it. Completely rewrite all the software, and start offering Google Online branded dial-up, WiFi, and Fiber. Merge Google Instant Messanger and AIM, eventually phasing out AIM's proprietary protocol.
It's entirely possible.
As far as I can tell, while being fairly expansive in number, the general quality of the titles available at launch is poor. I mean, it's expected, the Xbox 1 didn't have much during it's relatively short life, but as far as I can tell the only piece of software that could be worth the now-ludicrous $60 they're trying to extort from people for "NEXT-GEN!!!" games, is Kameo. Furthermore the genre-slice is virtually identical to the Xbox 1's library, and since I never found that FPS and Racing heavy idea of gaming very palatable, to the effect that I never bought the original Xbox, I don't understand how anyone could spend $300 (or worse $400) on this thing, and then go out and buy it's $60 games. Anyone who blows that kind of money on games this generic has more money than sense. I would love to play Kameo, but not for $360 dollars.
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Having people prove you wrong isn't persecution.
Having people hunt you down and kill you because of what you believe, is. Since this hasn't happened to christians in america, ever, at all, I think it's time the other members of my faith started shutting up and showing their faith and values through the most effective means of all: by example.
I feel most of us feel the same way, but the few of us that are loudly calling for the derailment of everyone who thinks differently, they are by far the loudest voices.
The key is to ignore them.
Debian is acceptable, and Google knows how to make a decent UI, so if they're writing their own window manager for this, this could be the best linux ever. Too few details to get excited about, but the concept has potential.
The concept of being able to archiave my DNA is just so amazing that I am perfectly willing to wait 20 years before I can afford it. Not even having children offers this level of hereditary legacy. One day there may even be a library where everyone can submit their DNA for archive. It's very exciting.
I'm not paying for shipping AND sales tax. That would totally eat the price advantage online stores have on B&M's and decimate ecommerce. Sales tax is bogus to begin with, it's a terribly regressive tax, ESPECIALLY in states that still tax food and such. States ought to be able to raise their income through property or income taxes. I live in washington where sales tax is 8.8%, so I try to buy as much stuff as possible online, depending on shipping costs. As it sits there are online stores that actually charge sales tax allready. The iTunes store comes to mind, even though I'm pretty sure Apple is based in California. It's just wrong. If they start doing this I'm going to be extremely pissed.
When people can spend all their time watching the garbage the typical TV channel shows, and yet this pinnicle of excellence in modern Sci-Fi cinema can't even overtake the freaking DOOM movie in sales, that's a pretty shocking indication of how very crappy our culture in the US has become. It makes you realize what a miricle it was that this movie ever got made in the first place. Spoonfeeding stupidity to the unwashed masses is much more profitible than making good movies that people don't watch.
It's a script that analyzes your web surfing. It IS spyware, except that you install it on purpose. In that regard, it's not spyware at all. It's lookware. Disclaimer: I actually work at Amazon. I (have to) use a modified version of Alexa (and IE, ugh) every day for my job. Other than javascript conflicts that make some web pages slow, it works as advertised. In that it looks at and analyzes your browsing and reports it to Amazon, which in this case happens to be on the LAN.
It's not a good idea to deride students or christians, and it's not as if every christian thinks evolution is wrong. I think it would have been a good thing to hold a class like that in a state like that, but if the prof is going to be confrontational about it, that's going to cheapen the whole point. Teaching ID in anything outside a philosophy class is such a crazy idea and so easily debunked that being negative is entirely unessicary, plain facts will do.
Are you sure you want to delete your account? yes You're account has been permanently deleted.
That's not entirely fair. Did I say I wasn't going to (eventually) buy a 360? Of course not! I fully plan on it, the new Treasure Sh'mup alone guarentees that.
While the Revolution isn't real yet, there's enough info to make a comparison, at least for minor points like this. WiFi connection is allready live, and is a pleasure, primarily due to the fact that nobody can be stupid at you, due to the lack of voice chat.
I didn't mean to come off as a Nintendo fanboy, but the Cube has been capable of handling virtually anything that has been thrown at it, except in the graphics department, and even there it's done fairly well. The PS2 is really the only console that still suffers from a lack of resources to devote to non-graphical aspects of the game. So that's not really a valid point, the only difference between the consoles this generation is going to lie in graphical capabilities, online capabilities, media storage, and controller. That was really my whole point.
And yet, I'm mostly in it to watch them with these comedic fake subtitles turned on.
There's a few more functions that are terribly expensive, computation wise, like ray tracing and stuff. But at least it looks a great deal like what it's supposed to now. That's what I mean by "photorealistic", not actually indistinguitiable from actual photos. I'm sure that's where we'll end up, but the difference isn't that big between that and this, at least from my perspective. Technologically, yes, but not so much visually. All CG is supposed to be is a representation of something, an avatar. This is why Wind Waker was so badly accepted, because people forgot how to use their imaginations.
You are right, in that we're not quite at pure photorealism yet, especially not in real-time. But I'm looking at this from a cost/effect viewpoint. The Xbox 360 is $300 and only looks marginally better than the GCN, which sells for a third the price (with a game). There's no telling how expensive the PS3 will be ($400 is my guess).
Concerning "hardcore", I guess I wasn't being specific. The ones that came in with the PS1, the ones that call themselves "hardcore" and rant about pwning newbies on Xbox live in a robot voice filter, those are the ones I can do without on Nintendo WiFi. The actual hardcore you describe are generally the best gamers. And Nintendo just knows they're good at making party games. They still make normal games (Zelda, Metroid). Though they need to put out more original titles like Pikmin.
I seem to be fairly resistant to that effect. Example: Other than some discontent about the way the charectors were portrayed, in that it was very hard to empathize with them and they didn't come across as having very strong personalities, other than that issue, I rather enjoyed FF:Spirits Within. It didn't bug me at all, I thought the animation was pretty good. I should probably finish FF7 so I can watch Advent Children.
"Why do people continue to compare Xbox360's graphics on a 480i NTSC TV to other consoles?"
Because that's the TV I have. And, for your information, I have seen 360 gaming on an HDTV. Higher resolutions are really nice, I'll agree, but not $1000-for-a-new-TV nice. It looked pretty good, but I wouldn't call it a more than 3xGCN. Possibly twice as good. (this was some basketball game). But the practical issue is that even if the 360 is capable of HD, nobody actually has HD, so it's virtually pointless, at least right now.
Furthmore, my point was that even if it is 3x better of 10x better, it can not possibly accomplish the same jump as the PSX/N64 -> GCN/PS2/XBox/DC jump. We're hitting the ceiling, and graphics power that costs twice is much is going to provide a fractional increase in perceptable graphics improvement.
Maybe I'm just not picky, but I haven't really been terribly upset with the Cube's graphics. In fact games like Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Resident Evil 4, and it would seem the new Zelda are just graphically stunning. (in fact Wind Waker was too, in a completely different way). Three times that is almost overkill. The Xbox 360 I would say, from what I've seen, is barely hitting that metric, except of course it can do HD, which really only matters for 5-10% of gamers anyway. Sure it's early, and I'm sure by the time we're almost done with the 360 it'll far surpassed anything I can differentiate (would anyone have possibly imagined a game that looks as good as Shadow of the Collosus could have come out of the PS2 when it launched in 2000?), but we're hitting the photorealistic barrier pretty hard as it is. There's only so much more graphical power is going to be able to accomplish. However, hype is everything, and having an "underpowered" console isn't going to help Nintendo regain their hardcore group. It seems like they've given up on them anyway. Which is fine, they aren't terribly good gamers anyway. With online I'm going to have to interact with fellow Revolution gamers and it will probably be a good thing that it won't be filled with the sort of people who eat marketing hype like candy and actually care about graphical powers that might possibly result in a fractionally better looking game.
Programming? High School? That's hilarious!
My high school had 150 students. Let me put it this way: The head of our computer "department", and I swear to God I'm not making this up, did not know HTML. He knew Microsoft Office and basic computer hardware, these were the only qualifications nessicary at my school. Computer Hardware, "Computer Applications"(Office), and Keyboarding were the only computer classes taught in my high school.
I graduated in two thousand and freaking one. We were in the stone age, computer wise.
capitalizing "KNOW" was supposed to emphesis that I pay attention to general programming culture, not that I actually have a lot of factual knowledge about VB or any other language. And regardless of merits or lack thereof, it's at least a very unpopular language amongst the unix inclined. I didn't mean act like I actually know much about VB, or any other language except Perl and Ruby, except that VB is fairly automated and windows-centric. Although that's more an effect of the development program, not the language itself. I think. Hell, I don't know.
Well, I'm sure that will come in handy Spring quarter. You see, I have to take classes because I'm working on a CS degree (I'm getting a transfer degree at the CC). I'll be transfering, idealy, to the University of Washington, which from what I hear has an excellent CS department. Though I'm more interested in hardware than programming, it's a very useful skill, and needed for the degree.
Next quarter. At the community college (don't laugh) I'm going to it's a prerequisite to take Java. WHY? I have no clue. Maybe the Java Prof doesn't want to have to explain what a method is. I don't know. But I am going to have to go through an entire 3 months of this.
I am upset, because I allready know a lot of programming concepts, even if I'm not fluent in any particular language (I know a smidgen of Perl). I'd rather just jump right into Java, but I can't. (or, you know, C++. They don't even offer that. Stupid High School 2.0) Maybe I won't be totally ruined. I at least KNOW that VB isn't exactly the best language on the planet. And knowing is half the battle! Any help on keeping the mind clear of the crud and pulling any useful info from the class?
The bug is that it uses IE in the first place.
If "they" are out there at all, they would have to be looking pretty hard to see us. Our electromagnetic transmissions, which only started 100 years ago and so couldn't possibly have reached any habitable star systems yet, are excedingly weak compared to the glare of our own sun, so are very likely not going to be picked up by anything. We ought to, if we think we're ready (I'm not so sure about that myself), put a probe out as fast as we can, into deep interstellar space, with some sort of nuclear battery, that would occasionally (oh, maybe once or twice a decade) BLAST an obviously intellegent, yet effiecient, signal into space, like, to pull something straight from Contact, prime numbers. Or some sort of representation of Pi. Something. There's no reason to think that there are no aliens, and there's no reason to think they'd be initialy hostal. They'd probably see us as trade partners, assuming their society still uses (or has begun to use) money.
Of course we have better things to spend public money on, so hopefully some rich eccentric guy will do the honors, assuming we as a planet can agree to such a proposition.
Considering how unsociable we are generally anyway I can't imagine this being too much of a problem. I presume most gamers don't have girlfriends to irritate in the first place. It really solves the whole issue.
On the same vein of thinking, I can't possibly imagine that a gamer, finding themselves in a situation where they actually had a girlfriend, would let anything screw that up, up to and including getting their gaming in. I would think one would be able to balence the two, assuming of course the girlfriend doesn't expect 100% of one's free time.
bleep.com offers FLAC for many of it's albums. If you're into electronica it's a good site.
I think this looks at it wrong perspective. What they should ask is: Why aren't other industries abandoning Dress Codes? They seem unnessicary to me. I don't see why wearing what one wants, within reason, is dressing "badly". I happen to think the clothes look good, otherwise I wouldn't be wearing them!
As blasphemous at the combination seems at first, Google is the only way AOL could ever be saved from a death by obscurity. Google could buy it. Fire EVERYONE that was ever involved with it. Completely rewrite all the software, and start offering Google Online branded dial-up, WiFi, and Fiber. Merge Google Instant Messanger and AIM, eventually phasing out AIM's proprietary protocol. It's entirely possible.
As far as I can tell, while being fairly expansive in number, the general quality of the titles available at launch is poor. I mean, it's expected, the Xbox 1 didn't have much during it's relatively short life, but as far as I can tell the only piece of software that could be worth the now-ludicrous $60 they're trying to extort from people for "NEXT-GEN!!!" games, is Kameo. Furthermore the genre-slice is virtually identical to the Xbox 1's library, and since I never found that FPS and Racing heavy idea of gaming very palatable, to the effect that I never bought the original Xbox, I don't understand how anyone could spend $300 (or worse $400) on this thing, and then go out and buy it's $60 games. Anyone who blows that kind of money on games this generic has more money than sense. I would love to play Kameo, but not for $360 dollars.