It's a blanket term used for stuff in the universe we think is there but haven't seen because we can not detect it's presence.
So... Scientists can't explain how the universe works, without appealing to a mysterious phenomenon they can't observe and whose nature they cannot describe except in terms of its supposed secondary effects?
And this is different from believing in God... how, exactly?
I think this is a fair and interesting criticism - but easy enough to answer.
Science is the accumulation of human knowledge. Our best model of the universe we live in. The scientific process governs how new knowledge may be discovered and accepted. But above all, it is an admittedly incomplete understanding of the universe. However, with the knowledge that's been accumulated, we are able to model the behavior of a great many phenomena in reliable ways - from that perspective scientific knowledge has clearly been a success.
The reason "dark matter" came into being (as a theory, I mean) is because we don't yet understand the whole of the universe - its origin, its overall nature, how it interacts with gravitation. But we're trying, you understand. Scientists develop these theories and ponder them, attempt to establish whether they may be true. It's an ongoing process. In this case, it seemed that given the motion of the universe, there ought to be more mass which couldn't be accounted for. Hence this idea of undetectable mass out in the expanses between stars. I'll readily admit that as theories go it's a bit vague, and it fits in (as you suggested) with criticisms of religion: that the idea is established "because" and quite "conveniently" can't be disproven, because the matter is undetectable.
So what's the difference?
First, dark matter is a theory. One of several attempts to explain these phenomena. Propoents of the theory will advocate it but there is no concensus. There are competing theories (equally credible competing theories, I mean) but as a theory Dark Matter has its merits.
Second, the idea of dark matter was introduced as a possible explanation for measured phenomena. And it is a relatively simple explanation: that there is mass out there we can't detect. In comparison, belief in God is something we introduced to satisfy ourselves, or to control others. Using a belief in God to justify a phenomenon is excessive: you are required to assume too much in order to explain the phenomenon that way, and as a result you accept information which doesn't directly help (and may interfere with) your understanding of the phenomenon. ("Why does the Foucault Pendulum's direction change? Because it's in God's plan." Doesn't really get you anywhere, does it?)
Third, ultimately it's quite likely that the Dark Matter theory will be proven, or disproven. If it's disproven, that'll likely mean we've achieved a new level of understanding of gravitational forces, in which Dark Matter is not needed as an explanation for the observed phenomena. Either way, for now, the theory acts as a guide for us to extend our knowledge. We can study phenomena and ask ourselves the question, "could the Dark Matter theory work in light of this evidence?"
A basic premise of the belief in God is generally the idea that the existence can't be proven or disproven: because things can be attributed to God even if we find perfectly plausible scientific explanations (like "Sure, we evolved, but that's just because God made it happen that way") and also because God supposedly exists at a level completely unreachable by our capabilities... And then if something like God did exist, there'd be no way for us to know whether this was or was not the God we recognized - because if this being has ultimate power over our universe, anything we can observe or measure is within its control, too.
So Dark Matter, while rather mysterious and sketchy as an idea, represents our best collective attempt to extend our understanding of the universe. And, ultimately, one way or another, it'll have helped us understand the workings of gravity and the universe. This is not true of God.
Muttering comment to self: why does English usage keep rotting out to the point where any short concise statement is often made 100% contrary to its intended meaning? If we have to decide everything by context and intuition, why not just have everybody say, "statistically appropriate speach act" as a placeholder? (Or "statistically inappropriate speach act" if we want to go with a nudge and a wink.)
Yeah! I agree with this wholeheartedly!
One question, though: What's "speach"? Prefix-pluralization of a fruit?
The entire point of the show is what he says is not really what he means.
Right. But in that position, where you've got an established audience of certainly thousands of people at least, there has to be some responsibility for what you lead those people to do. Even if you're not serious. The thing is, they're not serious, either. Colbert put the idea forward as a big joke - and people went along with it because they wanted to be part of the joke. Regardless of the intent, the effect was that he encouraged people to vandalize Wikipedia. The effect was something that he must have known was a possibility, and should have been responsible enough to avoid. Using his audience to make this happen, whether by intent or by negligence, is just plain rude.
(Further, anyone who thinks that Stephen Colbert, on the show, urging people to change Wikipedia actually MEANS he wants those people to do that betrays an utter ignorance of what the Colbert Report is: a dead-on satire of the right-wing talk show arena. No one should ever take anything the character of Stephen Colbert says seriously.)
His intent is not the point. The point is that he used his position as the host of a TV show to encourage people to vandalize Wikipedia. Whether that's what he really wanted, whether the "sensible" viewers went along with it, etc. is beside the point. The thing is, even if it was a joke, it encouraged people to vandalize Wikipedia. Even if people looked at it and knew it wasn't serious, probably a lot of people felt it'd be fun to go along with it. His action directly contributed to vandalism of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is by no means perfect, of course, but it is an earnest attempt at building something worthwhile. I can't abide people willfully sabotaging that, much less encouraging legions of fans to do it, as in this case and the older Penny Arcade case (though PA at least proposed a very harmless sabotage).
Yeah, basically you're supplementing one secret password with another: which makes the system less secure, because you only need one of the two passwords to get in.
'Course, you have to treat your answer to that question like a password, because its secrecy has roughly the same security implications as your actual password. So if you provide your mother's maiden name in place of "favorite pet" - so what? If someone's got some info on you and they're trying to get into your account, they're going to try that.
The bit that bugs me the most is how it's becoming more common for password systems to disallow punctuation characters. I suppose it's still pretty easy for someone to guess that I might try using "!" in place of "i" in a password, but it's still one more bit of complexity I can have in an easy-to-remember password.
so if you slip up once in taking them, will you forget to take them indefinately? call me when these pills remind you that they have to be taken with wailing sirens & flashing lights on the pill bottle.
That wouldn't help. More likely the result would be "Huh, what's all that noise? This bottle? What am I supposed to do with this?" And then maybe the bottle would get put in a drawer.
It's not just a failure to remember, it's a failure to process information and a failure to make some simple logical connections at times.
The common solution is to have someone else (family member, etc.) responsible for handling the medication, and dealing with any fallout (paranoia, etc.) surrounding the subject of the medication.
I sort of agree with what you're saying, but I feel I have a slightly different angle on it.
MST3K was done. It came, it had its time, and it left. We even got a movie version out of it. I don't think it needs to be done again. Part of the fun of the show was its novelty, and that's basically spent.
These efforts to come back and do more MST3K-ish stuff sort of send the message "this is all we're capable of". (Well, really this "message" is just the impression I get, my own interpretation...) That's a little disappointing.
Also, I don't know why they thought we couldn't handle the real one
IMO Super Mario Bros. 2 (the real one) is overrated. There's a lot there that makes the game harder, and some of it, as far as I'm concerned, falls under the category of "poor game design" rather than being a worthwhile challenge. For instance:
Poison Mushrooms: They're a fair enough game element, but the visual difference between these and good mushrooms (the color of the spots) could potentially be lost on poor TV monitors. Super Springboards: You bounce off these so high that you're off-screen for several seconds. On some levels you need to jump high off these and then make precision landings. Castle Mazes: There were a couple of these in SMB - how they worked is that if you're in a castle and you run to the right, the castle will appear to be an endless loop unless you're on the platform at the "correct" elevation. There's no indication that this is a dynamic thing. You just have to figure it out. Reasonable if it's not taken to extremes, but SMB2 pushes this farther than SMB did.
You have to also consider how this all went down:
1985: SMB comes out in US and Japan. 1986: SMB2 comes out in Japan for the Famicom Disk System. The game, for whatever reason, is not released in the US. I think it's because of a combination of the difficulty (perhaps) and the somewhat poor game design choices, and the fact that, overall, it's "just another" SMB without much new to it. 1988: SMB3 is on its way, and the US is still without a SMB2. Do they release SMB2 (a first-generation NES title, by US standards) to the US, three years after the release of the NES? Bear in mind that in the time since SMB came out, NES games had gotten a lot better. Contra, Castlevania, and Rockman 1-2 all came out in that period. Plus SMB3 was coming, and setting a new standard for the series. I think apart from any concerns about how SMB2 would be received by US audiences based on its merits as a game or sequel, there must also have been concern that if they released SMB2 in 1988, it wouldn't measure up to more contemporary titles, with its one-direction scrolling, rather simple sprites, animations, and backgrounds, and the fact that it was little more than a new set of levels for a three-year old game that almost all NES owners had played (and probably gotten tired of, begun to see as antiquated, etc.). So they took Doki Doki Panic and put in Mario characters.
Now you can say what you like about how Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario USA doesn't fit the style of gameplay in the rest of the series... but nevertheless it was a damn good game. It had a good central gameplay mechanic (lift/throw) and used that to good effect to create some interesting boss battles, like the mouse/bomb fight or the final battle - much better than the "dump in lava or shoot with fireflower" that you had with Bowser in SMB 1 and 2.
I don't get how the article can attribute the minigames in SMB3 to the roulette feature in Doki Doki, however. What's the connection? Tenuous at best, I'd say.
When Arthur C. Clarke imagined that in 2001 we would build an artificial computer intelligence that would turn homicidal in order to wrest control of a spacecraft...
HAL was compelled to obey the orders he was given, and was given contradictory orders: ensure the success of the mission at all costs, and serve and protect the crew. When it began to appear to HAL that the crew themselves could be a threat to the success of the mission, he had to choose the order that was given higher priority.
I think the story provides an interesting perspective, though: it assumes the weight and authority of an encyclopedia, but it is dangerously prone to misinformation, whether it's intentional misinformation or just popular-but-ill-founded ideas.
I like how you describe Wikipedia's strength, as a kind of harvesting of everything people have to contribute... The problem is what happens after that harvesting? I think the potential for misinformation is too serious to ignore or to handle in a purely defensive way. Perhaps after an article is sufficiently mature it should no longer be subject to the fully open collaborative process that allows fresh articles to mature as quickly as they do.
If you can post with such conviction, can you back it up with some kind of identity?
I'm usually pretty impressed with athiests who control themself, but at the same time I think thier stupid. Why would they do that? It gains them nothing at all, so they lived a miserable life, and died, seems like dumb thing to do to me.
And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
You're forgetting about consequences. Just about any "evil" deed carries some kind of consequences, because whether or not the other people on the planet have souls, they apparently care about their own well-being enough to put up some kind of organized resistance to people who would selfishly serve only themselves. Steal, rape, or murder and you run the risk of being caught, incarcerated, or maybe killed. Even petty offenses can be counterproductive, as you lose trust and friendship - it's hard to get far in this world without the cooperation of others. Even if the officers, judge, jury, guards, fellow prisoners are all just "bags of meat", it doesn't change the fact that you wind up living a considerably less comfortable existence.
I don't get that last point... First off you say that without religious faith you would be entirely self-serving... and then you say that altruism without religious faith is merely another kind of self-serving behavior... I think I understand mechanically what you're saying but what's your point? How does this say anything about the importance of religion? If people have found without religion that being good to people is still rewarding, then I think that diminishes the importance of religion.
Children go through a progression where they learn to see other people in the world as real peers as opposed to mere obstacles to the things they want. They learn from a practical standpoint the importance of dealing with people on equitable terms - because without that, they find themselves without friends and therefore without allies when allies are needed. Even if you'd like to argue from a philosophical standpoint whether you are the one and only actual sentient soul on a planet full of meat puppets, the fact is that living in this world, from a practical standpoint, it's more advantageous to assume that other people must be dealt with as equals.
That doesn't sound like much - equitability, acknowledgement, and so on - but understanding that at an intuitive level is how people function in society. Things like obeying laws, choosing not to be a criminal even if you think you can avoid consequences, etc. are sort of an extra layer. It can come from moral or religious guidance - in which case I'd say it's an example of ancient wisdom, knowledge gained early on about how to make a society work - but the role of a god in this is just as an abstraction, and a mechanism to shepherd people toward respect for common laws.
But it's this manipulation of the more blindly faithful that causes me the most concern, personally. They are catered to by people seeking credibility (thus hindering needed progress) and exploited by those interested in furthering their own agendas. Organized religion is a mechanism through which people gain power over other people - but who really ought to control that power, and for what purposes? If someone is willing to accept the premise of gods, but accepts wholesale the interpretation of those gods that's given to them by someone else, and not only fails to consider any other possibilities, but actually actively rejects other possibilities, then you've got some kind of zombie person, ready to follow the orders of the collective. And the first orders are usually to draw in more followers. I think philosophy ought to be left to the philosophers. If you're not going to actually think about why your supposed god is in heaven or why we exist, what the meanings are of good and evil, and so on, then don't dabble in that domain.
One basic problem (and something Red Steel has had to cope with) is that while a modern lightgun is great for pointing at things on-screen, it's not a good way to control a character's orientation in an FPS that allows full free movement. (Most lightgun games only give you very limited movement control, such as the "crouch" pedal in Time Crisis) So where a control pad + mouse would give you fairly good move, look, and aim capabilities, a control pad alone (as on most consoles) would give you good move and look but poor aim capabilities, and a control pad plus lightgun can give you good move and aim, but it's not so good for making your character look around or reverse direction - at least, not if the lightgun is responsible for orienting your character. So you either need an analog "look" control in addition to the lightgun, or you need to cook up a way to use the lightgun to control both aiming (within the confines of the screen) and looking (changing the viewpoint represented on the screen). Red Steel seems to have taken the latter route.
Actually, I've heard their first product, "Hyper Operating System" (HOS), will improve the movement efficiency of even older types of robots by as much as 60%! There's been some concern about the safety of upgrading to this product, but I don't think there's anything to that.
When asked how he felt about this victory, New Orleans attorney James Brown responded, simply, "I feel good!"
Here is why people compare Wii to lightguns!
on
Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Your technical details about lightguns are a little bit out of date.
The type you described, which has a single-direction lens and a light level or color sensor, that's pretty much the oldest type. It's what was used for the NES, and also for older systems - I had a portable Pong rig that included a lightgun game that worked that way. These types required the screen to flash (or else just have all targets be really high-contrast) in order for the lightgun to get a reading. You can see this effect in games like Duck Hunt.
Then you have the raster scan method. I believe this is what's used on most current console lightguns. Basically it finds out when precisely the TV's raster crosses the point the gun is aimed at, and compares that to the video signal output by the game console to figure out where the gun is pointed. The downside of this method is that it won't work on certain types of TVs, it's mainly a CRT thing. Plus you need to get the video sync signal from the console - on PS2 light guns they do this with an external connector on the lightgun cord, I believe, while on the X-Box a video timing signal is actually included on the controller port. I believe for the sensor to work the video at the target point on-screen does have to be reasonably bright (that is, not black) but I could be wrong about that.
Then you have IR emitter/sensor lightguns. These are used in current and relatively recent arcade lightgun games like House of the Dead series and so on. Basically they use a combination of emitters and sensors to figure out where the gun is pointed. The gun reports the relative intensity of the signal it receives from each emitter (it can discern which is which through timing) and that gives the machine a good idea where the gun is pointed. Some types also use tilt sensors in the gun itself to get better information. The strength of this system is that it's completely independent of the video monitor. So long as it's properly calibrated you can use it with any video display technology at all. There's a home version of this type of lightgun sold at Lik-Sang, and the technology of the Wii pointer is very similar to this type of lightgun. That is why the Wii remote is so commonly compared to lightguns. When people make that comparison, they're talking about this type of lightgun. The fact that most lightgun games don't care about the fact that the lightgun is capable of a fairly accurate 3-D position and orientation report is pretty much incidental.
Just 102138. It's a non-unitized scalar. Unfortunately, official recognition of this type of conversion has wreaked havoc on international trade economies, as non-unitized scalars may be multiplied, fed through arbitrary functions, etc. and then converted back to familiar units of currency with rather unconventional effects.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a fair and interesting criticism - but easy enough to answer.
Science is the accumulation of human knowledge. Our best model of the universe we live in. The scientific process governs how new knowledge may be discovered and accepted. But above all, it is an admittedly incomplete understanding of the universe. However, with the knowledge that's been accumulated, we are able to model the behavior of a great many phenomena in reliable ways - from that perspective scientific knowledge has clearly been a success.
The reason "dark matter" came into being (as a theory, I mean) is because we don't yet understand the whole of the universe - its origin, its overall nature, how it interacts with gravitation. But we're trying, you understand. Scientists develop these theories and ponder them, attempt to establish whether they may be true. It's an ongoing process. In this case, it seemed that given the motion of the universe, there ought to be more mass which couldn't be accounted for. Hence this idea of undetectable mass out in the expanses between stars. I'll readily admit that as theories go it's a bit vague, and it fits in (as you suggested) with criticisms of religion: that the idea is established "because" and quite "conveniently" can't be disproven, because the matter is undetectable.
So what's the difference?
First, dark matter is a theory. One of several attempts to explain these phenomena. Propoents of the theory will advocate it but there is no concensus. There are competing theories (equally credible competing theories, I mean) but as a theory Dark Matter has its merits.
Second, the idea of dark matter was introduced as a possible explanation for measured phenomena. And it is a relatively simple explanation: that there is mass out there we can't detect. In comparison, belief in God is something we introduced to satisfy ourselves, or to control others. Using a belief in God to justify a phenomenon is excessive: you are required to assume too much in order to explain the phenomenon that way, and as a result you accept information which doesn't directly help (and may interfere with) your understanding of the phenomenon. ("Why does the Foucault Pendulum's direction change? Because it's in God's plan." Doesn't really get you anywhere, does it?)
Third, ultimately it's quite likely that the Dark Matter theory will be proven, or disproven. If it's disproven, that'll likely mean we've achieved a new level of understanding of gravitational forces, in which Dark Matter is not needed as an explanation for the observed phenomena. Either way, for now, the theory acts as a guide for us to extend our knowledge. We can study phenomena and ask ourselves the question, "could the Dark Matter theory work in light of this evidence?"
A basic premise of the belief in God is generally the idea that the existence can't be proven or disproven: because things can be attributed to God even if we find perfectly plausible scientific explanations (like "Sure, we evolved, but that's just because God made it happen that way") and also because God supposedly exists at a level completely unreachable by our capabilities... And then if something like God did exist, there'd be no way for us to know whether this was or was not the God we recognized - because if this being has ultimate power over our universe, anything we can observe or measure is within its control, too.
So Dark Matter, while rather mysterious and sketchy as an idea, represents our best collective attempt to extend our understanding of the universe. And, ultimately, one way or another, it'll have helped us understand the workings of gravity and the universe. This is not true of God.
Water might be nice. You know, to drink, and not be totally dependent upon the small cups given in the scheduled in-flight feedings, if any.
Muttering comment to self: why does English usage keep rotting out to the point where any short concise statement is often made 100% contrary to its intended meaning? If we have to decide everything by context and intuition, why not just have everybody say, "statistically appropriate speach act" as a placeholder? (Or "statistically inappropriate speach act" if we want to go with a nudge and a wink.)
Yeah! I agree with this wholeheartedly!
One question, though: What's "speach"? Prefix-pluralization of a fruit?
Not a doctor, but...
No no no... you got it all wrong.. The line is:
"Damnit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not..."
The entire point of the show is what he says is not really what he means.
Right. But in that position, where you've got an established audience of certainly thousands of people at least, there has to be some responsibility for what you lead those people to do. Even if you're not serious. The thing is, they're not serious, either. Colbert put the idea forward as a big joke - and people went along with it because they wanted to be part of the joke. Regardless of the intent, the effect was that he encouraged people to vandalize Wikipedia. The effect was something that he must have known was a possibility, and should have been responsible enough to avoid. Using his audience to make this happen, whether by intent or by negligence, is just plain rude.
I do not hear the words of Anonymous Cowards.
(Further, anyone who thinks that Stephen Colbert, on the show, urging people to change Wikipedia actually MEANS he wants those people to do that betrays an utter ignorance of what the Colbert Report is: a dead-on satire of the right-wing talk show arena. No one should ever take anything the character of Stephen Colbert says seriously.)
His intent is not the point. The point is that he used his position as the host of a TV show to encourage people to vandalize Wikipedia. Whether that's what he really wanted, whether the "sensible" viewers went along with it, etc. is beside the point. The thing is, even if it was a joke, it encouraged people to vandalize Wikipedia. Even if people looked at it and knew it wasn't serious, probably a lot of people felt it'd be fun to go along with it. His action directly contributed to vandalism of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is by no means perfect, of course, but it is an earnest attempt at building something worthwhile. I can't abide people willfully sabotaging that, much less encouraging legions of fans to do it, as in this case and the older Penny Arcade case (though PA at least proposed a very harmless sabotage).
See also: The Touch
Yeah, basically you're supplementing one secret password with another: which makes the system less secure, because you only need one of the two passwords to get in.
'Course, you have to treat your answer to that question like a password, because its secrecy has roughly the same security implications as your actual password. So if you provide your mother's maiden name in place of "favorite pet" - so what? If someone's got some info on you and they're trying to get into your account, they're going to try that.
The bit that bugs me the most is how it's becoming more common for password systems to disallow punctuation characters. I suppose it's still pretty easy for someone to guess that I might try using "!" in place of "i" in a password, but it's still one more bit of complexity I can have in an easy-to-remember password.
It's hard not to see the Kilrathi in WC3 as cattish versions of "Sweetums" from the Muppet show, though...
I dunno. That occurred to me, too - though it could as easily be Paul Hogan.
Judge: Will the defendant please identify exhibit A?
Hogan: Tha's moy Subaru Ew'bek: the woold's first spo't utelety weggin!
so if you slip up once in taking them, will you forget to take them indefinately? call me when these pills remind you that they have to be taken with wailing sirens & flashing lights on the pill bottle.
That wouldn't help. More likely the result would be "Huh, what's all that noise? This bottle? What am I supposed to do with this?" And then maybe the bottle would get put in a drawer.
It's not just a failure to remember, it's a failure to process information and a failure to make some simple logical connections at times.
The common solution is to have someone else (family member, etc.) responsible for handling the medication, and dealing with any fallout (paranoia, etc.) surrounding the subject of the medication.
I sort of agree with what you're saying, but I feel I have a slightly different angle on it.
MST3K was done. It came, it had its time, and it left. We even got a movie version out of it. I don't think it needs to be done again. Part of the fun of the show was its novelty, and that's basically spent.
These efforts to come back and do more MST3K-ish stuff sort of send the message "this is all we're capable of". (Well, really this "message" is just the impression I get, my own interpretation...) That's a little disappointing.
Also, I don't know why they thought we couldn't handle the real one
IMO Super Mario Bros. 2 (the real one) is overrated. There's a lot there that makes the game harder, and some of it, as far as I'm concerned, falls under the category of "poor game design" rather than being a worthwhile challenge. For instance:
Poison Mushrooms: They're a fair enough game element, but the visual difference between these and good mushrooms (the color of the spots) could potentially be lost on poor TV monitors.
Super Springboards: You bounce off these so high that you're off-screen for several seconds. On some levels you need to jump high off these and then make precision landings.
Castle Mazes: There were a couple of these in SMB - how they worked is that if you're in a castle and you run to the right, the castle will appear to be an endless loop unless you're on the platform at the "correct" elevation. There's no indication that this is a dynamic thing. You just have to figure it out. Reasonable if it's not taken to extremes, but SMB2 pushes this farther than SMB did.
You have to also consider how this all went down:
1985: SMB comes out in US and Japan.
1986: SMB2 comes out in Japan for the Famicom Disk System. The game, for whatever reason, is not released in the US. I think it's because of a combination of the difficulty (perhaps) and the somewhat poor game design choices, and the fact that, overall, it's "just another" SMB without much new to it.
1988: SMB3 is on its way, and the US is still without a SMB2. Do they release SMB2 (a first-generation NES title, by US standards) to the US, three years after the release of the NES? Bear in mind that in the time since SMB came out, NES games had gotten a lot better. Contra, Castlevania, and Rockman 1-2 all came out in that period. Plus SMB3 was coming, and setting a new standard for the series. I think apart from any concerns about how SMB2 would be received by US audiences based on its merits as a game or sequel, there must also have been concern that if they released SMB2 in 1988, it wouldn't measure up to more contemporary titles, with its one-direction scrolling, rather simple sprites, animations, and backgrounds, and the fact that it was little more than a new set of levels for a three-year old game that almost all NES owners had played (and probably gotten tired of, begun to see as antiquated, etc.). So they took Doki Doki Panic and put in Mario characters.
Now you can say what you like about how Doki Doki Panic/Super Mario USA doesn't fit the style of gameplay in the rest of the series... but nevertheless it was a damn good game. It had a good central gameplay mechanic (lift/throw) and used that to good effect to create some interesting boss battles, like the mouse/bomb fight or the final battle - much better than the "dump in lava or shoot with fireflower" that you had with Bowser in SMB 1 and 2.
I don't get how the article can attribute the minigames in SMB3 to the roulette feature in Doki Doki, however. What's the connection? Tenuous at best, I'd say.
Well, I was going to go with the Chewbacca defense, but when I explained it to HAL he started regressing again.
When Arthur C. Clarke imagined that in 2001 we would build an artificial computer intelligence that would turn homicidal in order to wrest control of a spacecraft...
HAL was compelled to obey the orders he was given, and was given contradictory orders: ensure the success of the mission at all costs, and serve and protect the crew. When it began to appear to HAL that the crew themselves could be a threat to the success of the mission, he had to choose the order that was given higher priority.
I think the story provides an interesting perspective, though: it assumes the weight and authority of an encyclopedia, but it is dangerously prone to misinformation, whether it's intentional misinformation or just popular-but-ill-founded ideas.
I like how you describe Wikipedia's strength, as a kind of harvesting of everything people have to contribute... The problem is what happens after that harvesting? I think the potential for misinformation is too serious to ignore or to handle in a purely defensive way. Perhaps after an article is sufficiently mature it should no longer be subject to the fully open collaborative process that allows fresh articles to mature as quickly as they do.
If you can post with such conviction, can you back it up with some kind of identity?
I'm usually pretty impressed with athiests who control themself, but at the same time I think thier stupid. Why would they do that? It gains them nothing at all, so they lived a miserable life, and died, seems like dumb thing to do to me.
And don't give me noncense about how helping people is the best way to live a happy fulfiled life - you are just prooving my point, if you are only helping people because it helps you, then you are doing exactly what I said: living for your own pleasure. I just so happens you are helping people along the way, but that's not why you are doing it.
You're forgetting about consequences. Just about any "evil" deed carries some kind of consequences, because whether or not the other people on the planet have souls, they apparently care about their own well-being enough to put up some kind of organized resistance to people who would selfishly serve only themselves. Steal, rape, or murder and you run the risk of being caught, incarcerated, or maybe killed. Even petty offenses can be counterproductive, as you lose trust and friendship - it's hard to get far in this world without the cooperation of others. Even if the officers, judge, jury, guards, fellow prisoners are all just "bags of meat", it doesn't change the fact that you wind up living a considerably less comfortable existence.
I don't get that last point... First off you say that without religious faith you would be entirely self-serving... and then you say that altruism without religious faith is merely another kind of self-serving behavior... I think I understand mechanically what you're saying but what's your point? How does this say anything about the importance of religion? If people have found without religion that being good to people is still rewarding, then I think that diminishes the importance of religion.
Children go through a progression where they learn to see other people in the world as real peers as opposed to mere obstacles to the things they want. They learn from a practical standpoint the importance of dealing with people on equitable terms - because without that, they find themselves without friends and therefore without allies when allies are needed. Even if you'd like to argue from a philosophical standpoint whether you are the one and only actual sentient soul on a planet full of meat puppets, the fact is that living in this world, from a practical standpoint, it's more advantageous to assume that other people must be dealt with as equals.
That doesn't sound like much - equitability, acknowledgement, and so on - but understanding that at an intuitive level is how people function in society. Things like obeying laws, choosing not to be a criminal even if you think you can avoid consequences, etc. are sort of an extra layer. It can come from moral or religious guidance - in which case I'd say it's an example of ancient wisdom, knowledge gained early on about how to make a society work - but the role of a god in this is just as an abstraction, and a mechanism to shepherd people toward respect for common laws.
But it's this manipulation of the more blindly faithful that causes me the most concern, personally. They are catered to by people seeking credibility (thus hindering needed progress) and exploited by those interested in furthering their own agendas. Organized religion is a mechanism through which people gain power over other people - but who really ought to control that power, and for what purposes? If someone is willing to accept the premise of gods, but accepts wholesale the interpretation of those gods that's given to them by someone else, and not only fails to consider any other possibilities, but actually actively rejects other possibilities, then you've got some kind of zombie person, ready to follow the orders of the collective. And the first orders are usually to draw in more followers. I think philosophy ought to be left to the philosophers. If you're not going to actually think about why your supposed god is in heaven or why we exist, what the meanings are of good and evil, and so on, then don't dabble in that domain.
Or perhaps more simply:
./-annoying_file
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But the characters visited New York City a few times... City on the Edge of Forever, Assignment: Earth, and (I guess) Miri as well...
</trek geek>
One basic problem (and something Red Steel has had to cope with) is that while a modern lightgun is great for pointing at things on-screen, it's not a good way to control a character's orientation in an FPS that allows full free movement. (Most lightgun games only give you very limited movement control, such as the "crouch" pedal in Time Crisis) So where a control pad + mouse would give you fairly good move, look, and aim capabilities, a control pad alone (as on most consoles) would give you good move and look but poor aim capabilities, and a control pad plus lightgun can give you good move and aim, but it's not so good for making your character look around or reverse direction - at least, not if the lightgun is responsible for orienting your character. So you either need an analog "look" control in addition to the lightgun, or you need to cook up a way to use the lightgun to control both aiming (within the confines of the screen) and looking (changing the viewpoint represented on the screen). Red Steel seems to have taken the latter route.
Actually, I've heard their first product, "Hyper Operating System" (HOS), will improve the movement efficiency of even older types of robots by as much as 60%! There's been some concern about the safety of upgrading to this product, but I don't think there's anything to that.
When asked how he felt about this victory, New Orleans attorney James Brown responded, simply, "I feel good!"
Your technical details about lightguns are a little bit out of date.
The type you described, which has a single-direction lens and a light level or color sensor, that's pretty much the oldest type. It's what was used for the NES, and also for older systems - I had a portable Pong rig that included a lightgun game that worked that way. These types required the screen to flash (or else just have all targets be really high-contrast) in order for the lightgun to get a reading. You can see this effect in games like Duck Hunt.
Then you have the raster scan method. I believe this is what's used on most current console lightguns. Basically it finds out when precisely the TV's raster crosses the point the gun is aimed at, and compares that to the video signal output by the game console to figure out where the gun is pointed. The downside of this method is that it won't work on certain types of TVs, it's mainly a CRT thing. Plus you need to get the video sync signal from the console - on PS2 light guns they do this with an external connector on the lightgun cord, I believe, while on the X-Box a video timing signal is actually included on the controller port. I believe for the sensor to work the video at the target point on-screen does have to be reasonably bright (that is, not black) but I could be wrong about that.
Then you have IR emitter/sensor lightguns. These are used in current and relatively recent arcade lightgun games like House of the Dead series and so on. Basically they use a combination of emitters and sensors to figure out where the gun is pointed. The gun reports the relative intensity of the signal it receives from each emitter (it can discern which is which through timing) and that gives the machine a good idea where the gun is pointed. Some types also use tilt sensors in the gun itself to get better information. The strength of this system is that it's completely independent of the video monitor. So long as it's properly calibrated you can use it with any video display technology at all. There's a home version of this type of lightgun sold at Lik-Sang, and the technology of the Wii pointer is very similar to this type of lightgun. That is why the Wii remote is so commonly compared to lightguns. When people make that comparison, they're talking about this type of lightgun. The fact that most lightgun games don't care about the fact that the lightgun is capable of a fairly accurate 3-D position and orientation report is pretty much incidental.
See also, Wikipedia's Entry on Lightguns
(Also, "it's" is "it is". "its" is a posessive pronoun.)
Just 102138. It's a non-unitized scalar. Unfortunately, official recognition of this type of conversion has wreaked havoc on international trade economies, as non-unitized scalars may be multiplied, fed through arbitrary functions, etc. and then converted back to familiar units of currency with rather unconventional effects.
Don't worry, I got it, I was joking around too... (dur)