There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
It's a lot more complex than just "calories in, calories out", as evidenced in this kind of experiment: take healty mice, restrict their food by a mere 5%, and *surprise* they grow a lot more fat tissue at the expense of lean mass.
If it really is just a problem of "balancing caloric incomes and expenses", then please explain why do people who restrict their calorie intake do not lose the amount of weight that corresponds to the missing calories, and why people who expand their calorie intake on purpose do not quite gain the weight that they should (some of them not gaining any weight at all) ?
Metabolism adjusts towards the amount of energy available from your food, and not the other way around. That amount derives from the calories you eat, MINUS those that are diverted to long term storage in your adipocytes. If metabolism fails to adjust enough, or on the contrary if it overshoots, then you are looking at a metabolic problem: one of regulation of energy storage versus energy bioavailability, and not one of "bad behavior".
Weren't the Blackshirts [wikipedia.org] and Brownshirts [wikipedia.org] actually citizens' militias who weren't part of the police and military after all?
Actually, no. They were paramilitary forces comprised of volunteers, and only used the name "militia" without actually trying to uphold law and order (which normally is the point of forming a militia). They were about as civilian as any form of organized crime can be, including terrorist organizations. Were they distinct from the state ? Yes, but that did not make them part of civil society either.
One can never be certain, but whoever you're responding to is most likely human, perhaps even distinctly so. Could that explain their perspective?
Dunno... Many humans apparently think their individual perspective would be *improved* if other humans' perspectives or outcomes went bleaker. And many think just the opposite.
Indeed, there are three types of robbers: - beginner robbers who point a gun and demand money, - seasoned robbers who hand you a contract to sign - expert robbers who legislate
"This is logical since Ayn Rand is their idolized ideological forebear."
No, it's not, but then I don't think you really care. If you do, though, look rather at Paul's personal friend and famous libertarian Murray Rothbard than Ayn Rand, and especially what he has to say about Randism.
"Imagine no rules/laws/regulations. Perfectly free market."
If it has no rules then it is not free. Forced sales, property violations, etc. contradict the very principle of freedom, I think you're confusing "free" with "arbitrary" here.
The very term "free market" holds a lot of moral implications you seem completely unaware of. For one, to say that all the participants are free, means they cannot legitimately impinge on one another's freedom. That's one easy implication, which has implications of its own too, and there are more besides this one - and the end result of finding out those implications form a large part of what is usually called "natural right" or jusnaturalism, a longstanding tradition of right and law.
An axis with liberal and conservative ends is not 2D but 1D.
Besides, in politics, the means one is eager to use in order to further one's values or ends, is just as important as where those values fall on this liberal/conservative axis. That requires another dimension of measurement.
No it isn't. We're barely saturating this one planet despite trying so hard at it for so long, and there's 13.7 billion light-years of visible universe around.
That device sounds like a parietal accelerator wound into a loop. French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit suggested it would make an ideal submarine propulsion method.
My guess is that the depth of the film has to be small for the flow to remain stable and entrain all the water.
For all those slashdoters that work at apple: Make sure you let your Marketing department know that this has cost them a long time customer.
I have a powerbook G4 and I recently bought a mac mini for my wife.
I was planning to get a new Macbook for Xmas.
However hearing about this has changed my mind.
Same here, I was considering bying yet another Powerbook (it'd have been the fourth in a row, out of seven Macs) as a replacement for my 2006 model whose battery died recently, and intended to upgrade to MacOS 10.5 in the process.
Now, I'll just wait until either Apple renounces this policy or simple and effective solutions for fixing this defect (here it is considered a defect of the video output function) become popular.
I will not let a company dictate what my fair use rights are. I'm disappointed, its so short sighted on Apples part. Technology companies should stick to technology and let our courts and elected members of government worry about our rights and rights of content producers (admittedly they haven't done a good job either).
I'll go one step further and will not even let our courts and elected members of government worry and decide about our preexistent, inalienable and absolute rights, whether we are content producers or consumers (or, increasingly, both at the same time).
I moved away from BigParties because of this (that and stability issues). I know from the LastLegislativePeriod that they won't let me play is my own content (I created it, I own the copyright) and home videos over a projector...
Handcrafting a scenery is just another form of procedural generation, at the core. The crafter follows his or her own heuristics and combine them with specific content models and elements as a source, while remaining within the technical constraints projected for the end-result.
How do you make, say, a RTS map ? You start by stating your goals: there will be N starting bases, the landscape will include M ridges so that the length of path between each base is balanced, and each will have access to pretty much the same amount of ressources, etc. Then you just lay out all those required elements down in a fractal or geometrical way, and that process may have a lot in common with some pathfinding algorithm.
Of course, the crafter is not limited a priori in terms of sources and methods, but then anything you may think about including into your one-time work could just as well be set to end up included in the generatio nalgorithm that mimics your handcrafting. Just because right now an human has a much vaster culture than a piece of software, does not mean heuristics might not one day be able to piece out elements from, say, news websites or art libraries.
The point of procedural generation is not to machine-generate content, rather to humanize the machine and its content, so I will not be one bit surprised when game content generation becomes a fully-recognized branch of AI research. Could Turing tests be one day judged by art critics evaluating proposed 3D models and scenes, or scripted events ?
The article's mention of choosing between a handcrafted skybox and a generated one is not that far from it: soon enough game studios will be considering the "tastes" of the many different content-generation tools.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading an excellent short story by Greg Egan entitled "the mitochondrial Eve", which shows a "war" between antagonists groups of crazy fanatics all hell-bent (for the sake of both their racist and anti-racist prejudices) on finding the exact genealogical line for each human on Earth through the identification of, for one group (the partisans of Eve) the set of mitochondrial DNA mutations (of which the author reports there are about 50 in total for all of mankind), and for the other group (the children of Adam) through the use of the mutations on the Y chromosome.
*SPOILER*
The protagonist spectacularly proves them all wrong using fancy quantum physics experiments and explaining all the many discrepancies each group has in their respective all-encompassing genealogical trees with the simple hypothesis, backed by his scientificevidence, that mutations occur preferably on the same spots of the DNA.
Science and faith are not mutually exclusive, if you delimit their domains: faith for things metaphysical, un(dis)provable either way ; science for all the mundane, observable / measurable things. That's the Discordian way.
I find the "children slaying ban" especially odd after visiting the ruins of the Springvale primary school in Fallout 3: there you can find a make-shift detention cell containing the burnt remains of tiny skeletons, amidst the very obvious traces of local raiders' torture practices around every other corner.
The peg was removed back in 2005. I wouldn't put my own savings into the RMB/Yuan anyway, because the Chinese have invested massively in the very same failing securities that are bankrupting everyone left and right. They hold, for example, over 300 billions $ worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and I suspect this is the prime reason for their bailouts: the Feds don't want China to register heavy losses so they don't liquidate their $ assets.
Somehow this is a bit comparable to how the Fed kept inflating during 1925-1928 to keep the Sterling Pound afloat... which brought us the 1929 recession and stock krach.
CO2 also is already providing the maximum greenhouse effect it can. It reflects/absorbs only a pair of infrared wavelengths and the current density of CO2 in the atmosphere is already catching pretty much all of the solar energy radiated through these bands. Sorry I don't have a link handy.
Reading their Features page, this game seems just a clone of vendetta online. Twitch-based combat ? Three nations to pick from ? Bots-shooting grind ? Pirate minor factions ? Epic battles with capital ships ? Player-driven economy where you deliver needed goods to space stations ? The only feature missing is the asteroid mining.
"there's like fighting types of ships, mining types of ships, cargo haulers and within that there's sort of sub-classes. So like, there's light fighters, medium fighters, heavy fighters, bombers. There's haulers that carry a lot of stuff, but move kind of slowly and there's haulers that carry lost stuff, short little courier shuttles that move really quickly"
Ah, yes, kinda like the Centurion, Behemoth, Raptor, etc...
Well, not quite. The separatists and russian troops combined an attack on the 6th of august, and this is what the Georgian troops reacted to by going through Tskhinvali.
Now think again, hard. You say "ethics can not exist. People have different values, different opinions,..., therefore different morals and ethics.
Which is it ? Ethics don't exist, there is no right or wrong and people making choices all the time is actually pure nonsense, including your own urge to write a comment about how no such thing as good or bad exists ; or they do exist and everyone has some of their own ?
See, the very fact that there are things you do and things you don't establishes a sense of right and wrong of your own, just like in everyone - and that's very sufficient to formalize the whole thing and prove you wrong.
That story about witnesses reporting a countdown on the workers' radio was completely made up by one of my Discordian friends - who can feel quite proud it propagated so well ! As for the parts *I* made up that propagated... well, I'm not telling.
Not only were the characters in Snow Crash excellent, but I also find its ending mind-blowing:
- the rich villain's master plan for world domination is foiled at the last minute using ancient artefacts no one fuly understands, then he gets killed by a crazy dog-cyborg - the terrifying bad guy meets a shattering death - the nuke goes off - the virtual nuke goes off too - the clever hacker saves his whole kin with a simple script and gets his love interest back
All this happens while people get blown off, shot down and sliced up with all sorts of cool weapons.
OK, so Hiro does not get laid, but apart from that, this is a better ending than most James Bond and Indiana Jones movies combined.
Slashdot Mirror
"Its a simple equation, energy in, energy out."
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
It's a lot more complex than just "calories in, calories out", as evidenced in this kind of experiment: take healty mice, restrict their food by a mere 5%, and *surprise* they grow a lot more fat tissue at the expense of lean mass.
If it really is just a problem of "balancing caloric incomes and expenses", then please explain why do people who restrict their calorie intake do not lose the amount of weight that corresponds to the missing calories, and why people who expand their calorie intake on purpose do not quite gain the weight that they should (some of them not gaining any weight at all) ?
Metabolism adjusts towards the amount of energy available from your food, and not the other way around. That amount derives from the calories you eat, MINUS those that are diverted to long term storage in your adipocytes. If metabolism fails to adjust enough, or on the contrary if it overshoots, then you are looking at a metabolic problem: one of regulation of energy storage versus energy bioavailability, and not one of "bad behavior".
Actually, no. They were paramilitary forces comprised of volunteers, and only used the name "militia" without actually trying to uphold law and order (which normally is the point of forming a militia). They were about as civilian as any form of organized crime can be, including terrorist organizations. Were they distinct from the state ? Yes, but that did not make them part of civil society either.
One can never be certain, but whoever you're responding to is most likely human, perhaps even distinctly so. Could that explain their perspective?
Dunno... Many humans apparently think their individual perspective would be *improved* if other humans' perspectives or outcomes went bleaker. And many think just the opposite.
Indeed, there are three types of robbers:
- beginner robbers who point a gun and demand money,
- seasoned robbers who hand you a contract to sign
- expert robbers who legislate
"This is logical since Ayn Rand is their idolized ideological forebear."
No, it's not, but then I don't think you really care. If you do, though, look rather at Paul's personal friend and famous libertarian Murray Rothbard than Ayn Rand, and especially what he has to say about Randism.
"Imagine no rules/laws/regulations. Perfectly free market."
If it has no rules then it is not free. Forced sales, property violations, etc. contradict the very principle of freedom, I think you're confusing "free" with "arbitrary" here.
The very term "free market" holds a lot of moral implications you seem completely unaware of. For one, to say that all the participants are free, means they cannot legitimately impinge on one another's freedom. That's one easy implication, which has implications of its own too, and there are more besides this one - and the end result of finding out those implications form a large part of what is usually called "natural right" or jusnaturalism, a longstanding tradition of right and law.
An axis with liberal and conservative ends is not 2D but 1D.
Besides, in politics, the means one is eager to use in order to further one's values or ends, is just as important as where those values fall on this liberal/conservative axis. That requires another dimension of measurement.
No it isn't. We're barely saturating this one planet despite trying so hard at it for so long, and there's 13.7 billion light-years of visible universe around.
Or, for the matter, money that could be spent by the general civil population of the country instead, and not necessarily on military tech.
That device sounds like a parietal accelerator wound into a loop. French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit suggested it would make an ideal submarine propulsion method.
My guess is that the depth of the film has to be small for the flow to remain stable and entrain all the water.
For all those slashdoters that work at apple: Make sure you let your Marketing department know that this has cost them a long time customer.
I have a powerbook G4 and I recently bought a mac mini for my wife.
I was planning to get a new Macbook for Xmas.
However hearing about this has changed my mind.
Same here, I was considering bying yet another Powerbook (it'd have been the fourth in a row, out of seven Macs) as a replacement for my 2006 model whose battery died recently, and intended to upgrade to MacOS 10.5 in the process.
Now, I'll just wait until either Apple renounces this policy or simple and effective solutions for fixing this defect (here it is considered a defect of the video output function) become popular.
I will not let a company dictate what my fair use rights are. I'm disappointed, its so short sighted on Apples part. Technology companies should stick to technology and let our courts and elected members of government worry about our rights and rights of content producers (admittedly they haven't done a good job either).
I'll go one step further and will not even let our courts and elected members of government worry and decide about our preexistent, inalienable and absolute rights, whether we are content producers or consumers (or, increasingly, both at the same time).
I moved away from BigParties because of this (that and stability issues). I know from the LastLegislativePeriod that they won't let me play is my own content (I created it, I own the copyright) and home videos over a projector...
Handcrafting a scenery is just another form of procedural generation, at the core. The crafter follows his or her own heuristics and combine them with specific content models and elements as a source, while remaining within the technical constraints projected for the end-result.
How do you make, say, a RTS map ? You start by stating your goals: there will be N starting bases, the landscape will include M ridges so that the length of path between each base is balanced, and each will have access to pretty much the same amount of ressources, etc. Then you just lay out all those required elements down in a fractal or geometrical way, and that process may have a lot in common with some pathfinding algorithm.
Of course, the crafter is not limited a priori in terms of sources and methods, but then anything you may think about including into your one-time work could just as well be set to end up included in the generatio nalgorithm that mimics your handcrafting. Just because right now an human has a much vaster culture than a piece of software, does not mean heuristics might not one day be able to piece out elements from, say, news websites or art libraries.
The point of procedural generation is not to machine-generate content, rather to humanize the machine and its content, so I will not be one bit surprised when game content generation becomes a fully-recognized branch of AI research. Could Turing tests be one day judged by art critics evaluating proposed 3D models and scenes, or scripted events ?
The article's mention of choosing between a handcrafted skybox and a generated one is not that far from it: soon enough game studios will be considering the "tastes" of the many different content-generation tools.
Coincidentally, I just finished reading an excellent short story by Greg Egan entitled "the mitochondrial Eve", which shows a "war" between antagonists groups of crazy fanatics all hell-bent (for the sake of both their racist and anti-racist prejudices) on finding the exact genealogical line for each human on Earth through the identification of, for one group (the partisans of Eve) the set of mitochondrial DNA mutations (of which the author reports there are about 50 in total for all of mankind), and for the other group (the children of Adam) through the use of the mutations on the Y chromosome.
*SPOILER*
The protagonist spectacularly proves them all wrong using fancy quantum physics experiments and explaining all the many discrepancies each group has in their respective all-encompassing genealogical trees with the simple hypothesis, backed by his scientificevidence, that mutations occur preferably on the same spots of the DNA.
Science and faith are not mutually exclusive, if you delimit their domains: faith for things metaphysical, un(dis)provable either way ; science for all the mundane, observable / measurable things. That's the Discordian way.
I find the "children slaying ban" especially odd after visiting the ruins of the Springvale primary school in Fallout 3: there you can find a make-shift detention cell containing the burnt remains of tiny skeletons, amidst the very obvious traces of local raiders' torture practices around every other corner.
The peg was removed back in 2005. I wouldn't put my own savings into the RMB/Yuan anyway, because the Chinese have invested massively in the very same failing securities that are bankrupting everyone left and right. They hold, for example, over 300 billions $ worth of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and I suspect this is the prime reason for their bailouts: the Feds don't want China to register heavy losses so they don't liquidate their $ assets.
Somehow this is a bit comparable to how the Fed kept inflating during 1925-1928 to keep the Sterling Pound afloat... which brought us the 1929 recession and stock krach.
CO2 also is already providing the maximum greenhouse effect it can. It reflects/absorbs only a pair of infrared wavelengths and the current density of CO2 in the atmosphere is already catching pretty much all of the solar energy radiated through these bands. Sorry I don't have a link handy.
Yeah, "free market". Or even: "free"-market. Both work.
Reading their Features page, this game seems just a clone of vendetta online. Twitch-based combat ? Three nations to pick from ? Bots-shooting grind ? Pirate minor factions ? Epic battles with capital ships ? Player-driven economy where you deliver needed goods to space stations ? The only feature missing is the asteroid mining.
"there's like fighting types of ships, mining types of ships, cargo haulers and within that there's sort of sub-classes. So like, there's light fighters, medium fighters, heavy fighters, bombers. There's haulers that carry a lot of stuff, but move kind of slowly and there's haulers that carry lost stuff, short little courier shuttles that move really quickly"
Ah, yes, kinda like the Centurion, Behemoth, Raptor, etc...
"Yes, Georgians did attack"
Well, not quite. The separatists and russian troops combined an attack on the 6th of august, and this is what the Georgian troops reacted to by going through Tskhinvali.
Now think again, hard. You say "ethics can not exist. ..., therefore different morals and ethics.
People have different values, different opinions,
Which is it ? Ethics don't exist, there is no right or wrong and people making choices all the time is actually pure nonsense, including your own urge to write a comment about how no such thing as good or bad exists ; or they do exist and everyone has some of their own ?
See, the very fact that there are things you do and things you don't establishes a sense of right and wrong of your own, just like in everyone - and that's very sufficient to formalize the whole thing and prove you wrong.
That story about witnesses reporting a countdown on the workers' radio was completely made up by one of my Discordian friends - who can feel quite proud it propagated so well ! As for the parts *I* made up that propagated... well, I'm not telling.
Not only were the characters in Snow Crash excellent, but I also find its ending mind-blowing:
- the rich villain's master plan for world domination is foiled at the last minute using ancient artefacts no one fuly understands, then he gets killed by a crazy dog-cyborg
- the terrifying bad guy meets a shattering death
- the nuke goes off
- the virtual nuke goes off too
- the clever hacker saves his whole kin with a simple script and gets his love interest back
All this happens while people get blown off, shot down and sliced up with all sorts of cool weapons.
OK, so Hiro does not get laid, but apart from that, this is a better ending than most James Bond and Indiana Jones movies combined.
Then let's just scale the loops with the building where it is meant to be used. Wire the walls.
Great ! It just makes it more efficient at diverting my annoyance from getting a phonecall onto the caller.