As far public evidence goes, the "Russian interference" basically boils down to three prongs:
1. Hacking into state voter registration to get detailed data for targetting voters in critical states. Comey stated publicly that Russians tried this hundreds of times through spearfishing attacks, but it is unclear how successful they actually were in accessing/tampering with voter registrations.
2. Hacking and releasing e-mails from the DNC and John Podesta. We now know that more than one person unofficially affiliated with the Trump campaign was involved in chasing after the missing e-mails (Roger Stone contacting Guccifer 2.0 and Peter W. Smith contacting Russian hackers, allegedly with instructions from Michael Flynn).
3. Releasing targeted propaganda/fake news on Facebook etc. to try to influence voters. This operation was allegedly run by Brad Parscale and Cambridge Analytica, although the evidence that they directly collaborated with Russian hackers to obtain voter data is missing.
Almost no one is suggesting voting machines were directly hacked.
Magic Online, the digital version of the famous trading card game, is currently undergoing a kind of "economic recession". Basically, trading for cards is facilitated by event tickets (roughly $1 in value) and booster packs (containing 15 cards, roughly $4 in nominal value) that act as a digital currency. Events are entered using event tickets as payment and they pay out as booster packs to the most winning players. This is done to avoid gambling laws.
What has happened is that number of players entering events has gone down while the amount of booster packs floating around has increased, so that the going price for booster packs has fallen to around 2 tickets (so $2 equivalent). This has made entering events unattractive for all but the top players, since the expected value of the prizes to win are now half of what they should be, while the entry fees remain the same. This further drove the number of players down, with many people selling their collections and leaving Magic Online.
Several months ago Wizards of the Coast set up an "economy strike force" that supposedly consisted of several people with "advanced math degrees" to solve this conundrum of a depressed economy. They finally announced their "solution" some weeks ago. It was to double the entry fees and basically cut the prizes to 75% of the old one.
The economy predictable tanked even harder, leading to more players selling out.
The CD is still very much alive, in my house anyway.
At this moment in time, I don't see myself ever paying for a digital music download, call me old fashioned but I need something tangible when it comes to music. (Though I do admit to downloading and paying for games through Steam and Good Old Games.)
To me, the CD represents excellent value for money, especially if I am paying around £10 UK for a piece of music I may well end up repeatedly enjoying over the next few decades.
Your CDs will not function a few decades from now.
They are smaller no doubt, but in both cases the blood brain barrier is just beneath the surface of the skull
No it's not. It's formed by the endothelium (thin layer one cell thick that is in direct contact with the cerebral blood stream) on the smallest capillaries that penetrate deep into the brain matter.
So why is scientific error in the news so often? The submission skimmed right past it: public relations sabotage by political and commercial interests who stand to gain by casting doubt on science. Global warming deniers, anti-vaccine nuts, anti-evolution zealots, nontraditional medicine snake-oil salesmen... there's money to be made, and votes to be won, by making scientists sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
And no, I don't have any rigorous data to support my claim. But according to the submission, I should treat all data as baloney and make my arguments based on truthiness alone.
There's nothing like that in the submission, why don't you read the articles linked rather than spout off "ermahgerd its a republican smear campaing!!!!!!1111one" like all the other idiots with their heads in the sand.
Funding is moving away from small, easily reproducible studies towards huge, billion dollar projects that can only be performed in one or two highly specialized research institutes. Even if you have the resources to replicate any study you want, some questions require following through an experiment for decades (pitch drop experiment), which limits reproducibility.
It is not just bad scientists or media/politicians using scientists for their own purposes. It is also good scientists, working on high-level topics, deciding to cut corners/falsify results to announce major results that turn out to be false to get their paper out first.
It is difficult to give exact figures because there are so far few formal studies quantifying the extent of the problem. We know that for example psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989, a rate higher than the growth in the number of publications in the same period. It is also likely that most scientific misconduct remains uncovered or unacknowledged. It seems that few scientists admit misconduct, but many more know someone else who is committing it:
"an average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once – a serious form of misconduct by any standard – and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices." (from http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/sep/13/scientific-research-fraud-bad-practice)
I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.".
I recently opened an account in UBS and I must say, the female staff were all dressed in rather stylish form-fitting pantsuits. In comparison their male counterparts looked decidedly more homely. I wonder if this policy has not been introduced to bring some equality between the sexes.
I think the point the GP was making was that, yes the US military can instantly and overwhelmingly wipe out any civil resistance. However that is entirely dependent on said soldiers of the US military actually following those orders. If there was a civil insurrection, there is a real possibility that soldiers would simply refuse to open fire on civilians and also possible that they would simply join them.
Look, left-wing parties are likely to do well in our next election, but no-one sensible here, left or right, wants to raise the corporation tax rate. These companies provide our jobs.
If a raise would be announced, ordinary people here would really start to protest.
Ireland is not the US, where lower-middle class working people will protest on the streets saying that Mario Antoinette should have more cake.
I think he was referring to the "Press X to duck behind this crate. Press Y to shoot your opponent. Wait 5 seconds to heal fully from any and all damage you've taken. Watch a five minute cutscene" type gameplay that passes for console FPS.
I'd like to see a game that isn't a click-fest, but still would offer some action and nice visuals. Something with the gameplay involving giving orders to partially autonomous troops. After giving orders, you could watch and see how they fare and perhaps give some further orders, maybe with some possible penalty incurred for breaking radio silence. Or in the setting of a Total War type of game, there could be a limited number messengers who would take time to reach the troops and even have a chance to fail in delivering your orders.
Scourge of War: Gettysburg and its predecessors Take Command: 2nd Manassas and Take Command: Bull Run pretty much work that way. The graphics are dated (think Medieval: TW quality) but functional enough, the gameplay fairly slow and meticulous. Most battles start with 5-20 minutes of maneuvering into attack positions, after which you order your divisions/brigades their set targets and watch them march into the fray. If and when things start looking bad you start to micromanage individual batteries and regiments. That's when it gets really hectic and interesting.
Or you can play Empire: TW and watch the beautifully rendered but historically ridiculously inaccruate soldiers run up and down mountains on a tiny battlefield while being bombarded by overpowered artillery.
Multigrid is theoretically O(s), so I don't immediately see how this is such a huge leap. Of course the actual complexity also depends on the problem and the implementation. Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
Also, the "iterated sparsifying" sounds a lot like algebraic multigrid.
Because anyone who points out that modern greens have abandoned real convervationism for made-up issues like CO2 "pollution" gets modded a troll on/. nowadays.
Dozens of identical TIE advanceds circling around in one big furball, desparately trying to get on each others' tails for minutes on end. No skill needed. Just lean on the stick and twitch the trigger whenever you see a craft flash past your sights.
Seriously guys, we're limited by the technology. There's a reason CRPGs and JRPGs are what they are -- it's just not feasible to make the kind of experiences you are asking for. Consider Mass Effect or Dragon Age, games that have hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Even they feel "railroady" at times. You can't join the villain, after all, because they didn't have an extra 5 years to write, script, draw, program, etc that scenario and the 500 sub-scenarios involved.
That's the problem with modern games. They assume the player needs to be inundated with pages upon pages of mediocre fantasy guff to keep them engrossed in what is otherwise a plastic and unconvincing game world that has an economy entirely run on monster loot.
Make the game world logical if not realistic, fill it with NPCs that act like you would expect them to, and allow the PCs to act in meaningful ways with them. The players imagination can fill in the gaps and come up with a great story. Darklands might play like a multiple choice quiz at times, but it did this nearly two decades ago.
RPG nowadays means:
Follow pre-scripted whiny one-dimensional stereotypes run around cliched worlds fulfilling repetitive fetch quests while having a tenuous chance at actually changing the course of events at one or two specific points in the plot.
I Finland everyone has a national identification number.
So am I living in some socialist police state, or is it just a matter of what kind of government implements this kind of a scheme?
Finland is one of those countries that could be turned into a police state if TPTB were more motivated towards evil and if the national spirit was a bit different. Off the top of my head, we've recently had:
Police raiding people who grow chili peppers in their homes because they bought too much irrigation equipment from the store and looked sufficiently suspicious.
Foreign-looking people in a popular nightclub getting rounded up until they can produce evidence they are in the country legally.
Internet-blocking software that randomly blocks you, telling you you're visiting "child pr0n websites" when you for example try to visit a site describing the problems in said filter. And maintaining a site for anonymous reporting of "Internet crime", apart from child abuse material, which is to be submitted to a private advocacy organization (who are accountable to no one) for processing.
Deanonymizing people and dragging them into court for gossiping about a woman who had an affair with the prime minister.
Convicting people of blasphemy for pointing out historical facts about Islam that are embarrassing to followers of said faith.
In CIV the player turns are concurrent (turn-based WEGO). It works pretty well, although if you're used to strict turn-based IGOUGO in single-player the combat will throw you off a bit.
Seriously, read the article. Yeah, I must be new here. Sure the panel contains some climate scientists. It would be a bit dumb not to. It also contains a statistician and a physicist.
But now I've just spoiled your latest notion, you'll have to find another bogus reason to disbelieve it.
Two unbelievers out of seven do not matter when you read the report. It's only nine pages long. It flat out says they are not interested in discussing whether the science is sound. They spend more paragraphs castigating AGW critics than they do the deplorable conduct evidenced by the CRU emails. My favorite part is the one where they state that more advanced statistical methods would probably not have improved the results, while at the same time suggesting more advanced statistical methods be used next time. So the purpose of using better statistics for the panel is not to obtain more certain results, but simply to obtain a more credible facade for the spaghetti reconstructions the climatologists love so much.
...when they're exonerated by a panel of scientists who are NOT connected to renewable energy sources, environmentalist groups, conservation movements, carbon trading etc. That is to say, physicists, statisticians, and real mathematical modellers. In general people who are not doing science because it suits the environmental fancy they picked up in the 1980s and who are not willing to overlook glaring problems with their results (like a disappearing medieval warm period) simply because the results confirm their preconceived notion of impending catastrophe.
"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times.
Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky -- "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature."
Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground -- the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective -- and by doing that, they actually cool the planet.
"The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says.
Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.
Slashdot Mirror
As far public evidence goes, the "Russian interference" basically boils down to three prongs:
1. Hacking into state voter registration to get detailed data for targetting voters in critical states. Comey stated publicly that Russians tried this hundreds of times through spearfishing attacks, but it is unclear how successful they actually were in accessing/tampering with voter registrations.
2. Hacking and releasing e-mails from the DNC and John Podesta. We now know that more than one person unofficially affiliated with the Trump campaign was involved in chasing after the missing e-mails (Roger Stone contacting Guccifer 2.0 and Peter W. Smith contacting Russian hackers, allegedly with instructions from Michael Flynn).
3. Releasing targeted propaganda/fake news on Facebook etc. to try to influence voters. This operation was allegedly run by Brad Parscale and Cambridge Analytica, although the evidence that they directly collaborated with Russian hackers to obtain voter data is missing. Almost no one is suggesting voting machines were directly hacked.
You are insane.
Magic Online, the digital version of the famous trading card game, is currently undergoing a kind of "economic recession". Basically, trading for cards is facilitated by event tickets (roughly $1 in value) and booster packs (containing 15 cards, roughly $4 in nominal value) that act as a digital currency. Events are entered using event tickets as payment and they pay out as booster packs to the most winning players. This is done to avoid gambling laws.
What has happened is that number of players entering events has gone down while the amount of booster packs floating around has increased, so that the going price for booster packs has fallen to around 2 tickets (so $2 equivalent). This has made entering events unattractive for all but the top players, since the expected value of the prizes to win are now half of what they should be, while the entry fees remain the same. This further drove the number of players down, with many people selling their collections and leaving Magic Online.
Several months ago Wizards of the Coast set up an "economy strike force" that supposedly consisted of several people with "advanced math degrees" to solve this conundrum of a depressed economy. They finally announced their "solution" some weeks ago. It was to double the entry fees and basically cut the prizes to 75% of the old one.
The economy predictable tanked even harder, leading to more players selling out.
The CD is still very much alive, in my house anyway.
At this moment in time, I don't see myself ever paying for a digital music download, call me old fashioned but I need something tangible when it comes to music. (Though I do admit to downloading and paying for games through Steam and Good Old Games.)
To me, the CD represents excellent value for money, especially if I am paying around £10 UK for a piece of music I may well end up repeatedly enjoying over the next few decades.
Your CDs will not function a few decades from now.
They are smaller no doubt, but in both cases the blood brain barrier is just beneath the surface of the skull
No it's not. It's formed by the endothelium (thin layer one cell thick that is in direct contact with the cerebral blood stream) on the smallest capillaries that penetrate deep into the brain matter.
So why is scientific error in the news so often? The submission skimmed right past it: public relations sabotage by political and commercial interests who stand to gain by casting doubt on science. Global warming deniers, anti-vaccine nuts, anti-evolution zealots, nontraditional medicine snake-oil salesmen ... there's money to be made, and votes to be won, by making scientists sound like they don't know what they're talking about.
And no, I don't have any rigorous data to support my claim. But according to the submission, I should treat all data as baloney and make my arguments based on truthiness alone.
There's nothing like that in the submission, why don't you read the articles linked rather than spout off "ermahgerd its a republican smear campaing!!!!!!1111one" like all the other idiots with their heads in the sand.
Funding is moving away from small, easily reproducible studies towards huge, billion dollar projects that can only be performed in one or two highly specialized research institutes. Even if you have the resources to replicate any study you want, some questions require following through an experiment for decades (pitch drop experiment), which limits reproducibility.
It is not just bad scientists or media/politicians using scientists for their own purposes. It is also good scientists, working on high-level topics, deciding to cut corners/falsify results to announce major results that turn out to be false to get their paper out first.
It is difficult to give exact figures because there are so far few formal studies quantifying the extent of the problem. We know that for example psychology retractions have quadrupled since 1989, a rate higher than the growth in the number of publications in the same period. It is also likely that most scientific misconduct remains uncovered or unacknowledged. It seems that few scientists admit misconduct, but many more know someone else who is committing it:
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data
"an average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having "fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once – a serious form of misconduct by any standard – and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices." (from http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/sep/13/scientific-research-fraud-bad-practice)
I admit, I struggled a bit with the polynomials as I don't work much with them anymore, I still don't see any direct application for them even after years of working in scientific computing. Therefore, I see them as a graduation test only, meaning "If we can force you to learn this, then we can force you to learn anything.".
Just for that you fail the exam.
I recently opened an account in UBS and I must say, the female staff were all dressed in rather stylish form-fitting pantsuits. In comparison their male counterparts looked decidedly more homely. I wonder if this policy has not been introduced to bring some equality between the sexes.
I think the point the GP was making was that, yes the US military can instantly and overwhelmingly wipe out any civil resistance. However that is entirely dependent on said soldiers of the US military actually following those orders. If there was a civil insurrection, there is a real possibility that soldiers would simply refuse to open fire on civilians and also possible that they would simply join them.
Doesn't happen much, does it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings
Look, left-wing parties are likely to do well in our next election, but no-one sensible here, left or right, wants to raise the corporation tax rate. These companies provide our jobs.
If a raise would be announced, ordinary people here would really start to protest.
Ireland is not the US, where lower-middle class working people will protest on the streets saying that Mario Antoinette should have more cake.
I think he was referring to the "Press X to duck behind this crate. Press Y to shoot your opponent. Wait 5 seconds to heal fully from any and all damage you've taken. Watch a five minute cutscene" type gameplay that passes for console FPS.
I'd like to see a game that isn't a click-fest, but still would offer some action and nice visuals. Something with the gameplay involving giving orders to partially autonomous troops. After giving orders, you could watch and see how they fare and perhaps give some further orders, maybe with some possible penalty incurred for breaking radio silence. Or in the setting of a Total War type of game, there could be a limited number messengers who would take time to reach the troops and even have a chance to fail in delivering your orders.
Scourge of War: Gettysburg and its predecessors Take Command: 2nd Manassas and Take Command: Bull Run pretty much work that way. The graphics are dated (think Medieval: TW quality) but functional enough, the gameplay fairly slow and meticulous. Most battles start with 5-20 minutes of maneuvering into attack positions, after which you order your divisions/brigades their set targets and watch them march into the fray. If and when things start looking bad you start to micromanage individual batteries and regiments. That's when it gets really hectic and interesting. Or you can play Empire: TW and watch the beautifully rendered but historically ridiculously inaccruate soldiers run up and down mountains on a tiny battlefield while being bombarded by overpowered artillery.
Multigrid is theoretically O(s), so I don't immediately see how this is such a huge leap. Of course the actual complexity also depends on the problem and the implementation. Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
Also, the "iterated sparsifying" sounds a lot like algebraic multigrid.
Why is this a troll?
Because anyone who points out that modern greens have abandoned real convervationism for made-up issues like CO2 "pollution" gets modded a troll on /. nowadays.
Dozens of identical TIE advanceds circling around in one big furball, desparately trying to get on each others' tails for minutes on end. No skill needed. Just lean on the stick and twitch the trigger whenever you see a craft flash past your sights.
No thanks.
Seriously guys, we're limited by the technology. There's a reason CRPGs and JRPGs are what they are -- it's just not feasible to make the kind of experiences you are asking for. Consider Mass Effect or Dragon Age, games that have hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Even they feel "railroady" at times. You can't join the villain, after all, because they didn't have an extra 5 years to write, script, draw, program, etc that scenario and the 500 sub-scenarios involved.
That's the problem with modern games. They assume the player needs to be inundated with pages upon pages of mediocre fantasy guff to keep them engrossed in what is otherwise a plastic and unconvincing game world that has an economy entirely run on monster loot.
Make the game world logical if not realistic, fill it with NPCs that act like you would expect them to, and allow the PCs to act in meaningful ways with them. The players imagination can fill in the gaps and come up with a great story. Darklands might play like a multiple choice quiz at times, but it did this nearly two decades ago.
RPG nowadays means: Follow pre-scripted whiny one-dimensional stereotypes run around cliched worlds fulfilling repetitive fetch quests while having a tenuous chance at actually changing the course of events at one or two specific points in the plot.
I Finland everyone has a national identification number.
So am I living in some socialist police state, or is it just a matter of what kind of government implements this kind of a scheme?
Finland is one of those countries that could be turned into a police state if TPTB were more motivated towards evil and if the national spirit was a bit different. Off the top of my head, we've recently had:
In CIV the player turns are concurrent (turn-based WEGO). It works pretty well, although if you're used to strict turn-based IGOUGO in single-player the combat will throw you off a bit.
Back already!
Seriously, read the article. Yeah, I must be new here. Sure the panel contains some climate scientists. It would be a bit dumb not to. It also contains a statistician and a physicist.
But now I've just spoiled your latest notion, you'll have to find another bogus reason to disbelieve it.
Two unbelievers out of seven do not matter when you read the report. It's only nine pages long. It flat out says they are not interested in discussing whether the science is sound. They spend more paragraphs castigating AGW critics than they do the deplorable conduct evidenced by the CRU emails. My favorite part is the one where they state that more advanced statistical methods would probably not have improved the results, while at the same time suggesting more advanced statistical methods be used next time. So the purpose of using better statistics for the panel is not to obtain more certain results, but simply to obtain a more credible facade for the spaghetti reconstructions the climatologists love so much.
...when they're exonerated by a panel of scientists who are NOT connected to renewable energy sources, environmentalist groups, conservation movements, carbon trading etc. That is to say, physicists, statisticians, and real mathematical modellers. In general people who are not doing science because it suits the environmental fancy they picked up in the 1980s and who are not willing to overlook glaring problems with their results (like a disappearing medieval warm period) simply because the results confirm their preconceived notion of impending catastrophe.
"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky -- "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature." Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground -- the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective -- and by doing that, they actually cool the planet. "The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says. Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.
BINGO!