What is especially interesting is that when we can use the technology to deal with the boring aspects of socialisation we can give more attention to more advanced things. For example, I don't need to spend hours wandering around my city block looking for people who may be interesting in discussing social aspects of some innovative mobile applications. I just click on a link, read the story^H^H^H^H^Hblurb, read the comments and post what I think.
Similarly, may be if people don't feel like they need to spend time just keeping track of what everyone is doing on Friday evening, and who goes where and who is taking whom with them, and instead concentrate on having good time, when one feels like it, working more on interpersonal relationships and stuff.
Personally I think that socialisation is for idiots. Due to some personality traits (which are probably a mild form of some mental illness, as things always are), I don't care much about socialising and the pleasure of talking or hanging out with someone are proportional to the content of our communications. I don't care whom I am talking with, as long as the topic and ideas are interesting, and conversely I don't care that these people are my friends, if they engage in idle pointless banter, I will be soon bored to death.
I can't wait until I can ask my phone to look for interesting people around me (filtering for interests and other stuff), so that I don't waste my time getting to know the boring 99%.
P.S. I have no problem communicating whatsoever and the vast majority of people who meet me like me, I just don't care about them and can't be bothered to go to bars, parties, birthdays and other such black holes.
You are correct, although for cultural reasons most people would tend to disagree. If a safe and inexpensive technology was available, I would accept a genetic enhancement that would do something like add more melatonin to my skin so that I am better protected from the sun. With artificially designed melatonin replacement it may even be possible to retain the pale white colour while getting the protection benefits.
You are not entirely correct, even though you say some interesting things. For example, it is a well-known fact that there are some complex chemicals that humans can't build, we must find these "building blocks of life" in nature and consume them. One notable example is Vitamin C. Just like these buzzing robots need more cubic blocks we need more chemicals. Just like our cells, proteins, etc. have binding spots that can connect to a particular type of molecules, so do these robots.
Yes, there is a quantitative difference. The robots in the video are small, very simple and the program they use requires the building blocks to be manually placed in a predefined locations.
But combine it with something like M-Tran, add slightly better programming, make thousands of these blocks and add a powerful computer (or parallel computers inside the blocks) and you suddenly can have much more impressive things. Yes, these 4-block thingies from Cornell can only bend and buzz. But the Japanese 15-block thingies can run on four legs and can evolve new movement modes in virtual space.
Soon someone will build a 1000-block thingy and it will be much more impressive. Then, if you like this particular path, you can refine the technology, shrink the building blocks, make much more of them and you can have something approaching life in complexity. Move to the atomic level and you can leave the biological life behind.
I think that Japanese M-Tran (videos galore) is more impressive. It is a similar technology for modular robots. Each module has a motor, a battery and some magnets to connet with other modules.
The blocks can connect with each other in different forms, from a snake-like robot that crawls to a four-legged robot that runs. Even more interestingly, the programs for movement are generated using genetic algorithms in a virtual environment first. An M-Tran robot can be any odd configuration of the blocks, then after some thinking (done on an external computer right now, I guess) it can use that particular shape to move around and (in the future) do something else.
You can rather easily modify M-Tran robots so that they could copy themselves. Just add a magnetic sensor that would feel other blocks and program it to wander randomly around to stumble into blocks (fancy sensors like eyes that can see the unique markers on the blocks can make it more efficient).
Of course, self-replication is just one example of self-construction and not a particularly interesting or important one. We are so excited about it only because evolution works this way. You have heredity and it works by having stuff make copies of itself. There is no reason why our future robots or nanobots must self-replicate (but it makes for a simplier brute force explanation of what they can do) - they can just design a good shape and form it (for example, by using genetic programming). In a typical scenario you would not have the blocks form a hundred of similar robots (or a few types of robots) - instead the blocks would form a single organism (not necessarily fully connected) that would do exactly what is needed and would reconfigure itself on the fly.
Of course, replication is easier and may prove useful to some extent, I am just saying that there are ultimately better ways to tackle problems than by throwing hundreds of identical robots at them.
Some believe that this is communism (Uh! Scary!) and it scares most Americans shitless. One of the factors that allowed extremely rapid development of planned socialist economies is that technical and scientific information was not a commodity - it was free and open to everyone. Any solution would not be patented, but instead freely spread to all enterprises in the industry (barring the usual bureaucracy and incompetence, of course).
As you correctly point out, competition is not the only thing leading to progress, cooperation can be just as important if not more.
Well, it's a genetic mental illness. Like the Down syndrome, only not as bad.
I accept the arguments about it being just a difference to some extent. Yes, genetic variations are not necessarily bad per se. Some "illnesses", such as synesthesia are even considered cool. There is a whole spectrum of these variations, from debilitating abnormalities to actual enhancements. On this scale Asperger's is pretty close to an illness, since there aren't many benefits.
But let's face it; most people here weren't old enough to be movie critics when the original trilogy came out, so they don't really have much perspective.
Exactly. Being a kid does wonders to your ability to enjoy a film. I mean, I really liked Police Academy. I thought it was brilliant comedy and I even, gasp!... enjoyed Mission to Moscow! Kids just don't have good taste, it's acquired.
What you are saying is that compulsory treatment of people with mental illnesses is bad. This is an ethical dilemma and your position is valid. This doesn't change the fact that doctors are usually justified in diagnosing the mental illness. If you don't want to be treated for Asperger's, fine, live with it, but it doesn't change the fact that your mental condition is pathological.
Yes, you can start a philosophical discussion of what is pathology and what is the norm. Yes, it's not totally cut and dry, but in cases like autism we are mostly justified in calling it a pathology.
First of all the parent is referring to the kind of prototype tech announcement we find almost daily on slashdot the vast majority of which never amount to anything.
Did you analyze the Slashdot stories and found out the percentage of such announcements that amount to nothing?
We want to know about future tech as early as possible. Logically it follows that it will take quite a while for the announcements to turn into real products. We won't see these NED screens for at least 2-3 years. And for these 2-3 years we will be constantly reminded that nothing has yet came to fruition every time there is a story about displays.
I am almost certain that we will have nanoassemblers by 2050. But for at least several decades every time someone mentions them, some idiot will come up and say - "They were promised in 1985, but we still don't have them. It's all fake!". Does it make sense to behave this way?
Second of all if you look back a few decades you will see promises of things like It's your fault if you choose to believe the most outlandish predictions. If this is so, you are simply to prone to believe sensationalist claims - this is wrong. If you look at Japan's 1971 technology foresight study that covered predicted progress in 1971-2001, you will realise (as was shown in a study run around 1990) that the majority (IIRC >70%) of predictions were realised and those that weren't, were not realised due to social or economic, not technological reasons.
Yes, there are some well-publicised predictions that were proven false. But it is to be expected. It's difficult to predict the future, mistakes are bound to happen. Get over with it, because despite these errors many good predictions are made every day.
The key thing is that we finally know enough about the brain to realise that these behaviours have a real tangible biochemical cause. It's like a buffer overflaw that causes your favourite application to crash. It doesn't crash because it is in a bad mood or because it doesn't like you. It crashes because there is a traceable pattern that happens regardless of our wishes.
Same thing with the numerous syndromes. We know that a missing protein or a damaged gene can cause behavioural changes. When these changes are negative, we name it a syndrome that goes beyond mere personality issue. It is indeed a medical condition, but this fact may be hard to accept for someone in his 30-40s (or older), who got his biology in school when we didn't understand much about the brain.
That's sound thinking. Mod parent up. As far as I remember, every promise of technological improvement in the 20th century was broken. The computers became slower over time, cars became less safe and consume more fuel with each year. TVs are losing brightness and become smaller each coming month (and portable TVs become bigger). Don't believe anything Motorola tells us. After all, has anything good ever came out of their research labs? I mean, it's not like they invented the mobile phone or anything.
Don't believe that "cheaper and better" crap. We all know that technology (especially computer technology and consumer electronics) becomes more expensive each year and the capabilities and quality decrease.:(
It's interesting that American members of parlament do not actually feel that they must represent the people who elected them. As soon as they are elected, they have the legal and moral right to do anything they want, with only the pressure of risking not being re-elected.
Is there a difference between being required by law to answer what your friends and co-workers did, when questioned by FBI agents or the court and being required by law to visit a police station daily and report what your friends and co-workers did?
The difference (if you think there is any) is the same as between compulsory registration (propiska) and people being able to follow you (and risk stalking charges) and find where you live (if you do not actively attempt to prevent it by shaking them off).
"An adress of current residence" is very bad. Do you realise that eventually (even if not in the beginning) it may require you to report to the authorities every time you move. Initially it may not be required for short trips, but it's only a technical change to replace "more than 60 days" with "more than 6 days". That would basically mean an obligatory trip to a police station when you travel to any place for more than a few days. Trust me, it sucks and it does strongly infringe on human rights of people - in practice, in those places that have such requirements.
I don't know much more about the law than is written in your post and don't particularly care, not being an American and having decided already that I don't want to visit your nice police state any time soon. But I can tell you that requiring a "propiska" is indeed undemocratic, restrictive and limits your freedom of travel. Sucks to be an American.
I am not saying that. I agree with you that most people who make the effort to customize their desktops end up with something worse than the default configuration. Yes, people suck. But you seem to feel that the Japanese way of forcing everyone to live with immutable beauty is good. I disagree - I think that it is good that people can change their desktop environment even if the results suck. The creative act is by itself good. Giving people this freedom is good, even if the result is not, as long as they do not force their lameness on others and not harm them against their will.
You may be right that the majority of viewers won't care. But the same can be said about every other aspect of the film (show). Why are there people on the sets, whose job is to ensure continuity, for example?
Why do the filmmakers feel it's important to have the actors in a historical movie wearing the correct uniforms, using the correct weapons, etc.? It's not that the directors aren't trying, it's they are failing so miserably that it's impossible to explain how can that be.
My peeve is when directors use other languages, especially Russian and just type random Cyrillic characters that can't even be pronounced instead of words. How difficult could it be to at least try?
The big question is does it matter that the film is scientifically wrong? The emptyheaded directors and most of the audience may believe that the only thing that matters is that they get their laughs. But they don't care about science in real life either. The truth is that it matters - the laws of physics are important, the reality is important, the scientific literacy is important and the "art" should improve it, not use the lack of it to prop a failing script.
I think at this stage it is clearly a problem of people clinging to different understandings of common words.
Gore said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
Let's read this.
1) To "take the initiative" means to "begin a task or plan of action". This is an idiom. It uses "initiative" in the sense of "the power to originate something," a usage dating from the late 1700s. 2) To create is obviously "To cause to exist; bring into being".
We must note, of course, that the Internet was not created instantly on a certain day - instead it was a long process, during which something that wasn't Internet (APRANET) gradually became Internet. APRANET clearly wasn't Internet, it was a precursor of it. There were several important stages - transition to TCP/IP, creation of university backbone, creation of WWW and the Internet was created throughout these steps, not in 1969 when first computers were connected via APRANET.
This basically means that Gore was one of the major forces behind the process of creation of the modern Internet, he has the right to claim what he did.
There can be an alternative way to parse the sentence. May be it meant "initiative in the process", that is noone was leading the process and noone was taking the initiative. If Gore was in fact one of the leaders, then he is still justified in claiming what he did. Was he one of the leaders? Well, I think it is a safe bet to state that on the political front he was THE leader of Internet emergence. So far no one has come forward and claimed that someone else was.
I don't believe it claims to find photos that contain the image you reference. It's more like the system is searching for images that are similar to the one one you give overall.
So the search system went looking for large red triangles on a white backgrounds. Obviously, there were none, so it settled for the next best thing - white non-triangular planes on light blue background or something.
Google is your friend, moron. Or does your mom's basement not have Internet, you inbred failure? Search for "functional illiteracy united states", retard, and the first result will give the result of the 1993 study by U.S. Department of Education - 21-23% functionally illiterate.
According to the studies that I recall, something on the order of 30% of Americans were functionally illiterate. That basically means they can't understand a written text (except sufficiently dumbed down content, of course) even though technically they are able of reading it.
I wonder if you realise the inherent flaw in your reasoning. It is precisely this attitude of "I know what is the best for the user" that leads web designers to create monstrous user-unfriendly and inaccessible Flash interfaces.
Personally I think that all your rant is rubbish. Yes, some people have no sense of style, but as long as they do it on their own computer and are happier because of that, that's great. Forcing your personal aesthetics on everyone is just sick.
Well, both HL2 and Doom 3 had renderers for old versions of DirectX. Some people even managed to run Doom 3 on Voodoo 2. Yes, any graphics card can probably handle the levels and the characters moving around. You don't need an X800 for that. But if you don't mind low-res textures, low-poly models, no bump, no shadows, no dynamic lighting, then you will be essentially playing something only slightly better than Quake 2 and Half-Life. What's the point? I probably can also watch video on a 386 (an MPEG1 in a 160x120 window), but is it the same as watching High Definition DivX?
Good videocards allow better image quality in games. If you don't need better image quality, that's fine, but most people disagree with you.
I don't know. I guess it was just a strange statement that looked very much like an error. It was weird and out of place, and there already was a disute - of cource it caught my attention. May be I just felt a lot like Dijkstra.:)
You're obviously having some trouble realizing that I was originally talking about a person who didn't "get" how large space was, and then as part of the rant I brought in more things that people should know.
Yes, indeed, I did have some trouble with that. Thanks for taking the time to explain. Now it's clear - you simply are sometimes poor at getting your point across and not stupid. Though I do wonder if you just dump unrelated factoids spliced with some incoherent rants during your lectures too...;) I hope not. Seriously, sometimes if you add 5-10% more text to join disparate ideas together it can make the text several times easier to read.
Can't you read, PMF? I got your stupid point about balls and sticks. That was obvious. What is not obvious is what is the point of your post. Why did you just suddenly start talking about the empty space between atoms? And how is your comment about Armageddon relevant to the discussion or relevant at all. This is what is not obvious at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What is especially interesting is that when we can use the technology to deal with the boring aspects of socialisation we can give more attention to more advanced things. For example, I don't need to spend hours wandering around my city block looking for people who may be interesting in discussing social aspects of some innovative mobile applications. I just click on a link, read the story^H^H^H^H^Hblurb, read the comments and post what I think.
Similarly, may be if people don't feel like they need to spend time just keeping track of what everyone is doing on Friday evening, and who goes where and who is taking whom with them, and instead concentrate on having good time, when one feels like it, working more on interpersonal relationships and stuff.
Personally I think that socialisation is for idiots. Due to some personality traits (which are probably a mild form of some mental illness, as things always are), I don't care much about socialising and the pleasure of talking or hanging out with someone are proportional to the content of our communications. I don't care whom I am talking with, as long as the topic and ideas are interesting, and conversely I don't care that these people are my friends, if they engage in idle pointless banter, I will be soon bored to death.
I can't wait until I can ask my phone to look for interesting people around me (filtering for interests and other stuff), so that I don't waste my time getting to know the boring 99%.
P.S. I have no problem communicating whatsoever and the vast majority of people who meet me like me, I just don't care about them and can't be bothered to go to bars, parties, birthdays and other such black holes.
You are correct, although for cultural reasons most people would tend to disagree. If a safe and inexpensive technology was available, I would accept a genetic enhancement that would do something like add more melatonin to my skin so that I am better protected from the sun. With artificially designed melatonin replacement it may even be possible to retain the pale white colour while getting the protection benefits.
You are not entirely correct, even though you say some interesting things. For example, it is a well-known fact that there are some complex chemicals that humans can't build, we must find these "building blocks of life" in nature and consume them. One notable example is Vitamin C. Just like these buzzing robots need more cubic blocks we need more chemicals. Just like our cells, proteins, etc. have binding spots that can connect to a particular type of molecules, so do these robots.
Yes, there is a quantitative difference. The robots in the video are small, very simple and the program they use requires the building blocks to be manually placed in a predefined locations.
But combine it with something like M-Tran, add slightly better programming, make thousands of these blocks and add a powerful computer (or parallel computers inside the blocks) and you suddenly can have much more impressive things. Yes, these 4-block thingies from Cornell can only bend and buzz. But the Japanese 15-block thingies can run on four legs and can evolve new movement modes in virtual space.
Soon someone will build a 1000-block thingy and it will be much more impressive. Then, if you like this particular path, you can refine the technology, shrink the building blocks, make much more of them and you can have something approaching life in complexity. Move to the atomic level and you can leave the biological life behind.
I think that Japanese M-Tran (videos galore) is more impressive. It is a similar technology for modular robots. Each module has a motor, a battery and some magnets to connet with other modules.
The blocks can connect with each other in different forms, from a snake-like robot that crawls to a four-legged robot that runs. Even more interestingly, the programs for movement are generated using genetic algorithms in a virtual environment first. An M-Tran robot can be any odd configuration of the blocks, then after some thinking (done on an external computer right now, I guess) it can use that particular shape to move around and (in the future) do something else.
You can rather easily modify M-Tran robots so that they could copy themselves. Just add a magnetic sensor that would feel other blocks and program it to wander randomly around to stumble into blocks (fancy sensors like eyes that can see the unique markers on the blocks can make it more efficient).
Of course, self-replication is just one example of self-construction and not a particularly interesting or important one. We are so excited about it only because evolution works this way. You have heredity and it works by having stuff make copies of itself. There is no reason why our future robots or nanobots must self-replicate (but it makes for a simplier brute force explanation of what they can do) - they can just design a good shape and form it (for example, by using genetic programming). In a typical scenario you would not have the blocks form a hundred of similar robots (or a few types of robots) - instead the blocks would form a single organism (not necessarily fully connected) that would do exactly what is needed and would reconfigure itself on the fly.
Of course, replication is easier and may prove useful to some extent, I am just saying that there are ultimately better ways to tackle problems than by throwing hundreds of identical robots at them.
Some believe that this is communism (Uh! Scary!) and it scares most Americans shitless. One of the factors that allowed extremely rapid development of planned socialist economies is that technical and scientific information was not a commodity - it was free and open to everyone. Any solution would not be patented, but instead freely spread to all enterprises in the industry (barring the usual bureaucracy and incompetence, of course).
As you correctly point out, competition is not the only thing leading to progress, cooperation can be just as important if not more.
Well, it's a genetic mental illness. Like the Down syndrome, only not as bad.
I accept the arguments about it being just a difference to some extent. Yes, genetic variations are not necessarily bad per se. Some "illnesses", such as synesthesia are even considered cool. There is a whole spectrum of these variations, from debilitating abnormalities to actual enhancements. On this scale Asperger's is pretty close to an illness, since there aren't many benefits.
But let's face it; most people here weren't old enough to be movie critics when the original trilogy came out, so they don't really have much perspective.
Exactly. Being a kid does wonders to your ability to enjoy a film. I mean, I really liked Police Academy. I thought it was brilliant comedy and I even, gasp!... enjoyed Mission to Moscow! Kids just don't have good taste, it's acquired.
What you are saying is that compulsory treatment of people with mental illnesses is bad. This is an ethical dilemma and your position is valid. This doesn't change the fact that doctors are usually justified in diagnosing the mental illness. If you don't want to be treated for Asperger's, fine, live with it, but it doesn't change the fact that your mental condition is pathological.
Yes, you can start a philosophical discussion of what is pathology and what is the norm. Yes, it's not totally cut and dry, but in cases like autism we are mostly justified in calling it a pathology.
First of all the parent is referring to the kind of prototype tech announcement we find almost daily on slashdot the vast majority of which never amount to anything.
Did you analyze the Slashdot stories and found out the percentage of such announcements that amount to nothing?
We want to know about future tech as early as possible. Logically it follows that it will take quite a while for the announcements to turn into real products. We won't see these NED screens for at least 2-3 years. And for these 2-3 years we will be constantly reminded that nothing has yet came to fruition every time there is a story about displays.
I am almost certain that we will have nanoassemblers by 2050. But for at least several decades every time someone mentions them, some idiot will come up and say - "They were promised in 1985, but we still don't have them. It's all fake!". Does it make sense to behave this way?
Second of all if you look back a few decades you will see promises of things like
It's your fault if you choose to believe the most outlandish predictions. If this is so, you are simply to prone to believe sensationalist claims - this is wrong. If you look at Japan's 1971 technology foresight study that covered predicted progress in 1971-2001, you will realise (as was shown in a study run around 1990) that the majority (IIRC >70%) of predictions were realised and those that weren't, were not realised due to social or economic, not technological reasons.
Yes, there are some well-publicised predictions that were proven false. But it is to be expected. It's difficult to predict the future, mistakes are bound to happen. Get over with it, because despite these errors many good predictions are made every day.
The key thing is that we finally know enough about the brain to realise that these behaviours have a real tangible biochemical cause. It's like a buffer overflaw that causes your favourite application to crash. It doesn't crash because it is in a bad mood or because it doesn't like you. It crashes because there is a traceable pattern that happens regardless of our wishes.
Same thing with the numerous syndromes. We know that a missing protein or a damaged gene can cause behavioural changes. When these changes are negative, we name it a syndrome that goes beyond mere personality issue. It is indeed a medical condition, but this fact may be hard to accept for someone in his 30-40s (or older), who got his biology in school when we didn't understand much about the brain.
That's sound thinking. Mod parent up. As far as I remember, every promise of technological improvement in the 20th century was broken. The computers became slower over time, cars became less safe and consume more fuel with each year. TVs are losing brightness and become smaller each coming month (and portable TVs become bigger). Don't believe anything Motorola tells us. After all, has anything good ever came out of their research labs? I mean, it's not like they invented the mobile phone or anything.
:(
Don't believe that "cheaper and better" crap. We all know that technology (especially computer technology and consumer electronics) becomes more expensive each year and the capabilities and quality decrease.
It's interesting that American members of parlament do not actually feel that they must represent the people who elected them. As soon as they are elected, they have the legal and moral right to do anything they want, with only the pressure of risking not being re-elected.
Is there a difference between being required by law to answer what your friends and co-workers did, when questioned by FBI agents or the court and being required by law to visit a police station daily and report what your friends and co-workers did?
The difference (if you think there is any) is the same as between compulsory registration (propiska) and people being able to follow you (and risk stalking charges) and find where you live (if you do not actively attempt to prevent it by shaking them off).
"An adress of current residence" is very bad. Do you realise that eventually (even if not in the beginning) it may require you to report to the authorities every time you move. Initially it may not be required for short trips, but it's only a technical change to replace "more than 60 days" with "more than 6 days". That would basically mean an obligatory trip to a police station when you travel to any place for more than a few days. Trust me, it sucks and it does strongly infringe on human rights of people - in practice, in those places that have such requirements.
I don't know much more about the law than is written in your post and don't particularly care, not being an American and having decided already that I don't want to visit your nice police state any time soon. But I can tell you that requiring a "propiska" is indeed undemocratic, restrictive and limits your freedom of travel. Sucks to be an American.
I am not saying that. I agree with you that most people who make the effort to customize their desktops end up with something worse than the default configuration. Yes, people suck. But you seem to feel that the Japanese way of forcing everyone to live with immutable beauty is good. I disagree - I think that it is good that people can change their desktop environment even if the results suck. The creative act is by itself good. Giving people this freedom is good, even if the result is not, as long as they do not force their lameness on others and not harm them against their will.
You may be right that the majority of viewers won't care. But the same can be said about every other aspect of the film (show). Why are there people on the sets, whose job is to ensure continuity, for example?
Why do the filmmakers feel it's important to have the actors in a historical movie wearing the correct uniforms, using the correct weapons, etc.? It's not that the directors aren't trying, it's they are failing so miserably that it's impossible to explain how can that be.
My peeve is when directors use other languages, especially Russian and just type random Cyrillic characters that can't even be pronounced instead of words. How difficult could it be to at least try?
The big question is does it matter that the film is scientifically wrong? The emptyheaded directors and most of the audience may believe that the only thing that matters is that they get their laughs. But they don't care about science in real life either. The truth is that it matters - the laws of physics are important, the reality is important, the scientific literacy is important and the "art" should improve it, not use the lack of it to prop a failing script.
I think at this stage it is clearly a problem of people clinging to different understandings of common words.
Gore said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
Let's read this.
1) To "take the initiative" means to "begin a task or plan of action". This is an idiom. It uses "initiative" in the sense of "the power to originate something," a usage dating from the late 1700s.
2) To create is obviously "To cause to exist; bring into being".
We must note, of course, that the Internet was not created instantly on a certain day - instead it was a long process, during which something that wasn't Internet (APRANET) gradually became Internet. APRANET clearly wasn't Internet, it was a precursor of it. There were several important stages - transition to TCP/IP, creation of university backbone, creation of WWW and the Internet was created throughout these steps, not in 1969 when first computers were connected via APRANET.
This basically means that Gore was one of the major forces behind the process of creation of the modern Internet, he has the right to claim what he did.
There can be an alternative way to parse the sentence. May be it meant "initiative in the process", that is noone was leading the process and noone was taking the initiative. If Gore was in fact one of the leaders, then he is still justified in claiming what he did. Was he one of the leaders? Well, I think it is a safe bet to state that on the political front he was THE leader of Internet emergence. So far no one has come forward and claimed that someone else was.
I don't believe it claims to find photos that contain the image you reference. It's more like the system is searching for images that are similar to the one one you give overall.
So the search system went looking for large red triangles on a white backgrounds. Obviously, there were none, so it settled for the next best thing - white non-triangular planes on light blue background or something.
Google is your friend, moron. Or does your mom's basement not have Internet, you inbred failure? Search for "functional illiteracy united states", retard, and the first result will give the result of the 1993 study by U.S. Department of Education - 21-23% functionally illiterate.
According to the studies that I recall, something on the order of 30% of Americans were functionally illiterate. That basically means they can't understand a written text (except sufficiently dumbed down content, of course) even though technically they are able of reading it.
I wonder if you realise the inherent flaw in your reasoning. It is precisely this attitude of "I know what is the best for the user" that leads web designers to create monstrous user-unfriendly and inaccessible Flash interfaces.
Personally I think that all your rant is rubbish. Yes, some people have no sense of style, but as long as they do it on their own computer and are happier because of that, that's great. Forcing your personal aesthetics on everyone is just sick.
Well, both HL2 and Doom 3 had renderers for old versions of DirectX. Some people even managed to run Doom 3 on Voodoo 2. Yes, any graphics card can probably handle the levels and the characters moving around. You don't need an X800 for that. But if you don't mind low-res textures, low-poly models, no bump, no shadows, no dynamic lighting, then you will be essentially playing something only slightly better than Quake 2 and Half-Life. What's the point? I probably can also watch video on a 386 (an MPEG1 in a 160x120 window), but is it the same as watching High Definition DivX?
Good videocards allow better image quality in games. If you don't need better image quality, that's fine, but most people disagree with you.
I don't know. I guess it was just a strange statement that looked very much like an error. It was weird and out of place, and there already was a disute - of cource it caught my attention. May be I just felt a lot like Dijkstra. :)
You're obviously having some trouble realizing that I was originally talking about a person who didn't "get" how large space was, and then as part of the rant I brought in more things that people should know.
;) I hope not. Seriously, sometimes if you add 5-10% more text to join disparate ideas together it can make the text several times easier to read.
Yes, indeed, I did have some trouble with that. Thanks for taking the time to explain. Now it's clear - you simply are sometimes poor at getting your point across and not stupid. Though I do wonder if you just dump unrelated factoids spliced with some incoherent rants during your lectures too...
Can't you read, PMF? I got your stupid point about balls and sticks. That was obvious. What is not obvious is what is the point of your post. Why did you just suddenly start talking about the empty space between atoms? And how is your comment about Armageddon relevant to the discussion or relevant at all. This is what is not obvious at all.