I'm tired of Sid Meier's civilization, I want to play Jared Diamond's civilization
It would be great fun briefly to see it play out, but it wouldn't be a great game. The Eurasians got a bigger continent with a large band of temperate farmland, consequently better crops, animals and resistance to worse diseases. How would you create a game using JD's principles so that the native americans could win the encounter with europe?
From gut feeling I would expect 30:20 to be much preferable to 3:2. It depends on how the combat system is implemented of course, but if I am told that my odds are 30:20 I interpret that as telling me something about the granularity of the combat system.
I would expect a confrontation (especially in modern civ, with hit points rather than win/lose) to bea series of rounds. I would expect losing one round of 30:20 to cause the loss of some portion of strength, perhaps 3 points, and trigger another round at the new rate of 27:20 - still highly in my favour. Losing at 3:2 sounds much more likely to reduce the odds to 2:2 for the next round, which is merely even!
In the system I imagine, battles with high values (30:20) will be much more likely to have the odds-on victor because losing one round merely triggers another round with slightly reduced positive odds. A low value battle (3:2) could be lost by one unlucky roll (now 2:2), a slightly unlucky roll (1:2) and then not being very lucky (0:2, dead)
The solution is to make the player aware of how combat is calculated so they know what 30:20 actually means. Modern (mostly German for some reason) board games like Settlers of Catan are very good for this; because the game rules must be implemented by the players during the game they must be perfectly clear.
I had big trouble with unclear game mechanics in Diablo II and World of Warcraft. I tend to play defensive characters and in D2 the blocking ability of shields is barely specified. The item will have a property like [Chance to block: 40%], but what that actually means is anyone's guess. Blocking presumably negates one attack. Is it melee only, or can you block projectiles and spells? Is blocking instantaneous or does it carry an interrupt like being hit does? Is it a bigger or smaller interrupt than being hit? If I get 50% increased chance to block, is my chance now 90% or 60%? The formula for blocking is also based on DEX apparently, but there's no clue as to precisely how. See (a href='http://strategy.diabloii.net/news.php?id=551#Chance to Block'>here for someone's attempt to calculate it. And, after all that uncertainty I'm meant to figure out whether carrying a shield is better than using a two handed weapon which does 1.4x as much damage as my 1-hander? One solution is to trust that the game devs have balanced the items properly and just assume that a high level shield is better than a mid level one regardless of what the stats hint at.
In WoW I played a defense warrior; massive armour, blocking and dodging ability. Mosly solo since I was in an odd time zone and it was hard to find regular players. I discovered after an embarrassingly long time that defense warriors just aren't meant to solo; it's a multiplayer game and their skills are (were? I don't play any more) balanced so they can hold a lot of damage while someone else does the killing. Even though I had some of the best gear available for my level and had built a sensible ability set my character was ineffective solo and I couldn't observe this from looking at my abilities or item stats because the combat mechanics weren't clearly specified.
Usually we are interested in the surface temperature of a planet but if consider different levels in the atmosphere there is a large temperature range. The surface temperature of venus is [lots], the temperature of this exoplanet somewhere - but probably not at the surface since that is poorly defined for gas giants - is [bigger lots]. However, if you move up through the atmosphere of any planet it gets colder, so as there is a temperate atmospheric range somewhere above the surface of venus there also should be a temperate range somewhere in the atmosphere of this gas giant.
Entering text with mouse gestures is a simple matter of gesturing the bits of the unicode character you want... yeah, obviously not entering text with the mouse. I don't do that often in casual browsing though so I don't mind 'switching modes' to comment on slashdot or google for something new, rather than just following links/bookmarks.
I only mean to say that there is a useful niche for mouse gestures in between GUI icon land and keyboard shortcuts, even if you can use keyboard shortcuts - as I do on this laptop because the trackpad sucks.
I'm not trying to be divisive here, but is it really that bad without adblock plus? I use opera pretty much exclusively because I'm more familiar with it even though I have firefox installed too, with adblock plus. Opera's adblocking lets you block wildcarded URLs, so whenever you block an ad it's easy to block the entire domain, and the internet I use just isn't serviced by very many distinct ad vendors. Perhaps you have a different usage pattern from me.
As a side note, I quite like seeing ads briefly before I block them, it tells me what the site policy is on ad placement and obnoxiousness, that there's an unfamiliar ad vendor serving to the site, gives me a brief sample of how crap their ads are and then I can block them to hell if I want. I guess it's like the American thing of not showing tax on the sticker price in stores so you (theoretically) get angry about being taxed every time you buy something.
You've sure got a lot of hate for the mouse gestures there!
For one thing, they're not slower than keyboard shortcuts if I'm already using the mouse because it can control the entire browser session (with one hand!).
They may be less intuitive than GUI buttons but so are keyboard shortcuts and an UI designer will tell you about the difference between quick to learn and quick to use (for an experienced user).
And finally, Opera has had mouse gestures since way back so I think they should be excused for duplicating functionality that the OS is just catching up with. I dearly wish I could use gestures in windows to manipulate explorer windows the way I do tabs. I think it's great if OSX has gestures now too, and could you recommend a gestures package for Ubuntu? Honest question, I don't know that much about linux and I'd rather not try half a dozen gesture packages myself.
Please disregard my recent, unnecessarily combative post. Bad week, itchy trigger finger on the flamethrower. It seems there is indeed recently published evidence for interbreeding between neanderthals and cro magnons.
Do you have a source for that? My last information was that neanderthals were plain outcompeted and there was no evidence for interbreeding. If you know of a popular science book or a journal article that outlines the theory I'd be interested, but it has the sound of a Discovery Channel "Some scientists think that... [hot caveman sex]" snippet.
the media has made lots of fusses about claims that they were a different species. But the actual scientific evidence is very weak. It's mostly based on mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA), which is a tiny part of the genome and only inherited via the maternal line. If you understand much about genetics, you won't find this very convincing.
Mitochondrial DNA isn't really part of our genome, it's the mitochondria's genome. Yes, it traces the maternal line because the mitochondria come via the egg cell. You propose that the neanderthal population diverged sufficiently to have distinctly different mitochondrial DNA but retained the ability to interbreed with cro magnons but did so only with willing cro magnon mothers, and bands of cro magnon men never would have overpowered neanderthals, killed all the men and raped the women like humans have been doing to each other throughout history? And your post is meant to be convincing if I understand much about genetics?
I sincerely doubt you have any qualifications in biology, or reputable sources for your post. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
I've been half-watching the news in England, and earlier on tonight there was a collection of EU diplomats quoted who could all be paraphrased as "Thank fuck for that, maybe now we can work with America again". I gather that a large number of countries are willing to consider that maybe the 'good old America' is back again, and as long as Obama plays along with that I think the future of America's international relations is very rosy.
I know! And the other day I was minding my own business, talking to this sweet honey in a bar when her husband punched me right in the face! Don't blame me, I'm the victim!
Trolling aside, if somebody attacks you it's worth knowing why they did it no matter if their reasons are good or bad. What you do once you have that knowledge is another matter.
we accept that it is possible for something to either (be created from nothing) or (exist infinitely), yet we ridicule anybody who suggests either of these concepts can be applied a conscious being.
Claiming that God has existed forever is not inherently more stupid than claiming that matter has existed forever, apart from the difference that matter obviously exists now, and God does not obviously (unless you're a believer) exist now. If you accept that God exists now, the statements are logically equivalent - so really it's a proxy argument for 'does God exist?'
My problem is, evolutionary scientists seem quite certain the Creationists are wrong...
Oh nuts, it always comes down to evolution v. creationism these days. First I'd like to make it clear that the whole evolution v. creationism thing only applies to young earth creationism - evolution doesn't clash particularly with any other Christian creation theories because it's entirely believable as the method of God's creation if you're inclined to look at it that way - as, for instance, the Vatican does.
and lump all religious faiths in with Creationists.
Yeah, well that's a mistake on their part. Unfortunately it's all very polictical and complicated, and the internet just makes it worse. Actual evolutionary scientists tend to have better things to do (such as science!) than flame people on the internet but there are plenty of armchair evolutionists (I guess that would be me) who like to heckle creationists (not me), and creationists who like to heckle evolutionary scientists, and the internet makes it easy to find a target even though the group you want to bother is very small. I've never met in real life either an evolutionary scientist or a young earth creationist even though they're all over the internet if you want to look for them.
1. Neither theory has been proven, so neither theory is more valid than the other.
Err. I'm not eager to address this because I'm going to have to say some things that come up in flame wars between stupid people arguing about stupid things. I assure you, I'm not trying to push an agenda here other than a friendly and relatively impartial examination of the issue. I make this disclaimer because...
Evolution is proven, in any scientific sense of the word. Creationism is not even a scientific theory, it's a statement without support. This is what drives the science guys like Richard Dawkins absolutely nuts - creationism and evolution aren't even remotely equal theories even before the evidence is examined. I could spend all day talking about how creationism does not meet the criteria for a scientific theory, has no predictive power (and hence no utility), and is by definition unfalsifiable. I don't really want to go into that - it's long and the internet is full of it already. I could go into it at great length, and I will if you ask. There are probably two points that I should make. The first is that evolution is real and useful and not teaching it in science classes would be madness.
Consider antibiotics. When you have an infection, you can take a course of antibiotics to kill whatever is infecting you and make you well again. You have probably heard of the problem of antibiotic-resistant infections, bacteria that have a resistance to one or more of the common antibiotics. This is a big problem in hospitals, because if you get an outbreak of an antibiotic resistant infection in the hospital it can easily spread to other patients with weakened immune systems who are in the hospital for some unrelated reason, and because the infection resists the usual antibiotics there is a risk of the patient dieing from a normally easily curable infection.
You probably also know that if you only take part of a course of antibiotics there is an opportunity for antibiotic resistance to develop. How this happens is that the antibiotics you take kill all the least resistant bacteria first so if you stop before they're all gone the
Yes, yes. Your search and replace madlib is very clever, but that doesn't make it correct. Electronic voting machines have problems that pen and paper ballots don't. The major one is that with paper ballots they can remain in the public eye from the moment they are cast until the moment they are counted. That makes them immensely harder to falsify than some bits in a computer which may have been compromised at any time and cannot be inspected by a layman.
It's a colour association thing designers use. Blue is authority and trustworthiness - policemen, banks, lawyers. Red and yellow are tasty food - McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, probably any other chain food outlets in your locality. Green is healthy and natural - Subway, organic shops, BP wishes they were.
Corporate OSes want to position themselves with business and authority, so blue and grey is the style.
I don't know if there's any standard association with brown. It seems fine to me as long as it's a good mix of browns and golds with some decent graphic design and not ugly wood veneer or dirt.
Sounds like one of the more decent ways of doing it. My concern would be the storage of the votes between when they were cast and when they were tallied. Do you know anything about how that is done?
The holy grail of election rigging is to SECRETLY alter the vote. It's very very hard with paper ballots and very very easy with electronic ballots. Pen and paper voting equipment is easy to verify at the start of the day, and can be kept in public view all the way through voting and vote counting. Electronic voting machines are very hard to verify, requiring time and experts, and would have to be kept in public view for the entire period between verification and voting.
With paper ballots you don't have to trust anyone barring a grand conspiracy between the vote counters and the observers from all the parties and the public at some voting location.
If someone wants to tamper with paper ballots there are countless ways of doing it, especially for counters. You can stuff the ballot box, you can spoil ballots, you can replace paper votes.
How would you suggest doing that secretly in the middle of a school hall full of observers where the votes are being counted?
Granted, as a foreigner I'm prone to forgetting how lengthy some of the American ballots are. I hear California is especially bad. But with all respect, if you're compromising the election of your national government because you have to vote for the town dogcatcher and proposition 514 to reduce the speed limit through Hill Valley then maybe you should rethink your ballot system.
Sure, paper ballot voting can be defrauded, but it's very very hard to throw an election silently. There are abundant examples of paper ballot elections that aren't democratically sound, but the great thing is that there are little hints like the police checkpoints where the trucks carrying votes are 'examined' or the armed guards watching the vote counters that tell you you're not in a democracy any more. The big scary potential of electronic voting is that it can be rigged by a tiny number of people and still present the illusion that it was a fair election.
I just jumped across from your post in the Spore thread. I can make a decent stab at answering this. For the record, I count myself as a ferociously moderate atheist whose ancestors progressed so far through liberal Christianity that they fell off the end into secular humanism (or something, who cares about labels anyway?)
But what I don't understand is how a scientist will reconcile the concept (matter cannot be created or destroyed) with the concept (matter exists).
So your problem is with the statements 'matter can neither be created nor destroyed' and 'matter was created once'. They are contradictory, and, briefly, the first statement is wrong. Or maybe the second one is. It's complicated. But you're right, if somebody claims both things at once they're wrong and stupid.
'Matter cannot be created or destroyed' is just a statement based on observation of the universe. Perhaps in the future we will discover an astounding new technique to create or destroy matter at which point science will happily throw away the laws of thermodynamics as old hat. As an aside, don't be misled by the 'laws' of thermodynamics. They're just another theory that their originator had the hubris to call 'laws'. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say 'matter is never created or destroyed in situations we have created or observed'.
'Matter was created once' can be inferred because obviously there is matter now and it must have come from somewhere. Or maybe matter/energy (because they are just different states of the same thing) has always existed. What is matter anyway? What is existing? What is our universe, and can anything exist outside it?
Any particular scientist might reconcile the two statements by picking some combination of those possibilities, but the general answer from science is that we don't know how matter happened and any evidence would be appreciated.
They ask "where does God come from?" but do not explain where matter comes from.
As a bit of background, 'Where did God come from' is the science reply in a first year philosphy argument. Religion says 'If science is so great, how do you explain the origin of the universe. If God didn't create it, where could it have come from?' Science replies 'If you think God created the universe what do you think created God? And if you think God is eternal, just Is, or needs no explaination, why couldn't you assume the same for the universe without God?'. It's no big deal for science that it can't explain the origin of matter at the moment, but if you claim that religion can explain the origin of matter you'd better have some evidence. Science and religion are not making equal claims - science says 'I don't know', no evidence required; religion says 'this is how it is', but where's the evidence?
The flipside is to say matter was always here but they get mad if you say God was always here.
I think I already covered the gist of that, but just to make sure: Science says matter is here now, and we'd like to know where it came from. 'God did it' isn't a scientific answer because 1) there may be no God and 2) we have no evidence He did it. Somebody who gets mad if you say 'God was always here' probably doesn't understand the argument they're trying to make and is just repeating (badly) what they heard somewhere else.
Science (science in abstract; individual scientists are just people and may be idiots) treats God the same way it treats unicorns - you can't prove that unicorns don't exist, we may simply not have found any yet. Whether unicorns exist or not doesn't really matter for science because they don't explain gravity or hydrogen bonds or the pheromone signals used by ant colonies. However, if you want to say that unicorns or God do explain one of those things you'd better have some evidence thanks.
Then they say we just haven't figured it out yet and science will explain all of these things in time, but they get mad if you say we don't understand now but God will reveal Himself in time.
For instance most Abrahamic religions have within their core doctrine that the earth was created 6000 years ago, which may have sounded believable 2000 years ago, but which by today's standards is truly arcane.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that's thoroughly wrong. The 6000 year old earth, or young earth creationism more broadly, is a fringe belief within Christianity. Catholics, for instance, won't have anything to do with it. The 6000 years number came from a Christian theologian a couple of hundred years ago (too lazy to get a reference, even from google. It's been a long day) who added up the generations listed in the bible since Adam and Eve. It relies on the bible being literally true, which is itself a fringe belief most prominent in American evangelical Christians and it's a ripe target for anyone who wants to ridicule weirdo religious beliefs (which I'm not accusing you of btw) so it's a belief that gets a lot of press. I would be extremely surprised if there is anyone (trolls aside) reading slashdot who seriously believes that the Earth is 6000 years old because the bible says so.
I have no idea what Jews or Muslims think about it, probably not much since they have their own religious scholars and don't need to borrow from Christianity.
I don't mean to make any remark about the rest of your post, I just wanted to correct the point.
There's actually quite a simple solution to the "rich get richer" problem, but I've rarely seen it implemented: give rewards to players who voluntarily handicap themselves. In WoW terms, consider PVP where you could get increased rewards by restricting yourself to green gear. Maybe give out rewards of crafting materials, honour or something other than new gear since giving a reward of something you deliberately don't use is a bit perverse. Good players could gimp themselves as low as they like in exchange for better loot (and better bragging rights), which would naturally encourage competition that was actually challenging rather than merely n00b farming.
The recent DS game "The World Ends With You" used a system like that, where you could voluntarily lower your character level to increase the loot drop rate. (btw, the game has quite a few interesting game mechanics, but I wouldn't recommend it if you're just looking for a Square RPG to mash away at) The board game Go is similar too; strong players give an advantage to weak players by letting them place a number of stones at the start of the game. The game can then be challenging for both players, but if the weaker player wins they have only proved that they're not as crap as the stronger player thought.
Wikipedia 'Chinese Room'. 1980(!) wants its philosophy back.
OK, I don't actually mean to be so smarmy - it's a good point and well raised, but there aren't any posts here that haven't already been argued to death by philosophers years ago. Turing tests are a curiosity and are good for generating publicity about AI, but not much else. There's not much profit in fretting over whether AI is 'really intelligent', whatever that means, or just some clever tricks. The clever tricks are what is interesting!
Slashdot Mirror
It would be great fun briefly to see it play out, but it wouldn't be a great game. The Eurasians got a bigger continent with a large band of temperate farmland, consequently better crops, animals and resistance to worse diseases. How would you create a game using JD's principles so that the native americans could win the encounter with europe?
From gut feeling I would expect 30:20 to be much preferable to 3:2. It depends on how the combat system is implemented of course, but if I am told that my odds are 30:20 I interpret that as telling me something about the granularity of the combat system.
I would expect a confrontation (especially in modern civ, with hit points rather than win/lose) to bea series of rounds. I would expect losing one round of 30:20 to cause the loss of some portion of strength, perhaps 3 points, and trigger another round at the new rate of 27:20 - still highly in my favour. Losing at 3:2 sounds much more likely to reduce the odds to 2:2 for the next round, which is merely even!
In the system I imagine, battles with high values (30:20) will be much more likely to have the odds-on victor because losing one round merely triggers another round with slightly reduced positive odds. A low value battle (3:2) could be lost by one unlucky roll (now 2:2), a slightly unlucky roll (1:2) and then not being very lucky (0:2, dead)
The solution is to make the player aware of how combat is calculated so they know what 30:20 actually means. Modern (mostly German for some reason) board games like Settlers of Catan are very good for this; because the game rules must be implemented by the players during the game they must be perfectly clear.
I had big trouble with unclear game mechanics in Diablo II and World of Warcraft. I tend to play defensive characters and in D2 the blocking ability of shields is barely specified. The item will have a property like [Chance to block: 40%], but what that actually means is anyone's guess. Blocking presumably negates one attack. Is it melee only, or can you block projectiles and spells? Is blocking instantaneous or does it carry an interrupt like being hit does? Is it a bigger or smaller interrupt than being hit? If I get 50% increased chance to block, is my chance now 90% or 60%? The formula for blocking is also based on DEX apparently, but there's no clue as to precisely how. See (a href='http://strategy.diabloii.net/news.php?id=551#Chance to Block'>here for someone's attempt to calculate it. And, after all that uncertainty I'm meant to figure out whether carrying a shield is better than using a two handed weapon which does 1.4x as much damage as my 1-hander? One solution is to trust that the game devs have balanced the items properly and just assume that a high level shield is better than a mid level one regardless of what the stats hint at.
In WoW I played a defense warrior; massive armour, blocking and dodging ability. Mosly solo since I was in an odd time zone and it was hard to find regular players. I discovered after an embarrassingly long time that defense warriors just aren't meant to solo; it's a multiplayer game and their skills are (were? I don't play any more) balanced so they can hold a lot of damage while someone else does the killing. Even though I had some of the best gear available for my level and had built a sensible ability set my character was ineffective solo and I couldn't observe this from looking at my abilities or item stats because the combat mechanics weren't clearly specified.
Usually we are interested in the surface temperature of a planet but if consider different levels in the atmosphere there is a large temperature range. The surface temperature of venus is [lots], the temperature of this exoplanet somewhere - but probably not at the surface since that is poorly defined for gas giants - is [bigger lots]. However, if you move up through the atmosphere of any planet it gets colder, so as there is a temperate atmospheric range somewhere above the surface of venus there also should be a temperate range somewhere in the atmosphere of this gas giant.
Think of the two planets as cars if that helps.
Entering text with mouse gestures is a simple matter of gesturing the bits of the unicode character you want... yeah, obviously not entering text with the mouse. I don't do that often in casual browsing though so I don't mind 'switching modes' to comment on slashdot or google for something new, rather than just following links/bookmarks.
I only mean to say that there is a useful niche for mouse gestures in between GUI icon land and keyboard shortcuts, even if you can use keyboard shortcuts - as I do on this laptop because the trackpad sucks.
I'm not trying to be divisive here, but is it really that bad without adblock plus? I use opera pretty much exclusively because I'm more familiar with it even though I have firefox installed too, with adblock plus. Opera's adblocking lets you block wildcarded URLs, so whenever you block an ad it's easy to block the entire domain, and the internet I use just isn't serviced by very many distinct ad vendors. Perhaps you have a different usage pattern from me.
As a side note, I quite like seeing ads briefly before I block them, it tells me what the site policy is on ad placement and obnoxiousness, that there's an unfamiliar ad vendor serving to the site, gives me a brief sample of how crap their ads are and then I can block them to hell if I want. I guess it's like the American thing of not showing tax on the sticker price in stores so you (theoretically) get angry about being taxed every time you buy something.
You've sure got a lot of hate for the mouse gestures there!
For one thing, they're not slower than keyboard shortcuts if I'm already using the mouse because it can control the entire browser session (with one hand!).
They may be less intuitive than GUI buttons but so are keyboard shortcuts and an UI designer will tell you about the difference between quick to learn and quick to use (for an experienced user).
And finally, Opera has had mouse gestures since way back so I think they should be excused for duplicating functionality that the OS is just catching up with. I dearly wish I could use gestures in windows to manipulate explorer windows the way I do tabs. I think it's great if OSX has gestures now too, and could you recommend a gestures package for Ubuntu? Honest question, I don't know that much about linux and I'd rather not try half a dozen gesture packages myself.
Please disregard my recent, unnecessarily combative post. Bad week, itchy trigger finger on the flamethrower. It seems there is indeed recently published evidence for interbreeding between neanderthals and cro magnons.
Do you have a source for that? My last information was that neanderthals were plain outcompeted and there was no evidence for interbreeding. If you know of a popular science book or a journal article that outlines the theory I'd be interested, but it has the sound of a Discovery Channel "Some scientists think that... [hot caveman sex]" snippet.
Mitochondrial DNA isn't really part of our genome, it's the mitochondria's genome. Yes, it traces the maternal line because the mitochondria come via the egg cell. You propose that the neanderthal population diverged sufficiently to have distinctly different mitochondrial DNA but retained the ability to interbreed with cro magnons but did so only with willing cro magnon mothers, and bands of cro magnon men never would have overpowered neanderthals, killed all the men and raped the women like humans have been doing to each other throughout history? And your post is meant to be convincing if I understand much about genetics?
I sincerely doubt you have any qualifications in biology, or reputable sources for your post. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
I've been half-watching the news in England, and earlier on tonight there was a collection of EU diplomats quoted who could all be paraphrased as "Thank fuck for that, maybe now we can work with America again". I gather that a large number of countries are willing to consider that maybe the 'good old America' is back again, and as long as Obama plays along with that I think the future of America's international relations is very rosy.
I know! And the other day I was minding my own business, talking to this sweet honey in a bar when her husband punched me right in the face! Don't blame me, I'm the victim!
Trolling aside, if somebody attacks you it's worth knowing why they did it no matter if their reasons are good or bad. What you do once you have that knowledge is another matter.
we accept that it is possible for something to either (be created from nothing) or (exist infinitely), yet we ridicule anybody who suggests either of these concepts can be applied a conscious being.
Claiming that God has existed forever is not inherently more stupid than claiming that matter has existed forever, apart from the difference that matter obviously exists now, and God does not obviously (unless you're a believer) exist now. If you accept that God exists now, the statements are logically equivalent - so really it's a proxy argument for 'does God exist?'
My problem is, evolutionary scientists seem quite certain the Creationists are wrong...
Oh nuts, it always comes down to evolution v. creationism these days. First I'd like to make it clear that the whole evolution v. creationism thing only applies to young earth creationism - evolution doesn't clash particularly with any other Christian creation theories because it's entirely believable as the method of God's creation if you're inclined to look at it that way - as, for instance, the Vatican does.
and lump all religious faiths in with Creationists.
Yeah, well that's a mistake on their part. Unfortunately it's all very polictical and complicated, and the internet just makes it worse. Actual evolutionary scientists tend to have better things to do (such as science!) than flame people on the internet but there are plenty of armchair evolutionists (I guess that would be me) who like to heckle creationists (not me), and creationists who like to heckle evolutionary scientists, and the internet makes it easy to find a target even though the group you want to bother is very small. I've never met in real life either an evolutionary scientist or a young earth creationist even though they're all over the internet if you want to look for them.
1. Neither theory has been proven, so neither theory is more valid than the other.
Err. I'm not eager to address this because I'm going to have to say some things that come up in flame wars between stupid people arguing about stupid things. I assure you, I'm not trying to push an agenda here other than a friendly and relatively impartial examination of the issue. I make this disclaimer because...
Evolution is proven, in any scientific sense of the word. Creationism is not even a scientific theory, it's a statement without support. This is what drives the science guys like Richard Dawkins absolutely nuts - creationism and evolution aren't even remotely equal theories even before the evidence is examined. I could spend all day talking about how creationism does not meet the criteria for a scientific theory, has no predictive power (and hence no utility), and is by definition unfalsifiable. I don't really want to go into that - it's long and the internet is full of it already. I could go into it at great length, and I will if you ask. There are probably two points that I should make. The first is that evolution is real and useful and not teaching it in science classes would be madness.
Consider antibiotics. When you have an infection, you can take a course of antibiotics to kill whatever is infecting you and make you well again. You have probably heard of the problem of antibiotic-resistant infections, bacteria that have a resistance to one or more of the common antibiotics. This is a big problem in hospitals, because if you get an outbreak of an antibiotic resistant infection in the hospital it can easily spread to other patients with weakened immune systems who are in the hospital for some unrelated reason, and because the infection resists the usual antibiotics there is a risk of the patient dieing from a normally easily curable infection.
You probably also know that if you only take part of a course of antibiotics there is an opportunity for antibiotic resistance to develop. How this happens is that the antibiotics you take kill all the least resistant bacteria first so if you stop before they're all gone the
We don't learn, do we. We just apply technology so we can make mistakes faster.
I propose replacing these ineffective voting computers with tequila and handguns!
Yes, yes. Your search and replace madlib is very clever, but that doesn't make it correct. Electronic voting machines have problems that pen and paper ballots don't. The major one is that with paper ballots they can remain in the public eye from the moment they are cast until the moment they are counted. That makes them immensely harder to falsify than some bits in a computer which may have been compromised at any time and cannot be inspected by a layman.
It's a colour association thing designers use. Blue is authority and trustworthiness - policemen, banks, lawyers. Red and yellow are tasty food - McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, probably any other chain food outlets in your locality. Green is healthy and natural - Subway, organic shops, BP wishes they were.
Corporate OSes want to position themselves with business and authority, so blue and grey is the style.
I don't know if there's any standard association with brown. It seems fine to me as long as it's a good mix of browns and golds with some decent graphic design and not ugly wood veneer or dirt.
Sounds like one of the more decent ways of doing it. My concern would be the storage of the votes between when they were cast and when they were tallied. Do you know anything about how that is done?
The holy grail of election rigging is to SECRETLY alter the vote. It's very very hard with paper ballots and very very easy with electronic ballots. Pen and paper voting equipment is easy to verify at the start of the day, and can be kept in public view all the way through voting and vote counting. Electronic voting machines are very hard to verify, requiring time and experts, and would have to be kept in public view for the entire period between verification and voting.
With paper ballots you don't have to trust anyone barring a grand conspiracy between the vote counters and the observers from all the parties and the public at some voting location.
If someone wants to tamper with paper ballots there are countless ways of doing it, especially for counters. You can stuff the ballot box, you can spoil ballots, you can replace paper votes.
How would you suggest doing that secretly in the middle of a school hall full of observers where the votes are being counted?
Granted, as a foreigner I'm prone to forgetting how lengthy some of the American ballots are. I hear California is especially bad. But with all respect, if you're compromising the election of your national government because you have to vote for the town dogcatcher and proposition 514 to reduce the speed limit through Hill Valley then maybe you should rethink your ballot system.
Sure, paper ballot voting can be defrauded, but it's very very hard to throw an election silently. There are abundant examples of paper ballot elections that aren't democratically sound, but the great thing is that there are little hints like the police checkpoints where the trucks carrying votes are 'examined' or the armed guards watching the vote counters that tell you you're not in a democracy any more. The big scary potential of electronic voting is that it can be rigged by a tiny number of people and still present the illusion that it was a fair election.
I just jumped across from your post in the Spore thread. I can make a decent stab at answering this. For the record, I count myself as a ferociously moderate atheist whose ancestors progressed so far through liberal Christianity that they fell off the end into secular humanism (or something, who cares about labels anyway?)
But what I don't understand is how a scientist will reconcile the concept (matter cannot be created or destroyed) with the concept (matter exists).
So your problem is with the statements 'matter can neither be created nor destroyed' and 'matter was created once'. They are contradictory, and, briefly, the first statement is wrong. Or maybe the second one is. It's complicated. But you're right, if somebody claims both things at once they're wrong and stupid.
'Matter cannot be created or destroyed' is just a statement based on observation of the universe. Perhaps in the future we will discover an astounding new technique to create or destroy matter at which point science will happily throw away the laws of thermodynamics as old hat. As an aside, don't be misled by the 'laws' of thermodynamics. They're just another theory that their originator had the hubris to call 'laws'. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say 'matter is never created or destroyed in situations we have created or observed'.
'Matter was created once' can be inferred because obviously there is matter now and it must have come from somewhere. Or maybe matter/energy (because they are just different states of the same thing) has always existed. What is matter anyway? What is existing? What is our universe, and can anything exist outside it?
Any particular scientist might reconcile the two statements by picking some combination of those possibilities, but the general answer from science is that we don't know how matter happened and any evidence would be appreciated.
They ask "where does God come from?" but do not explain where matter comes from.
As a bit of background, 'Where did God come from' is the science reply in a first year philosphy argument. Religion says 'If science is so great, how do you explain the origin of the universe. If God didn't create it, where could it have come from?' Science replies 'If you think God created the universe what do you think created God? And if you think God is eternal, just Is, or needs no explaination, why couldn't you assume the same for the universe without God?'. It's no big deal for science that it can't explain the origin of matter at the moment, but if you claim that religion can explain the origin of matter you'd better have some evidence. Science and religion are not making equal claims - science says 'I don't know', no evidence required; religion says 'this is how it is', but where's the evidence?
The flipside is to say matter was always here but they get mad if you say God was always here.
I think I already covered the gist of that, but just to make sure: Science says matter is here now, and we'd like to know where it came from. 'God did it' isn't a scientific answer because 1) there may be no God and 2) we have no evidence He did it. Somebody who gets mad if you say 'God was always here' probably doesn't understand the argument they're trying to make and is just repeating (badly) what they heard somewhere else.
Science (science in abstract; individual scientists are just people and may be idiots) treats God the same way it treats unicorns - you can't prove that unicorns don't exist, we may simply not have found any yet. Whether unicorns exist or not doesn't really matter for science because they don't explain gravity or hydrogen bonds or the pheromone signals used by ant colonies. However, if you want to say that unicorns or God do explain one of those things you'd better have some evidence thanks.
Then they say we just haven't figured it out yet and science will explain all of these things in time, but they get mad if you say we don't understand now but God will reveal Himself in time.
For instance most Abrahamic religions have within their core doctrine that the earth was created 6000 years ago, which may have sounded believable 2000 years ago, but which by today's standards is truly arcane.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that's thoroughly wrong. The 6000 year old earth, or young earth creationism more broadly, is a fringe belief within Christianity. Catholics, for instance, won't have anything to do with it. The 6000 years number came from a Christian theologian a couple of hundred years ago (too lazy to get a reference, even from google. It's been a long day) who added up the generations listed in the bible since Adam and Eve. It relies on the bible being literally true, which is itself a fringe belief most prominent in American evangelical Christians and it's a ripe target for anyone who wants to ridicule weirdo religious beliefs (which I'm not accusing you of btw) so it's a belief that gets a lot of press. I would be extremely surprised if there is anyone (trolls aside) reading slashdot who seriously believes that the Earth is 6000 years old because the bible says so.
I have no idea what Jews or Muslims think about it, probably not much since they have their own religious scholars and don't need to borrow from Christianity.
I don't mean to make any remark about the rest of your post, I just wanted to correct the point.
There's actually quite a simple solution to the "rich get richer" problem, but I've rarely seen it implemented: give rewards to players who voluntarily handicap themselves. In WoW terms, consider PVP where you could get increased rewards by restricting yourself to green gear. Maybe give out rewards of crafting materials, honour or something other than new gear since giving a reward of something you deliberately don't use is a bit perverse. Good players could gimp themselves as low as they like in exchange for better loot (and better bragging rights), which would naturally encourage competition that was actually challenging rather than merely n00b farming.
The recent DS game "The World Ends With You" used a system like that, where you could voluntarily lower your character level to increase the loot drop rate. (btw, the game has quite a few interesting game mechanics, but I wouldn't recommend it if you're just looking for a Square RPG to mash away at) The board game Go is similar too; strong players give an advantage to weak players by letting them place a number of stones at the start of the game. The game can then be challenging for both players, but if the weaker player wins they have only proved that they're not as crap as the stronger player thought.
I wandered into a furmentation area in Second Life once; never again!
Truly, Slashdot is powered by your submissions!
Wikipedia 'Chinese Room'. 1980(!) wants its philosophy back.
OK, I don't actually mean to be so smarmy - it's a good point and well raised, but there aren't any posts here that haven't already been argued to death by philosophers years ago. Turing tests are a curiosity and are good for generating publicity about AI, but not much else. There's not much profit in fretting over whether AI is 'really intelligent', whatever that means, or just some clever tricks. The clever tricks are what is interesting!