He's talking about the 2011 edition of the movie, where the Death Star has been upgraded to blow up solar systems. It's to prepare for the upcoming tie-in with the Superman franchise.
Dont really want to change my workflow unless theres a clear benefit, and cramming Metro into the mix isnt a clear benefit-- so far as I can tell its a hindrance.
It isn't meant to improve the workflow. It's meant to make the workflow in Windows PCs identical to Windows tablets, to leverage Microsoft monopoly in the former to help push the latter. Microsoft is counting on there being sufficient lock-in to Windows-specific applications that people have to upgrade to Windows 8 once Windows 7 support ends, whether they like it or not. Time will show if that'll happen, but it's an awful risk to take - because if the answer is "no", it's the end of Windows.
What, exactly speaking, is wrong with being content when you have everything you need, and the same is true for everyone else?
That we are human beings, not irrational animals.
That doesn't answer my question. Being content when everything is well is perfectly rational, and appealing to some definition of humanity requires you to specify said definition, justify why it should be accepted, and then show why BNW-type situation conflicts with it, none of which you have done. Unless, of course, you are trying to appeal to emotion rather than logic. You know, like irrational animals do.
You either get it or don't get it.
Using an ad hominem in place of a rationale strongly suggests that you don't have one.
For phone stuff I set security questions like "Would you like to have dinner some time?" or "Wanna have sex when I get off?" and call to tease the cute customer service girl.
Nothing's funnier than harassing a minimum wage worker who has no choice but to take your shit or be fired, eh?
The fixed pipeline api still has it's uses. If you are just starting out in 3d and only need it for minimal things being able to just go glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES) and then start drawing stuff is neat.
But that means that you'll need to basically start again from the beginning once you want to do something more advanced. Using simple shaders and vertex arrays isn't really any harder, and means that you can build on what you've learned later on.
For a lot of people the fixed function pipeline is all they need, if you don't care about performance (i.e. your bottleneck is elsewhere) you don't even have to bother with vertex arrays etc either.
But the simplicity gain from using immediate mode is quite small, so why not just learn to do it the performant way from the beginning?
Well, I'd say it's you the one confused: those that would want to shake the other people and say "awake, don't you see what's happening?" are deprived *exactly* of that.
So what is happening? What is the deep, dark secret that the "wakers" are trying to make others see? What, exactly speaking, is wrong with being content when you have everything you need, and the same is true for everyone else? What justifies trying to disrupt a status quo everyone is happy with?
This type of education process combined with these types of labour laws are aimed at producing workers, employees, not businessmen, not owners of business.
A wise choice, seeing how it's the workers who produce the wealth, and businessmen merely manage it (at best; usually they just loot it).
I think if South Korea wants to give more opportunities to its young people, to reduce this stress and increase entrepreneurship and independence, they need to allow people to opt out of the compulsory education process and to allow people to hire minors as apprentices and they need to wave all sorts of regulations, starting with the minimum wage.
What a great opportunity: instead of getting an education you get to be an unpaid child laborer.
I think we are creating robots, not individuals with this compulsory education and pressure to get highest scores on exams rather than allowing people to experiment with their interests in different types of businesses early on. I think the kids who are into these games are actually goal oriented and they are suppressed and depressed by the system, they could be entrepreneurs, but they are robbed of that chance.
I think you're confusing artists and businessmen. Artists experiment to figure out what interests them, businessmen try to maximize some variable (such as profits or test scores). An entrepreneur who prioritizes based on what happens to interest him is not going to be in business for very long.
What I can't figure out is if you're serious, or doing some kind of absurd parody of libertarianism.
Well, the counter argument to this is that the, let's call them 'informational', goods don't depreciate with use like a tangible product does. A (pressed) game disk will be just as functional in 5 years, though your, say, lawn mower will probably be all gunked up with grass, rusting a bit and have some wear on the engine.
And the counter argument to that is: so?
Industries exist to satisfy needs. They are means to an end, not ends by themselves. Trying to artificially drive up demand once natural demand has been satisfied is our goold old friend the Broken Window Fallacy.
Game companies should do the same. Offer something worth buying and people will buy it.
You're making a mistake here. You're accepting the unstated assumption that game companies existing has positive value by itself, and are trying to figure out ways for them to continue doing so. It is important to reject this assumption, because if society survives the looming energy crisis the accelerating development of technology will make more and more products basically free - just remember the article about an automated 3D printer a few days back, and think what happens once we can print low-tolerance spare parts (or even effectively download a car, to paraphrase a tired cliche). We don't want post-scarcity held back by artificial scarcity, but there are plenty of people who do, so it's important to clarify these concepts - specifically that an industry collapsing because its product became worthless due to its abundance is a good thing.
The medical definition, which is quite easy for me since I'm also a physician. Death can be reversible or non reversible. The legal definition of death is the minute I put my signature to the death certificate.
Unfortunately, this disqualifies your experience of disproving any but the most bureaucratic of hypothethical afterlifes. And the same is true of anyone else capable of relaying theirs, of course. Which rises some questions about the viability of this entire research project as anything but a flamewar generator.
The whole of the universe and all the organisms could just as easily be running IN THE DARK, computing, executing, interacting, evolving, without any awareness anywhere to experience any of the process. Consciousness, the experiencer, is totally unnecessary. For example, your fancy digital camera captures light, processes it and identifies faces and adjusts the focus on the faces. The camera doesn't experience doing this, the camera is not a "being".
You are making a logical error here: you assume that other human beings have a conscious experience despite this being - according to yourself - unnecessary to explain their observed behaviour, yet you assume that the camera doesn't have it. Then you present this presumed difference - which, remember, you yourself said cannot be proven from the actual observations - as something mystical and in need of an explanation. In other words, you claim that an unobservable agent exists and then want its existence explained.
It would be far simpler to say that the camera is indeed aware of the image it processes to the extent its observable behaviour suggests, and extend this to everything - and yes, this means that electrons are aware of the electric field, since they react to it. In this model the difference between "conscious experience" and "mere awareness" becomes a matter of semantics: agents which have a lot of information processing capacity relative to their inputs and complex enough feedback loops that their internal state becomes more important than their immediate inputs for determining their reactions are said to be conscious.
The alternative is a universe overrun by philosophical zombies - or, as you say, one running IN THE DARK.
Any alternative to the above is LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE than "we are all in The Matrix" or "We are in a dream of a sleeping God" hypotheses, what means that it can not be a part of any realistic philosophy and should be relegated to the realm of fiction.
Do you have any way to calculate the probabilities of any of these things, even in a crude order-of-magnitude way? No, of course not. So your claim they're LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE is completely unsupported. But even if you had a way to calculate the probabilities, your claim "it can not be a part of any realistic philosophy" would not follow. In science there are often competing theories, some more likely than others, and they only get relegated to the realm of fiction once they're ruled out by actual evidence. To the best of my knowledge, the idea that our universe is actually a simulation (which includes dreams) hasn't been ruled out, nor has it been confirmed.
All in all, these religious arguments certainly do serve to illustrate the human tendency towards irrationality, and not only in the believers.
Unless you have the Downloads window open, in which case it starts to get mysterious slowdowns until you close the window. And of course every time you save a file, the damn thing pops up again, even if's an image or something that's already downloaded.
Since people going totally apeshit doesn't happen for no reason, I'd say it's more reason based than some natural recurring phenomenon based on time.
It's called "mortality". Given enough time, the memory of the previous time a bad idea was tried fades, and the new generation does it all over again. How long it takes depends on the depth of the trauma and how fast the nasty effects take hold: for example, the recent rise of Western police states is due to the memory of Nazism finally fading, while it was Reagan who began ignoring the lessons of the Great Depression, yet it took until now for deregulation to finally lead to a new economic collapse.
Basically, you get a new Great War as soon as those who survived the previous one are too frail to prevent it anymore. Or earlier, if enough charisma and stupidity are involved.
It boils down to each country deciding for itself what it wants to do.
It boils down to each country's government deciding for its subjects what it wants to do. In some countries these subjects have some kind of say over some issues, in most they don't - and in none do they have any control over what gets censored, since there's too much money and power riding on that for the powers that be to not become involved. But having the US manage things means that non-US governments need to jump through hoops to censor, and every little bit helps.
So if they're using missile defense computers to watch porn, they are potentially infecting critical defense computers with trojans that could be exploited by an enemy.
...Why are any critical missile defense computers connected to the Internet? I mean, isn't that pretty much asking for that very scenario?
The real question is, why arent these less than half a dozen getting fired? If they have time to watch porn, then the position they are filling is not required.
There are quire a few positions where periods of activity and waiting alternate. Trying to "remove the slack" in such scenarios typically results in small savings in periods of passivity and huge disasters in periods of activity. This is especially true in scenarios like missile defense where activity periods depend on some unpredictable external factor - it's too late to hire staff when the air raid sirens start blaring, and having enough staff to handle a missile attack means that you'll have more than you need when an attack is not incoming.
But even beyond that, human beings aren't capable of giving 100% 8 hours a day. If you try to make them, those who can leave for greener pastures and those who can't concentrate on looking busy, rather than doing their job. The end result is that you'll end up with incompetent, unmotivated people trying their best to deceive the management.
But perhaps this isn't about wasted time but porn. If so, then please remember that this is a position that likely requires quite a bit of highly specialized training. Is punishing people for being impure sinners a good enough reason to justify the cost of training their replacements? Maybe, maybe not - but since this training would come out of taxpayer money, it would probably be best to not pay to enforce any moral code that doesn't absolutely have to be.
Windows 8 is about to push out very real performance improvements, as well as DirectX 11.1.
This, actually, is a major problem for DirectX: it's tied to new Windows versions in order to force upgrading. Based on everything that's been revealed of Windows 8 so far I have no desire to upgrade, and will likely not do so just because of some game. So, you either support older DX versions and support them well, which means that you can't optimize the engine for the new ones without basically maintaining two different versions, or you lose customers.
On the other hand, new OpenGL versions depend on driver support, and its in the best interests of card manufacturers to not artificially limit it, as that would be shooting their own sales on the foot.
Yes, but you can have political debates. You can't have true religious debates: when people run out of argument, they pull the "faith" card and the discussion is over.
From what I've seen, both political and religious debates tend to degenerate into "everyone who disagrees with me is evil or stupid or both" pretty fast. There are numerous reasons for this, from trying to oversimplify the world to a kind of magical thinking where everything will be fine if you just perform certain rituals (oppose anything Obama does; bash gays; vote Republican; etc). However, the most important reason is that people who have common political or religious beliefs tend to cluster together and form groups, and membership in said groups becomes part of the identity of their members; thus any attack against the group is considered an attack against its members, and reacted to accordingly.
And we're all supposed to respect faith as if it was unattackable by definition.
The problem is the word you use here: attack. People don't "debate" politics or religion, they fight for dominance for their group. Historically, these fights tended to escalate into all-out wars, which is what respecting faith is trying to prevent. And of course people being people means that this gets abused.
I mean, you can't copyright the idea of selling a mattress for $30;
Of course not. That's clearly a job for a business method patent.
the only copyright Craigslist would be gaining would be on the specific text of a specific ad.
Doesn't really matter, now does it? There's enough ambiguity that Craigslist could drag you to court and keep the case going for a while. Even if they'd lose eventually, it would cost you enough time and money to bankrupt Joe Average, thus making it an effective blackmail tool.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't really matter who the law would eventually side with, if it takes long enough to do so to bankrupt you.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Don't worry, I'm sure there's a Service Pack on its way to deal with this legal bug ;).
He's talking about the 2011 edition of the movie, where the Death Star has been upgraded to blow up solar systems. It's to prepare for the upcoming tie-in with the Superman franchise.
It isn't meant to improve the workflow. It's meant to make the workflow in Windows PCs identical to Windows tablets, to leverage Microsoft monopoly in the former to help push the latter. Microsoft is counting on there being sufficient lock-in to Windows-specific applications that people have to upgrade to Windows 8 once Windows 7 support ends, whether they like it or not. Time will show if that'll happen, but it's an awful risk to take - because if the answer is "no", it's the end of Windows.
Interesting times we are living in.
That doesn't answer my question. Being content when everything is well is perfectly rational, and appealing to some definition of humanity requires you to specify said definition, justify why it should be accepted, and then show why BNW-type situation conflicts with it, none of which you have done. Unless, of course, you are trying to appeal to emotion rather than logic. You know, like irrational animals do.
Using an ad hominem in place of a rationale strongly suggests that you don't have one.
Nothing's funnier than harassing a minimum wage worker who has no choice but to take your shit or be fired, eh?
Let me guess: you're a CEO?
But that means that you'll need to basically start again from the beginning once you want to do something more advanced. Using simple shaders and vertex arrays isn't really any harder, and means that you can build on what you've learned later on.
But the simplicity gain from using immediate mode is quite small, so why not just learn to do it the performant way from the beginning?
So what is happening? What is the deep, dark secret that the "wakers" are trying to make others see? What, exactly speaking, is wrong with being content when you have everything you need, and the same is true for everyone else? What justifies trying to disrupt a status quo everyone is happy with?
Of course it does. Just see the Prohibition (any of them) for an example of how ineffective regulation will be when people actively resist it.
A wise choice, seeing how it's the workers who produce the wealth, and businessmen merely manage it (at best; usually they just loot it).
What a great opportunity: instead of getting an education you get to be an unpaid child laborer.
I think you're confusing artists and businessmen. Artists experiment to figure out what interests them, businessmen try to maximize some variable (such as profits or test scores). An entrepreneur who prioritizes based on what happens to interest him is not going to be in business for very long.
What I can't figure out is if you're serious, or doing some kind of absurd parody of libertarianism.
And the counter argument to that is: so?
Industries exist to satisfy needs. They are means to an end, not ends by themselves. Trying to artificially drive up demand once natural demand has been satisfied is our goold old friend the Broken Window Fallacy.
You're making a mistake here. You're accepting the unstated assumption that game companies existing has positive value by itself, and are trying to figure out ways for them to continue doing so. It is important to reject this assumption, because if society survives the looming energy crisis the accelerating development of technology will make more and more products basically free - just remember the article about an automated 3D printer a few days back, and think what happens once we can print low-tolerance spare parts (or even effectively download a car, to paraphrase a tired cliche). We don't want post-scarcity held back by artificial scarcity, but there are plenty of people who do, so it's important to clarify these concepts - specifically that an industry collapsing because its product became worthless due to its abundance is a good thing.
Unfortunately, this disqualifies your experience of disproving any but the most bureaucratic of hypothethical afterlifes. And the same is true of anyone else capable of relaying theirs, of course. Which rises some questions about the viability of this entire research project as anything but a flamewar generator.
You are making a logical error here: you assume that other human beings have a conscious experience despite this being - according to yourself - unnecessary to explain their observed behaviour, yet you assume that the camera doesn't have it. Then you present this presumed difference - which, remember, you yourself said cannot be proven from the actual observations - as something mystical and in need of an explanation. In other words, you claim that an unobservable agent exists and then want its existence explained.
It would be far simpler to say that the camera is indeed aware of the image it processes to the extent its observable behaviour suggests, and extend this to everything - and yes, this means that electrons are aware of the electric field, since they react to it. In this model the difference between "conscious experience" and "mere awareness" becomes a matter of semantics: agents which have a lot of information processing capacity relative to their inputs and complex enough feedback loops that their internal state becomes more important than their immediate inputs for determining their reactions are said to be conscious.
The alternative is a universe overrun by philosophical zombies - or, as you say, one running IN THE DARK.
What specific limitation are we talking about, and what indicates that humans aren't subject to it?
Do you have any way to calculate the probabilities of any of these things, even in a crude order-of-magnitude way? No, of course not. So your claim they're LESS LIKELY TO BE TRUE is completely unsupported. But even if you had a way to calculate the probabilities, your claim "it can not be a part of any realistic philosophy" would not follow. In science there are often competing theories, some more likely than others, and they only get relegated to the realm of fiction once they're ruled out by actual evidence. To the best of my knowledge, the idea that our universe is actually a simulation (which includes dreams) hasn't been ruled out, nor has it been confirmed.
All in all, these religious arguments certainly do serve to illustrate the human tendency towards irrationality, and not only in the believers.
Unless you have the Downloads window open, in which case it starts to get mysterious slowdowns until you close the window. And of course every time you save a file, the damn thing pops up again, even if's an image or something that's already downloaded.
It's called "mortality". Given enough time, the memory of the previous time a bad idea was tried fades, and the new generation does it all over again. How long it takes depends on the depth of the trauma and how fast the nasty effects take hold: for example, the recent rise of Western police states is due to the memory of Nazism finally fading, while it was Reagan who began ignoring the lessons of the Great Depression, yet it took until now for deregulation to finally lead to a new economic collapse.
Basically, you get a new Great War as soon as those who survived the previous one are too frail to prevent it anymore. Or earlier, if enough charisma and stupidity are involved.
It boils down to each country's government deciding for its subjects what it wants to do. In some countries these subjects have some kind of say over some issues, in most they don't - and in none do they have any control over what gets censored, since there's too much money and power riding on that for the powers that be to not become involved. But having the US manage things means that non-US governments need to jump through hoops to censor, and every little bit helps.
...Why are any critical missile defense computers connected to the Internet? I mean, isn't that pretty much asking for that very scenario?
There are quire a few positions where periods of activity and waiting alternate. Trying to "remove the slack" in such scenarios typically results in small savings in periods of passivity and huge disasters in periods of activity. This is especially true in scenarios like missile defense where activity periods depend on some unpredictable external factor - it's too late to hire staff when the air raid sirens start blaring, and having enough staff to handle a missile attack means that you'll have more than you need when an attack is not incoming.
But even beyond that, human beings aren't capable of giving 100% 8 hours a day. If you try to make them, those who can leave for greener pastures and those who can't concentrate on looking busy, rather than doing their job. The end result is that you'll end up with incompetent, unmotivated people trying their best to deceive the management.
But perhaps this isn't about wasted time but porn. If so, then please remember that this is a position that likely requires quite a bit of highly specialized training. Is punishing people for being impure sinners a good enough reason to justify the cost of training their replacements? Maybe, maybe not - but since this training would come out of taxpayer money, it would probably be best to not pay to enforce any moral code that doesn't absolutely have to be.
This, actually, is a major problem for DirectX: it's tied to new Windows versions in order to force upgrading. Based on everything that's been revealed of Windows 8 so far I have no desire to upgrade, and will likely not do so just because of some game. So, you either support older DX versions and support them well, which means that you can't optimize the engine for the new ones without basically maintaining two different versions, or you lose customers.
On the other hand, new OpenGL versions depend on driver support, and its in the best interests of card manufacturers to not artificially limit it, as that would be shooting their own sales on the foot.
From what I've seen, both political and religious debates tend to degenerate into "everyone who disagrees with me is evil or stupid or both" pretty fast. There are numerous reasons for this, from trying to oversimplify the world to a kind of magical thinking where everything will be fine if you just perform certain rituals (oppose anything Obama does; bash gays; vote Republican; etc). However, the most important reason is that people who have common political or religious beliefs tend to cluster together and form groups, and membership in said groups becomes part of the identity of their members; thus any attack against the group is considered an attack against its members, and reacted to accordingly.
The problem is the word you use here: attack. People don't "debate" politics or religion, they fight for dominance for their group. Historically, these fights tended to escalate into all-out wars, which is what respecting faith is trying to prevent. And of course people being people means that this gets abused.
If you don't care about the end result, why get involved in the first place?
Of course not. That's clearly a job for a business method patent.
Doesn't really matter, now does it? There's enough ambiguity that Craigslist could drag you to court and keep the case going for a while. Even if they'd lose eventually, it would cost you enough time and money to bankrupt Joe Average, thus making it an effective blackmail tool.