That's it, I suddenly have a craving for some sort of little plastic desk clutterer that combines Penguin and Demon, some sort of great, red, horned penguin of the apocalypse. "Ooohhh, you got Tux on my Beastie!" "Ooohhh, you got beastie in my Tux." "Two great OS's that OS great together!".
Re:my favorite hack for those without a nice scope
on
Astronomy Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
When I go to a public frequented area to observe, I always bring along the spare generic 5 inch reflector and set it up on an obvious target like Saturn or the current newsworthy comet. The wife and I take turns keeping it on target and doing a little yadda-yadda for the folks. Any promising kid who seems to actually know what the difference between a star and a nebula is, we steer them towards somebody with a bigger rig and a little patience now and then, but we prescreen the types who are loud and obnoxious or can't keep their fingers off the knobs.
We have a 12 inch for real observing, plus lots of thanks from all the dog walkers and families with kids, and lots of offers to share viewing from the guys with the portable Liquid Nitrogen cooled CCD rigs, 18's and various other really good gear because we are keeping the most ignorant types off their butts.
"They should start a big campaign for birth-control all over the world and tackle the root of the problem."
"They" did - the last I looked, the overlap between large (500$ and up) contributers to Greenpeace and to Planned Parenthood was over 75%. Other numbers are at least roughly similar. Rephrasing "they" as Nadar voters instead of Greenpeace supporters gives even higher correlations. The chance that a Nadar supporter that donates to anything at all will donate to at least one of three organizations on a multi-year basis is over 95%: (Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood). The chance for at least 2 out of 3 is over 85%.
I'm not entirely sure I disagree with them. People who advocate "natural" methods of population limitation tend to ignore that nature's prefrred methods seem to be war, famine, pestilence, and death. It's actually worse than your arguement directly implies, as if population becomes stable, energy demand will continue to increase, as most of the existing population will still want to move up to home ownership, blue jeans for the kids, cable TV, clean drinking water, SUVs, and sewage treatment lifestyles.
The executives of a public company would face a stockholder suit for NOT doing it.
This threat is way over-rated. 1. Shareholders sue executives either way. They sue because the stock didn't make them enough money. If the company doesn't do something legal and (potentially)profitable, that's just the excuse they use. If the company does something morally wrong and legal and the expected profits don't result, they sue on that excuse instead. An executive may be able to tell you in advance what is legal and be 100% reliable in that opinion, but none of them can guarentee in advance what is going to be profitable. There is literally no such thing as "morally wrong but legal and profitable", just "legal now, and possibly profitable in the future".
2. Stockholders may file these suits, but they very seldom win them. It takes special exemptions, like the ones in Sarbanes-Oxley, to give a shareholder much chance of actually winning. (and S-O is written exactly so as not to support suits for not doing everything that might be legal. In fact it's quite the contrary - the easiest way to win a S-O based lawsuit is to show the company didn't disclose that there might be an ethical backlash from business partners or consumers over the executive's sharp dealings). 3. The source of this claim is executives who are engaging in sharp business practices, and justifying their behavior. The same people who open sweat shops in third world countries and practice age discrimination to keep pension costs down are in a situation where they can lie in press statements and not face the penalties they would for lieing in court or on an SEC form, and they make this claim as part of justifying their business strategy, and that's where the claim starts, and yet so many people take it uncritically.
A very good arguement, and I hope you don't mind if I nitpick about one point:
We don't just give creators a temporary monopoly, we (meaning taxpayers) pay the costs of enforcing a temporary monopoly, especially now that many copyright violations are criminalized.
This is one reason our greatly lengthened copyright law is a bad thing. 1. Works typically bring in most of their money in the first few years. The benefit to the author usually declines as the works age. 2. Costs to enforce go up with age, and often go up non-linearly. When you have to start researching what company sold what rights to whom, 40 and 50 and sometimes 80 years ago, and when a work has passed through, say, 5 or 6 now defunct company's hands, proving who has infringed on just what becomes very expensive.
Repeatedly scaling up costs to get repeatedly decreasing benefits is a stupid solution at best to just about any problem.
That's really common. I've worked about 20 elections so far, and at primaries you constantly get people wanting to have one box or lever so they can vote for the party without having to do so much work as punch six or eight of them itty bitty lil' boxes.
When both parties have primaries on the same ballot, I always get asked why we didn't just set up one machine just for Republicans and one just for Democrats. When only one party offers a primary, there's always at least one person who claims I'm part of some sort of conspiracy to keep the other party from having one, or somehow stop their candidate from getting votes.
In presidential primaries, there's always 10 or so people who talk like they think their candidate will be President that night, and not just their party's nominee.
At general elections, you get people who want to vote for one presidential candidate, and another party's vice-president - people who want to vote directly for president and not for the electors, and people who want to vote by party when it's not a primary at all, and demand I take all those independant's names off the lists so they can find their party easier.
When we close for the evening, our machines print an extra copy of the totals, which we post at the polling place door for the press to read if they want to check on separate precinct's results. I've had press people complain that I didn't print out one strip with all the machine's totals instead, and people want me to print them another copy, and mail it to them before their paper's deadline (Yeah, I can tell you at 2:30 PM what the total will be at 8 PM, and the time traveling mailmen will get it to you the day before I post it, Um-hum.).
I've had people call the location, asking me to delay sombody else so they could vote first, or stop their wife from canceling their vote (usually they get connected to a high school secretary or sombeody like that, because, thank God, they can't figure out how to get through to the poll workers directly).
I've never had a candidate hang around inside the polling place when they didn't have a right to be there, but I have had candidates come in to vote at their home precinct, carefully follow all the rules, and someone demand I throw them out. It's amazing how many people think that anyone running for office isn't allowed to vote.
This is what the RIAA is doing as well. I haven't bought a CD from an RIAA member in about 2 years. I haven't bootlegged anything either. But by them, I'm a pirate. I can't possibly be boycotting them, by their definitions, I simply must be pirating music instead.
Same thing here: I can't possibly be installing legitimate freeware, I simply must be pirating software instead.
I'm getting damned tired of playing fair with these people and being called a thief in return, just to hide the fact that I'm a dissatisfied former customer. I don't want to start violating their copyrights to get even - I want to get even within the system - they learn to respect their honest customers again, or go bankrupt quickly.
The whole "smallpox to the Indians" claim has been frequently touted and exaggerated by some of the more militant Atheists, who have emphasized not that Jeffery Amhurst was a white guy, but that he called himself a Christian. Some (not all, but a fair selection) of the web sources have tended to take the claims of widespread, deliberate spread of the disease uncritically. In trying to decide just how common the use of Smallpox as germ warfare really was, I reccomend disregarding two types of sites: 1. Those that are mostly anti-Christian first, and historical second (at best). These mention Amhurst as an example of the failings of the Christian religion, but don't discuss what the beliefs of Cpt. Ecuyer and others were (several of the people who may have deliberately tried to pass Smallpox on to Native Americans were apparently "freethinkers". In most of that handfull of cases where action was discussed, we don't know if anything deliberate actually happened, nor do we know if a single attempt actually worked. The chance some white guy caught Smallpox trying to infect some Native Americans was always higher than the chance he succeeded). Any site that claims to even have a firm estimate on the numbers of Native Americans deliberately killed by such methods is lieing with statistics, at best. 2. Those sites that try to make the same points re. Colombus and other earlier white guys who did not yet even know of the germ theory of disease, as though they were morally responsible for not knowing it yet. Claims that Columbus was in posession of secret knowledge that made it possible for him to use germs as a deliberate weapon should be a dead give away that the site has an axe to grind.
Generation 33 = One for everybody on Earth, plus about 10% overage. Let's stop there and start making stuff with them. In fact, what will probably happen is everyone who gets one going will make a copy or two (on the average) for people near and dear (for average values of dear). Then they will turn them to making other stuff. That means it will spread much more slowly than exponential growth. A slower growth rate is good from a control standpoint, bad if you are waiting for them to spread to your area and lack the skills to jump-start the process.
What's neat is having someone make their own replicator simultaniously teaches them how to use their copy for making other stuff, unlike sex.
Both the liquid and solid phases are really anomalous:
The liquid outer core is made of mostly the same stuff as the deep mantle, Iron with about 5% assorted dense metals mixed in. It's just hot enought to be liquid. The boudary region between them shades gradually from solid to liquid, so what we mean by outer core is essentially arbitrary. Geologists assign a level where it's 'liquid enough', as the boundary.
The solid inner core is a single Iron crystal. 1,500 Km across, and with damned near no contaminants. We guess this because earthquake waves passing through the inner core speed up if moving along the directions of the crystal lattices, and the pattern matches both it being a crystal and having the structure typical for iron at such enormous pressures. The boundary between inner and outer core is much crisper than the one between outer core and mantle.
A couple of years ago, I took part in a project to build desktop PCs for low income families with high-school age kids.
We made about 200 total boxes. When we got towards the end, we had about 3 dozen donated motherboards that could only be set to a max of a 450 Mhz processor and PC 100 DIMMs for RAM, but had 2x AGP slots, and a bunch of P2-500 and 600 CPUs, PC 133 RAM, and single speed AGP video cards to match up. We ended up turning out a bunch of machines that were all basically underclocked in several ways at once.
These have tended to last surprisingly well, compared to the rest. This was charity, and there was no way to regularly survey all the recipients afterwards, find out who had gotten other tech support, installed other hardware and so on to make it a scientifically accurate conclusion, but just as an impression, there have been no power supply failures or burned up CPUs or RAM in that group, and at least a few in each of those categories for the others.
Whoops, got so angry I didn't proofread enough. That "Causians" is of course meant to be a second use of the word "Caucasians", Sorry.
I'm trying hard not to flat out hate some people here. I've seen it claimed before that Darwin wasn't speaking with approval of these hypothetical extinctions, simply stating it as a likelyhood. Maybe some people really believe that. As for the rest, the quote is accurate, and speaks on its own - shoot the messenger all you want, the message is still true.
Seems to me like nowhere did He say that they can't be named post-mortem. "I hereby dub thee Sir Moosalot the Cheeseburger." *CHOMP* Problem solved, and the Lord must be pleased;)
What are you, some kind of a liberal or something?;-)
It was this weird looking three-legged green alien that landed in my back yard and I shot it. Want a pound of it?"
No, half a pound will be plenty to try it. Set the slicer at about 15, will you?
You can look at writing claiming Negros are closer to Gorillas than Caucasians are and calling for the extinction of all Negroes, Chimps and Gorillas and say with a straight face that you don't see how a charge of racism is relevant? You think the claim that Causians are superior to all other races is a valid point? You're a sick puppy, you know that?
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man
So yes, at least some Evolutionists didn't care if some 'animals' became extinct. I think there's not just some slight trace of racism in that paragraph, but a general callousness towards life that is anti-survival, even the survival of the "more evolved" parts of the human race and not just their 'inferiors'. However, I expect to get modded down for this one. Darwin is a Holy Prophet to some people, and the truth can't be allowed to tarnish the Prophet's name.
You've thoroughly covered all the bases, and surely no one could disagree.
If the Jews and Christians are right, the second commandment, given to Adam before he even fell, was to name all the beasts.* Nothing in the Bible says that duty has been taken off Man's shoulders. It's pretty hard to fufill that one if you kill them all off before a cladistic taxonomist can at least hang some Latin on them. Personally, I'm makeing sure a substantial part of my tithe goes to support Field Biology expeditions.
*The first one was very roughly "Eat stuff that grows on trees - but not that one!". This is why so many Christians, keeping to a literal reading of the KJV, are Vegans. Can't eat em, milk em, or make coats out of em, cause it might get in the way of namin em.
No game that is produced under time and market strengths can be "perfect", but any game can play to its own strengths. I'd like to see more games where the programmers don't undermine the game's own strong points.
Here's an older example of the wrong way: Hexen, by Raven Games under an Id liscense.
There are several things that counted as winning in a player's mind in an early Id style FPS: 1. Finishing the level. 2. Killing all the monsters on a level. 3. Beating your old time for 1 of the above. 4. Finding all the secrets. Note that Id games usually gave scores in these areas - actually reporting "'Secrets 3 of 6", "Monsters:131 of 143", and "Time 4:31" at the end of the level. That says that Id's designers regarded those as victory conditions and tried to get players to treat them the same way.
Obviously, some of these have to work against each other. You can't kill all the monsters if you take a short cut that detours right around some of them to save time. You can't cut your time by pokeing around looking for secret doors. If total fun is a combination of these, weighted by some factor that describes how important a given player thinks each one is, then total fun will never be the sum of maximal resultes in each category. But, players are free to replay with a different goal in mind, so replay motivation is high.
So, what on Earth prompted Raven to make new monsters spawn as long as the POV stays in the level? Ammo doesn't respawn, so simply staying too long means the character will always run out. You can't clean up a level and then look for secrets afterwards. If you didn't want to play like time was the most important factor, well, you were simply wrong to think that way. Raven paid to liscence an engine that could give the player 4 different possible victory conditions (and 4 sources of player satisfaction), and threw 2 of them out even though that code was already written for them, then made one that was usually optional manditory. The player's goal becomes finishing the game quickly, and replay motivation is low. What do you expect most players to say about a game that they finished fast and don't particularly want to play again?
There's lots of this: Develop lots of cool weapons (stong point), then put in a boss monster that is unkillable except by a special secret trick instead (play against your strong point).
Hire professional voices - use cheap semi-pro dialog writers.
Create some really cool opponents, do tricks with the terrain and the physics engine, and implement distinctive weather, lighting, traps, attack forms, new player character powers and sound effects - save all of them to throw at the player on the very last level of a 33 level game.
Do great graphics, then make most of the game take place in the dark. Make the commonest screen color brown. Include a flashlight, but no duct tape.
Microsoft can either win the suits at reasonable cost to themselves, and offer the features, or settle for a reasonable cost if it looks like they are losing, and still offer the features.
Microsoft could even gamble on a win at some point when the rational thing to do would be to settle instead, and still liscence the technology at a higher price they can still afford. It's a risk that may cost MS something overall, and it's usually ego driven, but it's a mistake that doesn't put the price of liscencing this sort of tech so high MS can't still potentially make a profit.
I suspect you are thinking that there could be other outcomes, like the companies they are litigating with winning, and then refusing to do business with Microsoft at any cost. Such outcomes are theoretically possible, but in practice almost never seen.
I've gone out on a limb before by predicting that the whole SCO fandango may end up with some normally rational companies like IBM persueing a scorched-earth policy at some short term cost to themselves. This time I'll predict that all parties involved will stay more focused on the bottom line than that.
No possible CGI is going to convince anyone over 7 years old that Cristopher Lee can do a 12 foot standing forward flip and live through it. Your brain is screaming "unbelievable" regardless of the quality.
Edison had the chance (repeatedly) to hire Tesla and keep him. Westinghouse ended up hiring him instead. Edison had chances to work with Westinghouse and many others in ways that could have been very profitable, but insisted on being a solo star ticket at practically all costs. Edison chose repeatedly to spend lots of money on patent litigation, demonstrations for the public, and other fluff to try and prove his points (electrocuting elephants isn't cheap!).
That's the essence of what the military calls command presence. When there are two passes through a mountain range, and they are both very much equal obstacles, a good commander swiftly declares, "That one, it's obviously better!", and gets everyone moving.
If you don't have enough clear criteria to evaluate a situation to your satisfaction, don't waste time evaluating it by ambiguous criteria. If the situation looks very much 50-50, then either choice is as right as right can be.
'Either bale might be wrong' paralizes - 'either bale must be right' frees.
We really can't tell how much anyone wants power in and of itself, and how much they have goals that "justify" their quest for power. I'm sure Hitler thought there were good things comeing that made a few sacrefices necessary. We can't really tell by racial doctrines either, unless you include racial superiority arguements without always requiring megadeaths to accompany them. It's worth remembering that the Italians under Mussolini were practically the epitomy of fascism, but they didn't round up their local Jews and other ethnic types nearly as much as the Germans did (near the very end of the war, the Italians did turn over about 4,500 Jews to Gestapo representitives, under strong pressure from Germany. That's a lot of individual tragedies, but when you look at it against the background of WW2, it almost disappears.).
Fascism seems to require telling your chosen audience they are special, and in some poorly defined way, superior to everyone else, and in blameing every complex problem on scapegoats that are well defined enough to make the problems look simple and solvable. Trotting out the Scapegoats whenver there's a reversal of fortune is one of the clearest signs of it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's it, I suddenly have a craving for some sort of little plastic desk clutterer that combines Penguin and Demon, some sort of great, red, horned penguin of the apocalypse. "Ooohhh, you got Tux on my Beastie!" "Ooohhh, you got beastie in my Tux." "Two great OS's that OS great together!".
When I go to a public frequented area to observe, I always bring along the spare generic 5 inch reflector and set it up on an obvious target like Saturn or the current newsworthy comet. The wife and I take turns keeping it on target and doing a little yadda-yadda for the folks. Any promising kid who seems to actually know what the difference between a star and a nebula is, we steer them towards somebody with a bigger rig and a little patience now and then, but we prescreen the types who are loud and obnoxious or can't keep their fingers off the knobs.
We have a 12 inch for real observing, plus lots of thanks from all the dog walkers and families with kids, and lots of offers to share viewing from the guys with the portable Liquid Nitrogen cooled CCD rigs, 18's and various other really good gear because we are keeping the most ignorant types off their butts.
"They should start a big campaign for birth-control all over the world and tackle the root of the problem."
"They" did - the last I looked, the overlap between large (500$ and up) contributers to Greenpeace and to Planned Parenthood was over 75%. Other numbers are at least roughly similar.
Rephrasing "they" as Nadar voters instead of Greenpeace supporters gives even higher correlations. The chance that a Nadar supporter that donates to anything at all will donate to at least one of three organizations on a multi-year basis is over 95%: (Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood). The chance for at least 2 out of 3 is over 85%.
I'm not entirely sure I disagree with them. People who advocate "natural" methods of population limitation tend to ignore that nature's prefrred methods seem to be war, famine, pestilence, and death. It's actually worse than your arguement directly implies, as if population becomes stable, energy demand will continue to increase, as most of the existing population will still want to move up to home ownership, blue jeans for the kids, cable TV, clean drinking water, SUVs, and sewage treatment lifestyles.
The executives of a public company would face a stockholder suit for NOT doing it.
This threat is way over-rated.
1. Shareholders sue executives either way. They sue because the stock didn't make them enough money. If the company doesn't do something legal and (potentially)profitable, that's just the excuse they use. If the company does something morally wrong and legal and the expected profits don't result, they sue on that excuse instead. An executive may be able to tell you in advance what is legal and be 100% reliable in that opinion, but none of them can guarentee in advance what is going to be profitable. There is literally no such thing as "morally wrong but legal and profitable", just "legal now, and possibly profitable in the future".
2. Stockholders may file these suits, but they very seldom win them. It takes special exemptions, like the ones in Sarbanes-Oxley, to give a shareholder much chance of actually winning. (and S-O is written exactly so as not to support suits for not doing everything that might be legal. In fact it's quite the contrary - the easiest way to win a S-O based lawsuit is to show the company didn't disclose that there might be an ethical backlash from business partners or consumers over the executive's sharp dealings).
3. The source of this claim is executives who are engaging in sharp business practices, and justifying their behavior. The same people who open sweat shops in third world countries and practice age discrimination to keep pension costs down are in a situation where they can lie in press statements and not face the penalties they would for lieing in court or on an SEC form, and they make this claim as part of justifying their business strategy, and that's where the claim starts, and yet so many people take it uncritically.
A very good arguement, and I hope you don't mind if I nitpick about one point:
We don't just give creators a temporary monopoly, we (meaning taxpayers) pay the costs of enforcing a temporary monopoly, especially now that many copyright violations are criminalized.
This is one reason our greatly lengthened copyright law is a bad thing.
1. Works typically bring in most of their money in the first few years. The benefit to the author usually declines as the works age.
2. Costs to enforce go up with age, and often go up non-linearly. When you have to start researching what company sold what rights to whom, 40 and 50 and sometimes 80 years ago, and when a work has passed through, say, 5 or 6 now defunct company's hands, proving who has infringed on just what becomes very expensive.
Repeatedly scaling up costs to get repeatedly decreasing benefits is a stupid solution at best to just about any problem.
That's really common. I've worked about 20 elections so far, and at primaries you constantly get people wanting to have one box or lever so they can vote for the party without having to do so much work as punch six or eight of them itty bitty lil' boxes.
When both parties have primaries on the same ballot, I always get asked why we didn't just set up one machine just for Republicans and one just for Democrats. When only one party offers a primary, there's always at least one person who claims I'm part of some sort of conspiracy to keep the other party from having one, or somehow stop their candidate from getting votes.
In presidential primaries, there's always 10 or so people who talk like they think their candidate will be President that night, and not just their party's nominee.
At general elections, you get people who want to vote for one presidential candidate, and another party's vice-president - people who want to vote directly for president and not for the electors, and people who want to vote by party when it's not a primary at all, and demand I take all those independant's names off the lists so they can find their party easier.
When we close for the evening, our machines print an extra copy of the totals, which we post at the polling place door for the press to read if they want to check on separate precinct's results. I've had press people complain that I didn't print out one strip with all the machine's totals instead, and people want me to print them another copy, and mail it to them before their paper's deadline (Yeah, I can tell you at 2:30 PM what the total will be at 8 PM, and the time traveling mailmen will get it to you the day before I post it, Um-hum.).
I've had people call the location, asking me to delay sombody else so they could vote first, or stop their wife from canceling their vote (usually they get connected to a high school secretary or sombeody like that, because, thank God, they can't figure out how to get through to the poll workers directly).
I've never had a candidate hang around inside the polling place when they didn't have a right to be there, but I have had candidates come in to vote at their home precinct, carefully follow all the rules, and someone demand I throw them out. It's amazing how many people think that anyone running for office isn't allowed to vote.
This is what the RIAA is doing as well. I haven't bought a CD from an RIAA member in about 2 years. I haven't bootlegged anything either. But by them, I'm a pirate. I can't possibly be boycotting them, by their definitions, I simply must be pirating music instead.
Same thing here: I can't possibly be installing legitimate freeware, I simply must be pirating software instead.
I'm getting damned tired of playing fair with these people and being called a thief in return, just to hide the fact that I'm a dissatisfied former customer. I don't want to start violating their copyrights to get even - I want to get even within the system - they learn to respect their honest customers again, or go bankrupt quickly.
The whole "smallpox to the Indians" claim has been frequently touted and exaggerated by some of the more militant Atheists, who have emphasized not that Jeffery Amhurst was a white guy, but that he called himself a Christian. Some (not all, but a fair selection) of the web sources have tended to take the claims of widespread, deliberate spread of the disease uncritically. In trying to decide just how common the use of Smallpox as germ warfare really was, I reccomend disregarding two types of sites:
1. Those that are mostly anti-Christian first, and historical second (at best). These mention Amhurst as an example of the failings of the Christian religion, but don't discuss what the beliefs of Cpt. Ecuyer and others were (several of the people who may have deliberately tried to pass Smallpox on to Native Americans were apparently "freethinkers". In most of that handfull of cases where action was discussed, we don't know if anything deliberate actually happened, nor do we know if a single attempt actually worked. The chance some white guy caught Smallpox trying to infect some Native Americans was always higher than the chance he succeeded). Any site that claims to even have a firm estimate on the numbers of Native Americans deliberately killed by such methods is lieing with statistics, at best.
2. Those sites that try to make the same points re. Colombus and other earlier white guys who did not yet even know of the germ theory of disease, as though they were morally responsible for not knowing it yet. Claims that Columbus was in posession of secret knowledge that made it possible for him to use germs as a deliberate weapon should be a dead give away that the site has an axe to grind.
Generation 33 = One for everybody on Earth, plus about 10% overage. Let's stop there and start making stuff with them.
In fact, what will probably happen is everyone who gets one going will make a copy or two (on the average) for people near and dear (for average values of dear). Then they will turn them to making other stuff. That means it will spread much more slowly than exponential growth. A slower growth rate is good from a control standpoint, bad if you are waiting for them to spread to your area and lack the skills to jump-start the process.
What's neat is having someone make their own replicator simultaniously teaches them how to use their copy for making other stuff, unlike sex.
Here's the Rotten Tomatoes take on it:
d /
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/crack_in_the_worl
Both the liquid and solid phases are really anomalous:
The liquid outer core is made of mostly the same stuff as the deep mantle, Iron with about 5% assorted dense metals mixed in. It's just hot enought to be liquid. The boudary region between them shades gradually from solid to liquid, so what we mean by outer core is essentially arbitrary. Geologists assign a level where it's 'liquid enough', as the boundary.
The solid inner core is a single Iron crystal. 1,500 Km across, and with damned near no contaminants. We guess this because earthquake waves passing through the inner core speed up if moving along the directions of the crystal lattices, and the pattern matches both it being a crystal and having the structure typical for iron at such enormous pressures. The boundary between inner and outer core is much crisper than the one between outer core and mantle.
A couple of years ago, I took part in a project to build desktop PCs for low income families with high-school age kids.
We made about 200 total boxes. When we got towards the end, we had about 3 dozen donated motherboards that could only be set to a max of a 450 Mhz processor and PC 100 DIMMs for RAM, but had 2x AGP slots, and a bunch of P2-500 and 600 CPUs, PC 133 RAM, and single speed AGP video cards to match up. We ended up turning out a bunch of machines that were all basically underclocked in several ways at once.
These have tended to last surprisingly well, compared to the rest. This was charity, and there was no way to regularly survey all the recipients afterwards, find out who had gotten other tech support, installed other hardware and so on to make it a scientifically accurate conclusion, but just as an impression, there have been no power supply failures or burned up CPUs or RAM in that group, and at least a few in each of those categories for the others.
Move? Why?
Stewart Tartan Bumblebees!
Whoops, got so angry I didn't proofread enough. That "Causians" is of course meant to be a second use of the word "Caucasians", Sorry.
I'm trying hard not to flat out hate some people here. I've seen it claimed before that Darwin wasn't speaking with approval of these hypothetical extinctions, simply stating it as a likelyhood. Maybe some people really believe that. As for the rest, the quote is accurate, and speaks on its own - shoot the messenger all you want, the message is still true.
Seems to me like nowhere did He say that they can't be named post-mortem. "I hereby dub thee Sir Moosalot the Cheeseburger." *CHOMP* Problem solved, and the Lord must be pleased ;)
;-)
What are you, some kind of a liberal or something?
It was this weird looking three-legged green alien that landed in my back yard and I shot it. Want a pound of it?"
No, half a pound will be plenty to try it. Set the slicer at about 15, will you?
You can look at writing claiming Negros are closer to Gorillas than Caucasians are and calling for the extinction of all Negroes, Chimps and Gorillas and say with a straight face that you don't see how a charge of racism is relevant? You think the claim that Causians are superior to all other races is a valid point? You're a sick puppy, you know that?
There's an original quote from Darwin himself:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man
So yes, at least some Evolutionists didn't care if some 'animals' became extinct. I think there's not just some slight trace of racism in that paragraph, but a general callousness towards life that is anti-survival, even the survival of the "more evolved" parts of the human race and not just their 'inferiors'. However, I expect to get modded down for this one. Darwin is a Holy Prophet to some people, and the truth can't be allowed to tarnish the Prophet's name.
You've thoroughly covered all the bases, and surely no one could disagree.
If the Jews and Christians are right, the second commandment, given to Adam before he even fell, was to name all the beasts.* Nothing in the Bible says that duty has been taken off Man's shoulders. It's pretty hard to fufill that one if you kill them all off before a cladistic taxonomist can at least hang some Latin on them. Personally, I'm makeing sure a substantial part of my tithe goes to support Field Biology expeditions.
*The first one was very roughly "Eat stuff that grows on trees - but not that one!". This is why so many Christians, keeping to a literal reading of the KJV, are Vegans. Can't eat em, milk em, or make coats out of em, cause it might get in the way of namin em.
No game that is produced under time and market strengths can be "perfect", but any game can play to its own strengths. I'd like to see more games where the programmers don't undermine the game's own strong points.
:131 of 143", and "Time 4:31" at the end of the level. That says that Id's designers regarded those as victory conditions and tried to get players to treat them the same way.
Here's an older example of the wrong way: Hexen, by Raven Games under an Id liscense.
There are several things that counted as winning in a player's mind in an early Id style FPS:
1. Finishing the level.
2. Killing all the monsters on a level.
3. Beating your old time for 1 of the above.
4. Finding all the secrets.
Note that Id games usually gave scores in these areas - actually reporting "'Secrets 3 of 6", "Monsters
Obviously, some of these have to work against each other. You can't kill all the monsters if you take a short cut that detours right around some of them to save time. You can't cut your time by pokeing around looking for secret doors. If total fun is a combination of these, weighted by some factor that describes how important a given player thinks each one is, then total fun will never be the sum of maximal resultes in each category. But, players are free to replay with a different goal in mind, so replay motivation is high.
So, what on Earth prompted Raven to make new monsters spawn as long as the POV stays in the level? Ammo doesn't respawn, so simply staying too long means the character will always run out. You can't clean up a level and then look for secrets afterwards. If you didn't want to play like time was the most important factor, well, you were simply wrong to think that way. Raven paid to liscence an engine that could give the player 4 different possible victory conditions (and 4 sources of player satisfaction), and threw 2 of them out even though that code was already written for them, then made one that was usually optional manditory. The player's goal becomes finishing the game quickly, and replay motivation is low. What do you expect most players to say about a game that they finished fast and don't particularly want to play again?
There's lots of this: Develop lots of cool weapons (stong point), then put in a boss monster that is unkillable except by a special secret trick instead (play against your strong point).
Hire professional voices - use cheap semi-pro dialog writers.
Create some really cool opponents, do tricks with the terrain and the physics engine, and implement distinctive weather, lighting, traps, attack forms, new player character powers and sound effects - save all of them to throw at the player on the very last level of a 33 level game.
Do great graphics, then make most of the game take place in the dark. Make the commonest screen color brown. Include a flashlight, but no duct tape.
Microsoft can either win the suits at reasonable cost to themselves, and offer the features, or settle for a reasonable cost if it looks like they are losing, and still offer the features.
Microsoft could even gamble on a win at some point when the rational thing to do would be to settle instead, and still liscence the technology at a higher price they can still afford. It's a risk that may cost MS something overall, and it's usually ego driven, but it's a mistake that doesn't put the price of liscencing this sort of tech so high MS can't still potentially make a profit.
I suspect you are thinking that there could be other outcomes, like the companies they are litigating with winning, and then refusing to do business with Microsoft at any cost. Such outcomes are theoretically possible, but in practice almost never seen.
I've gone out on a limb before by predicting that the whole SCO fandango may end up with some normally rational companies like IBM persueing a scorched-earth policy at some short term cost to themselves. This time I'll predict that all parties involved will stay more focused on the bottom line than that.
No possible CGI is going to convince anyone over 7 years old that Cristopher Lee can do a 12 foot standing forward flip and live through it. Your brain is screaming "unbelievable" regardless of the quality.
Edison had the chance (repeatedly) to hire Tesla and keep him. Westinghouse ended up hiring him instead. Edison had chances to work with Westinghouse and many others in ways that could have been very profitable, but insisted on being a solo star ticket at practically all costs. Edison chose repeatedly to spend lots of money on patent litigation, demonstrations for the public, and other fluff to try and prove his points (electrocuting elephants isn't cheap!).
That's the essence of what the military calls command presence. When there are two passes through a mountain range, and they are both very much equal obstacles, a good commander swiftly declares, "That one, it's obviously better!", and gets everyone moving.
If you don't have enough clear criteria to evaluate a situation to your satisfaction, don't waste time evaluating it by ambiguous criteria. If the situation looks very much 50-50, then either choice is as right as right can be.
'Either bale might be wrong' paralizes - 'either bale must be right' frees.
"unlike hitler and other fascists in history"
We really can't tell how much anyone wants power in and of itself, and how much they have goals that "justify" their quest for power. I'm sure Hitler thought there were good things comeing that made a few sacrefices necessary. We can't really tell by racial doctrines either, unless you include racial superiority arguements without always requiring megadeaths to accompany them. It's worth remembering that the Italians under Mussolini were practically the epitomy of fascism, but they didn't round up their local Jews and other ethnic types nearly as much as the Germans did (near the very end of the war, the Italians did turn over about 4,500 Jews to Gestapo representitives, under strong pressure from Germany. That's a lot of individual tragedies, but when you look at it against the background of WW2, it almost disappears.).
Fascism seems to require telling your chosen audience they are special, and in some poorly defined way, superior to everyone else, and in blameing every complex problem on scapegoats that are well defined enough to make the problems look simple and solvable. Trotting out the Scapegoats whenver there's a reversal of fortune is one of the clearest signs of it.