Aliens already figured it out. I saw this documentary where they activated this giant machine and that is how they made the Martian atmosphere breathable for humans. Why don't they just utilize that tech?
So, if space flight really is becoming something consumers can do, what is the extra cost of all of the high atmospheric pollution and space junk? How are we going to keep low orbit from becoming the riskiest dodgeball court around?
Actually they did stream from the disk. I think this is part of the issue. SSX3 had no zoning for almost the entire game. The only issue was when you entered the 'lodge' or jumped to another part of the mountain.
Roughly as expected, BlueGene/L can now crank away at 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), up from the 70.72 teraflops it was doing at the end of 2004. BlueGene/L now has half of its planned processors and is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.
Clinton in the U.S. and Blaire in the U.K. are generally considered moderate liberals.
Moderate being an important term in this statement. Both of these leaders are actually quite centrist in their views, but they both follow the 'third way' that was part of Labour's post-Thatcher rise. This basically means altering traditional Labour policies toward business and continuing privitization of government programmes. All of this anti-terror stuff is definately a notable detraction from his government's previous trajectory, but taken as a whole I feel it can be argued that his policies have been moderately Liberal.
I never said they were far Left, I said they were liberal in the true sense of the term. Libertarians (in general, diversity is the rule) agree with the Right on some things (e.g. tax policy) and with the Left on others (e.g. abortion policy).
The term 'liberal' used to describe Democrats and other Leftist parties is part of a rhetoric campaign by Republicans to focus public debate on social issues in order to win votes of what is commonly called the 'Southern Democrat'; people who desire both government assistance programs as well as greater government intervention in social policy. By calling themselves conservative they are referring to their policies on things such a abortion, flag burning, etc. which they can frame well enough to sway those voters.
My intent wasn't to imply that Libertarians were far Left by any means. The model I presented wasn't a line, it was a plane with four corners: Left, Liberal, Right, Statist. I hope this clarifies.
TOS agreements almost universally stipulate that they can be altered by the man at any time and it is your own responsibility to be aware of changes. You agreed once, you agree if the TOS says that anybody who uses the product must present his or her kidneys at request for black market sale.
Liberal in the international political sense are ideologies limiting government intervention in the activities of the governed. Clinton in the U.S. and Blaire in the U.K. are generally considered moderate liberals. Strong liberals have many different parties, but in the U.S. the largest strong liberal party is the Libertarian party.
Left refers to ideologies which reflect increased government intervention in economic matters generally with the goal of increased egalitarianism and decreased intervention in the social behaviors of the governed.
While communism is a leftist ideology, Soviet style communism was largely statist, conservative, or totalitarian in nature meaning ideologies supporting increased control of both economic and social matters.
The final major compass point in political ideology is Right. Right (the direction, not meaning correct) parties have ideologies favoring decreased government intervention in economic matters and increased intervention in social matters. These parties often focus around their reactionary policies to social change, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. Republican party is a party on the Right.
Was there any real reason that this feature should cause anxiety? Was it seriously rumored to be vaporware? Was there a lot of worry that it would suck?
Or, perhaps, you were eager for it to be released.
Perhaps, but I think there is a lot more going on here than simply selective memory.
Firstly, our first love sets the bar for what is acceptable and desireable. I for example am primarily a 16bit console kid. I love going back and playing the good games of the early ninties, but I can't stand going back and playing much comodore64 or intellivision because the graphics tend to get in the way for me. This tends to apply forward as well, graphics in current games often seem overdone and I think, where is the subtlety of design that I grew up loving?
In another way games today have very different pressures on them than they had 'back in the day'. Today, so very often, game companies have to release something which is a synthesis of visual art, story telling, sound design, and gameplay in a way which was not done back in the day. They also pile lots of cash into a single project and thus go to the hype machine with greater intensity to try and get their money back. This combination of greater expectations and more difficult game design (thus more chance that something in the game is 'broken') logically create a situation where it feels like new games just aren't as satisfying as old ones.
Observations are not fact. In all actuality, hard "facts" do not exist in science, observations stand for themselves and are inherantly subjective.
Many theories are 'unproven concepts', particularly when dealing with things which we cannot easily observe, such as string theory. One of the fundamental ideas of science is that nothing can be definitively proven regardless of how well something explains a phenomenae. Newtonian theory was once a dominant theory, and while very useful in its time, and even today on Earth, it was found to be wrong and replaced with relativity theory.
Evolution is by no means a dead theory either. While natural selection is seen as a very important force in evolution, there is much debate about other evolutionary forces and seeming limits of current evolutionary theory to explain many observations.
To single out evolution I think was incorrect, but to call it constitutionally forbidden is rediculous. Fact of the matter is, science isn't taught with enough skepticism in many schools and people start to believe it like they would a religion. Just another reason we should re-examine the way we educate our children.
Probably the same way you change the resolution on your monitor now. There is no reason it would change just because you are using LEDs.
Most displays that people use have pre-determined pixels, using all of them independantly gives you maximum resolution, using them in blocks gives you lower resolution. If you were to reduce your screen resolution down to 2x2 you would get giant rectangles made up of thousands of pixles. Same would be true for OLED.
A leap of logic, yes... but not completely unfounded.
The "war" on drugs has been charactarized as something that was winnable. The cost and the damage to people and society is a reasonable one because someday it won't be needed. Try to remember back to Vietnam (or civics class for the youngins in the audience) and remember when we were stuck in a war where we had no clear conditions for success and no exit strategy or conditions to impliment it in case of failure.
This statement shows an official admitting that there is no clear strategy for success in the "war" on drugs, it is essentially a quagmire where we keep throwing resources at the problem without a net gain. For many this change from a winnable situation to one with no clear resolution would doubtlessly cause their view of the situation to transform from one of useful expenditure to wasted money.
This page has some speculation on Revolution controller possibilities and is a good, if somewhat old, look at what Nintendo has been doing for a while.
I personally like the idea of gyro-enabled motion sensing controllers. Lots of possibilities there for increased gameplay if they do it right.
According to the law, yes it is considered more accurate than the machine count.
Is it really? Probably not.
But that doesn't mean that a recount system couldn't be put in place that actually does increase the accuracy of an election. Here is a laundry list of what you need to have an increasing accuracy recount system instead of this craziness we have today.
1: Durable Ballots - You need to use ballots that will be resistant to damage which would make the ballot unreadible or even change the vote cast. This is one of the big problems with punchcard ballots losing chads on the ground. (I can't believe that 'chad' is in my vocabulary)
2: Traceable ballot history - All ballots, after being cast to ensure privacy, should be given a human and machine readable identifying mark (barcode or something) and whenever the vote is counted its results should be recorded. This would greatly reduce the chance of double counts and it would allow action to be taken to ensure the validity of a ballot if it changes in the course of a re-count. This would also require that the machines could electronically record ballot results.
If we did this, then a hand-recount would give us a more accurate count of the ballots by creating a safe-guard against tabulation mistakes and identifying the specific ballots which change as a result of a recount.
This is news? Did anybody see the Dune mini-series or countless other TV Movies they have made that just tear up the intent of the author?
Good Sci-Fi is a genre where authors play hypothetical sociologist to reflect on humanities strengths and weaknesses (albiet with often erotic consequences), but it doesn't translate very well from book form to screen form, particularly when done by a second-rate cable channel just trying to make a buck on the name recognition.
Ok, now as I understand it the sonofusion only fuses the deuterium at the center. So this $200 gallon of heavy water having the equivelant of 40,000 barrals of oil's worth of energy, what does that have anything to do with what they are doing?
Whether it is electricity, motor fuel, or virtually anything else, the greatest impact we can have on energy supplies is to use less of it. Invest in public transportation, replace lightbulbs with low power equivelants, spend a little bit more on proper insulation, recycle. There are hundreds of ways that we can get more out of what we have and it all equates to cleaner, healthier water, air, and soil.
(yes I know that conservation isn't a direct source of energy, it is an indirect one)
No, the original film based on the musical was not too much like the book, but this movie doesn't look like it will shape up to capture the 'feel' of the book either. The book was always goofy but with an edge of sinister that you just couldn't grasp. This trailer with the music chosen and the silly slapstick Burton has Depp doing as well as the camera direction (the down shot on the group standing next to the chocolate river) makes it feel like Burton isn't catching the British part of all of this.
Just like Planet of the Apes, he just doesn't 'get' the concept of the story and even if he is truer to hard action the original work, he just doesn't have it in him to be true to the idea of it.
If any one of the machines is faulty (i.e. gets the count wrong by 1 or more votes), then it's highly likely that all of the machines are faulty. Testing a sample will reveal this.
Perhaps if it is a problem of design then all of them will be faulty. If it is a problem of equipment failure it could easily be isolated to a single machine.
If one of them is out by a single vote, then the whole count is invalid and needs to be recounted in full.
Exactly my point. A system of sampling cannot exclude the possibility that a single machine miscounted a single vote with 100% certainty. You MUST verify ALL votes and ALL machines. Do you want to say that you are 70%, 90%, 95% certain that all machines counted all of the votes correctly? That might be acceptible in some circumstances, but when the margin is this small, it is unreasonable.
I think you misunderstand what I said because you basically made my argument yourself, though you came to different conclusions.
It's not a sample we want. We're not after statistical estimate.
Um, only testing some of the machines to draw conclusions about all of them is using a sample (10 machines out of however many there are) and the results would be a statistical estimate of the performance of the rest of the machines.
roughly a 70% chance of hitting a compromised machine. Enough to deter fraud for later elections, and offering reasoanble security.
We aren't talking about preventing fraud in the future, we are talking about verifying the tally of the votes cast. The Dems in Washington aren't saying that any of the machines were rigged, but what they are saying is that if one machine in one district has an error that caused it to mis-count 25 votes for the Republican candidate instead of her, then the election could be reversed. It is important in an election for the electorate to be confident in the results and it is a widely held belief that a hand recount can discover anomalies is counting better than a machine recount (just saying it is widely held, not that it is neccessarily correct). When an election of this size is this close, it is important that the accuracy of counting be extraordinary.
Am I saying that machines shouldn't be verified as well? No. I am saying that sampling machines is not a meaningful way to do it because even if you had confidence that 99.9% of machines counted correctly, it is well within the means of just a single machine to change the result of the election.
Slashdot Mirror
Aliens already figured it out. I saw this documentary where they activated this giant machine and that is how they made the Martian atmosphere breathable for humans. Why don't they just utilize that tech?
So, if space flight really is becoming something consumers can do, what is the extra cost of all of the high atmospheric pollution and space junk? How are we going to keep low orbit from becoming the riskiest dodgeball court around?
Actually they did stream from the disk. I think this is part of the issue. SSX3 had no zoning for almost the entire game. The only issue was when you entered the 'lodge' or jumped to another part of the mountain.
SSX 3. Fun game but often rediculously long load times and terrible save interface.
Is it just me or is 135.3 * 2 < 360 / 2?
Somebody should start a collection now for the inevitable lawsuit.
Clinton in the U.S. and Blaire in the U.K. are generally considered moderate liberals.
Moderate being an important term in this statement. Both of these leaders are actually quite centrist in their views, but they both follow the 'third way' that was part of Labour's post-Thatcher rise. This basically means altering traditional Labour policies toward business and continuing privitization of government programmes. All of this anti-terror stuff is definately a notable detraction from his government's previous trajectory, but taken as a whole I feel it can be argued that his policies have been moderately Liberal.
I never said they were far Left, I said they were liberal in the true sense of the term. Libertarians (in general, diversity is the rule) agree with the Right on some things (e.g. tax policy) and with the Left on others (e.g. abortion policy). The term 'liberal' used to describe Democrats and other Leftist parties is part of a rhetoric campaign by Republicans to focus public debate on social issues in order to win votes of what is commonly called the 'Southern Democrat'; people who desire both government assistance programs as well as greater government intervention in social policy. By calling themselves conservative they are referring to their policies on things such a abortion, flag burning, etc. which they can frame well enough to sway those voters. My intent wasn't to imply that Libertarians were far Left by any means. The model I presented wasn't a line, it was a plane with four corners: Left, Liberal, Right, Statist. I hope this clarifies.
TOS agreements almost universally stipulate that they can be altered by the man at any time and it is your own responsibility to be aware of changes. You agreed once, you agree if the TOS says that anybody who uses the product must present his or her kidneys at request for black market sale.
Liberal in the international political sense are ideologies limiting government intervention in the activities of the governed. Clinton in the U.S. and Blaire in the U.K. are generally considered moderate liberals. Strong liberals have many different parties, but in the U.S. the largest strong liberal party is the Libertarian party.
Left refers to ideologies which reflect increased government intervention in economic matters generally with the goal of increased egalitarianism and decreased intervention in the social behaviors of the governed.
While communism is a leftist ideology, Soviet style communism was largely statist, conservative, or totalitarian in nature meaning ideologies supporting increased control of both economic and social matters.
The final major compass point in political ideology is Right. Right (the direction, not meaning correct) parties have ideologies favoring decreased government intervention in economic matters and increased intervention in social matters. These parties often focus around their reactionary policies to social change, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. Republican party is a party on the Right.
You are part of the movement to get Major League Baseball to move to Portland aren't you?!?
Bah!
We killed a top figure skater's parent in the last month, stay away, you aren't safe!
Oregon is bad, stop it if you can.
Or, perhaps, you were eager for it to be released.
Perhaps, but I think there is a lot more going on here than simply selective memory. Firstly, our first love sets the bar for what is acceptable and desireable. I for example am primarily a 16bit console kid. I love going back and playing the good games of the early ninties, but I can't stand going back and playing much comodore64 or intellivision because the graphics tend to get in the way for me. This tends to apply forward as well, graphics in current games often seem overdone and I think, where is the subtlety of design that I grew up loving? In another way games today have very different pressures on them than they had 'back in the day'. Today, so very often, game companies have to release something which is a synthesis of visual art, story telling, sound design, and gameplay in a way which was not done back in the day. They also pile lots of cash into a single project and thus go to the hype machine with greater intensity to try and get their money back. This combination of greater expectations and more difficult game design (thus more chance that something in the game is 'broken') logically create a situation where it feels like new games just aren't as satisfying as old ones.
Observations are not fact. In all actuality, hard "facts" do not exist in science, observations stand for themselves and are inherantly subjective.
Many theories are 'unproven concepts', particularly when dealing with things which we cannot easily observe, such as string theory. One of the fundamental ideas of science is that nothing can be definitively proven regardless of how well something explains a phenomenae. Newtonian theory was once a dominant theory, and while very useful in its time, and even today on Earth, it was found to be wrong and replaced with relativity theory.
Evolution is by no means a dead theory either. While natural selection is seen as a very important force in evolution, there is much debate about other evolutionary forces and seeming limits of current evolutionary theory to explain many observations.
To single out evolution I think was incorrect, but to call it constitutionally forbidden is rediculous. Fact of the matter is, science isn't taught with enough skepticism in many schools and people start to believe it like they would a religion. Just another reason we should re-examine the way we educate our children.
Probably the same way you change the resolution on your monitor now. There is no reason it would change just because you are using LEDs.
Most displays that people use have pre-determined pixels, using all of them independantly gives you maximum resolution, using them in blocks gives you lower resolution. If you were to reduce your screen resolution down to 2x2 you would get giant rectangles made up of thousands of pixles. Same would be true for OLED.
A leap of logic, yes... but not completely unfounded.
The "war" on drugs has been charactarized as something that was winnable. The cost and the damage to people and society is a reasonable one because someday it won't be needed. Try to remember back to Vietnam (or civics class for the youngins in the audience) and remember when we were stuck in a war where we had no clear conditions for success and no exit strategy or conditions to impliment it in case of failure.
This statement shows an official admitting that there is no clear strategy for success in the "war" on drugs, it is essentially a quagmire where we keep throwing resources at the problem without a net gain. For many this change from a winnable situation to one with no clear resolution would doubtlessly cause their view of the situation to transform from one of useful expenditure to wasted money.
I personally like the idea of gyro-enabled motion sensing controllers. Lots of possibilities there for increased gameplay if they do it right.
According to the law, yes it is considered more accurate than the machine count.
Is it really? Probably not.
But that doesn't mean that a recount system couldn't be put in place that actually does increase the accuracy of an election. Here is a laundry list of what you need to have an increasing accuracy recount system instead of this craziness we have today.
1: Durable Ballots - You need to use ballots that will be resistant to damage which would make the ballot unreadible or even change the vote cast. This is one of the big problems with punchcard ballots losing chads on the ground. (I can't believe that 'chad' is in my vocabulary)
2: Traceable ballot history - All ballots, after being cast to ensure privacy, should be given a human and machine readable identifying mark (barcode or something) and whenever the vote is counted its results should be recorded. This would greatly reduce the chance of double counts and it would allow action to be taken to ensure the validity of a ballot if it changes in the course of a re-count. This would also require that the machines could electronically record ballot results.
If we did this, then a hand-recount would give us a more accurate count of the ballots by creating a safe-guard against tabulation mistakes and identifying the specific ballots which change as a result of a recount.
Good Sci-Fi is a genre where authors play hypothetical sociologist to reflect on humanities strengths and weaknesses (albiet with often erotic consequences), but it doesn't translate very well from book form to screen form, particularly when done by a second-rate cable channel just trying to make a buck on the name recognition.
Ok, now as I understand it the sonofusion only fuses the deuterium at the center. So this $200 gallon of heavy water having the equivelant of 40,000 barrals of oil's worth of energy, what does that have anything to do with what they are doing?
Or maybe other Canadian sports.
C'mon curling!
Conservation
Whether it is electricity, motor fuel, or virtually anything else, the greatest impact we can have on energy supplies is to use less of it. Invest in public transportation, replace lightbulbs with low power equivelants, spend a little bit more on proper insulation, recycle. There are hundreds of ways that we can get more out of what we have and it all equates to cleaner, healthier water, air, and soil.
(yes I know that conservation isn't a direct source of energy, it is an indirect one)
No, the original film based on the musical was not too much like the book, but this movie doesn't look like it will shape up to capture the 'feel' of the book either. The book was always goofy but with an edge of sinister that you just couldn't grasp. This trailer with the music chosen and the silly slapstick Burton has Depp doing as well as the camera direction (the down shot on the group standing next to the chocolate river) makes it feel like Burton isn't catching the British part of all of this.
Just like Planet of the Apes, he just doesn't 'get' the concept of the story and even if he is truer to hard action the original work, he just doesn't have it in him to be true to the idea of it.
Perhaps if it is a problem of design then all of them will be faulty. If it is a problem of equipment failure it could easily be isolated to a single machine.
If one of them is out by a single vote, then the whole count is invalid and needs to be recounted in full.
Exactly my point. A system of sampling cannot exclude the possibility that a single machine miscounted a single vote with 100% certainty. You MUST verify ALL votes and ALL machines. Do you want to say that you are 70%, 90%, 95% certain that all machines counted all of the votes correctly? That might be acceptible in some circumstances, but when the margin is this small, it is unreasonable.
It's not a sample we want. We're not after statistical estimate.
Um, only testing some of the machines to draw conclusions about all of them is using a sample (10 machines out of however many there are) and the results would be a statistical estimate of the performance of the rest of the machines.
roughly a 70% chance of hitting a compromised machine. Enough to deter fraud for later elections, and offering reasoanble security.
We aren't talking about preventing fraud in the future, we are talking about verifying the tally of the votes cast. The Dems in Washington aren't saying that any of the machines were rigged, but what they are saying is that if one machine in one district has an error that caused it to mis-count 25 votes for the Republican candidate instead of her, then the election could be reversed. It is important in an election for the electorate to be confident in the results and it is a widely held belief that a hand recount can discover anomalies is counting better than a machine recount (just saying it is widely held, not that it is neccessarily correct). When an election of this size is this close, it is important that the accuracy of counting be extraordinary.
Am I saying that machines shouldn't be verified as well? No. I am saying that sampling machines is not a meaningful way to do it because even if you had confidence that 99.9% of machines counted correctly, it is well within the means of just a single machine to change the result of the election.