Except that this is completely rigged so that you will almost always lose.... The tractor will break down soon. The Sun will break down eventually, I hear.
To teach metaphysical theories as scientific is to teach lies as truth.
Actually, I think this works the other way around. Religious beliefs like ID aim to describe "The Truth", while scientific theories aim to describe reality. As we know, there is no way to extract the truth from reality, so all scientific theories are false (some are simply less false than others).
So I find it quite flabbergasting and counter-productive that people would go as far as to call their take on "The Truth" as science, since it automatically makes their beliefs into a certainly-false interpretation of reality. It's rethorically shooting oneself in the foot ! They're trying to pass off what they genuinely believe to be true as something false, for no discernable reason.
Seriously, as a man of faith from "Old" Europe, the whole Intelligent Design / Creationism trolling (there's no other way to qualify it, frankly) makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
Don't diss ravens, they can make tools, sometimes more proficiently than apes ! I've seen one of these birds cut a small rectangle of spiky leaf to use as a hook to pull some juicy worms from a dead tree bark; and another cut a stick from a tree, remove the leaves then make one end into a hook for the same task, in mere seconds.
Except the article pretty clearly states that Alex has NEVER BEEN TRAINED to exhibit this behaviour. This parrot linked the "none" answer to an absence of information by itself.
It is amazing what technology and social progress the Greeks had advanced to in their time, right before the fall of their civilization... Steam power, complex mechanical design, philosophy, democracy, calculus, electricity, atomic theory, and more ! They were due an Industrial Revolution of their own very soon, I think.
According to the Intel roadmap that steve Jobs kept refering to in the keynote, Apple is likely to move to the 65nm, 64bit, multicore (EM64T) processors that Intel plans to release in summer 2006. Expect Gilo processors in PowerBooks by 2007.
What about the existing possibility to open up links from a dialog in SL into local browsers ? Will this feature be modified to open the same links into a window within SL instead of opening the user's browser of choice ?
For those who don't know, Dark Life is an attempt to bring a Diablo-like game to Second Life. Of course it can be abused by a tentative sweatshop, but since it is owned by players (whom I happen to know personnally), there is an absolute cap on how much money you can make on it. And trust me that limit is very low (especially right now) so you can't make a profitable sweatshop out of it (it's not profitable to the owners already !).
If you mean making a game like Dark Life in SL to make money, well, you'll be hitting on the same limit I mentioned in my original post: the money you make has to come from the players, and that L$100 (= $0.25) stipend will be spent quite fast.
You either need to convince players to start paying through PayPal or any other real cash method for your virtual goods and services to work around this state of things, or you have to recycle the L$ very fast by converting them back in real cash and feeding them back to your clients somehow. There are a number of ways to do this (GOM, IGE, etc...) but it imposes a bottleneck on your revenue stream and makes the whole process vulnerable to inflation. Besides, making virtual goods that sell in SL is way out of the "sweatshop" activity. You'd make a lot more money in the real world than in a MMOG if you have employees who can pull this off while being paid low enough to make the whole operation profitable.
The people who make a living or any decent amount of money from Second Life are in fact all profitting from a near-monopoly position in land business. They buy all the land available in the game then resell it back with a considerable profit (land being the most expensive commodity in the game since it is a _scarce_ resource). The more competition comes into this business to try and profit from it, the less profitable it becomes... and the total revenue that can be made from this business decreases with the number of participants, tending to zero in the long term and with growth of the virtual world. It'll happen eventually.
Except that this is Second Life, not WoW. There are no monsters you can kill over and over and over for hours on to earn a sustainable revenue, much like there is no infinite gold mine in the real world either. No trivial/automatic way to turn time into value. The money you earn has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is : other players. Each player receives a somewhat fixed stipend of money each week from Linden Lab, and this amount is revised from time to time to accomodate with the money that returns to Linden Lab continuously (as a payment for uploads or land allotment).
Because of this, you cannot have a sweatshop in Second Life, and its economy has zero inflation.
Just so you know, Second Life is an MMOG entirely built by its players. There are some simple building tools (everything is made of the same basic shapes, cube/sphere/cylinder/torus/particles/etc) and capable ingame scripting, although the language is less powerful than UnrealC. You then upload your own textures, sounds, etc... for everyone else to see and hear and interact with.
Virtual families already exist in Second Life. For example my character has a virtual mother, and one friend who married ingame has modified her character to look pregnant. Another friend who married and later divorced ingame has adopted another player as her son, etc... And there is a field in character profiles for your partner, be it husband or wife or whatever-you-call-it.
From TFA: Under this higher, real world pressure situation, the HWM group's score dropped to that of the LWM group, which was not affected by the increased pressure. One group's score dropped, the other group got the same result.
It's not supernatural. Just because no theory explains it fully does not mean it's not real. We still don't know how superconductivity works exactly, for example.
The MPEG2 decoding of a stream from a HDTV signal does NOT require a dual G5. At the last Apple Expo we were demoing an EyeTV 310 displaying an HDTV DVB-S channel on a dual G4, and it was very smooth, no noticeable slowdowns of the whole machine. It could read another standard resolution MPEG2 file or two at the same time, so a single G4 processor might even suffice.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that this is completely rigged so that you will almost always lose. ...
The tractor will break down soon.
The Sun will break down eventually, I hear.
You're only a floating point error away from being a billionaire.
I'm making this my SecondLife account sigquote.
Surely you mean 5x5 squares ? 'Cause I only know of 3x3x3 or 4x4x4 Rubik cubes :P
To teach metaphysical theories as scientific is to teach lies as truth.
Actually, I think this works the other way around. Religious beliefs like ID aim to describe "The Truth", while scientific theories aim to describe reality. As we know, there is no way to extract the truth from reality, so all scientific theories are false (some are simply less false than others).
So I find it quite flabbergasting and counter-productive that people would go as far as to call their take on "The Truth" as science, since it automatically makes their beliefs into a certainly-false interpretation of reality. It's rethorically shooting oneself in the foot ! They're trying to pass off what they genuinely believe to be true as something false, for no discernable reason.
Seriously, as a man of faith from "Old" Europe, the whole Intelligent Design / Creationism trolling (there's no other way to qualify it, frankly) makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER.
Second Life has a Mac client, and Vendetta Online has one too, as well as *gasp* a Linux client.
Yes please :) -> (my /. name)@free.fr
Don't diss ravens, they can make tools, sometimes more proficiently than apes ! I've seen one of these birds cut a small rectangle of spiky leaf to use as a hook to pull some juicy worms from a dead tree bark; and another cut a stick from a tree, remove the leaves then make one end into a hook for the same task, in mere seconds.
Except the article pretty clearly states that Alex has NEVER BEEN TRAINED to exhibit this behaviour. This parrot linked the "none" answer to an absence of information by itself.
I can think of another sort of open source robots that cost well under $100.
And so has Mark Tilden !
"If you can't compete [fairly], engage in abusive business practice !"
It is amazing what technology and social progress the Greeks had advanced to in their time, right before the fall of their civilization... Steam power, complex mechanical design, philosophy, democracy, calculus, electricity, atomic theory, and more ! They were due an Industrial Revolution of their own very soon, I think.
And they don't photosynthesize, unlike vegetals. They absorb organic matter to grow. No organic matter on Mars = no mushroom salad for dinner.
According to the Intel roadmap that steve Jobs kept refering to in the keynote, Apple is likely to move to the 65nm, 64bit, multicore (EM64T) processors that Intel plans to release in summer 2006. Expect Gilo processors in PowerBooks by 2007.
What about the existing possibility to open up links from a dialog in SL into local browsers ? Will this feature be modified to open the same links into a window within SL instead of opening the user's browser of choice ?
For those who don't know, Dark Life is an attempt to bring a Diablo-like game to Second Life. Of course it can be abused by a tentative sweatshop, but since it is owned by players (whom I happen to know personnally), there is an absolute cap on how much money you can make on it. And trust me that limit is very low (especially right now) so you can't make a profitable sweatshop out of it (it's not profitable to the owners already !).
If you mean making a game like Dark Life in SL to make money, well, you'll be hitting on the same limit I mentioned in my original post: the money you make has to come from the players, and that L$100 (= $0.25) stipend will be spent quite fast.
You either need to convince players to start paying through PayPal or any other real cash method for your virtual goods and services to work around this state of things, or you have to recycle the L$ very fast by converting them back in real cash and feeding them back to your clients somehow. There are a number of ways to do this (GOM, IGE, etc...) but it imposes a bottleneck on your revenue stream and makes the whole process vulnerable to inflation. Besides, making virtual goods that sell in SL is way out of the "sweatshop" activity. You'd make a lot more money in the real world than in a MMOG if you have employees who can pull this off while being paid low enough to make the whole operation profitable.
The people who make a living or any decent amount of money from Second Life are in fact all profitting from a near-monopoly position in land business. They buy all the land available in the game then resell it back with a considerable profit (land being the most expensive commodity in the game since it is a _scarce_ resource). The more competition comes into this business to try and profit from it, the less profitable it becomes... and the total revenue that can be made from this business decreases with the number of participants, tending to zero in the long term and with growth of the virtual world. It'll happen eventually.
Except that this is Second Life, not WoW. There are no monsters you can kill over and over and over for hours on to earn a sustainable revenue, much like there is no infinite gold mine in the real world either. No trivial/automatic way to turn time into value. The money you earn has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is : other players. Each player receives a somewhat fixed stipend of money each week from Linden Lab, and this amount is revised from time to time to accomodate with the money that returns to Linden Lab continuously (as a payment for uploads or land allotment).
Because of this, you cannot have a sweatshop in Second Life, and its economy has zero inflation.
French generally use an ellipse for that: Heureux les imbéciles...
Just so you know, Second Life is an MMOG entirely built by its players. There are some simple building tools (everything is made of the same basic shapes, cube/sphere/cylinder/torus/particles/etc) and capable ingame scripting, although the language is less powerful than UnrealC. You then upload your own textures, sounds, etc... for everyone else to see and hear and interact with.
Virtual families already exist in Second Life. For example my character has a virtual mother, and one friend who married ingame has modified her character to look pregnant. Another friend who married and later divorced ingame has adopted another player as her son, etc... And there is a field in character profiles for your partner, be it husband or wife or whatever-you-call-it.
From TFA:
Under this higher, real world pressure situation, the HWM group's score dropped to that of the LWM group, which was not affected by the increased pressure.
One group's score dropped, the other group got the same result.
It's not supernatural. Just because no theory explains it fully does not mean it's not real. We still don't know how superconductivity works exactly, for example.
A couple days ago I was teasing myself with how good a movie based on McMaster-Bujold "Spirit Ring" could be.
... and runs MacOS X :)
The MPEG2 decoding of a stream from a HDTV signal does NOT require a dual G5. At the last Apple Expo we were demoing an EyeTV 310 displaying an HDTV DVB-S channel on a dual G4, and it was very smooth, no noticeable slowdowns of the whole machine. It could read another standard resolution MPEG2 file or two at the same time, so a single G4 processor might even suffice.