This is just an largely sony fanboi, asking someone about sony's products, "what is Sony going to talk about in their keynote and why does it make you confident in their platform?"
As far as I can tell the article had everything to do with the/. summary. We got to hear about the 'amazing Sony keynote' and its hype, something called Phil Harrison and how great that was. The only interesting piece of information was a mention of a keynote by Shigeru Miyamoto who will be 'on stage for an hour, talking about his creative vision' aparently important because of a Lifetime Achievement Award. Oh and the iPhone will apparently be neat.
I wish I could share the video I have over slashdot. I've got a nice mpeg on my home computer of some crazy stuff Bruce Lee did, like the 1-inch punch, three finger (one hand) push ups and a kick that was described as feeling like "being hit by a car".
Finally, the Japanese attack. At last, projectile motion! Then Hollywood drops the ultimate physics bomb. The special effects animators in their effort to dramatically portray the bomb's deadly descent do a bang up job of reinforcing the major misconception that horizontally released bombs fall straight down. When a bomb is released it has the same velocity as the aircraft. When the velocity is horizontal, the bomb will travel a considerable distance forward as it descends. The bomb will remain nearly horizontal for much of its flight and its nose will tilt downward slowly. In the movie, when the bomb is released, it immediately turns its nose earthward and falls straight down until it crashes through the deck of the Arizona. This was a scene which shall live forever in movie physics infamy.
The only problem as I see it is that many websites and magazines have many reviewers, many of whom are not confined to any particular genre. What if I spend my time learning the habits of reviewer X, and then reviewer Y reviews that game I'm interested in? Now I'm up the creek.
More importantly, what good is a review if I have to invest a significant portion of my potentially valuable time just learning to understand one reviewer out of many? Why is it imperative that the person hoping to attain useful information from a review must first spend time observing the reviewer? I thought the whole point of a review was to reduce the effort involved for the person who was attempted to benefit from it.
I'm about to be 23, and I remember the Commodore 64. I played Frogger on it and some painting program. It got replaced with an NES before I ever learned what your neat sig means. Alas.
Mosaic and Sybase may have left the door open to be backstabbed, but Microsoft still had to make with the pointy sharp knives. You can put some blame on them for being naive, but saying they have no one to blame but themselves isn't a fair statement.
This is possible. However, it takes time. For a raindrop the amount of inertia is very small as it has a small mass. For a bomb, it has a much higher inertia and as such it will take longer to lose a horizontal component.
Without resistance, the vertical component eventually might dwarf the horizontal.
However, if you look at a movie like Pearl Harbor you'll see planes dropping bombs straight down without any horizontal component at all. There's no initial velocity with is dwarved or diminshed. There is simply a straight drop.
Reviews are useful, if they are done properly. The problem today is that they aren't. The second opinion piece made a very insightful point I feel must be quoted.
Such a piece would wind up being nothing more than an unimpressionable summary: a book report, rather than a book review.
Today's reviews, or the majority thereof, are not reviews. They are reports, telling us with slightly greater detail and pretty screenshots what the game is. We do not get thorough evaluations, deep inspection of possible flaws, or effective comparisons between similar excursions. You could easily make a checklist containing 95% of the content of reviews, with some tailoring to specific consoles and platforms.
These "reviews" are not useful to anyone. A hardcore gamer will scoff at the lack of detail and simply download the demo or look up user reviews. A casual gamer will only need to know what kind of game it is and a few screenshots, the review itself doesn't affect them. A non-gamer won't likely know a thing about the genre the review is talking about, and the review won't bring them into "the know".
In short, the inherent problem is that we are being presented the opinion of someone we don't know without the details required to properly apply it to our own tastes. We get very vague understandings of the fun the reviewer did or did not have, with statements such as "the controls felt sloppy" or "the art style didn't stick with me" our only morsels of information. These tibdits are open doors ignored by reviewers. How were the controls sticky? Why didn't the art style have enduring value?
There is something to be said for brevity, but that is what "The Good" and "The Bad" sections of some reviews are for. If you're going to write a full bodied review spanning multiple pages, give us something more to glean than those summaries. Tell us that Ninja Gaiden's controls were awesome because you "felt like a ninja", because they were "responsive on a dime, and were easy to manipulate", because "it's difficult to do things right, but once you learn it's ninja time", because "the combat system in combination with the reponsive controls, map to a system that flows as smoothly as possible, although it takes some time to become a master ninja". Don't take all of that and summarize it in "the controls were good". Those ideas may roam free and meander around, but pinning down all of that into an informative piece is what a reviewer must do.
In example: The controls for the Ninja Gaiden Xbox excel in making you feel like an actual ninja. They are highly responsive, and deceptively simple. It's very easy to begin running around and making like a ninja. This belies the complexity of the combat system, which can be somewhat trying to master given the difficulty of the game. However, as the button combinations and tactics become ingrained in the player, the distinct feeling of being a badass master ninja will pervade the experience from then on.
Is it a perfect example? No. Could there be more detail? Yes. Would I want more detail? Probably. However, that there appears to be a systemic problem achieving even that much detail vexes me greatly.
1) The point of the Matrix was to bend the laws of physics. It was rather explicit.
2) The author obviously never watched Bruce Lee in action. If you plant yourself correctly you can send people flying across the room without moving an inch yourself. However, if you're in midair you certainly can't without the mentioned conversion of momentum.
Also concerning #5.
1) If it's a hole with level ends on both sides, it is entirely impossible to jump it on car without a ramp or other device to add a vertical component to velocity. However, in the event of a bridge being raised for a boat, the angle can potentially allow a vehicle to "jump" the gap. Is it likely or feasible? Not particularly, but it is possible.
2) This could have been expanded to include the "Bombs do not drop straight down" category of gravitational violation. A plane flying at high horizontal velocity v over a stationary target is not capable of dropping a bomb without horizontal velocity. Unless it fires the bomb backwards at a relative velocity -v, in which case we can have a semantic argument over whether the bomb is being dropped or fired.
Like I said, it isn't death that scares me, it's the idea that afterwards there is absolutely nothing. I reject that idea outright. Partly because there is absolutely nothing to lose by doing so, and partly because I have experiences which leads me to believe there is more than nothing after death.
And you never know, I'm the kind of person who delves deep into sub threads anyway.
I'll admit my use of the word "hypothesis" might have been bad, but the point stands that believing anything in science that hasn't advanced beyond the stage of theory requires some measure of faith that it will eventually proven.
To claim that anyone will "know" anything after death is a claim of blind faith; no evidence, precept not established, concept not verified, belief held anyway. This is in no way similar to science's position here: Science advances the idea - not the faith, but just an idea - that consciousness is limited to the body. There is high confidence; this confidence has yet to be shown to be misplaced; so it makes a reasonable operating presumption. But if shown to be wrong, science will turn on a dime, no problem, and work with the reality, whatever it is. This is not a common characteristic of faith, as I think you well know.
The idea that science "turns on a dime" is ridiculous and unfair to science itself. Science, as you have mentioned, involves rigorous testing at the very least. If one scientist achieves a result his work is often tested by his colleages and then the scientific community at large in an attempt to duplicate the experiment. This can take a large amount of time, and often yields inconclusive results (see Cold Fusion). Additionally, there exist scientists who are as dogmatic in their scientific beliefs as any fundamentalist of a given religion. There was a incident where Chinese scientists suggested it was possible for evolution to occur much more rapidly than before, and a few American scientists went berserk claiming they were trying to bring God into everything. Fundamentalist Darwinians as it were.
There is a degree to which being open minded is definitively good. It allows us to adapt, to change and to understand each other. However, if we were to take this to the extreme and "turn on a dime" the would never be consistancy. No one would consider us credible if one day we claimed one things, and the very next we claimed another. To an equal extent some measure of resistance is necessary in order to ensure honesty and proper verification.
Science and Religion are parallel. They each are in place to answer the two most fundamental questions that gnaw in the back of humanity's minds. "How?" and "Why?" respectively.
In which case you should give some thought to the annihilation of the soul as an alternative to the eternal suffering. The "second death" does not disrespect one's choice, and, unlike Hell, it is merciful. One just goes back into non-being from which he came. The end result is also quite awesome: Heaven for everyone, no pointless suffering anywhere, no more opposition to God's will.
I'm going to be perfectly honest here. Death does not scare me in the context of an afterlife of any sort, but the idea of "non-existence" scares the living daylights out of me. My consciousness is completely repulsed by the very concept, and frightened of its potential truth. I'm going to state publicly here that I'm flawed enough of a person that if I had to choose separation from God over non-existence, I would likely choose the former.
We could probably get into a lengthy debate over the nature of Christ's sacrifice and its meaning for life, the universe, and everything, but I think that might be digressing a little too far.
There are situations where there is evidence, but it is insufficient to prove a hypothesis. To continue to believe the hypothesis is faith, but it is not blind because there exists evidence. In science, this faith is often substanciated or destroyed upon subsequent research. In religion, the same is often true by subsequent experiences, although for many the final word will not be known until death.
The attitude you mention is one that should be true of both science and religion, but sadly often isn't.
We can choose all we want, but in the end it is up to God to assemble our destiny.
I personally believe in the "Authentic Love" argument regarding God's reason for allowing humanity the choice, the whole point of which is God wanted people to choose to Love him rather than automaton-like yesmen. If he forces us to be in communion with him regardless of our choice, then there is no point to allowing us the choice, or allowing evil, in the first place.
Giving us the option to say no belies a fundamental respect of our ability to say no. While it is true that whether we say yes or no God technically has the final say, my understanding of God leads me to believe that he would respect our final choice whether it is good or not.
I also do not agree that God is a sadist if he allows people to choose Hell. He is not inflicting this upon them, but rather allow them their free will. Were he to force them to do otherwise he would be callously murdering their ability to choose, and their sense of self or pride.
Personally I think it's possible that more money can solve the issue, but it requires responsible handling thereof. The reason why the current allotment will not suffice is due to the entrenched ideas it has propgated, which will resist any reallotment as no one will want to give up what they already have.
What I'm proposing is the merit based salary often cited in other comments. However, rather than garnishing the tenured salaries we allow them to persist until those bearing them retire. Eventually the overpaid will be gone from the system simply as a matter of course, leaving only the bright and dedicated teachers.
While this won't have immediate results, I think it will be much more effective than attacking entrenched and tenured teachers. Sparking a civil war in the lines of teachers doesn't strike me as a good idea.
I am not stating that faith is provable, but rather that it is not necessarily blind. Scientists look at the unsolved mysteries of their profession, but very few of the dedicated ones will suddenly swear that all of it is wrong simply because we can't figure out the nature of Dark Matter or other conundrums.
Is this blind?
What I am alluding to is the difference between a scientist or theologian who finds a contradiction and ignores it without a moment's consideration, and the scientist or theologian who wrestles with it and adapts.
This goes back to the whole point that the cited comment was debating. Namely whether faced with God people would conciously choose against him.
God isn't condemning anyone, we're condemning ourselves. We make the choice to be separate from God, or inseparable from him. The core of that choice is formed in our time here on earth, but the final say does not come into play until the hereafter. There, shown the truth of God face to face, we make a choice.
All faith is blind. If it were not, it would not be faith.
I disagree.
There is faith that wanders endlessly in darkness, oblivious (willfully or otherwise) to anything that might contest it. There is also faith which deep into that darkness peering, long will stand there, wondering, fearing and doubting.
The former is blind even to the darkness. The latter sees it and wrestles with the unknown much as science does (though generally with a different portion thereof with some measure of overlap).
Do not believe Microsoft's lies! Though it may be "Shut Down..." in the Start menu, it's all a plot by Bill Gates to slowly bend your mind until you can no longer type or spell properly!
A cursory reading of the internet should prove me right!
The comment you cite makes two dangerous assumptions/premises.
1) People are reasonable 2) People are informed
In the case that these are true, of course it would be impossible to not choose God. However, I had yet to meet a person who is either of these things, let alone both. I'm a generally reasonable person, but certainly not all the time. I may be very informed about a number of things, but not 100% on any subject.
One need only take a cursory glance at the state of the world to see that mankind is neither reasonable nor informed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just an largely sony fanboi, asking someone about sony's products, "what is Sony going to talk about in their keynote and why does it make you confident in their platform?"
/. summary. We got to hear about the 'amazing Sony keynote' and its hype, something called Phil Harrison and how great that was. The only interesting piece of information was a mention of a keynote by Shigeru Miyamoto who will be 'on stage for an hour, talking about his creative vision' aparently important because of a Lifetime Achievement Award. Oh and the iPhone will apparently be neat.
As far as I can tell the article had everything to do with the
Say it ain't so!
I wish I could share the video I have over slashdot. I've got a nice mpeg on my home computer of some crazy stuff Bruce Lee did, like the 1-inch punch, three finger (one hand) push ups and a kick that was described as feeling like "being hit by a car".
Reference: http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/pearlharbor.
The only problem as I see it is that many websites and magazines have many reviewers, many of whom are not confined to any particular genre. What if I spend my time learning the habits of reviewer X, and then reviewer Y reviews that game I'm interested in? Now I'm up the creek.
More importantly, what good is a review if I have to invest a significant portion of my potentially valuable time just learning to understand one reviewer out of many? Why is it imperative that the person hoping to attain useful information from a review must first spend time observing the reviewer? I thought the whole point of a review was to reduce the effort involved for the person who was attempted to benefit from it.
I'm about to be 23, and I remember the Commodore 64. I played Frogger on it and some painting program. It got replaced with an NES before I ever learned what your neat sig means. Alas.
A grammarian in love with punctuation.
Mosaic and Sybase may have left the door open to be backstabbed, but Microsoft still had to make with the pointy sharp knives. You can put some blame on them for being naive, but saying they have no one to blame but themselves isn't a fair statement.
True, but I was talking about planes flying horizontal to the earth while dropping their payloads.
Bah, I drew out a wonderful ASCII rendition, but encountered the lameness filter.
This is possible. However, it takes time. For a raindrop the amount of inertia is very small as it has a small mass. For a bomb, it has a much higher inertia and as such it will take longer to lose a horizontal component.
Without resistance, the vertical component eventually might dwarf the horizontal.
However, if you look at a movie like Pearl Harbor you'll see planes dropping bombs straight down without any horizontal component at all. There's no initial velocity with is dwarved or diminshed. There is simply a straight drop.
Reviews are useful, if they are done properly. The problem today is that they aren't. The second opinion piece made a very insightful point I feel must be quoted.
Today's reviews, or the majority thereof, are not reviews. They are reports, telling us with slightly greater detail and pretty screenshots what the game is. We do not get thorough evaluations, deep inspection of possible flaws, or effective comparisons between similar excursions. You could easily make a checklist containing 95% of the content of reviews, with some tailoring to specific consoles and platforms.
These "reviews" are not useful to anyone. A hardcore gamer will scoff at the lack of detail and simply download the demo or look up user reviews. A casual gamer will only need to know what kind of game it is and a few screenshots, the review itself doesn't affect them. A non-gamer won't likely know a thing about the genre the review is talking about, and the review won't bring them into "the know".
In short, the inherent problem is that we are being presented the opinion of someone we don't know without the details required to properly apply it to our own tastes. We get very vague understandings of the fun the reviewer did or did not have, with statements such as "the controls felt sloppy" or "the art style didn't stick with me" our only morsels of information. These tibdits are open doors ignored by reviewers. How were the controls sticky? Why didn't the art style have enduring value?
There is something to be said for brevity, but that is what "The Good" and "The Bad" sections of some reviews are for. If you're going to write a full bodied review spanning multiple pages, give us something more to glean than those summaries. Tell us that Ninja Gaiden's controls were awesome because you "felt like a ninja", because they were "responsive on a dime, and were easy to manipulate", because "it's difficult to do things right, but once you learn it's ninja time", because "the combat system in combination with the reponsive controls, map to a system that flows as smoothly as possible, although it takes some time to become a master ninja". Don't take all of that and summarize it in "the controls were good". Those ideas may roam free and meander around, but pinning down all of that into an informative piece is what a reviewer must do.
In example: The controls for the Ninja Gaiden Xbox excel in making you feel like an actual ninja. They are highly responsive, and deceptively simple. It's very easy to begin running around and making like a ninja. This belies the complexity of the combat system, which can be somewhat trying to master given the difficulty of the game. However, as the button combinations and tactics become ingrained in the player, the distinct feeling of being a badass master ninja will pervade the experience from then on.
Is it a perfect example? No. Could there be more detail? Yes. Would I want more detail? Probably. However, that there appears to be a systemic problem achieving even that much detail vexes me greatly.
I've got two complaints about #4.
1) The point of the Matrix was to bend the laws of physics. It was rather explicit.
2) The author obviously never watched Bruce Lee in action. If you plant yourself correctly you can send people flying across the room without moving an inch yourself. However, if you're in midair you certainly can't without the mentioned conversion of momentum.
Also concerning #5.
1) If it's a hole with level ends on both sides, it is entirely impossible to jump it on car without a ramp or other device to add a vertical component to velocity. However, in the event of a bridge being raised for a boat, the angle can potentially allow a vehicle to "jump" the gap. Is it likely or feasible? Not particularly, but it is possible.
2) This could have been expanded to include the "Bombs do not drop straight down" category of gravitational violation. A plane flying at high horizontal velocity v over a stationary target is not capable of dropping a bomb without horizontal velocity. Unless it fires the bomb backwards at a relative velocity -v, in which case we can have a semantic argument over whether the bomb is being dropped or fired.
Like I said, it isn't death that scares me, it's the idea that afterwards there is absolutely nothing. I reject that idea outright. Partly because there is absolutely nothing to lose by doing so, and partly because I have experiences which leads me to believe there is more than nothing after death.
And you never know, I'm the kind of person who delves deep into sub threads anyway.
The idea that science "turns on a dime" is ridiculous and unfair to science itself. Science, as you have mentioned, involves rigorous testing at the very least. If one scientist achieves a result his work is often tested by his colleages and then the scientific community at large in an attempt to duplicate the experiment. This can take a large amount of time, and often yields inconclusive results (see Cold Fusion). Additionally, there exist scientists who are as dogmatic in their scientific beliefs as any fundamentalist of a given religion. There was a incident where Chinese scientists suggested it was possible for evolution to occur much more rapidly than before, and a few American scientists went berserk claiming they were trying to bring God into everything. Fundamentalist Darwinians as it were.
There is a degree to which being open minded is definitively good. It allows us to adapt, to change and to understand each other. However, if we were to take this to the extreme and "turn on a dime" the would never be consistancy. No one would consider us credible if one day we claimed one things, and the very next we claimed another. To an equal extent some measure of resistance is necessary in order to ensure honesty and proper verification.
Science and Religion are parallel. They each are in place to answer the two most fundamental questions that gnaw in the back of humanity's minds. "How?" and "Why?" respectively.
I'm going to be perfectly honest here. Death does not scare me in the context of an afterlife of any sort, but the idea of "non-existence" scares the living daylights out of me. My consciousness is completely repulsed by the very concept, and frightened of its potential truth. I'm going to state publicly here that I'm flawed enough of a person that if I had to choose separation from God over non-existence, I would likely choose the former.
We could probably get into a lengthy debate over the nature of Christ's sacrifice and its meaning for life, the universe, and everything, but I think that might be digressing a little too far.
There are situations where there is evidence, but it is insufficient to prove a hypothesis. To continue to believe the hypothesis is faith, but it is not blind because there exists evidence. In science, this faith is often substanciated or destroyed upon subsequent research. In religion, the same is often true by subsequent experiences, although for many the final word will not be known until death.
The attitude you mention is one that should be true of both science and religion, but sadly often isn't.
I personally believe in the "Authentic Love" argument regarding God's reason for allowing humanity the choice, the whole point of which is God wanted people to choose to Love him rather than automaton-like yesmen. If he forces us to be in communion with him regardless of our choice, then there is no point to allowing us the choice, or allowing evil, in the first place.
Giving us the option to say no belies a fundamental respect of our ability to say no. While it is true that whether we say yes or no God technically has the final say, my understanding of God leads me to believe that he would respect our final choice whether it is good or not.
I also do not agree that God is a sadist if he allows people to choose Hell. He is not inflicting this upon them, but rather allow them their free will. Were he to force them to do otherwise he would be callously murdering their ability to choose, and their sense of self or pride.
Personally I think it's possible that more money can solve the issue, but it requires responsible handling thereof. The reason why the current allotment will not suffice is due to the entrenched ideas it has propgated, which will resist any reallotment as no one will want to give up what they already have.
What I'm proposing is the merit based salary often cited in other comments. However, rather than garnishing the tenured salaries we allow them to persist until those bearing them retire. Eventually the overpaid will be gone from the system simply as a matter of course, leaving only the bright and dedicated teachers.
While this won't have immediate results, I think it will be much more effective than attacking entrenched and tenured teachers. Sparking a civil war in the lines of teachers doesn't strike me as a good idea.
This isn't contested.
I am not stating that faith is provable, but rather that it is not necessarily blind. Scientists look at the unsolved mysteries of their profession, but very few of the dedicated ones will suddenly swear that all of it is wrong simply because we can't figure out the nature of Dark Matter or other conundrums.
Is this blind?
What I am alluding to is the difference between a scientist or theologian who finds a contradiction and ignores it without a moment's consideration, and the scientist or theologian who wrestles with it and adapts.
This goes back to the whole point that the cited comment was debating. Namely whether faced with God people would conciously choose against him.
God isn't condemning anyone, we're condemning ourselves. We make the choice to be separate from God, or inseparable from him. The core of that choice is formed in our time here on earth, but the final say does not come into play until the hereafter. There, shown the truth of God face to face, we make a choice.
I disagree.
There is faith that wanders endlessly in darkness, oblivious (willfully or otherwise) to anything that might contest it. There is also faith which deep into that darkness peering, long will stand there, wondering, fearing and doubting.
The former is blind even to the darkness. The latter sees it and wrestles with the unknown much as science does (though generally with a different portion thereof with some measure of overlap).
Do not believe Microsoft's lies! Though it may be "Shut Down..." in the Start menu, it's all a plot by Bill Gates to slowly bend your mind until you can no longer type or spell properly!
A cursory reading of the internet should prove me right!
And Engineering brings you the Zapthrottle Mote Extractor and Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles, which allow you to extract Motes of Life, which combined can form Primal Life.
The good news, you obviously have enough of a life to be ignorant of this. The bad news, I obviously don't.
In short...
Isn't this just another case of correlation =/= causation?
The comment you cite makes two dangerous assumptions/premises.
1) People are reasonable
2) People are informed
In the case that these are true, of course it would be impossible to not choose God. However, I had yet to meet a person who is either of these things, let alone both. I'm a generally reasonable person, but certainly not all the time. I may be very informed about a number of things, but not 100% on any subject.
One need only take a cursory glance at the state of the world to see that mankind is neither reasonable nor informed.