What is it about you that makes people escalate what seem to be incredibly mundane disputes into the scenes you describe, I wonder?
He's a crazy bully. He's evil. He seems to be utterly incapable of comprehending that people might find his behaviour anything but exemplary, based on his behaviour in both threads. Also note what he's arguing in this thread.
Notice how both disputes were basically used as methods of getting him away from the other party by said party? I'd hazard to guess he simply sets off the warning bells in people's heads so they get rid of him - a wise choice, IMHO.
Re:NOT the most disgusting form of human imaginabl
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Child Porn As a Weapon
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Writing about murders in crime dramas certainly doesn't land the writers in jail, nor does it convict the producers with actual murder, so why should writing/drawing about underage sex be any different?
Because it's writing/drawing about sex, and America was found by witch-hunting puritans and is still plagued by Born-Again Christian assholes. It's very difficult to be rational when you confuse your personal likes and dislikes with those of God. Just ask Bin Laden.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
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Child Porn As a Weapon
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Those questions can be answered once the pedo apologists can provide a legitimate case of a child completely on their own seeking out to have a sexual relationship with an adult (cases of a 14 year old having sex with say a 16 or 17 year old don't count).
As long as people insist on charging said 16 or 17 year olds with pedophilia, they count.
Also, if a 14 year old isn't harmed by sex with a 17 year old, I find it hard to believe she would be devastated by an 18+ year old either.
The problem is that they can never provide such an example and thus always make up these bullshit "No true scotsman" cop outs.
Since any case that comes out inevitably draws hysterical reactions, it's impossible to prove that any perceived harm was caused by sex rather than said reactions.
It should also be noticed that many countries have age of consent far lower than the USA, yet this doesn't seem to result in traumatized populations; for example, Finland has 16 and Japan has 13 - okay, bad example;).
Basically, "pedophilia" has been extended from fucking kids to fucking teenagers, which is ridiculous and harms said teenagers since they get labeled sex offenders for fucking each other. Grow up, America, and get over this twisted obsession with sexuality you have. Even catholics are less neurotic about it than you.
But do we really want that? I'm quite a modern thinking person, but I just feel that stops us being human.
Could be, at least for some purely biological species definition, but what does that matter if I'm still me?
What is the point in achieving greatness if you no longer have the emotions to feel it?
Why wouldn't I feel it? Emotions are part of a mind, so an uploaded mind would certainly still have them, assuming the upload process works at all of course.
The friends to celebrate it with?
Why wouldn't I have those? Are you going for some variant of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul sci-fi trope here?
The partners to love?
Other uploads, or even fleshy humans, through either robot bodies or a virtual reality environment, can act as partners. You do know what is the most important part of Second Life economy, right ?-)
Sorry, but I just feel its wrong and no amount of logical points will sway my opinion on that simply because its not a "logical" debate to begin with.
What debate? Nobody's forcing or even encouraging you to abandon your fleshy form. I'm simply speculating what I would do. Or did you mean you're going to dictate how I should live my life?
As for "no amount of logical points will sway my opinion", that's not something to be proud of. It's a mental problem to overcome. You are basically declaring yourself deliberately irrational.
Not to mention that if prosthetics are knocked out, we may miss out on things like fully-controllable mechanical limbs, which could change the direction the human race goes (do we continue to utilize technology, or do we become technology?)
We'll become technology. In the long run we'll go far beyond mere cyborgs into full mind uploading. There's far too many advantages to separating your mind from a particular body, the least not being that your intelligence is no longer bound by the amount of brain matter that can fit inside your skull.
It seemed (here... again, YMMV) that simply receiving a new e-mail into a folder would cause the entire folder to be reindexed. When one has more than ten thousand e-mails in a folder, that brings even a powerful machine to its knees.
So perhaps the applications that use a database should, you know, use a database rather than making their own half-cooked solutions. For example, PostgreSQL is Free, fast and reliable.
We already have a database as a standard part of the OS: the filesystem. However, that's pretty primitive, doesn't support transactions nor indexing, and is in general far less powerfull than, say, a relational one, which is why applications cook their own. A better system is needed to get rid of these kinds of problems.
I think you'll find searching is now an even cheaper operation, since the slowdown seems to be caused by the background indexing service.
I've noticed this is a bane of new systems in general: everything from Windows Media Player to e-mail clients are indexing stuff, theoretically speeding themselves at the cost of slowing all the other programs. The same is true of various "preloaders", auto-updaters and other miscellaneus crap.
It's tragedy of the commons at work on your computer.
That's an assumption. In any case, you aren't investing when you buy stocks from him.
Of course I'm investing. I'm buying something in order to use it to make money. Whether or not you agree it's a good investment doesn't make it not one. In fact your assertion here is ridiculous.
You're paying him off for his investment, and taking a gamble that there's still some growth value left in the company, or that there is someone around the corner you can sell the shares to whether the company is any good or not.
Or I could simply keep the stocks and get dividends. That's independent on whether or not the company keeps growing, and in fact only requires it to stay profitable.
But yes, it's a gamble. Every decision is, since you can never be absolutely certain of the outcome. That's not what's meant when stock market is compared to gambling: day traders gamble, investors spreading their money out are pretty much guaranteed a steady return of investment over a long time.
When he invests, he does so with full knowledge of the internal state of the company, including information that only he and the company principals are privy to.
Most of the time there's not much company to speak of at this stage. There's just some guy with an idea seeking funding.
When you buy stock in the secondary market, you only have what is in the most recent prospectus. It is illegal for the company principals to give you information they aren't giving to your allies and competitors.
You know what the company is doing. You know what the market aroud it is like. That's sufficient information to decide whether the company is likely to stay profitable and paying dividends.
His money built the company. Yours only builds his wealth.
His wealth and his money are the one and the same. You are using different words here to try and obscure the fact that he'll use his money - gained by selling succesfully started companies to people like me - to fund yet another company.
Just wait until the blackhats get ahold of this and change the phone home site from the standard to the blackhat's servers. Voila, instant botnet that is illegal for a French citizen to remove. I'm sure the guys on Elbonia are just drooling over that they can do once they can poison an ISP's DNS to get command/control access to the machines.
So... would that be good or bad from the user's point of view? I know I'd rather be relaying spam than be spied on by a Hitler wannabe.
Nazi comparison intentional. Anyone who's trying to push a program like this is a fascist and will likely end up marching people to death camps if allowed. You can't treat people like cattle without the thought of just slaughtering the difficult ones popping into your head eventually.
And that's why the government can't do it: It would help ordinary people and therefore be communism. But worry not, I'm sure there's a way to instead give the money to some corporate CEO in the best capitalist tradition.
The economy is based on the fallacy of infinite growth. Some day it will all crash and burn so fucking hard that the bible humpers will call it The Apocalypse.
The economy has grown the entire human history, from the very first stone tools onward. To permanently stop its growth would, indeed, take The Apocalypse, for it implies that nobody ever again invents anything. Given this, I think this "fallacy" is actually pretty sound.
Your money doesn't go into a company's pocket to build machines and hire personnel. It goes into another speculator's pocket. It's a false flow in the economy. It's gambling. No more or less than poker or craps.
A venture capitalist pays the initial cost of starting a business and receives stocks. If the business doesn't go belly-up, the value - liekly future dividends - of those stocks grows a lot, more than making up for all the businesses the VC funded which failed. The VC sells the stocks onward to someone on a secondary market, thus receiving money he'll use to invest in another company.
Do you understand? The secondary market exists to make it easier to rise capital to start businesses; the money you pay when you enter it will eventually end up with some venture capitalist, who'll invest it into a business that's starting up. It's about separation of labour: rather than having to find people with business ideas yourself, and then evaluating those ideas, you can simply buy stocks of a company a specialist helped start. It's no more false flow than buying stuff from a second-hand store - the money ends up with a manufacturer eventually. And it also allows established companies to rise more capital by selling new stocks.
As for gambling, yes, that happens. Nobody's forcing you to participate in that. You can simply buy stocks from multiple companies and keep them, rather than trying to guess whether a particular company will go up or down. Of course your earnings won't be as much as you could win by gambling, but if you spread your investments enough, you will end up with a steady increase in value that could only be prevented by the entire economy crashing - and I do mean permanent collapse, not a mere recession or depression - at which point you are screwed, no matter what you did.
We had a lot of back-and-forth about how fair it would be to put a 100% death tax on people. Either use your influence before you die, or lose it. After you die, just giving it to your kids is bullshit, because they could be worthless pieces of trash.
If you have 100% death tax, then wealthy people simply give things to their kids before they die, or use some legal shenigans to ensure they get it after they die, while the poor can't afford to, making the kids of the wealthy get even more of an advantage.
That strategy gives a moderate return over a certain medium-long term outlook. Provided something large doesn't get involved, like you get in during a marketwide bubble or are forced to cash out in the middle of a marketwide downturn, or both.
Don't "get in" at any given period of time. Invest the same sum - few hundred dollars - every month, on a random (use dice) date, spread over as many companies and industries as possible. Don't ever sell, and it would be advisable to not pay any attention the the share prices of the companies you've invested in, so you don't get caught up in panics. Oh, and most important of all: don't ever invest money you think you might need, precisely so you aren't forced to sell at inopportunate moment.
That way, if the market is up at any given month, you end up paying less stocks, and if it's down, you end buying lots. Since you're money's scattered all over the market, your gains are equal to the average growth of economy, and since you're not trying to outsmart the fat cats, they can't outsmart you.
Until the fund manager decides to screw you and a fund you picked for its nice upward drift starts trending down and stays that way for several quarters, wiping out years of "gains".
What fund manager? Invest directly, a little bit here, a little bit there, precisely so you can avoid a single point of failure.
The DJIA is a very small, randomly selected subset of the overall market. Whatever your algorithm is doing, it's violating causality, or has a bias that happens to match the local bias in the markets. You're on a streak at the craps table. That's all.
Not necessarily. If most trading is directed by computer algorithms nowadays, it should exhibit a pattern that's predictable by another computer. It might be difficult to predict how unknown people will bet, but that very quality makes it possible to treat them as basically random data; feed that data into a computer algorithm, along with its own output from the previous iteration, and the result should be predictable more often than simply guessing.
Speculation is just as rampant in the real estate market as in the stock market, but that doesn't make owning a home a gamble.
That's because you don't own a home in the hopes of getting money for it, you own it to get a root over your head. It provides value to you even if nobody would pay a single cent for it. That's not true of stocks: if they aren't gaining in value or paying you dividends, they're worthless.
Besides, as the current economic disaster clearly shows, owning a house is a gamble, because few people can afford to pay cash.
But if the choice is between animated, flowing wheat fields in the farming squares, or a bigger game, I want the bigger game.
It isn't. The GPU draws the wheat field, the CPU handles AI and such.
Anyway, I suspect that the 5000x3000 squares map you wanted would require making the game 64-bit. That's 15,000,000 squares; if you store just 287 bytes of info per square, you exhaust the memory space of 32-bit applications - and even that would require running on a 64-bit machine and having the proper executable flags set.
Once you have reasonably spaced cities, military units, resources, improvements, borders etc. on the map, that 287 bytes per square starts looking pretty small...
This is another case of not having to choose; let me play the big game, and if that becomes a five, ten minute turn compute-fest, let me turn off features I value less, such as terrain animation, in order to make that more practical.
I remember each turn taking 15+ minutes with SimLife:). Someone really should make a modern version.
Of course, we're still playing on a cylindrical world. How about going spherical, so I could finally build that city beneath Antarctican mountains for explorers from future civilizations to find ?-)
Other wishes: adapt the undersea and orbital cities from Call to Power, fix the border mechanism - it's rather weird that the first thing you build in a conquered city is a Theater to get cultural borders spreading again.
Why not just puke out a massive mindwank and let the software organise it into prose for you?
Because software is not yet capable of that. Once it has, I'll certainly take advantage of that, thus freeing more of my personal brainpower into producing that "massive mindwank", or doing something else.
Professional writers already use a system like this. It's known as "editors". Bypassing it tends to result in noticeably worse end result.
Telling people to set the IDE to automatically convert tabs to the required number of spaces does the trick. Also, it seems like you think people should be amazed that your are able to replace tabs with spaces in your IDE? Welcome to new millennium. Here we use graphical IDE's with something called "Find & Replace".
So tell me: why does this amazing new-millenium graphical IDE apparently treat code as a flat text file? Why not treat it as a parse tree, and let the user represent it however he wants - each block indented by certain amount, color-coded for your convenience, maybe some kind of tree structure with every block in the entire project as leaves, or maybe he really likes flowcharts? Or maybe some kind of fancy graph where each object has links linking it to objects it references, and you can zoom in to see its internal structure, from "whole project as a single black box" to "individual lines of code as small boxes"? Then make it 3D and add a flight simulator mode and debug with double Vulcan cannons:).
Seriously, using a glorified text editor as an example of a new-millenium IDE is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
And even he considers jury members dumb :(.
The little boy was a child. What excuse do these supposedly adult wolf-callers have?
He's a crazy bully. He's evil. He seems to be utterly incapable of comprehending that people might find his behaviour anything but exemplary, based on his behaviour in both threads. Also note what he's arguing in this thread.
Notice how both disputes were basically used as methods of getting him away from the other party by said party? I'd hazard to guess he simply sets off the warning bells in people's heads so they get rid of him - a wise choice, IMHO.
Because it's writing/drawing about sex, and America was found by witch-hunting puritans and is still plagued by Born-Again Christian assholes. It's very difficult to be rational when you confuse your personal likes and dislikes with those of God. Just ask Bin Laden.
As long as people insist on charging said 16 or 17 year olds with pedophilia, they count.
Also, if a 14 year old isn't harmed by sex with a 17 year old, I find it hard to believe she would be devastated by an 18+ year old either.
Since any case that comes out inevitably draws hysterical reactions, it's impossible to prove that any perceived harm was caused by sex rather than said reactions.
It should also be noticed that many countries have age of consent far lower than the USA, yet this doesn't seem to result in traumatized populations; for example, Finland has 16 and Japan has 13 - okay, bad example ;).
Basically, "pedophilia" has been extended from fucking kids to fucking teenagers, which is ridiculous and harms said teenagers since they get labeled sex offenders for fucking each other. Grow up, America, and get over this twisted obsession with sexuality you have. Even catholics are less neurotic about it than you.
Could be, at least for some purely biological species definition, but what does that matter if I'm still me?
Why wouldn't I feel it? Emotions are part of a mind, so an uploaded mind would certainly still have them, assuming the upload process works at all of course.
Why wouldn't I have those? Are you going for some variant of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul sci-fi trope here?
Other uploads, or even fleshy humans, through either robot bodies or a virtual reality environment, can act as partners. You do know what is the most important part of Second Life economy, right ?-)
What debate? Nobody's forcing or even encouraging you to abandon your fleshy form. I'm simply speculating what I would do. Or did you mean you're going to dictate how I should live my life?
As for "no amount of logical points will sway my opinion", that's not something to be proud of. It's a mental problem to overcome. You are basically declaring yourself deliberately irrational.
It's not idiots but psychopaths who are the problem. You know, the creeps who suggest "kill the weak" as a solution to any problem.
In any case, I suspect that at least half of those labels are jokes.
We'll become technology. In the long run we'll go far beyond mere cyborgs into full mind uploading. There's far too many advantages to separating your mind from a particular body, the least not being that your intelligence is no longer bound by the amount of brain matter that can fit inside your skull.
Okay, so what's the last digit of Pi?
So perhaps the applications that use a database should, you know, use a database rather than making their own half-cooked solutions. For example, PostgreSQL is Free, fast and reliable.
We already have a database as a standard part of the OS: the filesystem. However, that's pretty primitive, doesn't support transactions nor indexing, and is in general far less powerfull than, say, a relational one, which is why applications cook their own. A better system is needed to get rid of these kinds of problems.
I've noticed this is a bane of new systems in general: everything from Windows Media Player to e-mail clients are indexing stuff, theoretically speeding themselves at the cost of slowing all the other programs. The same is true of various "preloaders", auto-updaters and other miscellaneus crap.
It's tragedy of the commons at work on your computer.
Of course I'm investing. I'm buying something in order to use it to make money. Whether or not you agree it's a good investment doesn't make it not one. In fact your assertion here is ridiculous.
Or I could simply keep the stocks and get dividends. That's independent on whether or not the company keeps growing, and in fact only requires it to stay profitable.
But yes, it's a gamble. Every decision is, since you can never be absolutely certain of the outcome. That's not what's meant when stock market is compared to gambling: day traders gamble, investors spreading their money out are pretty much guaranteed a steady return of investment over a long time.
Most of the time there's not much company to speak of at this stage. There's just some guy with an idea seeking funding.
You know what the company is doing. You know what the market aroud it is like. That's sufficient information to decide whether the company is likely to stay profitable and paying dividends.
His wealth and his money are the one and the same. You are using different words here to try and obscure the fact that he'll use his money - gained by selling succesfully started companies to people like me - to fund yet another company.
So... would that be good or bad from the user's point of view? I know I'd rather be relaying spam than be spied on by a Hitler wannabe.
Nazi comparison intentional. Anyone who's trying to push a program like this is a fascist and will likely end up marching people to death camps if allowed. You can't treat people like cattle without the thought of just slaughtering the difficult ones popping into your head eventually.
And that's why the government can't do it: It would help ordinary people and therefore be communism. But worry not, I'm sure there's a way to instead give the money to some corporate CEO in the best capitalist tradition.
The economy has grown the entire human history, from the very first stone tools onward. To permanently stop its growth would, indeed, take The Apocalypse, for it implies that nobody ever again invents anything. Given this, I think this "fallacy" is actually pretty sound.
A venture capitalist pays the initial cost of starting a business and receives stocks. If the business doesn't go belly-up, the value - liekly future dividends - of those stocks grows a lot, more than making up for all the businesses the VC funded which failed. The VC sells the stocks onward to someone on a secondary market, thus receiving money he'll use to invest in another company.
Do you understand? The secondary market exists to make it easier to rise capital to start businesses; the money you pay when you enter it will eventually end up with some venture capitalist, who'll invest it into a business that's starting up. It's about separation of labour: rather than having to find people with business ideas yourself, and then evaluating those ideas, you can simply buy stocks of a company a specialist helped start. It's no more false flow than buying stuff from a second-hand store - the money ends up with a manufacturer eventually. And it also allows established companies to rise more capital by selling new stocks.
As for gambling, yes, that happens. Nobody's forcing you to participate in that. You can simply buy stocks from multiple companies and keep them, rather than trying to guess whether a particular company will go up or down. Of course your earnings won't be as much as you could win by gambling, but if you spread your investments enough, you will end up with a steady increase in value that could only be prevented by the entire economy crashing - and I do mean permanent collapse, not a mere recession or depression - at which point you are screwed, no matter what you did.
If you have 100% death tax, then wealthy people simply give things to their kids before they die, or use some legal shenigans to ensure they get it after they die, while the poor can't afford to, making the kids of the wealthy get even more of an advantage.
Don't "get in" at any given period of time. Invest the same sum - few hundred dollars - every month, on a random (use dice) date, spread over as many companies and industries as possible. Don't ever sell, and it would be advisable to not pay any attention the the share prices of the companies you've invested in, so you don't get caught up in panics. Oh, and most important of all: don't ever invest money you think you might need, precisely so you aren't forced to sell at inopportunate moment.
That way, if the market is up at any given month, you end up paying less stocks, and if it's down, you end buying lots. Since you're money's scattered all over the market, your gains are equal to the average growth of economy, and since you're not trying to outsmart the fat cats, they can't outsmart you.
What fund manager? Invest directly, a little bit here, a little bit there, precisely so you can avoid a single point of failure.
Not necessarily. If most trading is directed by computer algorithms nowadays, it should exhibit a pattern that's predictable by another computer. It might be difficult to predict how unknown people will bet, but that very quality makes it possible to treat them as basically random data; feed that data into a computer algorithm, along with its own output from the previous iteration, and the result should be predictable more often than simply guessing.
That's because you don't own a home in the hopes of getting money for it, you own it to get a root over your head. It provides value to you even if nobody would pay a single cent for it. That's not true of stocks: if they aren't gaining in value or paying you dividends, they're worthless.
Besides, as the current economic disaster clearly shows, owning a house is a gamble, because few people can afford to pay cash.
No, it requires a computer.
It isn't. The GPU draws the wheat field, the CPU handles AI and such.
Anyway, I suspect that the 5000x3000 squares map you wanted would require making the game 64-bit. That's 15,000,000 squares; if you store just 287 bytes of info per square, you exhaust the memory space of 32-bit applications - and even that would require running on a 64-bit machine and having the proper executable flags set.
Once you have reasonably spaced cities, military units, resources, improvements, borders etc. on the map, that 287 bytes per square starts looking pretty small...
I remember each turn taking 15+ minutes with SimLife :). Someone really should make a modern version.
Of course, we're still playing on a cylindrical world. How about going spherical, so I could finally build that city beneath Antarctican mountains for explorers from future civilizations to find ?-)
Other wishes: adapt the undersea and orbital cities from Call to Power, fix the border mechanism - it's rather weird that the first thing you build in a conquered city is a Theater to get cultural borders spreading again.
Because software is not yet capable of that. Once it has, I'll certainly take advantage of that, thus freeing more of my personal brainpower into producing that "massive mindwank", or doing something else.
Professional writers already use a system like this. It's known as "editors". Bypassing it tends to result in noticeably worse end result.
So tell me: why does this amazing new-millenium graphical IDE apparently treat code as a flat text file? Why not treat it as a parse tree, and let the user represent it however he wants - each block indented by certain amount, color-coded for your convenience, maybe some kind of tree structure with every block in the entire project as leaves, or maybe he really likes flowcharts? Or maybe some kind of fancy graph where each object has links linking it to objects it references, and you can zoom in to see its internal structure, from "whole project as a single black box" to "individual lines of code as small boxes"? Then make it 3D and add a flight simulator mode and debug with double Vulcan cannons :).
Seriously, using a glorified text editor as an example of a new-millenium IDE is ridiculous.