Just watch out for those sharks with frickin lazer beams!
Lasers don't work well underwater. Water both absorbs energy from the beam and cools the target. Sharks with diamond drills, on the other hand, might be a problem.
So, in the future it's impossible to figure out what browser supports what? Because, after all, browser support is dragging behind years even now. Or is that the very goal of Google? Make Chrome the de facto standard, and force everyone else to play the catch-up game?
Seriously, don't do this "living standard" crap. At the very least use minor version numbers to identify a given set of standards. Don't force me to guestimate how a web page I write today is going to behave in browsers 5 years from now; let me specify what behaviour I want.
As long as square didn't screw around much with the battle system, I'd actually be EXCITED to see a FF VI remake with current gen graphics...and remakes usually make me cringe.
The thing is, current-generation graphics take an absurd amount of work to make. I suspect that this is the real reason behind non-linearity: if you have two routes through a forest, you can't just draw tree-sprites according to a simple bitmap, as you could with 2D games. And voice acting does this for dialogue, too.
If a book writer wants a scene with 16 exploding universes, he just writes it, but if a filmmaker wants one, he needs a budget. Games have been steadily evolved from text-based ones to symbolic graphic to ever more movie-like graphics, and now we're seeing the darker side of that.
Since it's unlikely that people will be satisfied with a return to SNES-era graphics, I think that this problem will only be helped once AI advances to the point where it can procedurally generate much of the contents of scenes and levels. We are nowhere near that point, however, so we'll be seeing a lot of linear games in the near future.
After 50-odd years of people taping new releases off the radio, they've finally got their heads around the idea that releasing them for sale at the same time means that people will buy singles while they still like them.
Yeah, it shocked me too. It's almost like they'd reached sapience all of the sudden. I wonder if a black monolith took pity on Sony and played "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" through cafeteria speakers?
This universe is not the best possible one for life.
That's quite an assumption there. Care to back it up - by, for example, explaining what changes would make it better? In other words, what natural constants would you tweak and how?
Given that black holes have finite mass, yet "almost infinite" volume according to the link, one would actually have very low density. However, that's a matter of semantics, and it might be more meaningful to define a black hole's density as the volume of space cut out by the event horizon and imagined to be flat. In that case the density would be high, but still finite. Or you could define density as the density of the singularity, which we are sadly yet unable to calculate, not having a theory that combines General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
We can easily see its effects through gravitational lensing. We know much about its characteristics.
You can see a black hole through gravitational lensing if there happens to be something suitable behind it to lense and if the hole is big enough, relative to its distance.
Dark matter also produces such lensing, but it is observably different because dark matter is not dense and point-like, as are black holes.
Black holes are not point-like. Their singularities may be, but that's unlikely; in any case, that doesn't affect their gravitational lensing effects.
Black holes are not inconsistent with quantum mechanics and relativity.
Seeing how General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are inconsistent with each other (GR assuming a flat spacetime and QM making one impossible due to the Uncertainty Principle), it is impossible for black holes to be consistent with both. In fact, what happens in a black holes singularity is one of the questions beyond current physics ability to explain.
This inconsistency is what String Theory and other quantum gravity theories are trying to bridge.
Your understanding of physics and black holes is deeply flawed.
There's something to say about pots and kettles here:).
Consider that it might actually be the other way around: we evolved in this Universe, therefore we are fined tuned for it.
The problem is, we aren't. The concept of fine-tuning doesn't really apply to this problem. The conditions that arise due to different values for various natural constants aren't smooth and continuous, they're drastically different.
As far as we can tell, no life exists in the Sol System outside of Earth. Nor does abundant life exist in all conditions on Earth either; specifically, deserts have very little life due to lack of water. That's one obstacle Earth life has never been able to overcome, yet water itself can exist only with very narrow range of various constants. Similarly, with slightly different values, either hydrogen would not ignite or all of it would had been burned to iron in the first three minutes. Carbon only exists in abundance due to a specific set of resonances in binding energies of nucleons.
In short, it's not that the Universe is fine-tuned for us, it's fine-tuned for allowing complex structures to develop within its lifetime.
That's a terrible analogy. Consider instead: There is a lottery to determine whether or not the human race lives or dies. We wouldn't be around to comprehend any losing draws, so we make the (flawed) conclusion that we were always bound to have won.
However, using this to answer the question of why we won the lottery - why did the lottery machine pick the numbers it did, or why do the natural constants have the values they do - is deeply flawed unless you presume that the game is rigged. "I won the lottery because I owed the Mafia money and would have been killed if I hadn't won it" only makes sense if there's an entity that both cares about your continued existence and is capable of influencing the lottery.
That's the problem with the Antropic Principle: it requires either a god or infinite credits for the cosmic one-armed bandit, otherwise it has zero explanatory power.
Doesn't the Anthropic Principle adequately deal with this issue in any case?
No, the Anthropic Principle simply states that the Universe must be compatible with life since life is observed to exist within it. Trying to use it to actually explain why anything is as it is is confusing cause and effect, unless you can prove that every possible universe exists or something to that effect.
It's the difference between a fiat currency and a representative currency. The worth of the representative currency is determined by the amount of a real physical asset that is available.
Which, in the case of fiat currency, is the total industrial output of the nation issuing it.
It's the gold-backed currency that's backed by nothing of value.
A lot of mileage can be gained by targeting spending that changes peoples' behavior in adverse ways, such as subsidized educational loans and financial assistance, and mandated employer health insurance. Sure, it's nice to have better educated people and the security of health insurance, but these expenses increase faster than GDP (much less inflation) and are unsustainable in the long run.
Which, of course, is an outright lie. The cost to produce education isn't increasing; how could it, when new tools make it less - not more - labour-intensive? And if its cost isn't increasing, how can it increase faster than the GDP? Unless the GDP is expected to fall in the long range - in which case you'll go bankrupt no matter what you do - it's impossible for a fixed cost to overtake it. Unless, of course, you run education as a private business, where the owners will of course keep rising the price to extract more and more profit.
The same goes to medical care. Yes, there are some potentially very expensive treatments, but only a few people will ever need them. For almost everyone, publicly funded medical care will actually more than pay itself back from increased productivity; also, pre-emptive medical care lessens the need for those expensive procedures by acting as maintenance.
Finally, having lots of people without education or healthcare creates a very unstable situation. People with nothing to lose but their chains are dangerous. When they finally realize that they have the entire world to win, they aren't going to play by your rules anymore. Better make sure they have stakes in your game while you still can.
you think roads and stuff come from nothing but sunshine and the love of jesus?
Which remains me: why should sunshine and thelove of Jesus be free? True, people had nothing to do with creating either, but they had nothing to do with the birth of Earth or its resources either yet can still own parts of those. Various churches and televangelists have the divine love thoroughly commercialized, but sunshine is still regarded as a public good, even in our capitalist society.
To combat this problems, we could privatize the Sun, selling its energy output in an auction piecemeal. The consumers who need sunlight can then ask for offers from various Sun Providers, thus letting the Free Market do its magic of balancing supply and demand. This system would also be fairer than the current one: after all, if I spend my life in my basement, why should I have to compensate my neighbour's habit of being up and out during the day? Why should he receive free sunlight when this only helps fuel his sense of entitlement and creates a moral hazard of not acquiring flashlight batteries in time?
There is, however, one unresolved question in my model: should the FCC sell or merely lease the frequencies needed to deliver the product to the Earth?
Pathetic troll is pathetic. Try a bit harder next time, okay?
Or was yours some kind of meta-troll meant to offend through its low quality of workmanship rather than its actual contents? In that case, well played sir!
That's the problem with Modern Art/Trolling: you can never tell if a garbage bin is part of the exhibition or furniture.
What sorta applications need so many columns? Curious.
Judging by the name, a pretty incredible one.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
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· Score: 1
There have been far to many hardware abstraction and filesystem virtualization layers developed for Linux many of which competes with each other.
The obvious solution is to add an abstraction layer that wraps them all. Perhaps a small set of intermediate layers to wrap various combinations of existing abstraction layers, and a loopback layer to deal wtih more complex circumstances, such as a many-world quantum computer?
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?
on
Xfce 4.8 Released
·
· Score: 1
As far as ThunarVFS vs GIO,
Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems? Is there a point to it besides just making it harder to use applications not native to said GUI system? Or do the developers just like adding redirection layers to make their codebase look bigger?
If M$ can prove access to it's source code was exploited by government to break the security of the program,
How could the government possibly do that? Did it have submit privileges to Microsoft's code control system?
Or did you perhaps mean "expose existing security problems" by "break the security"? Because if that counts as "breaking" security nowadays, things could get pretty nasty.
What will you do if, while working for the government, you come up with evidence of highly illegal activities by your higher-ups? You'll either publish the evidence and violate their trust, or not publish and thus help cover their crimes, thus violating the trust of the public who ultimately pay your paycheck.
Not violating trust is a fine principle, but it also allows corruption to continue unhindered. It also allows corporations to kill people through neglect like BP did. It allowed the Catholic Church to keep on protecting pdeophile priests for decades and pretend that this was a good thing. Or, to stop beating around the bush, it allowed Nazi death camps to operate despite every participant knowing perfectly well - judging by their own letters - that they were doing a horrible, vile thing.
Every organization needs people who are ready to betray it. Otherwise there's nothing stopping it from rotting to the very core.
Someone who expresses unhappiness with government policies is likely to be security risk when it comes to government secrets. Conceptually, this is not a bad idea.
Yes, it is. It means that someone who is unhappy will simply hide his opinions, which of course gives him more reasons to be unhappy: "I'll be fired if I don't toe the party line! I'm being oppressed!" And of course he's quite right, whether his original problem had any basis in reality or not. This means that not only does this not solve the problem, but will actually make it worse, as well as puts a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
Yet another bright idea from our brave leaders worthy of a Dilbert Award.
Also, any time you go under general anesthesia, there is a chance you will never wake up... most that take elective surgeries ignore the statistical dangers of "going under," but they are quite real.
Of course there's a chance you never wake up, since you could die anytime. The question is: are your hourly chances of dying during general anesthesia greater than otherwise, and if so, could the difference be explained by the fact that you're being operated on?
Slashdot Mirror
Lasers don't work well underwater. Water both absorbs energy from the beam and cools the target. Sharks with diamond drills, on the other hand, might be a problem.
So, in the future it's impossible to figure out what browser supports what? Because, after all, browser support is dragging behind years even now. Or is that the very goal of Google? Make Chrome the de facto standard, and force everyone else to play the catch-up game?
Seriously, don't do this "living standard" crap. At the very least use minor version numbers to identify a given set of standards. Don't force me to guestimate how a web page I write today is going to behave in browsers 5 years from now; let me specify what behaviour I want.
FF's original intent was to be a cashcow. It's called Final Fantasy because, had it not sold, the company would had gone belly-up.
The thing is, current-generation graphics take an absurd amount of work to make. I suspect that this is the real reason behind non-linearity: if you have two routes through a forest, you can't just draw tree-sprites according to a simple bitmap, as you could with 2D games. And voice acting does this for dialogue, too.
If a book writer wants a scene with 16 exploding universes, he just writes it, but if a filmmaker wants one, he needs a budget. Games have been steadily evolved from text-based ones to symbolic graphic to ever more movie-like graphics, and now we're seeing the darker side of that.
Since it's unlikely that people will be satisfied with a return to SNES-era graphics, I think that this problem will only be helped once AI advances to the point where it can procedurally generate much of the contents of scenes and levels. We are nowhere near that point, however, so we'll be seeing a lot of linear games in the near future.
Yeah, it shocked me too. It's almost like they'd reached sapience all of the sudden. I wonder if a black monolith took pity on Sony and played "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" through cafeteria speakers?
Disregarding the consequences of ones actions to other people is psychopathic, and expecting that there will be no consequences for that is psychotic.
That's quite an assumption there. Care to back it up - by, for example, explaining what changes would make it better? In other words, what natural constants would you tweak and how?
Wrong.
Given that black holes have finite mass, yet "almost infinite" volume according to the link, one would actually have very low density. However, that's a matter of semantics, and it might be more meaningful to define a black hole's density as the volume of space cut out by the event horizon and imagined to be flat. In that case the density would be high, but still finite. Or you could define density as the density of the singularity, which we are sadly yet unable to calculate, not having a theory that combines General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics.
You can see a black hole through gravitational lensing if there happens to be something suitable behind it to lense and if the hole is big enough, relative to its distance.
Black holes are not point-like. Their singularities may be, but that's unlikely; in any case, that doesn't affect their gravitational lensing effects.
Seeing how General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are inconsistent with each other (GR assuming a flat spacetime and QM making one impossible due to the Uncertainty Principle), it is impossible for black holes to be consistent with both. In fact, what happens in a black holes singularity is one of the questions beyond current physics ability to explain.
This inconsistency is what String Theory and other quantum gravity theories are trying to bridge.
There's something to say about pots and kettles here :).
The problem is, we aren't. The concept of fine-tuning doesn't really apply to this problem. The conditions that arise due to different values for various natural constants aren't smooth and continuous, they're drastically different.
As far as we can tell, no life exists in the Sol System outside of Earth. Nor does abundant life exist in all conditions on Earth either; specifically, deserts have very little life due to lack of water. That's one obstacle Earth life has never been able to overcome, yet water itself can exist only with very narrow range of various constants. Similarly, with slightly different values, either hydrogen would not ignite or all of it would had been burned to iron in the first three minutes. Carbon only exists in abundance due to a specific set of resonances in binding energies of nucleons.
In short, it's not that the Universe is fine-tuned for us, it's fine-tuned for allowing complex structures to develop within its lifetime.
However, using this to answer the question of why we won the lottery - why did the lottery machine pick the numbers it did, or why do the natural constants have the values they do - is deeply flawed unless you presume that the game is rigged. "I won the lottery because I owed the Mafia money and would have been killed if I hadn't won it" only makes sense if there's an entity that both cares about your continued existence and is capable of influencing the lottery.
That's the problem with the Antropic Principle: it requires either a god or infinite credits for the cosmic one-armed bandit, otherwise it has zero explanatory power.
No, the Anthropic Principle simply states that the Universe must be compatible with life since life is observed to exist within it. Trying to use it to actually explain why anything is as it is is confusing cause and effect, unless you can prove that every possible universe exists or something to that effect.
Which, in the case of fiat currency, is the total industrial output of the nation issuing it.
It's the gold-backed currency that's backed by nothing of value.
Good? Any proposal that results in the creation of a website called "Slashdong" and a conference called "Arse Elektronika" is an awesome proposal !-)
Which, of course, is an outright lie. The cost to produce education isn't increasing; how could it, when new tools make it less - not more - labour-intensive? And if its cost isn't increasing, how can it increase faster than the GDP? Unless the GDP is expected to fall in the long range - in which case you'll go bankrupt no matter what you do - it's impossible for a fixed cost to overtake it. Unless, of course, you run education as a private business, where the owners will of course keep rising the price to extract more and more profit.
The same goes to medical care. Yes, there are some potentially very expensive treatments, but only a few people will ever need them. For almost everyone, publicly funded medical care will actually more than pay itself back from increased productivity; also, pre-emptive medical care lessens the need for those expensive procedures by acting as maintenance.
Finally, having lots of people without education or healthcare creates a very unstable situation. People with nothing to lose but their chains are dangerous. When they finally realize that they have the entire world to win, they aren't going to play by your rules anymore. Better make sure they have stakes in your game while you still can.
Which remains me: why should sunshine and thelove of Jesus be free? True, people had nothing to do with creating either, but they had nothing to do with the birth of Earth or its resources either yet can still own parts of those. Various churches and televangelists have the divine love thoroughly commercialized, but sunshine is still regarded as a public good, even in our capitalist society.
To combat this problems, we could privatize the Sun, selling its energy output in an auction piecemeal. The consumers who need sunlight can then ask for offers from various Sun Providers, thus letting the Free Market do its magic of balancing supply and demand. This system would also be fairer than the current one: after all, if I spend my life in my basement, why should I have to compensate my neighbour's habit of being up and out during the day? Why should he receive free sunlight when this only helps fuel his sense of entitlement and creates a moral hazard of not acquiring flashlight batteries in time?
There is, however, one unresolved question in my model: should the FCC sell or merely lease the frequencies needed to deliver the product to the Earth?
Pathetic troll is pathetic. Try a bit harder next time, okay?
Or was yours some kind of meta-troll meant to offend through its low quality of workmanship rather than its actual contents? In that case, well played sir!
That's the problem with Modern Art/Trolling: you can never tell if a garbage bin is part of the exhibition or furniture.
Judging by the name, a pretty incredible one.
The obvious solution is to add an abstraction layer that wraps them all. Perhaps a small set of intermediate layers to wrap various combinations of existing abstraction layers, and a loopback layer to deal wtih more complex circumstances, such as a many-world quantum computer?
Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems? Is there a point to it besides just making it harder to use applications not native to said GUI system? Or do the developers just like adding redirection layers to make their codebase look bigger?
How could the government possibly do that? Did it have submit privileges to Microsoft's code control system?
Or did you perhaps mean "expose existing security problems" by "break the security"? Because if that counts as "breaking" security nowadays, things could get pretty nasty.
Once again it's demonstrated why labour unions are a necessity and will remain so as long as people work for a living.
It is perfect, at least until some enterprising scammer makes a statusbar-lookalike appear when the real one's not visible.
What will you do if, while working for the government, you come up with evidence of highly illegal activities by your higher-ups? You'll either publish the evidence and violate their trust, or not publish and thus help cover their crimes, thus violating the trust of the public who ultimately pay your paycheck.
Not violating trust is a fine principle, but it also allows corruption to continue unhindered. It also allows corporations to kill people through neglect like BP did. It allowed the Catholic Church to keep on protecting pdeophile priests for decades and pretend that this was a good thing. Or, to stop beating around the bush, it allowed Nazi death camps to operate despite every participant knowing perfectly well - judging by their own letters - that they were doing a horrible, vile thing.
Every organization needs people who are ready to betray it. Otherwise there's nothing stopping it from rotting to the very core.
Yes, it is. It means that someone who is unhappy will simply hide his opinions, which of course gives him more reasons to be unhappy: "I'll be fired if I don't toe the party line! I'm being oppressed!" And of course he's quite right, whether his original problem had any basis in reality or not. This means that not only does this not solve the problem, but will actually make it worse, as well as puts a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
Yet another bright idea from our brave leaders worthy of a Dilbert Award.
Of course there's a chance you never wake up, since you could die anytime. The question is: are your hourly chances of dying during general anesthesia greater than otherwise, and if so, could the difference be explained by the fact that you're being operated on?