Multiverse doesn't say anything about the occurance of intelligence in ours. We know it can happen. We also know that life is very robust and can take hold under very extreme circumstances. Lately we've found out that planets are quite common. What we don't know yet is how often intelligence is the outcome of an evolutionary process. The latest I read stated that there are some pretty hefty tradeoffs for our brain and tool use. It's possible that the circumstances that led to our dominion where pretty specific to earth and thus unlikely.
BUT: just look at the hubble deep view pictures. Trillions and Trillions indeed, galaxies that is. Even if the chance of intelligence is very, very small there will be an immesurable amount of smart lifeforms out there. Wether we can ever get in contact with them, well, that's written on an other page entirely.
For the sake of what-the-fuck!? Adaption on a genetic level IS evolution. We can see it happening under a microscope. Quickly, jump on an other bandwagon, I think yours is beyond repair.
Why is this god person so special? According to your statements it's perfectly A-OK to believe in anything that can't be disproven (read: every possible thing a mind can imagine) when in reality those "god" people go to war even over subtle details in their respective "man in the sky" "theory"?
Why can athiests get so passionate about the topic? Maybe because we realize how many people where slaughtered and persecuted because they believed the wrong or slightly incorrect thing or even in no thing at all. Maybe because we see that the righteousness that inevitably comes from believing to be on a special mission from the creator of the heavens and the earth is a recipie for murder, intolerance, close mindedness and backwardness. This is our society too, you know, and we will not stand by idly while those people try to dial back the wheel of enlightenment a good 2000 years.
Thirdly, treating god as a scientific theory does not work. A valid theory isn't just any old thing you believe could be "true". It has to be an improvement over existing theories, i.e. by predicting and explaining something that couldn't formerly be predicted and explained AND observed to be happening in nature. The 'theory' of god only begets more questions and answers none.
It's from a book that was written thousands of years ago by what can only be called goat farmers. It spends a considerable amount of time telling you with which animals "thou shalt not lay". I think the rest can be taken pretty fucking literal as well...
I wonder where people get the idea that the bible is the work of some writer genius that baths in subtle metaphore before having a breakfeast of exquisite allusions.
You are right of course except that this tragedy is unfolding right at this moment. Discussions about the USA's foreign policy this short after 9/11 where just as insufferable as speaking of human rights in the context of this disaster.
Also one should consider that it's never the "movers & shakers" that are afflicted by something like this, only the peons ever die. Anyone who truly thinks they have more in common with the people in their respective governments than with that receptionist you saw in that video does not understand how the world works.
It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" situation. Everyone says they'll buy games if copy protection is removed but nobody does. For the record, I immensely dislike any kind of "phone home" authentication except when it's a feature as in WoW but I also think that many people on here are intellectually dishonest. It's always been true that you can't get anything for nothing and once those hated gaming company have gone out of business there will simply be no one left to finance 100+ staff for 2 years to make games like Spore and ME. Same with hollywood and the music industry: you can only be fine with that if all you need is indy/freely produced content but if so why do you concern yourself with mainstream products in the first place?
This particular DRM at least demonstrates how not to do it: the 3 times install limit and the requirement for inet access on installation will only bother regular customers and it will do very little to deter pirates. Steam has tought us this lesson: there are torrents for standalone HL2 and Portal out there. Copy protection must take an other route: hassle your customers as little as is humanly possible but inconvenience pirates much more. Maybe it's time the crypto hardware dongle made a come back?
I don't pretent to have all the answers but it has to be said that physically your picture is a bunch of photons re-emitted towards the camera. As such, I don't see how you can have a right to this. It's your responsibility to not send your photons where you don't want them to be (that's also why we all wear clothes and exhibitionism is (sometimes) a crime and not "seeing nacked people").
As others have said: this is fascinating. It makes sense too: Games are practical problem solving wrapped in eye candy and sometimes a story. Why not solve a useful problem why you are at it? The distributed wetware aspect is very cool as well.
I wonder: did you consider implementing the client in java? Will we see this game on cell phones or PDAs?
there should be a rule against blatant pushing of blog or other websites that the submitter has any ties to. Really getting tired of slashdot being an ego deflation device for some people.
I've been rallying against Microsoft's so-called 'Get the Facts' site for the last fortnight in my blog.
Translation: I am a gigantic douche. Why in the hell would you grace what is essentialy marketing with so much attention and why can't you just say "two weeks" for the love of...
I thought the prime directive examples in Star Trek where contrived as hell too. Enterprise takes the cake there. Refusing to treat a disease that would wipe out a whole species because an other species might evolve to take the place of the former one. How anyone could think that this was not, in essence, mass murder I don't know.
There is no room in the rational mind for believing in god. That's the whole point: BELIEVING and not KNOWING. No matter how smart some religious people might be, this part of their reason is not based on argument and evidence. Dawkins put it nicely: it's a delusion. It's not like science and religion are two sides of the same coin. Science is wanting to understand, Religion is believing with complete lack of basis and proof: anti-knowing. And I pitty humanity that so many of our numbers are vunerable to such what amounts to an DoS attack on the mind.
To the point: ID is the attempt to increase the relevance of religion by hijacking the scientific form (or what a laymen might think it is) but it also shows that truly religious people realize that they can not flip-flop on an issue that their holy (and therefor correct) book(s) has(ve) a completely clear opinion about. If GOD created man, the animals, the heavens and the earth and if GOD said so himself it MUST be true or their believe is false. It's really basic modus ponens really. I value integrity so I actually prefer those believers who care for what their book says over those folks who think they can pick and choose ("woah, look, god is like EVERYTHING and isn't it beautiful so this must be GOD").
If I where a complete geek I'd use that as my new signature:
To really understand programming at a lower level, you need at best only a small subset of C++, and unfortunately for C++ that subset is properly called "C".
I'd say that leaking memory (which is far easier to do in C or C++) is a lot better then overwriting arbitrary program state or code (which is impossible in java or C#). Of course, C++ fanatics will just reply with "well, if you can't keep track of your memory allocations, array indexes and pointers you are too stupid to be a programmer" or some variation thereof. Which makes me wonder: why is it that most security leaks in databases, operating systems and web servers stem from buffer overflows? Are all those programmers stupid? If so, maybe memory management is a task better left to machines after all?
Reading the linked article, I found it ironic that back at C++'s conception even C was in the same place as Java is now. "Real programmers" that did "real coding" would only use assembler because higher order programming languages are just too slow and for dummies anyways.
Thing is, in the last 20 years it never paid of to use brain power where machine power would do. The former is a (expensive) constant while the later still grows exponentially.
Beware of any one true path and that also goes for programming languages.
I'd rather they focus on, excuse me, AJAX and Flex execution speed and footprint. Already there are webpages out there where firefox will hog all of the CPU and over 100 megs of memory. This will only get worse as rich client webapp frameworks like GWT, ECHO and JSeamless become better known and is one area where they could hit internet explorer where it hurts.
Bastards! Again with the friday night pid of death that also killed Firefly. What-the-fuck!? Why is it that any show I enjoy seems to be a prime canditate for cancelation?
do some slashdot articles sound like straight out of a little boys discussion? "Wouldn't it be great if there where a candy shop on every street corner EXCEPT the candy wouldn't cost anything!?"
There are two lessons here: comparing technologies that are only a decade available to the mainstream against one that is over a hundred years old is completely useless. The second one is: "marginal value". Look it up, learn it, love it: it explains/SO MUCH/!
You guys realize that the data is on the server, right? A-Bomb poof means also bomb proof and "Sorry, we didn't mean to fly that plan into your datacenter that happened to host incriminating information about us" proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Multiverse doesn't say anything about the occurance of intelligence in ours. We know it can happen. We also know that life is very robust and can take hold under very extreme circumstances. Lately we've found out that planets are quite common. What we don't know yet is how often intelligence is the outcome of an evolutionary process. The latest I read stated that there are some pretty hefty tradeoffs for our brain and tool use. It's possible that the circumstances that led to our dominion where pretty specific to earth and thus unlikely.
BUT: just look at the hubble deep view pictures. Trillions and Trillions indeed, galaxies that is. Even if the chance of intelligence is very, very small there will be an immesurable amount of smart lifeforms out there. Wether we can ever get in contact with them, well, that's written on an other page entirely.
For the sake of what-the-fuck!? Adaption on a genetic level IS evolution. We can see it happening under a microscope. Quickly, jump on an other bandwagon, I think yours is beyond repair.
Why is this god person so special? According to your statements it's perfectly A-OK to believe in anything that can't be disproven (read: every possible thing a mind can imagine) when in reality those "god" people go to war even over subtle details in their respective "man in the sky" "theory"?
Why can athiests get so passionate about the topic? Maybe because we realize how many people where slaughtered and persecuted because they believed the wrong or slightly incorrect thing or even in no thing at all. Maybe because we see that the righteousness that inevitably comes from believing to be on a special mission from the creator of the heavens and the earth is a recipie for murder, intolerance, close mindedness and backwardness. This is our society too, you know, and we will not stand by idly while those people try to dial back the wheel of enlightenment a good 2000 years.
Thirdly, treating god as a scientific theory does not work. A valid theory isn't just any old thing you believe could be "true". It has to be an improvement over existing theories, i.e. by predicting and explaining something that couldn't formerly be predicted and explained AND observed to be happening in nature.
The 'theory' of god only begets more questions and answers none.
It's from a book that was written thousands of years ago by what can only be called goat farmers. It spends a considerable amount of time telling you with which animals "thou shalt not lay". I think the rest can be taken pretty fucking literal as well ...
I wonder where people get the idea that the bible is the work of some writer genius that baths in subtle metaphore before having a breakfeast of exquisite allusions.
You are right of course except that this tragedy is unfolding right at this moment. Discussions about the USA's foreign policy this short after 9/11 where just as insufferable as speaking of human rights in the context of this disaster.
Also one should consider that it's never the "movers & shakers" that are afflicted by something like this, only the peons ever die. Anyone who truly thinks they have more in common with the people in their respective governments than with that receptionist you saw in that video does not understand how the world works.
It's a classic "tragedy of the commons" situation. Everyone says they'll buy games if copy protection is removed but nobody does. For the record, I immensely dislike any kind of "phone home" authentication except when it's a feature as in WoW but I also think that many people on here are intellectually dishonest. It's always been true that you can't get anything for nothing and once those hated gaming company have gone out of business there will simply be no one left to finance 100+ staff for 2 years to make games like Spore and ME. Same with hollywood and the music industry: you can only be fine with that if all you need is indy/freely produced content but if so why do you concern yourself with mainstream products in the first place?
This particular DRM at least demonstrates how not to do it: the 3 times install limit and the requirement for inet access on installation will only bother regular customers and it will do very little to deter pirates. Steam has tought us this lesson: there are torrents for standalone HL2 and Portal out there.
Copy protection must take an other route: hassle your customers as little as is humanly possible but inconvenience pirates much more. Maybe it's time the crypto hardware dongle made a come back?
I don't pretent to have all the answers but it has to be said that physically your picture is a bunch of photons re-emitted towards the camera. As such, I don't see how you can have a right to this. It's your responsibility to not send your photons where you don't want them to be (that's also why we all wear clothes and exhibitionism is (sometimes) a crime and not "seeing nacked people").
As others have said: this is fascinating. It makes sense too: Games are practical problem solving wrapped in eye candy and sometimes a story. Why not solve a useful problem why you are at it? The distributed wetware aspect is very cool as well.
I wonder: did you consider implementing the client in java? Will we see this game on cell phones or PDAs?
I'd really quite like to know what your definition of "force" is ...
Sorry for the AC posting (feeling very dirty now!): well, in this case I must apologize. Sorry Australia & UK!
Really getting tired of slashdot being an ego deflation device for some people.
I've been rallying against Microsoft's so-called 'Get the Facts' site for the last fortnight in my blog.
Translation: I am a gigantic douche. Why in the hell would you grace what is essentialy marketing with so much attention and why can't you just say "two weeks" for the love of
The enemy who makes my enemies position look ridiculous is my friend.
I haven't played it yet but from what I hear the new GTA is a hallmark that finally manages to marry a sandbox world to a solid story. Go Rockstar!
I think you forgot the part of your post that presented an argument, counterpoint or something otherwise useful to the topic at hand ...
I thought the prime directive examples in Star Trek where contrived as hell too. Enterprise takes the cake there. Refusing to treat a disease that would wipe out a whole species because an other species might evolve to take the place of the former one. How anyone could think that this was not, in essence, mass murder I don't know.
Never would the ASCII O'Rly Bird have been more appropriate ...
There is no room in the rational mind for believing in god. That's the whole point: BELIEVING and not KNOWING. No matter how smart some religious people might be, this part of their reason is not based on argument and evidence. Dawkins put it nicely: it's a delusion. It's not like science and religion are two sides of the same coin. Science is wanting to understand, Religion is believing with complete lack of basis and proof: anti-knowing. And I pitty humanity that so many of our numbers are vunerable to such what amounts to an DoS attack on the mind.
To the point: ID is the attempt to increase the relevance of religion by hijacking the scientific form (or what a laymen might think it is) but it also shows that truly religious people realize that they can not flip-flop on an issue that their holy (and therefor correct) book(s) has(ve) a completely clear opinion about. If GOD created man, the animals, the heavens and the earth and if GOD said so himself it MUST be true or their believe is false. It's really basic modus ponens really. I value integrity so I actually prefer those believers who care for what their book says over those folks who think they can pick and choose ("woah, look, god is like EVERYTHING and isn't it beautiful so this must be GOD").
and now do it for unicode ;)
I'd say that leaking memory (which is far easier to do in C or C++) is a lot better then overwriting arbitrary program state or code (which is impossible in java or C#). Of course, C++ fanatics will just reply with "well, if you can't keep track of your memory allocations, array indexes and pointers you are too stupid to be a programmer" or some variation thereof. Which makes me wonder: why is it that most security leaks in databases, operating systems and web servers stem from buffer overflows? Are all those programmers stupid? If so, maybe memory management is a task better left to machines after all?
Reading the linked article, I found it ironic that back at C++'s conception even C was in the same place as Java is now. "Real programmers" that did "real coding" would only use assembler because higher order programming languages are just too slow and for dummies anyways.
Thing is, in the last 20 years it never paid of to use brain power where machine power would do. The former is a (expensive) constant while the later still grows exponentially.
Beware of any one true path and that also goes for programming languages.
I'd rather they focus on, excuse me, AJAX and Flex execution speed and footprint. Already there are webpages out there where firefox will hog all of the CPU and over 100 megs of memory. This will only get worse as rich client webapp frameworks like GWT, ECHO and JSeamless become better known and is one area where they could hit internet explorer where it hurts.
Bastards! Again with the friday night pid of death that also killed Firefly. What-the-fuck!? Why is it that any show I enjoy seems to be a prime canditate for cancelation?
Compared to what? I hope you don't mean C. Like fopen() is all there is to reading a file ...
do some slashdot articles sound like straight out of a little boys discussion? "Wouldn't it be great if there where a candy shop on every street corner EXCEPT the candy wouldn't cost anything!?"
/SO MUCH/!
There are two lessons here: comparing technologies that are only a decade available to the mainstream against one that is over a hundred years old is completely useless. The second one is: "marginal value". Look it up, learn it, love it: it explains
How can one possibly become so agitated over something so trivial as video codecs that are almost indistinguishable?
You guys realize that the data is on the server, right?
A-Bomb poof means also bomb proof and "Sorry, we didn't mean to fly that plan into your datacenter that happened to host incriminating information about us" proof.