Oooh, oooh, oooh! I've got proof! Even better, it comes from that bastion of truth and unintentional comedy, The Trustworthy Encyclopedia.
Here you go, every scrap of tangential evidence pertaining, even remotely to WMDs. Clicky If this is the best that the world's right-wingers can come up with, I'd consider Enderandrew throughly debunked.
You come from a place where the inbreeding coefficient is greater than 1, don't you? (That's a joke, BTW.)
It would have been trivial to run a simplified simulation where you controlled a hundred or so different Mendelian alleles (no need for epistasis or anything), and acted as the force of mutation to guide your civilization as it progressed. You could accelerate the entire process so that you could complete the entire game in about an hour, but you'd lack the "look ma, I built a protozoa with a penis" effect that the game seems to have brought out in people.
Sure, but it would have been nice (to me, as an evolutionary biology student and a gamer) if you'd had an increase in fitness with certain traits.
The idea being that if you place flagella on the front and back of your creature, you have the same fitness as if you put the same two flagella on the front. It makes no sense.
I would have liked this game a whole bunch more if it had been nothing but a bunch of quantitative genetics equations, and you'd had submissions like maximizing net effective population size or gotten an achievement for trying to keep an overdominant advantageous allele out of your population.
As a simulation and an RTS it was wildly dumbed down, and really not to my taste. Then again, next year I'll be getting paid money to do this sort of thing for real next year, so I'm probably way outside this game's demographic.
Calling my a pirate implies cunning, bad-assary, awesome hacking skills, and sticking it to the proverbial man while striking a blow for freedom.
Calling me a copyright infringer makes me feel like a 33 year old virgin sitting in his mothers basement arguing over the definition of copyright with other people engaged in the same hobby. Uh, not that I am...
People who aren't pirates are the only ones who complain (at least about music and movies).
Game pirates gripe all the time about releases being a mere week in advance of retail release, or about how the crack just uses a VM to break the DRM without actually removing it from the executable.
I can't believe they left off the Unofficial Patch for Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines.
Seriously, it is probably the most professionally done mod I've ever seen.
They took the buggy piece of crap that was vanilla Bloodlines and turned it into one of the most immersive role playing worlds I've ever seen.
You could argue that the dev team should have done this job, but I say that it's the end gameplay that counts, and this mod really delivers. Check it out.
I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
640 GB of porn ought to be enough for anybody!
Seriously, my experience has been remarkably similar to yours, except without the little care and maintenance bit. I once dropped one of these down the stairs at a LAN party. Worked just fine afterward. I've also had good luck with Maxtor, however one of these died after only 10 years of use (in an incident perhaps relating to a Coke set on it), so I generally buy Seagate.
But do you really need 1.5 TB of space for software development?
Even 3D animation and video editing aren't going to eat up 1.5 TB until you hit the professional level, at which point you can probably afford a RAID solution.
Having said that, this tech will improve over time, and I would just like to point out that we now have more storage space available on a single hard drive than in any one human brain (well, probably. Unless there's some sort of "intron/alternate splicing" analogue going on in the brain).
I swear, if you were any more dense, you'd fall within your own Schwarzschild radius, become a black hole, and we wouldn't have to deal with you anymore.
Hey, everybody's thinking it, I'm just saying it.;)
Read the in-game histories pages for the non-humanoid races, and you'll see that they actually do explain why you never see any Turian females.
ME has plenty of scientific errors anyway: *Atmospheric coloration (if it's not blue, I shouldn't have my helmet open)
*Sound in space *The Asari having no explanation to counter the Red Queen hypothesis *How did the alien races manage to overcome their innate desire to conquer the universe (required for advancement to the space stage) and instead work in harmony with one another? *I also remember a number of errors in solar system creation, where you'd have a gas giant orbiting waaay to close to a sun. *GELFs were far too rare, were these banned? *There didn't seem to be any checks in place to keep VIs from becoming AIs (and they could, remember the mission to Luna? *Also, there were lots of problems with their gravity and atmosphere, like remember that one planet which had a 3.9Gs, but the description said its high O2 content "made you able to jump really high" ROFL, right. *That planet that had a railgun scar was messed up as well, the scar was curved, and any scar visible from that far back should have gone straight along the planet.
However, they did a pretty good job on most stuff (I loved the Fires of St. Elmo and right-chiral Turians).
I could go on, but I fear any further remarks might be taken as proof of virginity *looks around nervously*.
And what makes you think we aren't the model for life everywhere?
we share DNA with every other animal
Life on earth shares so much DNA because that seems to be the minimum required to sustain a life form in a N/O/Ar atmosphere at 1G. (Sorry no reference for this but most biology textbooks should have it in the first chapter)
Second, if you look at brain development, you'll see that no matter what pressure selects for a larger brain, you're going to end up with a large neocortex developing last, and other area of the brain will maintain a relatively fixed proportion. I'm way overextending the significance of this research, but it's true in every mammal species studied; tasks are then assigned to existing brain structure (Finlay BL, Darlington RB. 1995. Linked regularities in the development and evolution of mammalian brains. Science 268: 1578-1584.).
Understand, I'm not saying all life everywhere looks like Stargate life, or even that life exists anywhere else, but I think it's too early to simply throw out the idea that any intelligent race living on a "class M" planet will wind up looking pretty much human.
(See also: carboniferous era, cyanobacteria, global warming, and the other "terraforming" events on earth. These say to me that most of the time, you aren't going to get any sort of intelligent life at all. Then again, Sarah Palin seems to be trying to prove that we don't have intelligent life at all yet).
Good point. I can admit when I'm wrong, and this looks like one of those times. There is no standard universal definition for life, but to put this whole thread back on topic (and defending my original point) earth before membranes evolved was not alive.
I linked to the Wikipedia article because those 7 factors which you pointed out, while contested as to the ultimate definition of life, are the basis for dismissing the idea that the earth could be called alive.
Old people are able to reproduce at some point in their lives, therefore they are alive.
Biologists cracked the problem of life years ago, I haven't looked at this stuff in years, but I recall learning about it in 9th grade.
I could try to explain it, but I think I'll save myself the time and link here instead.
See? It's not difficult to define at all (although it does get really, really tricky when talking about abiogenesis, hence why we're all reading this).
IIRC you must be able to interact with your environment, reproduce, and grow to be considered alive.
Primordial earth was able to interact with environment (sunlight, space) but could not reproduce or grow in any meaningful sense of the term.
Besides, we still aren't sure how exactly those first membranes formed (oil drops something something micelles is probably right, but if you can define the exact mechanism, theres a lot of fame and fortune to be made).
If you really want to be anal about it, the sunlight (photon, actually, plants don't absorb all sunlight) just inputs enough energy to move an electron to a higher energy state. This electron is taken from water, and gets stored in glucose, the carbon in that glucose itself being taken from CO2.
Oh, FFS, get with the times. This was solved years ago. Most torrent clients set this by default, and it's been working pretty well to prioritize Linux ISOs over movies for the last five years now. I'm actually kind of surprised that this tool uses hash checking instead, but whatever, ISPs are clearly morons.
Well, in defense of his position on telecom immunity, he realized that FISA was expiring, and decided that it was better to get a compromise than just let the law expire.
He's still better than McCain IMHO, but I won't be voting for either of them. I'll write in for Cthulhu, same as always. Disclaimer: don't do this if you live in a swing state.
Bingo. I would have beaten CoC if I'd been able to figure out what to do, but as it was half the time I was just wandering lost - and if I'd gotten a walkthrough it would have ruined the immersion.
Scary is Vampire Bloodlines, the perfect mix of brutal violence, creepy lighting, and, lots and lots of tense moments. Too bad most of the scary stuff was scripted so it became less so on the third and fourth play throughs (still that Hotel gives me the creeps)
Slashdot Mirror
It would be cheaper just to put the passport in the microwave, however this might be illegal. Anyone know for sure?
Here you go, every scrap of tangential evidence pertaining, even remotely to WMDs. Clicky If this is the best that the world's right-wingers can come up with, I'd consider Enderandrew throughly debunked.
The Australians I've talked to seem to get most of their files through sneakernet due to outrageous bandwidth limitations.
I bet TPB could rig up a new proxy server every week to help serve up content to the tech savvy.
It would have been trivial to run a simplified simulation where you controlled a hundred or so different Mendelian alleles (no need for epistasis or anything), and acted as the force of mutation to guide your civilization as it progressed. You could accelerate the entire process so that you could complete the entire game in about an hour, but you'd lack the "look ma, I built a protozoa with a penis" effect that the game seems to have brought out in people.
The idea being that if you place flagella on the front and back of your creature, you have the same fitness as if you put the same two flagella on the front. It makes no sense.
I would have liked this game a whole bunch more if it had been nothing but a bunch of quantitative genetics equations, and you'd had submissions like maximizing net effective population size or gotten an achievement for trying to keep an overdominant advantageous allele out of your population.
As a simulation and an RTS it was wildly dumbed down, and really not to my taste. Then again, next year I'll be getting paid money to do this sort of thing for real next year, so I'm probably way outside this game's demographic.
Calling my a pirate implies cunning, bad-assary, awesome hacking skills, and sticking it to the proverbial man while striking a blow for freedom.
Calling me a copyright infringer makes me feel like a 33 year old virgin sitting in his mothers basement arguing over the definition of copyright with other people engaged in the same hobby. Uh, not that I am...
People who aren't pirates are the only ones who complain (at least about music and movies).
Game pirates gripe all the time about releases being a mere week in advance of retail release, or about how the crack just uses a VM to break the DRM without actually removing it from the executable.
Oh really? I don't see you with a fungineering degree.
This subgenera has a lot of potential, and has never been fully realized, but it has been tried before.
Seriously, it is probably the most professionally done mod I've ever seen.
They took the buggy piece of crap that was vanilla Bloodlines and turned it into one of the most immersive role playing worlds I've ever seen.
You could argue that the dev team should have done this job, but I say that it's the end gameplay that counts, and this mod really delivers. Check it out.
I dunno about goatee, but goatse...
640 GB of porn ought to be enough for anybody!
Seriously, my experience has been remarkably similar to yours, except without the little care and maintenance bit. I once dropped one of these down the stairs at a LAN party. Worked just fine afterward. I've also had good luck with Maxtor, however one of these died after only 10 years of use (in an incident perhaps relating to a Coke set on it), so I generally buy Seagate.
Even 3D animation and video editing aren't going to eat up 1.5 TB until you hit the professional level, at which point you can probably afford a RAID solution.
Having said that, this tech will improve over time, and I would just like to point out that we now have more storage space available on a single hard drive than in any one human brain (well, probably. Unless there's some sort of "intron/alternate splicing" analogue going on in the brain).
Hey, everybody's thinking it, I'm just saying it. ;)
Takes about a hour to set up, you can integrate all your drivers and everything, and then install it on any computer you want.
I use it on my gaming machines and it simply flies. Far more to my taste than Tiny XP, because it comes with all my registry tweaks by default.
ME has plenty of scientific errors anyway:
*Atmospheric coloration (if it's not blue, I shouldn't have my helmet open)
*Sound in space
*The Asari having no explanation to counter the Red Queen hypothesis
*How did the alien races manage to overcome their innate desire to conquer the universe (required for advancement to the space stage) and instead work in harmony with one another?
*I also remember a number of errors in solar system creation, where you'd have a gas giant orbiting waaay to close to a sun.
*GELFs were far too rare, were these banned?
*There didn't seem to be any checks in place to keep VIs from becoming AIs (and they could, remember the mission to Luna?
*Also, there were lots of problems with their gravity and atmosphere, like remember that one planet which had a 3.9Gs, but the description said its high O2 content "made you able to jump really high" ROFL, right.
*That planet that had a railgun scar was messed up as well, the scar was curved, and any scar visible from that far back should have gone straight along the planet.
However, they did a pretty good job on most stuff (I loved the Fires of St. Elmo and right-chiral Turians).
I could go on, but I fear any further remarks might be taken as proof of virginity *looks around nervously*.
Life on earth shares so much DNA because that seems to be the minimum required to sustain a life form in a N/O/Ar atmosphere at 1G. (Sorry no reference for this but most biology textbooks should have it in the first chapter)
Second, if you look at brain development, you'll see that no matter what pressure selects for a larger brain, you're going to end up with a large neocortex developing last, and other area of the brain will maintain a relatively fixed proportion. I'm way overextending the significance of this research, but it's true in every mammal species studied; tasks are then assigned to existing brain structure (Finlay BL, Darlington RB. 1995. Linked regularities in the development and evolution of mammalian brains. Science 268: 1578-1584.).
Understand, I'm not saying all life everywhere looks like Stargate life, or even that life exists anywhere else, but I think it's too early to simply throw out the idea that any intelligent race living on a "class M" planet will wind up looking pretty much human.
(See also: carboniferous era, cyanobacteria, global warming, and the other "terraforming" events on earth. These say to me that most of the time, you aren't going to get any sort of intelligent life at all. Then again, Sarah Palin seems to be trying to prove that we don't have intelligent life at all yet).
I linked to the Wikipedia article because those 7 factors which you pointed out, while contested as to the ultimate definition of life, are the basis for dismissing the idea that the earth could be called alive.
Biologists cracked the problem of life years ago, I haven't looked at this stuff in years, but I recall learning about it in 9th grade.
I could try to explain it, but I think I'll save myself the time and link here instead.
See? It's not difficult to define at all (although it does get really, really tricky when talking about abiogenesis, hence why we're all reading this).
IIRC you must be able to interact with your environment, reproduce, and grow to be considered alive.
Primordial earth was able to interact with environment (sunlight, space) but could not reproduce or grow in any meaningful sense of the term.
Besides, we still aren't sure how exactly those first membranes formed (oil drops something something micelles is probably right, but if you can define the exact mechanism, theres a lot of fame and fortune to be made).
So it's not all sunlight.
Oh, FFS, get with the times. This was solved years ago. Most torrent clients set this by default, and it's been working pretty well to prioritize Linux ISOs over movies for the last five years now. I'm actually kind of surprised that this tool uses hash checking instead, but whatever, ISPs are clearly morons.
He's still better than McCain IMHO, but I won't be voting for either of them. I'll write in for Cthulhu, same as always. Disclaimer: don't do this if you live in a swing state.
Nothing beats real competition!
Scary is Vampire Bloodlines, the perfect mix of brutal violence, creepy lighting, and, lots and lots of tense moments. Too bad most of the scary stuff was scripted so it became less so on the third and fourth play throughs (still that Hotel gives me the creeps)