Sorry to reply to you with a barely related rant, but:
Why are some slashdot pages randomly 500k+? It's freakin' annoying if my connection is having a slow day. I use Opera's built in ad-blocking, so it's not misbehaved ads unless Opera is foolishly downloading ads but not displaying them.
I'm a 'casual' (have a job/life) gamer who started playing when WoW opened. WoW is casual friendly until you hit max level, and that takes a long time if you actually are casual. I messed around with a couple of characters, and made level 60 after about 9 months - but at level 60 there was nothing casual left to do. Grind, raid, farm. Not casual. I have better things to do with my time than shepherd retarded 14 year olds, and I couldn't devote enough time to join a guild and meet proper players. I explored all the map regions, and then quit because I was bored.
I'm sure there are heaps of casual players - but I doubt if many of them are playing end-game content and I suspect lots of them quit at max level (remember that could take a year at casual pase) unless they have real life friends who play too.
"We take this kind of statement very seriously. We have an organisational image which we strive to maintain, and we can't have people making this kind of spurious comparison. They need to learn that it's just not acceptable, even as a jest" said Mafia spokesman Vinnie "The Axe" Scapieri when contacted today.
Well, in the interest of dicussion I'd say "yeah, probably". But I wouldn't take a firm stance on it. Do you think the teachings of the bible are less important if they didn't "really happen"? If the authors of the various books of the Bible were inspired by God to write about a Jesus who never existed, is the Bible less divine? I'm not just trying to wind you up; I hate it when discussions about religion turn into shouting matches.
There is a view called theistic evolution which essentially does this. It does not wash from a Christian perspective. It cannot work logically.
Sorry, but I do not accept literal readings of the bible. I find it much better as a metaphor and all you've said is that you believe it must be literal.
Here's a quick metaphorical reading off the top of my head:
There were no specfic Adam and Eve, but they represent the character of all people, which has been with us since the birth of our species (however that was). We all hold within us the dark desire to turn away from God and eat the forbidden fruit (this represents fixation with worldly success at the expense of our morals). Christ was a religious visionary who, through demonstration and leadership, showed us how to live in harmony and righteousness even in the face of temptation and the threat of violence. Whether he was literally the son of God or not depends on what you think of the first Council of Nicaea.
In the end, neither the evolutionist nor the creationist was able to observe the mechanism of speciation, and so neither has a scientifically-verifiable or testable theory about speciation. You may not like my explanation, but frankly my non-testable theory is as valid as evolution's non-testable theory.
Actually, although it's not very practical to perform speciation in a lab, you might be interested in the well documented cases where speciation has been "caught red-handed", such as ring species. The wiki article is a bit light, but it will get you started.
Nice troll. I was going to wait until I got to the "Kansas schools..." thread before I bit at anything, but what the hell - it's the weekend.
Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming isn't particularly controversial anywhere except in the "Fair and Balanced" American media and in the statements of politicians who are funded by oil companies. Real scientists argue about precisely how bad it is and what to do about it. Is it so outrageous to think that changing the composition of the atmosphere will change the climate?
The RC plane missions in San Andreas are side missions, except for perhaps the first one. I found them much harder than the 'normal' missions, and didn't complete them until almost the end of the game. If you got frustrated by them, you can leave them and keep going with the main story. Not that you're wrong to enjoy just messing around:)
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds.
I understand your skepticism. Scaremongers (i.e. most media) won't bother going in to detail about exactly why bird flu is a threat, which leads to your reaction above. Bird flu as it stands isn't really scary unless you spend all your time with birds, as you say. The scary bit is the nature of influenza.
Imagine that a strain of influenza is made up from a dozen or so assorted lego blocks. H5N1 has the 'kills humans real good' block in it. More common influenzas have the 'spreads from human to human' block (side note: there are a bunch more strains of influenza that can't spread to humans at all, they're purely avian). When a host gets infected by more than one strain of influenza, the two strains can swap blocks with each other (called reassortment, iirc). Imagine that all the lego blocks get broken down and put in a bag, then a new influenza is made out of some of the pieces. If the new strain has 'kills humans real good' and 'spreads from human to human' we're really fucked.
I was working in the health sector when H5N1 was just starting up, and I sat in on some discussions between honest-to-god local doctors who were trying to figure out what to do if an H5N1 variant takes off. It's a really bad position, because local doctors need a way to sort H5N1 cases from the common cold, without any more equipment than is in an average doctor's surgery. These guys have no infectious disease protection, and most have families they want to go home to. Would you want to swab someone's mouth to find out if they had bird flu?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Working from home is perfectly sensible in case of an epidemic, although I'd be inclined to ditch work altogether;) . One of the first things to do is close all the schools so kids don't share their germs around. Non-essential businesses are the next to go.
Nitpick: hydrogen isn't a fuel source, it's a battery (until we start harvesting it directly from Jupiter's atmosphere that is). You use it to store the energy you get from wind/solar/nuclear.
Heh. I wish it were so, but the invisible hand of the market tends to focus on 'cheaply' unless you regulate the f*** out of the market - at which point the government might as well just do the business itself.
While I agree with your sentiment, a terrorist is actually more interested in having people scared shitless than outright murder. The premise of terrorism is that you can't directly kill enough people to make a difference, but you can kill enough people to scare all the ones you couldn't get to directly.
I'm getting a bit OT here, but this discussion has made me think of what ripe opportunities there are for terrorists now. Given the current political climate in America you could run a very effective terrorist cell without committing any crimes. Leave packed backpacks in public places. Walk around looking foreign and shifty during rush hour. Put das blinkenlights under bridges. Watch as the local government overreacts and provides free publicity reminding all their citizens of the bad men who want to murder them in their sleep.
I'm not talking about whether people are smart, or capable, or able to do brilliant research. I'm talking about handling the tedious monotony of 2 month long patrols without surfacing. Dealing with crap from supervisors with no possible recourse. Living in quarters so tight that your idea of personal space is what's inside your uniform.
Raiders from WoW then? Or maybe not, they won't touch anything with a 5-man limit.
I wouldn't defend this point myself, but the idea is that the war is very expensive for Americans in general, but hugely profitable for Bush's buddies at Haliburton. It's the largest pork barrel project ever.
What's that meant to mean? Zelda has more story and more difficult puzzles than PoP, but they're more like each other than either is like Monkey Island.
Zelda is almost an adventure game - action-adventure would be most appropriate. Deus Ex could be counted if you don't mind FPS game play in with your adventure. Oblivion has a weak story and no puzzles.
Adventure games from the 'golden age' of LucasArts and Sierra had a similar presentation style to each other, but the significant point is that they also shared the same gameplay style. That gameplay is what is missing from modern games, and nobody knows exactly why.
'Adventure games' has a meaning more specific than just "a game in which you have an adventure". Look up "adventure games" on Wikipedia. 'Adventure games' are heavily story based, rarely have arcade-style game play and have non-trivial puzzles. Fetch quests in Oblivion don't count.
Well, there's also the danger of strictly true but misleading statements. Should deliberately misleading statements be protected?
For example, the statement you reference was actually "13 percent of illegal immigrants detained in Arizona...". What percentage of illegal immigrants are detained? Presumably to be detained an illegal immigrant must be doing something more suspicious than "Driving While Mexican" and so they would be more likely to have a criminal record than an honest, hard working illegal immigrant house cleaner. What percentage of non-immigrant detainees have criminal records? I could believe 13%.
The database would not be a problem in a hypothetical world where it could never be abused, and would probably not be a problem in the near future even in the real world.
The biggest problem is that such data, once collected, never goes away. You don't just need to trust the currently elected government, you need to trust the next government, and the next one, and the one after that who declares martial law after terrorists detonate a dirty bomb in a big city.
And you need to trust the operators of the database, since even if the data is perfect the operators can mis-report for their own ends - which is even worse if the database is reliable. The Oracle Has Spoken.
One last thing - Democracy is about not trusting elected officials. If we really trusted them we wouldn't need elections to replace them!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to reply to you with a barely related rant, but:
Why are some slashdot pages randomly 500k+? It's freakin' annoying if my connection is having a slow day. I use Opera's built in ad-blocking, so it's not misbehaved ads unless Opera is foolishly downloading ads but not displaying them.
I'm a 'casual' (have a job/life) gamer who started playing when WoW opened. WoW is casual friendly until you hit max level, and that takes a long time if you actually are casual. I messed around with a couple of characters, and made level 60 after about 9 months - but at level 60 there was nothing casual left to do. Grind, raid, farm. Not casual. I have better things to do with my time than shepherd retarded 14 year olds, and I couldn't devote enough time to join a guild and meet proper players. I explored all the map regions, and then quit because I was bored.
I'm sure there are heaps of casual players - but I doubt if many of them are playing end-game content and I suspect lots of them quit at max level (remember that could take a year at casual pase) unless they have real life friends who play too.
I propose a rigorous scientific investigation! Where's my funding?
"We take this kind of statement very seriously. We have an organisational image which we strive to maintain, and we can't have people making this kind of spurious comparison. They need to learn that it's just not acceptable, even as a jest" said Mafia spokesman Vinnie "The Axe" Scapieri when contacted today.
Have you seen how much stock Walmart shifts? They'll make it up on volume.
Well, in the interest of dicussion I'd say "yeah, probably". But I wouldn't take a firm stance on it. Do you think the teachings of the bible are less important if they didn't "really happen"? If the authors of the various books of the Bible were inspired by God to write about a Jesus who never existed, is the Bible less divine? I'm not just trying to wind you up; I hate it when discussions about religion turn into shouting matches.
There is a view called theistic evolution which essentially does this. It does not wash from a Christian perspective. It cannot work logically.
Sorry, but I do not accept literal readings of the bible. I find it much better as a metaphor and all you've said is that you believe it must be literal.
Here's a quick metaphorical reading off the top of my head:
There were no specfic Adam and Eve, but they represent the character of all people, which has been with us since the birth of our species (however that was). We all hold within us the dark desire to turn away from God and eat the forbidden fruit (this represents fixation with worldly success at the expense of our morals). Christ was a religious visionary who, through demonstration and leadership, showed us how to live in harmony and righteousness even in the face of temptation and the threat of violence. Whether he was literally the son of God or not depends on what you think of the first Council of Nicaea.
In the end, neither the evolutionist nor the creationist was able to observe the mechanism of speciation, and so neither has a scientifically-verifiable or testable theory about speciation. You may not like my explanation, but frankly my non-testable theory is as valid as evolution's non-testable theory.
Actually, although it's not very practical to perform speciation in a lab, you might be interested in the well documented cases where speciation has been "caught red-handed", such as ring species. The wiki article is a bit light, but it will get you started.
Nice troll. I was going to wait until I got to the "Kansas schools..." thread before I bit at anything, but what the hell - it's the weekend.
Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming isn't particularly controversial anywhere except in the "Fair and Balanced" American media and in the statements of politicians who are funded by oil companies. Real scientists argue about precisely how bad it is and what to do about it. Is it so outrageous to think that changing the composition of the atmosphere will change the climate?
The RC plane missions in San Andreas are side missions, except for perhaps the first one. I found them much harder than the 'normal' missions, and didn't complete them until almost the end of the game. If you got frustrated by them, you can leave them and keep going with the main story. Not that you're wrong to enjoy just messing around :)
Second, what bird flu? Who has been affected? People who have very close contact with infected birds.
I understand your skepticism. Scaremongers (i.e. most media) won't bother going in to detail about exactly why bird flu is a threat, which leads to your reaction above. Bird flu as it stands isn't really scary unless you spend all your time with birds, as you say. The scary bit is the nature of influenza.
Imagine that a strain of influenza is made up from a dozen or so assorted lego blocks. H5N1 has the 'kills humans real good' block in it. More common influenzas have the 'spreads from human to human' block (side note: there are a bunch more strains of influenza that can't spread to humans at all, they're purely avian). When a host gets infected by more than one strain of influenza, the two strains can swap blocks with each other (called reassortment, iirc). Imagine that all the lego blocks get broken down and put in a bag, then a new influenza is made out of some of the pieces. If the new strain has 'kills humans real good' and 'spreads from human to human' we're really fucked.
I was working in the health sector when H5N1 was just starting up, and I sat in on some discussions between honest-to-god local doctors who were trying to figure out what to do if an H5N1 variant takes off. It's a really bad position, because local doctors need a way to sort H5N1 cases from the common cold, without any more equipment than is in an average doctor's surgery. These guys have no infectious disease protection, and most have families they want to go home to. Would you want to swab someone's mouth to find out if they had bird flu?
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Working from home is perfectly sensible in case of an epidemic, although I'd be inclined to ditch work altogether ;) . One of the first things to do is close all the schools so kids don't share their germs around. Non-essential businesses are the next to go.
Nitpick: hydrogen isn't a fuel source, it's a battery (until we start harvesting it directly from Jupiter's atmosphere that is). You use it to store the energy you get from wind/solar/nuclear.
Heh. I wish it were so, but the invisible hand of the market tends to focus on 'cheaply' unless you regulate the f*** out of the market - at which point the government might as well just do the business itself.
While I agree with your sentiment, a terrorist is actually more interested in having people scared shitless than outright murder. The premise of terrorism is that you can't directly kill enough people to make a difference, but you can kill enough people to scare all the ones you couldn't get to directly.
I'm getting a bit OT here, but this discussion has made me think of what ripe opportunities there are for terrorists now. Given the current political climate in America you could run a very effective terrorist cell without committing any crimes. Leave packed backpacks in public places. Walk around looking foreign and shifty during rush hour. Put das blinkenlights under bridges. Watch as the local government overreacts and provides free publicity reminding all their citizens of the bad men who want to murder them in their sleep.
Raiders from WoW then? Or maybe not, they won't touch anything with a 5-man limit.
Or, we could just bundle about 1200 kilos of pot along with the Mars astronauts
Dude! Now that's pushing the frontiers of hotboxing.
I wouldn't defend this point myself, but the idea is that the war is very expensive for Americans in general, but hugely profitable for Bush's buddies at Haliburton. It's the largest pork barrel project ever.
This may be a noob question:
How does one block bittorrent? Do you block the default port, or look for some kind of TCP header? Couldn't a motivated user disguise their traffic?
So? I won't argue with that, and I never said it wasn't. Are you saying that Zelda isn't also action-adventure?
What's that meant to mean? Zelda has more story and more difficult puzzles than PoP, but they're more like each other than either is like Monkey Island.
Zelda is almost an adventure game - action-adventure would be most appropriate. Deus Ex could be counted if you don't mind FPS game play in with your adventure. Oblivion has a weak story and no puzzles.
Adventure games from the 'golden age' of LucasArts and Sierra had a similar presentation style to each other, but the significant point is that they also shared the same gameplay style. That gameplay is what is missing from modern games, and nobody knows exactly why.
'Adventure games' has a meaning more specific than just "a game in which you have an adventure". Look up "adventure games" on Wikipedia. 'Adventure games' are heavily story based, rarely have arcade-style game play and have non-trivial puzzles. Fetch quests in Oblivion don't count.
Well, there's also the danger of strictly true but misleading statements. Should deliberately misleading statements be protected?
For example, the statement you reference was actually "13 percent of illegal immigrants detained in Arizona...". What percentage of illegal immigrants are detained? Presumably to be detained an illegal immigrant must be doing something more suspicious than "Driving While Mexican" and so they would be more likely to have a criminal record than an honest, hard working illegal immigrant house cleaner. What percentage of non-immigrant detainees have criminal records? I could believe 13%.
The database would not be a problem in a hypothetical world where it could never be abused, and would probably not be a problem in the near future even in the real world.
The biggest problem is that such data, once collected, never goes away. You don't just need to trust the currently elected government, you need to trust the next government, and the next one, and the one after that who declares martial law after terrorists detonate a dirty bomb in a big city.
And you need to trust the operators of the database, since even if the data is perfect the operators can mis-report for their own ends - which is even worse if the database is reliable. The Oracle Has Spoken.
One last thing - Democracy is about not trusting elected officials. If we really trusted them we wouldn't need elections to replace them!