The claim is that the current model...can provide real time feedback.
The claim is that the current model can provide 75Hz updates, which isn't high enough for haptics -- 1000Hz is the standard for a real-time haptic interface.
It sounds promising, though, especially with regards to the stiffness it can produce.
What I liked best about roleplaying was that you didn't really need much to have fun. You basically needed a good DM to setup a story and who was familiar with the rules, but that didn't have to cost much.
You still don't; never did, really.
D&D required a bunch of boxes, or (much later) the very nice all-in-one Rules Cyclopedia. 1ed and 2ed required 3 books (PHB/DMG/MM), although I've played fun games with fewer. 3ed required the same 3 books. 4ed will apparently require those same three books. I can't see how much has changed in terms of cost.
Each of those editions had loads of extra books, many of which I own, and none of which were in any way necessary. Sitting on a shelf in front of me are about 25 3.5ed books; if I started a campaign tomorrow I would use exactly 3 of them: the PHB, the DMG, and the MM.
I've never understood the complaint that there are "too many books" - don't buy the ones you don't want!
Is this really stil about gaming or...
To a large extent, it never was. RPG companies are filled with people struggling to make a living, and you'd better believe that putting food on their tables is going to be a factor in their decisions. (Read, for example, Monte Cook's descriptions of working at ICE in the early 90's.)
These companies are trying to make a game that's fun, but they're also trying to make a profit, and the latter is a necessity to continue doing the former. Don't give them your money if you don't like what they're doing (I stopped buying D&D books a couple years ago), but I don't really see "trying not to go bankrupt" as something to complain about.
illustrated mainly by Larry Elmore. An artist who's work I really admired.
That would be because his art is great.
I've heard D&D moved to different artists in part to differentiate itself from its past and project a new image. Regardless of the reason, it's unfortunate - Elmore's drawings were much more dynamic than those of any other RPG artist I've seen, especially those of his peers (Easley, Brom, Vallejo, etc.), in the sense of capturing the subjects in action, rather than appearing posed and static.
Personal preference, of course, but anyone who doesn't think he was the best artist D&D had is outright wrong.
The solution was building characters that started at level 5, or thereabouts. So 3rd and now 4th edition are just being honest and getting rid of the 1st-4th levels that sucked to play, sucked to DM, and actively encouraged min-maxing and not roleplaying.
Just pointing out that an awful lot of people didn't have the same experience of (A)D&D that you did. I know plenty of people - myself included - who had lots of fun with 1st-4th-level characters, and by no means found they provided a less enjoyable time than higher levels.
In all honesty, my experience has been that the details of the game's mechanics are very much secondary when it comes to how much fun a game will be. Indeed, I've found that some people get so sucked in by detailed, polished rules sets (e.g., D&D3ed, GURPS) that their play becomes more mechanical and less fun. (I'm not the only one to observe that, either; Sean Punch, long-time line editor for GURPS, has related stories of exactly the same thing in rec.games.frp.gurps)
Different strokes for different folks, of course. The rules-heavy/tactical crowd is presumably a more profitable market than the rules-light/story crowd, so I don't begrudge D&D moving heavily in that direction. I'm not even sure it's leaving me behind - I have a foot in both camps. I'm just pointing out that it's not getting better, just different, and there very definitely are gamers (with huge game libraries) who have no interest in the direction D&D has moved.
It's interesting to actually read your link. For example:
Myth 13: Psychic Reformation is overpowered Answer: Psychic Reformation is one of the most heatedly debated power in the XPH. There are two ways to balance this power if you see it being abused: 1. Make outside sources to purchase the service from unavailable 2. Balance the power if the character takes it themselves
i.e.,: "It's a myth that this is too powerful because you can change the rules to weaken it."
Last I heard, that was known as the Oberoni Fallacy. And, last I heard, a list of fallacious arguments was less than persuasive.
I don't know if you're only looking back on 2E nostalgically or if you've just never run a 3/3.5E campaign before, but the newer rulesets are much much much better.
Isn't that a bit of a presumptive statement about someone you've never met?
The 3ed rules aren't "better"; that's just your opinion. They're different, and so they suit some people (you) more than others (the guy you're responding to, as well as gamers I know personally).
Many people find the new rules much, much more complex (think about how many AC/Att bonus options you have with Expertise/Power Attack/Dodge/Incorporeal/Flatfooted/Flanking/Charge/...), and simply don't find that fun. To those people, the 3ed rules are far from "better".
get a better DM because 3E, properly run, should be quite a bit harder (or at least more tactical).
Or get a game that plays less like a squad-level miniatures game. "More tactical" isn't "better" for everyone.
Even though AD&D was my first PnP experience, I've liked each release less after 2nd Ed.
Then you've been moving in the wrong direction; try 1ed instead.
Seriously, pick up the books second-hand. The rules are a mess, the writing is overly complex, the power balance is shot, everything's scattershot, and the result positively crackles with fun and imagination.
It's not just me - my sister, for example, has essentially the complete 1ed set - and it's not the RPG I've played first, played most, or even liked most. It's just that the books read like they were written for fun, to be fun, like a kid writing about candy.
To my eye, the earliest 1ed books have that feel most strongly, and later books (and editions) get more and more polished, and more and more sterile and lifeless. That doesn't mean they're not fun -- I'm a bit of a gearhead, so I certainly have fun playing with 3ed's maze of rules -- but it's a very different style of game. 3ed always felt like it was about making characters; 1ed felt like it was about playing them.
So, since I consider 2ed much closer to 1ed than to 3ed, I'd honestly recommend picking up those early books, for inspiration if nothing else.
You might want to look up the difference between "evidence" and "some guy making a bunch of dubious claims on the internet."
Your list of "evidence" is nothing more than a link to a set of shoddy arguments. For example:
genetically, a wide variety of dogs can come to exist, but a dog can never become anything other than a dog. It remains in its kind. It does not have the genetic ability to become anything more. Admitting this, evolutionists have tried to explain that natural selection happened in conjunction with mutations to the genetic code. This could not produce evolution, however, since mutations do not create new genetic potential, they just alter what is already there. Furthermore, mutations are small, random, and harmful alterations to the genetic code. This also makes evolution from mutations impossible.
The author's "argument" consists of repeatedly claiming that certain things are not possible, with utterly no data to back up those claims.
This may surprise you, but not everything you read on the internet is true. Even if it says what you want to hear.
Basically, there's very little we can do to save the Earth
There's plenty.
Conceptually, a gamma ray burst is akin to a laser beam; shade the target, and you prevent the damage. Moreover, the effects of the GRB are relatively low-energy -- it's described as splitting ozone and N2 molecules, not blasting away the whole atmosphere -- so the beam would be able to ablate only a small amount of a protective shield. Finally, the effects -- splitting molecules, creating muons, etc. -- are already happening anyway, so the protection doesn't need to be perfect, simply good enough to leave the results within the same ballpark as the level of bombardment the earth sees all the time.
Accordingly, it seems likely that manufacturing an earth-sized dust cloud between us and the GRB would be sufficient protection; essentially, corral some rocks from the asteriod belt, move them into position, and pulverize them. While that's not something we could effectively do now, it's not so outlandish for 1,000 years in the future.
Fighting against Mother Nature has proven time and time again to be futile.
Only with careful definitions.
Most of the Netherlands has been wrested from the stormy North Sea over the course of centuries, a process that would fall under most definitions of "fighting against Mother Nature". Given the state of the Netherlands today, though, it would also fall under few definitions of "futile".
A great deal of what modern civilization does and is could be considered as fighting against nature, and I would disagree that civilization is futile. Natural forces are not something that can be dismissed as irrelevant, but neither are they something that should be fawned over as omnipotent; as is almost always the case, the truth lies between the extremes.
it's not a good sign that people are not prepared to pay even $5 for 4 CDs worth of music in a DRM-free format.
Why? There's a lot of music I wouldn't pay $5 for; most of that I wouldn't bother downloading even if it was free.
Most.
There does indeed exist some music that I wouldn't pay $5 to get access to, but that I'm sufficiently interested in to give a listen to. Having acquired that music, I'd get a chance to listen to it, and decide whether (a) I wanted to buy it, and (b) whether I was interested in acquiring or buying other music from the same artist(s).
$5 is cheap, but not cheap enough to remove all music from the "I'll need to try before buying" category.
Do I think that's what all of those 8,000 concurrent downloads are? Of course not. I do think, though, that the vast majority of those downloads never would have been sales in the first place, and that the number would not be drastically lower even if the official download was free. At a guess, Pirate Bay is simply the default content provider for some people, and it never even occurs to them to look for an "official" provider, regardless of price.
That, and some people are hoarders; I'll bet a fair chunk of those Pirate Bay downloads never get listened to.
>>> So, how is all the new demands for electricity going to be satisfied.
A lot more easily than you seem to think.
There are about 3T vehicle miles logged in the US each year. An electric car requires about 250Wh/mi, well-to-wheel. Using electricity to power the US's total yearly vehicle miles would require 250Wh/mi x 3Tmi = 750M MWh.
For comparison, the total amount of electricity generated in the US per year is 4,000M MWh, or 5-6 times as much. Converting every vehicle in the US to all-electric would add less than 20% to the electricity generation needs of the most car-happy country on earth.
For further comparison, note that the US used 115Mbbl of oil in 2006 to generate 41M MWh, meaning that existing generating facilities generate roughly 1M MWh per 3Mbbl. Accordingly, the 4,000Mbbl of gasoline and diesel the US consumes to run its vehicles for a year could be converted to 1,300M MWh, or nearly twice as much electricity as would be needed to run all-electric versions of those vehicles.
If getting enough electricity to run an all-electric fleet is the problem you're worried about, you simply haven't done the math.
How about the 18650 lithium-ion cell that's used in most laptops? Slap together a few thousand of those and apparently you have a battery for an electric car.
Similar to the 18650 cell (although larger, of course), there's no reason not to settle on a standard cell for vehicles. It might involve a little scuffling like for HD DVDs, but so what?
How would you like to own an electric sports can that has the same battery pack as a single seat local commuter vehicle?
That'd be awesome.
Today's sports cars use much the same petrol pumps as econoboxes, no? So why are the rules different for batteries?
There's also the need to invest in sufficient numbers of battery packs by the stations to meet consumer need.
As opposed to the need to invest in large amounts of gas (and sealed underground storage tanks) today. Again, not so different.
(You may argue that battery packs are more expensive than gasoline, but I can argue that storage tanks can't be continuously refilled from the electricity grid, so it's not at all clear which is easier.)
That means every battery would have to have a battery life indicator on it
Like, for example, just about every laptop battery known to man?
you have to have a way to track and credit or debit the customers for bringing in new or almost defunct batteries.
Why?
Own the car and lease the battery. Since the battery belongs to the manufacturer, not you or the fuel station, neither of you care how old it is or how old the replacement is; under the terms of the lease, it's an even trade.
(The only problem would be if people started taking the batteries out, abusing them, and then trying to swap them. That's not so different from doing the same thing with a Prius's battery and then trying to get it replaced under the 8-year warranty, and I suspect it'd be as uncommon and as unrewarding.)
None of your complaints hold up under scrutiny. His idea might not be a good one, but we still don't have a reason why it wouldn't be.
And what I'm trying to point out to you is that all you're doing is showing that the machine counts are consistent with an "urban bias" theory
Yes, that's what I'm doing. That's what I said I was doing in the initial post, and said I was doing in the last post. This whole "can't use them to confirm that the machine counts are not corrupt" business is nothing more than a straw man of your own devising.
Let's take another(?) look at what I said:
"So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes."
Two main points in there:
The analysis in TFA was poorly done, and in particular was wrong about size effects.
There exists a plausible alternative explanation to fraud.
Both of those are quite supportable from the machine-counted data. The first point is simply derived from the data itself, and is true regardless of whether fraud occurred or not, and the second point follows directly from the first.
I'm not saying the machine-counted votes were clean; I'm saying that the analysis which suggests they were dirty is wrong, that a better analysis provides an obvious explanation for the difference, and that Occam's Razor would thus favour the explanation that the root cause of the three correlations we see was town-size effects rather than fraud.
Which part of "natural gas is not oil" do you not understand?
Oil, natural gas, and coal are all very different resources that are subject to very different constraints. Confusing them - intentionally or otherwise - is not at all helpful. In fact, it's often highly misleading - warning that oil production may be at risk and then (incorrectly) stating that fertilizer is made from oil is nothing but bait-and-switch, and it gives a flat-out wrong picture of the situation.
(General disclaimer: on average, exceptions exist, blah blah. We're talking generalizations here, so it's pointless to respond with an anecdote about an exception - we all already know they exist, so chill.)
Case in point. Back in 1996, I had an SGI Indigo on my desk, this other guy...
sometimes they're just chimps with initials after their names...
And, yes, we did have a PhD who...
And here I was questioning whether that disclaimer was necessary...
You get a range of people in each group, and inter-individual differences are typically larger than inter-group differences, which means the distributions have significant overlap. That's obvious, so it's not necessary to bust out war stories to try to make that point.
But I did understand what he was saying and I still maintain that "more educated" doesn't mean "more intelligent".
If you'd understood what he was saying, you'd have understood that he wasn't saying that. He didn't say why they were more intelligent; he just said they were.
That's based on his experience, but it's not that hard to see why that would often be the case (for example, PhD programs aren't easy, and represent another layer of weeding beyond undergrad). It's also the case, though, that brains are like muscles - use them and they get better. A (good) PhD is an awful lot of mental activity, so most people leave one sharper than they entered it. (The same can be done outside of school, of course, but it's forced on you there, so the effect on the mean is greater.)
Fundamentally, though, if you're talking about coding ability, you're missing the point. Someone with a BSc and six years in industry has roughly the same quantity of experience as someone with a PhD, but has a very, very different type of experience, and at a more fundamental level than "drivers guy vs. UI guy". An undergrad with years of industry experience should be much better at coding than a fresh PhD, since he's spent much longer focusing on that.
Hell, based on the research code I've seen, you should count yourself lucky if the machine doesn't explode when he hits "compile"... (Research code is a very different thing from production code.)
*cough*JDAM*cough*Tomahawk*cough*F-16*cough*
Sorry got something stupid stuck in my throat.
From the looks of it, that "something stupid" has migrated upwards a little.
Exactly as the parent poster said, weapons like the Tomahawk have multiple guidance systems of which GPS represents only one. In this case:
Guidance System: Inertial and TERCOM [terrain contour matching]
That same website has stats for JDAMs ("an inertial navigation system/global positioning system guidance kit") and F-16s ("AN/APG-66 pulsed-Doppler radar"). Little or nothing seems to be GPS-only.
PhDs are actually really easy to manage if you aren't intimidated by managing people who are more intelligent than you.
More *educated* to be sure, but not necessarily more intelligent. The two are not always related.
I have fixed and re-written many a PhD's overly-complex and/or poorly-written code using only my little BSCS
You appear not to have understood what the OP was saying.
He didn't say they were better programmers; he said they were smarter. If you're hiring someone with a PhD to crank out code, you're wasting their time and your money.
A PhD is a research degree; that means they're trained in solving problems. It is, typically, a high-level degree, in the sense that details like code matter only insofar as they represent ideas. If you want someone to come up with ideas for tackling a viciously-hard problem, the guy with the PhD is your man; if you want someone to implement a mostly-known solution...say, one that the clever PhD just hacked up a prototype of...then the experienced coder is your girl. If you mistake one for the other, you're woefully misusing your staff's abilities.
A PhD is training for a particular type of work, and it's a mistake to assume they should be like BSc degreed folk only moreso. It's a common mistake, but it's a big one.
(General disclaimer: on average, exceptions exist, blah blah. We're talking generalizations here, so it's pointless to respond with an anecdote about an exception - we all already know they exist, so chill.)
Perhaps you have the wrong thread. In my original post that you responded to I said:
"On the other hand, I think it is possible to explain these very strange results without resorting to election fraud. Even so, I do think the current situation warants further scrutiny."
You also said:
IMO, the discrepancy in the exit polls is the most troubling statistic. If we don't see similar discrepancies (of 5% or more) in primaries in other mostly white states then I think election fraud would be the only possible explanation of the New Hampshire results.
It still reads to me like you're suggesting fraud was likely.
the eagerness with which people are leaping on the notion of voting fraud - despite very, very thin evidence - is disturbing.
I'm sure there were many people who jumped to the conclusion that this had to be fraud but I wasn't one of them.
Then feel free to not leap to the conclusion that I was talking about you personally (I wasn't, by the way).
We seem to agree that a substantial number of people did leap to that conclusion, though, which is a problem, both in terms of those people's lack of critical analysis of the situation and in terms of the apparently wide-spread lack of faith in the system.
As has been pointed out, it's natural gas-based, and not all fossil fuels are oil.
I'll just add that natural gas isn't the energy source, it's the hydrogen source, and that world nitrogen fertilizer use takes up only 4% of world natural gas production, so there's no need to speculate about how to produce it from electrolysis any time soon (although those calculations have been done, and it would be a few percent addition to existing electricity requirements).
using more oil than they replace is certainly not good.
None of them do. Not even corn ethanol, which is perhaps the least useful alt-energy form out there. The vast majority don't even use more energy than they produce, despite periodic claims to the contrary. Wind turbines and solar cells have been getting 10x-100x energy payback for years now. At that kind of energy payback, they could easily be used to reform CO2 into whatever hydrocarbons they need for their supply chain, should that be necessary.
I've only looked at corn ethanol in much detail, but that stuff requires MORE oil to produce, per unit of burnable energy (that you can actually pump into your car), than gasoline does. It gets fertilized with oil, harvested with tractors that run on oil, transported with oil... by the time it gets to your tank, it would have been better just to use the stupid oil to begin with.
That's total nonsense. Not all energy is oil!
Take a look at the studies on ethanol - Pimental's, for example. About 90% of the energy involved is for (a) fertilizer, or (b) distillation-process heat, neither of which involve oil!
Basically, you've been fed a lie.
Maybe switchgrass is a little better than corn
It's better by about a factor of four; that's more than "a little".
Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is similar to switchgrass in that regard. Basically, anyone who's only looked at corn ethanol has a very, very biased view of what can be done. US-grown corn ethanol is a ridiculous product - it's agricultural subsidies in a bottle - and shouldn't be used as the basis of any sensible technological comparison.
Show me a large-scale ethanol process, sunlight-to-tank, that doesn't take petroleum as an input
Don't be absurd. Oil isn't going to vanish overnight, and agriculture uses such a small fraction of it (~5%) that even peak-is-nigh models like ASPO's predict the world will have plenty for agriculture for decades to come.
Moreover, demanding that alternative energy sources make no use of current energy sources is as useful as demanding they turn the moon to green cheese - there is absolutely no economic benefit to cutting an alt-energy business off from the world's infrastructure, so nobody who's running such a business will do it. Insisting they should is no more than a way to ignore their results as "not counting".
In the past decade there has been a change of power in Serbia, (the former Soviet Republic) Georgia, and the Ukraine because the exit polls disagreed with the official results. Mismatching exit polls are assumed to be prima facie evidence of election fraud.
(a) Bigger differences - the difference between the exit poll and election results was 12% in the Ukraine.
(b) Supporting evidence - the Ukraine results included a highly suspicious 96% voter turnout rate in the pro-goverment east, vs. an apparent overall turnout of 79%. Plus, you know, the opposition candidate getting poisoned.
It's not like exit polls aren't wrong in other countries, too. In the 2004 French election, exit polls put the vote split at 40/34/17, whereas the final results were 50/37/13, which is quite a substantial difference.
"The trouble is, whenever you have a surprise result in an election, and it runs counter to the polls, the media always say the problem is the polling, not the counting." But he adds, "The thing is, these things always work in one direction-in favor of the more conservative candidate, and that defies the law of quantum mechanics."
That's an absurd analogy.
If there are problems with polls, they're likely to be systematic problems, such as "conservatives are more likely to ignore pollsters because of antagonism towards perceived liberal bias in the news" or "angry rednecks vote Republican and don't talk to pollsters", rather than the truly random problems he's assuming.
Is the question of tampering worth looking into? Of course, and I'm glad Kucinich is getting a recount going, and anything that gets more paper trails into voting is good, but the eagerness with which people are leaping on the notion of voting fraud - despite very, very thin evidence - is disturbing.
I suppose it might be left over from the losses in 2000 and 2004; however, obsessing over the past isn't going to win the future. Now that there's going to be a hand recount, I'm not at all sure it's in the best interests of Democratic supporters (or democratic supporters, for all that) to engage in a nasty internal spat over accusations of fraud. Don't think this won't be saved as possible ammunition later this year in the actual election.
The paper you linked was interesting - thanks - although unfortunately it has some serious flaws in its analysis. For example:
The pollsters who work outside the polling stations often have problems with officials who want to limit access to voters. Unless the interviews have sampled the entire day's voters, the results can be demographically and hence politically skewed.
Time-of-Day Bias. End of day numbers favored Kerry (not only early results).
I think he's misunderstood the explanation of the problem. If the pollsters have uneven access to the voters - i.e., the officials arrive and chase them off, or don't let them get there until later - then they'll be unable to sample the entire day's voters, and hence the end of day numbers will be skewed.
Of course, the same uneven temporal sampling could happen for any number of reasons. If, for example, one party's voters tend to come in all day (say, students, housewives, people with flexible schedules) and another party's voters tend to come in bursts (maybe church busses or good ol' boys on their way home from work), then interviewing a certain number of people per hour will obviously be skewed towards the first group, as will trying to interview a certain fraction of people and being unable to keep up during peak times.
Another example:
Random imbalances are part of normal sampling error and result in the poll precision and confidence intervals that I have reported. Under such conditions, Republicans, Westerners, etc., are equally (un)likely to be over- or under-represented.
That's simply not true. If one group is disproportionately likely to avoid talking to pollsters - say, a group that routinely vilifies the "liberal bias in the MSM" - then that group will be systematically underrepresented, regardless of how careful pollsters are in their selection process.
And yet, with zero evidence, he dismisses this potential problem as not making sense on the face of it. He complains that it's merely a hypothesis so he can dismiss it, and then goes on to make hypotheses of his own.
I can't say as I think the 2004 election was handled well, but it's pretty obvious that the writer of this paper has an axe to grind and a conclusion he wants to support, so it's hard to take his conclusions seriously.
Moreover, the fact of the matter is that we have no evidence initial exit polls disagreed with the count other than "a guy who says on his blog that he heard a guy on the news say that". For someone who complains about "the MSM", you seem awfully trusting of them when they're saying what you want to hear.
As the saying goes:
So unless you provide a link to some actual evidence, I'm going to have to call bullshit on you.
You might be right, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it.
Your link just goes to a guy saying that another guy said the exit polls didn't match. The LA Times link goes to actual data from an actual exit poll, and if you calculate the results, you'll find their exit poll was within ~1% of the actual outcome.
Why are people so desperate to hallucinate evidence of fraud? Not everything is a conspiracy, you know, and there're plenty of real problems you could be devoting your righteous indignation towards. It's good to second-guess and double-check, but that includes your own assumptions. Self-delusion ain't pretty.
The UK Independent said the exit polls gave Obama a 4 point lead
They appear to have been wrong, or at least using a different poll than the LA Times.
According to their poll, Clinton won 29% of the male vote and 46% of the female vote, vs. 40%/34% for Obama. As the voters polled were 43% male and 57% female, that translates into 38.7% of the vote for Clinton and 36.6% for Obama, which is very close to what the final result was.
I have no idea what poll the UK Independent was using, but the data from the LA Times's poll matches up very closely with the actual results. As a wise man once said:
So unless you provide a link to some actual evidence, I'm going to have to call bullshit on you.
Am I mistaken, or are you actually using data from the machine counts to confirm that the machine counts must be okay?
You are mistaken. I'm using data from the machine counts to confirm that there exists an alternative and more plausible explanation than widespread fraud.
The data shows that town size, voting pattern, and machine-countedness are all correlated. There are several possible explanations:
Machines are the common cause.
The machines were programmed to skew the results by larger fractions in larger towns - basically an n^2 effect on votes changed - even though there is a full paper trail and recounts have happened in recent elections. That would result in an enormous chance of uncovering solid evidence of massive fraud, and hence would be a very silly way to go about doing it.
Town size is the common cause.
Cities have different voting patterns than more rural areas. Like is the case across the world, like has been noted in every single election (seen the red/blue maps of US counties ever?), and like was noted as being not at all surprising by several people familiar with the state's voting patterns, including several posters here and the link from DailyKos.
Aliens are the common cause.
Mind control lasers made people change their votes for Clinton. Hey, you can't prove it didn't happen!
Now, I'm not saying the vastly-more-plausible one is necessarily what happened, but I am pointing out it's there. And vastly more plausible.
And I thought about your post, and realized that the post you were pointing to for support appears to be nonsense, and I realized that your post was also quite likely nonsense.
Your userdata says you have a Stanford email address; there's plenty of good statisticians at Stanford, so go ask some of them to explain why you're wrong. Start them off with:
Spurious relationship fallacy
If size, machine-count, and voting pattern are all correlated, it's an error to jump to the conclusion that size doesn't matter.
Data mining fallacy
If you comb through a big dataset for long enough, you'll find a pattern. That's why tests for statistical significance take into account the number of tests you're running (e.g., Tukey's HSD). If you slice your data 20 ways, the odds of finding a pattern that's only 5% likely are pretty damn high.
Correlation vs. causation
An oldie but a goodie. The grandaddy of the spurious relationship fallacy, it's still the most common way people misinterpret data. Surface temperature of the earth is positively correlated with number of pirate attacks, but you'd be a fool to say one caused the other.
Wouldn't it be interesting if actually had a meaningful recount of this data
No. With very high probability it'd just tell us that the original results were right, just like it did last time there was a recount in the state (2004, based on other comments here). Not really that interesting.
What is VERY important, though, is that such a recount is POSSIBLE. As far as I'm concerned, it should be a LEGAL REQUIREMENT that a full, manual recount can be done on ANY voting station, and any system which doesn't support that can't be used.
Slashdot Mirror
The claim is that the current model can provide 75Hz updates, which isn't high enough for haptics -- 1000Hz is the standard for a real-time haptic interface.
It sounds promising, though, especially with regards to the stiffness it can produce.
You still don't; never did, really.
D&D required a bunch of boxes, or (much later) the very nice all-in-one Rules Cyclopedia. 1ed and 2ed required 3 books (PHB/DMG/MM), although I've played fun games with fewer. 3ed required the same 3 books. 4ed will apparently require those same three books. I can't see how much has changed in terms of cost.
Each of those editions had loads of extra books, many of which I own, and none of which were in any way necessary. Sitting on a shelf in front of me are about 25 3.5ed books; if I started a campaign tomorrow I would use exactly 3 of them: the PHB, the DMG, and the MM.
I've never understood the complaint that there are "too many books" - don't buy the ones you don't want!
To a large extent, it never was. RPG companies are filled with people struggling to make a living, and you'd better believe that putting food on their tables is going to be a factor in their decisions. (Read, for example, Monte Cook's descriptions of working at ICE in the early 90's.)
These companies are trying to make a game that's fun, but they're also trying to make a profit, and the latter is a necessity to continue doing the former. Don't give them your money if you don't like what they're doing (I stopped buying D&D books a couple years ago), but I don't really see "trying not to go bankrupt" as something to complain about.
That would be because his art is great.
I've heard D&D moved to different artists in part to differentiate itself from its past and project a new image. Regardless of the reason, it's unfortunate - Elmore's drawings were much more dynamic than those of any other RPG artist I've seen, especially those of his peers (Easley, Brom, Vallejo, etc.), in the sense of capturing the subjects in action, rather than appearing posed and static.
Personal preference, of course, but anyone who doesn't think he was the best artist D&D had is outright wrong.
Just pointing out that an awful lot of people didn't have the same experience of (A)D&D that you did. I know plenty of people - myself included - who had lots of fun with 1st-4th-level characters, and by no means found they provided a less enjoyable time than higher levels.
In all honesty, my experience has been that the details of the game's mechanics are very much secondary when it comes to how much fun a game will be. Indeed, I've found that some people get so sucked in by detailed, polished rules sets (e.g., D&D3ed, GURPS) that their play becomes more mechanical and less fun. (I'm not the only one to observe that, either; Sean Punch, long-time line editor for GURPS, has related stories of exactly the same thing in rec.games.frp.gurps)
Different strokes for different folks, of course. The rules-heavy/tactical crowd is presumably a more profitable market than the rules-light/story crowd, so I don't begrudge D&D moving heavily in that direction. I'm not even sure it's leaving me behind - I have a foot in both camps. I'm just pointing out that it's not getting better, just different, and there very definitely are gamers (with huge game libraries) who have no interest in the direction D&D has moved.
It's interesting to actually read your link. For example:
i.e.,: "It's a myth that this is too powerful because you can change the rules to weaken it."
Last I heard, that was known as the Oberoni Fallacy. And, last I heard, a list of fallacious arguments was less than persuasive.
Isn't that a bit of a presumptive statement about someone you've never met?
The 3ed rules aren't "better"; that's just your opinion. They're different, and so they suit some people (you) more than others (the guy you're responding to, as well as gamers I know personally).
Many people find the new rules much, much more complex (think about how many AC/Att bonus options you have with Expertise/Power Attack/Dodge/Incorporeal/Flatfooted/Flanking/Charge/...), and simply don't find that fun. To those people, the 3ed rules are far from "better".
Or get a game that plays less like a squad-level miniatures game. "More tactical" isn't "better" for everyone.
Then you've been moving in the wrong direction; try 1ed instead.
Seriously, pick up the books second-hand. The rules are a mess, the writing is overly complex, the power balance is shot, everything's scattershot, and the result positively crackles with fun and imagination.
It's not just me - my sister, for example, has essentially the complete 1ed set - and it's not the RPG I've played first, played most, or even liked most. It's just that the books read like they were written for fun, to be fun, like a kid writing about candy.
To my eye, the earliest 1ed books have that feel most strongly, and later books (and editions) get more and more polished, and more and more sterile and lifeless. That doesn't mean they're not fun -- I'm a bit of a gearhead, so I certainly have fun playing with 3ed's maze of rules -- but it's a very different style of game. 3ed always felt like it was about making characters; 1ed felt like it was about playing them.
So, since I consider 2ed much closer to 1ed than to 3ed, I'd honestly recommend picking up those early books, for inspiration if nothing else.
You might want to look up the difference between "evidence" and "some guy making a bunch of dubious claims on the internet."
Your list of "evidence" is nothing more than a link to a set of shoddy arguments. For example:
The author's "argument" consists of repeatedly claiming that certain things are not possible, with utterly no data to back up those claims.
This may surprise you, but not everything you read on the internet is true. Even if it says what you want to hear.
There's plenty.
Conceptually, a gamma ray burst is akin to a laser beam; shade the target, and you prevent the damage. Moreover, the effects of the GRB are relatively low-energy -- it's described as splitting ozone and N2 molecules, not blasting away the whole atmosphere -- so the beam would be able to ablate only a small amount of a protective shield. Finally, the effects -- splitting molecules, creating muons, etc. -- are already happening anyway, so the protection doesn't need to be perfect, simply good enough to leave the results within the same ballpark as the level of bombardment the earth sees all the time.
Accordingly, it seems likely that manufacturing an earth-sized dust cloud between us and the GRB would be sufficient protection; essentially, corral some rocks from the asteriod belt, move them into position, and pulverize them. While that's not something we could effectively do now, it's not so outlandish for 1,000 years in the future.
Only with careful definitions.
Most of the Netherlands has been wrested from the stormy North Sea over the course of centuries, a process that would fall under most definitions of "fighting against Mother Nature". Given the state of the Netherlands today, though, it would also fall under few definitions of "futile".
A great deal of what modern civilization does and is could be considered as fighting against nature, and I would disagree that civilization is futile. Natural forces are not something that can be dismissed as irrelevant, but neither are they something that should be fawned over as omnipotent; as is almost always the case, the truth lies between the extremes.
Why? There's a lot of music I wouldn't pay $5 for; most of that I wouldn't bother downloading even if it was free.
Most.
There does indeed exist some music that I wouldn't pay $5 to get access to, but that I'm sufficiently interested in to give a listen to. Having acquired that music, I'd get a chance to listen to it, and decide whether (a) I wanted to buy it, and (b) whether I was interested in acquiring or buying other music from the same artist(s).
$5 is cheap, but not cheap enough to remove all music from the "I'll need to try before buying" category.
Do I think that's what all of those 8,000 concurrent downloads are? Of course not. I do think, though, that the vast majority of those downloads never would have been sales in the first place, and that the number would not be drastically lower even if the official download was free. At a guess, Pirate Bay is simply the default content provider for some people, and it never even occurs to them to look for an "official" provider, regardless of price.
That, and some people are hoarders; I'll bet a fair chunk of those Pirate Bay downloads never get listened to.
>>> So, how is all the new demands for electricity going to be satisfied.
A lot more easily than you seem to think.
There are about 3T vehicle miles logged in the US each year. An electric car requires about 250Wh/mi, well-to-wheel. Using electricity to power the US's total yearly vehicle miles would require 250Wh/mi x 3Tmi = 750M MWh.
For comparison, the total amount of electricity generated in the US per year is 4,000M MWh, or 5-6 times as much. Converting every vehicle in the US to all-electric would add less than 20% to the electricity generation needs of the most car-happy country on earth.
For further comparison, note that the US used 115Mbbl of oil in 2006 to generate 41M MWh, meaning that existing generating facilities generate roughly 1M MWh per 3Mbbl. Accordingly, the 4,000Mbbl of gasoline and diesel the US consumes to run its vehicles for a year could be converted to 1,300M MWh, or nearly twice as much electricity as would be needed to run all-electric versions of those vehicles.
If getting enough electricity to run an all-electric fleet is the problem you're worried about, you simply haven't done the math.
Similar to the 18650 cell (although larger, of course), there's no reason not to settle on a standard cell for vehicles. It might involve a little scuffling like for HD DVDs, but so what?That'd be awesome.
Today's sports cars use much the same petrol pumps as econoboxes, no? So why are the rules different for batteries?As opposed to the need to invest in large amounts of gas (and sealed underground storage tanks) today. Again, not so different.
(You may argue that battery packs are more expensive than gasoline, but I can argue that storage tanks can't be continuously refilled from the electricity grid, so it's not at all clear which is easier.)Like, for example, just about every laptop battery known to man?Why?
Own the car and lease the battery. Since the battery belongs to the manufacturer, not you or the fuel station, neither of you care how old it is or how old the replacement is; under the terms of the lease, it's an even trade.
(The only problem would be if people started taking the batteries out, abusing them, and then trying to swap them. That's not so different from doing the same thing with a Prius's battery and then trying to get it replaced under the 8-year warranty, and I suspect it'd be as uncommon and as unrewarding.)
None of your complaints hold up under scrutiny. His idea might not be a good one, but we still don't have a reason why it wouldn't be.
Yes, that's what I'm doing. That's what I said I was doing in the initial post, and said I was doing in the last post. This whole "can't use them to confirm that the machine counts are not corrupt" business is nothing more than a straw man of your own devising.
Let's take another(?) look at what I said:
"So while it's clear that support for Clinton vs. Obama is correlated with machine-counting vs. hand-counting, it's also clear that both of those are correlated with city size, suggesting a much simpler and rather less nefarious underlying common cause. The tables in TFA don't show that simply because of the highly unbalanced manner in which they split up towns into size classes."
Two main points in there:
Both of those are quite supportable from the machine-counted data. The first point is simply derived from the data itself, and is true regardless of whether fraud occurred or not, and the second point follows directly from the first.
I'm not saying the machine-counted votes were clean; I'm saying that the analysis which suggests they were dirty is wrong, that a better analysis provides an obvious explanation for the difference, and that Occam's Razor would thus favour the explanation that the root cause of the three correlations we see was town-size effects rather than fraud.
Oil, natural gas, and coal are all very different resources that are subject to very different constraints. Confusing them - intentionally or otherwise - is not at all helpful. In fact, it's often highly misleading - warning that oil production may be at risk and then (incorrectly) stating that fertilizer is made from oil is nothing but bait-and-switch, and it gives a flat-out wrong picture of the situation.
And here I was questioning whether that disclaimer was necessary...
You get a range of people in each group, and inter-individual differences are typically larger than inter-group differences, which means the distributions have significant overlap. That's obvious, so it's not necessary to bust out war stories to try to make that point.
If you'd understood what he was saying, you'd have understood that he wasn't saying that. He didn't say why they were more intelligent; he just said they were.
That's based on his experience, but it's not that hard to see why that would often be the case (for example, PhD programs aren't easy, and represent another layer of weeding beyond undergrad). It's also the case, though, that brains are like muscles - use them and they get better. A (good) PhD is an awful lot of mental activity, so most people leave one sharper than they entered it. (The same can be done outside of school, of course, but it's forced on you there, so the effect on the mean is greater.)
Fundamentally, though, if you're talking about coding ability, you're missing the point. Someone with a BSc and six years in industry has roughly the same quantity of experience as someone with a PhD, but has a very, very different type of experience, and at a more fundamental level than "drivers guy vs. UI guy". An undergrad with years of industry experience should be much better at coding than a fresh PhD, since he's spent much longer focusing on that.
Hell, based on the research code I've seen, you should count yourself lucky if the machine doesn't explode when he hits "compile"... (Research code is a very different thing from production code.)
From the looks of it, that "something stupid" has migrated upwards a little.
Exactly as the parent poster said, weapons like the Tomahawk have multiple guidance systems of which GPS represents only one. In this case:
That same website has stats for JDAMs ("an inertial navigation system/global positioning system guidance kit") and F-16s ("AN/APG-66 pulsed-Doppler radar"). Little or nothing seems to be GPS-only.
You appear not to have understood what the OP was saying.
He didn't say they were better programmers; he said they were smarter. If you're hiring someone with a PhD to crank out code, you're wasting their time and your money.
A PhD is a research degree; that means they're trained in solving problems. It is, typically, a high-level degree, in the sense that details like code matter only insofar as they represent ideas. If you want someone to come up with ideas for tackling a viciously-hard problem, the guy with the PhD is your man; if you want someone to implement a mostly-known solution...say, one that the clever PhD just hacked up a prototype of...then the experienced coder is your girl. If you mistake one for the other, you're woefully misusing your staff's abilities.
A PhD is training for a particular type of work, and it's a mistake to assume they should be like BSc degreed folk only moreso. It's a common mistake, but it's a big one.
(General disclaimer: on average, exceptions exist, blah blah. We're talking generalizations here, so it's pointless to respond with an anecdote about an exception - we all already know they exist, so chill.)
You also said:
It still reads to me like you're suggesting fraud was likely.
Then feel free to not leap to the conclusion that I was talking about you personally (I wasn't, by the way).
We seem to agree that a substantial number of people did leap to that conclusion, though, which is a problem, both in terms of those people's lack of critical analysis of the situation and in terms of the apparently wide-spread lack of faith in the system.
As has been pointed out, it's natural gas-based, and not all fossil fuels are oil.
I'll just add that natural gas isn't the energy source, it's the hydrogen source, and that world nitrogen fertilizer use takes up only 4% of world natural gas production, so there's no need to speculate about how to produce it from electrolysis any time soon (although those calculations have been done, and it would be a few percent addition to existing electricity requirements).
None of them do. Not even corn ethanol, which is perhaps the least useful alt-energy form out there. The vast majority don't even use more energy than they produce, despite periodic claims to the contrary. Wind turbines and solar cells have been getting 10x-100x energy payback for years now. At that kind of energy payback, they could easily be used to reform CO2 into whatever hydrocarbons they need for their supply chain, should that be necessary.
That's total nonsense. Not all energy is oil!
Take a look at the studies on ethanol - Pimental's, for example. About 90% of the energy involved is for (a) fertilizer, or (b) distillation-process heat, neither of which involve oil!
Basically, you've been fed a lie.
It's better by about a factor of four; that's more than "a little".
Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is similar to switchgrass in that regard. Basically, anyone who's only looked at corn ethanol has a very, very biased view of what can be done. US-grown corn ethanol is a ridiculous product - it's agricultural subsidies in a bottle - and shouldn't be used as the basis of any sensible technological comparison.
Don't be absurd. Oil isn't going to vanish overnight, and agriculture uses such a small fraction of it (~5%) that even peak-is-nigh models like ASPO's predict the world will have plenty for agriculture for decades to come.
Moreover, demanding that alternative energy sources make no use of current energy sources is as useful as demanding they turn the moon to green cheese - there is absolutely no economic benefit to cutting an alt-energy business off from the world's infrastructure, so nobody who's running such a business will do it. Insisting they should is no more than a way to ignore their results as "not counting".
(a) Bigger differences - the difference between the exit poll and election results was 12% in the Ukraine.
(b) Supporting evidence - the Ukraine results included a highly suspicious 96% voter turnout rate in the pro-goverment east, vs. an apparent overall turnout of 79%. Plus, you know, the opposition candidate getting poisoned.
It's not like exit polls aren't wrong in other countries, too. In the 2004 French election, exit polls put the vote split at 40/34/17, whereas the final results were 50/37/13, which is quite a substantial difference.
That's an absurd analogy.
If there are problems with polls, they're likely to be systematic problems, such as "conservatives are more likely to ignore pollsters because of antagonism towards perceived liberal bias in the news" or "angry rednecks vote Republican and don't talk to pollsters", rather than the truly random problems he's assuming.
Is the question of tampering worth looking into? Of course, and I'm glad Kucinich is getting a recount going, and anything that gets more paper trails into voting is good, but the eagerness with which people are leaping on the notion of voting fraud - despite very, very thin evidence - is disturbing.
I suppose it might be left over from the losses in 2000 and 2004; however, obsessing over the past isn't going to win the future. Now that there's going to be a hand recount, I'm not at all sure it's in the best interests of Democratic supporters (or democratic supporters, for all that) to engage in a nasty internal spat over accusations of fraud. Don't think this won't be saved as possible ammunition later this year in the actual election.
I think he's misunderstood the explanation of the problem. If the pollsters have uneven access to the voters - i.e., the officials arrive and chase them off, or don't let them get there until later - then they'll be unable to sample the entire day's voters, and hence the end of day numbers will be skewed.
Of course, the same uneven temporal sampling could happen for any number of reasons. If, for example, one party's voters tend to come in all day (say, students, housewives, people with flexible schedules) and another party's voters tend to come in bursts (maybe church busses or good ol' boys on their way home from work), then interviewing a certain number of people per hour will obviously be skewed towards the first group, as will trying to interview a certain fraction of people and being unable to keep up during peak times.
Another example:
That's simply not true. If one group is disproportionately likely to avoid talking to pollsters - say, a group that routinely vilifies the "liberal bias in the MSM" - then that group will be systematically underrepresented, regardless of how careful pollsters are in their selection process.
And yet, with zero evidence, he dismisses this potential problem as not making sense on the face of it. He complains that it's merely a hypothesis so he can dismiss it, and then goes on to make hypotheses of his own.
I can't say as I think the 2004 election was handled well, but it's pretty obvious that the writer of this paper has an axe to grind and a conclusion he wants to support, so it's hard to take his conclusions seriously.
Moreover, the fact of the matter is that we have no evidence initial exit polls disagreed with the count other than "a guy who says on his blog that he heard a guy on the news say that". For someone who complains about "the MSM", you seem awfully trusting of them when they're saying what you want to hear.
As the saying goes:
You might be right, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it.
Your link just goes to a guy saying that another guy said the exit polls didn't match. The LA Times link goes to actual data from an actual exit poll, and if you calculate the results, you'll find their exit poll was within ~1% of the actual outcome.
Why are people so desperate to hallucinate evidence of fraud? Not everything is a conspiracy, you know, and there're plenty of real problems you could be devoting your righteous indignation towards. It's good to second-guess and double-check, but that includes your own assumptions. Self-delusion ain't pretty.
They appear to have been wrong, or at least using a different poll than the LA Times.
According to their poll, Clinton won 29% of the male vote and 46% of the female vote, vs. 40%/34% for Obama. As the voters polled were 43% male and 57% female, that translates into 38.7% of the vote for Clinton and 36.6% for Obama, which is very close to what the final result was.
I have no idea what poll the UK Independent was using, but the data from the LA Times's poll matches up very closely with the actual results. As a wise man once said:
You are mistaken. I'm using data from the machine counts to confirm that there exists an alternative and more plausible explanation than widespread fraud.
The data shows that town size, voting pattern, and machine-countedness are all correlated. There are several possible explanations:
The machines were programmed to skew the results by larger fractions in larger towns - basically an n^2 effect on votes changed - even though there is a full paper trail and recounts have happened in recent elections. That would result in an enormous chance of uncovering solid evidence of massive fraud, and hence would be a very silly way to go about doing it.
Cities have different voting patterns than more rural areas. Like is the case across the world, like has been noted in every single election (seen the red/blue maps of US counties ever?), and like was noted as being not at all surprising by several people familiar with the state's voting patterns, including several posters here and the link from DailyKos.
Mind control lasers made people change their votes for Clinton. Hey, you can't prove it didn't happen!
Now, I'm not saying the vastly-more-plausible one is necessarily what happened, but I am pointing out it's there. And vastly more plausible.
Your userdata says you have a Stanford email address; there's plenty of good statisticians at Stanford, so go ask some of them to explain why you're wrong. Start them off with:
If size, machine-count, and voting pattern are all correlated, it's an error to jump to the conclusion that size doesn't matter.
If you comb through a big dataset for long enough, you'll find a pattern. That's why tests for statistical significance take into account the number of tests you're running (e.g., Tukey's HSD). If you slice your data 20 ways, the odds of finding a pattern that's only 5% likely are pretty damn high.
An oldie but a goodie. The grandaddy of the spurious relationship fallacy, it's still the most common way people misinterpret data. Surface temperature of the earth is positively correlated with number of pirate attacks, but you'd be a fool to say one caused the other.
No. With very high probability it'd just tell us that the original results were right, just like it did last time there was a recount in the state (2004, based on other comments here). Not really that interesting.
What is VERY important, though, is that such a recount is POSSIBLE. As far as I'm concerned, it should be a LEGAL REQUIREMENT that a full, manual recount can be done on ANY voting station, and any system which doesn't support that can't be used.