"but consoles alwasy just seem to have better games, presumably because PC game makers always have to build their games for a lower common system that is less powerful that the state of the art.
The games on NES scrolled better and more smoothly than Commander Keen. Gran Turismo or Ridge Racer IV felt faster and smoother than Grand Prix Legends or CART Racing from Microsoft. I loved GPL and CART Racing, but there ya go."
Speak for yourself there, there are plenty of PC games that do much better then console games. Many console games STILL don't have AA. All of the need for speed games were better on PC, try playing most wanted on a console over the PC, I'll take the PC version every time. Or what about Prostreet? Prostreet looks amazing on a PC over a console, easily hands down. I could name more but those are the ones that stuck out, even Halo 1 was better on the PC. Playing with a mouse over a gamepad was much better.
I haven't had to install graphics drivers (or any drivers) to play any games for a long time. The whole couch vs chair thing is bs, one can easily hook their PC up to a modern HDTV since HDTV's are essentially big monitors.
"Eugenics works... do you think the Chihuahua,..."
Which is totally irrelevent to what I was speaking about, think about what the educated classes behaviour, not about the idea itself. How it was used to violate peoples rights, etc. They thought they were 'doing the right thing' and being 'compassionate'. I'm not against eugenics (human improvement) but to think most people then had a handle on improving humanity is quite naive given scientists still don't know what causes autism for example. There plenty experts don't know but pretend to know but in recent history we only find out after the fact. Plenty of healthy people have unhealthy babies and the causes and effects are not trivial and easy to find relations.
"BTW, as an aside, I'm a history guy, and never liked journalism's tendencies to ignore history and leave conflicting facts out of stories."
As a history guy you probably know that status and class bias is rampant and that censorship happens in academia and especially in "prestige" jobs or unsavor histories of countries that want to promote certain economic idealogies. In canada you won't see stuff like the bolshevik revolution taught in history courses in public or highschools for instance. Nor about employers killing their workers during the early 19th century, I was apalled at the hitsory painted in my "history" classes with garring facts ommitted and covered so quickly nad so naively that it was not meant to inform but to dissuade.
Like one commenter up above was concerned about credentials, what I'm more concerned about is what experts are getting away with. Looking back on the history of medicine and psychology (i.e. people with PHD's believing they could 'shock' their mentally ill patients and "cure" them) there are all kinds of quacks and nutcases unfortunately due to our limited knowledge that are only found out long after the fact, eugenics came from the most educated of classes, it certainly didn't come from the bottom. And at the time it was hopelessly naive, there needs to be a check on human ignorance at all levels.
Sony usurped nintendo because nintendo made a dire mistake (didn't understand technology), in this "competition" it was quite artificial. I should have qualified the comment "Market economics does not necessarily apply", with 'it is more complex then 'simple' economics'.
Human beings have a tendency to see their ideas in everything and backwards rationalize it, any perceived called 'improvement' as a 'force of the market', rather then 1) Supply being available from amount of time worked, oversight, error, etc, and then spin it off as 'competition' rather then simply a self-fulfilling prophecy of a) Passionate people wanting to make games 2) people willing to pay for games and 3) the improvement simply being a state of the environment one is put in and the feedback cycle it creates. i.e. you have people who need to eat, survive and earn a wage, therefore necessitating one continues to work, etc, feeding back into the cycle.
We could argue that piracy is healthy competition for the gaming industry after all they are adding value by giving customers what they want, at a price they want. See now wasn't that easy?? and I could spin it as 'piracy as competition is healthy for any industry'. After all that segment of the market is being served wonderfully and not being served very well by the gaming industry.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits that favor that theory. ~ Thomas Jefferson
In the case of Nintendo and PS1, it was quite obvious that N64 failed because they lost their library. Libary and Platform exclusivity was the road to #1 success, the PS1 broke down Nintendo significantly with the PS1. I wasn't meaning to make the NES era some panacea of gaming, just that there was more variety in the games and experimentation since costs were lower, as production costs go up, the range of experimentation one can do goes down.
All the sequels to previous games from the SNES era were now on PS1 by and large, where exactly was the gamer to go? It wasn't exactly competition, it was rather a migration of gamers from platform to platform to play the games they wanted to play, someone would always be there to pickup the slack as long as money was being made.
"I think it's actually healthier to keep the three-way competition going strong"
In video games market economics does not necessarily apply. Consider some of the best era's of video gaming were the NES and SNES era, and the snes era in terms of quality games, when PS1 came around with the CD rom, the library just moved between platforms (what was previous on Nintendo now was on playstation), if you follow the long standing game series on different systems the library and franchises just move from platform to platform. Consider games like Final fantasy 12 and FF13, that's THIRTEEN games in a single franchise that spans multiple platforms and console generations. Consider that even in the PS2 era Exclusivity was one of the primary means of dominating your opponents (PS2 gets Final fantasy, and Xbox and GC get nothing).
Gamers buy consoles for the games, so using franchises to 'ward off' competitors is a mainstay. One of the main reasons Rare was bought by Microsoft was to help take a few less hot exclusives from library of the GC.
Competition in the game industry is more of a pro vs con game, then it is as 'competition is always better'. Many games are arguably more dumbed down and mediocre due to massification of the gaming industry where glitz takes over gameplay, this is especially apparent in the MMO space.
"To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide."
Have you considered the end of aging would be the end of the world, what exactly are the billions of poor people going to do when they find out there will not be enough life to go around? Why even play by the rules of any economic system anymore? If someone had access to immortality I could see people burning down the hospitals so that no one did.
The elites of history have never been enlightened, or good, period, they have never shown mankind a better way, it's always come from below. Martin luther king, etc. Would you want to immortalize racists, prejudice people, etc, just because they have money? I wouldn't. If immortality ever existed the rules of the games must fundamentally change completely about what kind of quality person qualifies for life.
We have enough scum here on earth thanks, the last thing I want to do is immortalize such people.
Jesus how old is your wife I have to wonder? Maybe she's just not technically inclined but even my greying parents know how to use things like windows and excel.
"Of course, the disadvantage becomes immediately clear. There's no mind-reading involved. No cool body-takeovers, no telekinesis developing, nothing but a simple method of communication that is alien to us, yet accomplishes approximately the same task as human speech."
Unfortunately I am more interested in mind sharing, the ability to connect and share our images and raw data in our minds eye in another persons mind, even if imperfectly. Manythings can be accomplished once we can actually decode what peoples thoughts are in real-time and visualize them in some way, even if it's not telepathic, people can then actually 'draw' and 'show' with their mind what they want something to be or look like. The artist in me would love to do this and I'm sure many artists would also love to have the ability to actually be able to conver their thoughts directly into art or a working model upon which they can touch up outside their mind.
"I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984,"
While people may bitch and moan about 1984 most people value their privacy being able to spy on other people also prevents people from getting a fresh start. Imagine fucking up real bad and never having a chance for a fresh start, that's the kind of society permanent surveillance may bring.
Next censorship already is rampant private entities (not just corporations) censor those who disagree with them, on numerous forums you can find people banned if they criticize idealogy x, economic system y, and a host of other stuff. People defend their ego's and their perception that they are right. Most people cannot honestly examine the host of prejudices they possess honestly in an impartial manner. Hell most people don't even have the time to do the analysis nor have introspective skill to ferret out their own bias, that would be required for many of their opinions and judgements to begin with. The human mind is a poor arbiter of truth when it doesn't have the resources, personality, or ability to form an intelligent judgement so you get shortcuts which ultimately hurts in the long run.
"I mean, seriously, what's your point? The man's not actually a God so we shouldn't listen to him? Is there somebody more experienced I should prefer to listen to? Is "n3tcat" the handle for somebody with thirty years experience in first-person shooter engines or something?"
Many people with years of experience still make god awful mistakes. Experience can only take you so far considering that experience is also the reason why companies stagnate because people get locked into a certain way of looking at things.
"The one thing that struck me most in reading the book is that they really never understood human nature, specifically humans working for the casino. They kept on saying "well, we're not cheating" and expected there to be no problems. You're taking massive amounts of money from casinos - they don't like that. They seemed totally unaware of the dangers they faced, physically."
Casino's are a racket to begin with, the fact that people are dumb enough to want them to exist is why human beings are such sad creatures to begin with.
"Models from nature are rarely the best way to go."
That's a pretty big claim there.
"Heavier than air flight only got off the ground when people stopped looking to birds and bats for inspiration."
This is completely incorrect, heavier then air flight was not understood not because people were trying to emulate birds, but the did not understand the principles of flight. All flying things use principles for their locomotion, this changes depending on the size of the object (a bug vs a bird vs a plane) and how fast you want it to go, how much weight you want it to carry, etc. Engineering is not easy, and I say with the amount of technology already in life, life is a very safe bet. Before there were helicopters there were hummingbirds and dragonfly's.
"Wheeled vehicles have no resemblance to horses."
Which has no bearing on anything. No one understood what powered locomotion in a horse, or much of anything for that matter until we found out the primary causes of locomotion.
"Interestingly, we are still trying to understand the nuanced details of the flight of birds based on the aerodynamics we learned building highly un-bird-like flying machines."
But that is the whole point, the aerodynamics you talk about was nowhere near understood when flight was invented and what we're learning now about bird aerodynamics is that it's a lot more complicated and sophisticated then our solid wing aircraft.
You're putting the cart before the horse: Man stumbled his way into technology because he didn't know what to look for, the fact of the matter undersstanding the flight of organisms is nowhere as easy as designing rudimentary flying vehicles. Our 'advanced technology' (from then) was the low hanging fruit.
"Yes, more women believe in astrology then men -- but not by a huge margin. Women are a mere 5% more likely [rickross.com] than the population as a whole to believe in astrology."
Yes but women's belief in astrology and other non-logic based things is part and parcel of why superstition is still around, today women are MUCH more llikely to be religious then men are. Many churches are filled with women.
More often then you would think, as consoles have gotten more complex their games and hardware has been subject to what is experienced in the PC world.
You can't compare directly a PC to a console, consider the number of processors, video cards, chipsets, drivers, software, open webbrowsers, etc, etc. And you just CAN'T. The console is a fixed target and even THEN it is getting 'firmware' updates. To use virtual console on the Wii I had to update my firmware and the new Fire emblem Radiant dawn has a couple bugs where the game can outright freeze and an issue with savegame data with the previous Fire emblem game if you finished it on easy and try to transfer over to Radiant dawn.
First generation Wii's have issues with graphics corruption, the Xbox 360 had the red ring of death, etc. If anything the console industry has been getting more PC'ish lately.
"Generations of scientist are trained to communicate from the earliest parts of their training - "
I would disagree. They are trained to communicate with other scientists, not to just anyone. So "communication" in this context is a vague term, what really needs to be done are studies on how to break down complex topics into vocabulary that people can understand to get the main principles and points across without alienating them. I find it quite curious that scientists have yet to learn from marketing and politics in making 'marketable' people and messages. There are scientists who study this to be sure, but there aren't that many actually communicating that way despite being part of the discpline.
Truth is the internet collaboration much more effective and rewarding then the ivory tower luddites.
I think this has way more to do with social status, power and hierarchy then 'accuracy' especially when it comes to biographies, politics, etc, how could you ever be certain you're getting the 'truth' from an 'expert' who's economic livelihood, etc, can be easily threatened.
"My results show a temporary increase (lasting around 15-20 minutes) in "violent behavior"..."
It all depends on what you defined as 'violent behaviour' and it should be compared to kids who play sports for fairness, if we're going to study win/lose situations (like games) then sports is fair game.
I'd say sports is far more prone to people being violent then games, when was the last gaming riot that caused an uproar? I can't remember either.
"If we ever do get to a point where raytracing -- done on a CPU -- beats out rasterization, done on a GPU, then nVidia's business model falls apart, whereas Intel suddenly becomes much more relevant"
They've been saying the same thing for years, that everything will eventually be integrated "on die", and just the opposite has happened. The fact remains that on die memory and bandwidth cannot compete with a fully dedicated card, trying to split your functions to be a jack of all trades means your master of none. Even modern CPU's would have trouble emulating early 3D cards with current hardware, the biggest problem is: Memory bandwidth. That is the single most important factor people overlook in these 'debates', PC main memory cannot hope to compete with the insane bandwidth of modern GPU's. If cpu's ever take over graphics again it will be in a low end way, cutting edge stuff will always be done externally. The problem with centralizing the function of a graphics card is also the centralization of all problems (i.e. heat). Take an 8800 GTS for example (the original ones) they had massive heatsinks, how are you going to get cutting edge performance out of a small space and not basically have to refrigerate the thing?
It always 'seems to make sense' from people who don't consider that their shifting problems around (i.e. displacement) the geometry of these problems (heat vs complexity vs size, etc) is not going to go away any time soon.
"In the case of employers and their employees, it's not the employer's place to police what people do in their personal lives, unless there is a direct effect on their work."
Again employers have more power then the employee and they DO abuse their power already. Wal-mart for instance has camera's all over their store and they can simply data-mine this data and claim it as 'private' why should someone be able to observe me just because I am in their store and claim that as long as it's 'privately owned' they can data mine and record me willy nilly?
Not to mention what it's like to work with corporations. NDA's, non-compete agreements the worker is at the employers mercy especially when you have to compete with idiots that accept the worst in corporate behaviour because they essentially have no power and are desperate for money. The employee cannot survive for long without a wage. Employers and banks are basically regimes unto themselves, since they have direct influence over your life while you are working for them.
Private employers + gov = orwellian society. Banks and even private corporations already have extreme power over you the ycan can already freeze your money (i.e. paypal, etc) and get away with it by fangling with 'user agreements' and other 'contracts'. It's one big game of CYA (Cover your ass!).
An idea is made of data, and data is made of shapes. You have a circle and a square, two distinct sets of data. In order to describe that data (idea) you need mathematics. Hence my first post: You have a sphere, now how are you going to describe it? you need an abstract representational systm. i.e. symbols 1, 2, 3,4, etc. Numbers are merely symbols we use to describe geometry and the different relationships. You have to understand that what we call "geometry", is merely stuff that exists (stuff that exists, has structure, structure by definition because it exists, has logic, etc) is highly self-recursive. I know this because I'm working on languages right now and it's a matter of original research.
"It always amazes me how applicable math becomes hundreds of years after it's written."
All mathematics is descriptions of geometry, hence why math is applicable. You have a sphere: How are you going to describe it? Math is just an abstract representational system to describe structure, shapes and relationships.
"Programmed cell death happens in cells that are ready to die because they have become damaged or non-functional in some way. If you stop this natural mechanism you won't get immortality, you get a body that dies much faster, probably within weeks."
I'm not quite sure how this was labelled "informative" since apoptosis is critical to development of every part of the body, if your cells didn't die, you would have a problem with 'fusion' and not develop your body parts properly (look at the toes), it's the same principle why twins can be ended up fused together - apoptosis never takes place where it should and you get things like twins with joined heads, etc.
Body's are scukpted by apoptosis, if this process stopped you'd look like the hunch back or worse. Cell Death is absolutely necessary to people to maintain their 'dashing good looks' and normal healthy body. This idea that cell death is always bad is utter tosh. It's quite necessary.
Actually not really, the real problem is pooling of capital, no matter where it is pooling within the system, be it taxes or through other means, it's the suprplus value that is being stored rather then spent or invested. Next this of course ignores assymmetry of markets and the actual indivduals themselves. Any cursory glance of modern economic data knows inequality has been increasing, even famed investor warren buffet has spoken on these matters and I'm apt to trust someone with investment acument and has a proven track record then random joe from the internet.
"Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials.
How about figuring out how to deploy a network within your own agency first, that agency employees can actually use?"
More importantly, how about ending crime by extreme economic inequality, tax breaks for the rich and going after tax havens?
I'd rather see money spent on Prevention rather then re-action, making a society that people don't feel the need to turn criminal to begin with.
Human beings have this awful tendency to neglect the human environment and thus they bring revolution and crime down on themselves for their apathy and neglect.
Slashdot Mirror
"but consoles alwasy just seem to have better games, presumably because PC game makers always have to build their games for a lower common system that is less powerful that the state of the art.
The games on NES scrolled better and more smoothly than Commander Keen. Gran Turismo or Ridge Racer IV felt faster and smoother than Grand Prix Legends or CART Racing from Microsoft. I loved GPL and CART Racing, but there ya go."
Speak for yourself there, there are plenty of PC games that do much better then console games. Many console games STILL don't have AA. All of the need for speed games were better on PC, try playing most wanted on a console over the PC, I'll take the PC version every time. Or what about Prostreet? Prostreet looks amazing on a PC over a console, easily hands down. I could name more but those are the ones that stuck out, even Halo 1 was better on the PC. Playing with a mouse over a gamepad was much better.
I haven't had to install graphics drivers (or any drivers) to play any games for a long time. The whole couch vs chair thing is bs, one can easily hook their PC up to a modern HDTV since HDTV's are essentially big monitors.
"Eugenics works... do you think the Chihuahua, ..."
Which is totally irrelevent to what I was speaking about, think about what the educated classes behaviour, not about the idea itself. How it was used to violate peoples rights, etc. They thought they were 'doing the right thing' and being 'compassionate'. I'm not against eugenics (human improvement) but to think most people then had a handle on improving humanity is quite naive given scientists still don't know what causes autism for example. There plenty experts don't know but pretend to know but in recent history we only find out after the fact. Plenty of healthy people have unhealthy babies and the causes and effects are not trivial and easy to find relations.
"BTW, as an aside, I'm a history guy, and never liked journalism's tendencies to ignore history and leave conflicting facts out of stories."
As a history guy you probably know that status and class bias is rampant and that censorship happens in academia and especially in "prestige" jobs or unsavor histories of countries that want to promote certain economic idealogies. In canada you won't see stuff like the bolshevik revolution taught in history courses in public or highschools for instance. Nor about employers killing their workers during the early 19th century, I was apalled at the hitsory painted in my "history" classes with garring facts ommitted and covered so quickly nad so naively that it was not meant to inform but to dissuade.
Like one commenter up above was concerned about credentials, what I'm more concerned about is what experts are getting away with. Looking back on the history of medicine and psychology (i.e. people with PHD's believing they could 'shock' their mentally ill patients and "cure" them) there are all kinds of quacks and nutcases unfortunately due to our limited knowledge that are only found out long after the fact, eugenics came from the most educated of classes, it certainly didn't come from the bottom. And at the time it was hopelessly naive, there needs to be a check on human ignorance at all levels.
Sony usurped nintendo because nintendo made a dire mistake (didn't understand technology), in this "competition" it was quite artificial. I should have qualified the comment "Market economics does not necessarily apply", with 'it is more complex then 'simple' economics'.
Human beings have a tendency to see their ideas in everything and backwards rationalize it, any perceived called 'improvement' as a 'force of the market', rather then 1) Supply being available from amount of time worked, oversight, error, etc, and then spin it off as 'competition' rather then simply a self-fulfilling prophecy of a) Passionate people wanting to make games 2) people willing to pay for games and 3) the improvement simply being a state of the environment one is put in and the feedback cycle it creates. i.e. you have people who need to eat, survive and earn a wage, therefore necessitating one continues to work, etc, feeding back into the cycle.
We could argue that piracy is healthy competition for the gaming industry after all they are adding value by giving customers what they want, at a price they want. See now wasn't that easy?? and I could spin it as 'piracy as competition is healthy for any industry'. After all that segment of the market is being served wonderfully and not being served very well by the gaming industry.
The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees, in every object, only the traits that favor that theory. ~ Thomas Jefferson
In the case of Nintendo and PS1, it was quite obvious that N64 failed because they lost their library. Libary and Platform exclusivity was the road to #1 success, the PS1 broke down Nintendo significantly with the PS1. I wasn't meaning to make the NES era some panacea of gaming, just that there was more variety in the games and experimentation since costs were lower, as production costs go up, the range of experimentation one can do goes down.
All the sequels to previous games from the SNES era were now on PS1 by and large, where exactly was the gamer to go? It wasn't exactly competition, it was rather a migration of gamers from platform to platform to play the games they wanted to play, someone would always be there to pickup the slack as long as money was being made.
"I think it's actually healthier to keep the three-way competition going strong"
In video games market economics does not necessarily apply. Consider some of the best era's of video gaming were the NES and SNES era, and the snes era in terms of quality games, when PS1 came around with the CD rom, the library just moved between platforms (what was previous on Nintendo now was on playstation), if you follow the long standing game series on different systems the library and franchises just move from platform to platform. Consider games like Final fantasy 12 and FF13, that's THIRTEEN games in a single franchise that spans multiple platforms and console generations. Consider that even in the PS2 era Exclusivity was one of the primary means of dominating your opponents (PS2 gets Final fantasy, and Xbox and GC get nothing).
Gamers buy consoles for the games, so using franchises to 'ward off' competitors is a mainstay. One of the main reasons Rare was bought by Microsoft was to help take a few less hot exclusives from library of the GC.
Competition in the game industry is more of a pro vs con game, then it is as 'competition is always better'. Many games are arguably more dumbed down and mediocre due to massification of the gaming industry where glitz takes over gameplay, this is especially apparent in the MMO space.
"To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide."
Have you considered the end of aging would be the end of the world, what exactly are the billions of poor people going to do when they find out there will not be enough life to go around? Why even play by the rules of any economic system anymore? If someone had access to immortality I could see people burning down the hospitals so that no one did.
The elites of history have never been enlightened, or good, period, they have never shown mankind a better way, it's always come from below. Martin luther king, etc. Would you want to immortalize racists, prejudice people, etc, just because they have money? I wouldn't. If immortality ever existed the rules of the games must fundamentally change completely about what kind of quality person qualifies for life.
We have enough scum here on earth thanks, the last thing I want to do is immortalize such people.
Jesus how old is your wife I have to wonder? Maybe she's just not technically inclined but even my greying parents know how to use things like windows and excel.
"Of course, the disadvantage becomes immediately clear. There's no mind-reading involved. No cool body-takeovers, no telekinesis developing, nothing but a simple method of communication that is alien to us, yet accomplishes approximately the same task as human speech."
Unfortunately I am more interested in mind sharing, the ability to connect and share our images and raw data in our minds eye in another persons mind, even if imperfectly. Manythings can be accomplished once we can actually decode what peoples thoughts are in real-time and visualize them in some way, even if it's not telepathic, people can then actually 'draw' and 'show' with their mind what they want something to be or look like. The artist in me would love to do this and I'm sure many artists would also love to have the ability to actually be able to conver their thoughts directly into art or a working model upon which they can touch up outside their mind.
"I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984,"
While people may bitch and moan about 1984 most people value their privacy being able to spy on other people also prevents people from getting a fresh start. Imagine fucking up real bad and never having a chance for a fresh start, that's the kind of society permanent surveillance may bring.
Next censorship already is rampant private entities (not just corporations) censor those who disagree with them, on numerous forums you can find people banned if they criticize idealogy x, economic system y, and a host of other stuff. People defend their ego's and their perception that they are right. Most people cannot honestly examine the host of prejudices they possess honestly in an impartial manner. Hell most people don't even have the time to do the analysis nor have introspective skill to ferret out their own bias, that would be required for many of their opinions and judgements to begin with. The human mind is a poor arbiter of truth when it doesn't have the resources, personality, or ability to form an intelligent judgement so you get shortcuts which ultimately hurts in the long run.
"I mean, seriously, what's your point? The man's not actually a God so we shouldn't listen to him? Is there somebody more experienced I should prefer to listen to? Is "n3tcat" the handle for somebody with thirty years experience in first-person shooter engines or something?"
Many people with years of experience still make god awful mistakes. Experience can only take you so far considering that experience is also the reason why companies stagnate because people get locked into a certain way of looking at things.
"The one thing that struck me most in reading the book is that they really never understood human nature, specifically humans working for the casino. They kept on saying "well, we're not cheating" and expected there to be no problems. You're taking massive amounts of money from casinos - they don't like that. They seemed totally unaware of the dangers they faced, physically."
Casino's are a racket to begin with, the fact that people are dumb enough to want them to exist is why human beings are such sad creatures to begin with.
"Models from nature are rarely the best way to go."
That's a pretty big claim there.
"Heavier than air flight only got off the ground when people stopped looking to birds and bats for inspiration."
This is completely incorrect, heavier then air flight was not understood not because people were trying to emulate birds, but the did not understand the principles of flight. All flying things use principles for their locomotion, this changes depending on the size of the object (a bug vs a bird vs a plane) and how fast you want it to go, how much weight you want it to carry, etc. Engineering is not easy, and I say with the amount of technology already in life, life is a very safe bet. Before there were helicopters there were hummingbirds and dragonfly's.
"Wheeled vehicles have no resemblance to horses."
Which has no bearing on anything. No one understood what powered locomotion in a horse, or much of anything for that matter until we found out the primary causes of locomotion.
"Interestingly, we are still trying to understand the nuanced details of the flight of birds based on the aerodynamics we learned building highly un-bird-like flying machines."
But that is the whole point, the aerodynamics you talk about was nowhere near understood when flight was invented and what we're learning now about bird aerodynamics is that it's a lot more complicated and sophisticated then our solid wing aircraft.
You're putting the cart before the horse: Man stumbled his way into technology because he didn't know what to look for, the fact of the matter undersstanding the flight of organisms is nowhere as easy as designing rudimentary flying vehicles. Our 'advanced technology' (from then) was the low hanging fruit.
"Yes, more women believe in astrology then men -- but not by a huge margin. Women are a mere 5% more likely [rickross.com] than the population as a whole to believe in astrology."
Yes but women's belief in astrology and other non-logic based things is part and parcel of why superstition is still around, today women are MUCH more llikely to be religious then men are. Many churches are filled with women.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/342557
"How often does a game console crash? PC?"
More often then you would think, as consoles have gotten more complex their games and hardware has been subject to what is experienced in the PC world.
You can't compare directly a PC to a console, consider the number of processors, video cards, chipsets, drivers, software, open webbrowsers, etc, etc. And you just CAN'T. The console is a fixed target and even THEN it is getting 'firmware' updates. To use virtual console on the Wii I had to update my firmware and the new Fire emblem Radiant dawn has a couple bugs where the game can outright freeze and an issue with savegame data with the previous Fire emblem game if you finished it on easy and try to transfer over to Radiant dawn.
First generation Wii's have issues with graphics corruption, the Xbox 360 had the red ring of death, etc. If anything the console industry has been getting more PC'ish lately.
"Generations of scientist are trained to communicate from the earliest parts of their training - "
I would disagree. They are trained to communicate with other scientists, not to just anyone. So "communication" in this context is a vague term, what really needs to be done are studies on how to break down complex topics into vocabulary that people can understand to get the main principles and points across without alienating them. I find it quite curious that scientists have yet to learn from marketing and politics in making 'marketable' people and messages. There are scientists who study this to be sure, but there aren't that many actually communicating that way despite being part of the discpline.
Truth is the internet collaboration much more effective and rewarding then the ivory tower luddites.
I think this has way more to do with social status, power and hierarchy then 'accuracy' especially when it comes to biographies, politics, etc, how could you ever be certain you're getting the 'truth' from an 'expert' who's economic livelihood, etc, can be easily threatened.
"My results show a temporary increase (lasting around 15-20 minutes) in "violent behavior"..."
It all depends on what you defined as 'violent behaviour' and it should be compared to kids who play sports for fairness, if we're going to study win/lose situations (like games) then sports is fair game.
I'd say sports is far more prone to people being violent then games, when was the last gaming riot that caused an uproar? I can't remember either.
"If we ever do get to a point where raytracing -- done on a CPU -- beats out rasterization, done on a GPU, then nVidia's business model falls apart, whereas Intel suddenly becomes much more relevant"
They've been saying the same thing for years, that everything will eventually be integrated "on die", and just the opposite has happened. The fact remains that on die memory and bandwidth cannot compete with a fully dedicated card, trying to split your functions to be a jack of all trades means your master of none. Even modern CPU's would have trouble emulating early 3D cards with current hardware, the biggest problem is: Memory bandwidth. That is the single most important factor people overlook in these 'debates', PC main memory cannot hope to compete with the insane bandwidth of modern GPU's. If cpu's ever take over graphics again it will be in a low end way, cutting edge stuff will always be done externally. The problem with centralizing the function of a graphics card is also the centralization of all problems (i.e. heat). Take an 8800 GTS for example (the original ones) they had massive heatsinks, how are you going to get cutting edge performance out of a small space and not basically have to refrigerate the thing?
It always 'seems to make sense' from people who don't consider that their shifting problems around (i.e. displacement) the geometry of these problems (heat vs complexity vs size, etc) is not going to go away any time soon.
"In the case of employers and their employees, it's not the employer's place to police what people do in their personal lives, unless there is a direct effect on their work."
Again employers have more power then the employee and they DO abuse their power already. Wal-mart for instance has camera's all over their store and they can simply data-mine this data and claim it as 'private' why should someone be able to observe me just because I am in their store and claim that as long as it's 'privately owned' they can data mine and record me willy nilly?
Not to mention what it's like to work with corporations. NDA's, non-compete agreements the worker is at the employers mercy especially when you have to compete with idiots that accept the worst in corporate behaviour because they essentially have no power and are desperate for money. The employee cannot survive for long without a wage. Employers and banks are basically regimes unto themselves, since they have direct influence over your life while you are working for them.
Private employers + gov = orwellian society. Banks and even private corporations already have extreme power over you the ycan can already freeze your money (i.e. paypal, etc) and get away with it by fangling with 'user agreements' and other 'contracts'. It's one big game of CYA (Cover your ass!).
An idea is made of data, and data is made of shapes. You have a circle and a square, two distinct sets of data. In order to describe that data (idea) you need mathematics. Hence my first post: You have a sphere, now how are you going to describe it? you need an abstract representational systm. i.e. symbols 1, 2, 3 ,4, etc. Numbers are merely symbols we use to describe geometry and the different relationships. You have to understand that what we call "geometry", is merely stuff that exists (stuff that exists, has structure, structure by definition because it exists, has logic, etc) is highly self-recursive. I know this because I'm working on languages right now and it's a matter of original research.
"That's a very limiting definition."
Actually it's not, when you say "symbol" a symbol IS A SHAPE, therefore it has structure, therefore it is geometric. Fin.
"It always amazes me how applicable math becomes hundreds of years after it's written."
All mathematics is descriptions of geometry, hence why math is applicable. You have a sphere: How are you going to describe it? Math is just an abstract representational system to describe structure, shapes and relationships.
"Programmed cell death happens in cells that are ready to die because they have become damaged or non-functional in some way. If you stop this natural mechanism you won't get immortality, you get a body that dies much faster, probably within weeks."
I'm not quite sure how this was labelled "informative" since apoptosis is critical to development of every part of the body, if your cells didn't die, you would have a problem with 'fusion' and not develop your body parts properly (look at the toes), it's the same principle why twins can be ended up fused together - apoptosis never takes place where it should and you get things like twins with joined heads, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Celldeath.jpg
Body's are scukpted by apoptosis, if this process stopped you'd look like the hunch back or worse. Cell Death is absolutely necessary to people to maintain their 'dashing good looks' and normal healthy body. This idea that cell death is always bad is utter tosh. It's quite necessary.
Actually not really, the real problem is pooling of capital, no matter where it is pooling within the system, be it taxes or through other means, it's the suprplus value that is being stored rather then spent or invested. Next this of course ignores assymmetry of markets and the actual indivduals themselves. Any cursory glance of modern economic data knows inequality has been increasing, even famed investor warren buffet has spoken on these matters and I'm apt to trust someone with investment acument and has a proven track record then random joe from the internet.
"Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials.
How about figuring out how to deploy a network within your own agency first, that agency employees can actually use?"
More importantly, how about ending crime by extreme economic inequality, tax breaks for the rich and going after tax havens?
I'd rather see money spent on Prevention rather then re-action, making a society that people don't feel the need to turn criminal to begin with.
Human beings have this awful tendency to neglect the human environment and thus they bring revolution and crime down on themselves for their apathy and neglect.