Everything light does is a combination of reflections and refractions (shadows are an artifact of those).
Except the double-slit experiment. It's based on the fact that light has wavefront qualities, while ray tracing treats it as particles.
I also strongly doubt that the discreet ray approach will ever produce very good global illumination, since the number of rays bouncing between surfaces quickly grows towards infinite as the desired accuracy grows.
You'd need to do "wavefront racing" to fix these, and I for one have no idea how to do this - solve the quantum field equations for each particle in the scene after inventing the Grand Unified Theory ?-)
It's the most realistic possible way of rendering,
No. For starters, the rays are "sparse", that is, there is space between two parallel rays which goes unexplored; furthermore, each beam either hits or doesn't hit any given object, leading to aliasing (jagged edges). A much better solution would be racing a cone from each pixel, with no space between them; however, the mathemathics of calulating reflections when the cone hits something would be horrible.
Another problem is with global illumination. Normally, when the ray hits something, you send a ray towards each light source to figure out how that light source illuminates this place. However, any surface which is illuminated acts as a light source as well; in theory, you'd need to send a ray out to each point of each surface in the scene, and from those point again to each surface and so on ad infinitum to get it completely right.
The third problem is caused by the trace being done in inverse; that is, instead of tracing rays of lights from the light source to the eye, you trace rays from the eye to the source. This is neccessary, because each source in theory emits an infinite number of beams, so tracing them all would take an infinite amount of computer power. However, since light takes the same path either way, you can invert the trace and only trace those beams which actually hit the eye of the observer, usually simplified to be one per pixel.
So what's the problem ? Well, suppose there's a mirror near the light source, which reflects light to an are on a surface, on top of the surface already getting light directly from the source. This are will naturally be brighter than the rest of the surface, because it is receiving more light. However, when calculating the brightness with an inverted trace, you trace a ray to a spot on the surface, and then from the surface to the light source(s). There is no way to know that a mirror which is far from the path of the ray should also affect the brightness of the surface. Thus the spot which should be brighter isn't. Other variations of this problem include prisms and such rainbow-generating devices, for the same reason.
There are solutions to all these problems: for example, POV-Ray can trace multiple rays per pixel to anti-alias the image and use forward ray tracing to try to calculate the global illumination and lens- and mirror effects. However, these are ultimately kludges to cover for the weaknesses of the core ray tracing algorithm. This, in turn strongly suggests that ray tracing is not the ultimate rendering method as far as realism goes.
If I set cargo in motion that will return a $100 million payment in 100 years, I know that I'm not going to live long enough to ever see the return. But, in 50 years I can probably sell the right to the value of the cargo for $5 to $20 million, depending on interest rates (see present discounted value).
How much did you invest to get those $100 million ? If we assume that a bank pays, say, 2% interest annually, you could end up with $100 million in a 100 years with an initial investment of just $14 million. Can you get a starship for that amount ? And if you invested the money into a diverse long-term portfolio in the stock market, and assume that the annual return is about 5% (and gets reinvested, of course), you only need $800 000 initial capital.
Long-term investment needs a very good return of investment, otherwise the opportunity cost becomes prohibitive, since the yearly return is so small. This is especially true for such risky endeavours as this. I propably wouldn't invest into something like this unless it returned something like 15% profit yearly, in which case the spaceship and cargo combined can only cost $85. Yes, that's "eighty-five dollars". Even if you built the damn thing from tin cans, it still isn't going to happen.
If the transporters were "traveling salesmen" who flew around the galaxy buying and selling, they would need to be both long-lived and long-sighted since the demand for product X is entirely dependent upon time. Let's say they were selling a brand new Earth. 6000 years ago, such a thing would not have been necessary, while today it would be quite attractive at the right price. How could those beings know and prepare such a product 6000 years in the past in anticipation of demand 6000 years into the future? It wouldn't be trade so much as gambling.
While it is indeed a gamble to try to guess what way the dice will fall the next time it's thrown, it's not much of a gamble to bet that it will come up as "1" some time in the future.
Right now we have a need for a number of technologies: Fusion power, efficient, safe and cheap surface-to-orbit vechiles, efficient solar cells, some material to build a space elevator from, etc. It is very likely that any technical civilization will have a need for these if it doesn't self-destruct first; it is also likely that this need arises after the civilization begins emitting radio transmitters.
So the traveling spacemen fill their databanks with these technologies, then set out to travel. When and if they intercept a radio signal, they head towards it, and offer to trade technology for technology and supplies. They store any new technologies and trade with other salesmen when they meet. Every now and then, when the colony has accumulated enough supplies and population, it will build a new ship and spawn a new colony.
And of course the colony is performing research on its own too, and may trade with products of culture other than science/technology too.
What do you do with the goods already en route when you suddenly have the ability to deliver them faster, or even yesterday for that matter?
Intercept them en route, pick them up, and deliver them to their destination ?
Or, if we are talking about a constant stream of shipments of, say, uranium, simply cease sending shipments until the last one en route is almost there, then resume sending them, this time with the new fast method. If you time it right, the rate of arrival remains constant.
You know what else can stop your heart? And, at a much larger distance? My rifle. I find this kind of subject to just be more of the terror sensationalism.
You know what else rifles do ? They make a lot of noise and splatter a lot of blood eveyrwhere, making the cause of death extremely clear to even the dumbest coroner or bystander. Not only that, but nearly everyone in the world knows what a rifle is and looks like, so if someone was shot dead and you were seen with a rifle in your hands anywhere near, it would make you an immediate suspect.
Compare this to someone seemingly getting a heart attack, and you being seen somewhere near with a walkie-talkie. Do you think you just might have a bit less of a chance to be caught ?
Finally, the mental barrier against shooting someone is much higher than the mental barrier against playing with their pacemaker precisely because you know the former will cause a mess. The latter doesn't cause any obvious injury, so I can just see some brats playing around, turning the beats per minute up to 200 and leaving them there just to have a little harmless fun... And then the heart stops from overexertion, and that's that. Remember that Slashdot story a while ago about the kid who played around with tram controls and ended up derailing one ? People do stupid shit like that.
As for desktops - you could just use Firefox without noscript, after a few days the machine will be using all 80 CPUs and memory just to show flash ads and other junk;).
Except that Firefox is apparently singlethreaded, so in reality it would take minutes to render a single page while 79 of the cores would idle.
The reason/. continues to thrive while digg and reddit wallow in irrelevancy is due to the methods used for article selection.
The reason Slashdot continues to thrive is that it has sufficient mass that any conversation has good chances of getting an interesting comment, which gets interesting replies, and so on. The articles themselves are irrelevant; most conversatin happens based on the summary or the headline.
A website or other service based on user-generated content becomes self-sufficient once it has critical mass. Slashdot has it, Wikipedia has it (altought it has propably passed its peak, thanks to the deletionists), YouTube has it, various *chan imageboards have it, Pirate Bay has it, several Tor hidden service websites either have it or are very close to having it; Hell, even Freenet is close enough that it has had some forks along the way.
Starting a website is a bit like starting a fire: it smoulders barely burning and on the verge of going out for a long time, but when it reaches the critical size, it starts spreading like, well, a wildfire:). Internet itself followed this model: how many years did it spread slowly and without mainstream notice, until it finally exploded into relevancy in the span of a few years ?
Wikipedia will be quickly filled with balantant advertising, wanabe celebrities and marginal and hardly proved theories (this is alas sadly often already the case)
Wikipedia cannot be "filled" because it has no limits of growth that could ever reasonably be encountered. Having a page of "Khalid, Slashdot user 31037" does not affect any other page, nor anyone not specifically looking for it, so it doesn't matter; consequently, there is no reason why such a page shouldn't be included. Marginal and hardly proved theories - or even disproved ones - should have pages which clearly indicate their status.
Marginal entries are rarely visted, so they don't evelove that much (practice show that the most intersting pages are those which are often visited). Marigina entries are also at risk of being quiclky filled with spam and advertisement, in one word they don't get enough eyballs to be be correctly mainted. One solution to this is to merge marginal entries when this is possible to enhance their audience.
Since, as already noted, Wikipedia has no size limit, having unevolved marginal entries does not hurt anything. No one bothers filling an unvisited page with advertisements; what would be the point ? And even if they do, no one is going to see them, so what's the harm ? Also, it is trivial to have a system which notifies the editors (and anyone else interested) when a rarely-visited or -edited page changes, helping catch such malfeasance.
They tend to lower the signal/noise ratio as if WP is filled with everything and anything important fact don't naturally evolve.
Signal/noise ratio only has significance when the two interfere. Having lots of rarely visited stubs in no way interferes with other articles.
So at the end of the day the question is : does WP want to be a large source of trivia about anything and everything or rather a more "elitist" society which bring a real added value to your knowledge.
The world is already full of elitist societies. What's lacking is a centralized source of trivia about anything and everything. So, I'd say that the former is more desirable.
Besides, to be frank: Knowledge about Star Wars characters is likely to be more beneficial to me than knowledge about Napoleonic Wars. Neither will benefit me materially, but I'm far more likely to end up talking about the former than the latter, so knowledge about Star Wars will benefit me socially. So Wookiepedia is far more likely to bring added value to my knowledge than Napoleonpedia.
Maintaining those pages does cost... if not money... then the time of good editors who have to police it for idiocy/vandalism/neutral point of view. Effective editors put in a lot of time and effort. Effective trolls and vandals can do their thing with little effort at all.
The problem is trivially solvable by automatically notifying editors whenever small (stub) or rarely-visited pages change. Event-based system is far more efficient than a polling one.
Wikipedia burns through good editors like they are an infinitely renewable resource.
That would explain why the deletionists are the only ones left.
Then how, pray tell, does one divine the stupid from the not-stupid, if not by what they believe?
Give them problems to overcome, preferably several different kinds (social, logical, mathemathical, linguistical, etc), and observe the efficiency of the solutions they come up with. Then have them solve similar problems later, and see if there's improvement in said efficiencies.
But tell me: why you have a need to classify people as stupid and non-stupid ? That kind of coarse classification doesn't seem very useful for any practical purpose.
No, stupid people persist in believing stupid things. Some people are ignorant, but the measure is how readily they discard/defend that ignorance when it's refuted.
Last Thursdayism is impossible to disprove, so how would you go about refuting it ? And discarding any belief just because someone tells you you're stupid for holding it is evidence of suspectibility to peer pressure, not intelligence.
My answer to the original question is that no-one sensible should date someone who believes in astrology. Apart from the fact that they are obviously bad at thinking clearly, many people screw up their lives by making decisions based on astrology. Get involved with one and you will be under a lot of pressure to go along with unpredictable and arbitrary decisions.
On the other hand, if a believer might otherwise make good dating material - which I'm assuming she does, since else the question would never come up - then clearly her belief in astrology hasn't prevented her from taking proper care for herself. We aren't talking about someone who lives under a bridge, presumably, so she is taking care of her finances in semi-sensibly, for example. Finally, most horoscopes (none that I've ever seen) don't give any concrete enough predictions to justify any kind of decision, but are more in the lines of "rushed decisions may lead to unforseen consequences".
Besides, it's not like you're ever going to meet anyone without flaws; and even if you did, why would such perfect beings want to date you ? In the end, believing that "there is a change of romance because Venus is near the Sun" is an insignificant flaw. So, if you use this as a basis of chosing a girlfriend, then perhaps you are the one who is taking astrology a bit too seriously ?-)
Disclaimer: I know people who write horoscopes for a living, usually while drunk. This might affect my perspective on them (the horoscopes) somewhat. Specifically, I might underestimate what lengths people might go to due to them.
Why would the burden of proof be with the guy who refuses to believe the religious crap?
The burden of proof is with whoever makes claims either way. If you claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, prove it; if you claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, prove it. If you can't, then don't make claims; or if you absolutely have to make them, don't be surprised if people won't abandon their beliefs in favor of yours.
Then again, if people took that advice, we'd miss out on the wonderful atheism vs. theism -flamefests with the wonderful "everyone who disagrees with me is evil or stupid" -arguments together with random references to bodily waste thrown in for good measure. This one already shows promise - and was clearly predicted by the warm weather todays here in Finland;).
Question is, is there another way to tell the stories that isn't so formulaic and that doesn't give such an incorrect impression?
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Do they base their stance purely on how "trivial articles" may affect Wikipedia's public image, or do they have some sort of technical concern about having too many articles?
I suspect that the main reason is a lot less noble: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts completely out of proportion to the actual power." Destroying someone else's work is using power, and that is a rewarding activity in itself, so people with nothing to contribute do so to make themselves feel important.
That's why I've made a principal decision to never again contribute to Wikipedia: doing so would mean engaging in petty power games with deletionists and other control freaks, so why bother ?
That article sure uses a a lot of words to say 'the web should be communist'.
Communism is an economic system where the workers own the means of production; the practical implementations usually had the state owning everything. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
All analysis like these are missing a huge, huge point. The wider web may well end up under the control of powerful, agenda ridden groups. This isn't that important, no really, it isn't. They are trying to control something which is already on its way to being obsolete as a means to disseminate information between ordinary people.
Why not? Because the net will contain sub-internets within game worlds. sub-internets will be the new places to hang out. We may even see clones of our current Internet hosted entirely inside game worlds (or whatever game worlds become).
I use the Web mainly for reading text and looking at pictures. The current Web is absolutely superior in this compared to any imaginable virtual world.
The cyberspace - a simulation of real 3D world - is a fun thing for playing around, but when you need to get information, it is pathetically inefficient. Besides, it takes obscene amounts of resources to host a virtual world compared to simply hosting a website, so not surprisingly every virtual world in existence is tightly controlled by agenda-ridden groups. Add the fact that there is only a handful of them, and getting started in a new virtual world requires an absurd amount of effort - installing the client, at the absolute minimum - compared to simply going to a new website with the good old browser, and it is quite clear that the Internet's future lies in the lair of the spider queen.
User generated content just follows along the lines of urban legends. Expert content at least stems from previous discussions within expert communities where well modeled critiquing techniques other than Godwin's Law are used.
Do you have credentials to prove your expertise in this area ? Because otherwise I really have to discard this as an urban myth, possibly originating in Nazi Germany, which certainly would had had an incentive to start such a rumor discrediting anyone except the elite.
if they can 'morph' a polygon into a circle and vice versa, then can't they figure the size of the polygon precisely and use it to define the size of the circle and say that Pi is a finite number?
Pi is a finite number: it is more than 3 but less than 4. It is also precisely defined: it is exactly the circumference of a circle in an euclidean plane divided by the diameter of the same circle.
Why blow up a compiler in the first place? I'm assuming 'FCC' is some sort of relation to 'GCC'...
Because it is a communist compiler used by hackers who haven't paid for the license. And yes, you are right, it spawns new cells every now and then in a process these enemies of freedom call "proejct forking".
Science has succeeded in explaining the universe using some basic rules and starting with a featureless point of energy. That is about the simplest starting condition you can possibly have.
Creationism, on the other hand, has as a starting condition the existence of an omnipotent being capable of creating the universe in finished form. That being pretty much has to be more complex than the universe itself.
There seems to be a something fishy in this logic: why does the omnipotent creator need to be more complex than the universe it creates, while the point of energy and some rules does not ?
If we assume that the universe is deterministic, then whatever starting condition there was must contain the entire history of the universe from beginning to the end. You could, in theory, feed the starting condition to a computer and determine the exact state of the universe at any point in time. And even if the universe is not strictly deterministic but rather based on statistical propabilities, as quantum mechanics seem to imply, then you can still calculate all possible states in any given moment in time. And of course if we assume that the universe is not deterministic in any sense, then the very concept of starting condition becomes meaningless.
A closed system can not create new information. While the seeming complexity can increase, all the information was already contained in the starting condition, and is merely being decoded. Consequently, all possible starting conditions of the universe must have at least the same complexity as the universe at its most apparently complex point of evolution; the only question is how well it was hidden.
Most Bible Thumpers have it totally wrong. IF they actually read the bible, they would have found that the earth was NOT actually created in 6 or 7 days. YES YES That is the GENESIS account,
Actually, since we are splitting hairs, it isn't. "In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth." The six days start from that point, and are spent putting in finishing touches to and populating the latter.
However, all of this ignores a very important point: even if we assume that Genesis was personally written by God himself, could it possibly be accurate ? Remember that we are talking about nomadic people with no concept of anything approaching modern physics and likely no way to transcribe large numbers. A detailed, accurate report of how universe began would by neccessity be highly technical and complex in nature, since the universe is complex, and as such would be way over the ability of ancient jews to comprehend; in fact it would very likely be way over our ability to comprehend. As such it simply doesn't make any sense to treat the Genesis as some kind of design document or event log. It isn't, and wasn't meant to be, no matter what its origin.
So, basically, biblical literalism is just as inane as are arguments against it based on it containing rounded figures - I am, of course, referring to the rounded value of pi (3) that one gets if one tries to calculate its value based on some figures describing some ancient artifact there, and a particularly pathetic attempt to claim that this makes the book "wrong".
(bad code doesn't work, and that's obvious to users, not just experts)
I disagree. The Python mess I've been working on a few days is so bad it hurts my eyes, and I'm the one who wrote it. Yet it works and hasn't crashed for hours now, happily parsing Usenet messages of all things. 18000 done, 16000 left to do:).
Good code is elegant, but bad code can get the job done if it has enough error checks and aborts at the very first sign of trouble.
Which is why it's so bloody hard to get soft shadows and proper global illumination. You'd need forward wavefront tracing for accurate images - and don't forget that light moves at limited speed, so you'd also need to take into account blue- and redshifts (both due to moving objects and gravity wells), the simple fact that objects far enough from the light source aren't visible because light hasn't had enough time for a round trip, etc.
I wonder if it would be possible to prove that the smallest possible computer needed to accurately simulate the Universe in real time would be... Universe itself ?
Slashdot Mirror
Except the double-slit experiment. It's based on the fact that light has wavefront qualities, while ray tracing treats it as particles.
I also strongly doubt that the discreet ray approach will ever produce very good global illumination, since the number of rays bouncing between surfaces quickly grows towards infinite as the desired accuracy grows.
You'd need to do "wavefront racing" to fix these, and I for one have no idea how to do this - solve the quantum field equations for each particle in the scene after inventing the Grand Unified Theory ?-)
No. For starters, the rays are "sparse", that is, there is space between two parallel rays which goes unexplored; furthermore, each beam either hits or doesn't hit any given object, leading to aliasing (jagged edges). A much better solution would be racing a cone from each pixel, with no space between them; however, the mathemathics of calulating reflections when the cone hits something would be horrible.
Another problem is with global illumination. Normally, when the ray hits something, you send a ray towards each light source to figure out how that light source illuminates this place. However, any surface which is illuminated acts as a light source as well; in theory, you'd need to send a ray out to each point of each surface in the scene, and from those point again to each surface and so on ad infinitum to get it completely right.
The third problem is caused by the trace being done in inverse; that is, instead of tracing rays of lights from the light source to the eye, you trace rays from the eye to the source. This is neccessary, because each source in theory emits an infinite number of beams, so tracing them all would take an infinite amount of computer power. However, since light takes the same path either way, you can invert the trace and only trace those beams which actually hit the eye of the observer, usually simplified to be one per pixel.
So what's the problem ? Well, suppose there's a mirror near the light source, which reflects light to an are on a surface, on top of the surface already getting light directly from the source. This are will naturally be brighter than the rest of the surface, because it is receiving more light. However, when calculating the brightness with an inverted trace, you trace a ray to a spot on the surface, and then from the surface to the light source(s). There is no way to know that a mirror which is far from the path of the ray should also affect the brightness of the surface. Thus the spot which should be brighter isn't. Other variations of this problem include prisms and such rainbow-generating devices, for the same reason.
There are solutions to all these problems: for example, POV-Ray can trace multiple rays per pixel to anti-alias the image and use forward ray tracing to try to calculate the global illumination and lens- and mirror effects. However, these are ultimately kludges to cover for the weaknesses of the core ray tracing algorithm. This, in turn strongly suggests that ray tracing is not the ultimate rendering method as far as realism goes.
How much did you invest to get those $100 million ? If we assume that a bank pays, say, 2% interest annually, you could end up with $100 million in a 100 years with an initial investment of just $14 million. Can you get a starship for that amount ? And if you invested the money into a diverse long-term portfolio in the stock market, and assume that the annual return is about 5% (and gets reinvested, of course), you only need $800 000 initial capital.
Long-term investment needs a very good return of investment, otherwise the opportunity cost becomes prohibitive, since the yearly return is so small. This is especially true for such risky endeavours as this. I propably wouldn't invest into something like this unless it returned something like 15% profit yearly, in which case the spaceship and cargo combined can only cost $85. Yes, that's "eighty-five dollars". Even if you built the damn thing from tin cans, it still isn't going to happen.
While it is indeed a gamble to try to guess what way the dice will fall the next time it's thrown, it's not much of a gamble to bet that it will come up as "1" some time in the future.
Right now we have a need for a number of technologies: Fusion power, efficient, safe and cheap surface-to-orbit vechiles, efficient solar cells, some material to build a space elevator from, etc. It is very likely that any technical civilization will have a need for these if it doesn't self-destruct first; it is also likely that this need arises after the civilization begins emitting radio transmitters.
So the traveling spacemen fill their databanks with these technologies, then set out to travel. When and if they intercept a radio signal, they head towards it, and offer to trade technology for technology and supplies. They store any new technologies and trade with other salesmen when they meet. Every now and then, when the colony has accumulated enough supplies and population, it will build a new ship and spawn a new colony.
And of course the colony is performing research on its own too, and may trade with products of culture other than science/technology too.
Intercept them en route, pick them up, and deliver them to their destination ?
Or, if we are talking about a constant stream of shipments of, say, uranium, simply cease sending shipments until the last one en route is almost there, then resume sending them, this time with the new fast method. If you time it right, the rate of arrival remains constant.
You know what else rifles do ? They make a lot of noise and splatter a lot of blood eveyrwhere, making the cause of death extremely clear to even the dumbest coroner or bystander. Not only that, but nearly everyone in the world knows what a rifle is and looks like, so if someone was shot dead and you were seen with a rifle in your hands anywhere near, it would make you an immediate suspect.
Compare this to someone seemingly getting a heart attack, and you being seen somewhere near with a walkie-talkie. Do you think you just might have a bit less of a chance to be caught ?
Finally, the mental barrier against shooting someone is much higher than the mental barrier against playing with their pacemaker precisely because you know the former will cause a mess. The latter doesn't cause any obvious injury, so I can just see some brats playing around, turning the beats per minute up to 200 and leaving them there just to have a little harmless fun... And then the heart stops from overexertion, and that's that. Remember that Slashdot story a while ago about the kid who played around with tram controls and ended up derailing one ? People do stupid shit like that.
Except that Firefox is apparently singlethreaded, so in reality it would take minutes to render a single page while 79 of the cores would idle.
The reason Slashdot continues to thrive is that it has sufficient mass that any conversation has good chances of getting an interesting comment, which gets interesting replies, and so on. The articles themselves are irrelevant; most conversatin happens based on the summary or the headline.
A website or other service based on user-generated content becomes self-sufficient once it has critical mass. Slashdot has it, Wikipedia has it (altought it has propably passed its peak, thanks to the deletionists), YouTube has it, various *chan imageboards have it, Pirate Bay has it, several Tor hidden service websites either have it or are very close to having it; Hell, even Freenet is close enough that it has had some forks along the way.
Starting a website is a bit like starting a fire: it smoulders barely burning and on the verge of going out for a long time, but when it reaches the critical size, it starts spreading like, well, a wildfire :). Internet itself followed this model: how many years did it spread slowly and without mainstream notice, until it finally exploded into relevancy in the span of a few years ?
Wikipedia cannot be "filled" because it has no limits of growth that could ever reasonably be encountered. Having a page of "Khalid, Slashdot user 31037" does not affect any other page, nor anyone not specifically looking for it, so it doesn't matter; consequently, there is no reason why such a page shouldn't be included. Marginal and hardly proved theories - or even disproved ones - should have pages which clearly indicate their status.
Since, as already noted, Wikipedia has no size limit, having unevolved marginal entries does not hurt anything. No one bothers filling an unvisited page with advertisements; what would be the point ? And even if they do, no one is going to see them, so what's the harm ? Also, it is trivial to have a system which notifies the editors (and anyone else interested) when a rarely-visited or -edited page changes, helping catch such malfeasance.
Signal/noise ratio only has significance when the two interfere. Having lots of rarely visited stubs in no way interferes with other articles.
The world is already full of elitist societies. What's lacking is a centralized source of trivia about anything and everything. So, I'd say that the former is more desirable.
Besides, to be frank: Knowledge about Star Wars characters is likely to be more beneficial to me than knowledge about Napoleonic Wars. Neither will benefit me materially, but I'm far more likely to end up talking about the former than the latter, so knowledge about Star Wars will benefit me socially. So Wookiepedia is far more likely to bring added value to my knowledge than Napoleonpedia.
The problem is trivially solvable by automatically notifying editors whenever small (stub) or rarely-visited pages change. Event-based system is far more efficient than a polling one.
That would explain why the deletionists are the only ones left.
Give them problems to overcome, preferably several different kinds (social, logical, mathemathical, linguistical, etc), and observe the efficiency of the solutions they come up with. Then have them solve similar problems later, and see if there's improvement in said efficiencies.
But tell me: why you have a need to classify people as stupid and non-stupid ? That kind of coarse classification doesn't seem very useful for any practical purpose.
Last Thursdayism is impossible to disprove, so how would you go about refuting it ? And discarding any belief just because someone tells you you're stupid for holding it is evidence of suspectibility to peer pressure, not intelligence.
On the other hand, if a believer might otherwise make good dating material - which I'm assuming she does, since else the question would never come up - then clearly her belief in astrology hasn't prevented her from taking proper care for herself. We aren't talking about someone who lives under a bridge, presumably, so she is taking care of her finances in semi-sensibly, for example. Finally, most horoscopes (none that I've ever seen) don't give any concrete enough predictions to justify any kind of decision, but are more in the lines of "rushed decisions may lead to unforseen consequences".
Besides, it's not like you're ever going to meet anyone without flaws; and even if you did, why would such perfect beings want to date you ? In the end, believing that "there is a change of romance because Venus is near the Sun" is an insignificant flaw. So, if you use this as a basis of chosing a girlfriend, then perhaps you are the one who is taking astrology a bit too seriously ?-)
Disclaimer: I know people who write horoscopes for a living, usually while drunk. This might affect my perspective on them (the horoscopes) somewhat. Specifically, I might underestimate what lengths people might go to due to them.
The burden of proof is with whoever makes claims either way. If you claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, prove it; if you claim that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, prove it. If you can't, then don't make claims; or if you absolutely have to make them, don't be surprised if people won't abandon their beliefs in favor of yours.
Then again, if people took that advice, we'd miss out on the wonderful atheism vs. theism -flamefests with the wonderful "everyone who disagrees with me is evil or stupid" -arguments together with random references to bodily waste thrown in for good measure. This one already shows promise - and was clearly predicted by the warm weather todays here in Finland ;).
Hmm... Maybe it's an attempt to make the job of security guard more attractive to young people ?-)
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I suspect that the main reason is a lot less noble: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts completely out of proportion to the actual power." Destroying someone else's work is using power, and that is a rewarding activity in itself, so people with nothing to contribute do so to make themselves feel important.
That's why I've made a principal decision to never again contribute to Wikipedia: doing so would mean engaging in petty power games with deletionists and other control freaks, so why bother ?
Communism is an economic system where the workers own the means of production; the practical implementations usually had the state owning everything. It has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
I use the Web mainly for reading text and looking at pictures. The current Web is absolutely superior in this compared to any imaginable virtual world.
The cyberspace - a simulation of real 3D world - is a fun thing for playing around, but when you need to get information, it is pathetically inefficient. Besides, it takes obscene amounts of resources to host a virtual world compared to simply hosting a website, so not surprisingly every virtual world in existence is tightly controlled by agenda-ridden groups. Add the fact that there is only a handful of them, and getting started in a new virtual world requires an absurd amount of effort - installing the client, at the absolute minimum - compared to simply going to a new website with the good old browser, and it is quite clear that the Internet's future lies in the lair of the spider queen.
Do you have credentials to prove your expertise in this area ? Because otherwise I really have to discard this as an urban myth, possibly originating in Nazi Germany, which certainly would had had an incentive to start such a rumor discrediting anyone except the elite.
Pi is a finite number: it is more than 3 but less than 4. It is also precisely defined: it is exactly the circumference of a circle in an euclidean plane divided by the diameter of the same circle.
Because it is a communist compiler used by hackers who haven't paid for the license. And yes, you are right, it spawns new cells every now and then in a process these enemies of freedom call "proejct forking".
They do. That's why there are cameras in the toilets.
Hey, if illegal drugs sell for high profit... Police department needs funds, right ?
There seems to be a something fishy in this logic: why does the omnipotent creator need to be more complex than the universe it creates, while the point of energy and some rules does not ?
If we assume that the universe is deterministic, then whatever starting condition there was must contain the entire history of the universe from beginning to the end. You could, in theory, feed the starting condition to a computer and determine the exact state of the universe at any point in time. And even if the universe is not strictly deterministic but rather based on statistical propabilities, as quantum mechanics seem to imply, then you can still calculate all possible states in any given moment in time. And of course if we assume that the universe is not deterministic in any sense, then the very concept of starting condition becomes meaningless.
A closed system can not create new information. While the seeming complexity can increase, all the information was already contained in the starting condition, and is merely being decoded. Consequently, all possible starting conditions of the universe must have at least the same complexity as the universe at its most apparently complex point of evolution; the only question is how well it was hidden.
Actually, since we are splitting hairs, it isn't. "In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth." The six days start from that point, and are spent putting in finishing touches to and populating the latter.
However, all of this ignores a very important point: even if we assume that Genesis was personally written by God himself, could it possibly be accurate ? Remember that we are talking about nomadic people with no concept of anything approaching modern physics and likely no way to transcribe large numbers. A detailed, accurate report of how universe began would by neccessity be highly technical and complex in nature, since the universe is complex, and as such would be way over the ability of ancient jews to comprehend; in fact it would very likely be way over our ability to comprehend. As such it simply doesn't make any sense to treat the Genesis as some kind of design document or event log. It isn't, and wasn't meant to be, no matter what its origin.
So, basically, biblical literalism is just as inane as are arguments against it based on it containing rounded figures - I am, of course, referring to the rounded value of pi (3) that one gets if one tries to calculate its value based on some figures describing some ancient artifact there, and a particularly pathetic attempt to claim that this makes the book "wrong".
I disagree. The Python mess I've been working on a few days is so bad it hurts my eyes, and I'm the one who wrote it. Yet it works and hasn't crashed for hours now, happily parsing Usenet messages of all things. 18000 done, 16000 left to do :).
Good code is elegant, but bad code can get the job done if it has enough error checks and aborts at the very first sign of trouble.
Which is why it's so bloody hard to get soft shadows and proper global illumination. You'd need forward wavefront tracing for accurate images - and don't forget that light moves at limited speed, so you'd also need to take into account blue- and redshifts (both due to moving objects and gravity wells), the simple fact that objects far enough from the light source aren't visible because light hasn't had enough time for a round trip, etc.
I wonder if it would be possible to prove that the smallest possible computer needed to accurately simulate the Universe in real time would be... Universe itself ?