If you take this argument to the extreme and wikipedia becomes the sum of all knowledge then it will become unwieldy.
That's what searching technology is for.
If I hear someone say "George McGovern said something like that" and I don't know who they are referring to I would like a concise list of possibilities, not "George McGovern , purveyor of finest smoked haddock" and "George McGovern, Bogville's crossowrd champion 1997".
Maybe you could search for the saying in question, perhaps in combination of McGovern ? Especially since someone else might be interested in the crossword champion rather than the dead senator ?
How would you feel if you walked into a court room that had "THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MOHAMMAD IS HIS PROPHET" displayed? You might get an idea that the court was a bit biased, and you'd have good reason to.
Yes, he'd be biased. So is every judge on the planet, by the virtue of being human. A judge who makes his particular believes public knowledge is to be commended for his honesty, because such openness makes it easier to determine whether he will be impartial in a particular case or not.
Furthermore, you implication that a muslim cannot be a judge is contrary to the US Constitution, which clearly states that no religious test can be demanded for holding a public office.
I'd argue that it's definitely more stable than the state, which tends to break down every few years. Obviously there will have to be a change in the way people think before it will happen. States only have power because people let them. Voluntary societies can still have leaders.
And once those leaders have followers, what's stopping them from using those followers to enforce their will on others ?
What happens at the absence of central government is that some people accumulate enough power to become local warlords and begin fighting for power amongst themselves. The end result of that is civil war, followed by military dictatorship. It has happened every last time central authority has collapsed.
Humans are pack animals, and packs have leaders. Forming packs and a social hiearchy within them is amongst the most primal instincts human beings have; in many cases, protecting your pack gets priority even over self-preservation. That doesn't mean that the leaders have to have absolute power or be unaccountable for their actions; but it does mean that they will always exist.
And the point of democracy is not majority rule, but making the rulers easily replaceable. This, in turn, makes them accountable for their actions to those they rule, or so the theory goes anyway. Of course it doesn't always work, and almost never really well, but we have no better method of rulership right now.
In an earlier post you linked to Wikipedia, giving the impression that you advocate anarcho-capitalism. Surely you realize that in such a system results in all power being concentrated in the hands of those who own lots of property, since doing away with the state does away with the only entity capable of putting any limits on their actions; therefore, what's stopping them from crowning themselves God-Kings and killing anyone who doesn't obey their every last whim ?
Anarchism looks really good on paper, but in reality it degenerates into dictatorship almost immediately. Some people still have more personal charisma, property, social skills, or intelligence than others, and rise to be the leaders; and in the absence of central authority, there's nothing stopping these local leaders from crushing all opposition beneath their heels.
Or to sum it up: You can only have freedom if those stronger than you do not have the freedom to enslave you.
The pressures are not so important as the relative abundance of He to H which determines whether triple-alpha takes place.
But since He is produced from H during the reaction, does the initial amount really matter ? One would imagine that H alone is sufficient raw material.
Stars much smaller than the Sun are unlikely to undergo He burning, so a pressure of at least 10^15 dyne cm^-2 is recommended.
I can never understand what motivates the sheep to defend the wolf.
The wolf is likely to eat the collaborators last. Besides, collaborators may be able to steer the wolf towards their enemies first, allowing them to use the wolf as a weapon and therefore gaining power amongst the sheep. Finally, in some cases, the wolf may directly reward the collaborating sheep; while it happens very rarely, hope springs eternal.
What? You can't produce carbon from hydgrogen and oxygen?
Of course you can. You just pile a lot of hydrogen together and it will produce carbon all by itself. Turning oxygen to carbon would require more drastic measures, since oxygen has larger atomic weight than carbon; I imagine that you'd need to rise the temperature to sufficient levels to break the oxygen atoms back to hydrogen and then use the hydrogen as raw material as described before.
I'm surprise to you can still use the web today without javascript... or at least you are missing a great part of it. I think the solution is to have secure browser... nothing more.
That browser would need to be written in Java or other memory-managed language with built-in security infrastructure. A modern browser is simply too big and complex to make it secure if written in C, C++ or any language like that, especially since it can't just discard garbage input because most Web pages are more or less full of errors, and must therefore use fuzzy logic guessing of what the Web designer meant. And even with Java, you'd need to make sure the VM uses the absolute minimum of native code, to avoid things like the recent ImageIO exploit caused by usage of native library.
Cue a dozen replies about how you shouldn't be programming if you can't make C secure and only sissies need garbage collection.
And yes, there might be "someone" altering the results, but I don't know. As long as the results fit the model, there's no reason to throw it away nor need to worry about some evil daemon playing tricks with our perceptions.
I didn't say there is. I simply pointed out that the lack of such daemon must be taken at faith, because it is impossible to prove, and not making such assumption makes it impossible to test any hypothesis; without the assumption, no matter what your instruments tell you, it can't disprove any hypothesis, since the daemon might have falsified the data. Therefore you must take some things by faith if you desire to do science; there is no way around it.
The thing is, we humans don't actually perceive reality, we perceive an approximation of it, produced by our senses and mental faculties.
So am I to take this statement as reality or just your perception?
You are to take it as your perception of what you perceive I have said about my perceptions. There might be more points where inaccuracy may be introduced, but these I can think of offhand.
And congratulations - you have clearly understood my point.
But don't try to bring it into science, for faith requires belief without proof, and science requires proof before belief.
Science, and logic in general, requires taking things on faith; specifically, science in general requires faith in your ability to perceive surrounding reality - as opposed to your own fewered imagination - and the rules of logic, neither of which can be proven. On top of that, natural science usually also assumes that the laws of nature are stable, and that the universe is generally similar everywhere.
And of course every last experiment relies on the unprovable assumption that there are no supernatural or otherwise undetected entities altering the results.
Everyone is biased. The difference is between the ones who are aware of their own biases and those who are deluded into thinking that they aren't.
Nah. The difference is between the people who are aware of their biases - namely, me and everyone who agrees with me - and people who are sadly deluded and too caught up in the web of deceit or just plain too stupid to realize it or too stubborn to admit it, or who actually purposefully and maliciously lying and/or engaged in a huge conspiracy against the truth for whatever reason.
If you or the moderators disagree, that's just because your bias of thinking yourself as objective. Let go of your bias and support the objective point of view by modding me up;).
The thing is, we humans don't actually perceive reality, we perceive an approximation of it, produced by our senses and mental faculties. It is impossible to know how closely your approximation actually resembles reality as a whole or at any particular point, because you have no way of comparing it to reality proper, because the latter is not perceptible to you. That's why people usually assume that their approximation is a good match and anyone who disagrees is wrong or biased. And this is assuming that a particular perception is actually based on some objective reality, which is not at all certain for things like moral values.
What this means is that no one is truly aware of their own biases, since that awareness could only be gained by comparing your approximation of reality to reality proper, which is impossible. You, gentle reader, are biased, and not aware of all of your biases, no matter how certain you are of your own objectivity. You can trust me on this, because I clearly am truly objective, being aware of all this:).
You can't just carry around a fusion reactor in your pocket, silly...at least not for the next few years. The fuel cell is for portable energy storage, not energy generation.
Must be a big computer, then, if the fusion plant which doesn't fit into a car fits into it. Or am I missing the joke ?
As far as the android girlfriend goes, I think I'll wait until the shapechanging gel models come out. One little software glitch and you're making out with the business end of an industrial can opener.
Ouch. Good point. And on that note, don't run it on Windows.
I look forward to playing Spore on my fusion-powered computer (running a secure Windows OS) in the passenger seat of my robot controlled fuel cell powered flying car while listening to the inaugural address of president Kucinich.
And by "robot controlled" you of course mean your android girlfriend made of shapechanging liquid metal.
But why is the car powered by a fuel cell if you have fusion power ?
Maybe, but only a limited version at best. Do not forget that one of the assumptions for a Turing machine is infinite memory space; AFAIK the largest memory space Linux currently runs in has 2^64 memory locations. As such Linux doesn't run all the programs a theoretical Turing machine runs.
What's the difference between "coincidence" and "random coincidence"?
If you drown in the city harbor the day before you're supposed to give testimony against Tony Soprano, that's coincidence. If a falling meteor kills you instead, that's propably random coincidence.
Are you kidding? Allowed? What is this higher authority that confers on governments the right to do such things?
Judging by this story, the Almighty Dollar, acting through its servants, the US corporations, and justified by the often-demonstrated creed of capitalism that might makes right.
1) Marx didn't "invent" capitalism any more than Newton "invented" gravity, he described a system he already observed and gave it a name. 2) People such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, etc. also described essentially the same system well before Marx.
While both Smith and Marx describe the same system, the point of view is very different. Smith considers the system beneficial, seeing it when everything is working well, while Marx sees it during a catastrophic failure situation caused by the Industrial Revolution and the resulting simultaneous high barriers of entry - the capital needed to build a whole factory required to be competitive - and large oversupply of labour and naturally draws the obvious conclusion that it is the root of all evil and must be destroyed for the sake of mankind.
Both views are, of course, incomplete. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to get enamored with extremes, so we have free-market fundamentalists on one side and communists on the other, both trying to both trying to push their economic religion rather than actually thinking what happens to be the best decision in any given situation. Meanwhile the scoundrels and petty thiefs are taking advantage of the fighting and filling their own pockets by abusing the legal system, patent, and copyright systems - the ones who aren't engaged in outright stock or accounting scams, selling weapons for dictators, or launching wars for profit, anyway.
Interesting, what was the good/evil score then for?
Maximum goodness, which turned into neutrality after deciding to join Bastila and killing several of my companions in the aftermath.
The thing is that decisions shouldn't be 'good' or 'evil' and be messured on a 1D bar. If I help a group of people, the game should remember that I have helped those people and refer to it when I meat them again, not just do a 'good +1'. In KotoR a lot of stuff had basically no long term effect except changing your good/evil meter.
What are the chances of running into the same group of people again in a game featuring galaxy-wide space travel ? And what are the odds of this happening several times with several different groups ? KotOR is simply not long and large enough game for there to be long-term consequences for much of anything.
Please also note that the meter technically speaking tracks the attunement to Light or Dark side of the Force, which in turn affects the costs of Force powers. Furthermore, if you want to track how close to the Dark Side someone is getting, without making them fall from the first transgression, you pretty much have to track some kind of score.
Finally, what you are suggesting would mean that every side quests had implications for the plot and other side quests. While this may seem nice and desirable, the cold fact is that it soon becomes impossible to manage as the game size grows. You risk creating situations where the player runs into a dead end 20 hours into the game because of the consequences of decisions they made 2 hours into it clash with the consequences of the decisions made at 4 hours. That is not fun, and such situations are pretty much impossible to remove in a game with a complex plot. So are obvious plot holes for that matter.
Scripts-based games are fragile. The more complex the scripts, the more chances they have of breaking and either crashing the program or landing the player into impossible or absurd situations, limiting the complexity and consequently the flexibility of the plot which can be practically achieved. And currently scripts are the only way to do a plot-based game.
Warp Cores on starships explode when antimatter leaks and all that fun stuff and here we are making laser beams of the shit?
They are not laser beams, since they are not made of light. These are antimatter cathode rays. In the interests of marketing lets call them Cathode Antimatter Rays, or CARs, and make everyone think the scientists have built warp drives for road vechiles.
KotoR did it different in that all your 'good' and 'evil' decisions accumulated and your final score was what decided.
Actually, no. What decides which ending you get is whether or not you join Bastila on at the roof of Rakatan temple. If you do, you get the bad guy ending; if you don't you get the good guy ending.
While this means that all your doing actually matters, its still rather annoying, since again, instead of playing the story, you level up a 'good/evil' meter.
Any significant decision in a game does, by definition, either increase/decrease some internal variable or set a flag, since otherwise it could not influence any future events and therefore not be significant.
Besides, I for one like playing the hero, and forgetting the real world and its "no way up" -motif for a while.
And the undocumented protocols and interfaces these projects use would be what, exactly speaking ?
If by "interoperate" you mean "alter", then you're undoubtedly correct, the documentation of most such small projects sucks. But that has nothing to do with either protocols or interfaces. AFAIK they all use some standard protocol (HTTP, NNTP, POP3...). The sole exception which comes to mind is Freenet, but that's because Freenet is still pre-alpha and changes all the time.
I was just pointing out the absurdity of an argument that it might be illegal to distribute any OSS product that didn't provide just-so technical documentation for others even if the developers didn't need it internally themselves.
And I was pointing out that this wouldn't limit the choice of programs much if at all. Besides, source is documentation, and hopefully comprehensible for a developer.
I disagree, only certain genre's suffer from 2D-->3D
Yes; the ones where either fine control or situational awareness is important. In a 2D game you have pixel-perfect idea of what's around you and how far, but in 3D game you at most have a vague idea that you're "near" the cliff or that enemies are "that way", and this is assuming a perfect camera.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what searching technology is for.
Maybe you could search for the saying in question, perhaps in combination of McGovern ? Especially since someone else might be interested in the crossword champion rather than the dead senator ?
Yes, he'd be biased. So is every judge on the planet, by the virtue of being human. A judge who makes his particular believes public knowledge is to be commended for his honesty, because such openness makes it easier to determine whether he will be impartial in a particular case or not.
Furthermore, you implication that a muslim cannot be a judge is contrary to the US Constitution, which clearly states that no religious test can be demanded for holding a public office.
And once those leaders have followers, what's stopping them from using those followers to enforce their will on others ?
What happens at the absence of central government is that some people accumulate enough power to become local warlords and begin fighting for power amongst themselves. The end result of that is civil war, followed by military dictatorship. It has happened every last time central authority has collapsed.
Humans are pack animals, and packs have leaders. Forming packs and a social hiearchy within them is amongst the most primal instincts human beings have; in many cases, protecting your pack gets priority even over self-preservation. That doesn't mean that the leaders have to have absolute power or be unaccountable for their actions; but it does mean that they will always exist.
And the point of democracy is not majority rule, but making the rulers easily replaceable. This, in turn, makes them accountable for their actions to those they rule, or so the theory goes anyway. Of course it doesn't always work, and almost never really well, but we have no better method of rulership right now.
In an earlier post you linked to Wikipedia, giving the impression that you advocate anarcho-capitalism. Surely you realize that in such a system results in all power being concentrated in the hands of those who own lots of property, since doing away with the state does away with the only entity capable of putting any limits on their actions; therefore, what's stopping them from crowning themselves God-Kings and killing anyone who doesn't obey their every last whim ?
Anarchism looks really good on paper, but in reality it degenerates into dictatorship almost immediately. Some people still have more personal charisma, property, social skills, or intelligence than others, and rise to be the leaders; and in the absence of central authority, there's nothing stopping these local leaders from crushing all opposition beneath their heels.
Or to sum it up: You can only have freedom if those stronger than you do not have the freedom to enslave you.
But since He is produced from H during the reaction, does the initial amount really matter ? One would imagine that H alone is sufficient raw material.
You mean 100 terapascals, right ?
The wolf is likely to eat the collaborators last. Besides, collaborators may be able to steer the wolf towards their enemies first, allowing them to use the wolf as a weapon and therefore gaining power amongst the sheep. Finally, in some cases, the wolf may directly reward the collaborating sheep; while it happens very rarely, hope springs eternal.
Of course you can. You just pile a lot of hydrogen together and it will produce carbon all by itself. Turning oxygen to carbon would require more drastic measures, since oxygen has larger atomic weight than carbon; I imagine that you'd need to rise the temperature to sufficient levels to break the oxygen atoms back to hydrogen and then use the hydrogen as raw material as described before.
That browser would need to be written in Java or other memory-managed language with built-in security infrastructure. A modern browser is simply too big and complex to make it secure if written in C, C++ or any language like that, especially since it can't just discard garbage input because most Web pages are more or less full of errors, and must therefore use fuzzy logic guessing of what the Web designer meant. And even with Java, you'd need to make sure the VM uses the absolute minimum of native code, to avoid things like the recent ImageIO exploit caused by usage of native library.
Cue a dozen replies about how you shouldn't be programming if you can't make C secure and only sissies need garbage collection.
I didn't say there is. I simply pointed out that the lack of such daemon must be taken at faith, because it is impossible to prove, and not making such assumption makes it impossible to test any hypothesis; without the assumption, no matter what your instruments tell you, it can't disprove any hypothesis, since the daemon might have falsified the data. Therefore you must take some things by faith if you desire to do science; there is no way around it.
You are to take it as your perception of what you perceive I have said about my perceptions. There might be more points where inaccuracy may be introduced, but these I can think of offhand.
And congratulations - you have clearly understood my point.
Science, and logic in general, requires taking things on faith; specifically, science in general requires faith in your ability to perceive surrounding reality - as opposed to your own fewered imagination - and the rules of logic, neither of which can be proven. On top of that, natural science usually also assumes that the laws of nature are stable, and that the universe is generally similar everywhere.
And of course every last experiment relies on the unprovable assumption that there are no supernatural or otherwise undetected entities altering the results.
Nah. The difference is between the people who are aware of their biases - namely, me and everyone who agrees with me - and people who are sadly deluded and too caught up in the web of deceit or just plain too stupid to realize it or too stubborn to admit it, or who actually purposefully and maliciously lying and/or engaged in a huge conspiracy against the truth for whatever reason.
If you or the moderators disagree, that's just because your bias of thinking yourself as objective. Let go of your bias and support the objective point of view by modding me up ;).
The thing is, we humans don't actually perceive reality, we perceive an approximation of it, produced by our senses and mental faculties. It is impossible to know how closely your approximation actually resembles reality as a whole or at any particular point, because you have no way of comparing it to reality proper, because the latter is not perceptible to you. That's why people usually assume that their approximation is a good match and anyone who disagrees is wrong or biased. And this is assuming that a particular perception is actually based on some objective reality, which is not at all certain for things like moral values.
What this means is that no one is truly aware of their own biases, since that awareness could only be gained by comparing your approximation of reality to reality proper, which is impossible. You, gentle reader, are biased, and not aware of all of your biases, no matter how certain you are of your own objectivity. You can trust me on this, because I clearly am truly objective, being aware of all this :).
Must be a big computer, then, if the fusion plant which doesn't fit into a car fits into it. Or am I missing the joke ?
Ouch. Good point. And on that note, don't run it on Windows.
Linux-powered android girlfriend...
And by "robot controlled" you of course mean your android girlfriend made of shapechanging liquid metal.
But why is the car powered by a fuel cell if you have fusion power ?
Maybe, but only a limited version at best. Do not forget that one of the assumptions for a Turing machine is infinite memory space; AFAIK the largest memory space Linux currently runs in has 2^64 memory locations. As such Linux doesn't run all the programs a theoretical Turing machine runs.
If you drown in the city harbor the day before you're supposed to give testimony against Tony Soprano, that's coincidence. If a falling meteor kills you instead, that's propably random coincidence.
Of course not. It means "what is good for the bottom lines of large corporations."
Judging by this story, the Almighty Dollar, acting through its servants, the US corporations, and justified by the often-demonstrated creed of capitalism that might makes right.
While both Smith and Marx describe the same system, the point of view is very different. Smith considers the system beneficial, seeing it when everything is working well, while Marx sees it during a catastrophic failure situation caused by the Industrial Revolution and the resulting simultaneous high barriers of entry - the capital needed to build a whole factory required to be competitive - and large oversupply of labour and naturally draws the obvious conclusion that it is the root of all evil and must be destroyed for the sake of mankind.
Both views are, of course, incomplete. Unfortunately, people have a tendency to get enamored with extremes, so we have free-market fundamentalists on one side and communists on the other, both trying to both trying to push their economic religion rather than actually thinking what happens to be the best decision in any given situation. Meanwhile the scoundrels and petty thiefs are taking advantage of the fighting and filling their own pockets by abusing the legal system, patent, and copyright systems - the ones who aren't engaged in outright stock or accounting scams, selling weapons for dictators, or launching wars for profit, anyway.
They do on sex story archives.
I got 3979 kbps down and 729 kbps up from Finland in the test on this page.
Maximum goodness, which turned into neutrality after deciding to join Bastila and killing several of my companions in the aftermath.
What are the chances of running into the same group of people again in a game featuring galaxy-wide space travel ? And what are the odds of this happening several times with several different groups ? KotOR is simply not long and large enough game for there to be long-term consequences for much of anything.
Please also note that the meter technically speaking tracks the attunement to Light or Dark side of the Force, which in turn affects the costs of Force powers. Furthermore, if you want to track how close to the Dark Side someone is getting, without making them fall from the first transgression, you pretty much have to track some kind of score.
Finally, what you are suggesting would mean that every side quests had implications for the plot and other side quests. While this may seem nice and desirable, the cold fact is that it soon becomes impossible to manage as the game size grows. You risk creating situations where the player runs into a dead end 20 hours into the game because of the consequences of decisions they made 2 hours into it clash with the consequences of the decisions made at 4 hours. That is not fun, and such situations are pretty much impossible to remove in a game with a complex plot. So are obvious plot holes for that matter.
Scripts-based games are fragile. The more complex the scripts, the more chances they have of breaking and either crashing the program or landing the player into impossible or absurd situations, limiting the complexity and consequently the flexibility of the plot which can be practically achieved. And currently scripts are the only way to do a plot-based game.
They are not laser beams, since they are not made of light. These are antimatter cathode rays. In the interests of marketing lets call them Cathode Antimatter Rays, or CARs, and make everyone think the scientists have built warp drives for road vechiles.
Actually, no. What decides which ending you get is whether or not you join Bastila on at the roof of Rakatan temple. If you do, you get the bad guy ending; if you don't you get the good guy ending.
Any significant decision in a game does, by definition, either increase/decrease some internal variable or set a flag, since otherwise it could not influence any future events and therefore not be significant.
Besides, I for one like playing the hero, and forgetting the real world and its "no way up" -motif for a while.
And the undocumented protocols and interfaces these projects use would be what, exactly speaking ?
If by "interoperate" you mean "alter", then you're undoubtedly correct, the documentation of most such small projects sucks. But that has nothing to do with either protocols or interfaces. AFAIK they all use some standard protocol (HTTP, NNTP, POP3...). The sole exception which comes to mind is Freenet, but that's because Freenet is still pre-alpha and changes all the time.
And I was pointing out that this wouldn't limit the choice of programs much if at all. Besides, source is documentation, and hopefully comprehensible for a developer.
Yes; the ones where either fine control or situational awareness is important. In a 2D game you have pixel-perfect idea of what's around you and how far, but in 3D game you at most have a vague idea that you're "near" the cliff or that enemies are "that way", and this is assuming a perfect camera.