Maybe I'm missing something, but strip away all the hyperbole about this being news and to me all they've (re)discovered is that evolution tends to be smarter and more imaginative than mathematicians at solving control theory problems.
An imbalance caused by a mutation would be functionally similar to an imbalance of chemicals in the creature's environment, so I would expect systems that have evolved to be adaptable in the face of variable chemical inputs, as a side effect would tend to be resistant to mutations in the proteins in the chain. Faced with real-world chemistry, most mutated chains would still likely be vulnerable to rare/harsh conditions in the environment.
I'm a pretty green-leaning person and the last thing I want to do is deprive people who have devoted the best years of their life studying herpetology from getting grant money to make a living, but I think amphibian decline research is bordering dangerously on public relations BS pseudo-science.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline. That's not to say amphibians aren't wildly vulnerable to all the usual things humans do to an environment: drain it, pave it, spray it. But rather than get half the environmentally-sensitive population panicking randomly about crisis, I'd rather see 1% or 0.1% of the population deeply educated in field biology as serious hobby, keeping long-term consistent records of observations and measurements.
( by the way, the best way to completely destroy a long term population study of a pond is to dredge it and add fish to make it "look more natural" )
The Valeyard (from [i]Colin[/i] Baker's final season) could easily be explained away in a number of ways (eg: a regeneration of the parallel-doctor who regains a timelord essence and goes insane with jealousy because he's not the "real doctor"). It could even be one of those little things tossed in that never gets explained - left dangling for our imaginations.
As for the regeneration limit, not only has the master persisted beyond his limit by nefarious means, but in the Five Doctors, the time lords outright offered him a full set of new regenerations.
( besides, Doctor Who has never been a stickler for continuity... most of the recurring villains have been permanently defeated at least twice... for all we know, the Doctor might really be Rassilon )
However, correlation also does not imply "not causation."
I agree. I have a plan to fight global warming by putting polar bears in the tropics. Study after study has proven there is a high correlation between polar bears and colder temperatures yet people keep whining "correlation is not causation" and try to block my funding.
Benevolent dictatorships (which Plato already considered a few thousand years ago) fail as soon as they encounter a genuine disagreement. Any system of government needs be able to cope with conflicting ideas, whether it's a conflict of interest (benevolent dictator wants a raise?), the needs of the few vs needs of the many, a choice of equally good but mutually incompatible paths (socialism vs libertarianism) or being forced to make a decision when the consequences of the choice are not universally agreed upon (most environmental issues).
Dictatorships are benevolent as long as no major disagreements occur. Once a disagreement occurs, things go downhill very quickly - the population has to either be pacified or repressed.
Democracy as we practice it in the west is really a system of temporary dictatorship, punctuated by ritualized revolutions. We simulate a civil war to see which leader would manage to gather the largest group of followers... then accept that whoever has the most bodies would most likely win, skipping all the death and destruction of a real civil war. So long as people genuinely feel the result reflect what would be the real outcome of a conflict, there's no rational reason for actual violence - being part of the system is more productive than trying to oppose it.
Linux has not yet had to face a succession - and it's the successions more than the leadership of the moment that are the test of a system of government. Also, linux can fork if any schism grows too large - forking geography is a lot more messy: you can't take a copy to each side and you have to assume that people are willing to abandon their roots and communities to decide which fork to move to.
So in short... come back in a hundred years and let's take a look at the state of linux then before we decide if has lessons to offer for a system of government.
How is this different from the trillions of dollars in fake money that are created every year in borrowing/lending arrangements?
For good or ill, taking an asset and repeatedly leveraging it over and over to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system. Short selling is just a troublemaker critiquing the emperor's frugal fashion sense:)
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
What about putting live ads on the background billboards or changing the brand of burger the hero eats? I would expect updated product placements will be the next wave of live content.
You know, Although I've seen it on many shelves (including my own), I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who actually made it all the way through that book. Perhaps its impossible to prove or disprove if it's really a good book.
[i]You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)[/i]
No I can't actually. My eyes must not be quite up to 1080p quality because I've stood in the store and watched bluray vs upscaled DVD side by side and been completely unable to tell the difference. All I see is that the bluray disks are twice the price, there isn't a bargain bin and the industry seems to be trying to devalue/obsolete my library which I have no intention of giving up.
These bin Laden quotes are hardly proof of a conspiracy. Leaders twist the truth all the time. Surely you've noticed, after all you are in an election right now.
(of course what's frustrating is to watch conspiracy/counter-conspiracy rhetoric reach such a pitch that average citizens don't even know how to look for the truth any more)
This, to me, is a more important an issue than the DRM (at least with the DRM, in theory you can phone in to their customer support and get it unlocked). They are saying that Spore could be the start of a billion dollar entertainment franchise that goes beyond video games. This seems to means they are planning to leech off the creativity of their players to fuel entertainment that the players don't get compensated for.
The "interlocking minigames" and player-generated content ideas of Spore are a wonderful glimpse of the future, even if Spore has some flaws, I still feel the concept is still the heart of the next major video game revolution... but the way EA is playing it, trying to shut down any risk of competition, they're making me very, very wary. I'm still holding out hope that someone will come along with a "creative commons" version of Sporepedia.
OK, I'll bite. What's the force of gravity through a wormhole? If one end is in space and the other end is at a planet's surface, does a floating person accelerate towards the wormhole at 9.8m/s/s? Or does the atmosphere escape out into space because gravity isn't holding it in? Does going through a wormhole give you the bends?
(asking a geeky open-ended question about mythical tech on slashdot is dangerous)
I just couldn't ever work up the trust for putting any of my thoughts/ideas/games on Gleemax... it seemed like a recipe for disaster. They still tend to see their games as something they license out to players, as opposed to being the fonts in which people write their worlds.
To me, the key challenge in setting up a "living world" (aside from the QA nightmare of all the possible interactions of events) is that without static characters/locations/quests, how do you ensure that it stays fun. You see, the fun and rewarding quests will be done quickly while the difficult, unrewarding or simply unfun ones will tend to persist. In the population of available tasks in the game, evolution takes over with it becoming "survival of the unfunest".
My name is Xavier Zachary Quincy. How does this help me?
What happens if there IS another Xavier Quincy out there in the country who was arrested for rape? Are employers, friends and dates who google you going to go the extra step to see that this is a different person than you before letting their imaginations run wild?
Now one solution to this would be to go the other way of ensuring no privacy - that a person's complete records (with the final outcomes highlighted rather than just accusations) can be accurately found rather than randomly matching search terms (there's obviously some value in being able to be criminal background checks on a potential date and filter out those accused or associated with crimes - I'd certainly use it if it was easily available). Of course this will mean that there will be a lot more effort spent on challenges to expunge records, more victims who are afraid to come forward and a public brand hanging on every person who falls between saint and psychopath who has ever made a mistake.
( I haven't decided which side of this issue I'm on - I actually lean a little towards public records being public, but there are pretty heavy implications that I feel need to be carefully thought through - but that's privacy czar's role: to draw attention to debates that need to happen )
Funny thing I've noticed is that the more hours I work, the less I usually get done. It's not a conscious or deliberate thing, it's just that morale is hard to measure on a spreadsheet.
Outsourcing is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
The expectations are not going to be lower, so outsourcing just means there is another set of mouths to feed in the corporate food chain between your work and the company's income. In my experience, from a worker's point of view, there is very, very little good that can come of it: if you were a cost before, you will still be a cost. The CIO is trying to avoid actually being accountable for anything or the company is playing games with its "revenue per employee" statistic to pull the wool over investors eyes.
A field guide to birds. Come on, it's got to be fiction... little creatures that go around waving their arms to defy gravity? Surely those things only exist in cgi "nature" documentaries.
(that's it, I've officially gone all old and grumpy, thinking that there's so much fiction and fantasy in the world that we've stopped looking at the reality out the window)
Slashdot Mirror
anthropic principle: if you find fish that you must be looking in water.
biologist principle: the system evolves to use whatever the environment has to offer - if you have a world of water, then you can get fish.
An explanation that requires whole alternative universes fails the occam's razor test for me.
Maybe I'm missing something, but strip away all the hyperbole about this being news and to me all they've (re)discovered is that evolution tends to be smarter and more imaginative than mathematicians at solving control theory problems.
An imbalance caused by a mutation would be functionally similar to an imbalance of chemicals in the creature's environment, so I would expect systems that have evolved to be adaptable in the face of variable chemical inputs, as a side effect would tend to be resistant to mutations in the proteins in the chain. Faced with real-world chemistry, most mutated chains would still likely be vulnerable to rare/harsh conditions in the environment.
I'm a pretty green-leaning person and the last thing I want to do is deprive people who have devoted the best years of their life studying herpetology from getting grant money to make a living, but I think amphibian decline research is bordering dangerously on public relations BS pseudo-science.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline. That's not to say amphibians aren't wildly vulnerable to all the usual things humans do to an environment: drain it, pave it, spray it. But rather than get half the environmentally-sensitive population panicking randomly about crisis, I'd rather see 1% or 0.1% of the population deeply educated in field biology as serious hobby, keeping long-term consistent records of observations and measurements.
( by the way, the best way to completely destroy a long term population study of a pond is to dredge it and add fish to make it "look more natural" )
The Valeyard (from [i]Colin[/i] Baker's final season) could easily be explained away in a number of ways (eg: a regeneration of the parallel-doctor who regains a timelord essence and goes insane with jealousy because he's not the "real doctor"). It could even be one of those little things tossed in that never gets explained - left dangling for our imaginations.
As for the regeneration limit, not only has the master persisted beyond his limit by nefarious means, but in the Five Doctors, the time lords outright offered him a full set of new regenerations.
( besides, Doctor Who has never been a stickler for continuity ... most of the recurring villains have been permanently defeated at least twice ... for all we know, the Doctor might really be Rassilon )
However, correlation also does not imply "not causation." I agree. I have a plan to fight global warming by putting polar bears in the tropics. Study after study has proven there is a high correlation between polar bears and colder temperatures yet people keep whining "correlation is not causation" and try to block my funding.
correlation is not caucasian?
Benevolent dictatorships (which Plato already considered a few thousand years ago) fail as soon as they encounter a genuine disagreement. Any system of government needs be able to cope with conflicting ideas, whether it's a conflict of interest (benevolent dictator wants a raise?), the needs of the few vs needs of the many, a choice of equally good but mutually incompatible paths (socialism vs libertarianism) or being forced to make a decision when the consequences of the choice are not universally agreed upon (most environmental issues).
Dictatorships are benevolent as long as no major disagreements occur. Once a disagreement occurs, things go downhill very quickly - the population has to either be pacified or repressed.
Democracy as we practice it in the west is really a system of temporary dictatorship, punctuated by ritualized revolutions. We simulate a civil war to see which leader would manage to gather the largest group of followers ... then accept that whoever has the most bodies would most likely win, skipping all the death and destruction of a real civil war. So long as people genuinely feel the result reflect what would be the real outcome of a conflict, there's no rational reason for actual violence - being part of the system is more productive than trying to oppose it.
Linux has not yet had to face a succession - and it's the successions more than the leadership of the moment that are the test of a system of government. Also, linux can fork if any schism grows too large - forking geography is a lot more messy: you can't take a copy to each side and you have to assume that people are willing to abandon their roots and communities to decide which fork to move to.
So in short ... come back in a hundred years and let's take a look at the state of linux then before we decide if has lessons to offer for a system of government.
So ... Diebold governments? Haven't we slashdotters already detected the flaw in that approach?
*self-censors the comment I was thinking of making*
It looks more like some random bits and pieces that could easily have been created by players with a "part and pattern editor".
Ah well, I guess it's the publishing equivalent of "would you like to supersize your fries?"
How is this different from the trillions of dollars in fake money that are created every year in borrowing/lending arrangements?
For good or ill, taking an asset and repeatedly leveraging it over and over to generate wealth out of thin air and making everyone dependent on everyone else's well-being is the entire foundation of our economic system. Short selling is just a troublemaker critiquing the emperor's frugal fashion sense :)
Without time travel ability, no. "Live content" means "That movie you bought 5 years ago is showing trailers for next summer's movie lineup."
What about putting live ads on the background billboards or changing the brand of burger the hero eats? I would expect updated product placements will be the next wave of live content.
You know, Although I've seen it on many shelves (including my own), I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who actually made it all the way through that book. Perhaps its impossible to prove or disprove if it's really a good book.
[i]You can see the compression artifacts! (and that's on a low resolution display)[/i]
No I can't actually. My eyes must not be quite up to 1080p quality because I've stood in the store and watched bluray vs upscaled DVD side by side and been completely unable to tell the difference. All I see is that the bluray disks are twice the price, there isn't a bargain bin and the industry seems to be trying to devalue/obsolete my library which I have no intention of giving up.
These bin Laden quotes are hardly proof of a conspiracy. Leaders twist the truth all the time. Surely you've noticed, after all you are in an election right now.
(of course what's frustrating is to watch conspiracy/counter-conspiracy rhetoric reach such a pitch that average citizens don't even know how to look for the truth any more)
This, to me, is a more important an issue than the DRM (at least with the DRM, in theory you can phone in to their customer support and get it unlocked). They are saying that Spore could be the start of a billion dollar entertainment franchise that goes beyond video games. This seems to means they are planning to leech off the creativity of their players to fuel entertainment that the players don't get compensated for.
The "interlocking minigames" and player-generated content ideas of Spore are a wonderful glimpse of the future, even if Spore has some flaws, I still feel the concept is still the heart of the next major video game revolution ... but the way EA is playing it, trying to shut down any risk of competition, they're making me very, very wary. I'm still holding out hope that someone will come along with a "creative commons" version of Sporepedia.
how else could it do what it does?
OK, I'll bite. What's the force of gravity through a wormhole? If one end is in space and the other end is at a planet's surface, does a floating person accelerate towards the wormhole at 9.8m/s/s? Or does the atmosphere escape out into space because gravity isn't holding it in? Does going through a wormhole give you the bends?
(asking a geeky open-ended question about mythical tech on slashdot is dangerous)
I just couldn't ever work up the trust for putting any of my thoughts/ideas/games on Gleemax ... it seemed like a recipe for disaster. They still tend to see their games as something they license out to players, as opposed to being the fonts in which people write their worlds.
Gleemax: http://ww2.wizards.com/Gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?name=gleemax#
To me, the key challenge in setting up a "living world" (aside from the QA nightmare of all the possible interactions of events) is that without static characters/locations/quests, how do you ensure that it stays fun. You see, the fun and rewarding quests will be done quickly while the difficult, unrewarding or simply unfun ones will tend to persist. In the population of available tasks in the game, evolution takes over with it becoming "survival of the unfunest".
My name is Xavier Zachary Quincy. How does this help me?
What happens if there IS another Xavier Quincy out there in the country who was arrested for rape? Are employers, friends and dates who google you going to go the extra step to see that this is a different person than you before letting their imaginations run wild?
Now one solution to this would be to go the other way of ensuring no privacy - that a person's complete records (with the final outcomes highlighted rather than just accusations) can be accurately found rather than randomly matching search terms (there's obviously some value in being able to be criminal background checks on a potential date and filter out those accused or associated with crimes - I'd certainly use it if it was easily available). Of course this will mean that there will be a lot more effort spent on challenges to expunge records, more victims who are afraid to come forward and a public brand hanging on every person who falls between saint and psychopath who has ever made a mistake.
( I haven't decided which side of this issue I'm on - I actually lean a little towards public records being public, but there are pretty heavy implications that I feel need to be carefully thought through - but that's privacy czar's role: to draw attention to debates that need to happen )
Funny thing I've noticed is that the more hours I work, the less I usually get done. It's not a conscious or deliberate thing, it's just that morale is hard to measure on a spreadsheet.
Outsourcing is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
The expectations are not going to be lower, so outsourcing just means there is another set of mouths to feed in the corporate food chain between your work and the company's income. In my experience, from a worker's point of view, there is very, very little good that can come of it: if you were a cost before, you will still be a cost. The CIO is trying to avoid actually being accountable for anything or the company is playing games with its "revenue per employee" statistic to pull the wool over investors eyes.
A field guide to birds. Come on, it's got to be fiction ... little creatures that go around waving their arms to defy gravity? Surely those things only exist in cgi "nature" documentaries.
(that's it, I've officially gone all old and grumpy, thinking that there's so much fiction and fantasy in the world that we've stopped looking at the reality out the window)
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?