Just like crashes are (the major) part of the excitement of car sports, scandals are a part of pop idol culture. An idol who never does anything controversial is hopelessly bland and boring. Let's not forget where the word "idol" actually comes from, and how those myths usually played out.
There is no point or benefit to playing a video game at all, other than for entertainment value.
There is no point or benefit in anything, other than potential enjoyment.
Seriously. It's not like staying alive itself (or earning a better afterlife, or whatever) has any benefit that doesn't ultimately reduce into "I might enjoy it".
If the acheivement system increases a player's level of entertainment, then it is just as valid and the rest of the game.
The question is: does it? In my experience, most achievements are given for utterly trivial things (like the "Disciple of Osmos" in Osmos, unlocked by completing the tutorial), so there's no actual sense of achievement to them.
It's only me who have the impression that lawyers are going crazy?
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.
360/13=about 27.7//a doubling of speed in 13 months. Not sure if this is accurate
It isn't. It's 18 months. So it's 20 doublings.
2^27.7 = 218,037,342.4.
2^20 = 1 048 576.
This is (1.759x10^15)/(400*10^6)=4,397,500 times as much. Not as much as predicted with x2 every 13 months, but you get the picture.
The corrected figure is closer, especially when you remember that the 1982 Cray cost around $15,000,000 and the second around $100,00,000 (assuming 200 cabinets and $500,000 per cabinet - I couldn't find the actual figure anywhere).
If history is any indicator, then the next version of every software program would then be 1000x slower.
Yeah, but they'll also be 1000x smarter, meaning that SpinFox will automatically mod down any messages it thinks you might disagree with - with automatically created, nursed and ripened sock puppets!
Seriously speaking, 1000x faster starts getting near the level of human brains in raw power, so it should be able to run a real artificial intelligence on it.
Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.
Apple winding down OS X hardly qualifies as death knell for the PC.
Your beloved PC? Now a "content creator's" workstation. Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app".
So you're going to write text 8 hours straight, 5 days a week, on an iPad?
Desktop computers aren't going anywhere, because they're large enough to have a decent display and keyboard. As an added bonus, they can also fit a powerful (by the standards of the time) processor and GPU, lots of memory, and a large hard disk.
A bunch of hungry economists locked up in a cellar will not create sandwiches out of thin air.
The cellar doesn't have a government, thus a true free market solution can arise: the strongest economist slaughters and eats the rest one by one, preferably with good red wine - this is wine cellar, right? It would be barbarous to expect such civilized people to resort to cannibalism without wine.
This proves, once again, that the true nature of humanity can only be realized when the weak are not coddled by the socialistic monopoly on violence, but are required to be personally responsible for their own well-being.
When economy meets laws of physics, guess who wins?
According to the documentary "Atlas Shrugged", the only reason we don't have perpetual motion generators yet is because the horrible, oppressive persecution the rich and the powerful face in our society has forced them to withdraw from society. We are all going to die horribly, and deserve it for daring to tax CEOs.
Based on this, I theorize that if people make high enough offers for a single piece of bread I have, it should magically multiply and feed them all. Any opening bids? Come on, people: let's overcome world hunger through inflation!
I also wonder if the system could be automated. If I were to run two programs that constantly bid over the gasoline in my car's tank, would it refil by itself? And would the computer running these programs need to be physically present in the car, or could I run it on my home computer, violating thermodynamics on the background whenever I used my computer? And, coming to think of it, I could power the computer itself the same way! And I could even arrange cooling without fans through some kind of "heat credit" system!
All problems go away if you simply ignore them or insist that they were caused by government regulation. Rayndonomics - what a fascinating new branch of science!
Sola scriptura looks good on paper, but the fact that the Bible supports wildly different interpretations means it is less clear on many important issues than Luther realized.
That's not a bug, it's a feature:). Having your religion's holy texts be somewhat open to interpretation allows said religion to evolve along with society, which is a good thing for both its adherents and non-adherents.
The thing is, homosexuality isn't condemned in just the Old Testament. It's condemned in the new also. See the latter half of Romans 1
The thing is, "Romans 1" is a letter written by Paul to "all those in Rome" (hence the name). It has the same amount of divine authority as your average Slashdot post, even in the most literal imaginable reading of the Bible, and for the same reason: it was written by a mere mortal man (and one who had been very wrong before, at that). It certainly doesn't justify condemning homosexuality, much less the absurd obsession modern Christianity seems to have with it.
No, merchants add value by handling the logistics of actually selling a few items at a time to lots of different people. This guy doesn't do that, he simply loots the store of everything valuable, making it less interesting to everyone else and thus harming both the store and local populace.
I would also point out that it's a church, by definition it's supposed to represent the will of $deity not the opinions of the general population or its members.
No, it's supposed to be a community of individuals united by their faith. It's no more a representative of God's will than Slashdot is a representative of nerd's will. It's simply a social club. How could it be more? It's not like its leaders have a direct line to God to ask for orders.
There are many references to staying on the narrow path, that to stray and be sinful is easy while to stay true and rightous is hard.
The narrow path being, basically, "love your neighbour, stop pretending you're better than him and stop making up excuses why this doesn't apply to you".
To claim the church is not moral because a survey declares gay marriage as acceptable is a stretch. By the standards of Christian (and and in Islam and Judaism as well) the gay lifestyle is far from acceptable.
It appears that by most Finns standards "gay lifestyle" is acceptable. This would then make the church immoral, from their point of view.
I guess you could say that certain loud parts of society are upset they cannot change what is and therefor declare what offends them as immoral.
Well, actually, they can. A lot of people are doing that right now by their actions, declaring anti-gay discrimination to be immoral by severing their association with people who practice it.
So whether or not you agree with gay marriage/lifestyle/etc it do not expect to change religion, do not expect to minimize it by declaring it the problem either.
Religions evolve all the time. The very fact that there are multiple versions of Christianity is proof of that. And if a church falls short of people's expectations in ethics due to a doctrinal issue, then yes, that is a problem with religion.
I am quite sure you will find lots of positives in that survey who would not tolerate a gay couple in their circle of friends but are afraid of answering a poll in a way not considered politically correct. Can you change morality by intimidation?
In other words, these people disagree with you, therefore they can't honestly believe what they said, but must instead be intimidated. It's condescending and deceitful; how very efficient of you.
The bookstores are putting them up for sale at a price which they deem to make a fair profit for them. What's wrong with him buying them and selling them elsewhere if he believes that he can make a profit too?
Because it rises the price of books for everyone else. Rather than getting a book for $2 from the bookstore, I'll have to buy it for $5 from Amazon.
This guy is simply a new version of a ticket scalper. He's a parasite and will hopefully get banned from every bookstore. Every single penny he makes comes from someone else's pocket; he simply monopolizes a resource and profiteers from it, contributing absolutely nothing to the economy. He's scum.
And note that what is driving people away is the immorality of the church. Which is ironic, given that the church probably defines itself as the high bastion of morality.
What's driving people away is the conflict between their moral values and those of the church. Hopefully, this will force the church to re-examine its stance on various issues and improve, resulting in the world getting a tiny bit better.
I've never really understood the obsession with sexuality Christianity seems to have. Homosexuality is mentioned a few times in the Bible in the same context as the evils of eating shellfish and wearing clothes with multiple fabrics, yet religious people ignore the rest and focus all their energy on this one thing. Even adultery, which is condemned far more times, receives nowhere near this much attention.
Seriously, what the heck is wrong with these people? Are all the priests closet gays or something?
Evolution is like a trillion monkeys hammering away at potential genomes; if creating one that was viciously deadly to humans were easy, it probably would have happened already.
It is easy and it has happened already: rabies has 100% mortality. However, it turns out that killing your host is a bad thing for your own survival, so most diseases tend towards harmless.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before.
From the viewpoint of viruses, killing their host is a Bad Thing. It's much better to keep the host alive and mobile so he can keep spreading the infection. This is one of the reason why diseases tend towards less harmful over time.
By the way, those people who think HIV was created in a government lab seriously underestimate how cleverly made HIV is. It's way beyond our best evil geniuses.
Again, the longer a particular HIV strain takes to kill its host, the better its chances of spreading are.
Now I have to worry about the my idiot roommate engineering a virus that'll cause the zombie apocalypse?
No reason to worry, for it won't do you any good. Rabies is already the real-life zombie maker; all you have to do is make it airborne to cause the end of the world as we know it.
Then can you explain the problems that Perl, Python, and Ruby were invented to solve? It seems strange to have so many different scripting languages that _seem_ very similar.
Perl, Python and Ruby aren't programming paradigms, they are programming languages.
It seems amazing that the people who are actively manipulating the market with thousands of automatic trades every minute are being protected, while the little guy who figured out how to win over the machines gets convicted.
Not really. It's just nobility closing their ranks and watching each other's backs, least a peon would become their equal.
You didn't really think that the law was same to all, now did you?
While it's great to know other programming languages, learning a completely different language for the sole purpose of getting used to programming in general instead of just learning the language you want to learn seems like a waste of time.
If you're new to programming, start with line-number Basic. When you start inventing weird workarounds for the weaknesses of that language - namely, the lack of stack - graduate to C and the world of Block Programming. When that starts seeming small to you, graduate to C++/Java.
The thing is, each and every programming paradigm has been invented to solve problems. You can't really understand it if you don't understand the problem(s) it was invented to solve, and those problems are really only apparent once you push the language to its limits and try make up your own ways to escape them.
And hey, who knows, maybe you'll invent something better.
If rather than have a consensus for a vote, you had simply limited government so the scope of government involving that issue was eliminated, you'd have less elections and less problems.
Who's going to enforce that limitation? The Supreme Court? And who's going to appoint Supreme Court members - the Government or the citizenry (who want a bigger government so it can adress their pet issue)?
Like with most issues, here too the simple-sounding one fails miserably on closer inspection.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to identify just fine with Wall-E.
Just like crashes are (the major) part of the excitement of car sports, scandals are a part of pop idol culture. An idol who never does anything controversial is hopelessly bland and boring. Let's not forget where the word "idol" actually comes from, and how those myths usually played out.
Specifically, it tells that people are hardwired to see consciousness anywhere it's at all possible. Or did you have another point?
There is no point or benefit in anything, other than potential enjoyment.
Seriously. It's not like staying alive itself (or earning a better afterlife, or whatever) has any benefit that doesn't ultimately reduce into "I might enjoy it".
The question is: does it? In my experience, most achievements are given for utterly trivial things (like the "Disciple of Osmos" in Osmos, unlocked by completing the tutorial), so there's no actual sense of achievement to them.
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods.
It isn't. It's 18 months. So it's 20 doublings.
Yeah, but they'll also be 1000x smarter, meaning that SpinFox will automatically mod down any messages it thinks you might disagree with - with automatically created, nursed and ripened sock puppets!
Seriously speaking, 1000x faster starts getting near the level of human brains in raw power, so it should be able to run a real artificial intelligence on it.
Apple winding down OS X hardly qualifies as death knell for the PC.
So you're going to write text 8 hours straight, 5 days a week, on an iPad?
Desktop computers aren't going anywhere, because they're large enough to have a decent display and keyboard. As an added bonus, they can also fit a powerful (by the standards of the time) processor and GPU, lots of memory, and a large hard disk.
Businessmen don't sweat. They utilize an evaporation-based heat management solution.
The cellar doesn't have a government, thus a true free market solution can arise: the strongest economist slaughters and eats the rest one by one, preferably with good red wine - this is wine cellar, right? It would be barbarous to expect such civilized people to resort to cannibalism without wine.
This proves, once again, that the true nature of humanity can only be realized when the weak are not coddled by the socialistic monopoly on violence, but are required to be personally responsible for their own well-being.
According to the documentary "Atlas Shrugged", the only reason we don't have perpetual motion generators yet is because the horrible, oppressive persecution the rich and the powerful face in our society has forced them to withdraw from society. We are all going to die horribly, and deserve it for daring to tax CEOs.
Based on this, I theorize that if people make high enough offers for a single piece of bread I have, it should magically multiply and feed them all. Any opening bids? Come on, people: let's overcome world hunger through inflation!
I also wonder if the system could be automated. If I were to run two programs that constantly bid over the gasoline in my car's tank, would it refil by itself? And would the computer running these programs need to be physically present in the car, or could I run it on my home computer, violating thermodynamics on the background whenever I used my computer? And, coming to think of it, I could power the computer itself the same way! And I could even arrange cooling without fans through some kind of "heat credit" system!
All problems go away if you simply ignore them or insist that they were caused by government regulation. Rayndonomics - what a fascinating new branch of science!
That's not a bug, it's a feature :). Having your religion's holy texts be somewhat open to interpretation allows said religion to evolve along with society, which is a good thing for both its adherents and non-adherents.
The thing is, "Romans 1" is a letter written by Paul to "all those in Rome" (hence the name). It has the same amount of divine authority as your average Slashdot post, even in the most literal imaginable reading of the Bible, and for the same reason: it was written by a mere mortal man (and one who had been very wrong before, at that). It certainly doesn't justify condemning homosexuality, much less the absurd obsession modern Christianity seems to have with it.
No, merchants add value by handling the logistics of actually selling a few items at a time to lots of different people. This guy doesn't do that, he simply loots the store of everything valuable, making it less interesting to everyone else and thus harming both the store and local populace.
No, it's supposed to be a community of individuals united by their faith. It's no more a representative of God's will than Slashdot is a representative of nerd's will. It's simply a social club. How could it be more? It's not like its leaders have a direct line to God to ask for orders.
The narrow path being, basically, "love your neighbour, stop pretending you're better than him and stop making up excuses why this doesn't apply to you".
It appears that by most Finns standards "gay lifestyle" is acceptable. This would then make the church immoral, from their point of view.
Well, actually, they can. A lot of people are doing that right now by their actions, declaring anti-gay discrimination to be immoral by severing their association with people who practice it.
Religions evolve all the time. The very fact that there are multiple versions of Christianity is proof of that. And if a church falls short of people's expectations in ethics due to a doctrinal issue, then yes, that is a problem with religion.
In other words, these people disagree with you, therefore they can't honestly believe what they said, but must instead be intimidated. It's condescending and deceitful; how very efficient of you.
Because it rises the price of books for everyone else. Rather than getting a book for $2 from the bookstore, I'll have to buy it for $5 from Amazon.
This guy is simply a new version of a ticket scalper. He's a parasite and will hopefully get banned from every bookstore. Every single penny he makes comes from someone else's pocket; he simply monopolizes a resource and profiteers from it, contributing absolutely nothing to the economy. He's scum.
What's driving people away is the conflict between their moral values and those of the church. Hopefully, this will force the church to re-examine its stance on various issues and improve, resulting in the world getting a tiny bit better.
I've never really understood the obsession with sexuality Christianity seems to have. Homosexuality is mentioned a few times in the Bible in the same context as the evils of eating shellfish and wearing clothes with multiple fabrics, yet religious people ignore the rest and focus all their energy on this one thing. Even adultery, which is condemned far more times, receives nowhere near this much attention.
Seriously, what the heck is wrong with these people? Are all the priests closet gays or something?
It is easy and it has happened already: rabies has 100% mortality. However, it turns out that killing your host is a bad thing for your own survival, so most diseases tend towards harmless.
From the viewpoint of viruses, killing their host is a Bad Thing. It's much better to keep the host alive and mobile so he can keep spreading the infection. This is one of the reason why diseases tend towards less harmful over time.
Again, the longer a particular HIV strain takes to kill its host, the better its chances of spreading are.
No reason to worry, for it won't do you any good. Rabies is already the real-life zombie maker; all you have to do is make it airborne to cause the end of the world as we know it.
Perl, Python and Ruby aren't programming paradigms, they are programming languages.
Triple the points if the worms escape, block the doors to the laboratory with unbreakable spider silk sheet, then eat the scientists.
Quadruple them if they somehow mutate into an army of Shelobs and terrorize the general population.
Not really. It's just nobility closing their ranks and watching each other's backs, least a peon would become their equal.
You didn't really think that the law was same to all, now did you?
If you're new to programming, start with line-number Basic. When you start inventing weird workarounds for the weaknesses of that language - namely, the lack of stack - graduate to C and the world of Block Programming. When that starts seeming small to you, graduate to C++/Java.
The thing is, each and every programming paradigm has been invented to solve problems. You can't really understand it if you don't understand the problem(s) it was invented to solve, and those problems are really only apparent once you push the language to its limits and try make up your own ways to escape them.
And hey, who knows, maybe you'll invent something better.
Who's going to enforce that limitation? The Supreme Court? And who's going to appoint Supreme Court members - the Government or the citizenry (who want a bigger government so it can adress their pet issue)?
Like with most issues, here too the simple-sounding one fails miserably on closer inspection.