What's that, Lassie? Little Timmy has fallen into the sun's gravity well?
Lassie: *BARK*
...aaand what do you suppose we do about that? Strap him to a rocket, write "Voyager 3" on his face with a sharpie and shoot him out of the solar system?
Somehow I don't think a man with the awesome power of yoghurt would be particularly fearsome. What can he do? Get eaten by other people and aid their immune system?
In West Germany, copper was always dominating, so we don't have any bandwidth limits here (depending on the quality of cables installed on the way to the home).
...depending on where the nearest DSLAM is. I live in a more rural area where one or maybe two DSLAMs per city are deemed adequate. The result? The people in my neighborhood get a whopping 3 Gbit, even though the lowest possible plan T-Online offers is for 6 Gbit. Will this change? Perhaps somewhere in the next ten years.
That's the downside of a country where a single internet technology (DSL in this case) reigns supreme: Without competing technologies there might be no alternative infrastructure that might perform better. Of course it's still better than the USA where rural areas can get both lacking infrastructure and high prices due to lack of competition.
Often enough, the EXTENSIONS! contain that one obscure feature nobody else has.
In my case only a Firefox extension (and as of Fx4 the browser proper) offers tab groups. I tend to work on various projects concurrently and to open tabs for each of them. Juggling them all and shoving unused ones off into bookmarks would be excessively tedious. With tab groups I can neatly organize them according to topic, save and restore entire goups at a time etc.
Would I use Opera if it supported tab groups? Actually, probably not because for some reason I never liked the Opera UI. But I'd consider switching to Safari (on OS X, not Windows) or a Chrome offshoot with a more traditional GUI if they had tab groups. Alas, they don't, neither natively nor per extension. Thus I stick with the second-slowest browser on the web.
Extensions are great in that they allow people to add the kind of functionality browser designers think to be too obscure to put into the browser proper. Like something that allows you to color-code your tabs or craft and send custom HTTP requests. Those can be killer features for people with unconventional requirements.
Of course if someone only uses Opera because it has extensions they're either an extension developer or a tool.
In other terms all I need to do to block all data traffic between the United States and any country I wish is to have a botnet in that country and have it DDOS a high-profile US site? Yeah, that sounds awesome.
Unless of course all ISPs in that country will submit to whatever the American government says based on the promise that American ISPs will cater to every whim of every foreign government. Well, every whim that involves shutting down arbitrary network nodes.
...Why do I get the feeling that no sane government would ever keep that kind of promise?
Note that "it's not our fault, your smartphone sucks" is exactly the attitude that will convince people not to do business with you anymore. The marketplace explicitly advertised your app as being compatible with their phone, thus if it doesn't work it's your fault (as, as I understand it, the developer can tell the marketplace which devices the application is compatible with). An app that doesn't work on their phone by design never should have been made available to them.
Your customer doesn't know whether you're right about the firmware being wrong, they just know that your app doesn't work as advertised and you're unwilling to change it. And that's bad customer support.
Yes, it is IE6 all over again but this time you don't have the luxury of not catering to it. With Internet Explorer you could always point to other free, superior browsers that implemented the spec better. With Motoblur I'm fairly certain that replacing it with a different Android implementation is not possible without voiding the warranty. Either code your app to conform to what Motoblur does or take it out of the Motoblur-accessible marketplace once you notice the issue.
People complaining to Microsoft about IE6 did exactly nothing. Why should people complaining to anyone about Motoblur be different? And why should people do this for you after paying you money? Unless your app is free the onus is on you to ensure it either works on their device or isn't available to them in the first place.
1. Prior to presidential elections, get IP protection for all likely campaign elements.
2. When campaigns start, send C&D letters to all parties.
3. ????
4. Profit.
Actually, since console graphics are meaningless next to sales numbers (this is business, after all) the winner is Nintendo, with Microsoft and Sony being also-rans. Using a souped-up Gamecube (which sold as often as the PS3 and the X360 combined) and a portable system with four megabytes of RAM (which sold as often as the PS3, X360 and PSP combined) Nintendo has outpaced them.
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft's promo videos are pre-rendered and Sony's are not; Nintendo's look like they're from ten years ago and people buy Nintendo. In today's market, graphics don't mean as much as they used to and that's why Microsoft and Sony are busy trying to compete about the sizes of their new-and-improved manhoods while Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank, selling people yesterday's tech for today's money.
So that's another reason why Sony might rethink their strategy: Neither in the console market nor in the portable market can their more powerful devices compete with Nintendo's old but innvotative ones. Sony can only hope for the second place this generation.
While Sony paid a lot of money for the Cell, Nintendo developed an input system using not particularly new tech like motion sensors and IR imagery. And then Sony imitated it (= paid for much of the same development), giving Nintendo even more of a development cost advantage. Likewise, the NDS combines fairly conservative tech with a touchscreen. The PSP family has more powerful (= expensive) innards and a UMD drive, which again represents development cost.
Combine that with the fact that Nintendo's systems outsold Sony's by a wide margin (and Nintendo made a profit on them while Sony treated theirs as loss leaders) and you see that the company that relied on clever human interaction design made a lot of money and can afford whatever the next generation brings while the one that relied on clever hardware design... Well, they're Sony so they're not exactly poor but they could be doing better.
PS: I know I shouldn't be feeding obvious trolls but hey, I can always use some extra karma.;)
And president, with 100% confidence. NELL is uncertain, however, whether president Schwarzenegger qualifies as a person. (Well, that makes sense for a politician.) Schwarzenegger might have starred in movies such as California Governor, James Cameron and Don't Belong In The List and may possibly be the CEO of Barack. On her off time, Arnold might coach the teams China and Energy (one of which possibly won the coveted Term trophy) and might be active in the music genres of Fitness, Image and Two.
The uncertain facts would be whole lot less funny if one could easily see what probabilities NELL assigns to them.
Interesting are also the artist "song telephone see Anja Garbarek Briefly Shaking" and the well-known condiment "chicken recipe time". (Actually, NELL seems to have an odd fixation on the idea of recipes being condiments.)
Most of the "facts" NELL has learned are true or reasonably close so it's quite impressive - I'd like to see what NELL is capable of with a bit more training. Well, technically I could but I'm not going to let NELL spam me on Twitter for ages.
Your idea is intriguing but with the lack of accountability as to who is consuming what when, the content industry would never allow the distribution of movies and shows over your new network. Without multimedia capabilities, who would use it?
I don't particularly care about the XBox. The last non-portable console I actually was interested in was the PS2.
This comes from the point of view of a casual gamer who is not concerned with having the latest and greatest but has a brother who is. I've seen the X360 perform on a large HDTV set and I've seen the PS3 perform on the same set. Both look good. The Cell may outperform the X360 by a large margin if given enough time but that remains to be seen. Right now I'd put them as reasonably close (= to someone who isn't an expert on console graphics the PS3 is not obviously superior, which is exactly what I wrote).
Don't get me wrong, the Cell is powerful. Nobody would use the X360 for a scientific cluster but the PS3 was popular for that until Sony killed Other OS. However, that power is not easy to work with. They had a very impressive realtime raytracing demo on the GCDC with the SPEs doing the raytracing work and the PPE coordinating and compositing everything. Very nice.
But at the same time there were a lot of workshops (and at the GC proper, a lot of developers) who pointed out that getting an engine to work on the PS3 is much more work than on more traditional systems because it's a completely different programming model. Treat the SPEs as small CPUs and watch your framerate go to the low single digits. Ignore them and you're wasting most of the system's power. The SPEs have a tiny amount of RAM and you're expected to code in such a way that you deliver data to them in a single DMA operation. If your data set is too big for the SPE or your packet size does not align with what the Cell can do in a single DMA operation you plug up the bus and all SPEs starve.
It may very well be that the PS3 is a late bloomer and that we will see more and more optimized graphics for the Cell. Then again, Microsoft might be able to afford to just release a new XBox sooner than Sony can relace the PS3 as (if I remember correctly) the PS3 was really expensive to develop.
The big question is whether the PS3's approach of having a really powerful but hard to use processor is viable in the marketplace. If Microsoft can just toss out consoles at lower development cost and Nintendo outsells both of them by delivering cheap systems to casual gamers, Sony might be facing trouble.
For games and graphics this it thought to be good, hence its inclusion in the playstation 3.
Of course game developers tend to be a bit more sceptical. The Cell requires a very specific way of programming (don't align your data flow to the processor's capabilities and performance nose-dives), which doesn't go over well with people who have limited time to make their game/engine work on several different platforms, most of which work roughly the same.
I attended the Games Convention Developers Conference 2008. A number of panelists mentioned that what they presented was harder to get working on the Cell due to its unique requirements. It really does require a different approach to every other system on the market.
Add to that the fact that the PS3 doesn't appear to deliver obviously superior performance to the more conventional X360 and the question arises whether the Cell is worth the hassle in the gaming sector. Scientific programming can afford to write system-specific code and jump through hoops to attain maximum performance (after all, 10% faster execution speed may mean their calculations finish a month or more sooner). Game developers, on the other hand, are on a very tight development schedule and might make a better game with a sightly less powerful but conventional platform to develop for.
Yes. Between all of the big players there's more than enough money to buy off enough politicians to push through such a law. Just give them an election period.
Remember that Microsoft is using DirectX for hardware acceleration wherever applicable. While you could probably take these parts and implement them on something else, say GDI+, you'd still have to make sure they behave identically and you'd have to use a more powerful computer since the CPU now does work that Microsoft assumes is done by the GPU.
I don't doubt that India can create a useful operating system from scratch. I just doubt that they can make a fully compatible white-room Windows clone.
What version of Windows are we talking about? 9x? NT/2k/XP? Vista/7? If they want something that will run Windows software in the future they will need to reverse-engineer and implement not just the Windows kernel but also everything on top of it including much of DirectX and the entire.NET platform. And they will need to keep doing so, matching every new feature Microsoft introduces while remaining binary-compatible, all without falling behind more than a few months.
Excuse me if I assume that this OS will be scrapped and replaced with something more feasible. While a sufficiently determined government could probably do it the costs involved would be ridiculously high. Just migrating the entire country over to OpenBSD would most likely be cheaper, especially in the long run.
What's the goal? To improve the education process or to make sure that Laura Ingalls cannot recognize it as a school?
The latter. Which is why I propose a dramatically changed school.
First thing each day is homeroom. Except is't a homerave, each weekday from 6 AM through 11 AM, attendance mandatory. Nothing like MDMA and five hours of consecutive dancing to get those little brains in motion.
After the rave there's a ten-minute lunch break. If the kids can't eat fast enough, another dose of MDMA might help them either do it or get througn the rest of the day.
After lunch there's math. Except this isn't math it's X-TREME MATH!. Yes, the exclamation mark is mandatory. EXTREME MATH! is like regular math except everyone's on skateboards in a half-pipe and the teacher gets to hit students who answer incorrectly or can't perform tricks while answering with a baseball bat.
Then there's fear class where the students learn about the many ways they could be randomly killed or maimed without being able to do anything about it. At random intervals the teacher will actually bring the thing in question into the classroom and see which students can get away the fastest.
After that is Everything Else class, which covers all that other nonsense. Because modern school is all about adrenaline, baby, the students have to memorize what the teacher tells them while climbing up ever-lowering ropes in hopes of not getting mauled by a hungry tiger.
Computers are used, obviously, to coordinate all of this and to quickly alert paramedics and/or inform the next of kin.
If you take "creator" to mean "cause of our universe" then the sentence stands as another universe would work perfectly fine as a creator.
It's a good thing you didn't read further, though; the logic only gets more and more shaky as the proof goes on. For example, in the end the proof introduces "and this cause we're talking about is the Christian god" as a premise (well, two premises actually) and then uses that premise to derive "God exists". A shorter version that requires far fewer unprovable premises would be:
Something exists.
This something is the Christian god.
Therefore god exists.
Re:Can atheists refute one simple fact?
on
Largest Genome Ever
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· Score: 1, Informative
The universe had a beginning
[Premise I] HadBeginning(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
A widespread assumption that can reasonably be introduced as a premise.
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
[Premise II] HadBeginning(x) -> CausedBy(x, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Not neccessarily something I agree with but you can of course introduce any premise you like.
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
[Sentence III] CausedBySomething(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This sentence follows from the premises you introduced.
Every part of the universe is dependent
[Premise IV] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I assume you meant "dependent on something". Still, there's no reason not to allow this new premise.
If every part is dependent, then the whole universe must also be dependent
[Premise V] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) -> Dependent(Universe, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Since this follows from nothing you introduced so far, I assume you want to introduce it as a new premise.
Therefore, the whole universe is dependent for existence right now on some Independent Being
[Sentence VI] Dependent(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.) You made an error here. There are no premises from which follows that the universe must be dependent on an Independent Being. It could also be dependent on itself or a part of itself.
Every event that had a beginning had a sufficient cause
[Premise VII] HadBeginning(x) -> HadSufficientCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I don't see why we shouldn't introduce this premise, even though it might have been better style to introduce all the basic premises first.
The universe had a beginning
You just repeated sentence I.
Therefore, the universe had a sufficient Cause
[Sentence VII] HadBeginning(Universe) -> HadSufficientCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises I and VII.
Every effect has a cause
[Premise VIII] IsEffect(x) -> HasCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
The universe is an effect
[Premise IX] IsEffect(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Therefore, the universe has a Cause
[Sentence X] HasCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises VIII and IX.
An infinite number of moments cannot be traversed
If an infinite number of moments had to elapse before today, then today would never have come
But today has come
Therefore, an infinite number of moments have not elapsed before today (i.e., the universe had a beginning)
I'm going to skip assigning sentences to these since all you did with them was to restate premise I.
But whatever has a beginning is caused by something else
Hence, there must be a Cause (Creator) of the universe
These two sentences are just repetitions of premise II and sentence III.
An actual infinite cannot exist
[Premise XI] !\is x: Infinite(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Given the fact that (for example) the set of rationa
I understand that most gun owners are responsible adults who don't intend to harm anyone. Guns just make it very easy to do so, whether by intent, neccessity, misjudgement or even accident.
When I wrote that gun wielders are "ready to kill someone" I really should have written "able to easily kill someone". These things are just intrinsically dangerous and they make anyone holding them dangerous by proxy. Thus someone not accustomed to their presence tends to get nervous around one. Well, if they're smart and don't mistake it for something harmless...
To paraphrase and slightly extend Paracelsus: Everything is a poison and no poison. It's the dosage (and means of administering) that makes the difference.
Of course you can look elsewhere. Countries with more lax drug laws seem like the ideal place to find information or conduct studies regarding the effects on certain drugs on the user and on society if legally available.
In cases where no other country has the drug in question legally avaiable but some state wants to legalize it, a compromise may be possible: The state may legalize the drug in question as long as appropriate restrictions are in place to hinder the spread to states where it's illegal; during this time they have to conduct thorough studies to determine the effects of the legalization. After a certain period has passed there is a decision on the federal level whether or not states may lift or lighten the ban on the drug.
Of course more likely is that the parties will fling about sensationalist nonsense until everyone agrees that LSD is the root cause of AIDS and violent video games.
Whether or not a substance is awful depends on the situation. For instance, opiates can really mess up your body if abused but in hospitals they're a valuable resource for patients in heavy pain.
I agree with your post but I just wanted to point out that the statement "drugs are awful" is a bit sweeping for my taste. They're poison but sometimes they're useful poison.
Slashdot Mirror
What's that, Lassie? Little Timmy has fallen into the sun's gravity well?
...aaand what do you suppose we do about that? Strap him to a rocket, write "Voyager 3" on his face with a sharpie and shoot him out of the solar system?
Lassie: *BARK*
Lassie: *BARK*
Lassie, you're an evil little bitch.
Lassie: *BARK* *wags tail*
Oh, sorry. I forgot to add the disclaimer that my post is only valid in places where G equals M.
Somehow I don't think a man with the awesome power of yoghurt would be particularly fearsome. What can he do? Get eaten by other people and aid their immune system?
In West Germany, copper was always dominating, so we don't have any bandwidth limits here (depending on the quality of cables installed on the way to the home).
...depending on where the nearest DSLAM is. I live in a more rural area where one or maybe two DSLAMs per city are deemed adequate. The result? The people in my neighborhood get a whopping 3 Gbit, even though the lowest possible plan T-Online offers is for 6 Gbit. Will this change? Perhaps somewhere in the next ten years.
That's the downside of a country where a single internet technology (DSL in this case) reigns supreme: Without competing technologies there might be no alternative infrastructure that might perform better. Of course it's still better than the USA where rural areas can get both lacking infrastructure and high prices due to lack of competition.
Often enough, the EXTENSIONS! contain that one obscure feature nobody else has.
In my case only a Firefox extension (and as of Fx4 the browser proper) offers tab groups. I tend to work on various projects concurrently and to open tabs for each of them. Juggling them all and shoving unused ones off into bookmarks would be excessively tedious. With tab groups I can neatly organize them according to topic, save and restore entire goups at a time etc.
Would I use Opera if it supported tab groups? Actually, probably not because for some reason I never liked the Opera UI. But I'd consider switching to Safari (on OS X, not Windows) or a Chrome offshoot with a more traditional GUI if they had tab groups. Alas, they don't, neither natively nor per extension. Thus I stick with the second-slowest browser on the web.
Extensions are great in that they allow people to add the kind of functionality browser designers think to be too obscure to put into the browser proper. Like something that allows you to color-code your tabs or craft and send custom HTTP requests. Those can be killer features for people with unconventional requirements.
Of course if someone only uses Opera because it has extensions they're either an extension developer or a tool.
In other terms all I need to do to block all data traffic between the United States and any country I wish is to have a botnet in that country and have it DDOS a high-profile US site? Yeah, that sounds awesome.
...Why do I get the feeling that no sane government would ever keep that kind of promise?
Unless of course all ISPs in that country will submit to whatever the American government says based on the promise that American ISPs will cater to every whim of every foreign government. Well, every whim that involves shutting down arbitrary network nodes.
Note that "it's not our fault, your smartphone sucks" is exactly the attitude that will convince people not to do business with you anymore. The marketplace explicitly advertised your app as being compatible with their phone, thus if it doesn't work it's your fault (as, as I understand it, the developer can tell the marketplace which devices the application is compatible with). An app that doesn't work on their phone by design never should have been made available to them.
Your customer doesn't know whether you're right about the firmware being wrong, they just know that your app doesn't work as advertised and you're unwilling to change it. And that's bad customer support.
Yes, it is IE6 all over again but this time you don't have the luxury of not catering to it. With Internet Explorer you could always point to other free, superior browsers that implemented the spec better. With Motoblur I'm fairly certain that replacing it with a different Android implementation is not possible without voiding the warranty. Either code your app to conform to what Motoblur does or take it out of the Motoblur-accessible marketplace once you notice the issue.
People complaining to Microsoft about IE6 did exactly nothing. Why should people complaining to anyone about Motoblur be different? And why should people do this for you after paying you money? Unless your app is free the onus is on you to ensure it either works on their device or isn't available to them in the first place.
Portals are what you're not thinking in. They're also where all the cake is, as reputable sources tell me.
...or they're these AOLish websites offered by every single ISP, TV station, webmail provider, gas station...
1. Prior to presidential elections, get IP protection for all likely campaign elements.
2. When campaigns start, send C&D letters to all parties.
3. ????
4. Profit.
Actually, since console graphics are meaningless next to sales numbers (this is business, after all) the winner is Nintendo, with Microsoft and Sony being also-rans. Using a souped-up Gamecube (which sold as often as the PS3 and the X360 combined) and a portable system with four megabytes of RAM (which sold as often as the PS3, X360 and PSP combined) Nintendo has outpaced them.
;)
It doesn't matter whether Microsoft's promo videos are pre-rendered and Sony's are not; Nintendo's look like they're from ten years ago and people buy Nintendo. In today's market, graphics don't mean as much as they used to and that's why Microsoft and Sony are busy trying to compete about the sizes of their new-and-improved manhoods while Nintendo is laughing all the way to the bank, selling people yesterday's tech for today's money.
So that's another reason why Sony might rethink their strategy: Neither in the console market nor in the portable market can their more powerful devices compete with Nintendo's old but innvotative ones. Sony can only hope for the second place this generation.
While Sony paid a lot of money for the Cell, Nintendo developed an input system using not particularly new tech like motion sensors and IR imagery. And then Sony imitated it (= paid for much of the same development), giving Nintendo even more of a development cost advantage. Likewise, the NDS combines fairly conservative tech with a touchscreen. The PSP family has more powerful (= expensive) innards and a UMD drive, which again represents development cost.
Combine that with the fact that Nintendo's systems outsold Sony's by a wide margin (and Nintendo made a profit on them while Sony treated theirs as loss leaders) and you see that the company that relied on clever human interaction design made a lot of money and can afford whatever the next generation brings while the one that relied on clever hardware design... Well, they're Sony so they're not exactly poor but they could be doing better.
PS: I know I shouldn't be feeding obvious trolls but hey, I can always use some extra karma.
And president, with 100% confidence. NELL is uncertain, however, whether president Schwarzenegger qualifies as a person. (Well, that makes sense for a politician.) Schwarzenegger might have starred in movies such as California Governor, James Cameron and Don't Belong In The List and may possibly be the CEO of Barack. On her off time, Arnold might coach the teams China and Energy (one of which possibly won the coveted Term trophy) and might be active in the music genres of Fitness, Image and Two.
The uncertain facts would be whole lot less funny if one could easily see what probabilities NELL assigns to them.
Interesting are also the artist "song telephone see Anja Garbarek Briefly Shaking" and the well-known condiment "chicken recipe time". (Actually, NELL seems to have an odd fixation on the idea of recipes being condiments.)
Most of the "facts" NELL has learned are true or reasonably close so it's quite impressive - I'd like to see what NELL is capable of with a bit more training. Well, technically I could but I'm not going to let NELL spam me on Twitter for ages.
Your idea is intriguing but with the lack of accountability as to who is consuming what when, the content industry would never allow the distribution of movies and shows over your new network. Without multimedia capabilities, who would use it?
I don't particularly care about the XBox. The last non-portable console I actually was interested in was the PS2.
This comes from the point of view of a casual gamer who is not concerned with having the latest and greatest but has a brother who is. I've seen the X360 perform on a large HDTV set and I've seen the PS3 perform on the same set. Both look good. The Cell may outperform the X360 by a large margin if given enough time but that remains to be seen. Right now I'd put them as reasonably close (= to someone who isn't an expert on console graphics the PS3 is not obviously superior, which is exactly what I wrote).
Don't get me wrong, the Cell is powerful. Nobody would use the X360 for a scientific cluster but the PS3 was popular for that until Sony killed Other OS. However, that power is not easy to work with. They had a very impressive realtime raytracing demo on the GCDC with the SPEs doing the raytracing work and the PPE coordinating and compositing everything. Very nice.
But at the same time there were a lot of workshops (and at the GC proper, a lot of developers) who pointed out that getting an engine to work on the PS3 is much more work than on more traditional systems because it's a completely different programming model. Treat the SPEs as small CPUs and watch your framerate go to the low single digits. Ignore them and you're wasting most of the system's power. The SPEs have a tiny amount of RAM and you're expected to code in such a way that you deliver data to them in a single DMA operation. If your data set is too big for the SPE or your packet size does not align with what the Cell can do in a single DMA operation you plug up the bus and all SPEs starve.
It may very well be that the PS3 is a late bloomer and that we will see more and more optimized graphics for the Cell. Then again, Microsoft might be able to afford to just release a new XBox sooner than Sony can relace the PS3 as (if I remember correctly) the PS3 was really expensive to develop.
The big question is whether the PS3's approach of having a really powerful but hard to use processor is viable in the marketplace. If Microsoft can just toss out consoles at lower development cost and Nintendo outsells both of them by delivering cheap systems to casual gamers, Sony might be facing trouble.
Of course game developers tend to be a bit more sceptical. The Cell requires a very specific way of programming (don't align your data flow to the processor's capabilities and performance nose-dives), which doesn't go over well with people who have limited time to make their game/engine work on several different platforms, most of which work roughly the same.
I attended the Games Convention Developers Conference 2008. A number of panelists mentioned that what they presented was harder to get working on the Cell due to its unique requirements. It really does require a different approach to every other system on the market.
Add to that the fact that the PS3 doesn't appear to deliver obviously superior performance to the more conventional X360 and the question arises whether the Cell is worth the hassle in the gaming sector. Scientific programming can afford to write system-specific code and jump through hoops to attain maximum performance (after all, 10% faster execution speed may mean their calculations finish a month or more sooner). Game developers, on the other hand, are on a very tight development schedule and might make a better game with a sightly less powerful but conventional platform to develop for.
Yes. Between all of the big players there's more than enough money to buy off enough politicians to push through such a law. Just give them an election period.
Remember that Microsoft is using DirectX for hardware acceleration wherever applicable. While you could probably take these parts and implement them on something else, say GDI+, you'd still have to make sure they behave identically and you'd have to use a more powerful computer since the CPU now does work that Microsoft assumes is done by the GPU.
I don't doubt that India can create a useful operating system from scratch. I just doubt that they can make a fully compatible white-room Windows clone.
What version of Windows are we talking about? 9x? NT/2k/XP? Vista/7? If they want something that will run Windows software in the future they will need to reverse-engineer and implement not just the Windows kernel but also everything on top of it including much of DirectX and the entire .NET platform. And they will need to keep doing so, matching every new feature Microsoft introduces while remaining binary-compatible, all without falling behind more than a few months.
Excuse me if I assume that this OS will be scrapped and replaced with something more feasible. While a sufficiently determined government could probably do it the costs involved would be ridiculously high. Just migrating the entire country over to OpenBSD would most likely be cheaper, especially in the long run.
The latter. Which is why I propose a dramatically changed school.
First thing each day is homeroom. Except is't a homerave, each weekday from 6 AM through 11 AM, attendance mandatory. Nothing like MDMA and five hours of consecutive dancing to get those little brains in motion.
After the rave there's a ten-minute lunch break. If the kids can't eat fast enough, another dose of MDMA might help them either do it or get througn the rest of the day.
After lunch there's math. Except this isn't math it's X-TREME MATH!. Yes, the exclamation mark is mandatory. EXTREME MATH! is like regular math except everyone's on skateboards in a half-pipe and the teacher gets to hit students who answer incorrectly or can't perform tricks while answering with a baseball bat.
Then there's fear class where the students learn about the many ways they could be randomly killed or maimed without being able to do anything about it. At random intervals the teacher will actually bring the thing in question into the classroom and see which students can get away the fastest.
After that is Everything Else class, which covers all that other nonsense. Because modern school is all about adrenaline, baby, the students have to memorize what the teacher tells them while climbing up ever-lowering ropes in hopes of not getting mauled by a hungry tiger.
Computers are used, obviously, to coordinate all of this and to quickly alert paramedics and/or inform the next of kin.
If you take "creator" to mean "cause of our universe" then the sentence stands as another universe would work perfectly fine as a creator.
It's a good thing you didn't read further, though; the logic only gets more and more shaky as the proof goes on. For example, in the end the proof introduces "and this cause we're talking about is the Christian god" as a premise (well, two premises actually) and then uses that premise to derive "God exists". A shorter version that requires far fewer unprovable premises would be:
Something exists.
This something is the Christian god.
Therefore god exists.
The universe had a beginning
[Premise I] HadBeginning(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
A widespread assumption that can reasonably be introduced as a premise.
Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else
[Premise II] HadBeginning(x) -> CausedBy(x, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Not neccessarily something I agree with but you can of course introduce any premise you like.
Therefore, the universe was caused by something else (a creator)
[Sentence III] CausedBySomething(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This sentence follows from the premises you introduced.
Every part of the universe is dependent
[Premise IV] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I assume you meant "dependent on something". Still, there's no reason not to allow this new premise.
If every part is dependent, then the whole universe must also be dependent
[Premise V] \forall x \in Universe: Dependent(x, y) -> Dependent(Universe, y) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Since this follows from nothing you introduced so far, I assume you want to introduce it as a new premise.
Therefore, the whole universe is dependent for existence right now on some Independent Being
[Sentence VI] Dependent(Universe, y) ^ x != y (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
You made an error here. There are no premises from which follows that the universe must be dependent on an Independent Being. It could also be dependent on itself or a part of itself.
Every event that had a beginning had a sufficient cause
[Premise VII] HadBeginning(x) -> HadSufficientCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
I don't see why we shouldn't introduce this premise, even though it might have been better style to introduce all the basic premises first.
The universe had a beginning
You just repeated sentence I.
Therefore, the universe had a sufficient Cause
[Sentence VII] HadBeginning(Universe) -> HadSufficientCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises I and VII.
Every effect has a cause
[Premise VIII] IsEffect(x) -> HasCause(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
The universe is an effect
[Premise IX] IsEffect(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Premise added. (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Therefore, the universe has a Cause
[Sentence X] HasCause(Universe) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
This follows from the premises VIII and IX.
An infinite number of moments cannot be traversed
If an infinite number of moments had to elapse before today, then today would never have come
But today has come
Therefore, an infinite number of moments have not elapsed before today (i.e., the universe had a beginning)
I'm going to skip assigning sentences to these since all you did with them was to restate premise I.
But whatever has a beginning is caused by something else
Hence, there must be a Cause (Creator) of the universe
These two sentences are just repetitions of premise II and sentence III.
An actual infinite cannot exist
[Premise XI] !\is x: Infinite(x) (Slashdot thinks my lines are too short.)
Given the fact that (for example) the set of rationa
I understand that most gun owners are responsible adults who don't intend to harm anyone. Guns just make it very easy to do so, whether by intent, neccessity, misjudgement or even accident.
When I wrote that gun wielders are "ready to kill someone" I really should have written "able to easily kill someone". These things are just intrinsically dangerous and they make anyone holding them dangerous by proxy. Thus someone not accustomed to their presence tends to get nervous around one. Well, if they're smart and don't mistake it for something harmless...
To paraphrase and slightly extend Paracelsus: Everything is a poison and no poison. It's the dosage (and means of administering) that makes the difference.
Of course you can look elsewhere. Countries with more lax drug laws seem like the ideal place to find information or conduct studies regarding the effects on certain drugs on the user and on society if legally available.
In cases where no other country has the drug in question legally avaiable but some state wants to legalize it, a compromise may be possible: The state may legalize the drug in question as long as appropriate restrictions are in place to hinder the spread to states where it's illegal; during this time they have to conduct thorough studies to determine the effects of the legalization. After a certain period has passed there is a decision on the federal level whether or not states may lift or lighten the ban on the drug.
Of course more likely is that the parties will fling about sensationalist nonsense until everyone agrees that LSD is the root cause of AIDS and violent video games.
Whether or not a substance is awful depends on the situation. For instance, opiates can really mess up your body if abused but in hospitals they're a valuable resource for patients in heavy pain.
I agree with your post but I just wanted to point out that the statement "drugs are awful" is a bit sweeping for my taste. They're poison but sometimes they're useful poison.